WE'VE COME A LONG WAY BABY • Since the demise of my Canon G11 (I miss ya baby; I'm so sorry I made all those niggling complaints about ya) I have been experimenting with carrying an old Canon A10 or an old Canon G2. I always have my iPhone 6S+ with me because that's how I record my rides on the Strava service. If only the iPhone didn't have such a wide-angle lens then I would probably not bother with a 'real' camera. Today, I had the Canon A10 and the iPhone stowed in a frame bag on the bicycle. I had not intended to take any photos, but when I made a water stop I realized that it has been a long time since I took a photo of the Hurricane Fault mountain tops—known as Mollies Nipple, the Three Brothers, Whiteface, and the Wart—in the late afternoon sun. I went to dig out the Canon A10, but on an impulse I first took a photo at that same location using the iPhone. The headline photo is Mollies Nipple. The upper photo in the collage of the string of tops wa...
Just after dawn, the west of the valley catches the first rays of the rising sun. The highest point of the ridge is over 10,000 feet of elevation, which is over 7,000 feet above the valley floor. It takes another hour for the sun to rise above the escarpment and light the knoll, by which time the light is much whiter. The valley floor is still in shadow below the western escarpment. Finally the sun apears over the escarpment and floods the valley with white sunlight at around 5,600 Kelvin in color temperature. In the middle of the day it became necessary to retreat behind a street sign, which made a handy lens shade, while I took pictures of the jets flying high overhead to and from Las Vegas. Later in the day the afternoon sunshine lights up the escarpment and the western valley wall falls into shadow. Persons sleuthing the file names will realize that the sequence is jumbled over two days—no matter, sometimes a story is greater than the sum of its parts. The post title came to me...
No turning back • Folklorists use the ATU Index (Aarne–Thompson–Uther Index) to categorize folk tales. The Dick Whittington and His Cat folk tale is a type 1651 ('Whittington's Cat'). Lacking the necessary accoutrements (a cat and a peal of bells: we have many feral and domestic cats hereabouts, but I do not recollect ever hearing any campanology) to play out my own tale in that way today, I had to settle for not turning back. I felt cold when I started, although in my homeland 60°F (15.6°C) at sunup would qualify as the intense heat of high summer. It was the day after my rest day. At this point Paul Sherwen would always say to his fellow commentator Phil Liggett something like: 'The body can react in strange ways after a rest day, Phil.' I was feeling like a stranger to myself. I had expected to be energized following my R&R day, but I found that I was dragging my heels. I decided to go to the next 'exit point' (all well-planned routes incorpo...
Comments