It's Fall Follies Time Again. . .

A friend emailed me some pix by Clark Little to brighten up my day. I needed my day brightened. It is the start of cotton ginning season, and since we have not had a killing frost yet ( it was 92 degrees F/33 degrees C yesterday -- thank you, global warming!), they've sprayed the cotton with defoliant. Now they've started stripping it, and the air is full of fine leaf particles liberally laced with the Dept of Agriculture-approved version of agent orange. From now until they get it all ginned (the end of December) about 3/4ths of the town will be participating in the annual cough up your toenails competition, which this year will include the H1N1 lottery with drawings held daily.

We don't have much "fall color" out here in the flat lands, just the post oak trees in the local landscaping which are various shades of bronze and dark red, and the sycamores, which are interesting shades of golden yellow. Many people here have planted those kind of trees (some specie of catalpa, I think) that when they decide it's fall, all the leaves drop off at once. It happens literally overnight. My neighbor next door has about six of them along the fence line, so I'll be up to my ancestors in leaves any day now.

The Canada geese will start arriving at about half past November. They winter here. I live about two blocks from a local park which has a playa lake in the middle of it, a favorite honker hangout. I'm apparently right in the final approach for it, and morning and evening my front and back windows acquire furry tails of one color or another protruding from between the drapes, waggling furiously as the squadrons of geese fly over on their way out to the local fields to feast on the grain stubble, or return to the lake in the evening. (The kitties make this funny chattering noise that means they've spotted prey -- yeah, like they have a shot!) The long V's of geese against our clear, intensely blue October skies are a beautiful sight. I may have to don my face mask and stroll down to the park with my camera one of these days. . .(Who was that masked man. . . ?).

I'm currently listening to a playlist of all Harry Connick, Jr., (who is married to the daughter of one of our local girls, Glenna Goodacre, the one who did the Vietnam nurses' memorial in DC, and the Sacagawea relief on the gold dollar coin). His early stuff is some pretty hot Dixieland jazz, which is rather finger popping. ("Hello, Central, give me Dr. Jazz!") Next in the queue is my Jelly Roll Morton playlist (as played by Clarence Williams in the famous dueling pianos scene from "The Legend of 1900,") It's the kind of stuff that was on those old movie cartoons -- Silly Symphonies, and Betty Boop, etc., from the 1920's and 30s that I used to watch on TV after grade school. That would have been in the early Triassic, BCT (Before Color Television). I subscribe to Rhapsody, and I'm like the proverbial kid in the candy store running rampant through their very extensive catalog. A monthly subscription fee that is less than the cost of one CD buys you the privilege of unlimited plays of their 8+ million song music catalog, with the option to download or stream music to three devices (any combination of computers, laptops and MP3 players) -- For me, it's a tremendous bargain, since 90% of the stuff they only let you hear a 30 second sample of unless you buy it, is not the kind of stuff I'd consider fit to listen to anyway.

The other day I downloaded a cut of the instrumental music from the big love scene in Richard Wagner's opera "Tristan und Isolde" with Nadia Salerno-Sonnenberg on solo violin. (pronounced "REE-kard VOGner", please). It's like the soundtrack they play in the clenches of those 1940's romantic movies or films noires that would have starred Bogie, Claude Rains, Bette Davis, Ingrid Bergman, Leslie Howard or Stars of the Silver Screen of similar ilk. It has a solo piano part as well, and is backed by a full orchestra with a 40 megaton percussion section -- and since it's Wagner (pronounced "VOGner," please), the Sturm und Drang is laid on with a trowel. The sound track from the famous helicopter scene in "Apocalypse Now" was by Wagner -- "The Ride of the Valkyries" from his opera "Die Valkyrie" -- Think "Brunhilde" played by about 100 kg of soprano sporting a spear, the requisite stainless steel yarmulke with horns, blond braids, and a sheet metal bustier made to order by the costume dept from the trunk lid of a 1956 Cadillac, charging about the stage bellowing like a bull moose. (Most of the major European opera houses do at least one Wagner opera a year since it's cheaper than hiring a cleaning crew to dust the chandeliers. . .).

Though my pen is mighty, my pencil leaves a lot to be desired -- I need to find a talented cartoonist/caricaturist who can draw the Wagner opera cartoons and cat cartoons I have in my head. I have pages of snappy dialog for them but insufficient graphic talents to draw them the way I see them in my mind's eye. Any of you Chuck Jones wannabes out there in internetland, feel free to apply.

Exit blogger, stage left, singing, "Kill the wabbit! Kill the wabbit!"

Eye See versus I See

One of the Webcomics I follow is currently featuring a character evolved from bees who has compound eyes. That got me to thinking about insects with their compound eyes and how they might see the world. . . People always show views through compound eye as a bunch of miniature full images. That's always bothered me, -- like it has to be wrong. Seems like they would see like one pixel of color/light/dark information from each lens which their brain would merge into a single picture -- like Georges Seurat's Pointillist paintings. It makes much more sense to see a single, large, albeit very grainy image, rather than 8 zillion tiny views of the same thing. If that's all they had to go by -- multiple very tiny but identical images, all of which had terrible resolution and very little useful info, -- how could an organism like that survive? How could they quickly spot and recognize danger or find food? I mean, Duh! Makes much more sense if their multiple lenses are trying to do what we do with our retinas -- create a complex full-scale image from a large number of single data points -- Doing it with lenses will work, but only up to a point (the point of diminishing returns) and that point is reached very quickly. Notice how all the animals with compound eyes are all small, short lived, reproduce quickly, and are successful pretty much because they breed in such statistical-overkill-enormous numbers that their survival is due more to the law of averages than anything else?-- Obviously,"evolution" realized pretty quickly it was on the wrong track and went with a single lens/image to refract and spread the light across ever increasing numbers of cones and rods of a retina, each of which sends its one pixel of info to our brains, and the brain resolves them into a single image. The more pixels, the higher the resolution and the more detailed the image is. -- like Duh! If you want to know which system works best, all you have to do is look around at which animals have compound lens eyes and which animals (like the one writing this blog, for instance) have single-lens eyes.

Which reminds me of one of the (many) things that "blew me out of" that old 1950's movie version of "War of the Worlds" starring Gene Barry. When they looked through the Martian "eye" thingie that Gene Barry chopped off with the ax. They got three separate, different colored images, red, blue and green that kind of overlapped a little and were really anemic looking. And those idiot scientists blathered on about That's how the Martians see us. (and, of course, the woman took one look at the image and screamed -- that's all women ever do in those stupid 1940's and 1950's movies is scream and have the vapors. Give me a break!) Some scientists! -- They of all people should know that it's not what the eye sees that counts-- that's all just raw data. It's what the brain sees that's important. If the Martians were smart enough to build those stupid flying saucer thingies with the death ray emitting street lamps on their noses, those "eye" thingies would have had some kind of processing software to integrate the data from those three different images into a single composite full color image -- -- which is exactly what the old cathode ray tube color TV process did. It had three "guns" (red, blue and green) firing pixel streams at the front of the tube. The three different single color images were superimposed on each other to create the full integrated color image -- It's the same idea the old technicolor film used. Duh. I've understood the process since Junior High, when the "green gun" blew out on the picture tube of our color TV. We had to watch pink and blue TV til we got it fixed. (I do have to admit that old movie did have some pretty cool sound effects, though. )

Critical Mess

Let me preface this by saying I love my mom. I wouldn't trade for her. She is one in a million. But in all honesty, she and I have some basic ideological differences. For instance, when I was involved in the great sifting project to remove all the little white rocks from my front yard, a project that took several stages and about 7 years to complete. When I had finished a sifting session, I would move the sifter back to the back yard, and put my tools away , but I never filled in the hole that marked the point between sifted and unsifted. Having a hole in my front yard that was about 18 inches deep by a couple of square yards was not a matter of concern to me. In fact, it was essential to the ongoing project, since it allowed me to pick up exactly where I left off, which might have been months or even a year ago. But every time my mom came by, she would remark on that "unsightly hole." It nearly drove her crazy. "Why don't you fill in that hole?" was a question I expected from her every time she came by. You see, my mom is a "neatnick." She is a fanatic about putting things away when you're done with them -- I mean, completely away, so there's no trace. If I was working on something and had to stop in the middle of it, I'd just leave it out, knowing that I would come back to it later. It seemed an illogical waste of time to me to put everything away, only to have to get it all back out again later and set it up again so I could finish it. But not her. If you weren't actually working on something at that time, she wanted it cleaned up and put away, so that no trace remained. She is way more upset about the "piles of crud" in my office in my office than I am, and I think she has set foot in my office maybe 4 times in the last 8 years.

Needless to say, she does not understand the concept of "critical mess." For instance, in my "Liberry," almost every square inch of six bookshelves is jammed crammed with books. They've been that way for at least a year. I have a couple extra shelves, but the bookshelf they fit cannot accomodate any more books. However, I could squeeze two more shelves in a smaller bookcase, except these shelves are too big. Literally for years, I've been plotting how to maximize the space in the bookshelves I have because there is no room in the "Liberry." Then, last week, I took the shelves into the kitchen, got my saw horses and cut them down with my jigsaw. (I did put up the saw horses and jig saw, because I was through with them. At some point soon, the "Liberry" will attain a state of critical mess, and I will put the shelves where they need to go, and sort out the books accordingly.