Halloween Links

I decided to sprint through a  bunch of Halloween posts. I'll be taking a break for a while afterwards.

I've already posted on the original site, and here are another set. Seriously, I think I'm done for a while.

This is something about a book I'm reading, a note for Norm, and a Walken memory.

Inspired by my brother, this is a movie quote-and-clip quiz.

This is about one of my favorite flags.

Some Laker and ha-ha Harden notes are over on my sports blog.

Oh, the humanity! Check out the new Super Group in the pop-culture wasteland.

This is another Salton Sea preview on the travel blog.

A Halloween special book discussion.

Spicy grilled corn, anybody?

A mostly wasteful post for show; a Long Beach post on a blog that I've unfortunately neglected.

This is just ridiculous.

Happy Halloween!

Camera-Phone Pictures: FX Filter Comparison

The title of this post makes the entire enterprise sound boring. Let's prove it's not!

One of the earliest free apps I downloaded was a thing called "FX Camera". It had a series of things it would apply to the photograph taken by the camera lens to make it look like it was taken with a special camera. The original effects were Toy Camera, Fishbowl, Polaroid, Pop Art, and "Quadro-Mirror".

The Toy Camera filter is my favorite of those, and it tries to give the picture the color and quality of an old Holga or Diana plastic camera, something I'm pretty familiar with. The Polaroid effect is also pretty neat. The Fishbowl effect is too grainy; the Pop Art effect turns one photo into a postcard with four of the same pictures tiled and in different colors (which makes it really hard to make anything out), and what I call "Quadro-Mirror" flips and spins an image, to make something resembling a Rorschach blot.

I just wanted to compare some of the effects here, since I just took the pictures off the camera.

Here are two pictures, one taken with the regular camera on my phone, and the second taken with the Toy Camera "filter" activated. This was from the long hike with Norm at the end of May:

You can see how the colors of the pilings have gone from what it looks like normally in the top picture, to the greened look in the bottom. I think it just messes with hues and saturation. I think I like the second picture better.

Then I thought I'd throw in some of the other filters I spoke about, so they can be seen.

Here's the mirroring effect (it can be controlled where it centers to Rorschaching:

Here's a pile of coins and a few bills (our retirement) rocking the Polaroid effect:

And here's the Pop Art filter. This is a bounty from the Farmer's Market, placed out on the table to be photographed.

Camera-Phone Pics: Laundry on Friday

Tuesday, eight minutes 'til eleven in the morning. I stepped outside the laundromat and took a picture with my new mobile device. It was June 7th.

I thought it might be a cool place from where to take pictures on future trips. Less than a month later, on a random Friday night, July 1st to be exact, I stepped out and took a picture at 7:38, wondering just why exactly I was doing laundry on a Friday night, a rare off night for me at the time:

We got into a habit of doing laundry every two weeks, but as I had five white chef coats, I found I needed to get them washed and ironed as needed, so I pretty much ended up at the laundromat every week. But, I realized on one trip that the last time I'd gone out to take a picture was also a Friday. This Friday was a morning, right at 9:45, on the cloudy 26th of August:

Just over a month later, on September 30th, another Friday, I was back, and at almost the exact same time, 9:39 on a notably less cloudy that morning:

Now it was just getting weird. Friday had become this day where I had to wash and iron five big white chef coats. It wasn't until going on a trip to Seattle in early November that I was able to break the chain. But before then, I was back again, Friday morning again, 9:12 on October 7th, exactly a week later than the last trip:

Some days my phone was at home charging, other days I just didn't think about it. Also, it was hard to go from picture to picture, so when it came to lining them up, you can tell I was using the palm on the left as an anchor, and oscillated (unknowingly) at centering the shot on the round condo or between it and the pointy-roofed Villa Riviera.

I don't really miss having to do laundry every... single...Friday, though.

(I just found an efficient way of getting my pictures of the phone, so there'll be a few more posts like this in the coming days.)

Lonely Harvest of a Long Beach Balcony Garden

You know what's cool? Putting a seed into some dirt and then, after a considerable wait, getting to eat food that the seed's grown. It's awesome. Gardening, man.

On the original blog I've mentioned gardening in strange places, because that's how we do it. I think the first mention might have been in 2009 back in Brooklyn, with the tomato plant in the window sill. The next might have been from the Dwyce house in Austin, and Auntie Martha's backyard garden. In our own apartment in Austin we had a balcony garden.

Balcony gardens are where we're at at this moment. And since it doesn't get nearly as hot here (holy cow it's 83!) as it does in Central Texas, our heat loving tomatoes weren't exactly a bumper crop this year. Also, there's not exactly enough sunlight.

But this picture caused me to label it the Lonely Harvest:

Yup. Those are our two beefsteak tomatoes. The red one, while fully grown here, was slightly smaller than a golf ball. That made the flavor super-great, but the skin was a little tough. It was seriously delicious; we ate it yesterday at breakfast (eggs and market sage-cheddar with left-over rice and sausage, with the tomato on top)(leftovers and eggs: a tip from Tony).

Then I started looking around our garden to see what we had left. Earlier we were able to get some broccoli, but it was only enough to snack on in the raw. As of that day, the one a few days back, our dill had bolted and gone to seed, but was very good. We used the seeds a few times, even crushing them with the mortar and pestle and adding the powder to vinegar to add to a sweet potato salad dish:

Our rosemary soldiers away, getting plucked on average twice a week for things I'm cooking. I don't use very much...

And here are our pollinators. We have a working agreement: I don't bother them deliberately, they get to pollinate our flowering plants and anyone else's; they stay out of the house, and I don't set them and their nest on fire. It's worked out fine so far:

Wasps...both they and we want peace, so there's peace. If only certain parties in the world could learn the lesson that we've learned on our Balcony Garden...and if it were only that easy...

A Few From the Balcony

Occasionally I head out onto our back balcony and take pictures. When I put a new roll of film in Corrie's manual 35 mm camera, it takes a few clicks of the shutter and windings to get the film ready for actual taking pictures, and I usually aim it at the magnolia tree off one side:

This picture is from my Old Reliable camera. One way to tell is because it's over-exposed. It's too bright, and is actually brighter than you'd see with your eyes. But, here's the darker one...

You want the middle ground. In the first one the tree is too bright, but closer than here, while the roof here is much closer to reality than the roof in the other picture.

Sometimes at night I come out and take pictures of the "L" on the top of the Lafayette Building, a condominium, and the results are pretty sweet:

It looks like I fell, or took a step, but I was probably just shaky. Here's the same building during a rare foggy morning:

The balcony is a spot where we eat on occasion, take guests for a relaxing evening cocktail, and have our garden. The garden's next...

Moon in Perspective

Ever noticed how big the moon looks when it pops up over the horizon? You get a sense that it's a huge disc and looks so much bigger right at the horizon than it does hours later high above in the night sky. See what I mean:

The looming moonrise. Pretty sweet.

I was taught a trick though, a trick that helps trick your brain back into seeing the truth. At the horizon with the buildings and trees around, the moon looks bigger to our brains because of its line of sight relative to the ground.

It turns out that the moon never changes size (uhh, yeah), and one way to tell is to use the finger pinch trick. Extend your fingers to arm's length and make a pinching motion, like this:

Later on in the night, higher in the sky the moon will be in the exact same proportion to your fingers. My camera had a hard time with the darkness, and when I figure out how to get that picture, I'll show it off. You don't need to take my word for it, you can try it out yourself. It'll work.

Found a Four-Leaf Clover

I was going through a whole bunch of old books, culling my library for a book drive through Corrie's office, and I came across something kinda cool.

On page 125 in a dusty copy of The Last Essays of Elia, by Charles Lamb:

I guess I grabbed the book from Cal Poly's library dollar bins--books that have been discarded. I guess a book of old essays seemed like a good idea on the day I bought it.

This four-leaf clover is brittle and delicate, and you can see the stain that it created in the book.

So far the clover's been left in the book and the book has been removed from the discard pile.

This might be the first four-leaf clover I've ever "found".

Reclaiming this Bikepath for the West-Side

I got my groove back. Or something.

I carried down my bike, slowly, and went outside. I climbed on top, and started pedaling. Mostly. My left, surgically repaired knee, couldn't stay on the pedal all the way through the motion, so I had to pull out each time after putting force down on the pedal.

Pushing off was fine, then I'd have to pull out, and repeat the motion.

A few days later it was the weekend and Corrie and I went out biking, and after my stretches all week, I was able to keep my left heel on the pedal all the way through the pedaling motion. Also, Corrie was able to snap some pictures of my, eh, triumph.

This is the bike path we use to get around from the West Side, where we live, to the Belmont Shore, on the east side. This is also the Death-Bike, Causer of the Distal Fracture:

If you look close, in the shadows you can see Corrie with the camera and my shadow looking like a seahorse.

This next picture is an action shot; a grimace on my face. This happens when my knee was pushed beyond it's flexing point.

I went out today on a longer ride, and over the weekend we went on a nice ride when Tony was around, and on both days, I could keep my foot on the pedal just a little more than the last time.

Like today, I could keep my foot on the pedal for nearly the entire motion, and by the end, I was able to pivot my ankle and hold almost my entire foot on the pedal, instead of just the heel.

Progress, baby!

I like the way the clouds obscure the sun here:

This was a trip we made to the Belmont Brewing Company, a brewery along the beach right off of the pier. Not a bad selection, nothing too offensive. That is until I had a strawberry monstrosity from the Belmont Brewers at a tasting night in San Luis last week. That stuff was worse than a wine cooler.