holes, scuffed heels, and what?

Lots of pictures that I sent, early on, were of things on, around, or seen from a commuter train while I was, yes, you guessed it, commuting to and from work.




caption: Wondering what the default pattern is for holes in something but
didn't ask because I'd have
interrupted? This is it.

new caption for Nancy ONLY (because I never interrupt anymore): Wondering what the default pattern is for holes in something? This is it.







caption: I can't imagine why you would
care how scuffed my shoe heel is.
It's this scuffed. Okay?!
SATISFIED?!!!

(Note: Just to not leave the wrong impression, I never let Nancy not having actually asked me something, like how scuffed my shoe heel is, prevent me from pre-emptively responding with exasperation and sarcasm.)


The following was one where I thought I had an interesting image but I never came up with a caption. It's the overhead storage rack, looking straight up from the seat. I tried doing something with it looking like a ladder, or rotating it 90 degrees left and having it be the mustache between a mechanical monsters eyes and mouth. Nothing worked and I gave up. Any ideas?




caption: ?

squirrel not using an umbrella

Okay, in the course of getting myself setup to post old photos with captions that I've sent to people, I realized that some of the captions are inside jokes or, otherwise, only make sense with a little (or much) more context, so I'll provide that when needed. Also, this will be really boring for Nancy, who has already seen most of these, so for her sake, I may provide alternate captions, for her eyes only (this will be on the honor system so if you aren't Nancy please IGNORE the additional captions). If I've completely missed with my caption, please let me know what it should have been (must be 125 characters or less to meet the original caption limit).

From Feb '04:



caption:

squirrel not using an umbrella



caption for Nancy ONLY:

squirrel not using an umbrella near shovel





caption:

Squirrels more political than we
thought? Here, clearly, one
protests our actions in Iraq by
turning his back on the flag.








caption:

This image may seem familiar. This
time, see if you can find the
squirrel then create your own
caption.


(recipient of the last photo couldn't make out the squirrel sitting at the end of the rail as a squirrel)






caption:

Unless you think you might need
some of this stuff, I'm
throwing it out. I'll need to
know by Thursday morning.

photos with captions: an inadvertent hobby

For a long time I resisted getting a PDA because I usually had my laptop computer with me and I didn't want to carry yet another special purpose device. What made the difference for me was when they came out with the combination PDA and cell phone with wireless Internet access. As a very secondary consideration, I thought it would be interesting to have that gadget include a digital camera as well--relatively low resolution notwithstanding, it seemed like having some camera with me all the time vs no camera most of the time might pay off. I even decided to take advantage of the one month free trial service that allowed me to send pictures with captions to people wirelessly. Within a very short period, I realized I'd stumbled upon a new and favorite hobby.

I've sent over 400 pictures with captions, so far, and found that what made it fun and interesting for me was the immediacy of it and the challenge (for me), usually trying to be funny, to work within the original limit of 125 characters for the caption. Having been overly shy about sharing my creative work, my audience for these captioned photos was almost entirely limited to my friend Nancy, who shares my sense of humor. Being a little slow sometimes, it took awhile before I realized that if only 1% of people have my sense of humor, that' 3 million people, just in the United States.

So, for the sake of bringing a few smiles on occasion AND having a large stockpile of things I can post quickly when I have nothing "new" to offer, I'll be posting some of them here, working through them from the oldest first, starting with my next post. Also, I've taken many photos for which I never did come up with a caption, which is sad, so I'll be posting photos those and challenging you to come up with one where I haven't.

At least only one broke

Pow! Damn it, I dropped the 3-pack of preserves. That's okay, I really only wanted the apricot preserves anyway and what are the odds of ... DAMN IT!!!

I TOTALLY caught ...

... my kitchen sink rug with a "bed head"! I laughed my ass off and belittled it, just because I could. Now it's ticked off at me and I have to stand 2 feet from the sink and reach over it. Next time I'll be more sympathetic. Maybe it wasn't funny after all. Who's laughing now?

(Sometimes I come up with more than one caption for a photo. Another one for this was "Tora! Tora! Tora!", but that makes no sense now.)

Geography Quiz

Using the map in my last post, an alternative map from the source of you choice, or by driving from state to state and asking around (for those of you who are "social" learners and/or for 5 points extra credit), answer the following questions:

(oops, wait ..., new South Park episode break ...

Okay, I'm back. Thanks for waiting.)

1) Which state is the most sociable (i.e., has a common border with the most other states)?

2) Why?

3) Which state is the least sociable?

4) Is Lake Superior just a name or is it also an attitude and an explanation for Michigan?

5) Either:
A) If you can't read the names of the states on the map, which ones don't you recognize?
OR
B) If you can read the names of the states on the map, which ones did you think you recognized but, actually, didn't?

6) Which states have an unacceptable shape but can be forgiven for that?

7) Which states have an unacceptable shape and something MUST be done about it?

Well???

I've caught myself being disappointed with checking my blog and finding I haven't posted anything new lately, so I know how you must feel. I'd started spending time looking into some of the nifty things you can do with a blog, like adding a visit counter and getting other basic statistics on activity. I just STOPPED doing that in favor of posting this; it actually makes sense to have something worth keeping statistics on before you start keeping them. As I was discussing with my friend Nancy, yesterday, imagine if the founder of Google had been stopped by paying attention to how he spelled the name of his company instead of focusing on the service it would provide. It's actually a mistake; he intended to use the word googol (which means 10 to the 100th power, a LARGE number) but who cares now?

I am still interested in pushing the envelope of what would be interesting in this blog, for me and others, and I'll find a balance between unrealized intentions and actual content. Maybe I'll just post links to other interesting things when I'm not taking the time to create anything myself--sort of like blogger Muzak while you are waiting ;-)

For now, since everyone has fond memories of geography quizzes, study this map and we'll have a quiz later.