Posts

I Fell In Love With Those Curves.

Image
I saw the flower of the melissa plant on my balcony and fell in love with the curves. The flowers die pretty quickly and the one I wanted to look at with my Veho was a poor shriveled up thing by the time I got round to it. Luckily others had blossomed in the meantime, but even then it took me a while to find one which matched my inital impression. Here are the first attempts, the width of each of these photos is about 1cm. Then I found her: A tiny thing but leaping up out of the green with a hairy tongue sticking out and a smaller spiral one almost hidden within the mouth. Ah, those curves, those curves... especially the upper one going up at more than 45° then sloping over towards the mouth. Is it just me?

Of Socks and Sandals.

Image
Are you one of those mediocre minded sheep humans who thinks that people who wear sandals with socks are sexual perverts (at worst) or unimaginative techies (at best)? If so, switch off your brain (already in standbye it seems), stop reading this and get back to posting photos of your latest meal on FaceBook. I've decided that instead of staying in the summer office all day with steaming sweaty smelly feet it would be best to wear sandals, with or without socks. But since I live in a fashion dictatorship (where fat girls show off rolls of flesh above tight jeans and thin women clump loudly and clumsily around on shoes that make them look as if they have two wooden legs and men wear long floppy knitted hats because, because, well, because, why???)... Hmmm. Got distracted. Anyway. As I was saying since I live in a fashion dictactorship I have to wear sandals with socks, secretly . So I have to find black sandals and always were them with black socks. Well Owen, I can h

Nostalgia

Image
Nostalgia is not necessarily for a long time ago. I'm oddly nostalgic for last Christmas. Christmas 2014. The cat had an ischemia the day before Christmas Eve. I could not believe it, suddenly his back legs just went floppy. Within a few seconds. He started to drag himself around the room, back legs laying out behind him like two extra shorter tails. It was horrible and sad to watch. So Christmas Eve was spent at various vets, and the conclusion was, that he'd probably regain some control and power in his legs, but not be as he was before. I did not believe them. We were told to help him regain this power and control by lifting his back end up with a scarf under his belly and accompanying him on his walks around the garden. Only using two front legs fo 90% of the work. It was a terrible time. Ok, not terrible like being in a country invaded by ISIS, or having a nearest and dearest being diagnosed with incurable cancer. I know, I know, but I have got it all in

Spider on Mint

Image
I've already blogged about how much I like my Veho (and how to get 200X magnification out of it ) so when I saw a tiny spider on my mint plant I decided it was time to get the USB microscope out again. I brought the mint plant into the house onto the computer table, but as usual getting things into focus and at a decent magnification is a bit of a struggle. I managed like this: You can see the tiny dot of the spider in real life and its image from the Veho on the screen. It is about 1mm large. I balanced the microscope stand on a book and a box and was careful not to break the web of the spider: It was disturbed by me poking around in its jungle and started to run around a bit. I managed to get a few more nice shots: The motion blur below was caused by the spider running around too much. Aren't nature, science and engineering wonderful?

Credits.

Image
  Nice photo eh? Who should get the credit? I think credit should be given to... The universe for being so strange and beautiful. The designers of the optics of the camera. The designers of the electronics of the camera. The programmers who wrote the software inside the camera. The production engineers who put it all together so reliably and cheaply. The photographer did 0.0001% of the work compared with those above.

Scary Chewing Gum – The Super-People

Image
I was chewing away on some gum when I suddenly noticed the picture on the box... … I mean just look at those people! Don't they seem like super human giants just ready to take over the world? It looks like the designer found a stock photo of some healthy Scandinavian blue-eyed blondes and added extra-big teeth. The image scares me. And it is false advertising, I've chewed through a ton of this stuff, but my hair is still grey, my eyes are still grey and I still don't smile wildly like they do. And what are they looking at? The universe and beings they dominate?

Intelligent women and stupid men

She was young and intelligent, and because she was intelligent she had doubts. He was young and stupid, and, because he was stupid, he had no doubts. When she suggested that she'd like to become a doctor, maybe even a medical researcher, he smiled down at her, full of love and condescension, and told her that women were not made for that sort of thing. Women were too delicate and not intellectually capable of the effort required. He was very sure of what he said. She was full of doubt, and accepted his clear conviction of his own rightness. It was that sort of culture. Over the next fifteen years she came to understand (without a doubt) that he really was stupid. And realised she'd wasted her life because of him.