Author: Mellow Curmudgeon

My blog touches on many things, often with humor and/or haiku. I have been a scientist; an engineer; an Alzheimer’s caregiver.
haiku, history

Motion in Haiku: Another Surprise

Posted on by Mellow Curmudgeon
Like still photos, many haiku capture a moment in time.  My first foray into capturing motion in haiku yielded 2 surprises.  Here comes another, in time for the centennial on 2018-11-11 of the armistice that ended the fighting in World War I.
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Let’s start by summarizing the older surprises that I posted in response to a CDHK episode.  Credits for the images below are at the end of this post for readability.

The first surprise was that that so much motion could fit in a haiku:

Redemptive Trickle
|A shell exploded!
|Water slowly filled the hole
|and held the whole sky.

Of course, my haiku that is like a movie was inspired by this classic World War I haiku that is like a still photo:

© Maurice Betz
|A shell hole
|In its water
|Held the whole sky.

The second surprise was that I did not have a stable preference between these haiku.  Like someone viewing the classic ambiguous image that can be seen as a duck facing one way or as a rabbit facing the other, I flip-flopped between the still photo by Betz and the movie by me.  So did at least 2 readers of my old post.

Here is the new third surprise.  After writing yet another shell hole haiku, I finally have a stable preference.  My preferred haiku is like a movie that starts after the explosion:

Healing Trickle
|Water slowly filled
|the shell blast’s muddy crater.
|It held the whole sky.

Image Sources

Unable to find appropriate and affordable period images, I used contemporary images: a generic explosion and a puddle that looks much like the water-filled shell hole.  The puddle photo has been cropped to be more nearly square.

6
fiction, humor

Wondrous Weirdness — Worried Wabbit

Posted on by Mellow Curmudgeon
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Rabbit-Hole_Worried-Rabbit
Our little friend is worried.  Mistaken for Bugs Bunny by Elmer Fudd’s hired hit man, (s)he was on the run for a while.  There was no chance to pause for rational thought about whether to get the prerelease discount on The Rabbit Hole by ordering the e-book before 2018-11-01.  Yes, being big on rationality is weird for a rabbit.  Some weirdness rubbed off when (s)he posed for the cover of the book, but there is still plenty inside.

The upside of ordering early is that (s)he could save $1; the downside is that (s)he would be trusting promotions like my previous post.  Should (s)he wait for a chance to use something like [Look Inside] on Amazon?  After release, the e-price would still be low at $2.99, and the ink-on-paper version would be an option at $12.50.  Decisions, decisions.

Maybe our little friend will feel better after reading blurbs for some of the 35 stories, ordered as in the book:

  • Foggy
    A father and daughter’s boating trip is ambushed by a mysterious, underwater tormentor.
  • I Should’ve Known Better
    There’s just one thing wrong with his beautiful luxury apartment: it’s a transdimensional portal.  Will the Flying Demon Things get him before he gets one of the centaur Babes?
  • The Scroll and the Silver Kazoo
    You never know who (or what) will show up at an open mic event.
  • Quicksilver Falls
    A mysterious phenomenon puts the future of the world in the hands of a simple Indiana farmer and sparks the world’s strangest writing competition.
  • Satori from a Consulting Gig
    Management consultant Frank Dow has a new client: God.
  • The Adventures of Conqueror Cat
    Herr Trinket (a sharp-eyed and even sharper-tongued shelter cat) traverses an interdimensional rabbit hole into poochlandia to explore the enduring dog-cat dichotomy.
  • Eggs On End
    Claudia had a secret: she was ordinary – agonizingly, mind numbingly ordinary.  But all that was about to change.  And it would all begin with eggs.
  • Life Changing
    Lawrence decides to exercise his brain to avoid his Alzheimer-stricken mother’s fate, but when his life twists beyond recognition, he can’t escape the possibility that lost minds must be somewhere.
  • Carolina Brimstone
    The passion of the zealot is proportional to the power of the demon inside.  Constance Hennfield’s fervor knows no bounds.

 

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humor, philosophy, photography

Novice Philosopher Meets Old Yankee

Posted on by Mellow Curmudgeon
The novice bloviates.  Maybe people he has not met yet will try to set him straight.  They might say pretty much what the Yankee says, while making the points in ways that are gentler, longer, and subtler.  But not as funny.
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… Why are we here? …

‘Cuz wer nawt theyah.

… What is the meaning of life? …

Wehrds need meanings; life don’t.

What happens when an irrestible force meets an immovable object?

We lehrn who was lyin’: the fellah sellin’ a fawhrs or the fellah sellin’ an awbject.
Hmmm.  Coulda been both.

Certainty is not exclusive to math and logic.
For example, no squirrel can get past the baffle on my bird feeder.

Ehyah??

squirrel_840x636

 

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fiction, humor

Wondrous Weirdness — Prerelease Discount

Posted on by Mellow Curmudgeon
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The first volume in a new Writers’ Co-op anthology series will be released on 2018-11-01:

Rabbit-Hole_840x1267

An e-book version can be preordered now by clicking on the image and then clicking on the button for your platform.  On the release date, the e-price will rise from $1.99 to $2.99.  There will be good news then also: oldsters like me will be able to buy the physical ink-on-paper version from Amazon.

For 3 of the 4 platforms reached from the link to The Rabbit Hole, the platform’s page has a nice summary of the contents and spirit of the anthology:

How do you like your weirdness?  A subtle nudge towards the untoward?  A quick zap of zany?  Or a full-on assault of aberration?  Whatever your taste, you’ll find it here, and many more strains of strange that you didn’t suspect existed.  From magic rain to a talking (severed) head, extraordinary eggs to belligerent birds, the stories in this collection enter the rabbit hole to explore its hidden corners and winding ways.  Through all the variety, what they have in common is originality, creativity and fine writing.

While I will wait for hard copy before reading the whole thing, I really have read several of the stories (not just the one I contributed).  I solemnly swear (or affirm) that the following paragraph is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

The Rabbit Hole‘s first edition has 35 diverse selections by 35 authors.  Anybody with a taste for weirdness has a good chance of finding some things they like.  Moods are as varied as lengths, which run from 1 to 17 pages (with 7.6 as the average).  There is humanity and humor as well as some darkness and much weirdness.

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(reblog), haiku, photography

Pastel Synergy

Posted on by Mellow Curmudgeon
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This post ends with 2 haiku, each inspired by a photo of clouds imitating clams.  I took the calm photo; Sue Ranscht took the dramatic one.

Cee’s Fun Foto Challenge: Pastel Colors

Tho I usually prefer deeply saturated colors, I love the pastel pink and green sometimes seen in a cloud, when the angles are just right in the triangle formed by the cloud and the sun and the viewer.  At my latitude, it is a rare sight.  I have had just one chance to photograph the elusive synergy of pastel pink and green:

IMG_2199_CSTC_less-blue_800x414


Dramatic photos of pink and green in clouds can be seen by searching online for

[mother-of-pearl clouds] or [nacreous clouds].

There is also the marvel by Sue Ranscht that appears below.  Fair warning: the image credit links to a post in a series, with a striking image for each episode in a fantasy epic.  The series is so addictive that it hooked me despite my aversion to fantasies and impatience with epics.

elliot-275a-s-t-ranscht_800x403

© Sue Ranscht | Space, Time, and Raspberries

Clams in the Clouds #1
|Serene clouds
|give mother-of-pearl
|to old eyes.
Clams in the Clouds #2
|Molten pewter clouds:
|some are tinted pink or green.
|Abalone shell.

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flowers, humor, photography

Vibrant Synergy

Posted on by Mellow Curmudgeon

Cee’s Fun Foto Challenge: Vibrant Colors

I like the synergy when a few good things up their game by working together, as with peanuts and chocolate.  When they do not clash, bright colors can work together in vibrant synergy.

Pink and Green:

IMG_2223_840x592

Magenta and Yellow (with a bee):

purple-yellow_840x825

With help from blue and green, the pink and yellow flowers in the following photo team up to illustrate a deep truth about statistics.  Really.

Outside of CFFC, I posted the photo along with a beautiful image found on the web that espresses the same deep truth in another way.  Both ways have no equations, no jargon, and no saturated fat.  Click on the photo to see the details.

daff_pink-rebel._Yellow-10_840x960

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(reblog), flowers, haiku, photography

Calm, Cool, and CollectING

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Carpe Diem’s Quest For A (New) Masterpiece
#3 the quest continues

My latest haiku came quickly when I saw a superb photo by Cee Neuner.  While I gave the haiku a title to make it intelligible w/o the photo, I also requested and received permission to share the photo in a post.

red-yellow-dahlia_bee

© Cee Neuner

Red and Yellow Dahlia
|Amid swirling flames,
|pollen and nectar beckon.
|Bee stays calm and cool.
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flowers, photography

Red Trillium

Posted on by Mellow Curmudgeon

I often look at things from an odd angle.  Red trillium plants like shade, grow low, and have flowers that face downward.  Now is your chance to get a from-below view of a red trillium flower, in a mix of reflected and transmitted sunlight:

trillium_thru-lit_840x558

Figuratively, I sometimes “look” at a neat little thing from an odd angle to shine some light on a messy big thing with a subtle similarity to the little thing.  For example, there is a parallel between the history of a little word puzzle’s instructions and the history of a big idea in economics.

Cee’s Fun Foto Challenge: Red

Some of my photos with prominent reds were used outside of CFFC.  The following images link to posts that use them in ways that may be surprizing.  Can U guess what ideas they illustrate before following the links?

fruit-bowl_404x400

anzac

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food, humor, language, photography

Lime Time

Posted on by Mellow Curmudgeon
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The color word lime is used for many light or yellowish kinds of green.


Cee’s Fun Foto Challenge: Lime or Light Green

New leaves often display a version of lime.

lime-leaves_fix_840x1214

 
Actual limes display several versions of lime on the outside and …

lime-light_840x630

 
… yet another version on the inside.

lime-face_840x840

Got tequila?

Dry Margarita

A bottle of premixed margaritas is convenient, but the contents are too sweet for me.  To get a drier margarita with minimal mixological effort, I use roughly equal amounts of premixed margarita and dry white wine.  Tho admittedly not a world-class margarita, the result is a good no-fuss drink.

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flowers, humor, photography

Threesome of Floral Threesomes

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In response to challenge with the word [threesome], here is a threesome of floral threesomes that pushes the envelope of what flower pix can illustrate.
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One Word Sunday — Threesome

As Susie left home to start a new life with Dale, her mother watched and wondered.  Would the mixed marriage work?

susie-dale-mama_840x598

Other floral threesomes can illustrate a poem and a point that go beyond flowers.  The following images link to earlier posts that use them.  Can U guess what the posts are about before clicking on the images?

I used 3 clusters of rhododendron blossoms to illustrate an abstract haiku.

Rhodo_928x599

In about 40 yrs of making bouquets from the many daylilies in my yard, how often have I seen 3 flowers blooming on just 1 stalk?  Exactly once, on the left in this bouquet.

3-on-1
With 3 separate stalks, the commonplace floral threesome on the right is a freebie, beyond what my title promises.  Buy 3; get 4.

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haiku, language, philosophy, photography

AKA Blue-Green (or Cyan or …)

Posted on by Mellow Curmudgeon
This pretty color is also a visual metaphor: relationships mean more than intrinsic properties.  What to call it?  There’s a reason to prefer “blue-green” over other names, most of the time.
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Cee’s Fun Foto Challenge: Teal, Aqua, Seafoam or Turquoise

blue-green_840x666

What would I say is “the” color of the cloth in my image?  Even more than with other colors, how it looks depends on lighting and surroundings.  This pretty color is a visual metaphor: relationships mean more than intrinsic properties.

Colorful Plain English
|Inkjets squirt cyan;
|some poets sing of turquoise.
|I just see blue-green.

For most purposes, I prefer blue-green (and 2 variations on it) over the other names.  Anybody who knows what blue and green mean can guess what blue-green means.  Those who need more choices for naming colors like this can put blue-green between bluish green (AKA aqua) and greenish blue (AKA turquoise).  The 3 names I prefer are all clearer than names like aqua about where they lie on the range from just plain blue to just plain green.

Nerdy 😉 Note

Need still more choices?  Use Red|Green|Blue coordinates.  The 256x256x256 possible values for the RGB coordinates of a color can make more distinctions than U will ever need.

For example, the image below is a detail from the image above, with little yellow circles around 2 spots on the cloth, one relatively bright and another relatively dark.  Most spots on the cloth have [R|G|B] between the bright spot’s [45|223|226] and the dark spot’s [0|48|86].

blue-green_crop_upsize_mark_crop_840x131

If U like one of those colors enough to want it as a text or background color, U can use the corresponding hexadecimal code (#2DDFE2 or #003056) in an HTML style sheet.  Explicit hex codes avoid the bother of remembering the sometimes flaky conventional names for web colors.

Hex codes also provide flexibility.  Colors rarely look the way one expects when picking a color by pointing to it in another context, as I noticed when I used colors from an image to add a haiku to the image and then to write text referring to parts of the haiku.  Bumping coordinates up or down can adjust colors to look good in actual use.

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birds, photography

How to Hide in Plain Sight

Posted on by Mellow Curmudgeon
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K’lee and Dale’s Cosmic Photo Challenge:
Hiding In Plain Sight: Photo Elements You Might Have Missed!

The challenge illustrates a familiar way to hide in plain sight, by being a small part of a complex scene.  My response illustrates another way, by being quick and unexpected.  While a classic experiment using a fake gorilla provides one example, my response uses a genuine wren.

So long ago that I was using color negative film, I took a photo of a wren feeding his/her chicks.  When I eventually got the print back from the lab, I saw something I had never seen before and have not seen since:

Wren-Feeding-Chicks_840x1112

The parent’s tail feathers fan out to brace against the outside of the nest box, forming almost a half-circle.  Don’t blink or you’ll miss it.  The shutter clicked at a lucky instant, freezing a detail of the momentary handoff that I have never seen in real time.

To get a web image, I scanned the old print and looked more closely at the scanned image while deciding how to crop it.  A bird splat on the nest box was hiding in plain sight (the familiar way) and was now a distraction.  No problem.  Any decent photo editing software could remove it, as mine did.

Sad to say, all my instances of hiding in plain sight the familiar way are like that banished bird splat.  Experiencing a scene in real time, I either do not notice or can easily ignore power lines, bright reflections, and whatever else detracts from the good stuff.  Examining a photo later, I find that whatever hid (by being a small part of a complex scene) is now so distracting that I must tone it down if I cannot remove it.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The invisible gorilla experiment is a classic example of hiding in plain sight by being quick and unexpected.  The resulting book is a good read exploring several ways that people often overestimate their abilities.

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humor, photography

Elmer’s Epoxy Epic

Posted on by Mellow Curmudgeon
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Cee’s Oddball Photo Challenge: 2018-08-12

dark-shards_840x671

? ? ? ?

What U see depends on when U look.
Here is the same detail under typical lighting:

blue-shards_840x671

A detail of what?
Scroll down to see the answer (image & text).

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Keep scrolling …

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hide-baffle_840x866

A clever craftsperson repurposed some windows from an old house as suncatchers, with shards of colored glass held in place by clear liquid epoxy.  Alas, the epoxy components were not measured just right for the one I bought.  (It’s difficult.)  Sticky gunk oozed from cracks and seams after a few weeks of exposure to hot sun.

An epic battle between Elmer’s Glue and the rogue epoxy ended in victory for Elmer.  On one side of the suncatcher, a thick coating of glue was needed in some places.  I added more to make a whimsical mix of clear and cloudy, roughly 50-50.  The ratio is not so critical as when mixing epoxy.

My suncatcher is a good size for hiding the squirrel baffle above my hanging bird feeder, and it has withstood years of hot summer sun w/o having any gunk get past Elmer.  On the other hand, a few squirrels have gotten past the baffle.

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humor, photography

Navajo Rug

Posted on by Mellow Curmudgeon
Four of the eleven items specified in a CFFC challenge are sitting on a Navajo rug.  Glad I do not need everybody in one photo.  It’s a small rug.
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Cee’s Fun Foto Challenge: Week 1 Photo
geometry, bushes, window, brick, etc

Four of the items mentioned in this challenge are sitting on a small Navajo rug:

NavajoRug_840x682

Geometry, bushes, window, brick, curtain, green, tan, wall, building, dark red, tree

Glad I do not need everybody in one photo.
As I said, it’s a small rug.

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