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One of the key selling features of the Lumix DMC-TZ80 compact camera is its 30x optical zoom lens. That's a full frame equivalent of 24-720mm! Now, it is a Leica Elmar variable lens, so the quality is good, but as you'd expect with something that tries to do so much in such a small camera, this is going to produce a lot of distortion at the edges at certain focal lengths.
Here is a test shot with the zoom almost fully deployed. It did not require any cropping and as you can see the colour and clarity for an 18 MP sensor is more than acceptable. And notice you don't get those nasty sharp edges you do with a cell phone.
Silvereye (Zosterops lateralis)
We had a flock of Silvereyes vist our back garden this morning. This was the only one that paused long enough to take a shot.
I read a little less this year than usual. I found when my dad passed this summer, I became quickly wrapped up in the funeral and all of the things you have to take care of and then it took awhile to build up my concentration again. I only read 140 books this year, which is far lower than my usual amount of over 200. One year, I read 365 books! So, I slacked off this year. I found myself lingering along different pages and chapters more so than ever. Here are some of my favorite books that I read. They didn’t all come out this year but time is an illusion anyway.
I'd love to hear about all of your favorite reads from this year or other years!
Photo above is a multiple exposure from Iceland..a reading/study room with a landscape photo in honor of my favorite read of the year.
1. Rooms for Vanishing by Stuart Nadler
A real wonder of a book about different possibilities, split timelines, divergent futures confronting the personal horrors of WWII in one of the most creative and thought provoking ways I’ve ever seen. I read several chapters again and again and felt like this was one of the most philosophical and creative books Ive ever read!
2. The Membranes by Chi Ta-wei
Extremely ahead of its time and published originally 30 years ago and translated into English fairly recently. This is a glimpse of a future world which many facets have proved to be fairly accurate predictions but it is also about queer identity and is written sort of like a gay Taiwanese young William Gibson might write it. Wholly original!
3. Is a River Alive? by Robert McFarlane
Yes, a river is very much alive! This is a wondrous work of nonfiction that really explores some diverse and hard to reach areas of nature and its effect on both the nearby inhabitants and the visitors like this author. I loved its sense of environmental advocacy and questioning why we would allot personhood to corporations but not bodies of water, for instance. You really feel like you go on a psychological journey with the author and learn so much between the rivers he explores and the people he meets.
Thanks to my friend Bob for this recommendation!
4. Future Home of the Living God by Louise Erdrich
There was a period of my life where I just didn’t quite get Erdrich for some reason…it just didn’t click…but now, I am reading at least a couple of books a year by her. This is really a striking book about desperate women who have lost all body autonomy. Her books are always well written and engaging but this one felt more fast paced and thrilling than the others in style and topic.
5. House of Day, House of Night: by Olga Tokarczuk
I really love how Tokarczuk writes about dreams and mushrooms in this one especially. There is quite a bit about religion as well as physical gender identity within that religious space and a really interesting sense of the people who live in Poland in a border town with Germany and remnants of WWII even. She just has a really poetic way of writing.
6. The Measure by Nikki Erlick
I read this on recommendation from my sister in law in one sitting on the plane to Los Angeles. It is one of the most engaging book I have ever read and a speculative fiction masterpiece exploring the psychology behind lifespan and how society might change if everyone over 21 was sent a single string of a certain length that told them how much longer they would live….but not how they would die. Fascinating storyline and very well executed…I kept wondering how I would handle this situation myself. Another book that made me cry this year…I guess I am a bit of a mess! Apparently, this was an “instant” NYT Bestseller back in 2022 but I hadn’t heard of it until my sister in law mentioned it…I guess I just don’t pay attention to popular culture.
7. Archipelago of the Sun by Yoko Tawada
This is the third book of the trilogy of friends where Tawada explores language and identity within the context of our current world and its insistence on borders and a national identity that not all have and definitely not all share the same level of privilege. These friends are so diverse and interesting and also one of the characters and their transitioning identity is also explored so it is rather complex but also very thought provoking and meditative the way she writes…you just want to linger on certain sentences again and again.
8. Tell Me Everything by Erika Krouse
I read three books by Erika Krouse and loved all three-this one is nonfiction and is about all of the horrific ways a football team takes advantage of, persecutes, and threatens women and how deep the cover up goes. Krouse is helping the investigator while also going through the horrors of her past and personal identity. I was honestly not expecting to find this book as engaging as I did but Krouse is an exceptional author whose short stories Save Me, Stranger have stuck with me for many months and who also writes vivid characters in fiction books (see Contenders). Highly recommended!!
9. The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and his Mother) by Rabih Alameddine
If you ever have the chance to see Rabih Alameddine speak, DO IT! I saw him a few years back after Trump was office the first time around and he spoke about how art including writing is in and of itself an act of resistance. This book is both tragic and funny. There’s an image of our protagonist hero escaping a bunker during a civil war in Lebanon that actually had me laughing so hard I’m surprised I could stop. But, this is also a portrait study of a city and how it changed when the fighting began and equally an exploration of a mother and her gay son as they navigate through their relationship across decades. This is technically fiction but reads at times like an autobiography and, after all, it is a true true story.
10. The Dream Hotel by Laila Lalami
This book scared the crap out of me and if it had been published when she first had started working on it, it would have been even more terrifying. The premise reads like a Black Mirror story where there are corporations who own and monitor your dreams and might even insert products into them. You can also be suspect based on your dreams but people give up their dreams in desperate situations just to fall asleep….very riveting and terrifying!
11. Poets Square Cats by Courtney Gustafson
I’ve been following this author’s cat rescue in Tucson, Arizona for a few years now but only had part of the story before I read this book. This is the autobiographical back story of the author and cat rescuer herself and the ways in which becoming a full time cat rescuer changed her and perhaps made her more human or at least helped her focus her values and what being alive truly means to her. She is doing very good work and it is important to support this work. This book also gives the back story behind so many important characters, many of whom don’t seem quite so feral when you see their true feline selves in her way. A book to be treasured!
12. Sunbirth by An Yu
I loved her speculative novel Ghost Music and this new one is even more bizarre and has an apocalyptic angle about the sun slowly disappearing and people in this town being enveloped by and exploding with light. None of the characters know what it is like in other cities and towns and some try to escape but, after all, the sun is something we all share so you wonder how it could be different when it is the same major problem occurring. I loved these astounding characters and the sense of imagination here.
13. ACLU The Fight of the Century: Edited by Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman
Never has there been a more important time to stand up for human rights and also understand the history of human rights. I loved some of the authors responding to historical cases that are organized chronologically. Yea Gyasi Viet Thanh Nguyen, Elizabeth Strout, Salman Rushdie, Aleksander Hemon, Brit Bennett, Li Yiyun, Rabih Alameddine, Louise Erdrich, and Anthony Doerr amongst main more give us glimpses into their own personal history and how these cases may have impacted them. Some of these chapters are also critical of the ACLU’s stance too in some aspects in a healthy way as in the case of campaign funding, for example. Regardless, it’s an organization under great threat in America whose continued existence is vital.
14. Bad Bad Girl by Gish Jen
This is partly a memoir of the author but also an exploration of her mother’s past and her ancestry from back in Shanghai. It explores the horrors of the history they lived through while her mother escaped to America but it’s also an engaging imaginary conversation Gish Jen has with her mother who suffered sexism in her own life and treats her daughter as if she should also be quiet and easy and not have so many opinions. But Gish Jen is a phenomenal author of so many great fictional stories exploring culture and identity and she will always be a Good Bad Girl that we should be grateful for. Thank goodness for the women who don’t succumb to societal and family pressures put on us.
15. My Beloved Monster: Masha, the Half-Wild Rescue Cat Who Rescued Me by Caleb Carr
An extraordinary nonfiction work that really had me on the edge of my seat several times and crying at others. This is a story of a human who Is battling a personal history with physical abuse and has gone through several surgeries that have been only minimally successful. He is an acclaimed author (I haven’t read any of his other books) and lives alone when he decides to adopt a cat later on in life. I just love how he explores his relationship with his cat and the cat’s personality and sense of adventure. This is actually a story about two wandering souls who find each other and meet in the middle and I do believe that they have found each other again in the ether of the afterlife.
16. Generosity by Richard Powers
I read four different books by Powers this year. If you haven’t read his work, it’s quite masterful! He is one of those authors that has great ideas and can truly craft a complex storyline and bring it all back home in an impressive way. This one is interesting because it focuses on an immigrant who by all accounts should be miserable…she has very little and her parents have been murdered and her brother imprisoned. At one point, she is even sexually molested. Still, throughout all of this, our protagonist, Thassadit Amzwar. remains happy and joyful in a way that others just can’t quite seem to manage or understand. As one might imagine, people try to diagnose her as if something is wrong with her and study her DNA…things go so haywire because other humans literally just can’t imagine how this human could be this happy when the rest of us are so depressed.
17. Bewilderment by Richard Powers
This book really got to me in so many ways…it’s so much about the relationship between a father and a son who is neurodivergent and tests him in so many ways but it is also about biofeedback, flexible thinking, and consciousness after death. It is filled with wonder and sorrow both and really explores the complexity of human consciousness.
18. Beyond Anxiety by Martha Beck
I read quite a few nonfiction books this year related to flexible thinkers, nature, human consciousness existing after death, and octopuses but this one really resonated with me in the sense that it helped me immediately to manage my anxiety and is highly recommended to any artists. There are people in this world who consume art and those who create art and those who do both. I am probably in the latter category because I create art but also really love being part of an international community like Flickr and don’t really enjoy participating in other social media type of sites that seem to focus more on making oneself look cool or rich or just a made up version of a human.
This nonfiction is about how creativity can cancel out the heightened anxiety that threatens to overwhelm us every day. If you start to feel the heightened sensation taking over like you can’t even breathe except to scream, maybe this book is for you. Also, just sitting down and doing art for hours is indeed a luxury and makes it hard to go back to the “real world” of capitalism, etc. but sometimes this is exactly what self care is needed
19. A Love Story From the End of the World by Juhea Kim
I loved the wild weirdness and environmental focus of these short stories set all across the world in this time of climate chaos and political upheaval. Kim is an author and activist with a truly creative spirit!
20. After by Bruce Greyson M.D.
After what happened this summer with my dad passing, I read a ton of nonfiction regarding human consciousness continuing and this one really goes through quite a variety of Near Death Experiences and how it also ends up changing people. It’s a really fascinating look into human consciousness and how it continues from a medical expert. I am fascinated by these human stories and really enjoy the perspective of someone from a background in Science. I do believe that, when the body dies, the consciousness and soul of the spirit does continue and that most of us have already lived multiple lives at this point.
Honorable Mentions:
The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong
Annihilation by Michel Houellebecq
The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai
Mailman: My Wild Ride Delivering the Mail in Appalachia and Finally Finding Home by Stephen Starring Grant
**All photos are copyrighted**
If you are the squeamish sort, you will likely never see a margined carrion beetle in the wild. These forest-dwelling beetles live on dead animals, the larger the better. Females lay their eggs in rotting flesh and upon hatching, larvae eat that decaying tissue. As a way of helping their young, adult margined carrion beetles eat the fly maggots that are competing with their larvae for rotten flesh. The larvae transform into adults by late summer and adults overwinter in the forest duff. Notice how much this margined carrion beetle looks like a firefly. Fireflies are very toxic and few predators bother them, so the margined carrion beetle likely benefits from that association - if the smell of rotting meat doesn't repel predators already😃 Margined carrion beetles are also useful in forensic investigations since their arrival at the crime scene can help determine the time of death - they show up after they've got some fly maggots to feed on.
"Yeah, it's a floatplane, but it usually needs something larger than a puddle to land on with gears up.."
Dominion Proving Grounds: maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Jaguar/188/215/1096
A grizzly cub. with nose to the water, scavenges along the shoreline by the spring grasses and rockweed at low tide, Khutzeymateen Inlet, BC.
22/12/2019 www.allenfotowild.com
DRS' 88010 'Aurora' and 68004 'Rapid' pass the along the sea wall at Saltcoats with 6M23 from Hunterston to Sellafield. This service is used to move nuclear material from the Hunterston nuclear power stations to Sellafield for processing.
Hunterston in North Ayrshire is home to 2 nuclear power stations - Hunterston A and Hunterston B.
Hunterston A operated between 1964 and 1990 and is in the process of being decommissioned by NDA licensee Magnox Ltd. The decommissioning process is planned to end in 2072 at which point the buildings will be demolished and site cleared.
Hunterston B - operated by EDF Energy - is still active having started operations in 1976. The station has managed to remain operational for longer than initially expected (decommissioning was due to start in 2011), but operations will cease within the next few months with the decommissioning process planned to start no later than the 7th of January 2022.
Within the last decade Hunterston B has gained media attention after it was discovered that the number of fractures in the reactors exceeded the operational limit specified in the safety case. The reactors were shut down while investigations were carried out and a revised safety case submitted to the regulator. Each of the 2 reactors were subsequently restarted in August 2020 and September 2020 respectively.
Playing with dry ice
EXPLORE image
Como dijo mi gran amigo: "Todo es efimero, aunque pensemos lo contrario"
Yeah, I took some night courses to escape my 9-5. You may think I am lounging around but I am here to catch a man cheating on his wife. This is my first case and I am here because I had been following the husband, He comes here to this dark place every Friday and meets a Buxom Blond. I have heard people calling her Lily. In the background, I hear a huge fan and people chattering. I don't even smoke but the cigar is part of my blending in , This Newspaper? It's a blur. I am watching them dancing and recording it. Hey, it's none of my business what he does but I do this cos I am, Gabriel: PI
Job 11:11 “For He knows false men, and He sees iniquity without investigating.”
“Guatemala is investigating U.S. NGOs for child trafficking, seeks Texas AG collaboration”
saraacarter.com/guatemala-is-investigating-u-s-ngos-for-c...
It is a pretty big lake/pond at Earlswood Lakes - this is the bottom pond by the car park and Bacon Bap serving place . There is another bigger pond at a slightly higher level which overspills down into the lower pond down a flight of steps .
Anyway , here are three of the swans , I have not managed to do a swan count but there are quite a few more -I guess between two or three dozen at a rough guess !!
If you look closely at the nearest part of the crop circle you can see a couple of circle investigators. They give an idea to the scale of this work of art.
Camera: Hasselblad 500 C/M medium format film camera,
Carl Zeiss f/4 150mm Sonnar lens.
Film: Kodak T-Max 100 120
Scanned by Walkens House of Film, Melbourne, Australia
This research ship sits waiting for its next mission into the Southern Ocean. It is the major oceanographic research vessel in Australia.