Continue reading “A Brat commercial for Stella Artois, and a blackwasher mentions my work”
Category: American wilderness
Mathew Silverstone, a closer look
I thought I would give a try to explaining some photo manipulation as done above, with Mathew Silverstone, said to be a victim in the 9/10/2025 shootings at Evergreen High School, Evergreen, Colorado. It takes a minute or so to acclimate yourself, but it is a matter of perspective. Right off I can see that the head is too big for the body. Its width, cheekbone to cheekbone, is 45% of his shoulder width. I have a large head, size 7-3/4 hat size, but my width is only 35% of my shoulders. Same with my wife, on a smaller scale, of course, 35%. Try the measurement on yourself and see if you get something similar. This is one big noggin we are looking at.
A little McLuhan for us as we view events through the eyes of the TV
The mode of the TV image has nothing in common with film or photo, except that it offers also a nonverbal gestalt or posture of forms. With TV, the viewer is the screen. He is bombarded with light impulses that James Joyce called the “Charge of the Light Brigade” that imbues his “soulskin with subconscious inklings.” The TV image is visually low in data. The TV images is not a still shot. It is not a photo in any sense, but a ceaselessly forming contour of things limned by the scanning-finger. The resulting plastic contour appears by light through, not light on, and the image so formed as the quality of sculpture and icon, rather than a picture. The TV image offers some three million dots per second to the receiver. From these he accepts only a few dozen each instant, from which to make an image. (Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, edited version by W. Terrence Gordon, 2003, p418)
McLuhan, who died in 1980, wrote the above in an era where TV, colorized, was still a small screen with blurred images. Today we have 40-inch (minimum) high-definition screens, but I don’t imagine the power of TV has gotten anything but bigger as a result. It is still a two-dimensional medium, and we literally enter the screen and participate in the programming. McLuhan differentiated this from movies, which were and are highly defined, TV “cool”, movies “hot”. It could be that with the advent of better TV images, the medium is “hotter” now than then, but from what I see, maybe not.
Continue reading “A little McLuhan for us as we view events through the eyes of the TV”
The Evergreen, Colorado school shootings, 9/10/25, once more
I had to take down the original post I did on this event. I had foolishly linked it to NextDoor, which masquerades as a local source for pictures of bears in our yards and warnings of traffic jams. I had mentioned there that I could not locate either the shooter or one of the alleged victims in any public people source, like TruePeopleSearch or Geni. I then wrote the post and linked it there, inviting anyone curious to join us in our discussion, warning them to be civil.
I awoke to the scene pictured on the left, which is a spray can used for BBQ that I keep on a rolling rack on the deck. It had been taken from there, and the cap removed, the can upright, and a pine cone and birdseed nut in between. Since it was done in a manner that had everything in line and upright, it was not a bear or raccoon or fox, our normal visitors. It was a human who did this for us. It was none too subtle, and indeed carried a message, that by suggesting the shooting event was faked, that I was a nut, that I am not rational.
Continue reading “The Evergreen, Colorado school shootings, 9/10/25, once more”
Baseball notes
We had something I found interesting going in a post I had to take down due to emergence of hatefulness, an ugly aspect of the ongoing mass shooting sprees, all fake. I’ll come back to it.
Tyrone mentioned that one team, the Cleveland Indians/Guardians, hold the futility record, not having won a World Series since 1948, 77 years. I looked a bit further and found that there are a few teams who had not made WS appearances (win or lose) for long stretches of time, like Pittsburgh, Seattle, Oakland, Minnesota, Colorado and Cincinnati, and they shared one thing in common: small TV markets.
Childhood memories
This is a reminiscence, one that from childhood on affected my outlook on life. I am not unique in this regard, nor prescient, but merely aware of that fact that two memories of childhood are still with me in my advanced age. Others have similar experiences. Please feel free to recount them here.
Cowan and Kaufman, C+K = 33?
Mike Wallach, proprietor of The Viral Delusion, runs a nice website and I am happy to send along a few bucks each month. However, back in July he ran a video, The Viral Delusion Episode Three: Monkey Business: Polio, Measles And How It All Began, and right away, just a couple of minutes into it, I was looking up at the nose hairs of Tom Cowan and Andrew Kaufman. The latter for sure I do not trust, as someone pointed out to me long ago that Edward Snowden, then said to be quarantined in an airport in Moscow, and Mr. Kaufman bore a striking resemblance to one another.
No way, I thought, but decided to expend the effort to do the comparisons anyway. For newbies, my underlying criteria is based on the premise that our heads form their final for-life shape in our late teens and early 20s, and that as a result, the distance between our eye pupils can be used as a constant throughout our lives. That in mind, if I align eye pupils at a common distance, I can compare two faces to find differences and similarities.
How to lie, effectively
Below is a rather long excerpt from the book Dancing Naked in the Mind Field, published in 2000 and written by the late Kary Mullis. He won a Nobel Prize for his work on what became known as the polymer chain reaction process, or “PCR”. I intended yesterday as I wrote about world population to start with this, but quickly realized I was trying to ride a horse in two directions at once. Only politicians can pull that off.
I will comment after:
School shooting in Evergreen, CO
Please keep in mind as you read this that I am forced to use the WordPress Gutenberg editing format, and is is clunky and basically unworkable. Sometimes after I have published a piece I am offered the “Classic” format, and from there I can fix any oddball stuff that GBerg forces on me.
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On Wednesday, September 10, 2025, there was a shooting at Evergreen High School, located in Evergreen, Colorado. We live but a few miles from there. The event, as far as I can discern, is fake, and I’ll go into detail, but first, here is the official recounting from respectable journalists (trained not to think in some of our finest schools):
This morning’s reading
I arise very early, and have some good books going, and also came across other stuff this morning worth sharing. Please indulge me if you have a few minutes.
I commented on Judith Curry’s blog yesterday as follows:
I read Dr. Curry’s summary response to public comment, and then the comments here … well, I got maybe halfway through. I was distracted by Bushkin, Joe K and Appell, who account for maybe a third of these comments. I was reminded of Cool Hand Luke, who kept getting knocked down, who kept getting back up, till Dragline said “Stay down, Luke.” Later he embraced him for coming back “with nothing.”
Maybe that is the point of those three, as they have certainly tried to derail this thread. But I suggest we all go back and reread a comment by Rails at 2:45 on 9/2. What he is saying is profound, that our power grid is slowly being dismantled by inattention, and this would be the object of the Climate Change crowd, at the very top anyway. Since the public is not attune and does not care much about climate change anyway, the real work is being done by attrition, absence of new plants, and fewer entrants into the engineering field. The Climate Change movement is powerful, but not scientific. That’s a side issue. It is political. We can yak all we want about how off base it is, as was done by the DOE report, but none of that will derail the political thrust, to de-energize our society.
It is to be done slowly, over time, with great patience and total purpose. It is essentially a misanthropic movement. To argue about the bad science involved scores points along the way, but lands no punches.
Piece of Mindful 