SGRRC

Last week I participated as a volunteer for the 5th annual Souther Girls Rock & Roll Camp. It's one of the coolest things I've done in a long while (and was way cooler than attempt at being an official scorekeeper for Little League baseball).

The day camp was held in the music and recording buildings on campus at Middle Tennessee State University. This year's camp consisted of over 60 girls, ages 10-17, who spent the week in morning workshops and afternoon instructional classes and late afternoon band rehearsals. Some girls had returned from previous years to team up with fellow veterans from previous bands, but many/most were newbies who are more or less thrown together at the beginning of the week in accordance to their music tastes and band position requirements (guitars, bass, keyboards, vocals and drums).

I participated as a facilitator in the morning recording workshop and the afternoon keyboards & electronic music class, including teaching a 30 minute segment one afternoon on MIDI and computer music. I also tried to cover a little bit about "Gear Envy" and how to not let one's music playing self become paralyzed by what equipment they don't have. I had fun, but I don't envy those who teach (granite faced) teenagers on a daily basis. Those doing the heavy lifting on the instructional side rarely got any feedback clues on whether they were getting through or not. There was one exception: a 10 year old in the morning recording class, despite whatever degrees of capability, usually got to volunteer for the neatest exercises because her hand always shot up while the others sort of sheepishly scanned each other to see who was going to go first. It was not until nearly the end of the week before some of the older girls decided to pull age rank in order to get in on some of the fun. They did all have some pretty good questions by the last day that seemed to indicate they were leaving with the desire to learn more.

The week culminated with a Saturday night Showcase Concert featuring 16 all-girl bands, each playing a one-song set, and it was pleasantly amazing to see how far they all came along in one week. The bands were mixed ages and experience, but each had a good enough mix to pull off their one song with varying degrees of aplomb. For instance, one band had a 17 year old lead guitar and vocalist, with some mid-teen girls on bass and keyboards, and a 10 year old drummer (from the recording class) who was amazingly good. Together they sounded great, and not one of the bands had any nightmare off-beat or off-key like embarrassing moments. Plus they played to a full house in a fairly large campus concert hall, so I'm certain that all them -- whether they were intensely concentrated on their part or experienced enough to loosen up and groove a little -- experienced their dream for at least one night. I wish they had had something like this when we were kids.

Keybo Gives His Body for Science

I've received the final pathology report on Keybo, so here is the third and final part on what happened to him. This will get a bit graphic, so I'm warning you.

Keybo died on June 18, 2007. As I've reported previously, he had been slowing down and behaving differently, and he had the whole funky thing going on with his eye. I had been taking photos of the fish, trying to get a good look at what was going on with Keybo, but he was the hardest to capture, until I turned off the pump for a few minutes on June 15 and captured some good images of the fish in relatively still water. Yet, what I wasn't seeing was what was happening to Keybo.

As sick or "not himself" as Keybo had been, I hardly suspected that I would be finding him lying on the pond on Monday morning. I don't remember which side he was lying on, and while I made a quick trip to the grocery store to buy a bag of ice, my wife got him out of the pond. I really wished she hadn't done that though.

What I missed from the photos on the previous Friday was that Keybo was simply rotting away from the inside. It was very obvious when I saw the right side of his face, especially the lower part beneath the eye I had been paying so much attention to. In the curvature of his face in the water, I had missed that his face was wasting away.

It took a while to figure out what to do, but I wanted to know what killed Keybo, and to get some idea of what Dreamcicle and Blue might be facing, if it was contagious. Normally we would just bury a fish somewhere in the garden.

I ended up taking Keybo in for a Necropsy at the C.E. Kord Animal Disease Laboratory in Nashville, TN. It's part of the Tennessee Department of Agriculture. There I met Dr. Edward R. McKinley, a Veterinarian. Dr. McKinley was very patient with me and allowed me to give him some long and extensive background on the history of the Buddha Pond, its residents and the specifics of what had been going on with Keybo.

The diagnosis is in: Keybo died of Hemorrhagic Septicemia. His body was full of a bacteria known as Aeromonas Hydrophila. Whatever had been going on with right eye had extended right into the skeletal muscles of that same side of his head. No significant lesions were found in his heart, intestines, pancreas or gills. There were mildly inflamed cells in his liver, kidneys and spleen.

Bacterial cultures had been made from samples of his liver, a lung, his eye and gills. CFU is the measure of Colony Forming Units of, in this case, the Aeromonas Hydrophila. The breakdown looked like this:

Liver - 50 CFU
Lung - 50 CFU
Eye - 100 CFU
Gill - 100 CFU

From what I read, Aeromonas Hydrophila is common in fresh water. It can infect humans as well as fish. It's very aggressive once it takes hold, but it needs some way to get an upper hand, such as a wound or an otherwise impaired immune system.

Keybo did have those nasty wounds. The ones that made me wonder—facetiously, of course—if he used to sneak out of the pond and get into bar fights. Otherwise, I don't understand why Keybo's immune system would have been compromised, at least not any more so than the other two fish in the pond.

Now I'm concerned about Dreamcicle and Blue. Dreamcicle in particular. She does not look in to be ill in any way. The only difference in her that I've detected since Keybo's death is behavior. It's been all over the map, though, until recently. When Keybo was first gone she spent a day or two fussing about the pond, as though she was inspecting it and trying to find out where he had gone.

We have plant baskets in the pond, though there was nothing in them yet when this happened. She kept trying to get behind them, and at one point she got herself stuck on top of one of them. Fortunately it happened while I was around to see it and rescue her. But for days now she has hardly been herself. She just sort of hangs in the pond. She'll pick a spot and just hang there for a long time.

When Keybo started isolating himself it was easy to notice. Keybo generally cruised around the pond on his own and/or was more or less forced into frolicking with Dreamcicle as she tended to pay a lot of attention to Keybo, almost like she was nagging him half the time. When he started avoiding the other two fish, hanging out in "corners" of the pond, and when he stopped swimming away from me when I approached the pond (he was a scaredy-cat), those were all such obvious changes that I couldn't help but to notice.

With Keybo gone, it's difficult to say what Dreamcicle's normal behavior should be, without him around. I have to confess I don't know all that much about Blue. That's mostly because he is so hard to see and therefore so easy to ignore, other than at feeding time (which is a change in itself, this year). With only two fish left I've paid more attention to him lately. Blue seems to hang nearby and show some kind of deference towards Dreamcicle. Otherwise he goes for slow cruises around the pond, like a stealthy submarine.

Meanwhile, however, Dreamcicle is doing a lot more idle "hanging" than I've ever seen her do. While I don't know her to be a "bottom feeder" per se, she has always seem to enjoy "grazing" from the bottom of the pond. It's common to find tiny Bloodworms down there, and they are the larvae of Midge flies, and we have those, too. So I don't often panic when she seems to ignore fish food, because I imagine she's already found herself plenty to eat.

But because of Keybo dying from this horrible bacteria that rotted him away from the inside, I'm concerned now about both of the fish, because Dreamcicle is acting different and Blue is nearly impossible to inspect for sores, because of his color. I've put some MediKoi into the pond, which is supposed to be a rich food which contains anti-bacterial medicine, but Dreamcicle doesn't seem to be eating it. It's difficult to tell because it sinks to the bottom of the pond. Their usual food floats.

It's driving me nuts, that's for sure. I don't want to lose any more fish.

I miss Keybo. He was kind of ugly, but it was fun watching him and Dreamcicle. He got so big and by all measures that meant I had an overcrowded pond. But everything seems out of balance now. Three fish seems like such a good number to have.

Funky Organic Fireworks

I thought I was all prepared for my first attempt at fireworks photography, but not quite. I remembered the camera, the tripod, the remote and a black ball cap (see tip 11), but I forgot to bring the removable do-hickey from my tripod that I need to attach my camera to the tripod, so I had to go with hand-held.

Also, we were going to go to the usual city fireworks show at the MTSU campus in Murfreesboro, but one of my friends hurt her foot and was hobbling around, so we settled for the neighborhood shows, of which there were quite a few that were visible right from a driveway.

A lot of fireworks are completely legal here, including some larger sized rockets and mortars. The last two nights, from about 8:30 to midnight, have sounded as though there was sectarian violence going on in the Boro. Not a fun time for our poor old dog, Pip.

I shot over 100 images of fireworks. Handheld, manual shots for 1 and 2 second exposures. Many are no good, but I have some interesting ones, and the hand-held aspect adds a funky, organic look to the shapes of the streaks, making many look like some strange, luminous sea creatures or palm trees.







Tonight I made a desktop image composite in Photoshop. Fortunately I had one decent photo of the street with nothing happening, and then I added my favorite streaks and bursts from the previous night, in layers, and arranged them in rough approximation to the different neighborhood shows that were around us.

I had pretty much stayed in one spot last night, as it was the best vantage point for all the different mini-shows going on around me. There were some guys out in the street in front of the house to my immediate left. Theirs were the easiest for me to track, because I could watch them light them. Some of their shots went out and away from us, and a few of their best ones went directly over my head.

In between them and the space to my right were about 4 distant, neighborhood shows, of varying distance. Behind me, on my right, there was a pretty good show going on in a backyard, but only a few of the bursts made it above the tall trees.



I do wish I'd been able to use my tripod. Of course I'll try again next year, but last night was a good fireworks night, weatherwise. The sky was clear and there was enough of a breeze to keep the smoke clearing pretty fast.

On the other hand, I was really impressed with the effectiveness of the Shake Reduction of my K10D. I was moving pretty quickly, from side to side, up and down, with barely enough prepping to then stand still for 2 seconds. So, funky as they look, I'm pleased that I got the number of decent shots that I did.

This is Encouraging

I found this post on a movie blog site. It's about how a cadre of regular folks in the Dallas area responded to Michael Moore's new movie, Sicko. It woke them up.

Sicko started; the stereotypical Texas guy sat down behind me and never stopped talking. He talked through the entire movie… and I listened. The first ten to twenty minutes of the film he spent badmouthing Moore to his wife and snorting in disgust whenever MM went into one of his trademark monologues. But as the movie wore on his protestations became quieter, less enthusiastic. Somewhere along the way, maybe at the half way point, right before my ears, Sicko changed this man’s mind. By the forty-five minute mark, he, along with the rest of the audience were breaking into spontaneous applause. He stopped pooh-poohing the movie and started shouting out “hell yeah!” at the screen. It was as if the whole world had been flipped upside down. This is Texas, where people support the president and voting democratic is something only done by the terrorists. Michael Moore should be public enemy number one.

I also found a pretty good review on the site.

Happy 4th of July

But be careful!

Waves of shock poured through this Downriver city Tuesday after a grassroots picnic with a $1,000 fireworks show ended in horror -- a grand finale of 25 blastoffs and lights illuminating the motionless body of Danialle Barse, 27, of Taylor.

She had bent over to see why the first firework didn't launch. Moments later, it did. The explosive meant to propel 200-300 feet into the air struck her head, and a crowd of 30 -- including her three sons and fiancee -- could do nothing as the rest of the show cascaded above.

White House FAX

I don't know about you, but I had just had to thank the president for his open endorsement for lying by letting Scooter Libby off the hook.

So I have composed and sent the following letter as a fax.

The President
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Ave NW
Washington, DC 20500
FAX:202-456-2461

Tuesday, July 3, 2007

Dear Mr. President,

Thanks so much for all you have done to restore honor and decency to the great American tradition of lying to prosecutors and grand juries. Your profound decision, in support of those we look up to and count on to serve our nations interests, to uphold their rights to lie with impunity sends such an important message to liars and thieves everywhere. Not only is it a wonderful gesture in celebration of freedom on the eve of our great country’s 231st birthday, there couldn’t be a stronger endorsement of the kinds of values we try hard everyday to instill in our children. “Go ahead,” we can now tell them, “lie all you want to. There’s nothing wrong with lying—look, even the President says so. In fact, I’ll bet he and his administration do it everyday!”

I thank God, sir, that the stain of your legacy has been so devoutly preserved.

Sincerely,

Me

Hmm. It doesn't seem to be going through.

updated:They got it.

Here's Blue

I'm not kidding. If you don't see him, keep looking. He's really there. If you click on the small image you can see the desktop sized image.

Blue is blue. Blue is cool. Not much else I can say about him other than there probably isn't a day that goes by that I don't panic at least for a moment and think that he's gone, before I eventually find him. Finding Blue is often like finding a star by using another star as a reference point. That is, to find Blue, most often you need to find Dreamcicle, and Blue is usually about a foot or less away on either side and a little behind. If Dreamcicle is busy swimming about the pond, he usually is too, almost following, but always at a respectful distance to allow her some space.

While I wouldn't go so far as to say Dreamcicle ignores Blue, she certainly doesn't seem inclined to herd him around like she often did to Keybo, and even Nabu when he was around, even though they both dwarfed her in size.

Blue was very small and timid when first introduced to the pond in the late Summer of 2003. Being so small and dark blue made it terribly difficult to keep track of him. He was small enough to hide behind the plant baskets in the pond. There were times back then when I didn't see him for days at a time. I suppose it's possible it was also difficult for the other fish to see him, and that they only sort of gradually became aware of his presence.

These days Blue is not afraid of us, but neither does he go out of his way to approach us when we stand near the pond, unless he is hungry. Even then he often defers to the brave one, Dreamcicle, and let's her get the closest while he waits to see if she has any luck in getting us to fork out some dinner. If food comes forth, he'll bravely join in the feast, simply keeping a watchful eye on us.

Overall, Blue seems to have the temperament of a cow, blissfully chewing his cud. Just a good ol' friendly fish.

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This photo of Blue was pretty heavily processed in Photoshop, in order to make Blue visible. He's almost totally invisible in the original RAW camera image. The processing was mostly color processing. I didn't really pump Blue's color at all, but I did pump up the reds and yellows in the gravel at the bottom of the pond, in order to increase the color contrast enough to make Blue stand out.