A closer look… part 1…

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Did you notice the bee inside the flower?

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Okay, here is the story. My birthday is coming up. My older daughter asked me what I wanted. One thing was a macro lens for my camera, so I could take photos super close up.

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Her husband, Jason, has some. And they were visiting from Arizona for Easter. He loaned me three of them  of different focal lengths… or whatever it is called.

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Hey, the wind moved the flower.

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So, the thing is… (hey, thing, where have you been hiding?)… that there isn’t actually a lens in a macro lens. It is really just a spacer you add to a regular lens. Then, you have to adjust the focus manually to take a photo.

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I spent the day playing with the three lens spacers.

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It does, when you do it right, allow you to take pictures of tiny little flowers parts inside already small flowers.

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So I am going to keep playing with these lenses for a few days.

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Because maybe, I will be getting one… or some… for my birthday.

 

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I heard this loud ‘whooshing’ sound…

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I was sitting in the gate guard house at my new job as a private security officer for a luxury gated community. I suddenly heard this loud whooshing sound outside. I knew I had heard the sound before, but it was so out of context. I stepped outside and looked around. I didn’t see anything, until the noise came again, from right over my head. This hot air balloon was thirty feet above me. And yes, it is always sunny in San Diego, and not just at the Honda dealerships.

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Since this high-end private, gated community is only six miles or so from my house, I am very familiar with these balloons. People pay for rides in them. There are dozens of them, and they launch near the coast, which is only a few miles to the West. They ride the prevailing evening winds inland, and try to come down near major roads so the follow trucks can come and collect them. We see them, almost every night when the weather is good, sometimes in packs of a few dozen.

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It turns out that this community, with its large, open areas, is often the place where they come down.

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The next day, there were more of them. I think I did a post a year or so ago when one of these balloons landed in the backyard of a street just a few doors from my own house.

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I think I would like to try the balloon ride one of these days, but there is a lot that can go wrong. You are at the mercy of the wind. The balloon that basically crash landed in my neighbor’s yard ended up hitting a short chain link fence, and spilling all the passengers out. There were no serious injuries.

Posted in Stories of my life | Tagged , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Trump supporters seem annoyed by the idea of people from Mexico and South America wanting to come to the United States for a better life…

Which is funny, really, because that is how all of them ended up here. I mean, when you get right down to it, even the original Native Americans came here from somewhere else looking for a better life.

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Happy birthday to Mr. Eric Idle, whom I had the honor and pleasure of meeting once…

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I’m just sayin’…

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That is not Photoshopped.

Posted in funny famous people pictures, Stories of my life | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 4 Comments

I tried to fit in, I really did…

But this planet is just driving me crazy. I know that some of you did your best to make me feel like I fit in. Because you could sense that I didn’t belong, even though you never suspected just how far away I am really from. And I love you for it… although my interpretation of that emotion might be a little off base.

Oh sure, there are things about this world that I will miss. Dogs are cool. I like monkeys. And baby humans almost never get on my nerves. Music was an awesome invention. You should really get the patent rights on that before some other planet steals it. And I do like a nice fruit smoothie. And hats.

But for crying out loud, you people are freekin’ nuts! You go to war over the stupidest stuff. You kill each other for almost no reason. You are making a mess of your own planet. Your religions make you hate or despise one another. Your languages make no sense. I mean, how many languages do you need? It’s one planet, for crying out loud. And I will never really get used to blue sky and green plants. It just feels weird.

Besides, I have been here for 674 years. You have made some great leaps forward in that time, but it sometimes seems like you are fighting against progress. Let me just set you straight on a few things.

1. Money is not making your lives better. Friendship is worth so much more.

2. None of you, as a group or individually, are inherently better than anyone else, so stop pretending you are.

3. None of you has all the right answers, and only a couple of you are wrong almost all the time.

4. I know I said music was a good idea, but let me fill you in on another secret here… rap music is just regular music that you removed the singing from. It isn’t a new, improved kind of music. That is like saying that taking the engine out of a car is a new, improved form of transportation. And disco was not your best work either.

5. Corporations are not people.

6. Rich people don’t give a crap if most of you die, as long as there are enough of you to work in their factories , retail outlets, and franchises. And clean their houses and mow their lawns.

7. Farts are always funny… I don’t care where you come from.

8. Mild cheddar cheese is just surfboard wax with some orange food coloring in it.

9. Your religious leaders don’t know any more about what happens to you after you die than you do.

10. Your political leaders know even less about almost everything than most of you do, because they have never had real jobs or lived a normal life. Also, they don’t care a squat about you as long as they stay in power.

And last but not least, it actually takes less energy to be nice to people than it does to be an asshole. Sorry about that word, but your ability to invent new swear words is one of the reasons I decided to stay here in the first place. You call each other body parts and mean it as an insult. That is just so deliciously weird. Who does that? I mean, excrement and bodily secretions, sure. You have also invented more slang terms for the act of physical love than any race any time any where. That is f%#%^&%#ing awesome! And you use them as insults, compliments, exclamation points, whatever you want to. You guys are nuts.

So I am going to miss you, but I gotta see a guy about a thing. I am turning control of this body back over to the idiot I borrowed it from years ago.

Catch ya later.

Posted in thinking about stuff | Tagged , , , | 4 Comments

When superheroes let themselves go… part 1…

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Posted in Everything Else | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Look, we get it, you have now invested so much of yourself in the great tRump god that you can’t bring yourself to admit what an asshat he is…

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But admitting that he has a problem is the first stage of recovery.

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Hey, new people, did you know my blog has a post on it with 44,662 comments, perhaps the most comments on any single post by a non-famous person on WordPress?

Unfortunately, the wordpress overlords claim that this is the one statistic that they don’t keep track of. I do know that we couldn’t find any posts with more comments, and the few that came anywhere close were negative posts, and the comments were mostly insults.

What I did was invent the world’s first chat room in a blog post. You can go in there and tell your life story, or tell jokes, or whatever. If you are new, please leave a comment there. You can find it over there—> at the top of my sidebar–> in a link, made of blue words that say: Help break the WordPress record for most commented post!!!

Click on the blue words, and type something… type a lot of somethings. I swear, I will answer every comment made there.

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What is THIS thing called, Love?

Okay, obviously I mean ‘what is this thing called love?’ I stole the title from a line in a Benny Hill sketch, and when the girl said it, it was funny. But this is another of those posts where I start typing without thinking about what I am going to say… and I will either come up with something extremely profound, or else I will force you to do some thinking and we will have fantastically deep conversations about really deep stuff… maybe…

So what the hell is love?

Great writers and poets and thinkers and philosophers and romanticists have tried to answer this question down through the ages. I have written countless songs about love… you can hear some of them by clicking that button up there on my top bar called ‘my original songs’ or something clever like that… and the truth is, back in my single days, when I used to carry my guitar around, those songs actually got me some lovin’… just sayin’… I have written poems about love. I have written stories with love in them. But I am not sure I actually understand it.

It is so much more than a feeling. It is an emotion. Without it, what are we? But how much of it is just chemical reactions going on inside us? Are we just, as social mammals, geared towards needing to find other people that we can trust to survive in this big, cold world? Is love just a word that explains a natural process? Is it just our bodies telling us that we need to make babies so we can keep the species alive? Is mother nature just sending us biochemical messages that make us feel a connection with our families so we don’t end up alone?

And where, pray tell, do we draw the line between love and lust? I know damn well that lust is a chemical reaction sent by mother nature. Of course it is always nice when love and lust coincide with each other.  It doesn’t get much better than that. That is what led to my oh-so-clever quote: ‘Head over heels in love is nice, but not as nice as the heels over head kind’… HA!

And how sustainable is love, really? Back in the old days we used to live much shorter lives. Maybe love isn’t supposed to last forever. A chemical reaction like that would be difficult to maintain for decades. It would be like being on an adrenaline high for most of your life. We have all been in relationships that have passed beyond the heady early romance stage into a quiet and calm acceptance. That is where love gets tricky. That is when you hope your hormones were thinking clearly when they made you fall in love with someone. When the cute things they do start to get a little annoying, and you are more worried about your job and raising your kids than you are with practicing the act of making new ones… kids, I mean, not jobs.

Love might last, but passion is a mercurial beast. It sort of has to be. Remember when you were a teenager… what sort of primal torrents of love and lust chemicals were raging through your body? Do you think you could lead a productive life if that was still going on inside you now? (This post, now that I think about it, is not aimed at anyone under the age of twenty… not that it is inappropriate, but because you are still a victim of love, and you know nothing about it yet, even though you think you do. Talking to you about love would be like talking to a baby about investment strategies or automobile maintenance).

Is love a real thing? Is any emotion a real thing? Anger, hatred, shame, jealousy? Are these all just words we made up to label chemical signals that give us information on our environment? Are we in love, or have we just found the best mate we could find and have gotten used to having them around? That warm feeling you get when you look at the people you love, that might just be a cookie that mother nature throws us… so we don’t end up punching them in the face when they annoy us, and thereby end up alone. Isn’t that sort of the definition of ‘social animal’? They work better in a group or herd. We even have labels for people who don’t have these ’emotions’ and ‘connections’ with the rest of humanity. We call them sociopaths.

Okay, obviously I didn’t say anything that will shed any light on love. So I guess that means it is up to you…

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An interesting experiment to see how positive… or negative… your blog is…

Just go to that little search button below your top bar, and type in the word ‘love’. See how many blog posts pop up when you hit the search button. Then, do the same thing with the word ‘hate’. I mean, you can mix it up. Type in ‘friend’ or ‘enemy’, or whatever. It is just a quick way to see which way the mood of your blog swings.

Just so you know, I am not doing it. I release a lot of pent-up anger against politicians, racists, morons, hypocrites, asshats, jerks, weasels, fundamentalists, extremists, and other dregs of society. Yes, I do love poems, and travel stories, and Christmas posts… but in a world that spawned both Donald tRump and Dick Cheney, I am afraid to ride that pendulum.

Posted in stuff about blogging | Tagged , , , , , , , | 2 Comments