Journal

@SchuminWeb

Archives

Categories

An overnight trip to Pennsylvania…

14 minute read

August 21, 2024, 10:21 AM

On August 15 and 16, I made an overnight trip to Pennsylvania.  The main purpose of the trip was to photograph some things in the Harrisburg area, and also make some stops in Gettysburg, York, and Hanover.  Nowhere that I went was new territory for me, and I got everything that I wanted.  This was one of those trips where I started out with one idea, and then built a trip around it to justify it.  That idea was to fly my drone around a replica of the Statue of Liberty that someone erected in the middle of the Susquehanna River just north of Harrisburg.  I had previously flown a drone around this same subject on the afternoon of January 5, and quickly realized something: the lighting was wrong for what I wanted.  The statue faced approximately east, and coming in late afternoon, the sun was behind me, which didn’t lend itself to good photography.  My photography technique was fine, but the lighting was wrong.  See for yourself:

The Statue of Liberty on the Susquehanna when I flew it in January.

Continue reading...Continue reading…

That post certainly aged like milk…

4 minute read

August 16, 2024, 8:12 AM

It’s funny… I know when I write some Journal entries that they will not necessarily age well, but some become dated a lot faster than others.  Usually, when it comes to entries about politics and current events, I know that they will become dated more quickly than something else that isn’t related to politics or current events.  Multiply that by a zillion when it comes to posts about elections and political candidates that aren’t primarily civics lessons.  Those posts tend to become dated fairly quickly, often once the election is over.

However, I don’t think anything has aged worse than a Journal entry that I wrote a few weeks ago called “The Democrats are playing with fire…” talking about the Democratic Party’s circular firing squad, where they have this tendency to devour their own people at the slightest hint of anything, and that they had, at that time, turned their sights on President Biden.  In that entry, I suggested that the Democrats not devour the president, with the idea that they needed him in order to win in November, and I made a whole bunch of arguments in favor of sticking with Biden.  As it would turn out, the party devoured him, as Biden dropped out of the race a little more than a week after my entry published, which rendered my entire Journal entry moot.

So on one hand, I’m kind of salty about the loss of my entry’s relevance.  It now goes down in history as the entry that became irrelevant and/or moot the fastest.  This one became moot even more quickly than my “I believe that we have finally reached the other side of this thing…” entry from May 2021 where I was declaring all of the pandemic nonsense over, and then officials reneged on their all-clear and reinstated a lot of the nonsense all over again.  At least we got to have the summer on that one before everyone started screaming “delta, delta, delta” and made my entry moot.  Even more so than regular datedness that comes with Journal entries about elections, such as “Petty tribalism has no place in the 2020 cycle…” that became dated as soon as the primaries ended.  But it at least was relevant for a little while.

Continue reading...Continue reading…

That was darker than I realized…

4 minute read

August 6, 2024, 8:07 PM

Recently, while operating the train, I was singing the “Goldilocks and the Three Bears” opera from Today’s Special to myself in the cab.  For those of you who are not familiar, in the episode “Opera“, the main cast put on a short opera telling the story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears, singing the entire story as befits an opera.  The whole thing is really cute, and if you’ve seen it, you probably remember that it finished like this:

Continue reading...Continue reading…

Categories: Today's Special