Oh, My Poor Son, He Has...

... very odd people on both sides of his family tree. Entertaining, but odd.

His uncle, Bob Kroeger, probably fits both adjectives. Bob is one of the most interesting people I have met in my life, and I met him a long time ago. Bob is the youngest brother of Adam's late mom, Mary, and I taught him his first guitar chords in his family's basement in 1965 or thereabouts.

After that, Bob went on to graduate from the Berklee College of Music and to a career in... oh, gosh, lots of stuff. He is the only professional croquet player I know, for example, and his audio and visual creations are not famous only because we (as a civilization) haven't come up with neat verbal tags within which to categorize them.

Which leads to this blog entry: three collaborations between Bob and two of his nephews, Adam and Bill (Bill is the older son of Bob's late brother, the eldest of the Kroeger siblings, Dick.) Adam provides some of the voiceovers, Bill works guitar, and Bob provides absolutely everything -- concept, music composition, and sense of disconnect from every frame of reference we ordinary people depend on.

WARNING: These videos are completely safe for work in the traditional sense: no pr0n. On the other hand, they may be NSFW if anybody looking over your shoulder thinks that your sanity is suspect.

ADDITIONAL WARNING: Not everybody "gets" this stuff. If you don't get it -- if you think it's just precious self-congratulatory vapidity -- well, okay. You're probably not alone.

But I'm not with you. Or maybe I will be as soon as I stop giggling. In about 2039 or so.

Movie Trailer
Concept: Bob Kroeger
Music: Bob Kroeger
Guitar: Bill Kroeger
Voices: Adam Harrington, Bob Kroeger

Tank Farms
Concept: Bob Kroeger
Voice: Adam Harrington

Pumps on Spools
Concept: Bob Kroeger
Voices: Bob Kroeger, Adam Harrington

Bob Kroeger, Christmas 1966, with his very, very young nephew, Doug. Amherst, Massachusetts.

Bob Practicing his Craft:


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200 Days On

I had some vanilla ice cream last night. I actually got to eat it all, but didn't get to hear the purr.
Not a trade I would make voluntarily, all things considered.

Oh, for the Luvva Pete, I Don't Believe They Did This...

... again!

And to think, as I was going to bed last night, I was griping about the smell of wood smoke in the air from the nearby wildfire.

As the above frame from "Ihasa Hot Dog" gives away, we had a skunk incident last night here at Ft. Harrington. Mrs. Fort let the dogs out to do some business, as they requested, at about 2am. Kelsey then lit out into the darkness like a bolt toward the chicken run, with his faithful lieutenant Jax close behind him, and rotund Emma waddling along as quickly as she can behind them. Shortly thereafter, yelps from the dark. Shortly after that, the stench of skunk, mildly reminiscent of burning tires but orders of magnitude more revolting.

Kelsey, first to trouble as always, got a face and chest full, butt-blank ("point blank" just doesn't work in this context.) Jax got a little all over, and Emma was blessed with just a coy hint of an emetic perfume.

Since this has happened before -- at least four times before -- we were prepared, and all three got an immediate sponge bath of our current best remedy. It's a no-particular-ratio mixture of water, white vinegar, and baking soda that cuts the stench a lot, though not entirely. The mixture has advantages over other remedies: it's cheaper than commercial enzyme-based deskunkers, and it's made of stuff we always have on hand anyway, unlike our veterinarian's skunk bath of choice: Massengill douche. Contrary to legend, tomato juice doesn't work at all, and just leaves you with something else that you ultimately have to clean off your dog.

More effective than tomato juice.

Our vet, by the way, isn't shy about recommending over-the-counter human personal hygiene products in place of prescription veterinary remedies. At her suggestion, for example, we always have some Vagisil in stock to treat Emma's frequent ear-canal yeast infections.

As I say, this has happened before. The first time was three years ago, when skunks first moved into the hollow to take advantage of one of our neighbors' habit of leaving food outside for his cats. Unfortunately, the people who had to deal with that first episode were not Diane and me, but her sister Carolyn and brother-in-law Mel, who were doing us the huge favor of caring for Ft. Harrington while we were in Ireland. Lovely.

Carolyn still has a fondness for Kelsey, albeit from a distance (they live in Oregon), which may make it easier. She read here recently about Kelsey's favorite park, and sent this along the intertubes (the three pictures in it were taken nine days ago) :

Kelsey in the Park
verse by C. J. Meeks, photos by S. Harrington

Was there ever a dog so full of his doggieness as Kelsey in the park?
With plenty of room for a dog to run and jump and bark.

There are other dogs here in Kelsey's park.
So just so they know that Kelsey's been there he leaves his doggy mark.

The look on his face pleadingly begs, "Please, can't we stay until dark?"
"If not, please, won't there be another day in the park?"

That's really sweet, Carolyn. Thank you.

Mel and Carolyn with Kelsey when he was very, very young. Ft. Harrington, October, 2000.

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Firetime Again

Today is the second full day of a serious wildfire in our vicinity, the coastal redwood forests of the northern part of Santa Cruz County, California. The fire is large, and largely uncontained at this point, but so far has not taken any lives or structures. Also, while only about four miles from us, geography (it's on the other side of a steep mountain) and prevailing winds are keeping our San Lorenzo Valley from danger.

This time.


Above: a panorama of smoke from the fire, made from five frames. This view is from a vista point along California Highway 9 about halfway along my workaday commute from Boulder Creek to Cupertino. Ft. Harrington is located just a little bit left of the center of the panorama; Monterey Bay and the more distant mountains of Big Sur are at left. If you click on this to see it larger (and I urge that you do!), it will take you to a 2500-pixel wide version that you can scroll around for good detail.

The fire is called the "Lockheed" fire because it is suspected to have started somewhere near a research facility that Lockheed-Martin has atop Ben Lomond Mountain. There is no current suspicion that the facility had anything to do with the fire (and the campus is not in danger from the flames at present), but the folks at Lockheed are probably not happy with the name.

The research facility is near the location of two of my favorite photos:

October, 2005

March, 2006, with a rare dusting of snow

I hope this lovely home of horses has been spared.

[Click here for a short time-lapse movie of smoke billowing over the top of Ben Lomond Mountain.]

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Quiz

What do these items have in common?

Feel free to leave your guess in comments. The answer will appear there in two days (unless someone gets it right before then.)

Voiceover Hornets' Nest?

As most readers of this blog know, my son Adam is a voice actor. Also, most (but not entirely all) readers of this blog are familiar with Matt Groening's Futurama animated series.

Here's the connection: Futurama, having taken a lengthy hiatus from production for tv, is in the works for new episodes. However, there's trouble in labor-land. The studio recently released a statement which said, in part:

" We love the 'Futurama' voice performers and absolutely wanted to use them, but unfortunately, we could not meet their salary demands. While replacing these talented actors will be difficult, the show must go on." (For "these talented actors" you can probably just read "Billy West," who does most of the characters.)

This has stirred up a bit of a firestorm among Futurama's fan base. Click here to see hundreds of comments on the "Can't Get Enough Futurama" website, virtually every one of which is a variation on "if this happens I'll never watch the new episodes, ever," or "Cthulu will devour the loved ones of whoever replaces Bender's voice," or something like that.

At any rate, an audition's an audition, and in these times ya gotta respond to a call. Click on the character image below to hear Adam's audition therefor:

Joe-Bob Says:

Sherwood-Bob says: Check it Out!

Image by Robert Couse-Baker of Sacramento, one of the most innovative and playful photographers I've encountered on Flickr thus far. Please click here to go to a short compilation of his "Bob's Dreams" works.

Dead Park Walking [UPDATED, July 24]

[Update, July 24:
As Brian notes in the comments, today's action by the State legislature has spared most of the California state parks from closure, if that ever was a serious possibility. Some State parks will almost certainly close, but lists I've seen of the ones on the Governor's plate of possibilities include only those that actually could be physically closed: museums, historical homes, and mines, for example. So it seems that "Kelsey's Park" -- our local Henry Cowell Redwoods -- is likely to remain available to him for at least a while longer.
Now I can get back to the business of worrying about my colleagues' jobs, my students' welfare, my community's ability to function, and the intelligence of my State's leaders.]

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California isn't just broke, it's broken.

How do you close a forest? How do you close a river?
Kelsey and me, 2001, Henry Cowell State Park

The state is in a state of financial collapse. The legislature and the governor are trying to address a deficit of staggering proportions. The numbers are numbing, and beggar attempts to fathom: currently, the figure is $26 billion dollars for the next year. To try to put that in perspective, it's almost twice the entire yearly expenditure on prisons, and almost half of the entire state annual spending on elementary through community college education, and one-third of its annual expenditures on health and human services. Any fix will involve massive reductions in services, and conjures up images of Dickensian despair among the poor.

Just how the State with the world's eighth-largest economy got itself into this horrid mess can be (and is) debated endlessly, but it all boils down to an initiative process which has written mandatory, large expenditures into the State constitution while also making revenue increases almost impossible. We've been heading toward this gargantuan train wreck for more than thirty years, and it's here.

My own job is in jeopardy, of course, since my salary as a community college teacher ultimately comes from the State's coffers. While the people of my local district have been very, very generous over the past few years, taxing themselves to the tune of half a billion dollars to fund capital improvements (including my incredible new planetarium), that largesse can only go to capital improvements -- it can't fund salaries. My department is in relatively good shape, since we teach huge classes... but the folks at the Titanic's stern were in relatively good shape, too, in the spring of 1912.

Kelsey helps his mistress around the circuit after surgery, Henry Cowell State Park, 2002.

Since crucial state functions like education, safety, and social services are about to fall into an abyss, I almost feel guilty writing what I'm about to. But I'll write it anyway.

Bliss, 2004, Henry Cowell State Park

At last look, California is planning to close 220 of its 279 state parks. This supposedly will save, over a two-year period, about two-tenths of a billion dollars, if one doesn't factor in additional expenses that trying to keep forests and beaches "closed" will entail. Among those 220 are the three parks in our part of the Santa Cruz Mountains: Big Basin (California's first state park with an awe-inspiring stand of thousands of years old Sequoia Sempervirens), Castle Rock at the crest of the mountains, and Henry Cowell Redwoods park in Felton.

That last one is what pierces my heart like a shiv, since it is Kelsey's favorite place in the entire world.

Shortly after we rescued Kelsey from the pound in 1998, we took him for a walk in Henry Cowell park. The joy he manifested on that first visit was thrilling: he didn't walk or run, he leapt from place to place along the path. Sniffing, peeing, pooping, bouncing, grinning... it was like he had found heaven after his puppyhood of neglect. The course we took through he park -- a roughly two-mile circuit through the hardwood forest and along the banks of the San Lorenzo river -- burned itself into his brain then, and he and I have followed that course countless times since.

A winter's walk, 2006, Henry Cowell State Park. Our friend Lucile jollies Kelsey, while Diane is tended by the spaniels.

On most of those trips along his circuit, it has been just him and me, and we traipse it a couple of times a month. Now eleven years old, he can tell when I'm even thinking about taking him to "Kelsey's Park," and his usual dour demeanor changes to giddiness. He will remain patient in the back seat as we drive, until we go past the turn that would take us to the vet, and then he begins trembling. As we turn in to the road to the park entrance, he whines a warble that he never does at any other time, and when we get out of the car, he becomes ecstatic. For a while. Then he becomes all business, sniffing every leaf along our well-known path, marking his specific spots until both tanks are empty, and even beyond that. He wades in the river for about a minute along the way, pauses respectfully when horses pass on the horse-trail part of our circuit, and ignores, for the most part, other people and dogs. He has business to do, you know, and doggy newspapers to read on the scents of the grasses and the leaves.

From a horseback vantage point, 2000, Henry Cowell State Park.

River dog, 2005, Henry Cowell State Park.

If and when the park is closed, I suppose we will find other places for special times -- but, at his advanced age, he will lose something that has been an integral part of his joy forever.

And so will I.

Closure of the parks pales so much compared to other losses that will befall this State that I can't bring myself to become too active in protesting them. Many of the poorest among us are about to be handed a slow-motion death sentence, not by lethal injection but by lethal abandonment. My students, for many of whom community colleges are the last, best hope not just for them but for their families, will lose that opportunity. My co-workers will lose their jobs. How dare I worry about what effect it will have on my dog?

I don't know. You try explaining it to him here in the evening twilight of his life. I can't.

His heaven.

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Independence A

This old Model A is a bit like the rest of California on this Fourth of July, 2009: a little run down, a little corroded, but still proud of her looks... and fashionably attired.

I hope you all had a fine day, no matter where you live!

(Photo taken in the Santa Cruz Mountains town of Felton, California.)

Kelsey's Excellent Encounter

Usually when we have a weekend BBQ for family here at Ft. Harrington, there are many, many people involved. On Saturday, June 27th, 2009, though, we had an unusually small gathering: just Grace-the-Granddaughter, her mom (Adrianne), and her uncle Adam.

Old yellow Kelsey generally has an absolute gas at family gatherings, tripping happily from one person to another until he's so worn out that he collapses. With fewer targets this time, though, for some reason he zeroed in on Adrianne as the object of his attention.

In this little set, we see him wooing her, greeting her, and, ultimately, settling in happily at her side.

What a suck-up my dog is.

Adrianne, Kelsey, and Grace. Kelsey starts by placing himself where he can't be ignored.

Kelsey sandwich! Excellent!

"Please, let me introduce myself!"

"... I am a dog whose refinement belies my breeding, my lady."

(It's interesting to note how he holds his ears in this set compared to how he does when he's at work.)

Kissing the back of the hand is customary, but Kelsey's doing pretty well for a dog, don't you think?

She's let me sit here! Oh, the ecstasy! Oh, the joy!
Oh, the damn' little suckup spaniel, horning in from the left. He always does that.

Settled in.

Little does Adrianne know it, but, at this instant, Kelsey would have followed her through the very gates of Hell. He's also actively guarding her now; note the position of his ears.

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One Dome, Two Skies

Path to the main entrance of DeAnza College's Fujitsu Planetarium, whose blue dome can be glimpsed through the redwood grove that shelters it.

While I have posted before about the installation of remarkable new technology in the planetarium I'm privileged to work in, I have not until now posted any images of what that technology can produce. In part, that has been due to the imaging challenges involved: the planetarium simulates the night sky in all ways, including darkness. That and the odd geometry involved in shooting photos of images projected on a hemisphere was enough to keep me from learning how to manage it for a while.

But I'm starting to be able to do it.

Mars and Phobos, seen from about a hundred kilometers above the latter, as they would have been seen at about 2pm, Pacific Daylight Time, this afternoon.

The "Two Skies" part of this post's title refers to the two sky simulation systems at the heart of the planetarium's renovation. I refer to them as the "space simulator" (SkySkan's all-digital system) and the "sky simulator" (Konica-Minolta's new-generation Infinium-S optical-mechanical system.) Each does a different job in magnificent fashion.

The Space Simulator

SkySkan's digital system provides me with the ability to "fly" through a huge database which includes, among much else, accurate information about the locations, angles of illumination, and orientation of thousands of solar system objects at any time within several thousand years of now, both forward and backward in time.

Jupiter's inner satellites' orbital paths and their locations at about 2:15, PDT, June 25.

It's important to note that the images in this post are actual photographs of part of the inside of a planetarium dome, not screen captures from a computer monitor. Unless otherwise noted, each of the images here cover the same area of the dome, a slice about 25 feet wide and commensurately high. The dome itself is a hemisphere 50 feet in diameter, and the camera's location was about 35 feet from the point of aim. This means that, while not particularly evident, the edges and top of the frame are fairly significantly closer to the camera than the center and bottom (which is just above the bottom rim of the dome.)

Simulated Ganymede with Jupiter in the background, June 25, 2009. This and the other "space simulator" images in this post are 20-second exposures with a Nikon D70 at ISO 400 using an 18mm lens stopped to f/8.

It is also important to note that the images here are not frames from a movie. The operator of the system is completely free to specify location, time, and direction of view of the "camera." Navigation is remarkably simple -- but what goes on under the surface isn't. The database is manipulated by a stack of ten quad-core Intel computers. One computer orchestrates the other nine, one is dedicated to managing sound for applications that have it, and the other eight each manage one "channel." Each visual channel is projected on a "tile" that covers 1/8 of the dome, and the ensemble is remarkably seamless in appearance. Projection is done by a pair of cinema theater grade Sony digital projectors with special optics, each of which handles four of the channels.

Looking back toward the Sun from Saturn on June 25, 2009.

The detail and accuracy in the database (which is frequently updated by SkySkan) is astonishing -- and very, very useful as a teaching tool. The above image of Saturn, for example, shows some interesting things in the shadow of the planet across the rings toward us. (Click on the image to see it larger.) Notice that you can see some stars through the rings in the shadow? That's not a mistake: there are places in the rings where the material is thin enough for that to happen... and places where it isn't. If we shift our position a little down and to the right...


... the two stars that shone brightly through the "Cassini Division" in the previous view are now blocked by the more richly-populated A Ring (the brightest component of the system in reflected sunlight.)

View toward the center of the Milky Way Galaxy. If you click on the above image, you'll see that all of the stars have color. Those colors (based on the stars' spectral types) are not usually evident to most planetarium patrons except for the very brightest ones -- as is the case in the real sky -- but they're there, nonetheless.

The Sky Simulator

The other system, the Konica-Minolta Infinium-S, can't fly us around the solar system, but it provides a much more realistic simulation of the night sky as seen from right here on Earth.

The optical-mechanical projector at the heart of the Konica-Minolta system is an engineering marvel, and I don't have a clue as to how it performs its magic.

Until very recently, all planetarium projectors achieved different brightnesses for their projected stars by a very simple, but very innacurate, method for all but the very brightest ones: by having the "stars" be different sizes: bigger "star" --> brighter "star." That's also the way that the digital Space Simulator that we've been looking at so far does the trick.

But that's not the way the real universe looks.

Unless your eyesight is really bad, the stars in the real sky all look the same size: pinpoints of light. Their brightness differences are entirely due to different intensities. That's the heart of why planetarium simulations never looked very real to me: different brightnesses were achieved by different sizes of images which all had the same surface brightness.

Here's an expanded view of Canis Major in the space simulator system, the one that does brightnesses the old-fashioned way:


... and here, to the same scale, the constellation Lyra in the Konica-Minolta sky simulator system:


If you click on the above image, you'll see that all of the stars have exactly the same size, no matter what their brightness -- just the way the stars appear in the real sky. (As an added bit of realism, the 20 brightest stars in the Konica-Minolta sky can be made to twinkle!)

The realism of the sky simulator system is such that I still haven't figured out how to capture its view very well with my camera. Here's a two-minute exposure toward the Great Summer Triangle at f/8:

(the lights at the bottom are inside the projector itself.) And here's an eight-minute exposure:

I was baffled by the red glow here: to my eye, the dome was pitch black except for the pinpoints of the stars' images.

But the camera doesn't have the same spectral sensitivity that our eyes, do, evidently. Where the faint red in this long time-exposure came from is evident in this trial shot at a lower angle for the space-simulator system:

Saturn, its rings, and some of its satellites' orbital paths.

See the bright red rectangle near the bottom about 3/4 of the way from left to right? That's an infrared broadcast station for the planetarium's assistive listening device system. Its radiation is invisible to the human eye -- but not to the D70's sensor! (This was the first time that I realized that my old digital camera records a significant amount of infrared. That's a little disconcerting.) So the pervasive red glow in the very-long time exposures is IR from these devices reflected from the dome.

The next time I try this, I'll turn off the ALD system... but I ran out of time this afternoon.

The cities shine like stars.

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Tomorrow Came in the Mail Today

Whatever Happened to the World of Tomorrow, by Brian Fies. Please click on the above image to be taken to Amazon.com's ordering page.

My friend, Brian Fies, is a scientist by college training and a cartoon artist by fame. His first book, Mom's Cancer, was written and drawn in response to his mother's battle with the disease and his family's battles to cope with it and to support her. It was widely acclaimed and won many awards. More importantly, selfish creatures that we are, it touched a deep, personal place in each of us who have dealt with a loved one's cancer and that person's response to it, which is not always one of traditional stoic heroism. Maintenance of love through the most difficult of circumstances is facilitated by an unblinking inner eye, and Mom's Cancer showed that very, very clearly.

Since Mom's Cancer, Brian's fans have been anxiously waiting for his next book. Would it be a "sequel"? A medical advice book would have been logical, since Mom's Cancer was so widely acclaimed as a help for families coping with a loved one's catastrophic illness. Or would it be something else entirely?

It is something else entirely.

Brian's publisher, Harry N. Abrams, and his editor, Charlie Kochman, encouraged Brian to follow his enthusiasm for science, technology, and exploration instead of going the "safe" route with a sequel. Whatever Happened to the World of Tomorrow is the spectacular result of that gamble.

Whatever Happened... chronicles the 20th Century American love affair with technology and progress from its first-bloom manifestation in the 1939 World's Fair through its confused dissolution at the end of the Apollo era. Along the way, it presents images and print media that are genuine echoes of the times they represent, including "play-within-a-play" comic books that are authentic not only in their art, but in the paper on which they're printed! That sort of attention to detail pervades the work: every frame seems to have been researched assiduously for accuracy. I could find no anachronisms, and I tried. Hard.

Hardbound, handsome, brilliantly printed, it would be well worth the $50 cover price it should have. It is an absolute steal at $19.

I'm pretty sure that I would say all of that if I were a thoroughly impartial observer. But I'm not.

Page 118 of Whatever Happened... looks like this:

Click to see a clearer version. Guinness, at right, is waiting for his dinner, not particularly enthralled by the artwork.

... and here's a closer look:

(Click the image to see a ligible version. Guinness's butt, blurred by the long exposure, is scooting behind the book at upper-left. Maybe it's time to feed him, think?)

That scene is based on one of my Dad's photographs, taken in the early 1960's:

Mom and I lunching in a Florida roadside diner, spring, 1961.

Brian saw it in this post in SherWords at a very opportune time while he was working on Whatever Happened... , and asked if he could use it. I think I hesitated for less than an eighth of a second. I think he did the shot justice, and his acknowledgement at the end of the book is very gracious.

Another thing about Whatever Happened... : Brian had a little virtual "Launch Party" for Whatever Happened... just a little while ago. It is well worth watching -- especially for two things: Brian's careful demonstration of cartooning techniques, and for a "visit" by a famous cartoonist, Stephan Pastis, who does the daily Pearls Before Swine strip. Pastis is a hoot, and it's clear from his behavior at Brian's party where the inspiration for his "Rat" main character comes from.

Pastis also takes off his shirt in that clip. Just in case you needed any further impetus to watch.

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