Jeff Shaumeyer 🌈

Very yummy, especially at a fair.

At an indoor state fair, an old man with white beard and white hair (what's left of it), dressed in a dark-red jacket and wearing a scarf of dark-red and light-red triangles, smiles because he's holding a white paper plate filled with a deep-fried "Bloomin' Onion", with a cup of light-yellow dip in its center.

The Pennsylvania Farm Show, held annually in January in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania [USA], is a large state fair all in buildings that cover a large city-block.

Vendors provide lots of fair-type food. Here's my husband, Isaac, with our lunchtime Bloomin' Onion. 20220113

#FoodOnFriday #PAFarmShow

I used a LUMIX for maybe 10 years. I really liked it, loved taking pictures with it. (Something happened and it kept getting dust in the lens assembly that I couldn't keep clean.)
For several years now I've been using a Canon PowerShot G9X which has served me well. Good optics, bright lens.

"I have usernames older than you."
--username 'corporateash'; no date given, so: "timeless"

#CommonplaceBook

In a large, neoclassical building, this is a large circular opening in the ceiling, showing the floor above. Through it we can see the coffered ceiling, a wrought- iron hanging lantern, a door opening, and, in that opening, a small person looking over the railing.

This is a big hole (intentional) in the ceiling above the main entrance of the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC.

I call it the "oculus", but some people use that for the hole in the top of the rotunda dome (as in the dome of the Pantheon, in Rome.)

Either way, it's fun.

#NGA #Oculus

And to be honest, I've lately been lusting some about what I could do with a hi-res camera + drone setup.

This is good to know, and it might inspire me.

OTOH, i have been using a point & shoot pocket camera, with which I have learned how to coerce the light balance and depth of field, enough that I don't know if I want to return to an SLR. Maybe. I probably won't lose sleep over it.

It makes me sad when people can't see a way to keep living.

I guess we have to go with: at least we've still got his music and the people he taught and inspired.

So, here's an interesting report that is NOT about DHS: improving the life & taste of #SourdoughBread with waste from Greek yogurt.

I LOVE being surrounded by ideas I haven't learned yet.

The piles of books are like histograms measuring the amount of unlearned things.

#Books #WordOfTheDay #Tsundoku

As a graduate student I worked in a low-temp lab. All of the tiny wires on our apparatus were tied to support posts to keep them out of the way when putting the cryostat can on. I became very adept at tying half-hitches in threads with tweezers. (It might be a transferrable skill in aerospace.)

Dreaming of a Blue Texas Will economic progress turn Texas progressive?

"[T]he claim that low taxes lead to rapid economic growth has been more thoroughly tested in practice than any other proposition in economics, and has failed every time."
--Paul Krugman, 5 March 2026 [2008 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences]

#CommonplaceBook

Wow! This circular blade is a perfect balance for Randal's closed-body poses. Beautiful framing!

There's not much that's more satisfying than a beautifully designed #Book .

...emulsion plane. Optical magic! I've never had a camera I could do that with, though. So, software sometimes does it for me.

It's funny how sometimes some vertical convergence seems natural, other times it just looks wrong. I've been sensitized, I think, ever since I learned years ago that an old-fashioned, large-format bellows camera could compensate for vertical distortions by moving the lens place higher than the ...

Maybe a good reading, but actually I was trying for "stand ON it". The usual complaint: autocorrect is rarely my friend.

That's for sure. I'll use a perspective tool for nudging things into better rectilinear shape, but too much seems to make them funkier and less realistic looking than whe I started. "Camera first" is still the best goal.

Well, sure, all those things. Fortunately, the software can rotate and crop. Also fortunately, I haven't used film for 20 years so I can take several versions of shots I want to get just right--more or less. And some just don't ever come out right, but I don't have to share those.

You'll be rewarded with an interesting, but sad, backstory. I hadn't known about him until last year, when Isaac said we should have some Hugo Distler in our collection.

But it's so small! How can you even stand in it?

I like that cornerstone, too.

I like photographing churches, too! This is a nice dome--I can see the challenge it making it look good in a photo, but there's nice detail going on with it. (And how often do photographs not turn out as we'd hoped? Call in the cropping!)

Richard Deakin’s Flora of the Colosseum of Rome (1855) A thoroughly romantic amateur English botanist’s catalogue of more than 400 plants and flowers that once grew in profusion on the Roman Colosseum.

The link didn't survive the quoting process (although it's in the post if you click on that), so here it is:

publicdomainreview.org/collection/r...

#TIL that the Roman Colosseum ruins used to be a botanical potpourri, AND it's flora were catalogued (AND, the catalogue is freely available:)

Dreissig Spielstücke für Kleinorgel oder andere Tasteninstrumente, Nr. 1-4, op. 18/I YouTube video by Armin Schoof - Topic

#CatchingMyEar today is the first of these "30 Pieces for Small Organ" by Hugo Distler. (NB, this track is the first four of the op 18 collection; no 1 is the first 90 seconds.)

There is nice registration here, making it feel like bird calls in an Invocation of Spring to me.

#Music

It's a unique experience, and I think (like you) worth a 100-mile detour to be there. I like that they've made it generally open to visitors.

...in Languages, Classics, & Music, all of which enriched my own educational experience there, and which I feel are much too important to the Liberal-Arts education #CornellCollege had long been committed to.

Color It Purple - Hilltop Alumni Community

To my #CornellCollege friends: Today, our alma mater is doing its annual #ColorItPurple fund-raising drive.

In previous years, I've enjoyed making my financial contributions.

This year, however, I will not be contributing, to protest the Board of Trustee's decision last year to cancel programs...

I like the all-white best, but they all serve their purpose with creativity and enthusiasm.