Turtle Tchotchke Tuesday

A pot by Bernice Suazo Naranjo.

The lower side showing her signature.

The End is Near

My latest piece of art arrived today! It's a depiction of The Five Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

It will hang near my other piece of Liō artwork.

Turtle Tchotchke Tuesday

A ceramic plaque by New Zealand artist Peter Stewart.

We have another plaque of his filled with fish.

It wasn't the swine flu but...

I uploaded my latest YouTube masterpiece on Tuesday evening. On Wednesday it got a handful of views. The views came mostly from you, my loyal readers. A few people happened to find it by searching for terms like "dehydrator."

Thursday there wasn't a single view of it. I was bummed.

When I checked first thing on Friday morning there had been one more view of it. Before he went to work I whined to Jerry that it looks like dehydrator videos aren't as popular as Blendtec Blender movies.

Then things changed.

I was burning a vacation day Friday (I've maxed out on how much I can accumulate). So I was always near a computer. About an hour after Jerry left for work I checked again. There had been something like 20 new views of the movie. A few minutes later there had been five more. And through the day the view counter just kept rising at a pretty steady rate.

I had gone viral!

YouTube gives us insight into how people discover our videos and where they are watching them. That information shows up the next day. So I was looking forward to Saturday morning to see what had happened and where it was happening.

Nothing.

Sunday. Nothing.

YouTube's Insight feature was broken. Their support page said their engineers were hard at work fixing the problem. Right. They were at home enjoying the weekend. Lazy engineers.

So I had to wait until this afternoon to see what happened.

Sure enough 94% of the views had come from email or other non-web page sources (like instant messages). Somebody found it and told two friends who told two friends and so on till all the world was getting in on it (just like with shampoo)!

Well, not the whole world. It has had 183 views now. It's been seen in at least 40 of the states. There have been only a few views in the rest of the world. And the pace of new views has slowed to a crawl. But there is potential to become the next Numa Numa dance.

Wish me luck!

The Epic Journey of Apollo 11

Everybody, it seems, is remembering Apollo 11 today. It is the 40th anniversary of its landing on the Moon, after all.

My reminiscences come, of course, in the form of photographs.

Back in 1969 there weren't a lot of homes with video tape recorders to capture television programs. In the days leading to the landing, the news programs suggested that we could use cameras to take pictures of our television sets to keep a record of the event. All we had to do is put a camera on a tripod and set the shutter speed to 1/30th of a second. That's the refresh rate of the NTSC broadcast standard used in the U.S. at the time. We needed to carefully focus on the TV screen and set the aperture to let in enough light for the speed of the film we were using. They told us what apertures to use for the different speeds of film.

Our pictures of the event were on two rolls of film. The pictures leading up to the landing are color slides and the pictures of the extravehicular activity are black and white prints. Mom or Dad sent me the prints. I don't have the negatives.

The aperture for the color slides seems to have been set as if the faster, black and white film was in the camera. Those pictures are terribly underexposed and sometimes it is hard to see what's in the pictures.

The pictures of the EVA are not that great because the quality of what was on the TV screen was not that great.

I wasn't the nerdiest nerd on the block. After they went back into the Lunar Module I figured there wasn't a lot to see so I went to bed. It was well past my usual bedtime.

I wish I had a better memory. About the only thing I remember is Nixon's phone call to the astronauts. I was kind of annoyed that they had to pause to chit chat with him. They had more important things to get done.

I was also annoyed that Armstrong's descent down the ladder and his small step onto the moon were so dark and fuzzy. I wondered if they can send a man to the moon, why can't they make a camera that can show what's happening? They explained the technical issues of the difficulties with sending back live video from the moon and I guess that satisfied me. Still....

I'm glad I got to witness this. I'm not convinced that there is a need to go back yet. Low Earth orbit offers a lot of opportunities for valuable science to be done and is fairly accessible. But then, I'm not a rocket scientist so what do I know?

Here are the pictures we took of Apollo 11.

The Epic Journey of Apollo 11

The captions of the EVA pictures were written by Mom on the backs of the pictures.

Ai, Chihuahua!

In January, 1971, the family (minus Poss, who had gotten far too many demerits to deserve the opportunity to join us) took to the road and visited the capital of the Mexican state of Chihuahua. I told a story of this trip earlier.

Here are the pictures from that trip.

I am completely bummed because there are no pictures of Pancho Villa's widow nor his death car. I was looking forward to seeing our photos of them.

The things we get to see are:

• Outside Pancho Villa's house
• An aqueduct (featured on the state's Coat of Arms)
• Murals by Aarón Piña Mora in the Government Palace of Chihuahua
• A statue of Pancho Villa
• The Mines of Santa Eulalia (this Harper's article by Lew Wallace makes it sound like this is a place we wanted to see)
• Scenery around the city

Chihuahua, Chihuahua, Mexico

Here is a better picture of the execution of Hidalgo.

Anybody know anything about the unidentified scenery around town?

Childhood fears

I haven't worn cuffed pants since I was a kid. Dirt would collect in the cuffs and I didn't like that. When I'm shopping for pants I simply cannot try on pants with cuffs because I know that they will fill themselves with sand.

I quit eating my pancakes with syrup when I was young. I would always get syrup on the fork's handle and my hands would get sticky. I hated sticky hands. For many years I would use just butter on pancakes and waffles. I use syrup again. My fork and fingers occasionally get sticky but I just get up and rinse them off now. (Jerry makes the best pancakes!)

I was always sure that aliens were outside the house at night, hovering above the ground, looking into the house though the windows that didn't have curtains. One night I woke up and there there was a strange hum filling the room. It could only be an alien spacecraft hovering outside the room! But it turned out that I had fallen asleep with an old shortwave radio turned on and the turner had drifted off into a staticky spot. I still have weird feelings when I make a (still infrequent) nighttime trip to the bathroom. It takes a lot of effort to look out the window. I still have the feeling that a Martian will be there watching me. (Martians are perverts.)

I'm drying, man.

Time for another YouTube experience!

I've shown you photographs of bananas. I've shown you our dehydrator.

Now you get to see the dehydrator in action! Yes, you heard right, you're going to see how bananas are peeled and prepped for dehydrating. Oh, I hope you can watch this without having your minds blown.




Were you blown away?

Turtle Tchotchke Tuesday

These soapstone turtles are holding a dish that you're supposed to fill with fragrant oil that you warm with a tea light in its base. We've got lavender in it instead.

Another batch of family photos

The 17th carousel of slides will have very little appeal to non-family readers. And most of the pictures won't be terribly interesting to the family. But I scanned them so here they are. They are from Summer, 1967, and Christmas.

To give you an idea of what you're skipping by not looking at the pictures they include:

• Cute, cute, cute, cute Karen (and Doughie) (and chocolate stains)
  
• The rest of the kids
• Aunt Cecilia
• Ray and Helen Hanson
• Christmas 1967, featuring Marvel the Mustang

Carousel-17

Lots of visits from Holiday Inn Cheyenne

Following Colleen's advice, I have installed some code into my blog so that I can see interesting things about visitors to my little diary on the web.

You all have lost some of your privacy.

I get to see what Google searches bring visitors to me. Today somebody searched:

snort "supernova observational radio telescope"

They looked at my little gripe about my physics lab report's missing point.

One of my sisters doesn't use a bookmark to get to my blog. Instead, she uses the link in the blog list in the sidebar of her blog to get to mine.

Many people have searched for Classical radio in San Diego and checked out my little diatribe about its absence.

A disturbing number of people have searched for a porn video and found my blog instead.

Today I had a large number of page loads from the ISP "Holiday Inn Cheyenne."

Happy reunioning, Eutslers!

Turtle Tchotchke Tuesday

Here's an arrangement of three turtles (we've got to speed this process up!) on the mantel. The pot came from a shop in Madrid, NM, that is run by the local artists who make the pieces. The pot's artist wasn't on duty that day.