Let there be VLOG!!!

I’ve been thinking for years about vlogging and video content. I’ve even made some, here and there! But now, I’ve decided it’s time to get serious about this, now that I have actually decent video gear and also now that I’m starting to get more used to the way I sound on video. So, to that end, I have relaunched my YouTube channel, and here’s my introductory video over there! Make sure to watch, “Like”, and Subscribe! Onward and upward! Zap! Pow!!

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Tone Poem Tuesday

When in doubt, go with Berlioz. You can’t go wrong with Berlioz. Here is the Roman Carnival overture, for which Berlioz re-tooled a number of melodies from his first opera, Benvenuto Cellini, which–like many of Berlioz’s works during his lifetime, sadly–failed in its day but has since found much greater acceptance.

The Roman Carnival Overture is something of a showpiece; it’s one of Berlioz’s most overtly crowd-pleasing works, with that gorgeous melody in the first section and the infectious carnival dance that makes up the overture’s second half. It’s one of the most infectious works I know.

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“The Promise of Spring”

Via Leanne Boulton, one of my favorite photographers working today. Boulton resides in Scotland and primarily produces street photography, which is one of my favorite genres. And as great good luck would have it, this photo appears on a day when it’s actually sunny and warm in Buffalo! Since we just had five inches of snow the other morning, I’ll take it.

(I am long on record as loving winter and snow, but my personal cutoff for when I get annoyed by it is St. Patrick’s Day. Once the Irish folk have calmed back down, I’m done with snow. In an act of climatic disobedience, I refused to shovel any of this most recent snow. Screw that, says I! My car can easily drive through it, and as I write this, my driveway is every bit as clear as the people who insisted on shoveling this weekend.)

 

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The Worst Shopping Center Ever Built

I’ve had this post in my head for years, and heck, it’s time to get it outta my head and into here. (Why haven’t I written it? No real reason.)

Anyway, a few miles from Casa Jaquandor is a big shopping plaza called Quaker Crossing. Here it is, via Google Earth:

Looks like any other big suburban plaza, right? And sure, because let’s be honest, suburban shopping plazas are always terrible. But this one is somehow especially terrible. Usually these plazas are terrible because they are relentlessly optimized for cars and are almost anti-pedestrian to the point they feel almost punitive if you’re trying to walk, but this one is somehow terrible for both cars and pedestrians.

OK, let’s get the pedestrian shittiness out of the way first, because it’s easy. Note the gargantuan parking lots, each of them in the middle of their clusters of stores and businesses, with large driveways bounding them. This means that if you plan to shop at multiple businesses at Quaker Crossing, you are extremely discouraged from parking in one place and walking to each business. Those large buildings across the top (north) contain a Target, a Dick’s Sporting Goods, a Kohl’s, a Premiere liquor and wine store, and a Regal Cinemas. Over in the east cluster, you have a large furniture store, a large pet store, and a bunch of smaller stores. The two clusters are separated by a four-lane driveway right up the middle, and this whole plaza sprawls out over a huge parcel, so if you need to go to both Kohl’s and the pet store, there’s no way you’re walking from one to the other. This plaza has virtually no walking infrastructure.

So there you are at Quaker Crossing and you have no choice: you’re driving to the place and then from one side of the plaza to the other. This experience is awful, too.

Here I need a marked-up diagram to illustrate the awfulness:

We start with the red circle, before we even enter the Quaker Crossing plaza. That’s the exit ramp from southbound US219, heading onto westbound Milestrip Road. This used to be a single-lane ramp that yields onto Milestrip, which is four lanes from here to its terminus at NY 5, a few miles west; that’s fine. They added a second lane at the foot of the ramp to merge into the new third lane on Milestrip when the plaza was built, to accommodate people who are coming off 219 for the purpose of entering Quaker Crossing. Again, fine!

But they put a traffic light at the end of the ramp!

So now, instead of a simple yield-and-merge situation, there’s a damned stop light to content with. Why they did this, I have no idea; I have literally seen zero other stop lights at the feet of exit ramps that are designed for merging. Now, if the ramp’s terminus was angled perpendicular to Milestrip, I would get it. But this light makes the entire exchange counterintuitive, and on busy days actually makes things a mess, because there are times when you have to start aggressively braking as soon as you exit 219S. This is nonsense. That light is stupid.

Then there’s the yellow circle, which is the main entrance to Quaker Crossing. This actually isn’t super-bad. It’s a standard 4-way intersection with lights and turn-arrows. Also, if you look closer, just west of the main entrance to Quaker Crossing is a second entrance, just one lane, basically an exit ramp from Milestrip into the western end of the plaza. We use this a lot if we’re going to the theater or to Red Robin, both of which are the westernmost businesses here. Back to the main entrance, though: it’s four lanes itself, since most people entering the plaza have to be able to turn into the left (western) portion of the plaza, or the right (eastern) portion. That makes sense…but one problem here is that for accessing Quaker Crossing via Milestrip, this is the only exit point. That means that just about everybody leaving Quaker Crossing will have to come to this one intersection. Is that horrible? Not entirely…and there is a back way out, which goes to Lake Avenue, but if you’re not going that way, that’s not a big help. Still, the exit isn’t the worst thing in the world…until you factor in the blue circle.

That’s the main intersection from which people leave the short entrance road to either turn left or right to go to wherever they mean to go in Quaker Crossing, or where people have to come if they’re leaving. The problem here is twofold: First, it’s quite close to Milestrip, so there is no time for traffic to funnel out from the main entrance on busy days; second, there are no signals there to manage the traffic. So you have four lanes each way, with turn lanes, and you have busy side driveways with people coming and going, and all of this is dependent on motorists doing right-of-way correctly. This is one of the most nerve-wracking intersections I know of, and I’m honestly surprised I don’t hear of more fender-benders there than I do.

What should they have done? My contention is that they shouldn’t have built that intersection at all. All traffic should go all the way to the northernmost point on that road, and then have people turn, maybe even using a roundabout to guide and filter the traffic through the plaza. That initial intersection is almost always a mess, and it didn’t have to be.

Now, that aqua-colored line? That’s the main driveway through the western side of Quaker Crossing. It, too, is terribly designed; curves a-plenty, entrances to side lots seemingly every hundred feet, and stop signs galore that stop traffic one way but not the other. Why didn’t they design the entire plaza with all the businesses centralized and a single driveway running around the perimeter, like a ring road? Or cluster all the businesses into one large walkable plaza? I have no idea. But this entire place is really a negative miracle of modern architectural design and planning: a giant retail plaza that is terrible to drive and impossible to walk. I honestly do not know how they pulled that off, but pull it off, they did.

Posted in Commentary, On Buffalo and The 716 | Tagged | 1 Comment

Overalls in history….

Here’s something I never knew about! Fascinating story, this.

 

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Two scenes from a morning

As much as I’m not a fan of being up before dawn all the time, I have to admit that the pre-dawn hours have a certain beauty. Two quick shots, taking during my morning commute, before the sun has risen:

 

The pre-dawn light, seen through a frosty car window. Taken with my phone while I waited for a green light.
Commuters and a cop doing a traffic stop. The world is already moving, even before the sun has come up.
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Something for Thursday

First of all, a bit of administrativia: the post immediately below this one was supposed to run yesterday and I screwed up the publishing. Oops.

Now: not music, but a scene from a teevee show today: the closing scene from “The Unnatural” from The X-Files, an episode David Duchovny wrote and directed, in which his Agent Fox Mulder visits an elderly former FBI agent named Arthur Dales about a curious incident in Agent Dales’s past. It turns out that this Arthur Dales was actually the brother of the former FBI agent Arthur Dales, though both were named Arthur. Anyway, this Dales was a cop in Roswell, NM in the late 1940s, and was assigned to protect a black baseball player named Josh Exley. Of course, Exley turned out to be an alien who loved baseball, and a very strange period story emerges, in which the show’s decades-long alien conspiracy intersects the world of baseball. Honestly, it’s one of the show’s very best episodes.

One thing that makes it great is that the present-day Arthur Dales was played by the great character actor M. Emmet Walsh, who just died this week after decades of appearing in seemingly everything. Walsh was an outstanding actor, and he will be missed.

I couldn’t find the actual scenes of Walsh and Duchovny talking in the episode, so I’ll just share this scene, which concludes the episode as Mulder and Scully take a break from all their alien-chasing and conspiracy-pursuing to bond–pretty romantically, too–over a bit of batting practice. The song heard throughout the scene actually weaves through the entire episode; it turns out that the alien ballplayer in 1947 also had a great singing voice.

 

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Astro

Photography, that is.

Last week I was blessed with (a) a clear night, and (b) very little moonlight. This led to a brief astrophotography session outside, where I set up my tripod right in my driveway, set my camera’s focus for “infinity”, bumped up the ISO a bit, set the shutter for various lengths, and took photos.

This resulted in a lot of clunker photos, but…not all! One thing I’m quickly learning is that the formula “take a bunch of photos during a session and maybe you’ll have a few keepers” is quite normal, even for really good photographers. I was happier with my star photos than with my moon photos; clearly I have work to do in that particular department. I still have quite a bit to learn, but for now, these are much better than my first efforts at astrophotography with this camera, last summer.

 

I really think my problem with the Moon is one of getting the right focus and light settings.
Orion and Canis Major, rising over one of the big trees at the end of the street. I love astrophotography photos that combine the sky with a terrestrial element, like this tree.
Just Orion this time, with other stellar friends.
If you follow the three stars of Orion’s belt to the left–“southwest” across the sky–you encounter Sirius, the brightest star in our sky, in its constellation home of Canis Major. If you follow those same belt stars the other direction, though, you’ll find a small stellar cluster called the Pleiades. That’s them near the center of this photo. The Pleiades are utterly stunning through a telescope, but to the naked eye they are very dim. Luckily this timed exposure captured them nicely!

Of course, there’s a major celestial event coming up in just a couple of weeks that will test my photography skills in a unique way that I’m not likely to get another chance to practice in my lifetime. I’m starting to get excited for the eclipse!

 

Posted in On Exploring Photography, On Nature, On Science and the Cosmos, Photographic Documentation | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Tone Poem Tuesday

Whoops, it is Tuesday, isn’t it? Welp!

Some Borodin, then:

Well, before I get to that, background: the Polovtsian Dances are one of Borodin’s most famous works. It is, in fact, an excerpt from his opera Prince Igor. The opera itself hasn’t endured terribly well since its premiere in 1890, mainly because many singers are not trained in the work’s native Russian, and because it’s not entirely by Borodin at all: Borodin himself died before finishing it, so Alexander Glazunov and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov took it on themselves to complete it. The result is a disjointed opera that doesn’t flow as well as it should with musical unity…but also an opera that is full of brilliantly realized moments by Borodin. The Polovtsian Dances are the Act II showstopper that brings the entire company out to perform this exceptionally evocative and exotic music. In the story, Prince Igor has come to the camp of the Polovtsian tribe, who welcome him with this enchanting tableau of song and dance. It’s hard to listen to this and not want to disappear into this story….

 

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Ohhh, let’s get rid of some open tabs, shall we?

Time to clear out the open tabs! Yay!

::  Yes, changing the clocks is bad for you.

::  If you’re like me, you see all the reports of business closing locations and locking down security measures due to massive increases of theft through a rather skeptical lens. There is always theft, but the discussion always takes on a kind of racial tone, especially when it becomes the “suburban stores” dealing with “thieves from the city“. That’s particularly interesting when you read about the woman who might have spearheaded one particular shoplifting ring.

::  Trickle-down was always bullshit. This is not news, but many Americans still hold strong to the notion that the tax cuts on the rich will work in their favor just any day now….

::  How the Finger Lakes were named. I’m always up for some Finger Lakes content!

::  Kodak Instamatic review. I dug this up when I was trying to figure out what kind of camera we had when I was a kid. We weren’t much of a picture-taking family, which makes it almost surprising to me that I’ve taken photography as a decades-long pastime that has recently exploded into a passion. I’m 98 percent sure that our family camera was a Kodak Instamatic. I do wish, in retrospect, that we’d done more picture-taking as a family. Not the whole “Family Portraits” thing, which I’ve never really understood, but just more photographic documentation of the memories made along the way.

::  I’m not actually going to close this tab any time soon, but it might be a useful reference out there: One librarian’s 15 Essential New York City books. I love NYC as a setting, and I look forward to reading some of these. (We’re coming dangerously close to not getting back to NYC for ten years after the last time….)

::  Finally, a podcast called “Stuff You Should Know” did an episode about the pie in the face! I would have linked it on Pi Day but I hadn’t listened by that point.

More links to come soon, once I again look at my browser and realize Wow, have I got a lot of tabs open!

 

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