Mount Vernon by Candlelight 2005

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The Mansion I hadn’t originally planned on joining my church group to this year’s Mount Vernon by Candlelight, but seeing that the tour comes highly recommended, and since I hadn’t yet been to Mount Vernon (George Washington’s estate to which he retired after the presidency), I decided at the last minute to tag along. I did not regret it. Tour guides showed us what the estate was like at Christmastime in the 1790s, and actors and actresses within the mansion portrayed such persons as Martha Custis Washington and Tobias Lear, providing a convincingly immersive historical experience.

Washington Scultpure in Profile Salthouse Sewinghouse Overseer's Quarters Shoemaker's Bench Slave's Quarters

The full Mount Vernon by Candlelight 2005 photoset. Forgive any blurriness; it was nighttime, after all.

Photography was not allowed inside the mansion, but I did get a few exterior shots, and the various outbuildings were also interesting. I’ll have to come back to this place in the daytime someday, to check out the art hanging on the walls of the mansion, and to see other parts of the estate in a warmer season.

Photo Retrospectives

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Still on the topic of Flickr, you may have noticed a bunch of old photos starting to appear in my photostream. I’ve been scanning the original prints from my point-and-shoot film camera days (1996-2002) and uploading them to retrospective photosets. There’s a lot of duplicate material which gets only low-res treatment in the old photos section, which now I’m happy to be able to show full size in its original state, without all the tedious and amateurish image “enhancement” I used to apply to each and every photo. This also gives me the chance to show off long-forgotten pictures which predate my photolog.

Sailing to Fortune Island

I think this is from an April 2001 dive trip at Fortune Island. The passage from Cavite to Fortune is usually pretty rough, but it was really nice that day. I also had an artsy grainy B/W version of this shot.

Tempering my YahooFlickr Cynicism

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I come across as fairly cynical in my brief history of Yahoo acquisitions with regard to Flickr’s prospects for brand survival. On consideration, however, $24.95/year is still a great price for unlimited image storage, 2GB upload bandwidth per month, and an excellent dynamic interface to upload, organize, and share photos. So long as (1) the interface maintains its quality and continues to improve, (2) I can keep remote loading Flickr photos from my weblog, (3) image URLs don’t break, and (4) uptime stays consistently decent, I can stay with Yahoo-Flickr.

But if they block remote loading like they did with Geocities, things will get very ugly. (I mean that literally; broken image icons all over the place are not pretty.)

Of course, I may just be rationalizing, since I have over 1,400 photos already on Flickr, and am still adding more, and backup plus reorganization at this point would be a major pain.

What? December Already?

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It was cold and windy yesterday. I slept in most of the day thanks to nagging nasal congestion, but felt good enough in the afternoon to brave chill and wind to get some work done. Temperature was at freezing (32°F) by the time I left the office last night, with a stiff wind biting right through my layers. And to think that just two weeks ago, we were in the 70s. See what my thermometer has been saying (upper reading is from the outdoor probe sticking out the window):

Mid-November Late November Early December
Low 70s Low 40s Mid 20s

(For you Celsiusites, that’s about 22°C, 6°C, and -3°C respectively. I plan to call this Temperature Blogging, or “TLOGGING.” It’ll be so revolutionary.)

As with the year before last and the year before that, it looks like the season’s first snow will be coming on or around the 5th of December, though it may not be a blanket and it’s going to be a blanket.

Squirrels Attack Dog

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IMG_3877SQUIRRELS. Cute critters though they may seem when you see them scurrying about parks and trees, but their sinister side is never too far off: a pack of squirrels allegedly killed a stray dog in Russia, after a pine cone shortage drove them to extremes. And not just that, but they’ve been known to go after birds. And I need not remind you of my own close brush with Flying Squirrel Death when I encountered the Supreme Court Attack Squirrel. So now we know why White House grounds staff put out nut feeders: it keeps the murderous buggers off us and our pets!

Beware. A nearby squirrel may already have its eye on you.

Review: Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

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Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire was an okay film, but the stress of condensing 700+ pages of story into 2+ hours of movie showed strongly, so the storyline felt a bit rushed, with the sensation that many pieces were missing. [spoilers, highlight to read] We hardly saw Sirius Black outside of a few letters and a 3D fireplace cameo. Cho Chang was relegated to the background, a passing ball proposal added as an afterthought to the owl tower. Draco Malfoy got little screentime beyond his weasel scene with Professor “Moody.” I wondered why the screenplay, with so much cut from the book, actually added to the climactic buildup to Cedric Diggory’s death, having him speak a bit more and pose a bit before being felled by the Avadra Kevadra. One could have shaved precious seconds from that, as well as from various action scenes and Moaning Myrtle’s antics, to better pad more important aspects of the plot, and perhaps move Cedric’s character development to other parts of the story.

Still, the important aspects of Harry, Ron, and Hermione’s tense coming-of-age were explored, and the film just barely managed to maintain its narrative cohesiveness. Nonetheless, I wasn’t as impressed with the HP4 movie; any one of the last three films exceeded this one for overall enjoyability.

I would write more, but I found that Raffy has said everything I was thinking already.

Stand Far From Disembodied Head

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Photos from my Thanksgiving weekend trip to visit Amy and her folks in NJ have been mixed into the full NJ/NYC Nov 2005 photoset. We were looking at some of my older pre-Flickr albums and I realized I really need to get all these things in one place.

For now, enjoy this safety sign on the NJ Transit Bus, depicting the proper distance you should stand from the hat-wearing disembodied head at the top of the stairs.


(Stand Far From Disembodied Head Wearing Cap uploaded by brownpau.)

Lost 2.09

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So did you all go googling for the story of King Josiah when Eko mentioned it? Are you all dusting off your bibles for the “Eko recites Psalm 23” episode? Hey, if it gets you into your bibles and studying the Word, that’s got to be some good TV.

[spoilers, highlight to read]Finally, more hatch action, more Kate, more Sawyer, more Marvin Candle, more mystery and more of the kissy kissy! It all comes back to the survivors having visions and hearing whispers relating to past guilt. Remember the boar as a channel for Sawyer’s guilt over killing the wrong man back in Australia? Now Sawyer is a channel for Kate’s own guilt over killing her father. It seems that the island draws out these deep-seated traumas and makes them materially real, probably via the aforementioned nanotech mechanisms which create the security system black smoke monster and produce visions (or reanimations?) of the departed.

Also revealed in this episode: the Island Network features chat! I like this guy’s take on the Hatch as allegory for the Garden of Eden, with the computer being the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. And Island Network Chat is the Fruit of Temptation. And Walt is the Serpent. And Michael is Eve. Or something.

I close with yet another Lost Analogy Comprehension Quiz Question — Kate Austin is to Richard Kimble as Edward Mars is to:

(a) Sawyer

(b) Samuel Gerard

(c) Enkidu’s Friend

(d) Brill Lyle

Update: Go over to Alvar Hanso’s page and click on his photo. Also check out this HD screencap from the army office. See anyone familiar on TV?

Gallery-Hopping

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For the so-called post-Thanksgiving “Black Friday” Amy and I went into NYC, not to shop, but to check on her drawings in Square Foot, a small works show in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. (She entered two drawings: Bulbs and this untitled work.) This was my first foray into Brooklyn via the J/M/Z line over Williamsburg Bridge, and the view was marvelous.

After lunch at a drafty $5 buffet place in Chinatown (which was packed!), we proceeded to Chelsea to check out the works of Dorothea Tanning at Kent Gallery, Patricia Piccinini at Robert Miller Gallery, and Leslie Dill and James Valerio at George Adams Gallery. Somewhere along the way, I got this photo through a window in Chelsea:

Then we went home, watched Lost reruns, and ate leftover turkey.

Thanksgiving at Grandma’s

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As with last Thanksgiving and the one before it, I joined Amy and her folks for dinner at her grandmother’s, somewhere up in the wild Watchung Hills of New Jersey. A delicious traditional feast was served, with many thanks to Amy’s mom: Roast turkey, three kinds of stuffing (chestnut, sausage, and plain), mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, asparagus, green beans, shrimp cocktail, olives, gherkins, creamed pearl onions, and three kinds of pie (pumpkin, apple, and cherry). All quite sumptuous. Dinner conversation centered around how Amy’s uncle just found out that their family are Mayflower descendants.

Oh, and it snowed lightly, on and off throughout the day. None of it stuck to the ground, but it was pleasant to look outside during Thanksgiving dinner to see a sight more often reserved for Christmas (this far south, anyway).

After the Snow Amy Pours Asti Bob's Thanksgiving Meditation Shrimp Cocktail Turkey Wing Drumstick

How was your Thanksgiving? Did Turkey Claus come in the night and fill your Fall stockings with lots of pumpkin pie? Leave a comment linking to your story and photos from last Thursday.