Two lessons for me in these landscape shots:
Pond grasses against sky, Veterans Oasis Park, Chandler AZ
Algae on water treatment pond, Gilbert Water Ranch.
In December 2009, the Big Guy had a Board of Directors meeting at Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center. We stayed with friends in Kensington, MD, and he drove across town early in the morning to be in time for his all-day meeting. I was invited only for dinner, so in the afternoon I made my own way across town via the Metro (a train/subway/light-rail transit system), borrowed smartphone in hand, feeling quite adventurous. Continue reading
I don’t take many landscape shots, being drawn more to the small surprises, perhaps. Well, and big bridges.
But sometimes the composition is right there for the taking.
Neither of these is an exotic or picturesque location in the usual sense; both are sometimes striking indeed.
San Tan Mountains viewed from Veterans Oasis Park, Chandler AZ
Waste land adjacent to water treatment ponds, Gilbert AZ
Even the palindromes are helping us celebrate Canada’s 150th.
Huh?
Let’s start with some examples of palindromes, which are words that read the same forwards and backwards:
Similarly, a palindromic phrase or sentence reads ““ except for word breaks ““ the same forwards and backwards:
Palindromic numbers are, of course, also the same fore and aft, a concept that applies regardless of the meaning of the digits:
Good feng shui, too.
Great feng shui!
Palindromic dates are tricky to achieve, because they have three elements, and to agree on, because they depend on the format you use:
I have friends who use yyyy-mm-dd to align with the international standard based on computer time, where you can just keep specifying time to the right as long as you please (hours, minutes, seconds, and so on). I see no palindromic dates in this format for the foreseeable future.
In my former professional life I was focused on avoiding confusion, so I usually used formats with three letters for the month and four digits for the year:
My father once told me that D-Day was scheduled for June 6 to avoid any confusion between the Allies on different date formats: It was 6-6, no matter what order you used. True? Dunno.
Not wanting to exhibit a foolish consistency, I’m good to set aside my usual practice where it seems worthwhile, and this is one such occasion.
So . . . may we have the drum roll, please . . .
Welcome to this year’s 10-day stretch of palindromic dates,
— 71017 to 71917 —
occurring in the same month as our national holiday,
no doubt as one of the first celebrations of
Canada’s 151st year.
Read more here about palindromic dates.
“Now this.”
In 1985 Neil Postman identified this phrase as one of the indicators that news as an information vehicle had been swamped by TV as an entertainment medium. How so? Because “Now this” provides a seemingly sensible transition between unrelated bits in TV newscasts.
Canadian astronauts chosen for Space Station mission”“Now this”“
Children who eat pickles excel at hopscotch
His book-length diatribe, “Amusing Ourselves to Death,” is a masterful piece of sustained rational discourse, the very thing Postman argued that TV militated against. It requires the reader to follow a chain of reasoning, the very capacity that TV suppressed, according to Postman, by presenting us with unconnected information and with spurious connections, just by chance.
Attendance at summer festivals has risen appreciably in the last 10 years”“Now this”“Cancer death rates have dropped dramatically in the last decade
In the 30 years since I first read Postman, TV news hasn’t gotten any less bite-sized or any more connected. And yet I can’t remember the last time I heard the once-ubiquitous “Now this.” Instead, completely unconnected stories are now jammed head to tail without any separation by word, tone of voice, or facial expression. Major stories might be demarcated by a new camera angle on the talking head. Or not.
I have almost become inured to jumping from the global to the local, from politics to show business, from scientific studies to police reports, from health alarms to environmental alarms to celebrity news and back again with no warning and with no time for reflection. Now this. And this. And this.
And yet (as I pause here for reflection), I find that my old-fashioned desire for coherence lives on; my unconscious expectation that adjacent ideas are somehow connected, persists; my editorial impulse to make that connection explicit, endures. In the written word, this desire, expectation, and impulse are not usually problematic.
But the times, they are a-changin’ there too.
Due to the diversity of its subject matter, Smithsonian is my favourite magazine. Each issue covers topics such as archaeology, astronomy, life science, physical science, travel, art history, cultural history, and history history. That the articles are unrelated is not a bug, it’s a feature.
But the good communications folks have started sending out emails with links to blurbs on topics as diverse as the magazine. Each email comes with a teaser subject line listing the topics to which it links, turning my otherwise tidy inbox into a mess of spurious connections.
Do I exaggerate? You be the judge.
Scientists Spot Near-by Earth-sized Planets, Can Giraffes be Saved?
A Town Where Every Resident Lives in the Same Building, Cuddling Sourdough Starters
Skywatchers Spot New Atmospheric Phenomenon, Changing Causes of Death in America
The Swashbuckling History of Women Pirates, The World’s Best Fungus Farmers
What Really Turned the Sahara Desert Into a Wasteland?, FDR’s Famous Ghostwriter
There are simple remedies for these confusing concatenations, but if inserting unambiguous visual breaks in the subject line seems too hard, I’m sure that TV newscasters wouldn’t mind donating “Now this” to the cause. After all, they’re not using it.
This is how far we’ve gone down the path of disconnected discourse: the TV-newscast phrase decried by Neil Postman 30 years ago may now be our best hope for restoring a modicum of coherence to electronic communication.
There’s definitely a small chance we can still be saved, but I’m pretty sure the giraffes are hooped.
I’m a little conflicted here. Wiki lists Paul Anka’s musical genres as pop, soft rock, jazz, and doo-wop. With apologies to Russell Peter’s iconic Indian guy looking at the numeric system: None of those are music I want to listen to.
At least, I was pretty sure: I had to look up doo-wop to be sure.
Wiki says this: “Doo-wop features vocal group harmony, nonsense syllables, a simple beat, sometimes little or no instrumentation, and simple music and lyrics.”
Oh yeah?
Isabel says this: “Doo-wop takes this masterpiece by Bill Broonzy and turns it into this smoothness by The Five Keys.”
Nuff said.
So I’m not crazy about Paul Anka’s music. I’m also supposed to be done with this national treasures project, but I kinda miss it. Herewith, then, another one. After that, who knows?
Anka became famous during the late 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s with hit songs like “Diana”, “Lonely Boy”, “Put Your Head on My Shoulder”, and “(You’re) Having My Baby”. – Wikipedia
This, I knew. After all, I was around while it was happening. But courtesy of Wikipedia, here are things I didn’t know about Paul Anka.
Paul Anka was born in Ottawa to Lebanese immigrants.
His writing credits include the theme for The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, Tom Jones’s “She’s a Lady”, and the English lyrics for Frank Sinatra’s signature song, “My Way” (which comes from the French song, “Comme d’habitude,” something else I didn’t know).
Anka was inducted into Canada’s Walk of Fame in 2005.
He had five daughters by his first wife, Anne, and all five have names starting with “A.” One of them is married to Jason Bateman (who can be hysterically funny, not that that’s something I learned from Wikipedia).
He has had film and TV roles. And even though he’s 75 (closing hard on 76: his birthday is July 30), there’s a reason I used the present perfect progressive there (and yes, I had to look that up, too). May I have the drum roll, please . . .
His career spans 60 years: 1957 to the present. Don’t count him out yet.
So here’s to Paul Anka. I’m not crazy about his genres, but he’s got some pipes.
Thanks to Jim Taylor for suggesting Paul Anka.
Sitting in the shade on a warm summer afternoon might not be the height of decadence, but it’s mighty fine.
Looking up, I found this leaf silhouette worth the effort to go in the house to fetch my camera.
I was going for the shape of the leaf, and got the texture of the awning as an extra.
I admit I’m a little fuzzy on tree identification, but I think these are cottonwood leaves. If you’d like to watch a 17-minute video on cottonwoods (The Largest Trees in Arizona), well, you can.
And the mood strikes again, so here’s another photo of a helicopter from the Pima Air and Space Museum.
What kind? Dunno. I just like the shape.
Although I did have to resort to extreme cropping to get rid of the bare tree branches that photo-bombed the original.
Posted: 2025 Aug 20
