The Erie County Fair opens today! Huzzah!
This, from 2011, is still my favorite of all the photos I’ve taken there over the years. Maybe I was a budding street photographer all those years ago, and I didn’t realize it!
Full size version here.
We’re going to the Fair on Friday. I’ll have the new camera with me. We shall see what I manage to do, photographically!
Sometimes I need to go back to the beginning of my classical music roots. I had heard a lot of classical music as a kid, thanks to my parents’ music-listening habits and my sister’s piano lessons, and then later my horn, trumpet, and piano lessons; my initial love of movie music also primed the classical pump for me. But when did I really start to turn the corner toward classical music? I’m not entirely sure when I’d date that, but 1984’s Amadeus has to be a big signpost on that early stretch of road. I didn’t get parts of the movie, but much of it was utterly spellbinding to me, and of course…there was the music.
Here is the overture to The Magic Flute, which would a few years later become the first opera I ever saw, and has remained a favorite of mine ever since. Mozart sets the stage in just six minutes here. Amazing!
I took these on a whim the other night: I opened up one of my Complete William Shakespeare collections to Henry’s Crispin’s Day speech from Henry V, laid my glasses on the book, and took a few photos. It was an experiment in composition. I’m not sure which I like better, to be honest! What say you?
I have a slight feeling, as I write this, that the second photo is better…but I’m damned if I can say exactly why….
UPDATE, 8/7/23: I have added a clarification below.
I’ve heard of a “cuppa joe”.
I’ve heard of a “cuppa cocoa”.
I’ve made many a recipe with a cuppa flour or a cuppa sugar.
This one, seen at the farmer’s market yesterday, was a new one:
Yup. A cuppa bacon!
For four bucks, you’d better believe I got one. And then The Wife, who had lingered at a previous stand, arrived and wanted some of my bacon! Did I give her any? Of course not! But did I give her four bucks so she could get her own and thus avoid any marital strife over a refusal to share bacon? You bet!
CLARIFICATION: OK, she didn’t exactly demand my bacon. She joined me as I was finishing my first piece of bacon, with two to go, and she noticed the Cuppa Bacon guy. I said, “Yeah, it’s really good!” That’s when she realized I was eating the bacon. She had seen me eating something, but she assumed it was the deep-fried dumplings I often get from a place two stalls down. I reached into my pocket for my money and said, “Do you want some?” She replied, “Yes!” and went to grab some from my cup. That’s when I said, “No, get one of your own! Here’s four bucks!” Because me having two pieces of bacon and her having one piece of bacon will do in a pinch, but if we can each have three pieces, well, that’s the stuff of which marital bliss is made.
Sorry the focus is lacking…I was trying to manipulate my phone camera with one hand while holding my bacony goodness with the other. I was only partially successful.
The guy was cooking thick-cut bacon with maple syrup in a big pot. The point of this wasn’t actually to sell bacon; it was a demo for something called a “rocket stove”, which is essentially a three or four-foot tall pillar which houses burning fuel inside and chimneys all that heat out a relatively small opening at the top, resulting in a high, natural heat. I’m intrigued by the concept, actually, for applications like stir-frying; it’s hard to get the wok screaming hot enough in a household kitchen to really stir-fry properly. (At least, it’s hard to do it without smoke.)
Finally, the cuppa-bacon concept reminded me of one of the jokes in MAD Magazine‘s parody of 2001: A Space Odyssey, when astronauts Bowman and Poole are sitting down to dinner on the Discovery:
BOWMAN: I’ve brought you dinner: a glass of steak, a glass of potatoes, a glass of pie, and a glass of ice cream.
POOLE: Nothing to drink?
BOWMAN: Yeah, a piece of coffee!
This is mocking an actual thing in the movie, by the way. Astronaut food was always good for a few laughs in the 1960s!
Some shots from my photography session down at the Buffalo Outer Harbor this past Sunday:
I like how this one captures land and sea (lake, I should say) disappearing at the same vanishing point. The bird in flight was a happy unplanned element.
Here we see the jetskiers three! I like how their knees and the green trim of their Jetski form arrows pointing in the direction they’re going. I also wanted the lighthouse and the towers for the wind turbines in here as well. Again, the bird–flying low, the opposite direction–is a happy unplanned element.
Grain elevators. The dinosaurs, as it were, of the Great Lakes’ industrial past. I love these hulking old buildings.
More photos from that day, with full-size versions, in this Flickr album.
By the way, I think I am now going to start using HUE as an acronym: Happy Unplanned Element. I think Bob Ross (“There are no mistakes, just happy accidents”) would approve. “Accident” still sounds overly negative in my ears, though. So, a HUE is an element in my photo that I didn’t plan on capturing, either because I didn’t know it was there or because I couldn’t avoid capturing it.
Always look for your HUEs, people!
Happy birthday, Mom!
It’s August! I think August would count at “Midsummer”, right? Thus, here is some Mendelssohn: the overture to his suite of incidental music for A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
FOUL: Feline Of Unusual Length, obviously.
Daisy has opinions.
It begins.
