Getting fixed…
7 minute read
October 22, 2024, 1:30 PM
On Thursday, October 17, I did something that I had wanted to do for quite some time: I got a vasectomy, i.e. I got “fixed”. That affirms my commitment to a childfree life, as this stops the little swimmers right in their tracks, more or less cutting off their path to the outside world.
It’s funny how these things happen. The first time that I had ever heard of a vasectomy was out on the road. I was out with Mom, and I spotted a car with a bumper sticker that said something to the effect of, “Against abortion? Get a vasectomy.” I didn’t know what a vasectomy was, and so the message didn’t make any sense to me. Both parents always followed a policy of answering questions from my sister and me truthfully and thoroughly, and so this was no exception. So Mom explained what it was, i.e. it was a procedure that, at the end of it, makes it where a man is unable to produce children. I already had a decent handle on female sterilization procedures, because my mother had a tubal ligation done while she was already in the operating room for my sister’s birth (we were both caesarean babies). So I already knew that such a thing could be done on women, but until that moment, I didn’t know that there was an equivalent procedure that could be done on men. Good to know. Then later on, there was an episode of Home Improvement that aired when I was in the ninth grade, where Tim Allen‘s character gets a vasectomy. It really did a good job explaining how a vasectomy works, and addressed a lot of the myths surrounding it, and it really made it feel like a normal thing that men do, and it doesn’t make them any less manly for doing it.
That said, I recognized from a fairly young age that I didn’t want to have children of my own (I really could never imagine myself as being a father), and so it made sense to get a vasectomy. I had felt this way at least as far back as my early twenties, and it’s never changed. However, I also had no relationship prospects or anything like that at that time which would make a vasectomy necessary, plus Walmart insurance was laughably bad in those pre-Obamacare days (hello, $1,000 deductible at a job that only paid $7.00 an hour). But I knew that I eventually wanted to do it in order to permanently put any possibility of future children to rest.
Continue reading…Categories: Personal health
I have photographed the northern lights…
5 minute read
October 14, 2024, 6:47 PM
On Thursday, October 10, Elyse and I went up to Washington County in order to photograph the aurora borealis, also known as the northern lights, which were visible at our latitude due to a geomagnetic storm. We had a good time, photographing from High Rock, as well as the intersection of Route 64 and 418 in Ringgold. None of this was new territory to us, as we had been to these locations plenty of times, and if you’ve followed the website over the years, you will be quite familiar with these locations, as I photographed High Rock in 2015, and photographed at that intersection in 2020. Elyse brought her phone, and I brought the works, taking not only my phone, but also my tripod, my DSLR, and even a drone.
Driving up from our house in Montgomery Village, it was a very dark ride through Frederick and out to High Rock. We questioned whether or not we would see anything, because we certainly didn’t see anything all the way up. Everything looked perfectly normal. Arriving at High Rock, I still couldn’t see anything, but we saw a small crowd gathered up on the rock to see the lights. So I went up there, I set up my tripod, and I started photographing with my DSLR. This is what I got:
Categories: Maryland, Nature, Photography, Waynesboro (PA)
The Power Rangers sandbox…
10 minute read
October 11, 2024, 1:56 PM
For those of you who are fans of old-school Power Rangers like myself, one story arc tends to stand out: the Alien Rangers story arc. For those not familiar, the Alien Rangers story arc was the story that served as the bridge between Mighty Morphin Power Rangers and Power Rangers Zeo. In the first episode, “Rangers in Reverse”, one of the villains, Master Vile, planted a device called the Orb of Doom, which reversed the Earth’s rotation, which, through the magic of fantasy, also reverted the Power Rangers (and everyone else) in age. The Rangers also lose their powers in the process, as they are unable to morph in their much younger form (they looked like they were about middle school-aged). With the now-kid team out of commission, they get other rangers from the planet Aquitar to help defend the earth, and they keep Lord Zedd and crew at bay until the main team is able to restore time and replace their powers by retrieving and reassembling the Zeo Crystal, which they had broken up and put into a time hole a few episodes prior. While the team from Aquitar was the active Power Ranger team, the show took the title Mighty Morphin Alien Rangers, and used a modified theme song. As far as the story went, it was masterfully done, destroying the Rangers’ old powers and then sending them on a quest to retrieve the Zeo Crystal, which would reverse the time regression caused by the Orb of Doom, and also give the regular team a new set of powers. And then at the end of it all, the Command Center gets blown up, providing a nice little cliffhanger ending to lead into the next season.
However, if you look at Mighty Morphin Alien Rangers, you find something else going on inside. In-universe explanations aside, the entire Alien Rangers story arc was a giant experiment with different situations than we were used to on the hero side of things, and the temporary nature of the story meant that they weren’t committed to anything that they did during the test, because the regular heroes would eventually be restored to their original ages and get new powers, the Alien Rangers would go back to Aquitar, and the show could continue on in a similar format as we had been used to – which is exactly what happened. And the transition to Zeo was a perfect opportunity to do it, since that was the first of the show’s many annual suit changes, and it made for a nice buildup towards what would be the new status quo. Most people don’t give this story arc all of the credit that it deserves for advancing the franchise, thinking only about the way that it advanced the story, and not the many concepts that it piloted over its course, many of which would be implemented in later seasons.
I also get why they did it as a test, because heroes have far more staying power than villains. Think about it: villains, despite generally getting better lines than the heroes, are more easily replaced, and often do get replaced. Think about it: by the time that we had gotten to the third season of Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, the villains had changed fairly significantly in how they operated, while the heroes largely operated the same way as they always did. In the first season, the main villain was Rita Repulsa, who was a direct dub of Bandora from Zyuranger, i.e. the Japanese source show. Then in the second season, Rita got tossed into a dumpster (literally) and launched into space after Lord Zedd took over as the new villain. Rita Repulsa was brought back later on in the season, and in the third season, they added additional villains using costumes from Kakuranger, which formed the source material for the third season. And then when they did the first movie, they had a one-off villain in the form of Ivan Ooze, with the regular villains’ being present, but otherwise playing a minor role. Then going beyond that, Zeo threw out all of the villains that we had previously known, and brought in the Machine Empire (who were direct dubs of the Ohranger villains). Then Turbo replaced them with Divatox and her minions. And to round out the “Zordon era” of the program, in Space, Divatox took a back seat to Dark Specter and Astronema, and another set of minions. All the while, the hero characters evolved more organically, save for one instance where four out of the five Turbo Rangers were abruptly replaced (everyone except the one that we really wanted gone, of course), but other than the transition episode, the show acted as though they had always been there.
Categories: Power Rangers