Trivia that matter
It’s been a noisy evening, and there’s probably more to come. This is a snapshot from my front porch a few minutes ago.
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I loaned my good camera to a colleague whose Nikon is out for repair. Yesterday evening I went to the botanical garden to see if I could get some good close-ups with my cheap go-everywhere toy. Most of the pictures were blurry, but a couple were tolerably sharp, such as the one above.
Dracula ophioceps, to be precise, an odd visitor from Colombia.
I visited an orchid show yesterday morning. The lighting was terrible and I didn’t have the tripod with me, so I had to make do with the camera’s built-in flash. I did get a few okay pictures.
The most common rose in cultivation, currently furnishing a purplish-red accent in many Wichita gardens, is not a hybrid tea, floribunda or shrub rose, but a hybrid of Rosa wichuriana called “Dr. Huey.” It’s widely used as a rootstock for bud grafting. If suckers aren’t regularly removed, or if the grafted portion weakens or dies, Dr. Huey will take over. The flower in the above picture is about two inches in diameter.
It’s a pleasant day today. The sun even came out for a while. It will probably require a few days for the damages from yesterday to be fully assessed, but my neighborhood looks fine.
Although we get some of the most violent weather in the world here in the plains thanks to North America’s topography, I don’t really worry all that much about tornadoes. During stormy weather, there are constant updates on the radio and radar on my computer monitor, and most homes have basements. Dangerous though they are, tornadoes are much less a threat in Kansas than they are in Bangladesh, where the deadliest twister on record struck not all that long ago.
What I do worry about are gangs with guns. I live in an older neighborhood that borders some very different worlds. Go a few blocks south, and you are surrounded by expensive river-front homes. Go a few blocks east, and you’ll hear norteño. A few weeks ago, the place nearby where a scholarly friend of mine used to live was the scene of a gang shooting.
There was an unusual car parked nearby when I got home from Easter dinner.
This is what the interior of St. Mary Cathedral in Wichita looked like last summer.
Here’s what it looks like now:
I found a small collection of carnivorous plants tucked away inconspicuously in the greenhouse at the botanical garden this morning, including the sundew above. The picture is about twice life-size; right-click on it and open it in a new window to see it much larger.
It finally stopped raining here, and I was able to visit the botanical garden today. Here are a few of the pictures I took.
For most of the summer, non-migratory Canadian geese controlled the north bank of the river on my way to work. Now it’s occupied by a corps of ducks. Is there something going on I should know about?
Also in my camera: public enemy #3.
Another approach to weeding:
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There has been some loose talk recently about monkeys typing Shakespeare. This gives me an excuse to mention a couple of favorite short stories. Russell Maloney’s “Inflexible Logic” is the second-best tale on the topic. The best is R.A. Lafferty‘s “Been a Long, Long Time,” which unfortunately is not available online. I did find another Lafferty story, though, which might illustrate why I have a shelf of his books.
Photoshop usually does a good job of stitching panoramas together. Occasionally, though, it gets confused, as in this view from the choir loft in Wichita’s St. Mary Cathedral.
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.