Brian Frank link: Cars in Communities

I enjoy the writing of London blogger Brian Frank. I don't always agree with him, uh, I don't always understand him. But I follow him on Twitter and when it sounds as if he has posted on something in which I have an interest, I hit him. (Figuratively, not literally. Although, there are bloggers with whom I would much prefer to do the reverse. POW!)

I don't agree completely with Frank. He wrote: " . . . listening to music is half the fun of driving (and driving is definitely un-fun without it)." I cringe. If you need a radio, you are not driving. My Morgan has never had a radio and never will. In 41 years of driving that car, I have never, not once, wished I had a radio. (A narrower, twistier road with smoother pavement, no traffic and no speed limits, now there are some Morgan driver wishes. Keep your radio. I don't even want an i-Pod.)

Still, Frank is onto something. And even if you don't agree with everything he says, I think you will agree, he has a nice way with words.

Cheers,
Rockinon

Is it art?

I knew we'd get to this one sooner or later. An essay on art. As a photographer I am always hearing the refrain, " . . . but it isn't art."

Well photography is art, and it's craft as well. But often, especially with point and shoot cameras, a great deal of the craft is handled by the camera and this fools people into thinking there is no art. Not only is there art, but it can be almost pure art, devoid of craft.

The problem starts with the word art itself. The word means too many things. This is common in English, making one word, one group of letters, do double or triple duty — maybe even more.

You can bring cows in from the field, or field a ball, or in a similar vein, you can field a question. When you were young, you might have liked to play the field. You get the picture, uh, idea.

I'll let y0u play with the word art. The less I say here the better. It minimizes arguments.

If you hire an artist to make you some wine goblets, and give no instructions, you might get some incredibly imaginative goblets, wonderful to look at but completely useless when it comes to holding wine.

Once, I actually saw this happen when a well respected artist created a raku-fired, wine goblet collection. They were beautiful, they even moved when one walked by. The artist thought this was a neat effect; they were like the melding of mobiles and stabiles. Well, it was neat until the footsteps of a passing woman caused one to topple and break. I think Alexander Calder would have said these goblets needed more stability and less mobility.

Also, the very creative raku finish contained poisonous substances that would leach into wine. Not good. The artist made goblets that were great to admire, especially if you laid them on their sides, but they were not good to drink from.

Think of these goblets as approaching pure art.

Now, go to a craftsperson to order some wine goblets. Immediately, you will be asked about the type of wine that these goblets will hold. Will it be red or will it be white? It does make a difference.

When you pick up your goblets, you will find that the mouth is not wider than the bowl. Each goblet will have a good stem, easily held, preventing the wine from being warmed by the hand. And the foot of each delicate goblet will be fashioned such that it allows one to place the wine down without concern for it falling over.

These goblets will not surprise you; they will be just as envisioned. Dull but functional. Think of these goblets as approaching pure craft.

Let's try another example. Ask an artist to make you a lawn chair and give them no restrictions and you might get something like these, but I doubt it — these are just so creative, they are unique. Made by the Dutch artist Lisette Spee and architect Tim van den Burg these chairs can be found in het Valkenbergpark in Breda, The Netherlands.

Art is the creative thought while craft is the quality, the skill, needed to realize the art — the creative vision. Simple, right?

Most of us want a measure of both in what we simply call art. We want it to be creative and we want it to be something more than we would expect of a three-year-old. Well, take the blinders off; sometimes, even three-year-olds are on to something.

Our daughter, Ashley, when she was but 18-months sat on the floor with a piece of paper and some fine-tipped markers; she poked the colourful markers through the paper. Then, she turned the paper over and had one of those "Eureka!" moments. She discovered the back of the smooth, white paper was textured with small ragged holes, each one revealing, and reveling in, a burst of colour. The toddler toddled off looking for mom in order to share her work of art.

Creative? Yes!

Would you have thought of it? I doubt it.
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To learn what craft, skill, was necessary to shoot the image of the toilette at sunset, please check out my other blog: Rockin' On: Photography.

Shout Out to Houghton Lake Michigan

To my visitor from Michigan, isn't Houghton Lake somewhere near what used to be called Mount Grampion? I skied there when I was a teen.

Cheers,
Rockinon

National Punctuation Day

I need help with my punctuation, and I know it. It is one reason that I miss having an editor. Well, today is National Punctuation Day in the States and the Huffington Post has an on-line punctuation test. Try the test; I did. I blew two.

After taking the test, check out the National Punctuation Day site.

There may be hope for me yet.

Cheers,
Rockinon

Global sequential hits. Odd. Disconcerting.

My computer sits in a corner the master bedroom. By 6 a.m. each morning I am often sitting at the keyboard tapping out my thoughts and hoping someone else will enjoy sharing them.

Lately, I have been getting over 155 hits a day on my various blogs. Very gratifying. Or is it?

What do the numbers really mean? For instance, I know that one IP address hit my site 77 times one day. 77 times! I traced the address back to a local company. I don't know why I was hit 77 times but I do know it wasn't because I was immensely popular. It was a one day event.

This morning I noticed that this picture, posted months ago, was hit four times overnight. What search criteria would one use to stumble upon it and why would three different sites in three wildly separated locations all stumble upon the same picture over the course of just a few hours?

Are these computers connected?

Why is this question important? First, the New York Times was hacked the other day and a virus attached to files on their site. They warned their readers and purged their file servers, but if it can happen to the NYT what about me? Could someone attach a virus to my blog?

And the next question is important to those planning on making money from their Internet hits; people like those who run newspapers. If their numbers are inflated, possible grossly inflated, then they do not have the number of Internet followers that they think they have.

If newspapers should decide to charge for their content based on calculations using their Internet hits, they could find themselves walking the plank into a sea of red ink.

When I worked at the local paper, we used to get a lot of hits out of Norwich, a little town some kilometres from London, Ontario. The folk in charge did not question those numbers, even when I raised questions. They liked to assume that for some unknown reason we were exceedingly popular in Norwich.

Well, my sites have attracted a lot of Norwich hits on certain days and I don't assume that I am exceedingly popular in Norwich.

I know of one company that bragged about its surprisingly large number of Twitter followers. When I checked their followers, I found fully 66% of the followers were meaningless - many were links to porn sites. (Since then I have learned that this is not uncommon. I have rejected at least 90% of the follower requests I have received.)

So, why was a picture of a Ford Focus reflecting a sunset in London, Ontario, of interest to surfers in Doha, Qatar, Istanbul, Turkey and Wilcox, Arizona? (I have blurred the IP addresses as I don't know the legalities of publishing them.)


If you work for a newspaper, you should check Newsosaur's take on inflated Internet numbers too often quoted by newspapers.

Time-wasting trash in the old media

"I, who never never drink, was forced to go toe to toe with George. Because you have to man up. So we drank like four bottles of wine; I got (totally plastered). It was ugly." (So was the writing. The words were easier to clean up than than the values.)

Ian Gillespie, who writes The City column for The London Free Press, was onto something when he wrote his Wednesday piece, "Time-wasting trash poisoning youth."

Gillespie writes, "The experts call it "junk culture" and many are alarmed . . . "

Gillespie quotes Doug Mann, a professor with the University of Western Ontario's faculty of information and media studies. "Junk culture is inherent in new media . . . when you get new media moving in, it changes the way we see the world . . . "

Wait! I've made a big mistake. Please forgive me. I've taken a paragraph from a glowing article on actor George Clooney. An article that in its own words comes "precariously close to gushing."

How did I ever confuse a Sun Media piece by that insightful reporter Kevin Williamson, about the "perfect" man — George Clooney — and the Ian Gillespie column on ideas that poison our youth?

The behaviour condoned, no celebrated, in The London Free Press/Sun Media cover story, "Class act is no act", must be acceptable behaviour as it is clearly sanctioned by the old media.

Oh, oh! This blog is part of the new media. No wonder I got my stories mixed. As Mann points out, " . . . people's basic skills will fade away." Mine must be fading already.

But, I bet I'm not the only with fading skills. People who consume four bottles of wine at a sitting, just to prove their masculine prowess, will have grossly faded skills by the end of the evening binge.

Sadly, if they are small in stature, like many underage, youthful drinkers, even their skill to simply breath may fade. Alcohol poisoning fatalities do not happen all that often but these are totally preventable tragedies. When I was in high school, a good, bright young boy died from an alcohol overdose (AOD). He went to a high school dance, got drunk, went home, passed out in bed and was asphyxiated during the night. His mother discovered her dead son in the morning.

According to Gillespie, "Mann isn't optimistic about the future." Maybe Mann took a peek at his morning paper.

Addendum:

Remove Intoxicated Drivers (RID) began working on the problem of AOD (alcohol overdose) in 1992. Based on discussions with victims' families and county medical examiners, RID estimates as many as 4,000 deaths occur each year in the United States from alcohol overdosing: drinking too much alcohol too fast. Families learn, in the most difficult way, that alcohol can be a lethal drug.

Teenagers are particularly vulnerable to AOD.



Teens pictured on the site died from alcohol poisoning.




Another site for stats on alcohol and youth people is MADD.

Bernie lost but many of his clients won!

The following is an update of an earlier post which originally appeared on my WordPress site. I closed that blog and because of recent events I am revisiting my take on the Madoff Ponzi scheme.
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Bernie Madoff has the right moniker but the wrong spelling. It should be Madeoff as it was originally reported that Bernie made-off with from $50 to $65 billion of his trusting clients’ money. It now appears the media and others over-estimated Bernie’s accomplishments.

Former SEC head Harvey Pitt admitted Madoff "probably inflated the amount of money he had under management." If he had invested it, he might have grown it, but he didn’t and it didn’t. His much ballyhooed profits were ghost profits. Empty claims. Hollow boasts.

A Dec. 2018 Bloomberg article reported claims against Madoff's failed investment firm totalled $19.0 billion. Of that, $13.3 billion had been recovered and $11.3 billion distributed to the claimants. The rest was being held in reserve. At some point in the future, all recovered funds will be paid to Madoff's victims.

Bloomberg reports: "almost 1,400 victims who had claims of $1.38 million or less have been repaid in full." For many, investing with Madoff may not have been all that bad. Edward Zore, Chief Executive Officer of Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance, admitted, “We have stocks in our portfolio that lost 95 per cent.” And if you remember Providian Financial, you will recall it lost 95% of its value amid a spectacular run of credit card defaults.

Investors who bought into the American mutual fund ProFunds UltraOTC,when it was at its peak and rode it down to its June 2009 low, watched 95% of their wealth disappear. Will anyone go to jail? Of course not. This is legal. Losing money in the market is an everyday occurrence.

Something in the order of 70% of Madoff controlled money has now been recovered and almost 60% returned to Madoff investors. If you bought stock in the Canadian oil patch company PennWest when it was at its peak, you'd have been very happy to have recovered 60% of your investment.

Silly Bernie just cut out the middle man and lost the money directly. Dumb. He could have invested the money, taken his "well-earned" bonuses for losing the investments and gone on with his life.

The Huffington Post reports, Federal prosecutors said "a review of most accounts held by financier Bernard Madoff's customers when he was arrested show that about half of the customers had not lost money because they withdrew more money than they originally invested."

But making money with a Madoff investment was not problem free. Bloomberg reported that after the initial chaos, "Irving Picard, a New York lawyer overseeing liquidation of Madoff’s firm in bankruptcy court, focused on a simple formula to recover principal cash for victims: Suing customers who withdrew more money than they put in. The strategy sparked controversy but was ultimately blessed by the courts."

For fun, I took a quick look at Canadian mutual funds using globefund.com (my fave). Check out this chart. If you had invested in this fund, you would have easily bested Madoff's losses. Silly Bernie. He was but a piker at losing money. That said, he was a first rate crook.