kbobam

I think I need to narrow things down a bit if I'm going to be fair about this. This is something you might see in your house, but hopefully you never will. It looks almost exactly like it does here. I just increased the contrast a little bit. You're looking at it from about one foot away, and looking straight down. It's not a normal situation, and it isn't pretty, in the same way a murder scene isn't.

Although I tweaked this photograph a little bit to give it a cleaner more 'abstract' look, it's still pretty close to reality. I know there's at least one person here who might recognize it immediately!

(I have a school essay somewhere that I wrote when I was a little kid. There's a big red circle around my description of all of us as 'human beans'.) Back to the present! Apparently Galen doesn't (or didn't) suffer from the rare condition referred to by 'Sheldon' here. I hope very much that our dear friend is still 'with us' and didn't turn himself into an incendiary device. ( :

Here's a wonderful moment (well I think so!) from the living room in 'The Goldbergs' television show. (This show is set in the 1980's.) A beautiful old Trinitron television (dare I add 'set'?) with a genuine 80's holiday-time 'splash-screen'!

I'll have to save my take on Fargo for later. Loved it last season. It was a real breath of fresh air, and that doesn't happen on television all that often. The first episode this season was good, but it seemed like the powers that be had made a distinct decision to give it a slightly different 'feel'. Haven't seen any more of them, but have been recording them. Getting the thumbs up from you guys now has me psyched to watch them! ( :

That Alley 7up has always been a favorite of mine!

The 'f', 'j', and numeric keypad '5' keys on your keyboard very likely have some form of small raised 'bump' on them. Did you notice?

Mushrooms are the one thing to which I'm seriously allergic. There seems to be a 'threshold' where I can have a tiny little bit, but no more. For this stuff I'm willing to take the risk. ( :

Okay. It was a week or so ago. I'm only thinking about eating it 'right now'. Because in this movie, the girl on the right asked the one and only question that's on my mind that time of year. And got the answer she and I would both be hoping for. And did the little 'yes dance' just like I would.

I would have recorded that one if I'd seen it listed! I always like to have an episode on hand, because when you're in that perfect Love Boat mood it's a really great show. Particularly when you just know it's going to be one of those stand-out episodes. ( :

Galen's use of the word involving Groucho is probably the most common approach and the best 'definition'. Your 'schtick' is your 'thing'. What you do. Especially if it's slightly unusual, somewhat exaggerated, and intentional. It was okay the way I said it, in the sense that 'network schtick' is the same stupid stuff you see on TV over and over again even though it's painfully bad, but 'kitsch' would have been a better word to mean 'gaudy', 'overdone', and 'corny'. ( :

The Dollar Tree usually has 40 tablet bottles of ibuprofen for a buck! ( :

Hope you find some clarifolutions to your queronders! Thanks for a really neat post! ( :

Not long ago a friend suggested an approach to dealing with flare-ups and the occasional hard knock to my bad shoulder/upper arm area. I don't know exactly what's wrong with me either, so this may or may not be useful, but it seemed to work well, and it was an interesting concept I'd never heard of. The basic idea is that you take the anti-inflammatory pain-reliever of your choice, but you stick to a 'schedule' of continuing to take it for a few days. In this sense, it's similar to what they tell you about continuing to take your antibiotics even though you feel fine. The thinking here is that you want to make sure you're keeping any inflammation in check, which helps the healing process, even if your immediate pain stopped fairly quickly. And this allows you to comfortably 'push' the limits of your range-of-motion, in the physical therapy sense, which will bring back your full range more quickly. ( :

Going to talk about marbles now! And I'm going to skip all the diagrams and theory and explanations! (But you have to let me have this one slightly overdone advertising statement just for the fun of it.) What I'm going to tell you is The ONE BIG SECRET TECHNIQUE that world-famous marble photographers DON'T WANT YOU TO KNOW ABOUT! Here is why you might find it worthwhile to try some close-up marble photos using manual focus: The best shots are going to be when you're focused right on the point of where the marble is closest to you. Reflections of the lights you're using are likely to fool your camera's auto-focus into focusing on them, and they're not going to be on the closest part of the marble. Try aiming a laser-pointer on that closest point, and fine-tune your manual focus on that. That's it! See ya! ( :

Music, Music, Music! Yep, that's the show this stuff is from. Apparently Richard Carpenter thinks it was the best television show they ever did. The title gives a clue as to 'why'. It was pretty much all music. Which is to say that there wasn't any 'schtick' involved. (Another terrific Germanic word that Hoody will appreciate!) It was almost inconceivable that this schtick-free program was allowed to air. It wasn't the sort of thing that networks thought would 'sell' at the time. Glad that it somehow got put on! For those who aren't from the right locations to be familiar with the word 'schtick', in this case it refers to the situation where a performance is stupidly 'over-done' in order to fit pre-conceived 'rules'. Kind of like when the networks decided that The Brady Bunch could make a successful show performing as a 'singing group'! Oh geesh. I think I'm going to wretch. ( :

I feel reasonably sure that this spot isn't an artifact. But it could be, and I'm really glad you brought up that concept! Anyone who has any interest in experimenting with longer than normal exposure times needs to know that modern digital cameras do sometimes create 'dots' like this, or other little blobs of color that aren't actually there, when using these long exposure times. There might be a 'setting' on many people's camera that addresses this issue. On my camera it's called "Long Exposure Noise Reduction". This name is very misleading! It has absolutely no connection with any of the other 'noise-reduction' settings you may have. If you can identify what your particular camera 'names' this setting, there really isn't any reason you shouldn't have it set to 'on'. It won't have any effect at all on the normal photos you take most of the time. Personally, I have all the other noise-reduction settings turned 'off'. They definitely have a noticeable effect on your normal photos. Whether you want this effect is a matter of personal taste in terms of how you want your photo to look. But basically, using any noise-reduction other than the one for this special-situation is a case of intentionally blurring your photos in an effort to avoid any 'grainy' look. Your photos will look 'smooth', but they won't be as razor-sharp as they could be. Not worth it in my opinion. ( :

The 'mentioned spot' is definitely a little elusive depending upon one's viewing conditions. I was kind of amused at one point to realize that staying away from 'ambient light' (in this case, turning off my desk lamp) and looking slightly to the side made it much easier to locate on my computer monitor. Just like you'd do in the wild, looking up at the sky!

Good stuff! Several of us here are very fond of this guy and his colleagues, who in recent years have brought a new appreciation for physics to this country, even though it's a silly (but great) TV show. Although it's particularly nice when he uses marbles to think about molecular or DNA related problems, we forgive him when he uses pieces of corn and peas from his lunch. ( :

This is from the last 'television special' done by The Carpenters. Sorry I can't post video/audio here! Maybe this is on-line somewhere. I haven't looked. This is one of those moments which is pretty hard to beat. If you're not familiar with these women, all I can tell you is that their singing-voices aren't too shabby.

I like it. It might be real, but it's also a crazy abstract! ( :

Okay, I'm not going to win any 'most spectacular sunsets' competition with this one. But it was a nice quiet moment. ( :

Is 'lengua' what I think it might be?

Thanks, guys! I almost made the mistake of giving my new restaurant one of those traditional hoity-toity British-pub-sounding names like 'The Gilded Lily' or 'The Homburged Hound'. But now it's definitely going to be 'The Slurp 'n' Burp'!

Sounds like a more than reasonable approach to me! Let's see. I think I can add the last bits of the focusing technique experiment now. Take a photo of the night sky or those distant mountains in the usual auto-focus way. Now switch over to manual focus. At this point you'll be focusing in one of several ways. If you have a traditional lens with a genuine focusing-ring you'll be using that. Otherwise you'll probably be using 'up and down' push-buttons, or an awkward 'control wheel' like me. Regardless of the method, you'll now be involved with doing a slowly shrinking back-and-forth motion until you're pretty sure you have the focus just right. It's easiest to do with something small and bright, so stars at night are a good example. If you're shooting something on terra firma during the day, a bright reflection in the distance is also good. These bright spots make the focusing easier because adjusting the focus back and forth will make the spot look bigger either way you go. What you want is to make the spot appear as small as possible. (The 'spot' doesn't even have to actually be in the photo you're taking. It's just for establishing the camera setting. Feel free to take distant shots in a completely different direction!) So having done that, take another shot and take a close look at both of them on your computer later. If they look identical, terrific! No worries! But if your manually-focused shot is better, it's nice to know that you have this option. Talking too much again. Some things never change. Will add the last part about manual focus and marble photography in the near-future for those who can stand it! ( :