Trivia that matter
When the international market for anime collapses, Japan can export fingerpickers. Akihiro Tanaka took second place in the International Fingerstyle Championship at the Walnut Valley Festival two years ago, first place last year, and was a featured performer this year. Meanwhile, Tomoake Kawabata placed second in this year’s contest Thursday.
I made a little trip to northern Virginia last week. The ground trembled and the winds howled, and I am finally back home tonight.
It was mostly family business, which I won’t be writing about, but Robbo might be interested in this street sign near where I stayed.
This has been a brutal year (-17°F in February, 110°+ repeatedly this summer) and it shows in gardens. Yews and arbor vitae are badly damaged if not dead, hostas are shriveled and sugar maples have few intact leaves left for their fall display. However, the naked ladies, a.k.a. Lycoris sqamigera, spent the worst of the heat undeground and look just dandy right now.
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I’m going to be away from the computer for a few days. While I’m gone, you can study the saxophone solo in “Tank!”
When is goose-hunting season?
St. Mary Cathedral in Wichita is about to undergo over a year of renovations. When I have time, I haul my tripod and camera there to record it as it is now. Here are some recent pictures. There are more in my gallery here.
While setting up my new photo gallery, I came across old jpegs of pictures I took back toward the end of the film and darkroom era. Here’s a sampling. All of these I shot, developed and printed myself.
One of the first pictures I took when I began photographing dance, and still one of my favorites. The lady in the air is Melonie Buchanan, one of the best dancers ever to study at Friends University in Wichita. The image was taken with a 4×5 Crown Graphic camera. The negative made excellent 16×20 enlargements, one of which was on display for many years at Lawrence Photo in Wichita.
I shot about 700 pictures at AFW, and it’s going to take me a week or two to go through them all. I expect that I’ll eventually post about half of them in my photo gallery. Until then, here are a few more photos from today.
Update: the Saturday pictures are up.
Snapshots from the Elegant Gothic Lolita Tea Party at Anime Festival Wichita.
Pictures from Steampunk Star Wars Anime Festival Wichita this morning.
I haven’t kept a tally, but it looks like the Vocaloids finally outnumber the Narutards. I haven’t seen any Madoka cosplays yet, though.
A few pictures from Anime Festival Wichita this evening:
Continue reading “A little cosplay, and miscellaneous notes”
Last year when I visited Atchinson, it was magnolia season. This year, I was in time for the dogwoods.
Waiting for me when I got home today.
It’s blossom-gazing time. Here in Wichita the overwhelming majority of flowering fruit trees are boring white Bradford pears, with some redbuds and crab apples here and there. However, there are a few Japanese cherries at the botanical garden, and a couple of them were blooming this morning: the Yoshino cherry, above, and the Okame cherry.
It was warmer in Fairbanks, Alaska than in Wichita when I headed out to work this morning. Has Al Gore been in the area?
I spotted this near the south door of the Chancery Office a little while ago. The temperatures fell into the low single digits (fahrenheit) last week and didn’t rise above freezing for several days. Even though this bush is in a sheltered spot, it’s still surprising to see a flower in mid-winter.
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There’s a new business at the mall. People “customize” cars, so why not caskets?
It looks like a lousy year for fall color. Maples that are usually brilliant red at this time are merely brownish orange. However, roses are doing just fine.
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Today’s forecast. I probably should have stayed in bed.
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If you’re wondering my political affiliation is, it’s with the Wet Blanket Movement:
I too have a fervor—a fever, in fact—for political inactivity. I want to be part of a movement that makes electoral politics so boring that rather than having term limits, we’ll need laws requiring politicians to serve their full term. I want to join a party that make politics and government work so dull that political journalists and elected officials dream of leaving their fields for the exciting worlds of actuarial science and telemarketing.
I want to thrown in my lot with others who want to throw a wet blanket over politics and whose desire is to dampen the enthusiasm for all forms of political activity. I want to consort with citizens who are willing to arrest the ardor, dash the devotion, sap the spirit, and zap the zeal from anything that remotely resembles political enthusiasm. I want to create a new party, dedicated to the mastery of the art of anti-propaganda and committed to the conscientious devotion of alert inactivity.
If this is your dream too, then I hope you’ll join me in the Wet Blanket movement.
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Don’t take seriously what the “experts” predict:
The dismal performance of the experts inspired Mr. Tetlock to turn his case study into an epic experimental project. He picked 284 people who made their living “commenting or offering advice on political and economic trends,” including journalists, foreign policy specialists, economists and intelligence analysts, and began asking them to make predictions. Over the next two decades, he peppered them with questions: Would George Bush be re-elected? Would apartheid in South Africa end peacefully? Would Quebec secede from Canada? Would the dot-com bubble burst? In each case, the pundits rated the probability of several possible outcomes. By the end of the study, Mr. Tetlock had quantified 82,361 predictions.
How did the experts do? When it came to predicting the likelihood of an outcome, the vast majority performed worse than random chance. In other words, they would have done better picking their answers blindly out of a hat. Liberals, moderates and conservatives were all equally ineffective. Although 96% of the subjects had post-graduate training, Mr. Tetlock found, the fancy degrees were mostly useless when it came to forecasting.
(Via Steven.)
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Charles G. Hill on tomorrow’s chore:
I will, of course, continue to perform my civic duty. But every year that nothing is done to curb the politicization of Damn Near Everything, you can expect me to perform it with less enthusiasm. If, two years from now, someone hasn’t thrown Barney Frank into Boston Harbor, I’ll consider the entire two years a complete and utter waste.