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...
PLAYING BO PEEP WITH THE COPY EDITOR • My own writing has been criticized—quite fairly, I admit—for being long-winded and using over-complex sentence construction. At the polar extreme, Jeff Albertson spawned a host of imitators when he wore a T-shirt declaiming, "Worst Episode Ever." My starched-collar grammar checker tartly comments, "This may be a sentence fragment." The Albertson catchphrase is often written and punctuated in the form of "Worst. Whatever. Ever." because of the way Albertson delivers such comments when voiced by Frank Azaria. My grammar checker remains silent on this development. I settled down with English Traits by Ralph Waldo Emerson and the first sentence of the second paragraph brought my reading to a screeching halt: Like most young men at that time, I was much indebted to the men of Edinburgh and of the Edinburgh Review, — to Jeffrey, Mackintosh, Hallam, and to Scott, Playfair and De Quincey; and my narrow and des...
CULTURAL LEARNINGS FOR MAKE BENFIT • Today, the second Monday of October is either Indigenous Peoples Day or Columbus Day, or both in some places. Like many things in these decentralized United States the choice to go with one, or the other, or both, varies by state and even by city. The State of Utah remains with Columbus Day. Salt Lake City (the Utah state capital in the north of the state) went with duality. St George (the largest city in the south of the state) remains with Columbus Day and the Stars and Stripes were ubiquitous. Yesterday, we passed on the Art in Kayenta show and chose to visit the Shivwits fourth annual native American arts and crafts show, which is held on the Shivwits tribal lands beyond the well-heeled satellite towns to the northwest of St George. I chatted with two sisters who were continuing their mothers work with Navajo jewelry. One sister had stayed with traditional designs and the other sister had taken a more contempora...
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