Vegas, Baby

Is this sign a sign?

    Well that title may be a little misleading. It’s not really about Las Vegas, it’s more about the iconic “Welcome to Las Vegas” sign. And that’s really only the object of yet another one of my synchronistic-divine intervention moments. You can read about the previous two examples here and here. This time we're going to Vegas, baby.
    I was working on a photo in Photoshop. Basically I was experimenting with a photo I had taken back in November 2020. That particular shoot involved a 1960’s theme and the model was styled like a Vegas showgirl; I was doing a reproduction of a Robert McGinnis illustration that was from that era. So, like a lot of the times when I experiment in Photoshop, I picked a photo with the goal of just making something cool and interesting. Usually I’m just making something up as I go along. Since it was a 60’s shoot, I thought about including graphics of that era: mid-century graphics, atomic age graphics, etc. I worked on it for a few days and really liked how it looked. I had funky starbursts and atom icons, with warm, beautiful colors and nice geometrical shapes. Then I thought maybe I’d include the “Welcome to Las Vegas” sign and allude to the fact that model would be performing there. I found the sign quite easily in a google search and it was a png file that already had the photo on a white background; real easy to remove and place in my project. I worked on it for about an hour but ultimately decided it didn’t work and scrapped that idea. Later on the same night I finished watching season 3 of The Sinner that was just released on Netflix (originally aired on USA Network).

Another Coincidence?

It's a twister, It's a twister
(Image obtained from www.weather.com)

    Recently I posted a article about being amazed and seeing the same camera shot in a tv show and movie I had happened to watch back to back. Well just yesterday I came across a similar situation, this time involving StarTalk and the movie Places in the Heart.

    StarTalk is a podcast hosted by Neil deGrasse Tyson. There are different segments, including live town halls with guests(though not recently due to covid) and others that have a specific theme. I subscribe to the channel on youtube, and if I may put in a plug for it, it’s a channel I think you should subscribe to as well. It’s very educational of course but also very entertaining. Neil gets very excited talking about science. The particular show I was watching is called Neil deGrasse Tyson Explains and is co-hosted by comedian Chuck Nice, who does a good job of throwing down the humor. The segment was called Force vs Pressure. In one part he talks about how when there is a tornado, the air around it has very low pressure and if it descends near a house, the pressure inside the house will be greater than outside. There is no equilibrium between the air inside and outside. The result is there will be enough force to blow out the walls of the house, “turning it into matchsticks” as Chuck had said. I did not know this. I thought tornadoes just rip roofs off, spin cows in the air and send houses to OZ. I guess they do some of those things but I never thought that it could explode a house. This brings us to Places in the Heart.

Photo Walking

5 Spot restaurant along the staircase trail

    Recently I came across a website that has a list of 30 staircase trails throughout the city of Seattle and thought these would be perfect for photo walking. I’ve been doing photo walks since 2003, when I purchased my first camera. It's been something I’ve been doing a lot more this past year during this the Covid epidemic, especially in the last couple of months.   

    Seattle is composed of a series of hills and on those hills are more hills, slopes and ridges. Some of the steepest roads in Seattle: Denny Way, Dravus and Queen Anne Ave can be accessed by walking on the sidewalk. There are, however, many areas in Seattle where a sidewalk wouldn’t work. So Seattle built close to 500 staircases to access the streets below and above wherever you may be on any particular hill, some dating back to 1905. With these 30 staircase trails you can go in either direction, however the list does tell you how many up and down steps there are and favors the direction with more up steps than down. I’ve always loved walking and it's great exercise, especially if they involve lots of stairs to climb so it wasn't a problem to see the hikes were 4 to 5 miles, so I chose the direction with more steps up. I'm all for the challenge.  I chose the first trail on the list called “Queen Anne” simply because I could pick up the trail a half a block from my front door. I was familiar with most of the areas on this staircase climb, though I certainly hadn’t been on all the staircase before. Some of them are quite remarkable and beautiful such as Wilcox Wall, The Galer Crown and The Comstock Grand Dame. 

A Mere Coincidence?

    Possibly. Others might say probably. I guess there isn’t any kind of synchronicity at play here but it still fascinates me because I think to myself, what are the odds that this seemingly meaningless, silly thing occurred?
    Like everyone I’ve been watching a lot of TV. I have a lot of the streaming services and can pretty much watch most anything. One evening I came across the show Monk starring Tony Shaloub, which ran for 8 seasons. I remember when it came out back in 2002 but had never watched it. I like Mr. Shaloub so I figured I should give it a go. I’ve watched a lot of different series the past year. I call them filler, not in a negative way but just something easy to watch to fill in the time here and there or in between movies since they’re usually an hour or under. Some of these shows I had seen before and others were new to me. A few shows I’ve watched are: Twin Peaks, Community, Ozark, How To Get Away with Murder and The Twilight Zone(the original version. I do want to see Jordan Peele’s version but I don’t have CBS all access; you can’t have them all) And again like everyone, I tend to binge on these multiple episodic shows. You can watch just one(most likely not) or as many as you want and because of Covid you don’t have to feel bad that you are avoiding life by binging on several hours of TV because this is life right now. So watch ten episodes in a row guilt free. Unlike Netflix, which will throw up an entire season of their shows in one shot, channels like HBO, Showtime or AMC still follow the old way and release an episode a week. I tend to wait till shows on these channels have finished their seasons before beginning to watch them. I don’t want to wait a week between episodes. I can’t. I won’t. Let’s get back to Monk.

Ode to Baseball Cards

      In the past few weeks we lost two baseball greats: Lou Brock and Tom “Terrific” Seaver. One of the first things I thought about with their passing was my baseball card collection. When I was a kid in the late 70’s, I collected baseball cards and I remember seeing both the Lou Brock and Tom Seaver cards you see above. I’m sure all the names of baseball players of that era, however obscure, are somewhere in my brain. After all I was constantly flipping through all my cards and would see their names again and again. The first year I started collecting in a serious and passionate way was in 1976

     At this time it was mostly Topps cards that dominated the market, not just with baseball and the other major pro sports, but also with movies and TV. There was Mork and Mindy, Happy Days, Charlie's Angels and other collections from the biggest TV shows and movies of the day. You better believe there were a ton of Star Wars cards out there. My brother had some of those. But for me I think there was something more tangible and fun with collecting baseball cards. 1976 was also the year I went to my first major league baseball game at Shea Stadium to see the New York Mets, so it was thrilling to collect baseball cards and then see those players in person or watch them on TV. Each year the new baseball cards would come out right before baseball season started. It was exciting to see what the new design was and give it a thumbs up or down. I’m sure I disparaged the look of the 1978 baseball card, that year the team names were written in cursive. Yuck. But no matter how little I liked the look of the new baseball cards of any particular year, it would never discourage me from collecting them.