Picture Notes

Wait wait, is that the Truth I hear?

“Wall Street got drunk.” What a funny way to put it. I wonder if the oil companies are drunk as well. All the noise about emerging markets putting upward pressure on oil prices is just a cover for greed. Let’s see what happens when Americans stop buying stuff made in China. I agree with my bank when it writes that oil prices are another bubble that will burst. I wonder if the housing market will be the trigger that brings it all down. It was good news to read that highway fatalities have gone down since gas prices went up. Everyone has to be safer when the big cars are off the road. What if we all drove motorcycles? At least we’d be safe from cars.

I’m still having trouble with the “wall street got drunk” statement.
After 8 years all of a sudden everyone has started telling the truth?

Wall Street got drunk
The economy is in trouble and going to get worse

I like it when they say “mistakes were made” or “we didn’t understand the depth of the problem” or “we didn’t think the Iraq people would react that way” or how about “we did our best, we just didn’t foresee this.” Can’t they hire someone who has a little prescience and listen to him or her? And then they stand up and say, “I take responsibility for this.” The statement doesn’t change anything, it’s not their kids being killed in the middle east. So what does this responsibility amount to? You tell me.

OK, here’s the scorecard. 179 Days
Now that “Wall Street got drunk” and destroyed the economy because of greed the American people will once again have to come in and bail out the politicians with their tax dollars. The taxpayer really doesn’t have a choice with this Congress; the ones chosen by some divine being - it seems that way because they don’t listen to the people who elected them. But when are we ever going to learn?

I overheard this great conversation at work yesterday. I wasn’t paying much attention so I didn’t hear what report they were talking about but my ears perked up when one of them said, “this time we are going to tell the truth.”

My workspace was moved from a quiet corner surrounded by my work group to a busy hallway in the center of the department, into a different division really, and while I’m no fan of office moves, this being my 6th in 4 years, this might be the most interesting place I’ve been moved to if I get to overhear conversations like that. It does feel a little like punishment for something.

I have this theory that female manages need to move staff around like they do their own furniture at home, it gives them a sense of power. Of course they are just being bullies but I can’t tell them that. I find an office move to be the absolute most unproductive management technique in existence, especially when working groups get mixed. I put it in the same category as gossip.

I’m not sure why I like giant fiberglass farm animals, except they are fun. Here is another view of a Holstein Cow from North Dakota, billed as the largest cow in the world, photographed with an iphone. It’s so big they had to wire it to the ground. I posted the other end of it a few days ago. It would be a pretty funny dinosaur movie, like the ones where people walk with the dinosaurs, if they included one or two large cows among the T.Rex or other extinct Raptors. There’s a site dedicated to movie mistakes. I don’t “get” many of the mistakes they write about. These are fiction films, for the most part (art), and how can there be mistakes in fiction films except for mistakes in continuity which are really technical production errors (microphones in the shot, errant shadows and things changing without a visual or audio explanation.) I wonder how people who track these fiction film errors do on the metro train when the conductor announces the wrong station.

I just reread my last post about the gas prices and I’m not so sure there are any smart people left in America who want to make a difference, it seems like corporations which serve their own self interest control everything, even the government. There may be a few companies trying to make a difference but the captains of industry have a more compelling argument (ie. more cash) for hiring and keeping really smart people.

I had this great idea when I was pumping gas at $4.13 a gallon for the third time in one day. Let’s let the wind power everything. We have lots of wind in this country and we could put these electric generating windmills in Washington, DC and power the area easily, although most of the wind here is hot it probably doesn’t matter.

I had this other thought when I was driving down I-94 in North Dakota and into Wisconsin and Missouri, that there are too many semi trucks on the road now. I wonder how long it will be before the trucks take over the interstate and the automobiles have to use the small roads.

I’d like to see gas go to $13.00 per gallon as it is in England. Once the price of using our cars starts really hurting us we will change everything and become independent of foreign oil. I wonder how the oil companies own the oil. It seems that oil should be part of the common trust, like water, air and ocean fish.

I’m back at work and thought I’d write next on infidelity and how it effects attitudes in the office.

I’m back in Washington, DC after 12 days and this was one of the first photographs I shot when I left. Eventually the GPS did find Satellites but this was used very little. I found that I like the open Interstate highway and not the blue, red, orange or black highways. I’ll be posting photographs from the trip over the next few weeks.

I learned that I like the Prairie and the Great Plains and wonder why anyone would leave that area if they could stay. I like this area as well but it’s exhilarating to look out and see nothing but grass and sky for miles and miles - just green and blue and the wind is blowing, creating and moving patterns through the grass. You can see trouble coming a long way off. America is a large country. The new states that I visited: Wisconsin, Missouri, North Dakota, South Dakota and Montana. I also did google maps and at one point it read: “turn on to route I-90 and drive 1083 miles through Missouri, South Dakota, Wyoming and Montana. I thought that was encouraging.

Here is an interesting thing from the North Dakota. It might be the largest cow in the world.

I had to photograph it from the business end because I thought it was funny. While I was there looking and photographing this cow everyone who got out of their car to look at it was smiling. It reminded me that I recently read that things that make us smile and laugh are things that are unexpected. I probably should have expected this cow after seeing the Green Giant in South Dakota. Vacation is almost over and I need more time to find more of these kinds of funny things.

These American Bison are in the North Dakota Badlands and a few males started snorting at me, I guess I was getting too close.

This is a kind of apology for misnaming the South Dakota Badlands as North Dakota. North Dakota has their own Badlands in the Theodore Roosevelt National Park, part of the North Dakota Grasslands. North Dakota is another place of pleasant surprises as I’d never thought of it as cowboy country and it seems every rock and out crop has appeared in a Hollywood western movie, it’s great, like coming home. It is also the largest producer of wheat in the United States, or so the Welcome to North Dakota brochure goes. Tomorrow is dinosaur bones day.

A couple of wild American Icons on the range in Yellowstone National Park. This is the west side, close to Montana. I have a few more photographs of these two but thought this worked ok. Most people should get what they are. Right now the Bison are between summer and winter coats and look a little patchwork. It’s been 39 years since I was last here and in those years Yellowstone Park has become a human zoo with as many as 1000 people waiting to see not quite so “old faithful.” It’s nice to see the wild animals wandering around. The trout have remained too stubborn to catch so far.

So this has been the view for a couple of days and I keep shooting these mountains like no one else in the world ever has. I’m looking at the shots now and just see snap shots. It was a great experience, much better than the photography. I’m not sure it’s as much fun as trying to fly fish and catch the wily Montana trout who have remained elusive for the past two days. I probably need to light a candle or something.

I like the word portage and it’s exactly what anyone would have to do if they were coming up the Missouri River by boat and ran into this, one of 4 water falls, this being the “great” one. Lewis and Clark had to take some time going around this part of the river and carried the boats 18 miles across land. This was probably not runnable by kayak, especially since they put in the dam to divert water into hydro electric turbines and control the flow. I’m still wandering though the west, looking at stuff.