Ploafmaster General

At seven years old, my daughter is thoughtful enough to come up with an idea for a birthday gift that I truly love. Not just in the "aww, my kid gave me a gift" sort of way, which is still valid and wonderful. I mean in the "wow, I LOVE this, it is something I have always wanted" category. My wife helped take it over the top, but essentially, my daughter wanted to get me a pair of Converse All Stars for my birthday at the beginning of the month. My wife suggested making it a custom pair. I think you probably figured that out from the photo above.

I was super happy with Converse's configurator tool, and I'm pretty impressed with how accurately the preview during the entire build process represented the real, final product on my feet. They cost a bit more than an "off the rack" pair of Chucks and, for that reason, I’ve never really pulled the trigger on buying a pair. But I have played with the configurator many times in recent years. My daughter's gift idea was the perfect excuse to finally go for it :-D

Last night, just as I was about to climb in bed, I started saying <<agents provocateurs>> in a horrendous, overly-dramatic French accent. For whatever reason I had it in my head that this phrase referred to spies, but nope. These are people who stir up trouble in order to incriminate or discredit other folks. Where the hell in left field did this one come from?

I’ve been growing my hair for the entire pandemic. Rather than keep my normal, short haircut, I’ve even requested a mere light trim and shaping once I resumed monthly visits to the barber shop. My hair has long ago passed my own personal record, and today I decided to have a little fun with it for Halloween.

My wife and I knocked down the sides and back of my hair quite a bit with some clippers and collaborated on attempting to recreate the poster for David Lynch's Eraserhead. I didn't quite get it with the lighting (I'm an amateur, and I also suspect a 3rd light source), but I love the result, particularly the way the water spray mist worked out behind me. Both lights caught it perfectly, and it really adds some dimension to the final shot.

It’s a twofer this morning. I had "lachrymose" and "sanguine" bumping around my noggin when I woke up earlier desired. But I already know the meaning of these words: lachrymose means tearful, from the Latin word for tear (the same root that gives us "lacrimal gland" or tear-producing glands). Sanguine, on the other hand, feels almost opposite in certain contexts. I tend to think of sanguine in its hopeful usage, but it’s referring to the flush, reddish color of blood (imagine the blood, or "color" draining from a hopeless face), and comes from the Latin for the same.

This got me thinking about other words derived from body parts that have emotional or behavioral meanings beyond their simple descriptive denotations. Take "bilious", for example, which may refer simply to the digestive fluid produced by the liver. More colloquially, however, a bilious person is considered to be thoroughly unlikeable (see also the similarly used "splenetic" and "dyspeptic").

The word nerd in me would LOVE to hear any other such body words. Share 'em if ya got 'em.

This time it was “perspicacious”, rattling around my tired mind well before sunrise, after my intestines woke me for a ride in the porcelain bus.

Perspicacious sounds like something Foghorn Leghorn would toss out in one of his monologues, but it means essentially the ability to see through the surface to what’s real. Webster’s entry has a little too much fun differentiating between perspicacious and its synonyms, but it’s a nifty, not-so-little word that’s been around for a few hundred years.

Okay, so sometimes its not just a 3 dollar word that pops into my head. Sometimes its a song from 24 years ago. The video is unremarkable (though the kids are adorable), but the song still rocks pretty hard. I feel like '96 was one of the last good years for "alternative" rock before it ceased to be an alternative to anything.

I’ve been watching Ted Lasso (have you been watching Ted Lasso? You should be watching Ted Lasso) recently and at the beginning of an episode I watched last night, the titular Lasso gets hung up on the word "plan". After he says the word a few too many times he feels like it starts to lose its meaning. When he asks his friend/assistant coach about his experience, he’s reminded that it’s called "semantic satiation", whereby a repeated word becomes abstract noise to a listener.

I'm always here for nerdy, linguistic trivia thrown into the middle of my emotional sports comedies.

It’s week 2 of virtual schooling for my second grader in Richmond, Virginia. There's a lot of bubbling consternation among the parents of kids in my daughter's class. Whether it’s the length of the day or the frustration with certain assignments, folks have a lot to say. I don't think it’s perfect by any stretch, and my child's teacher is the source of some issues (extreme technology deficit at the top of the list), but I'm still cautiously optimistic. Every day the students improve their mute button etiquette. The teacher finds clever ways around her own technological limitations. The students respond to and engage in the classwork. I'm super lucky to have had my daughter tell me this morning that she likes her teacher, and she has been generally positive on the experience so far. We're privileged in that regard, and I recognize that many students may be struggling along with their teachers for a variety of reasons (different needs, home/care center environments, etc.).

I have a hypothesis, however. I think a new and terrible source of anxiety for parents is our sudden and complete view into our children's school day. Last year, like every year before, we sent our kids to school and hoped to get a few sentences out of them about their day when they returned in the afternoon. We didn't witness the teacher's instruction or see any classwork until the results came home. We haven't been in the classrooms witnessing challenges, disruptions, and any other issues that might surface.

Except now we are. Or at least folks like my wife and me who are largely white and/or privileged. Folks like us who have the money/time/job flexibility to have one or more parents working from home, lending assistance to our kids while they learn remotely. I don't think it’s a coincidence that our superintendent has received most of his feedback on the schedule from parents in the West End and Northside, home to most of the white families in system, with typically higher incomes. I don't presume that there are no issues for students in other parts of town, but most of the vocal frustration of schedule and operation isn't coming from the Southside or East End.

Did you have great teachers/school years throughout your entire education? If you did, you’re super lucky and I envy you. When I think back on my own second grade year I recall the very worst teacher of my primary education. She was actively hostile toward me (though I never shut up…)! My daughter's learning circumstances are not ideal because, well, GESTURES BROADLY, but her teacher is fine. She'll be fine.

I'm sympathetic to the parents and children that are dealing with real educational, emotional, neurological, social, or other issues in this situation. Every accommodation should be made to ensure equitable education for all students across socioeconomic strata and different levels of ability. But that’s not most of the families. I think a great deal of parents could benefit from weaning themselves off of active monitoring of their kids' virtual school days. Our kids are smart! Let's back away (at a reasonable pace) and let them develop self-sufficiency. Perhaps our collective blood pressure will lower.

Today is a return to school, such as it is. My daughter attends a school district that is 100% virtual through at least the first half of the school year. My son is starting pre-kindergarten and does NOT want to listen to what his mom or me tell him. So in the best interest of both of them, we’ve taken the calculated risk of sending him back to his in-person school for pre-k. The faculty and staff at his school are great about wearing masks, and the drop-off/pick-up protocol is terrific. But it’s still a bunch of little kids who won't be able to stay apart because they're four years old.

His absence from the house, however, will allow our second grader the peace, quiet, and brain space to focus on this weird new virtual schooling world. She loves to learn, actually enjoys reading, math, and science, so we hope that the quiet in our hose allows her to adjust while my wife and I get to our own work. We’ll see...

Tomorrow is my daughter’s 7th birthday and, in these damnable corona-times, that means no party or even a hangout with her friends. Call it overcompensating, call it one last hurrah for the summer, but we decided to take a short family trip to the beach for the occasion.

Takeout dining and easy outdoor social distancing at the beach make this a lower-risk trip, or at least that’s how I’m rationalizing it. Either way, the change in scenery and the smell of the ocean ought to be good for us all before diving into virtual schooling on Tuesday.

Happy birthday, kiddo.

My friend Trey shared a screen grab from the HBO series Lovecraft Country in a photography-oriented Slack channel. He wondered what type of camera was used by one of the lead characters. I have not seen the series (never been an HBO subscriber), but I'm given to understand photography plays an important part in the show.

I was told the show takes place in the 1950s, and I figured the production designers were likely to have used an American (or at least American branded) camera. Ansco? Argus? Kodak? I zoomed in a bit to get some more details...

• It’s a "folding" camera; the whole thing doesn't fold, but there's a door that opens (under her fingers) and the lens pops out on bellows.
• There's a cable running from the flash to the lens at the bottom.
• There's a little black semicircle on the right side of the lens barrel.
• There's a knob/winding dial of sorts at the top of the camera body, and it’s not very thick.
• You can see a small viewfinder window above the lens, part of a solid top plate of the camera.
• You can also see some kind of metal and textured protrusion on the far right edge of the camera.

All of those factors and the ever helpful Camera-Wiki.org led me to the Retina Ia, a camera manufactured in Germany for Kodak AG starting in 1951. Moreover, the camera in the TV show is most likely using one of the 50mm f/3.5 lenses based on the black ring around the lens opening, as opposed to the 50mm f/2.8 pictured at the top of this post. Obsessive nerd success!

If the season wraps up with continued plaudits, I'll see about watching some episodes. I can't help but want to check out a show that pays such homage to greats like Gordon Parks while making photography itself an important element of the show.

When he wants to get real chill he’s CBD Grey.
When he shops for knives on TV at 3 AM, he’s QVC Grey.
When it's Halloween he’s Heebie-Jeebies Grey.
When he buys underwear rep'd by Telly Savalas, he’s BVD Grey.
When he makes a clear logical argument he’s Q.E.D. Grey.

(with apologies and admiration)

I got kicked out of bed at 6:20 this morning by my four-year-old, so I went to sit on the toilet and catch up on Twitter for a few minutes. Then my almost-seven-year-old walks in on me in the bathroom and immediately launches into a hypothesis: "I have a guess. I think that centipedes are arachnids because they have more than 6 legs."

"That’s a good guess," I say, "but almost all arachnids have specifically 8 legs." So I looked up what centipedes are (Chilopoda) and we had a nice little chat about it (all while I'm still on the toilet, naturally). Then I found myself in a Wikipedia rabbit hole looking up the related classes under the sub-phylum Myriapoda ("10,000 feet"), including millipedes and such. That included such nifty little buds like the pill millipede in the photograph above. No, those aren’t pill bugs, but are so named because of the resemblance. True pill bugs, oddly enough, are land crustaceans! But that’s a rabbit hole for another morning on the toilet.

Just a few photos and such from the past couple of weeks. I don't usually do cloud photos or anything, but I couldn't help it with the shot above; they were so goofy and layered, and the sky was so brilliantly blue behind them.

Concerns have subsided a bit for contracting COVID-19 from surfaces, so for the first time since March, my family went to a playground. We picked one that was mostly empty, and left after more than a few other people showed up but, for about 40 minutes, it was a real treat to see how happy my kids were to climb and swing once again.

The playground we visited was behind The Carillon - a bell tower that was built as a memorial to Virginians that died in World War I.

Maybe I'll get to take more than a handful of photos over the next month...maybe...

Since the start of the pandemic, my time to go out and take pictures has plummeted. I'm wary of spaces with other people, and I just don't have the freedom I used to; the kids are home with us all the time.

Shortly before the pandemic, however, both of my kids started taking a real interest in LEGO. I played with LEGO almost exclusively as a child but essentially stopped by the time I was a teenager. Now, however, the kids' interest plus my lack of non-screen hobbies means I'm spending time digging through containers full of bricks all over again.

Lucky for me, LEGO has been producing kits geared toward advanced builders and adults for years now, so it’s been easy to find challenging and rewarding sets just for me. I’ve so far assembled a classic car, a historic Swiss locomotive, and the above pictured Ducati sport bike. Not only is it fun to put these together at the table while my kids build their own stuff; LEGO kit designs have seriously improved since my youth. Carefully thought-out sub-assemblies mate satisfyingly with the main structure, and the pendulum seems to have swung back toward building components rather than a reliance on custom, set-specific pieces.

Pretty sure this will finally be the year of a train around the Christmas tree. And it'll be made out of LEGO bricks.

My weird brain is at it again. I think I heard the words "cool house" from some show my kids were watching. A few misfiring neurons later and I had "Rem Koolhaus" in my head. Was he a painter? Like a Dutch Master or some such? That sure sounded familiar, so off to Google where I found out my spelling (and pronunciation) were off. Rem Koolhaas is absolutely Dutch but is, in fact, a living architect. There's a good chance you’ve at least seen photos of his CCTV Headquarters, Seattle Central Library, or Casa da Musica.

More days than not some word pops up in my head and floats around until I look it up. It’s usually something I heard or learned about long enough ago to forget what it means, but I always find it satisfying to learn it all over again. I’ve re-learned the difference between parsimonious (stingy with money) and pusillanimous (timid) at least 3 times.

Today I had "Marbury v. Madison" poking me in the brain right out of bed. What the hell is that? I was pretty sure it was one of those Supreme Court of the United States cases that I learned about in high school government class, and 2 seconds of research confirmed it.

According to the SCOTUS-centric law resource, Oyez, Marbury v. Madison established the concept of judicial review. This means, basically, that the Supreme Court can declare a law unconstitutional.

Okay! That’s out of my head. Maybe now I can focus on getting some work done before the weekend...

Perhaps the most depressing thing I learned working on a graduate business degree was the extent to which businesses worship metrics. Numerical measurements of whatever. And I get it - running a business carries risk, managers want certainty, and qualitative study doesn't give you the information you can extrapolate into projections for the next quarter.

But in the years during and since my studies, I’ve become increasingly aware of the ways in which quantitative measures seem to trump any other reason for determining success. This isn't always bad, but the preference for a number seems to lead to reductive conclusions about otherwise subjective experiences or results. I wish people would prod further and dig into subjective and qualitative findings rather than trying to convert everything to a number that can be charted and tracked by trendiness and measures of central tendency.

Lately it’s been difficult to think about posting sentimental family photos and random stuff to the internet in the face of unrelenting tragedy and political horrors. But what the hell. I'm stuck at home, you (if you’re American and responsible) are stuck at home. And I need an outlet. So here's just a random assortment of a few things that made me happy from the past month.

That’s really all I have for now. A scattershot summary of the past month by way of a reductive collection of smartphone pics.

It never takes long for white folks and business to squeeze themselves in the middle of black suffering and response, whether it’s to co-opt the tone-direction of demonstrations, or to cash in on public sentiment.

But to see photos of Nationwide and State Farm setting up tents by the Lee Monument today? That’s surely one of the most crass displays of corporate opportunism I’ve seen in years.

This was SO MUCH FUN, and next year I plan to actually have some FP4 on hand (one of my favorite B&W films anyway) to participate in Emulsive's FP4 Party.

I learned about FP4 Party from Jess Hobbs' YouTube channel, and some friends of mine and I started talking about it. Not all of us had FP4 on hand, and March had already just started. But we reworked it to suit our circumstances and decided to make it about whatever ISO 400 black & white film we each had in our respective inventories.

First week was shooting as much film as we could, second week was for processing, and the rest of the month for reviewing our results. I got my 3 process rolls of medium format film in the mail yesterday and got to scanning. These are the first results!

All of my 3 rolls were 10-year-expired Fujifilm Neopan 400 in 120 format, shot on my Mamiya RZ67. When Fuji discontinued the film stock, I bought a ton of rolls to keep in the freezer so I could extend the magic a little longer. I am SHOCKED at how beautiful this film looks after so many years. It reminds me why I loved it so much in the first place. I can't wait to scan the rest of the film and see what I got!

This is something that I feel like could have made an interesting topic for PBS Idea Channel, assuming it has any legs: a lot of entertainment from Generation X explores the effects of paternal absenteeism, while entertainment for millennials explores and or celebrates the notion of the chosen or assembled family.

I was spacing out in my dentist's office lobby the other day unconsciously bobbing my head to the quiet assortment of songs playing over the sound system when a very familiar minor 7th chord shook me out of my reverie:

Yeah, that’s right, turns out this is the famous bit sampled (and pitched down) in Biggie's "Hypnotize". Maybe I'm one of like, 5 people who didn't know that, but it was fun connecting the sampling dots between a jazzy hit from the 70s and a modern hip hop classic.