Justfolk's photos

It's a quiet morning in Ganny Cove Arm, but then I hear occasional splashes in the water. There's a couple of tunas out there splashing and lunging and feeding and amusing a couple of gulls. This guy, with his gullfriend, was straight out from our deck, about 300 metres across the Arm, working back and forth a short stretch of the shoreline on the other side.

A feather worked its way out.

It is a dark and clear night tonight so I took a picture of the Milky Way. I used my 8mm lens, the widest I have. I don't really know what the green glow on the horizon is. The view is looking South and there is not very much lit up in that direction. Probably the group of three service stations on the highway about twenty km from here. Being a minute and a half long, the picture shows each star as a short line rather than a pinpoint. I used a high ISO already but I may try it another time with an even higher one to shorten the shutter speed. I actually used a tripod. This tripod was a gift from my wife about 1980, a nice solid one. I hardly ever use it, nor any of the three or four lighter-weight ones I have. But it is better than trying to aim the camera when it sits on a railing.

My carrot patch is about two metres long and maybe a metre wide. Not very big. I have pulled my first two carrots from the patch and they were both big. Together they weighed about 650g, uhh just under a pound and a half. And they were delicious. I don't think you can say my pride is overweening. But I like to ween myself a good root gardener.

Eight of us and two dogs, the humans averaging something over seventy and both dogs a little infirm, walked the short path (two km or so) out to Tinker's Point for a picnic. All manner of good food and drink was brought. Despite the bubbly and, though it was a precipitous twenty-metre drop down to the water, none of the ten was damaged. Nor even by the walk back to the cars. I *was* tempted to take a nap in the grass first; I was convinced otherwise. I cannot blame my lack of plumb on the bubbly -- I can see the bottle unopened on the table. That's Tors Cove just to the south of us in the short distance. And the "fog" was smoke from fires in Western Canada, drifted north from NWT to the Arctic and then east and south over us. We are all linked environmentally.

I had about fifty freshly dug garlics hanging for a few days in this shed. But we had a frost overnight last night and I was worried they might get frostbitten if I left them there. So I made a makeshift table, shortened their stalks, bagged them, and brought them inside. While doing that, I hung my Fuji X100 on a nail, aimed it generally at me, set the ten-second timer, and went back to cutting garlic stalks. This is what I got.

The blue jay heard from someone I had posted a grey jay portrait last night and insisted I post his today. For balance, right? Well, ask and it will be done. Nice hairdo, hey? A friend of mine called him a popinjay.

We had another visit at suppertime today from the three grey jays, whiskeyjacks, that live in our neighbourhood in Ganny Cove. They are very different from their cousins, the blue jays. The Blues are noisey, jumpy, and apparently glutonous. They are willing to take every peanut you have, and bury them all. How can they remember all those places? Maybe that's providence, skillful preparation for future famine, but it looks like wasteful greedygutsism. The Greys are thoughtful, methodical, considerate, taking a single nut off somewhere private, to eat and not necessarily come back for more. Maybe that's improvident, but it looks like polite consideration. Both of them like to sit for a good portrait. Here a Grey.

We have found a couple of dead voles in our garden the past weeks. We assumed the predator was a neighbour's cat having a little sport. But today while I was leaning over the deck rail, this fellow poked his head out from a pile of clippings. He may be the culprit. I *think* it is a short-tailed weasel.

This morning, the first day of our (northern) autumn, I dug up my remaining garlics. I had had a few dozen planted in three little plots and this plot was the least accessible. So it waited till now. I probably should have dug them up a month ago, but they weren't much ill-served by waiting the extra time. Maybe not at all. I had no string so I used hops vines to tie them together and I stuck some old leftover clothesline through the vines to hang them from the rafters in the shed. I will cook with some in a couple of hours. This batch comprised fifty garlics of three varieties. I had already dug up eighty-some garlics in the other plots. So I have about 130 garlics hung up drying. I will put some of them back in the ground for next year — probably mostly this variety, “Rocambole.” Rocambole is a very bright-tasting garlic though it produces many small cloves in each head, a hassle when you are cooking. But it is the most delicious garlic I have grown.

More fakery -- A.I. plus outright theft plus shoppery. I wondered how well the AI could conjure a picture of someone like me hitchhiking in 1971 or '72. (I enjoyed being on the road and did it many times between 1970 and about 1976.) I asked the A.I. machine for a hitchhiker about a dozen times, with different prompts, before I got one I thought I could work with. But buddy's hair was like he had just stepped out of a hair salon. And of course it wasn't me. So I stole a friend's early 1972 picture of me looking up from my reading in the university caff. I decapitated myself and placed my head on buddy's shoulders. I clitted up the hair somewhat and put glasses on myself. I grained it all up to hide some faults. Et voilà! Not perfect. There's a definite mismatch between the graininess of the face and of the rest. The light's wrong -- especially the light's wrong! (Imagine the photographer was standing by a big white truck. . . .) The focus is wrong. My knapsack didn't look like this. The glasses aren't right. I never had blond hair on my arms. And, jeez: I *never* wore tee-shirts in 1972. But it's not bad as a dream-like, creepy A.I. simulacrum of my time on the road.

Gerald and Harold certainly had the harmonies right with their brother Orralt's song about his new pick-up truck. Just the same, Orralt was reluctant yet to start beating out the time on the spoons.

Twenty minutes ago the International Space Station went over. In this picture, it is the brightest light in the sky, pretty dead centre, and making the apex of a kind of concave lens of the Big Dipper's handle. This was with my widest, fisheyeyest lens, by the way. Thus the weirdities. Our neighbourhood does not look like this.

Among the little known aspects of life in the Vatican (at least to outsiders) is the regular Sunday night concert given by the revolving members of the official Vatican band, The Holy See. "The C," as everyone there knows it, has been led by each Holy Father in turn through a half-dozen papacies. In various eras it has been mainly a calypso band, a hard-rock band, a rock-jazz-fusion band, and even for a time a Texas swing band. These days, if you weren't paying attention, you might think Carlos Santana was leading it. Almost every week there are guest appearances, usually though not always by other clerics. Among the guest musicians have been several Archbishops of Canterbury, two Archbishops of Cyprus, the Very Rev. Desmond Tutu and even, for several years off and on, Oral Roberts himself. Roberts is legendary for his performance of a c&w version of Let It Heal, a song he learnt as a boy at summer camp. Bill Clinton famously showed up once with his saxophone but he was perceptibly drunk and was asked to leave. In the 1980s, Tom Lehrer, visiting Rome for a maths conference, was invited by the Holy Father (Wojtyła, of blessèd memory) to sit in. Lehrer stayed longer than he expected, playing piano in the band for over a month. "The C" nearly got renamed The Rag in his honour.

On the fourth anniversary of the 2024 acquisition by the Vatican of the Warner Brothers film catalogue, and after the Rome premiere of the new WB-V "Barbie" film "Sister Barbara Frances and the Conversion of Dolldom," the Pope stops for selfies with fans.

Although Ratzinger and Bergoglio both were well trained in bicycle maintenance and repair, Ratzinger had no interest in it. He would always step aside impatiently when, on their morning walks around Rome, Bergoglio would stop to give advice to people in the street. Many bikers were eager to hear what "Repairman Pope" would say about their pedals, their tires, and especially their chains. And most were happy that Ratzinger kept his counsel; he was known as a bit of a yappy dog.

Few people outside the Vatican know that, for nearly 125 years, new Popes have all been trained in bicycle maintenance and repair. This is in case the world changes, the Vatican's fortunes are reversed, and the Popes have to go out to work with their hands for a living. The present Pope, more than most in the past, embraced his new skills as an avocation.

I asked the AI image generator to give me a picture of some unhappy pudgy people at an open-air market in the 1940s. It gave me, as it does, four pictures and I moved the three I like best into this triptych. I especially like the woman in the left-most picture -- she appears to be trying to pass as a man, maybe as her companion's brother. AI faces are pretty limited by the algorithms so the two people look like they could be fraternal twins. Don't try to figure out what all the vegetables are -- some look like very alien fruit.