Sunday, June 5, 2016
Friday, June 3, 2016
Here comes your ghost again
Well I'll be damned
Here comes your ghost again
Here comes your ghost again
But that's not unusual
It's just that the moon is full
And you happened to call
And here I sit
Hand on the telephone
Hearing a voice I'd known
A couple of light years ago
Heading straight for a fall
As I remember your eyes
Were bluer than robin's eggs
My poetry was lousy you said
Where are you calling from?
A booth in the midwest
Hand on the telephone
Hearing a voice I'd known
A couple of light years ago
Heading straight for a fall
As I remember your eyes
Were bluer than robin's eggs
My poetry was lousy you said
Where are you calling from?
A booth in the midwest
Ten years ago
I bought you some cufflinks
You brought me something
We both know what memories can bring
They bring diamonds and rust
Well you burst on the scene
Already a legend
The unwashed phenomenon
The original vagabond
You strayed into my arms
And there you stayed
Temporarily lost at sea
The Madonna was yours for free
Yes the girl on the half-shell Would keep you
unharmed
Now I see you standing
With brown leaves falling around
And snow in your hair
Now you're smiling out the window
Of that crummy hotel
Over Washington Square
And snow in your hair
Now you're smiling out the window
Of that crummy hotel
Over Washington Square
Our breath comes out white clouds
Mingles and hangs in the air
Speaking strictly for me
We both could have died then and there
Mingles and hangs in the air
Speaking strictly for me
We both could have died then and there
Now you're telling me You're not nostalgic Then give me
another word for it You who are so good with words And at keeping things
vague
Because I need some of that vagueness now
It's all come back too clearly yes I loved you dearly
It's all come back too clearly yes I loved you dearly
And if you're offering me diamonds and rust
I've already paid
I was shadowboxing earlier in the day
I figured I was ready for Cassius Clay
I said “Fee, fie, fo, fum, Cassius Clay, here I come
26, 27, 28, 29, I’m gonna make your face look just like mine
Five, four, three, two, one, Cassius Clay you’d better run
99, 100, 101, 102, your ma won’t even recognize you
14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, gonna knock him clean right out of his spleen”
Thursday, June 2, 2016
Muybridge animation: more late-night madness
Worked on these, and worked on them, oh boy. To give you an idea of what I started with, here are the original images:
These had to be individually cropped apart, made exactly the same size, worked on to enhance to definition, then put through my gif program in correct order. Did it take a long time? Was it fiddly and difficult? What's good about all this is how completely absorbing it is. Donald Trump and climate change and jihad don't scare me any more than a package of Hostess Twinkies.
Is that good? I'm still trying to figure that out.
Wednesday, June 1, 2016
Pure magic: gifs from Piper Spit
I love making gifs, in full knowledge that they don't always run so well. They can be slow or jerky for the first thirty seconds or so when you open a post, but normally they resolve - or at least, they do for me. For you, they may not be jerky at all, I hope.
Lately I've been able to make some really beautiful ones from our Burnaby Lake visits. I've found a new program - Imgur - well, until IT stops working too, as they all do. Imgur works well and makes some huge gifs, but is very very slow and it's hard to save them. I'm not sure why that is. I use another one called Giphy that takes about thirteen seconds to make a beautiful gif, but it can only be from a short video, and a maximum of ten seconds long. Imgur is more like fifteen. But then, that's not important - is it? All that matters is getting them up here, a few seconds of magic time seen over and over again.
Some people say they hate gifs, and I do too, the two-second ones that are supposed to be funny. They are awful. People with the right equipment can make one-minute ones, but why don't I see them anywhere?
That gorgeous alpha male red-winged blackbird just swooped down on me unbidden, but after he finally left, THIS gorgeous creature came along. Looking it up, I found out it was a female red-winged blackbird, explaining her boldness. It's hard to describe her beauty, as her feathers were shot through with gold.
Now here's a nice little sequence! Though if you watch carefully, the male actually waited until the female flew away. Or so it appears - unless she saw him coming - but that's not likely, because he flew up behind her. May I say once more - I have NEVER fed wild birds, and don't believe in feeding wildlife, but in my old age I have become weak, and there is a dire shortage of magic in my life now that my backyard birds have fled. An excuse, no doubt.
These sandhill cranes are mystical creatures, and they love to hang around the docks, hoping to be fed like all these birds. We usually see a mated pair, but this looks to be a smaller bachelor male (note the red mask). I just keep waiting for the pair to return with a fuzzy crane chick. If that happens, oh God, the gifs, the GIFS!!
POST-IT NOTE: Sometimes I think the gifs have to go through one entire (in this case, 15-second) cycle to run properly. But how do I know? All I know is that they DO run properly eventually, but if they're slow and jerky it takes forever to run through that first cycle. Just keep watching, they'll move. These are some of the nicest gifs I've ever made. Just little packages of magic.
Tuesday, May 31, 2016
A bird in the hand: mystery songbird at Piper Spit
Later identified as a tree swallow, but can't they come up with a more lyrical name than that?! This guy's song was intoxicating. Like all the birds at Piper Spit, he's too tame for his own good, and I know I'm not helping matters with my handfuls of seeds. But what can I say? I'm weak, and short on magic moments in my life. I have NO birds in my back yard all, and barely any squirrels, though last year it was just teeming out there. Don't know why. Even took down the new bird house in case they thought it was a predator (like those plastic owls you see). And our former favourite haunt, the "duck park" at Lafarge Lake, is being bulldozed to make way for a Nazi-like cement amphitheatre (just the name has Third Reich connotations to me - like something from Hitler's proposed monstrous empire, Germania). We may never get that lake back, but now we have this.
Blackbird singing. . . on Piper Spit
I can't describe to you the feeling of having this handsome devil fly right down to me without any prompting. I know I shouldn't be feeding him, but I am. I'm tired of feeling like an evil human being. I need my moments of utter magic, and I find so many of them in this magical place.
Blackbird, fly: magic on Burnaby Lake
I was astounded when this guy flew right down to me. Obviously he has no fear, which is not the best thing for him. But it's the best thing for me. He is magnificent and he knows it!
Monday, May 30, 2016
How do you spell Mississauga?
You know that whatever may be going on in the world, at any moment, I can make a gif out of it.
This was what went on today in a parking lot in Costco. In Mississauga. That's one-Mississauga, two-Mississauga. . . whatever. It's Toronto, a cheap-ass, cut-rate version of Toronto, outlying scar(borough) tissue.
And here. Here are a whole bunch of people punching each other out. One guy knocks a woman over backwards, and that's not nice, no. Pushing a woman over onto cement. You can't hear the screaming here because I don't like posting videos (because I know nobody watches them), but believe me, it's fierce. The main word used is "fuck".
Depressing to think that Canadians used to be known as polite, as self-effacing, as peaceable. I don't see that here. I don't know what they're punching each other out for. The last parking space? The last 500-pack of Cheap-Ass Brand toilet paper? Had this been the States, somebody would be dead by now, because of that inalienable Right to Bear Arms. As it is, people are just screaming and punching each other bloody. Over nothing, really. Nothing they'll even remember tomorrow.
Catfall
NOTE. This is one of my gif animations, though I have to admit the images were sort of there already, borrowed from Google images. I guess you'd call this "fair use", like those ads with the animated raisins Maisie and Jake from the 1950s that show up on YouTube. I'm not quite clever enough to photograph falling cats this way, so I had to photoshop the cat at each pose on identical strips of black. This took a lot of experimentation and wasn't that smooth, due to being constricted to just five frames. Should I try again and make the cats closer together? Not sure it would make a difference. Anyway, here is the kitty falling at three speeds.
Before I dispense with this because it is becoming boring and I want to go to Piper Spit and feed blackbirds (which I never do), here's the cat falling over a shorter distance. This does show off the dramatic twist in the air which cats accomplish over very short distances, but it still isn't very smooth. Still, it's the best one yet.
Sunday, May 29, 2016
Saturday, May 28, 2016
Prawn killer! Thumb splitter! Must be the mantis shrimp
This is the picture that started it all. I think. God knows what I was actually looking for. Oh, I know. I was helping my granddaughter with an assignment. She said, "Nanny." "Yes." "I have to do the ocean." I wasn't sure what she meant. I had just printed out internet images of just about every animal that ever existed. But now I found out we had to "do the ocean".
So this led to me downloading a quite ordinary image of a shrimp:
God only knows how that led me on to THIS:
Like tardigrades, it's almost impossible to believe these things exist. Like tardigrades, they have some sort of supernatural strength. And they're icky. Plain icky. They're not pretty at all, no matter what that first picture looks like.
It's not so much all the swivelling around - which is creepy enough. It's the way those little holes in their eyes open and close. ICK. It's like some sort of evil wink. It also looks sort of like the top of an old microphone from the 1940s. I don't like any of those connotations.
For some reason I can see Louis Wain painting mantis shrimp. They have that hectic, even hellish quality that makes his cats look so scary. Most of the bright-colored stuff doesn't even show very much - it's kind of hidden under a buglike shell that I don't want to show right now.
I think the mantis thingie is eating something here. It's eating this fish which is probably still alive. It's sickening, really. The eyes remind me of Jeff Goldblum's in The Fly when he has made his final transformation into that sickening rotting thing stomping around.
This shell may look pretty, but in black and white it would just be wretched, like a giant. . . mantis. I looked at the Wikipedia entry and it was too long, so I'll just quote the more interesting part.
Called "sea locusts" by ancient Assyrians, "prawn killers" in Australia and now sometimes referred to as "thumb splitters" – because of the animal's ability to inflict painful gashes if handled incautiously – mantis shrimp sport powerful claws that they use to attack and kill prey by spearing, stunning, or dismemberment. In captivity, some larger species are capable of breaking through aquarium glass with a single strike.
Along with being pretty frightening, this looks a bit obscene to me, as if the mantis shrimp has two penises like some legendary figure of myth. Bi-penal? Never mind. These creatures are the Sylvester Stallones of the sea world. I don't like Sylvester Stallone.
It turns out that, as with so many other things, there is a mantis shrimp subculture. I was charmed and somewhat taken aback when I discovered the tardigrade paintings on DeviantArt. It made the fact of tardigrades' existence somewhat more bearable. But I was blown out of my chair to see well over a THOUSAND images, artwork in all media including origami and paper clips, celebrating the mantis shrimp. All I can do here is provide the link, as I really can't reproduce any of it here. Well OK, just a couple, with accreditation.
http://satanizmihomedog.deviantart.com/art/All-Hail-THE-MANTIS-SHRIMP-452373061
Really, they're all good, and some of them are headspinningly wonderful, making me think I should just retire from all creative endeavour. It makes me marvel at the richness and depth of talent out there, and it pisses me off that most artists can't make a living from their work. They should be able to make a living just by painting mantis shrimp. Anyone who can make me marvel at images of something I hate is OK by me.
For more like this - and trust me, you DO want more like this - just click on this link. It's helping me wipe out some of those gut-sinking mental images of Jeff Goldblum.
http://www.deviantart.com/browse/all/?section=&global=1&q=mantis+shrimp
(Not Jeff Goldblum - I couldn't. But Jeff Goldblum played him once. Badly.)
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