A.K.A. Oak, Redwood, and Cayenne
Oak and Cayenne live in our yard.
Or did. I ate Cayenne last night.
Scarabus
Crawling toward the sunlight
Archive for October, 2011
Three Amigos!
Sunday, October 30th, 2011Some things you *should* know about the Koch brothers!
Saturday, October 29th, 2011We the super-rich are terrified of Obama!!
Saturday, October 29th, 2011
Memories of childhood. My own and our daughter’s.
Sunday, October 23rd, 2011When I was a kid growing up in Miami, we had a bougainvillea in our yard and my grandmother, who lived across the street, had a much bigger one in her yard. Beautiful, but thorny. We live farther north now, in Central Florida, and I’ve tried to grow bougainvilleas in our yard and in raised garden beds. They’ve thus far failed to survive, either because of cold weather or because of negligence. I do still love those flowers, however, and I’m going to try once more. This time responsibly!
When our daughter was young, she had a game or device in which a child would push colored pegs into a matte black surface. Behind the surface a light could be turned on so that the picture the child had made (picture or abstract) would glow with color. Very nice, especially in the dark.
The photo I’m posting here shows the flower from one of the bougainvillea plants in our yard before I managed to kill it with negligence. (If you know flowers, you’lll recognize that I’ve turned it upside down for reasons of composition.) The filter and settings I’ve applied to the photograph emulate to some extent that device our daughter enjoyed when she was very young.
Good kid (and now mommy and scholar). Good memories.
Willard Romney: “I am the very model of a modern major candidate.”
Sunday, October 23rd, 2011Apologies to Gilbert and Sullivan. The “head” is a radio from the 1960s. AM and FM, hi-fi. (Not stereo.)
I’m trying a new way to enter text.
Saturday, October 22nd, 2011This is an experiment. I was overconfident when I thought that I could return to my blogs. That is, my arm still hurts so much that I bought dictation software. It’s this software I’m using right now to send this explanatory blog entry.
Right now the process is cumbersome. The software was trained successfully. The problem now is to train me with equal success. The former process is turning out to have been the easiest part of the transition.
Wish me luck!
Back on line!
Friday, October 21st, 2011I’ve survived the assembling of the desk, moving of the computer and drives and cables and such, and now that I know it works I’m ready to put everything back into civilized order.
And I’ll begin be creating something for this blog. Right after I check what’s been happening in the world so I can get some inspiration.
Been where? Done what?
Thursday, October 20th, 2011Lloyd Marcus, YouTube, and me
Wednesday, October 19th, 2011For obvious reasons it’s uncommon to find a black American who’ll acknowledge she or he is a Republican. It’s not just uncommon but rare to find one who’ll admit to being a Teabagger. After all, why would a black American associate himself or herself with a faction whose ideology is white racist? (Note that I’m talking about the ideology of the Teabaggers in general, not of every individual member. Lloyd Marcus is a prominent exception. There are lots of other of all races.
(Herman Cain is not among them. I don’t care about his personal life, but in political-economic philosophy – judging from his performance as a presidential candidate – he’s not a “teabagger,” but a member of the Alternate Universe Party.)
I satirized and even mocked Lloyd in a YouTube video. Piece of cake! He parodies himself. Take just half a moment to reflect on the images above, taken from his website. (Fully attributed!) Someone wrote to me suggesting I had passed the bounds of legitimate academic/editorial standards in using snippets of his music. I wasn’t convinced, but thought that it would be best to err on the super-safe side.
I removed the snippets of Lloyd’s music.
A short while ago YouTube told me one of my videos had been flagged for using snippets of copyrighted material. The very same snippets featured in dozens and dozens of other YouTube videos, by the way. And just today I received this:
The YouTube Community has flagged one or more of your videos as inappropriate. Once a video is flagged, it is reviewed by the YouTube Team against our Community Guidelines. Upon review, we have determined that the following video(s) contain content that may not be suitable for all viewers:
Video Response to Lloyd Marcus.mov
As a result, we have age-restricted this content.
Hmmmm…… Is someone dogging me? Or, much more likely, protecting Lloyd? In either case, why?
Regardless, I’ll remove the Lloyd video from YouTube. But subsequently I’ll satirize him even more astringently. Well, maybe. He might not be worth the trouble. I mean, the guy’s a character from a SNL sketch. Reflect carefully on the overall and two close-ups of Lloyd’s website (all three appropriately linked). Draw your own conclusions.