A Science Project Under My Kitchen Sink

John's Dregs being filtered of sediment

For the last couple of years I have been interested in putting bacteria to work for me.  Now I’m getting deeper and deeper into Fermentation.  I thought I’d start with something simple like red wine vinegar.  I read up and got a bottle of Apple Cider Vinegar “With The Mother”.  That means not Pasteurized to kill the beneficial bacteria.  I put some in the bottom of one of those sun tea jars from Goodwill and then added a little bit of leftover red wine.  Whenever I did not particularly like a wine I would feed my jar with a slosh.  Mediocore wine can produce fine vinegar so don’t worry.  I’m not wasting any of the good stuff.

I forgot about this for about a year.  I keep it under the sink in a little used compartment.  I drape a paper towel over the lid but do not seal it up.

I’m only guessing but I think that every time I added a new batch of wine to my vinegar jar a new “Mother” would form on the top.  When I got ready to harvest my vinegar there were several layers of Mother.  Each looked like a pancake but the texture was like a huge disk of gristle.  It was gross, amazing, tactile, visual, and a lot more.  I reached into the jar and extracted about 7 layers of Mother.

Layer after layer of The Mother prior to composting all but one.

Each one sort of reminded me of a ham steak.  I saved one for my next batch and tossed the others into the compost pile.

Here’s another shot of what my scientific workbench looked like.

A Handful of The Mother. The Mother is Always a Handful.

After filtering out the sediment with a funnel and paper towel I had about one liter of John’s Dregs Fine  Wine Vinegar.  I tried a coffee filter but that was too slow.  I filtered it into the Goofy jar and then decanted it into a lot of smaller bottles.  Now I use it and give it away.  Just ask.  No deliveries.

One last shot

One last shot of all that mother.  That was a hard working mother.  Wine was turned into fine vinegar.

My next step was to learn how to make a vinegrette.  That’s one of the basic recipes in cooking.  As I understand it it is about 1 part vinegar with some salt and pepper and Djon mustard and maybe some shallots chopped or other things.  Then you drizzle in 4 parts extra virgin olive oil as you whisk, whisk, whisk.  That emulsifies the mess.  You can shake it too but that lacks purity.  Your soul will suffer in the long run.

Painted Press Photos and Skiffle in Downtown Fillmore

Saturday night was the opening of a small exhibit of painted press photos from the John Nichols Gallery.  The event occurred at Coffeeboy in Fillmore.   My friend Jeremy arranges the exhibits and I was glad to bring nine framed vintage photos for the walls.  I chose newspaper photos that had been cropped and painted on to enhance contrast.  Train wrecks and accidents but no dead bodies.  They were a big hit.

Jeremy looks like he's been sniffing too much solder lately.

Not only was there art on the walls if you can call it that but there was great coffee and food and music. Opening the event was a guitarist and singer from Ventura named Deepak. I bought his CD “Deepakalypse”.

Deepak solo accustic opened.

The crowd was mixed in age and hip and cool.

The awed crowd. ISO too high for a small camera hence the noise.

At the back of Coffeeboy is one wall painted black like a chalk board.  A quotation changes on a regular basis. The quote for the evening was:::

Now comes the part about Skiffle. I’ll leave it to you to Google it and Wiki it and You Tube it.  Skiffle is the Music of the Future.  I’ve only been a fan for about one week.  Something lead me to Lonnie Donnegan .  You might as well click on his name and see and listen to him on You Tube.  I’m hooked.

The main attraction of the evening, musically, was up next.  Taking the stage was the Peculiar Pretzelmen.  Might as well click on their name AFTER you have soaked up Lonnie Donnegan to hear and see them.  I purchased their CD.  I thought their music was something like Captain Beefheart meets Bela Fleck.  Which is to say I loved it.  Correct me if I’m wrong but I think the spirit of Lonnie Donnegan was reincarnated that night in Coffeeboy in Fillmore.  There was a banjo, guitar, vocals accordian and a drum kit with at least a 26 inch kick and a pot for a tom and a skillet for a snare.  Primitive modernism.

The Peculiar Pretzelmen in Fillmore before heading to their next gig in Portland.

The lights dimmed.  I wanted to shoot at ISO 80 on my camera.  I switched to AV and set the shutter speed to 2 seconds. I propped the camera up on the counter and started taking pictures.  Time did not stand still.  The photo seems to me to match the music as the music matched the train wreck and airplane crash photos on the wall.

Check out the banjo. I'll never make another banjo joke again.

Finally the accordian came in. I'll also never make another accordian joke again. You know what they call someone who hangs out with musicians? A drummer.

I moved my camera to a face in the crowd.

Two seconds worth of coffee.

Brianna enjoying the music.

I talked with Brianna (hope I’m spelling it correctly) after the show. She keeps a journal and was writing in it during the evening.  I highly approve of that activity.  When she said she “did a little modeling” I gave her my card.  I’m ready to do more portraits and she wants to build her portfolio.  Might be a good trade.  I won’t use long exposures.

Money Talk

Money Talk – Universalist Unitarian Church of Santa Paula – March 1, 2009

What would you think if people around you started saying, “When we get through this global warming mess everything will be better again”.  To me that is very similar thinking to, “When we get through this recession everything will be better again”.  What if these are the good ol’ days?  When we get through the recession what date in history do you want to have replicated?  1963?  1993?  2003?  That will not be possible. We move in faith toward unseen goals and toward uncertain futures and startling new possibilities.
We all live in an interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part. That includes a financial web.  It’s a web not a safety net.  We would fall into a safety net.  We crawl about a web and explore new ways of being.  Reality keeps changing, even our financial reality.

I recently became a member of the Ag Futures Alliance.  We meet once a month at Faulkner Farm and talk about how to bring sustainability to agriculture in Ventura County.  The group is made up of farmers, farmworker housing advocates, environmentalists, civic planners,  foodies and activists.  I’m thinking a lot about sustainability lately as it applies not only to agriculture but to food, church, downtown businesses and my own personal life.

Our church here in Santa Paula has maintained its existence for more than 100 years.  We all want it to sustain that existence into the future.  To do that we must constantly change with the times.  We react, respond and also initiate.  We do that as an institution but mostly as a group of individuals.  How we live our lives as individuals helps us maintain and sustain our existence as a church.  When we become better at living our personal lives we create a better community.  When the community improves our individual lives benefit.  Nice web.  Pull on one side and the other size gets jiggled.  Cut one piece and the whole web sags a bit.

I can’t predict the future for myself, my business, the church or for agriculture in Ventura County.  I do predict that most things will cost more and we will have less of them.  That does not mean that we will be poor and hungry.  Challenging economic times require new ways of thinking and acting.  That means new ways of earning and spending along with new ways of eating and drinking.  To create a better future than the one we have been heading for over the last couple of generations we could consider the issue of sustainability.

One element of sustainability is to eat as much of our food as possible that is grown within 100 miles of where we live.  We vote with our forks about what kind of a food system we want to have.  Avocados from Chile or tomatoes from Fillmore.  Consider the implications of each food purchase.  Follow that line of reasoning and consider the implications of each and every purchase.  Vote with your dollars for the world you want.

I’m doing several thing on a personal level to change my relationship with food and money.  I like food and money.  I estimate I have saved over $1,500 in the last 6 months by one single action.  I stopped going to Costco once a month.  My purchases at Costco were not building a better Ventura County.  Santa Paula was not becoming more sustainable when I shopped at Costco.  I still go there but it is now a very mindful activity.  I go with a list and avoid impulsive shopping.  Not only has my financial debt been lessened but my karmic debt has also lessened.  I am not as responsible for the collapse of agriculture in Ventura County.

My life has also improved by refocusing my purchases toward sustainability and the shop locally movement.  I wasted a lot of money thinking I was getting a deal.  I bought a sack of avocados from Chile last year.  They never ripened.  I had to throw them all away.  They were not only cheap they were worthless and damaged the local agriculture community to boot.  Bad karma.  Bad deal.  I bought a case of little packets that you rip open to get to a piece of tissue impregnated with eyeglass cleaner.  It was about a 5 year supply.  I opened one last month and it was all dried out.  I had to throw away the rest of the case and feel like a fool for buying them in the first place.  More bad karma, bad ecology, and bad economics.

As I move toward giving more support to the concept of sustainability my life improves.  To make my business more sustainable I try to be more frugal.  That’s something I did not think I was naturally suited to.  It is an interesting challenge.  I find it difficult to reach out to the people in Santa Paula who think they have to drive to Ventura and spend more for picture frames of lesser quality than what I offer here in town.  I really appreciate all the people who buy the art I create and who do not purchase their art from phony auctions on cruise ships or while vacationing at tourist traps.

At home I am looking for quality above price in my food.  I”m not ripping out the back yard and planting a garden since I have learned that that is a very unrealistic dream for me.  My new, mature thinking is that if I can not bake a single loaf of bread then I most likely will not be able to grow my own food in my back yard on raised beds with compost.  If I can’t make refrigerator pickles with cucumbers from the local market and a gallon of vinegar then I’m unlikely to be able to can enough food to get me through until the harvest time.  Simple means simple.  Start simple and keep it simple.  Overreach and fail.  As one friend told me, “Best is the enemy of the good.”  Keep holding out for the best and you will never have the good.
Good is good.  Forget the best.

Printing an 8 Foot 4 Inch Long Gigapan Panorama on Canvas

The 8 foot pano, John Nichols and Sespe Red, “Voted Most Intelligent Cat In Santa Paula”.

Now that I have learned to operate my Gigapan Robot and taken a couple of panos it was time to see what happens when I print one.  The above pano was stitched from 68 separate images taken with the Canon G9 mounted to the robot.  I have uploaded it to the Gigapan site and then imbedded it into Google Earth.  When people search Santa Paula with Google Earth they can see a little blue pushpin with a G on it that indicates that a Gigapan photo has been taken of that site.  My Gigapan is here.

Next step for me was to make a print.  Before I stitched all the images I worked on them in RAW as outlined in my previous post.  Then I out put that file as a tiff. I treated it like any other photo I would work on.  I adjusted the curves and levels in CS3.  I cloned in some sky at the top.  I cropped.  I zoomed up to 100% and sharpened.  I thought about burning in the left and right ends but I think that in nature the haze would have made those sections hazy in real life.  I want my photos to look like what I saw.

I made a “small” print on my Canon IPF 5000.  That one is 13 inches tall by about 60 inches wide.  I stopped at 60 because foamcore comes in 40×60 sheets.  Larger than that and I would have had to splice pieces together.  For this smaller print I just wanted to mount it to foam core and not stretch it over stretcher bars like a painting on canvas.  I printed the smaller one and mounted it and put it in a frame and put it in my gallery front window.  It attracts a lot of attention.  At the time I printed that size my 24 inch wide hp Z3100 was acting up.

The Z3100 cured itself and I was ready to print larger.  I chose 20 inches high so I would have some canvas left over on the edges for stretching.  That made this particular pano 100 inches long.  Divided by 12 inches that makes 8 feet 4 inches in length.  The Z3100 will print that long.  Some printers won’t.  I think I read that this printer will print up to 30 feet long.  I’m still learning that.  I’m also still learning how large a file Photoshop will work with.  I ran into a maximum files size of 2 Gigs.  CS3 will save larger files but they have to be in a special format and I was worried that those would not print so I stopped at 2Gig.

Next step for me was to just print one full size to look at.  I know that may seem like a waste of money.  Cost for a print this size is probably about $25. I could have printed out a smaller section.  I just wanted to see the large one.  What came out took about 45 minutes to print.  I push pinned it to the wall and admired it.  The colors in the mountains were greener than the print done on the Canon IPF 5000.  Different printers and different profiles.  I had soft proffed the image but even with a calibrated monitor that did not tell me what I needed to know.  I found some bad spots in the cloudy sky and in the mountains at the far right edge.

You should probably know the resolution for a print.  For printing on canvas I can use 240 ppi ( that’s pixels per inch) at the final print size of 20×100 inches.  Don’t think in dpi. That’s “Dots per Inch”.  There are no dots on a computer screen or in a file.  The photographic industry has mislead us for years.  Let’s reclaim PPI and use DPI only for what a printing nozle spits out.  My standard workflow procedure on this issue is to get the largest file I can as my master. When I scan old photos I ask the client or myself…”What is the largest print you will ever want to make from this image?”  If you want to make a 2 foot by 8 foot image from your panos at any time in the future you had better obtain one that is 240 ppi at 20 x 100 inches.  It will be large.  If in the future you don’t want it that large then downsample it for other uses.  That’s a much better plan that upsampling an image later from a smaller file.  Hard disk space is cheap now.  Use it.

I want back to the file and opened it this time in Lightroom 2.  That has amazing controls.  I used all the tools I could in the develop module.  exposure, clarity, etc. and them moved down to the Saturation.  In Lightroom I can click on a button in the HSL area and the slider will do something magical.  Looks like it creates a mask for just the color I clicked on. In this case I wanted to bring down the Saturation in the mountains so I selected one area with the color I wanted to change and moved it down about 10 points.  Only those colors in the images moved down and the mountains were looking good.

At this large size I think that the image can “jump” a little more than in a smaller image.  I bumped up the colors a little more that I usually do.  Now I’m ready to print the next one.  I still have some thinking to do.  In a lot of the vintage panoramas in my collection the photographer wrote his name and the title in white opaque ink on the negative.  This caused the name and title and date to appear in the print as white.  It seems important to me to show the date of the Bird’s Eye View panorama of a town.  People in the future will want to be able to compare how a town has grown and changed.  I have a vintage pano of Santa Paula taken from almost the same location.  It is dated 1927 and is by Bernie Isensee of Ventura.  I think I’ll just Photoshop in some white lettering with my name and the subject and the date.  In the lower right corner a few inches in.

My next step will be to order some stretcher bars.  They come in 10 foot lengths.  UPS does not deliver packages that long so if you get into this you will have to buy retail or have them shipped by a carrier that handles long packages.  Then you will have to learn to stretch canvas.  There is a Wiki lesson and I’m sure a You Tube lesson in how to.  I have the tools and am pretty good at it.  It does take practice.  You cut the stretcher bars on a 45 degree.  Then I glue one short leg and one long leg together and let dry.  Next step is to underpin them.  If you don’t own an underpinner you could use finishing nails to secure the corners.  The next step then is to glue the two Ls you have made together.  I use band clamps.  This size job would require hooking up two or three bands into one long one.  Or just Micky Mouse it.

Frames also come in 10 foot lengths.  For that reason I think I’ll stay under 10 feet in length.  Longer is possible buy a challenge.  Splicing and putty and finish and paint and sand and glue and …

I’m using Breathing Color canvas.  I like it.  What I don’t like about the company is that they don’t offer their paper in sheets and rolls in every variety.  I prefer sheets for small jobs.  For that reason I’m using Moab products.  Everything comes in sheet and roll.

One more step in the process will be to coat the canvas with a UV and water repellent coating.  I brush it on with a foam roller. There are video tutorials on this on the Breathing Color web site.  It takes a little practice.  You can also spray a coating on.  More expensive but easier.  Just spray it on to a vertical print.  I have been getting blobs of the spray spitting out onto the print and creating the rim of a circle after that I don’t like.  I have to go back and work more spray into that area and hope.

Time for dinner.  I’ll be thinking about the next, next step.  How much to charge for this masterpiece.

An Anonymous African Photo Album. Is it Nuba or Jos Plateau?

 

African Photo Album

I have owned an interesting African photo album for a couple of years.  It is anonymous.  No names or dates or any data on it anywhere.  It has a snake skin cover.  I have shown it to several people with no leads.  Andrew McKecknie suggest last week that it might be Nuba. That’s where Leni Reifenstal photographed.  I scanned it and posted it to flickr.  You can see it there now. Just click on that Flickr link two sentences back.

   I labeled the album as Nuba and asked for comments.  The next day I received an opinion that it was not Nuba.  Someone named Nanne emailed me with the following.

 

Great album, for sure. I can see the striking ressemblence to Nuba but I think they are from Nigeria, the Jos Plateau. A few reasons: the landscape is just a bit too undulating to be South Kordofan; I never saw the cactus plants lining the fields; the girls have no tribal marks on their bodies; the men have facial marks I don’t recognize; the type of bow and arrow are not typical of Nuba… And if you look at images from the Jos Plateau in Nigeria it all fits perfectly.

 

Kind regards

Nanne

I went back and retitled the album on Flickr as Anonymous from the Jos Plateau.  I Googled for images and it sure looks like the Jos Plateau to me.  The album contains several interesting nudes.  Here’s one.

  

Jos Plateau Nudes

 

 

Today I got another email from my new cyberfriend Nanne.  He added this.

  

Dear John,

 

I saw just a few historic images that closely matched your album, some featuring the cactae, a clay pot similar to the ones in your album, and the landscape. But like you said, very little historic images.

 

This is one: http://sirismm.si.edu/eepa/eep/eepa_02635.jpg

Here are two more: http://www.photographersdirect.com/buyers/stockphoto.asp?imageid=1605437

and: http://www.photographersdirect.com/buyers/stockphoto.asp?imageid=1203856

 

There is a plain and simple answer to your question as to why the photos were taken. According to the wikipedia: ‘After the British colonization of Nigeria, Jos Plateau became one of the most important tourist destinations of Nigeria’. I would guess the photos were taken just before or after WWII. Most of them are staged, and from the way the girls pose for the photographer, it is clear that they were used to take directions.

 

The photographer selected his models with care – some of the girls are just stunningly beautiful – and he (I don’t think a woman would have taken thse photos) even selected the scenery with care. (The one with the diagonal cracks in the rocks is a very clear example.) So probably an amateur photographer who knew he would get some great shots here.

 

Best

Nanne

  The plot thickens.  I found another African scholar and have emailed her for her opinion.  I’ll report on any new developments.  I would really like to find out who took it and when and why.  Be sure to add any comments you have on this album.

  Oh, yeah.  Here’s what the cover looks like.  

Well.  Here’s an addition to this post.  I just received an email from the National Museum of African Art.  One person there said:

Dear Mr. Nichols, 

    In my opinion, the photographs you have posted are Nuba, Sudan  based on many things including:  the stature of the people, succulent plants, housing style, pipes, amulets, & facial scarification.   They most definitely are not by William B. Fagg, CMG.  Beyond that, you might try contacting our senior photo archivist.

 

I’ll follow up and report back.

 

 

 

Adventures in Panoland

 

The Robot

 I have been interested in panoramic photography for quite a while.  As with most aspects of photography my interest in panos began with collecting them.  I have hundreds.  Some of the most spectacular photos of the St. Francis Dam Disaster are panos taken by Bernie Isensee in 1928.  A man named Dingman took some in the Ventura County area.  My collection also includes smaller ones taken with a Kodak pano camera in the early part of the last century.  Several of them were exhibited at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art for their snapshot show about 10 years ago.  

 

 

   I took the pano on the front page of my blog and that image will also appear on the front page of my newly designed web site.  That pano was done with my Canon 5D and the 70 to 180 zoon on a tripod and stitched in Photoshop CS3.  It does a good job of stitching. The Strawberry Field was made up of only 9 shots.  It prints about 5 feet long and looks impressive.  

 

  I think it was in the New York Times, must have been.  It’s my favorite newspaper and I read the hard copy every day.  There was a mention of a new device called the Gigapan.  That was about 6 months ago. I visited the Gigapan.org site and saw amazing panoramas.  I could zoom into them just like I was doing with Google Earth.  This was way better than what I was doing with only 9 images stitched.  

 

  I found my way to the link about the Gigapan robot.  This device is what the conventional camera is mounted on.  Then the robot takes a hundred or so photos and they are all stitched into one.  The robot was not for sale.  Only a few scientists and insiders were using it.  I put my name on a waiting list.  Eventually I was contacted and offered one.  I became a Beta tester and received a $100 discount.  The Robot is $279.00.  I thought that was an amazing bargain.

 

  If you want to look at a couple of my panos taken with the Gigapan go to www.gigapan.org and search Santa Paula.  You can search my user name “Sespe” but you will also bring up photos of the actual place Sespe.  My first GP Pano, that’s short for Gigapan Panoramic, was to contain 100 images.  When I got home there were only 60 usable files on the card to download.  I learned that I had set the interval between exposures at 5 seconds.  The robot finger pushed the shutter every 5 seconds.  That did not leave enough time for the camera to write to the card.  For my next pano I set the duration between shots at 10 seconds.  That did the trick.  

 

   It took me almost one month of experimentation and failure to get all the elements working.  Now I think I’m having pretty good success and just need to work on the details and learn to see panos better.  In the interest of science I’ll discuss my equipment and system  There is a forum for all these discussions on the gigapan site but I find it difficult to navigate.  Too many meaningless comments clog the system.  

 

The Robot from the front

 

 

I’m using a Canon G9 as the camera to mount on the Gigapan robot.  I have a Lensmate hood that I just put on to help shield the lens from stray light.  I did have to remove one screw from the robot to allow the lens hood to fit on the camera holder.  I had attempted to mount a quick release plate on the camera and then mount the quick release unit onto the robot but that did not work.  It raised the camera up too much and was out of the range of the robot.  I did make a release plate for the bottom of the robot to mount to my tripod.  

   My initial problem was learning to use all the manual controls on the G9.  I read the manual and reviewed and learned to set the white balance to something other than AWB.  Since the camera is taking so many exposures over such a broad range you don’t want the white balance shifting from exposure to exposure.  For out doors it is set to sun or something appropriate.  Then the manual focus is locked in.  I then manual focus depending on the scene.  I assume most landscapes will be at infinity.  Next I set the exposure to Manual and select the combination that works for my time of day.  I take a test exposure at that setting and check the histogram.  

     Part of the programing of the robot is to set the zoom all the way out and use the robot to find out the field of view.  I pushed the up botton and the camera moved up and then down to show something like 12 degrees of coverage.  The robot uses this to figure out how far to move up and down between exposures.  

   Rather than read all about if from me you need to go to You Tube and there are 4 excellent tutorials that explain it all.  

  What is not explained in the tutorials is how to process the images. With the Canon G9 I’m shooting RAW.  The GP stitcher will not process RAW so I convert them. I put them all into one folder. Then I open them all in the Adobe RAW converter.  I select one with a lot of detail and foreground (not a sky area) and adjust the exposure for maximum detail in shadow and highlights, just like for a regular photo.  I then adjust saturation and what ever else I  want.  With that single image adjusted I then sync those settings with all the other images in the pano folder.  Then I save them as a tiff and move on to stitching.

  The Gigapan program that comes with the robot does the stitching.  Just tell it how many rows of images and they all line up in a mosaic grid.  I need to remember to write that down in the field and take better notes.  It sometimes takes hours for all the stitching to get done.  I notice that many people on the Gigapan web site just upload what comes out of the GP stitcher.  That is lazy in my opinion.  There are usually very ragged edges.  What’s up with that?  

   Coming out of the stitcher I save the single image made up of all the individual shots taken by the robot.  I save it as a tiff.  I name it with the date and place.  Pretty soon I have a folder with all the RAW images out of the camera, all the tiff conversions and the output from the GP stitcher.  In the case of the pano I did of the Ventura Westisde the file size was about 2.6 Gigabytes.  The minimum file size that can be uploaded to the GP site is 50 megabytes.  The maximum file size that I can get Photoshop to save in tiff format is 2 GB.  I had to downsize the pano to under 2 GB before Photoshop would save it.  

  I then treated it like a regular photo I would want to print.  On the screen the pano was filling up my screen at only 2% of actual size.  To sharpen it i zoomed and zoomed up to 100%.  I found that it needed a little more than usual sharpening at that size.  I could also crop it.  Cropping was done back down at a small size.  Adjust curves and Levels and anything else you want at this time.  The file is ready to upload. 

  The upload for my 2MB file to the GP site took all day.  By that I mean about 6 hours.  The stitching took at least a couple of hours.  This is the part where I need to get more experience.  What am I going to do when I take a pano with more than the 144 that made up the Ventura Westside pano?  

  Once uploaded with keywords and title I could hook it up to Google Earth.  That’s fun.  Now I have two panos that Earth users can discover and look at.  

  I have converted one old camera bag for my system.  It holds the Robot, the camera, batteries, charger, instruction manuals, flash cards and a Wolverine storage drive.  The Canon G9 will take 4GB flash cards. It takes about one of those to hold one pano. If I had more time I would be out there filling up all the flash cards I have.  My plan is to download them to the Wolverine after each pano is taken.  All these images are going to fill up my hard drive too.  My plan is to dedicate one DVD for each pano and burn all the raw, tiff, final upload and notes and data to individual DVDs.  

  The part I like about this process is that I can make huge prints.  With a 2GB file I was able to easily print something 13 inches by 5 feet on canvas and pop it in a frame.  Everybody loves it.  My 24 inch printer was not working at the time but my next print will be something 24 inches wide by about 8 feet long.  Printing on canvas and using stretcher bars means no glass or Plexi to deal with.  I’ll blog on this part of the experience later.

 

The Camera/Robot/Wolverine Bag

Teacher Salaries and Wall Street Compensations

I can’t wrap my head around who much 23.2 million dollars is.  I think I have a way to put it into perspective.

   It was reported that just days before the Lehman Bros. bankrupcy the company sought $23.2 million dollars in “special payments’ to three outgoing executives.  How much is that I asked myself?

  I thought it might be useful to find a new way to measure money.  I came upon the ATS.  That’s Average Teacher’s Salary.  The American Federation of Teachers teacher salary survey for the 2004-05 school year found that the average teacher salary was $47,602.  Let that be one unit of ATS.  

  I divided $47,602.00 into 23,200,000.00.  The result was 487.4 on the ATS scale.

  This just means that the “Special Payments” that Lehman Bros. was working to get for their failed executives is worth 487 teachers for an entire school year.  

   I wonder how many elementary schools it would take to be filled up by 487 teachers?  I wonder if those Lehman Bros. executives think the job they did on and for America are worth that many ATSs?

Hurling Pumpkins at the Santa Paula Rotary Pumpking Patch with the Trebuchet

Weekends in October in Santa Paula mean the Santa Paula Rotary Fulkner Farm Pumpkin Patch

This year Chris Wilson built a Trebuchet to hurl pumpkins about 200 feet.  He got the plans from a photo provided by Guy Cole.  He downloaded a simulation program from the internet and built the trebuchet just the right size for the length of the field and the size and weight of the pumpkins we used. 

   The energy for the machine comes from a 500 lb. block of steel.  The kids and adults pull on a rope through pulleys to cock the arm.  A long blue fiberglass pole is used to raise the pulley and rope to the eye on the top of the arm.  Once cocked and latched there is a safety.  The ropes are pulled out of the way and the pumpkin loaded in the sling.  After “All Clear!” the safety is switched to the off position and the countdown begins.  We start at “Three” because who can wait to start from “Ten”?  A blue rope is pulled to release the latch and the 500 lb. hunk of steel moves down as the arm and sling go into operation.  The sling has two ropes and a third attachment that is slipped over a steel pin.  As the arm comes up to the top of the arc the loop attachment slips off its pin and the pumpkin is hurled.  Each pumpkin spins in a little different way. Keeping the stem on the pumpkin helps in observation of its orientation durning flight.  At the point of impact several different actions occur.  Some pumpkins just roll, some split in half and some splatter.  

  As part of our fundraiser for our community service projects we ask $5.00 per pumpkin or 3 for $10.00.  

   You can find out more about trebuchets on the web.

Playing with the Birds

After viewing the feathered birds in the New Bird Hall at the SB Museum of Natural History we moved to the art gallery for more fun with birds.  Teresa and I met several other art types there and I demonstrated my new Flip video camera.  done

Opening Night in the Bird Hall of the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History

done

On a nice Thursday evening Anne Graumlich drove Teresa, Ariane and me to the opening of the new Bird Hall at the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History.  It was one of the nicest opening receptions I have every been to.  Upon entering the front door we were immediately greeted by food and wine servers.  Great red and white wine from Santa Barbara County and elegant little snacks.  All free.  How civilized.  Wine in hand we made our way to the newly opened Bird Wing.  It’s really the Bird Hall but Henry told us to say Bird Wing.  Get it?

  I was packing my new Flip video camera.  I was giving everyone who would listen the sales pitch.  This is my first attempt at uploading a video to my blog.  Teresa and I were taking a look at the birds on display and commenting.

  After the opening Anne took us to Ca’ Dario.  It’s a favorite restaurant when we go to Santa Barbara.  I had a Negroni.  That’s the official cocktail of the Italian Futurists.  I also had spectacular mozzarella with good stuff on top and the risotto.  

  I’m finding it takes a long time to upload even a short video.  I’ll go take a shower and upload some more when I have more time.