My Rambling Rosebush

This rosebush was there when I moved in, and it grows like a weed. But now my patio fence is slated to be replaced, so the rosebush will have to be cut way, way back. Fortunately, it produced blooms early, before the fencers come.

Artsy-Fartsy Photo Tale

P-Doobie's discussion of arty photography reminds me of an encounter I had several years ago in Harvard Square on a clear summer day. I was wandering about when I noticed a young woman photographing the street life. I could tell she was a serious photographer; she had a huge, protruding camera and she was dressed entirely in black. In this case, the black outfit signaled that she, like a stage hand, was (by convention) invisible, and could safely point her lens wherever she pleased. I passed through the main intersection and was waiting at a curb for the walk signal, when I happened to look to my right and see this artistic photographer's lens pointing straight at me. Startled and embarrassed I turned away. My skin tingled and blood heated up. A stranger had taken my picture! My initial excitement quickly cooled as I recalled the kind of pictures artistic photographers produced. They didn't photograph people who looked pretty; they photographed people who looked interesting. How did I look interesting? When I first saw her she was shooting tattoo-covered street musicians and punked-out kids. It haunts me to this day.

Goodbye Filene's

I went downtown with some buddies after work today, and look what greeted us: a smashed Filene's! Why couldn't they use the building for something else? I bought some shoes to console myself.

The Mysterians

In my youth I watched any kind of science fiction film or TV show. I saw The Mysterians on some Saturday in the late 60s or early 70s. Some bits from that flick stuck with me into my early fifties (i.e. now): the bird-headed robot with ray-gun eyes, the Mysterians' cool helmets and capes, the abduction of Earth women from hovering saucers. Recently, I noticed it had come out on DVD; I ordered it immediately. After 3 viewings I must say I am impressed with the beautiful Mysterian gadgetry and the splendid martial music accompanying the parade of tanks, planes, missiles, etc.
The version I got was dubbed, but when I listened to the original Japanese trailer, I realized that "Mysterian" was not the translation of some Japanese word. They actually call them "Mysterians," which must suggst the exotic, mysterious Occident.* The DVD cover supplies the uncredited quote "The Greatest Science Fiction Picture ever Conceived by the Mind of Man," which may be a bit inflated. Still, it's definitely worth at least a look at the trailer for the American release. I may have to have a Mysterian party.

*(The allure of the west still rules in modern Japan. Teenagers are keen to have their eyes embiggened.)

Love Thy Neighbor? Not This One!

This is James W. Lewis and his wife LeAnn. The couple lived in Chicago for a few months in 1981-2, after which they moved to New York. They were calling themselves Robert and Nancy Richardson, because James was wanted on Kansas City charges: bilking elderly people out of land and unlawful flight to avoid prosecution. Since LeAnn had been fired from her Chicago travel agency job for taking office stationery for personal use, James needed to take revenge on her ex-boss. The 1982 Tylenol poisonings gave him the means: he wrote a note to Johnson & Johnson (on the travel agency letterhead) demanding one million dollars to end the poisonings and signed it with the ex-boss's name. He asked that the money be transfered to an account belonging to said ex-boss. However, his clever plan backfired. Apparently he did not think to type the note or to disguise his handwriting. Police found his fingerprints on the letter and matched the handwriting. Since the couple were in New York when the Tylenol bottles must have been tampered with, James was only charged with extortion. After serving 13 years of his 20-year sentence he was released. He and his wife moved into a lovely building in Cambridge, MA, which happens to be one of the 2 buildings in my condo association. Luckily it wasn't my building. Still, it was pretty close.
Fast forward to July 29, 2004. Once again, Mr. Lewis is in trouble with the law. His partner in a consulting business claimed he had used spice spray on her and struggled with her for four hours before raping her. When the case finally came to trial, the accuser refused to testify against him and Lewis was released. Recently he's been giving interviews, bewailing his wrongs. Being suspected of the Tylenol killings caused him great anguish: "I can tell you it is a big weight to have thrown at you and it is nothing that your mother prepares you for and it is not something that you learn about in school" (see McCabe).
I don't suspect him of being the Tylenol poisoner. But I do call him the Tylenol man; writing that note earned him the name.

Bibliography:
McCabe, Neil W., "My Chat With the Tylenol Man" The Alewife, October 03, 2007
Bell, Rachel, "The Tylenol Terrorist: Looking for Answers" TruTV Crime Library
Hilts, Philip J. and Joyce Wadler, "Wanted on Extortion Charges; Tylenol Figure Arrested in New York" The Washington Post, December 14, 1982, Tuesday, Final Edition, First Section; A1
Roger Nicolsen Interview: http://youtube.com/watch?v=WH4iQzHdtIU&feature=related

John Malkovich Being John Malkovich

Overheard in a Harvard Square restaurant:

He: I saw John Malkovich today!
She: Where was he?
He: Just walking down the street!
She: Just walking down the street?
He: He was shopping!
He was shopping!

View From My Patio

Here you see the side of the old building next door. The bottom part houses Mayflower Poultry. Their sign says "Live Poultry, Fresh Killed." It sounds like a Zen koan. The tree on the right hides the grill behind which blows an industrial-strength fan, sending the scent of uncooked chicken outside. Sometimes the people on my side of the building have to call the city health dept. when the scent gets a bit too intense. A bunch of people, unconnected to the chicken trade, live in an apartment above. You can see two of their windows in the upper left. One of the occupants does commercial photography and makes big flashes that you think are lightening, until no thunder comes.

Cats and Ironing Boards go Together

A Satisfying Friday Night

Julie, Ann, me (behind camera), and Sue (below) enjoy a night out at the River Gods, an Irish pub with mystical and river-themed decoration.
The man at the left is a stranger. The lady hanging from the ceiling (below) is apparently some kind of river sprite.
After a delicious dinner of booze and fried food, we said goodnight to Ann. Dave (of Julie & Dave) joined us at Sue's place, where we marveled at her peonies (below).

Then we watched two TV shows (not pictured) of a type new to me. The hosts of Survivorman and Man vs. Wild travel to wild places where they demonstrate all sorts of useful survival skills. The Survivorman was in Utah; he almost died of thirst until he found a silty little pool. Then he made 5 pack rat traps with materials he found lying around and a stone knife he made. But only one trap actually caught anything. Bummer. The MvW host is a skinny British guy name Bear. His show was more exciting, and he ate a lot more gross stuff, like the big yellow thing (grub?) that exploded into a sticky mess on his face when he bit it. He also built an elaborate signal fire worthy (as Julie noted) of Martha Stewart. Good times!

I Missed the Fire on Dunster St....

...because I didn't go to work until 11:30, by which time most of the excitement was over. I had my camera with me, because I was going to take some library snaps for a web site. So had Fate sent me there in the early morning, I might have had my own photos, instead of this one I swiped off Boston.com. What EXCITEMENT was left? SLOW network service. The Harvard Health Service had to CLOSE, so I couldn't pick up my new glasses. Co-workers regaled me with stories of TRAFFIC jams and BLOCKED OFF streets. Oh well, maybe I'll be there for the next exciting thing.
Oh, no, here's something else that happened this morning:

Carmen 'The Cheeseman' DiNunzio indicted in Big Dig corruption sting

More Old Photos

Maybe I'll try scanning these again. It's hard to get the glare out when photographing photographs.

And Another...

In this one I maximized the contrast, steered the color towards greens, then ramped up the color saturation. Note the camera strap on the right.

Isn't NCR Pretty, Ladies and Gentlemen of the Board?

Welcome Back Retrofuture!

Yes, one of my all-time favorite sites is back on the web. I can once again indulge my nostalgia for the future.

Introducing My New Favorite Photoshop Thing

Mixed Greens

This bud's for you.

Spring hopes eternally green.

This is your plant on drugs.

This is 73 Dana St. where I lived in 5R for 7 years. It's a house built 1898 (I don't know if it always had the weird stone front), for 3 families. The roof was never free of leaks; they'd fix one, and the rain would make a new one elsewhere. I had a spout for a gaslight in the kitchen. My radiators were molded with Victorian decorative motifs. The floors sank in the middle of each room. It was a charming, but broken-down place. You could hear your neighbors too easily. Today it still looks poorly cared for; it needs a paint job. Probably if the owners renovated it, they could get a zillion dollars for it.

Pictures From Life are Hard to Reproduce

Life January 11, 1923

I'm trying to reproduce a series of ads in Life from 1923. I scanned this one then fooled with it on Photoshop. Then I decided to photograph the others. But I need to find a way to avoid glare and keep the page flat (these are bound library copies). I also wanted to put up some ads from the Proquest Historical Newspapers data base, but they fixed it so it can't be done.

Wild Horses Didn't Drag Them Away

Here's a wild horse from Julie 'n' Dave's trip to Baja CA. This will have to keep me until my own vacation in July.

What To Wear

Chuck's post on fashion reminded me that I must begin thinking of what to pack for my trip to the Canadian Rockies. One of life's keenest pleasures is planning to pack: settling on the clothes with just the right weight, practicality, and beauty.

Oh Geeze! I'm Mechanically Challenged

Saturday morning about 4 a.m. I heard this chirping noise: about one chirp per minute. The only time I'd heard anything similar was from my smoke alarm. I tried vacuuming the the dust out of the thing. I even disconnected it. Still the horrible chirping. Could it be the carbon-monoxide detector that I'd bought last year in response to a new Mass. law? I unplugged it. Still the slow, maddening chirping continued. I went to the Firex web site. Replace the battery when warned by chirping, it said. O.K. Since it was hard-wired I'd assumed there was no battery, but maybe there was. I took the thing down, but couldn't get it open. I took it to a hardware store. The clerk couldn't get it open. Then an elderly hardware employee looked at it and said, this is the hard-wired type of smoke detector. It doesn't have a battery. Could it be your carbon-monoxide detector? No, I unplugged that. I went back home and called the local electrician, who was able to come about 3 hours later. I told him my story and said it must be the heat detector. But no, it was the carbon-monoxide detector that does chirp, even when unplugged, because it uses the waning power of the battery to produce the chirps.

The Unarius Academy Missed.

It was just about one year ago that I visited Chuck 'n' Jerry. We contemplated a visit to the Unarius Academy HQ, but since we couldn't get them via phone, we feared they may have dispersed after the death of Ruth Norman. But today I found their up-to-date web site. Apparently they offer regular classes in Mexico and Nigeria. I keep wondering what happened to all of Ruth Norman's weird gowns. You can see one of them at Douglas Curran's web site. His book In Advance of the Landing: Folk Concepts of Outer Space is one of my faves. Here's another I found on the web:

Further Reading:

California space goddess : the mystagogue in a flying saucer cult. By: Kirkpatrick, R George; Tumminia, Diana. Source: Twentieth-century world religious movements in neo-Weberian perspective, p 299-311. Lewiston, NY : Edwin Mellen Pr, 1992 Publication Type: Essay

Unarius : emergent aspects of an American flying saucer group. By: Tumminia, Diana; Kirkpatrick, R George. Source: Gods have landed, p 85-104. Albany : State Univ of New York Pr, 1995 Publication Type: Essay

When the archangel died: from revelation to routinisation of charisma in Unarius By: Tumminia, Diana. Source: UFO religions, p 62-82. London ; New York : Routledge, 2003 Publication Type: Essay

The Beautiful Future

This lovely picture is courtesy of Retrofuture, a guy who posts on Flickr. Was he involved in retrofuture.com? I don't know. But I do know I want to follow his example in dredging up old, ridiculous visions of the future, scan them, and post them for the benefit of all humankind.

I (Finally) Finished my Self Portrait

If I look a bit grim, it's because I had to wipe off my work and do it over several times. Thank goodness oil paint is so forgiving. When this sucker dries, I'll bring it to work for a showing in my cubicle.

Tilt

Look at this picture I took. It looks like all the gravestones are about to slide down to the left, but they're not. I ramped up the color saturation. Few things, photographically speaking, are more satisfying than ramping up the color saturation. It's easy to go overboard, and I do.

S.O.S. (Same Old Stuff)

I got myself a Flickr page (in the links list). But damn, there are so many awesome photos out there. I'm taking a Photoshop class in June. Maybe I can come up with some wild stuff. In the meantime, amuse yourself with this short movie.

The Future is History

Well, it looks like Retrofuture, one of my favorite sites, is gone. The link has been dead at least a couple of days. The creator compiled old predictions of our wonderful science-blessed future. You know, flying cars, jet packs, robot maids. A month ago I sent the guy an article about robots we could marry by the year 2000 (see my February 10 post). I was nettled when he didn't respond. And now he and his site have been swallowed up into the abyss.

Ye Olde-Tymers' Lunch

Chris, Arthur, and Lynn were all at Lamont in the 80s with me.

Par-tay at Julie and Dave's

Dave and Julie relax.

Sue finds something funny.

Lynn meditates on the perfection of chocolate.

Stanley has a white mustache, which you can't really see here.

The camera often makes cats' eyes turquoise. This is Cliff.

Sue, back of Julie, Lynn.

Appreciation for the cook.

Nonprofit is not Necessarily Not Profitable

As I read of one financial disaster after another, it's comforting to know that my employer is doing just fine. Though not much trickles down into my paycheck, at least its wealth assures me that America's oldest corporation will be around to pay my pension.

April is the Cruelest Month...

But not for me, because I finished my taxes. This year Mass. introduced a tax on items bought out-of-state for in-state use. Of course I buy all kinds of stuff on the internet. Fortunately, Mass. gave us the option of paying a flat fee based on your income, if you didn't want to keep even more receipts. Did you know that you must even pay taxes on ill-gotten gains? So even if the feds can't prove you robbed the bank, they can nab you for not paying taxes on the take. Pay your taxes today!

Oh Canada.

Hooray, I will be spending 5 days in July-August at this place with two old college buddies.

Others Bowl

Dave


Julie


Lynn


Sue

I Bowl

Dave posted an old video of me bowling on Youtube. I made a strike that night, but nobody got a picture of it.

Cute

A New Transformer for the Neighborhood

These guys are replacing the transformer that lives off my condo ass.'s parking lot. The old transformer "blew up" some years ago, but they just fixed it. (When it "blew up" it did not fly apart, as the phrase "blew up" implies; it merely made a loud bang and stopped working.) Now we are getting a new, improved model!