Vancouver, BC

Operation “Salt City" resulted in the arrest of 248 individuals from May through September 2015. Of those arrested, 124 were active gang members. During the operation 22 firearms, more than $237,000 in U.S. currency, 70 grams of heroin, 266 grams of cocaine, and 723 grams of marijuana with a total estimated street value of almost $44,000 was taken off Syracuse streets by participating agencies.

Operation Salt City is part of the U.S. Marshals nation-wide “Triple Beam” gang reduction initiative. Triple Beam partners federal, state, and local law enforcement to reduce violent crime and take dangerous offenders off the streets. The goal of the U.S. Marshals Gang Enforcement Program is to seek out and disrupt illegal gang activity in areas of the country with smaller or nonexistent gang enforcement units by providing manpower, funding and the Marshals’ renowned fugitive tracking abilities.

Photo by Shane T. McCoy / US Marshals

The notes provide lengthy, effusive biographies of the performers, which are largely fiction. Yet both were real people: Warren Edward Vincent wrote arrangements for Design, and Jean Bargy was the daughter of bandleader Roy Bargy and a pianist of some note in the New York area. Still, neither of them had anything to do with this recording! This turns out to be the same Sondra Bianca performance as on a half-dozen other LPs in this gallery. Jean Bargy's nonexistent 'participation' was even hyped in the trades. Remember, this is the label that pilfered Paray's Mercury recording of Carmen, and printed a long technobabbly paean on the back cover to the highness of their records' fidelity, written by their audio consultant Dr George Poisse-Homme...a name that translates literally to Pitch-man!

Sort of a homage to Richard Prince - probably most famous for taking shots of Marlboro ads/billboards containing photos of cowboys in picturesque vistas. I think one of them may still hold the record for highest price ever paid for a photograph at auction. They're nice shots of someone else's shot recontextualized, or maybe decontextualized. I never really understood why his cowboys were so significant. Something about commenting on the American Myth of the Wild West and the Frontier or some "inside art baseball" stuff like that. Not to denigrate his work, just never pinned my needles at a gut level (I like his Hollywood Nurses a lot better).

Maybe a hundred and fifty years later the frontier has collapsed into something smaller and personal. Maybe it's push up bras and diet shakes and Viagra. I don't know.

And maybe this owes more to Dali's paranoid critical perspective anyway in the sense that I can see him taking the original shot and rotating it and seeing how the satin sheet can be wrapping a nonexistent head, the legs can turn into arms, panties into a bra, etc.

I blew the tones though. Oh well.

H&M billboard, 21st&Chestnut (? above the PhillyCarShare lot), rotated

The world is full of amazing and gorgeous wonders - the sky and everything in it is just one of them. It's amazing how the colors that paint sunset can fade from glorious to nonexistent in the blink of an eye.

I will be like the wind to you, one that blows so fierce that you never miss its departure. Soon this turbulent wind will be as silent as the sunset that fades into the sparkling dark of night.

Photographs and words are © Copyright Galactic Dreams (or others when indicated) and are not in the public domain and may not be used on blogs, websites, or in other media without advance written permission from Galactic Dreams.

The city of Eger is noted in the history books for managing to stop the expansion of the Ottoman empire in a siege. Eger, which was defended by about 2100 people, was faced with the Ottoman army of about 150000 men - and still came out on top... Even though it later fell and was about the most north/western position the Ottomans managed to settle in it is still seen as a symbol of national heroism.

There are several nice things to see in the city for instance the city's cathedral shown here. The cathedral has both a nice exterior but above all - a very ornamental interior with painted murals covering the walls and ceiling.

I think the text writing inside the dome is a bible quote but my Hungarian is close to nonexistent so I am assuming that there are others more qualified for an identification.

I have to give an extra thanks to my friends for being kind enough to wait for me while I shot this.

You should really watch this Large On Black since that brings out more details. My pictures aren't balanced for a white background and a lot of the finer details are lost in this small format.

So far, the only issue I have with video on Flickr is the current inability to choose the frame that is shown as the thumbnail for the video. Otherwise, streaming playback is a blast, even in HD!

Theme:

Lunch Time. I noticed that I was putting off producing videos because I felt like I never had time. I was talking to some friends and when we went to lunch, I brought my camera and shot a little bit.

PROJECT:

I am a storyteller and filmmaker, a little green behind the ears, but ripening every day. That is the purpose of this process. To ripen into a mature storyteller and filmmaker.

CHALLENGES:

For me, the biggest challenge was getting started. Taking the camera out of my car, mounting it onto my monopod and shooting.

DISAPPOINTMENTS:

I was feeling very uninspired as I shot this. I felt like I was just going through the motions. Since I didn't have a shot list, I was really just winging it. I was trying to mix my shots, but I felt like my movement could have been better.

Successes:

I always enjoy my work after I finish. When I finished this piece, I thought it was very respectable.

This is the fastest turnaround I have produced a video production. It is only 40 seconds, but I shot less than 6 minutes of footage, edited it and found music in what feels like less than an hour. It would not surprise me if I turned this around in less than 3 hours from pre-production (which was nonexistent) to delivery.

EQUIPMENT:

Nikon D5100

Manfrotto 561BHDV-1 Monopod

MUSIC:

"Off to Osaka" by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)

INFO from WIKI:-

The Cotton Pygmy Goose or the Cotton Teal, Nettapus coromandelianus is a small perching duck which breeds in Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, southeast Asia and south to northern Australia.

Small examples are the smallest waterfowl on earth, at as little as 160 g (5.5 oz) and 26 cm (10.5 in). White predominates in this bird's plumage. Bill short, deep at base, and goose-like.

Male in breeding plumage is glossy blackish green crown, with white head, neck, and underparts; a prominent black collar and white wing-bar. Rounded head and short legs. In flight, the wings are green with a white band, making the male conspicuous even amongst the huge flying flocks of the Lesser Whistling Duck, which share the habitat. Female paler, without either black collar and only a narrow or nonexistent strip of white wing-bar. In non-breeding plumage (eclipse) male resembles female except for his white wing-bar. Flocks on water bodies (jheels), etc.

Call: A peculiar clucking, uttered in flight..

It is largely resident, apart from dispersion in the wet season, but Chinese birds winter further south. It nests in tree holes, laying 8-15 eggs.

This is an abundant species in Asia, although the slightly larger Australian race appears to be declining in numbers.

Found on all still freshwater lakes (jheels), rain-filled ditches, inundated paddy fields, irrigation tanks, etc. Becomes very tame on village tanks wherever it is unmolested and has become inured to human proximity. Swift on the wing, and can dive creditably on occasion.

Its food is chiefly seeds and vegetable matter, especially water lilies; also insects, crustaceans, etc.

The nesting season is July to September (SW. monsoon). Its nest is a natural hollow in a tree-trunk standing in or near water, sometimes lined with grass, rubbish and feathers. It lays 6 to 12 eggs, which are ivory white.

Little League’s roots extend as far as baseball’s history itself – even into the 18th century.

Soldiers of the Continental Army played ball at Valley Forge during the American Revolution. U.S. citizens played more modern versions of the British games of cricket and rounders through the early 19th century, often called "town ball." In the 1840s, New Yorker Alexander Joy Cartwright and his acquaintances played a game they called "base ball" that was very similar to the game we know today. (Stories later arose saying Abner Doubleday invented the game, but historians generally regard the stories as myths.)

On June 19, 1846, in a contest many historians consider the first scheduled baseball game, Cartwright’s New York Knickerbocker Baseball Club was defeated by the New York Baseball Club, 23-1, in four innings.

During the American Civil War, soldiers on both sides played baseball to pass the time between battles. In 1869, the Cincinnati Red Stockings became the first openly professional baseball team. By the end of the 19th century, baseball was known as "America’s Pastime."

As early as the 1880s, leagues were formed for pre-teen children in New York, but they were affiliated with adult "club" teams and did not flourish. Children often played "pickup" baseball in streets or sandlots instead, and with substandard equipment. Cast-off bats and balls were taped and re-taped, and catcher’s equipment in children’s sizes was almost nonexistent.

In the 1920s, the American Legion formed a baseball program for teen-age boys that exists today. American schools also started baseball programs. But there was still a void for pre-teen boys who wanted to play in organized games. Other smaller programs cropped up from time to time, but did not catch on beyond local areas.

In 1938, a man named Carl Stotz hit upon the idea for an organized baseball league for the boys in his hometown of Williamsport, Pennsylvania. Carl had no sons of his own, but he often played ball with his young nephews, Jimmy and Major Gehron, and wanted a way to provide an organized program for them.

Carl gathered several of the neighborhood children and experimented with different types of equipment and different field dimensions during that summer. The program still did not have a name, and no games were played.

In 1939, Carl and his wife Grayce took the experiment a step further, enlisting the help of brothers George and Bert Bebble and their wives, Annabelle and Eloise, respectively. Carl, George and Bert were the managers of the first three teams: Lycoming Dairy, Lundy Lumber and Jumbo Pretzel. John and Peggy Lindemuth soon joined the group, with the eight volunteers making up the very first Little League board of directors.

Carl also talked to his friends in the community and came up with the name: Little League. His idea was to provide a wholesome program of baseball for the boys of Williamsport, as a way to teach them the ideals of sportsmanship, fair play and teamwork.

The sponsorships (the fee was $30) helped to pay for equipment and uniforms for 30 players. Since then, sponsorship of Little League both at the local league level and at the Headquarters level have helped to keep costs to parents to a minimum.

www.littleleague.org

www.vacationpa.com

Photo courtesy of Kalin Miller

yeah right, happy april fool's day everyone.

1. 6/365 in which Grumpy Informs Us That He Likes His Disaronno On The Rocks, 2. Haven't You Ever Seen Fried Green Tomatoes?, 3. 5/365 in which Grumpy Lounges On Some Twizzlers, 4. And The Memories Keep Being Torn Down, 5. Sarah Tailgate Style, 6. You Decide, 7. 4/365 in which Grumpy Shows Off His Fortune, 8. I Am Giving Up On Half Empty Glasses,

9. 17/365 in which Grumpy Embraces The Irish Spirit, 10. I Shall Have No Sorrow To Die, 11. Zantedeschia, 12. Drinking Tiger, Nonexistent Lion, 13. 1/365 in which Grumpy Shows Off Where He Got To Eat Dinner, 14. Boy I'm Glad You're Not A Saint Bernard, 15. 28/365 in which Grumpy Has No Clue Homer Is Sneaking Up Behind Him, 16. Pure of Heart,

17. Neanderthals Developed Tools, 18. That's Not How I Roll, 19. This Is Unacceptable, 20. A Wonderful Way To Celebrate Aging, 21. Sexy With A Star Studded Cast, 22. I Did Not Choose The One Less Traveled, I Didn't Trust The Look In That Squirrel's Eye, 23. The Tulip Sea, 24. 31/365 in which Grumpy Is Irritated By Our Commute,

25. 29/365 in which Grumpy Relaxes In A Tree With Some Cherry Blossoms, 26. 3/365 in which Grumpy Relates His Feelings For Verizon, 27. I Can't Believe I'm Speaking Greek, 28. 30/365 in which Grumpy Has An Upset Tummy, 29. 2/365 in which Grumpy Gears Up For Baseball Season, 30. Starving For Truth, 31. Don't Sign That Paper Tonight, 32. He Cuts A Rather Dashing Figure On Horseback,

33. Are You Ever Going To Stop Talking To Laura? We're On Vacation...., 34. 23/365 in which Grumpy Celebrates Easter, 35. 15/365 (part 1) in which Grumpy Climbs A Giant Apple (to save the girl), 36. Cheweez Are Delicious, 37. 6 of 365: You Should Not Drive Or Operate Machinery, 38. Butt to Butt, 39. I'm Sorry About All The Things I Said To You, 40. My Shoes Look Really Cute Sitting Over There On The Chair,

41. Blood Beans, 42. 5/365 Kisses Long Distance, 43. And I Think To Myself....., 44. O Say Can You See, 45. 26/365 in which Grumpy Takes A Dip, 46. 12 of 365: Are You Going To Miss Me? A Tremendous Amount?, 47. Letting Go Of All I've Held Onto, 48. But I Won't Feel Blue Like I Always Do,

49. 25/365 in which Grumpy Teaches His Flickr Friends Something, 50. 20/365 in which Grumpy Shows Some Team Spirit, 51. 18/365 in which Grumpy Has His Name Spelled Out In.... Jelly Beans, 52. 16/365 in which Grumpy Takes A Bubble Bath, 53. A Thousand Angels Dance Around You, 54. I Wish I Could Bubble Wrap My Heart, 55. Abe, Honest Or Otherwise, 56. I Woke Up This Morning With A Funny Taste In My Head,

57. 14/365 in which Grumpy Hangs Out In The Egg, 58. 22/365 in which Grumpy Is NOT Pleased With The Cold Spring Weather, 59. Bread Line, 60. Described As Not Very Sophisticated, 61. Sweet Caroline, Good Times Never Seem So Good, 62. Go All Bride Of Frankenstein, 63. 13/365 in which Grumpy Gets Into The Advil, 64. Some Hearts Just Get Lucky Sometimes,

65. Candy Love, 66. 10/365 in which Grumpy Decided To Join Me In The Shower After The Whole Donut Incident, 67. Top O' The Mornin To You, 68. Jupiter Spoke To Him In A Dream, 69. Oh, Beans!, 70. Water Hibiscus, 71. 24 of 365: We're Living In A Laundry Room, 72. 21/365 in which Grumpy Has To Visit With Some Relatives

Created with fd's Flickr Toys.

This was my first time actually plane watching at Miami International Airport (MIA). I checked some spotter websites to find some good locations. They recommended The Holes as being an "official" site so we checked it out. I was pretty disappointed; there was a lot of construction going on and parking was nonexistent. My wife dropped me off. The area is totally exposed. Even though it was December it was pretty hot - no shade, no place to sit, no other people around. The holes are actually pretty small so it's hard to get a lens through the hole. Arrivals were almost impossible to shoot but you could see planes taxiing by for takeoff. After an hour I was cooking so we bagged it. We then went to the area close to the El Dorado furniture store. Much better. There were a bunch of spotters from around the world there. It was a great atmosphere. Nicely shaded, safe, close to some stores and a lot of good traffic to watch. I saw a bunch of planes from airlines I had not seen before, including some airlines I had not heard of. Some of the planes didn't show up on Flight Radar 24 so they were very pleasant surprises. All in all a very good day and I'd love to go back there!

I took these photos in December 2019.

Tôi có một cái kẹp bằng cây tầm vông (kẹp để hái trái trên cây) do lâu dùng đến nên có 2 con ong bầu đục lổ và ở trong đó.

Ong bầu không có đàn, nó sống đơn lẻ, nó thường khoét gỗ và ở trong đó.

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Carpenter bees (the genus Xylocopa in the subfamily Xylocopinae) are large, hairy bees distributed worldwide. There are some 500 species of carpenter bee in 31 subgenera. Their name comes from the fact that nearly all species build their nests in burrows in dead wood, bamboo, or structural timbers (except those in the subgenus Proxylocopa, which nest in the ground). Members of the related tribe Ceratinini are sometimes referred to as "small carpenter bees".

Taxonomy The genus was described by French entomologist Pierre André Latreille in 1802. The name is derived from the Ancient Greek xylokopos/ξῦλοκὀπος "wood-cutter". Bumble bees live for a maximum of 5 days.

Characteristics

Carpenter bees have large compound eyes In several species, the females live alongside their own daughters or sisters, creating a sort of social group. They use wood bits to form partitions between the cells in the nest. A few species bore holes in wood dwellings. Since the tunnels are near the surface, structural damage is generally minor or nonexistent.

Carpenter bees can be important pollinators on open-faced flowers, even obligate pollinators on some, such as the Maypop (Passiflora incarnata), though many species are also known to "rob" nectar by slitting the sides of flowers with deep corollas.

In the United States, there are two eastern species, Xylocopa virginica, and Xylocopa micans, and three other species that are primarily western in distribution, Xylocopa varipuncta, Xylocopa tabaniformis orpifex and Xylocopa californica. X. virginica is by far the more widely distributed species. Some are often mistaken for a bumblebee species, as they can be similar in size and coloration, though most carpenter bees have a shiny abdomen, while in bumblebees the abdomen is completely clothed with dense hair. Males of some species have a white or yellow face, where the females do not; males also often have much larger eyes than the females, which relates to their mating behavior. Male bees are often seen hovering near nests, and will approach nearby animals. However, males are harmless since they do not have a stinger. Female carpenter bees are capable of stinging, but they are docile and rarely sting unless caught in the hand or otherwise directly provoked.

Many Old World carpenter bees have a special pouch-like structure on the inside of their first metasomal tergite called the acarinarium where certain species of mites (Dinogamasus spp.) reside as commensals. The exact nature of the relationship is not fully understood, though in other bees that carry mites, the mites are beneficial, feeding either on fungi in the nest, or on other, harmful mites.

Behavior

Carpenter bee nest in a tree trunk

Carpenter bee gallery in a split piece of 2X4 woodCarpenter bees are traditionally considered solitary bees, though some species have simple social nests in which mothers and daughters may cohabit. However, even solitary species tend to be gregarious, and often several will nest near each other. It has been occasionally reported that when females cohabit, there may be a division of labor between them, where one female may spend most of her time as a guard within the nest, motionless and near the entrance, while another female spends most of her time foraging for provisions.

Carpenter bees make nests by tunneling into wood, vibrating their bodies as they rasp their mandibles against the wood, each nest having a single entrance which may have many adjacent tunnels. The entrance is often a perfectly circular hole measuring about 16 millimetres (0.63 in) on the underside of a beam, bench, or tree limb. Carpenter bees do not eat wood. They discard the bits of wood, or re-use particles to build partitions between cells. The tunnel functions as a nursery for brood and storage for the pollen/nectar upon which the brood subsists. The provision masses of some species are among the most complex in shape of any group of bees; whereas most bees fill their brood cells with a soupy mass, and others form simple spheroidal pollen masses, Xylocopa form elongate and carefully sculpted masses that have several projections which keep the bulk of the mass from coming into contact with the cell walls, sometimes resembling an irregular caltrop. The eggs are very large relative to the size of the female, and are some of the largest eggs among all insects.

There are two very different mating systems that appear to be common in carpenter bees, and often this can be determined simply by examining specimens of the males of any given species. Species in which the males have large eyes are characterized by a mating system where the males either search for females by patrolling, or by hovering and waiting for passing females, whom they then pursue. In the other type of mating system, the males often have very small heads, but there is a large, hypertrophied glandular reservoir in the mesosoma, which releases pheromones into the airstream behind the male while it flies or hovers. The pheromone advertises the presence of the male to females

James got in trouble for taking this photo. I had a feeling cameras weren't allowed in casinos. They were a weird scene. Almost virtually no Westerners (we got stared at a bit) and no one was drinking anything except hot tea. Heavy smoking a la Vegas but the alcohol I associate with gambling was nonexistent and definitely not free. We were the only ones sitting at the bar from which this photo was taken. As it was the middle of the afternoon, the curtains were closed on the stage facing the bar. At night, girly singing and dancing shows are conducted mostly by Eastern Europeans.

The Luandan skyline, as seen from across the harbor, reveals a city undergoing a period of tremendous growth. Luanda, the capital city of Angola. It is estimated that due to the long civil war that forced people to flee smaller towns and villages throughout the country, 5 million people-- around 1/3 of Angola's entire population-- live in Luanda. The result of this is an overburdened infrastructure, inconsistent or nonexistent essential utilities, and a terrible traffic problem. In the face of these obstacles, it is also a city that is undergoing a construction boom, as investors in the oil and other industries continue to show an interest in the country's future.

The transitional sites are difficult to define, simply by nature of being areas of transition between different habitat types. They are best described as interspersed patches of several different vegetative communities, including pine rockland, upland mixed woodland, rockland hammock, maritime hammock, and mangrove swamp. Herbaceous species were virtually nonexistent in the interior portions of the transitional zones. Where these areas graded into the freshwater wetlands, we encountered giant leather fern, Jamaica swamp sawgrass, and sand cordgrass. Buttonwood was by far the most common woody species on these grids. Other frequently encountered woody species were white indigoberry (Randia aculeata), cabbage palm (Sabal palmetto), and Florida swampprivet (Forestiera segregata). Brazilian pepper was also common on some of the transitional sites. Also of note was the occurrence of joewood (Jacquinia keyensis), a State-Threatened species that we found on three of the transitional sites.

I love bringing my Sphero along on my explorations! :D

The second stop on the way home from my college visit was in Richmond!

The Richmond Kmart appears to be a former Grants (and thus reminded me of the Erie Kmart that I visited last summer). It is very noticeably bigger than Anderson; it is also very nice; it has a Kmart Express gas station and it has a former Kmart Cafe (that still has the counter/displays, the full menu board and even the register! Looks like a more recent KCafe closure from what I've seen; if anybody else here has any more information I would like to know more about it!). This store appears to be doing fairly well for one of the last remaining stores in/near the Miami Valley.

Of course, I had to check out the Kmart Express after my main store rounds were complete, so I headed over there and looked around. This is the second Kmart Express I've seen, but the first one I have actually visited, as the other one (at the now nonexistent Brooklyn Super Kmart) had already closed. I didn't buy anything at this KExpress though, as I had spent my money in the main store. Hopefully next time I can buy some coffee or donuts from Kmart Express while going to/from Anderson (if I plan another college visit to Anderson U, which is likely)!

Hopefully the Richmond Kmart will still be able to remain "normal" for a good time longer...I like this store! :D

Kmart #7246 - 3150 National Road West - Richmond, Indiana

Everglades National Park, South Florida, U.S.

As we came around a bend in our small skiff (boat), we caught a glimpse of this 15+ foot crocodile, which immediately slid into the water creating a huge splash. It was an amazing sight. Then he hung around and I was able to get this image with a 600mm lens.

The American crocodile is considered an endangered species in nearly all parts of its North, Central, and South American range. Survey data, except in the United States, is poor or nonexistent, but conservationists agree that illegal hunting and habitat depletion has reduced populations of this wide-ranging reptile to critical levels.

A small, remnant population lives in southern Florida, but most are found in southern Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean, and northern South America. Their habitat of choice is the fresh or brackish water of river estuaries, coastal lagoons, and mangrove swamps.

A prehistoric-looking creature, it is distinguishable from its cousin, the American alligator, by its longer, thinner snout, its lighter color, and two long teeth on the lower jaw that are visible when its mouth is closed.

This species is among the largest of the world's crocodiles, with Central and South American males reaching lengths of up to 20 feet (6.1 meters). Males in the U.S. population rarely exceed 13 feet (4 meters), however.

Their diet consists mainly of small mammals, birds, fish, crabs, insects, snails, frogs, and occasionally carrion. They have been known to attack people, but are far more likely to flee at the sight of humans.

Most countries in the American crocodile's range have passed protection laws, but unfortunately, few governments provide adequate enforcement.

_DSC6491 - 2017-02-14 at 10-55-12

Lunchbox for the HBO series Six Feet Under, or its sadly nonexistent Hanna Barbera style cartoon.

Published by Bart Gold under Creative Commons license: Attribution 3.0 US (CC-BY)

Twentieth century philosopher Isaiah Berlin was born in this elaborate Art Nouveau building in Riga shortly after it was built in 1906 and lived here for the first six years of his life.

His life story (from Wikipedia):

Sir Isaiah Berlin OM, FBA (6 June 1909 – 5 November 1997) was a British social and political theorist, philosopher and historian of ideas of Russian-Jewish origin, regarded as one of the leading thinkers of the twentieth century and as the dominant liberal scholar of his generation. He excelled as an essayist, conversationalist and raconteur; and as a brilliant lecturer who improvised, rapidly and spontaneously, richly allusive and coherently structured material. He translated works by Ivan Turgenev from Russian into English and, during the war, worked for the British Diplomatic Service. The Independent stated that "Isaiah Berlin was often described, especially in his old age, by means of superlatives: the world's greatest talker, the century's most inspired reader, one of the finest minds of our time ... there is no doubt that he showed in more than one direction the unexpectedly large possibilities open to us at the top end of the range of human potential."

Operation “Salt City" resulted in the arrest of 248 individuals from May through September 2015. Of those arrested, 124 were active gang members. During the operation 22 firearms, more than $237,000 in U.S. currency, 70 grams of heroin, 266 grams of cocaine, and 723 grams of marijuana with a total estimated street value of almost $44,000 was taken off Syracuse streets by participating agencies.

Operation Salt City is part of the U.S. Marshals nation-wide “Triple Beam” gang reduction initiative. Triple Beam partners federal, state, and local law enforcement to reduce violent crime and take dangerous offenders off the streets. The goal of the U.S. Marshals Gang Enforcement Program is to seek out and disrupt illegal gang activity in areas of the country with smaller or nonexistent gang enforcement units by providing manpower, funding and the Marshals’ renowned fugitive tracking abilities.

Photo by Shane T. McCoy / US Marshals

Doubtful Sound is a very large and naturally imposing fjord (despite its name) in Fiordland, in the far south west of New Zealand. It is located in the same region as the smaller but more famous and accessible Milford Sound.

Doubtful Sound was named 'Doubtful Harbour' in 1770 by Captain Cook, who did not enter the inlet as he was uncertain whether it was navigable under sail. It was later renamed Doubtful Sound by whalers and sealers.

A Spanish scientific expedition commanded by Alessandro Malaspina visited Doubtful Sound in February 1793 to conduct experiments measuring the force of gravity using a pendulum, a part of the effort to establish a new metric system. The officers of the expedition, which included Felipe Bauzá y Cañas, a cartographer, also made the first chart of the entrance and lower parts of the Sound, naming features of it. Today these form a unique cluster of the only Spanish names on the map of New Zealand: Febrero Point, Bauza Island and the Nee Islets, Pendulo Reach and Malaspina Reach.

There are three distinct arms to the sound, which is the site of several large waterfalls, notably Helena Falls at Deep Cove, and the Browne Falls which have a fall of over 600 metres. The steep hills are known for their hundreds of waterfalls during the rainy season.

Access to the sound is either by sea, or by the Wilmot Pass road from the Manapouri Power Station. Most areas of the sound itself are only accessible by sea however, as the road network in this area of New Zealand is sparse or nonexistent, as is the human population.

Charles John Lyttelton, 10th Viscount Cobham, Governor-General of New Zealand (1957-1962) wrote about this part of Fiordland:

"There are just a few areas left in the world where no human has ever set foot. That one of them should be in a country so civilized and so advanced as New Zealand may seem incredible, unless one has visited the south-west corner of the South Island. Jagged razor backed mountains rear their heads into the sky. More than 200 days of rain a year ensure not a tree branch is left bare and brown, moss and epiphytes drape every nook. The forest is intensely green. This is big country... one day peaceful, a study in green and blue, the next melancholy and misty, with low cloud veiling the tops... an awesome place, with its granite precipices, its hanging valleys, its earthquake faults and its thundering cascades."

Doubtful Sound is unusual in that it contains two distinct layers of water that scarcely mix. The top few meters is fresh water, fed from the high inflows from the surrounding mountains, and stained brown with tannins from the forest. Below this is a layer of cold, heavy, saline water from the sea. The dark tannins in the fresh water layer makes it difficult for light to penetrate. Thus, many deep-sea species will grow in the comparatively shallow depths of the Sound.

This fiord is home to one of the southernmost population of bottlenose dolphins. The Doubtful Sound bottlenoses have formed a very insular sub-group of only about 70 individuals, with none having been observed to leave or enter the Sound during a multi-year monitoring regime. Their social grouping is thus extremely close, which is also partly attributed to the difficult and unusual features of their habitat, which is much colder than for other bottlenose groups and is also overlaid by the freshwater layer.

Other wildlife to be found in Doubtful Sound includes fur seals and penguins (Fiordland crested and blue), or even rare large whales (Southern Right Whale, Humpback Whale, Minke Whale, Sperm Whale and some Giant Beaked Whales. Orca, the Killer Whales and Long-Finned Pilot Whales can be found also. The waters of Doubtful Sound are also home to an abundance of sea creatures, including many species of fish, starfish, sea anemones and corals. It is perhaps best known for its black coral trees which occur in unusually shallow water for what is normally a deep water species.

The catchment basin of Doubtful Sound is generally steep terrain that is heavily forested except for locations where surface rock exposures are extensive. Nothofagus trees are dominant in many locations. In the understory there are a wide variety of shrubs and ferns.

Phottix recently came out with a new remote that uses 2.4GHz wireless. The Phottix Plato. It's a little pricier (~$45) but from first glance, I can see a couple of advantages over the Cleon.

[0] Digital encoding gives you a more discrete signal and helps to avoid misfires.

[1] Smart codes rolls the codes automatically to avoid contention with other remotes or RF signals.

[2] Two-way communications between receiver and transmitter confirms you are within range or not. It also seems to have a longer range.

[3] Interchangeable end-cords allows you to use the same remote on various cameras simply by replacing the connecting cord. For instance, use the N8 cord for the D300 and the N6 cord for the D80.

[4] Uses more common batteries rather than the expensive "exotic" ones the Cleon uses.

[5] Slicker looking construction.

So... I decided to get one. Tonight I came home from a business trip and found my Plato sitting in my mailbox. There were three items in the package... well five if you count the two double-packs of AAA batteries.

[0] Transmitter

[1[ Receiver

[3] Cable

Both the transmitter and receiver take common AAA batteries. This is a great improvement over some of the older Phottix and Cactus wireless remotes that took a combination of CR2 and type-N... both of which are rather expensive. There was also a single instruction sheet which was as expected written in Engrish although admittedly it's not as bad as some other products I've seen. There was however one glaring error which I will go into about later.

After installing the batteries, both the transmitter and receivers immediately power up. Shutting each of them down requires a push of their power/select button for about 3 seconds. Both have an auto-poweroff feature that shuts them off after an hour of inactivity.

Unlike previous Phottix RF remotes, this one uses rolling codes instead of choosing from amongst preset frequencies. So instead of flipping DIP switches on each device to match one another, the transmitter and receivers must be paired like bluetooth devices. The set comes pre-synced to one another from the factory but you can reset the code by resyncing them. This is accomplished by first turning on the receiver and transmitter. The transmitters picks a code. Then on the receiver, you set it to learning mode by tapping the power button five times. On the transmitter, you push the shutter release button and the two are now synced. You can sync as many as 16 million receivers to the same transmitter. The remote uses the 2.4GHz band which can get congested so in certain environments, it may take a while for the pair to negotiate with one another. But once paired the likelihood of misfires or inadvertent triggers is nearly nonexistent. There are two status LEDs on the transmitter. Half-pressing the shutter release button will confirm that you're in range by lighting them both green as well as passing a half-press action to the camera which should respond in kind (ie. activate AF and VR) depending on how the camera is configured.

The transmitter and receiver are make and model agnostic. The vendor specific interface is handled by the cable. In my case, I am using the N8 cable for the D200 and D300. One end of the cable plugs into the camera and the other end is a simple three-contact 3.5mm "headphone" style plug which can be plugged into the receiver or the transmitter. When plugged into the receiver, the transmitter is in wireless mode. If however you wish to trigger things via a wired remote, you can plug the cable into the transmitter directly. All functions are the same in either mode. Note that the instruction sheet says that it is the receiver that can be used for wired triggering operations but this is in fact incorrect.

The transmitter has two buttons. The big button is the shutter release. The smaller button is the mode select and power button. Holding down this button for about 3 seconds powers the transmitter on or off. There is a series of LEDs that indicate which type of triggering mode you've selected. The following modes are supported:

[] Single - Pressing the shutter release acts like a single press of your camera's shutter release.

[] 2s Delay - Pressing the shutter release button invokes a 2-second delay before a single release signal is sent.

[] Continuous - Pressing the shutter release button once will cause the remote to trigger five individual releases. Holding down the button will act like holding down the shutter release on your camera. The camera's behaviour will be governed by the drive-mode in such a case.

[] Bulb - Pressing the button once is the same as holding down the shutter release on the camera. Press it again to release. This is intended to be used with the bulb shutter-speed setting but if combined with any other shutter speed will act like a press once to activate and press again to release so for instance, if you are in AF-C and don't have bulb set for the shutter-speed, your camera will continue shooting until you tap the button again.

Again, half-press operation is supported and in wireless mode, the two status LEDs at the top will turn green to confirm transmitter-to-receiver signal reception. A full press will turn the two LEDs red. In wired mode only LED #1 will show status.

The receiver has a single button for on/off and learning mode selection. There are also two LEDs. In normal operation, the left most LED will repeatedly flash red to indicate that the unit is on and ready. The right LED will turn green when it receives a trigger signal from the transmitter. Putting the receiver into learning mode causes the right LED to flash rapidly. The receiver also has a hot-shoe mount so it can be conveniently secured to the flash shoe.

All in all, I'm pretty happy with this remote. It's certainly a nice improvement over the older Cleon and would highly recommend it over the Cleon line even though it's about $10 more expensive.

Kmart #3438 (84,280 square feet)

1550 Saint Georges Avenue, Delco Plaza, Avenel, NJ

Opened October 17th, 1979, renovated in the mid 2000s

With only four open locations left in the Continental United States, I'd have to be one hard-headed retail photographer to pass up a visit to one of three Kmart stores in the Northeast while in New Jersey. However, last time I was up this way I instead decided to visit the Media, PA Sears, which took precedence since that store was closing at the time. This time around Avenel's Kmart just so happened to be near several other points of interest I had during this trip, so going there was a no brainer! I hadn't even been to a Kmart since Silver Spring, MD in February, and I was more than ready to experience one of their stores again. I'm sure most people (i.e. retail fans) reading this are already somewhat familiar with this location, whether from another user's photos here on Flickr or in a Facebook group, from watching a Youtuber's video, or from visiting the store themselves out of interest, but I figured I'd throw my hat in the ring because why not? After all, while us folks who document retail do tend to visit the same places, I feel like we all have different perspectives and ways about going about our visits that make it interesting. In this case, you get a whole album of RetailRyan-brand Kmart photos!

The store, as many of you already know, is a standard 1970s-build with a 2005-era décor package inside (something I usually associate with the old Kill Devil Hills store). While this does give the store a much more refreshed feel compared to those that had been stuck with 1997-era Big Kmart aesthetics, there's no denying that the glory days are long gone. For the most part I found the store to be decently stocked, but did notice several areas where merchandise seemed thin. And of course there's the matter of the store's back right corner (where automotive and the garden center were) being completely blocked off to the public due to lack of product, which is a maneuver I've seen in a few Sears stores as of late. Oh, and the pharmacy is nonexistent now. I'd say the store is serviceable for the most part, but definitely on borrowed time. It's no surprise that a closure was indeed announced in the following March, so I'm glad I was able to visit the store while it still existed in a non-going out of business state kinda-sorta!

colinhuggins.bandcamp.com/track/claude-debussy-clair-de-lune

NY Times, Dec. 4 2011

Colin Huggins was there with his baby grand, the one he wheels into Washington Square Park for his al fresco concerts. So were Tic and Tac, a street-performing duo, who held court in the fountain — dry for the winter. And Joe Mangrum was pouring his elaborate sand paintings on the ground near the Washington Arch.

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Enlarge This Image

Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times

Kareem Barnes of Tic and Tac collected donations on Sunday.

Enlarge This Image

Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times

Joe Mangrum showed his sand paintings on Sunday.

In other words, it was a typical Sunday afternoon in the Greenwich Village park, where generations of visitors have mingled with musicians, artists, activists, poets and buskers.

Yet this fall, that urban harmony has grown dissonant as the city’s parks department has slapped summonses on the four men and other performers who put out hats or buckets, for vending in an unauthorized location — specifically, within 50 feet of a monument.

The department’s rule, one of many put in place a year ago, was intended to control commerce in the busiest parks. Under the city’s definition, vending covers not only those peddling photographs and ankle bracelets, but also performers who solicit donations.

The rule attracted little notice at first. But the enforcement in Washington Square Park in the past two months has generated summonses ranging from $250 to $1,000. And it has started a debate about the rights of parkgoers seeking refuge from the bustle of the streets versus those looking for entertainment.

At a news conference in the park on Sunday organized by NYC Park Advocates, the artists waved fistfuls of pink summonses while their advocates, including civil rights lawyers, called on the city to stop what they called harassment of the performers.

“This is a heavy-handed solution to a nonexistent problem,” said Ronald L. Kuby, one of the lawyers.

The rule is especially problematic in Washington Square Park, performers say, because there are few locations across its 10 acres that are beyond 50 feet from a memorial or fountain — whether the bust of Alexander Lyman Holley, who introduced the Bessemer steel process to this country, or the statue of the Italian liberator Giuseppe Garibaldi.

Then there is the park’s international reputation as a gathering place for folk music pioneers and the Beats.

“Washington Square is the live-music park of New York City, and it would be close to impossible for any one of us to follow these regulations,” said Mr. Huggins, who has received nine summonses with fines totaling $2,250.

But Adrian Benepe, the parks commissioner, argues that there is ample room for performers away from the monuments. And, he added, a musician who is not putting out a tin cup is welcome to sit on the edge of the fountain or under a monument.

“It’s the whole issue of the ‘tragedy of the commons,’ ” he said. “If you allow all the performers and all the vendors to do whatever they want to do, pretty soon there’s no park left for people who want to use them for quiet enjoyment. This is a way of having some control and not 18 hours of carnival-like atmosphere.”

Gary Behrens, an amateur photographer visiting from New Jersey, applauded the city’s efforts to rein in the performers. “I’m O.K. with the guitar, but the loud instruments have taken over the park,” he said.

The lawyers and advocates, however, challenged the idea that street performers were selling a product as a vendor does. And threatening a lawsuit, they faulted the city for creating what they called “First Amendment zones” through the rules.

“Is this place zany?” asked Norman Siegel, the former director of the New York Civil Liberties Union. “You bet. Public parks are quintessential public forums. Zaniness is something we should cherish and protect.”

Park visitation has soared along with the rise of tourism in the last 15 years, and with it vendors and artists interested in a lucrative market.

Mr. Benepe insisted that the rules would not scare off future music legends.

“If Bob Dylan wanted to come play there tomorrow, he could,” he said, “although he might have to move away from the fountain.”

Oddly, the dispute coincided with the 50th anniversary of the so-called Folk Riot in Washington Square Park, when the parks commissioner tried to squelch Sunday folk performances. Hundreds of musicians gathered in protest, the police were called in and a melee ensued.

In April, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg wrote a letter commemorating the Folk Riot, saying he applauded “the folk performers who changed music, our city and our world beginning half a century ago.”

Picture taken 1987 during my 5-month-trip around the world - digitally captured from paper print. Sorry for the bad quality.

I have uploaded a lot of my digitally captured photos, which I took since 2004. But the most interesting journeys I did between 1979 and 2004! Those photos are on slide.

__________________________________________

Bora Bora (French: Bora-Bora, Tahitian: Pora Pora) is a 30.55 km2 island group in the Leeward group in the western part of the Society Islands of French Polynesia, an overseas collectivity of France in the Pacific Ocean. The main island, located about 230 kilometres northwest of Papeete, is surrounded by a lagoon and a barrier reef. In the center of the island are the remnants of an extinct volcano rising to two peaks, Mount Pahia and Mount Otemanu, the highest point at 727 metres.

Bora Bora is a major international tourist destination, famous for its aqua-centric luxury resorts. The major settlement, Vaitape, is on the western side of the main island, opposite the main channel into the lagoon. Produce of the island is mostly limited to what can be obtained from the sea and the plentiful coconut trees, which were historically of economic importance for copra.

DEMOGRAPHICS

As of 2017, the Bora Bora group has a permanent population of 10,605.

NAME

In ancient times the island was called "Pora pora mai te pora", meaning "created by the gods" in the local Tahitian dialect. This was often abbreviated Pora Pora meaning simply "first born". Because of ambiguities in the phonemes of the Tahitian language, this could also be pronounced Bola Bola or Bora Bora. When explorer Jacob Roggeveen first landed on the island, he and his crew adopted the name Bora Bora which has stood ever since.

HISTORY

The island was inhabited by Polynesian settlers around the 4th century C.E.[citation needed] The first European sighting was made by Jakob Roggeveen in 1722.

James Cook sighted the island on 29 July 1769, using a Tahitian navigator, Tupaia. The London Missionary Society arrived in 1820 and founded a Protestant church in 1890. Bora Bora was an independent kingdom until 1888 when its last queen Teriimaevarua III was forced to abdicate by the French who annexed the island as a colony.

WORLD WAR II

In World War II the United States chose Bora Bora as a South Pacific military supply base, and an oil depot, airstrip, seaplane base, and defensive fortifications were constructed. Known as "Operation Bobcat", it maintained a supply force of nine ships, 20,000 tons of equipment and nearly 7,000 men.

At least eight 7"/44 caliber guns, operated by elements of the 13th Coast Artillery Regiment (later the 276th Coast Artillery Battalion), were set up at strategic points around the island to protect it against potential military attack. Eight of these guns remain in the area.

However, the island saw no combat as the American presence on Bora Bora went uncontested over the course of the war. The base was officially closed on 2 June 1946. The World War II airstrip was never able to accommodate large aircraft, but it nonetheless was French Polynesia's only international airport until Faa'a International Airport opened next to Papeete, Tahiti, in 1960.

ADMINISTRATION

The commune of Bora-Bora is made up of the island of Bora Bora proper with its surrounding islets emerging from the coral reef, 29.3 km2 in total. The surrounding islets include Motu Tapu, Motu Ahuna, Tevairoa, Motu Tane, Motu Mute, Motu Tufari, Motu Tehotu, Motu Pitiaau, Sofitel Motu, Motu Toopua, and Toopuaiti. The commune also includes the Tūpai atoll. (11 km2), located 20 kilometres north of Bora Bora. The atoll of Tūpai has no permanent population apart from about 50 workers in the coconut plantations.

The commune is an administrative subdivision of the Leeward Islands and consists of three associated communes: Anau, Faanui and Vaitape. The administrative centre of the commune is the settlement of Vaitape, on the island of Bora Bora proper. Gaston Tong Sang is the Mayor of the commune of Bora-Bora, serving since 1989.

TOURISM

The island's economy is driven almost solely by tourism. Several resorts have been built on motu (small islands, from Tahitian) surrounding the lagoon. Hotel Bora Bora opened in 1961, and nine years later built the first over-the-water bungalows on stilts over the lagoon. Today, over-water bungalows are a standard feature of most Bora Bora resorts. The quality of those bungalows ranges from comparably cheap, basic accommodations to very luxurious and expensive places to stay.

Most of the tourist destinations are aqua-centric; however it is possible to visit attractions on land such as WWII cannons. Air Tahiti has five or six flights daily to the Bora Bora Airport on Motu Mute from Tahiti (as well as from other islands). Public transport on the island is nonexistent so rental cars and bicycles are the recommended methods of transport. There are also small, two-seater buggies for hire in Vaitape. It is possible to rent a motorboat to explore the lagoon.

Snorkeling and scuba diving in and around the lagoon of Bora Bora are popular activities. Many species of sharks and rays inhabit the surrounding body of water. There are a few dive operators on the island offering manta ray dives and also shark-feeding dives. Sharks living in the island's lagoon are not considered to be dangerous to people.[citation needed]

In addition to the existing islands of Bora Bora, the new manmade motu of Motu Marfo has been added in the northeastern corner of the lagoon on the property of the St. Regis Resort.

WIKIPEDIA

Another shot with Eugenie, this time in downtown Los Angeles in an alley we found. Ambient light is almost nonexistent in this image. Her manager was pressed into service as my lighting assistant, and he's holding the Norman 200B in a 43" shoot through umbrella, camera left. To remain portable, that was the only light I used while we roamed around LA. Strobe was triggered with Cybersyncs.

You can see more image from this monster shoot (10 hours, two cities) on my blog post here.

still from a nonexistent film

THE VALUE OF PIGEONS

Pigeons are fascinating to watch. Their courting behavior is quite entertaining. Their affectionate attention to their mate is sweet and romantic.

© D.L. Roth, 4/96

Taken from this page

© All rights reserved. Please do not use this image without my permission.

Though personalized art appeared during World War I, and occasionally grew to incorporate the entire aircraft, most pilots carried a saying or a slogan, or a family crest, or squadron symbol. Some were named, but nose art was not common. During World War II, nose art not only saw its true beginnings, but its heyday.

No one knows exactly who started nose art first--it appeared with both the British and the Germans around the first time, with RAF pilots painting Hitler being kicked or skulls and crossbones on their aircraft, while German nose art was usually a personal symbol, named for a girlfriend or adopting a mascot (such as Adolf Galland using Mickey Mouse, something Walt Disney likely didn't approve of). It would be with the Americans, and a lesser extent the Canadians, that nose art truly became common--and started including its most famous forms, which was usually half-naked or completely naked women. This was not always true, but it often was.

The quality of nose art depended on the squadron or wing artist. Some of it was rather crude, while others were equal to the finest pinup artists in the United States, such as Alberto Vargas. For men thousands of miles away from home and lonely, a curvaceous blonde on a B-17 or a P-51 made that loneliness a bit easier. Others thought naked women were a little crude, and just limited themselves to names, or depicted animals, cartoon characters, or patriotic emblems, or caricatures of the Axis dictators they were fighting.

Generally speaking, there was little censorship, with squadron and group commanders rarely intervening on names or pictures; the pilots themselves practiced self-censorship, with profanity almost unknown, and full-frontal nudity nearly nonexistent. After the loss of a B-17 named "Murder Inc.," which the Germans captured and used to make propaganda, the 8th Air Force, at least, set up a nose art committee that reviewed the nose art of aircraft--but even it rarely wielded its veto. For the most part, nose art was limited only by the crew's imagination and the artist's ability. The British tended to stay away from the lurid nudes of the Americans, though the Canadians adopted them as well. (The Axis also did not use nose art in this fashion, and neither did the Soviets, who usually confined themselves to patriotic slogans on their aircraft, such as "For Stalin!" or "In the Spirit of the Motherland!")

When World War II ended, so did nose art, for the most part. In the peacetime, postwar armed forces, the idea of having naked women were wives and children could see it was not something the postwar USAF or Navy wanted, and when it wasn't scrapped, it was painted over. A few units (especially those away from home and family) still allowed it, but it would take Korea to begin a renaissance of nose art.

"What's Up, Doc?" is C-47B 44-76423, which ironically spent very little of its over 30 year career with the USAAF--most of it was spent as an RC-47 reconnaissance aircraft with the Israeli Air Force. When it was sold to the Palm Springs Air Museum in 2003, it was repainted as an aircraft of the 438th Troop Carrier Group at RAF Langar, as it would have appeared during the D-Day landings. Museum artist Stan Stokes painted Bugs Bunny on the nose, with his catchphrase. "Doc" is very much flyable. I hadn't had a chance to get a picture of this nose art when I first saw "Doc" in 2021, but I was able to get this shot in 2023.

About an hour and 15 minutes' worth of startrails at Lake Sabrina, west of Bishop in the High Sierra. Pointing southwest - you can actually see the smear of the Milky Way cloud at the left of the image - see the previous single-shot image I posted earlier, which is just one of the frames for this image stack. I actually like the garish green from the tackle/snack shop light but I decided to replace the foreground with another image taken about 45 minutes before I started the startrail sequence.

Which brings up a point - that most people in the world will not see a Milky Way or a bazillion stars like this because of light pollution. Even here, in the High Sierra, a bastion of dark sky, someone somewhere finds it important to light up the lake which is practically nonexistent because of serious drought condition. Not a soul around except me and my two crazy friends. Pshew, I feel better.

If you click on the map view, you can see I'm set up in front of the island, virtually on the lake bottom because the water level is so low.

The second stop on the way home from my college visit was in Richmond!

The Richmond Kmart appears to be a former Grants (and thus reminded me of the Erie Kmart that I visited last summer). It is very noticeably bigger than Anderson; it is also very nice; it has a Kmart Express gas station and it has a former Kmart Cafe (that still has the counter/displays, the full menu board and even the register! Looks like a more recent KCafe closure from what I've seen; if anybody else here has any more information I would like to know more about it!). This store appears to be doing fairly well for one of the last remaining stores in/near the Miami Valley.

Of course, I had to check out the Kmart Express after my main store rounds were complete, so I headed over there and looked around. This is the second Kmart Express I've seen, but the first one I have actually visited, as the other one (at the now nonexistent Brooklyn Super Kmart) had already closed. I didn't buy anything at this KExpress though, as I had spent my money in the main store. Hopefully next time I can buy some coffee or donuts from Kmart Express while going to/from Anderson (if I plan another college visit to Anderson U, which is likely)!

Hopefully the Richmond Kmart will still be able to remain "normal" for a good time longer...I like this store! :D

Kmart #7246 - 3150 National Road West - Richmond, Indiana

Rare surviving Ford from 1959.

Ford Prefect 1000E Deluxe.

Equipped with a three speed gearbox and 1172 sidevalve engine, performance was sluggish.

Qingdao is China’s premier “beer” city, as the country’s most famous brew – Tsingtao – was founded and continues to be brewed here. (For those who do come to the city, Tsingtao makes a decent dark beer – Yuan Jiang – that is quite hard to get outside of the city.) I guess the easiest comparison I can make would be to say that Qingdao is the same to beer culture here as St. Louis and Milwaukee are in the United States; a town famous for a mass-produced beer.

The Tsingtao brewery and museum (slightly underwhelming, according to my Lonely Planet guidebook) is located on Dengzhou Lu a bit north of Zhongshan Park. Dengzhou Lu is also famously known as Pijiu Jie (Beer Street). During the day, it’s easy to see the nightlife potential. At night, almost every establishment along this stretch of Dengzhou Lu (probably about a half kilometer to a one kilometer long) is a restaurant that opens up with the focus on drinking beer – almost always Tsingtao. (Curiously, in coming by here at night, the taxi took me past Hongjiu Jie – Red Wine Street. It looked quite a bit less subdued as wine culture here is, well, nonexistent. I didn’t have a chance to get back and look around there. Having drunk Chinese wine before…I don’t think I’m missing too much.)

I’ve lived in China for almost three years now; about two years in Shanghai and one year in Tianjin. Shandong province is the province that’s on the sea between the two cities. (From Shanghai to Tianjin by train is around 5 hours; by plane, 2 hours.) Qingdao, probably the most well-known city in Shandong, is a charming city, to say the least. In my opinion, it’s exceptionally photogenic – with very nice beaches, great architecture, good geography/topography, and terrific food.

Qingdao also happens to be known for the most famous of Chinese beers (Tsingtao), which is actually a company started by the Germans. (For what it’s worth, Chinese beers are quite watery and Tsingtao is somewhat like the Budweiser of Chinese beers. That being said, I’m happy to drink an ice cold Tsingtao on a hot summer day whereas I wouldn’t say the same thing about a Budweiser.

So what to make of Qingdao then? Before colonial powers swept in and started chopping up China piecemeal, Qingdao was basically a sleepy fishing village. During the Ming dynasty, a battery was built here. In 1898, the Germans seized control of Qingdao when two missionaries were killed. (Personally, it seems alarming to me that a country could lose a city because two foreigners happened to be killed – and China sure lost a lot that way during the 19th century. I guess that’s the downside to outmoded military technology; the Europeans and Americans basically plundered China…) At any rate, Qingdao was ceded to the Germans for 99 years, but that didn’t last long, thanks to World War I.

During the 15-20 years that the Germans did have control of the town, they managed to build a handful of churches (still standing) and missionaries, in addition to the aforementioned Qingdao brewery. Because of that, a lot of the European architecture has a heavy German influence and there are still a few random signs of German heritage around town.

From the Germans, Qingdao didn’t land directly with the Chinese. It spent 8 years under Japanese control (1914-1922) before being returned to the Kuomintang (aka General Chiang Kai-Shek’s clan). The Japanese took control once again in 1938 (as they swept through northeast China and across half the country) before losing it for the last time in 1945 at the end of World War II. Since then, it’s been in Chinese hands. (Brief history courtesy of Lonely Planet.)

Contemporary Qingdao certainly makes its way as a tourist destination – and it’s a fine one at that. The population (per my LP from 2011) lists it at 1.73 million. The city has a few areas that are quite appealing to tourists: the Old Town (the heart of the city) off the beach and just east of the railway station downtown, Badaguan (which means “eight passes”) is a hilly area with a lot of nice residential architecture to the east of the Old Town. Other than that, there are a lot of parks, a beer street, churches, and a 40 km. scenic walk (which, obviously, most people do not cover from end to end) along the shore which goes by all of the beaches in the area.

All in all, Qingdao is the type of town that, if you get the chance to visit, I think you would find yourself thinking it would be great to return again and again.

Haugestad. City on a rock (in the middle), surrounded by flatland. 2009.

meeting at Jeder el Mohguene

-.-

Travel the world means to pass by from a province to another, everyone of which is a solitary star. For the greater part of the persons who live in the real world ends on the home’s threshold, at the limit of the village, at the extreme - to the border of the valley.

The world that is beyond is nonexistent and quite useless, while the one around them and all what their eye succeeds to embrace, rises to the dimensions of the great cosmos that darken all the rest.

Often the inhabitants of a place and who come from outside have difficulty to find a common language, since everyone of them watches the place from a various optical: who comes from outside uses to wideangle, than make smaller the images but increases the horizon, while the person of the place has always used the telephoto lens, if not quite the telescope, than enlarge the minimums details.

Rysard Kapuscinski (Ebony)

Paying a quick visit to Akihabara, well known since the end of World War II as the place to stock up on electric and electronic products - and more recently, on anime, manga, and other geek culture items.

The overpass carrying the Chuo Line (中央線) trains right through the center of Tokyo, run right over old-fashioned electronic stores.

On the street, there is a Nissan Cedric taxicab, as well as a Hyundai Universe motorcoach. The Hyundai ended up the only Korean automobile of any kind I spotted in Japan. Despite the strong economic interdependence between Japan and South Korea, and despite Japanese technology having taken a huge role in the development of the South Korean automobile industry, the historic enmity between the two countries means that demand for Korean cars in Japan, especially for noncommercial vehicles, is virtually nonexistent, and demand for Japanese cars in South Korea is pretty weak as well, aside from Lexus luxury models and a few select Hondas. In fact, the Universe motorcoach has been Hyundai's only model in Japan since 2009.

On the motorcoach, the number plate only has dots for the first two digits of the four-digit serial number; dots are used in place of leading zeros.

It seems one Marvel-based film franchise isn’t enough for Josh Brolin.

The actor plays the supervillain Thanos in Marvel Studios’ Avengers: Infinity War and in just under a month will hop across some (soon-to-be nonexistent) intellectual property lines to play Nathan Summers AKA Cable in 20th Century Fox’s X-Men film, Deadpool 2.

The sequel to Ryan Reynolds’s R-rated hit will be the first of four films that Brolin has signed on for.

Brolin has had an illustrious film career that only really hit full-speed in the mid aughts, with the actor admitting that he was put off film work for years after watching his second feature film, Thrashin’.

In 2018 Josh Brolin plays supervillain Thanos in Avengers: Infinity War and Cable in Deadpool 2

‘It’s a skateboard movie, and when I went to the premiere, I was crushed. I thought my acting was horrendous,’ the actor told the New York Times while promoting his 2010 film, Jonah Hex.

‘It was the worst acting I’ve ever seen in my life. I moved to New York after that. And I devoted myself to the theater.’

Here is all you need to know about Josh Brolin including what his net worth is, his roles in The Goonies and as Thanos and Cable in Infinity War and Deadpool 2.

Who is Josh Brolin?

Josh James Brolin was born in Santa Monica, California to Jane Cameron and James Brolin.

Brolin’s mother was the assistant casting director on the 1960s Batman TV series and met Brolin’s father, the actor James Brolin on the show’s set.

Brolin’s parents divorced when he was 16 and in 1998 James Brolin married the Oscar-winner Barbra Streisand.

Brolin’s first big role came in 1985’s cult-classic The Goonies, acting alongside future Lord of the Rings star Sean Astin, and Corey Feldman.

He followed that up with Thrashin but then took a break from films until 1993’s The Road Killers, in-between missing out on a lead role in 21 Jump Street to Johnny Depp.

After Brolin’s mother died after a car crash in 1995, on the actor’s 27th birthday, he started drinking and using again, only getting treatment after a close friend from AA staged an intervention.

After getting sober, Brolin’s acting career resumed, albeit very slowly. ‘I was the last-resort guy,’ the actor told Esquire.

Brolin’s life and career turned around in 2006, when he landed the role in the Coen brothers’ film, No Country for Old Men. At the time, Brolin was in Robert Rodriguez’s film Grindhouse.

He was having breakfast with the American playwright and actor Sam Shepard, who told him about the film.

Despite believing he had no chance of getting a role, Brolin made an audition tape – directed by Quentin Tarantino, who was visiting the Grindhouse set that day – and landed the role of Llewelyn Moss.

A string of increasingly big films followed including American Gangster, George W Bush biopic W. and Milk, for which Brolin was nominated for an Oscar.

Brolin’s industrious approach to acting continued through to the 2010s. High-profile films such as True Grit, Men in Black 3, Guardians of the Galaxy and Sicario consolidated Brolin’s status as a Hollywood star.

In 2018 alone, Brolin will star in Avengers: Infinity War, Deadpool 2, Sicario: Day of the Soldado and The Legacy of a Whitetail Deer Hunter.

Brolin has been married three times, to actress Alice Adair between 1988 and 1994 and with whom he has two children; Diane Lane between 2004 and 2013; and former assistant Kathryn Boyd in 2016.

What is Josh Brolin’s net worth?

Josh Brolin’s net worth is estimated to be $35 million (£25.3m), according to Celebrity Net Worth.

Most of Brolin’s net worth is bolstered by his salaries in huge films such as Marvel’s Avengers and Guardians of the Galaxy, and his four-film deal with 20th Century Fox to play Cable in the X-Men series.

via The Little Moment ift.tt/2r49e1S

One really can never get enough of Benedict Cumberbatch... most of the planet is still waiting for Sherlock Season 5 to finally be filmed. But in the mean time, there's of course his biggest money maker, Dr. Strange.

Strange was most recently seen headlining the first half of the Avengers Infinity Saga - Infinity War, while coming back for the climactic battle with Thanos in Endgame. Hot Toys and Marvel Legends did their versions of this character a while ago, and now it was time for Figuarts and Mafex, with the latter being out of my price range... for now.

I do get bored, after all.

As the fancy box indicates, this is Strange from the Battle on Titan, before he made that ultimate sacrifice and disappeared for a movie. It comes decently packed, though is missing two key items - the multi armed effect, and a FREAKING STAND TO LEVITATE HIM WITH.

Contents do, however, include the figure, an alternate eye closed sculpt, 14 posing hands, one additional Crimson Bands of Cytorek hand, two small and medium Time Stone hand effects coupled with one "large" effect, two small, medium, and large general orange effects, his mystic sword, interchangeable Eye of Agamoto and Time Stone chest effect, and finally, a giant ass portal effect.

Even from the prototype pictures, it's easy to see that Tamashii Nations improved the figure aesthetically. I say that because I only own components of the first figure. Two major areas of discussion, namely the sculpt and the cape.

The sculpt I'm pretty sure my photos speaks for itself. Like with most of the recent Avengers release.. again.. MOST, because their Loki is made of the stuff I laugh at. Tamashii Nations have done a damn fine job of capturing the essence of the actor. The first one really isn't that great., nailing maybe the hairstyle and general facial structure.

The cape isn't super fancy per se, but it IS a wired cloth cape, though sadly the section that drapes over the shoulder is rigid plastic. The work on the Mafex cape admittedly destroys this, as it really does look like a scaled down Hot Toys version. This cape, however, is far superior to the Wile E Coyote steam roller accident prop that came with the first one. It's truly a sight to behold, possibly being the worst toy cape I've ever seen on any toy, with the only redeeming value being that it's decently painted. Furthermore, this wired cape still allows for some pretty cool posing.

Having said that, we're now free to move on to this figure.

The outfit is multi layered, which does look nice. Unfortunately, those layers are made of some pliable, yet still pretty rigid plastic, which looks great but generally gets in the way of everything. There's even a warning about permanent deformation if you leave Strange in his crossed leg pose for too long.

The Eye of Agamoto is something you want to keep your eye on because there is a tendency for the piece to go flying should you move the figure too quickly. Also, the Eye is connected to two raised and painted lines that represent the necklace strap, rather than being on an actual strap.

The translucent plastics used for the effects are also somewhat concerning, given the fragility of them and all. Especially the sword, where you have to shove the handle into a fist. The larger mystic mandalas are printed on clear plastic, which are less fragile, but more susceptible to scratching. There's also lovely warnings in the manual about potential paint wear as you pose the figure and attach the various mystic effects.

From an articulation perspective, Strange is about the same as Bucky, except that Strange has pull down hips. Based on previous practices and general logic, I'm going to go ahead and guess that they probably reused the actual body. You get ankles, single jointed knees, hips with thigh twist, waist, mid torso, standard shoulders with butterfly joints for lateral movement, single jointed elbows, wrist, neck, and head.

I've mentioned the hips, so here's some other highlights. The ankle joints are terrible, probably due to the bulk of the boot. Basically they're nonexistent. The coattails predictably get in the way of leg movement, as does the solid shoulder piece on the cape. All-in-all, it's a functional body with decent posing options, but I can't help but feel it's an older body that they didn't want to spend money to bring up to Ant Man standards.

Paint is generally above average. Work on the head and body are very good. Even in the areas of finer detail you can make out the masking is pretty sharp. Things like the Eye of Agamoto I can give a pass on as it is hard to get the paint into every tiny crevice. Paint work appears smooth. But, it's the hands that knock it down a peg for me. For starters, paint application is a bit thick, but maybe that's a material thing.

What you might not be able to make out is that wrist at the wrist there's a very small layer of black to help it blend in with the wrist and sleeves. The masking here is horrible.. like, they didn't even try, and it's consistent across all the hands I looked at. I wish they hadn't bothered at all, and just kept them as all flesh coloured.

Build quality, however, is all good. The usual criteria of joints, materials used, QC, tolerances, finish - none of those register a true concern or complaint from me and are up to what I expect from a Figuarts release.

Overall, I'd say this Dr. Strange is pretty much what the WW 84 Figuarts was like, namely its what they should have done in the first place, though I guess I can say that at least WW was better than Dr. Strange. While from an overall perspective the Figuarts certainly looks more like Benedict Cumberbatch as compared to the Mafex photos, you are getting a better articulated body and an outfit that works with you as opposed to against you... and a 120 USD preorder price tag.

To me, it's fascinating that each of the two figures chose a different key moment to include accessories for. Maybe this was planned so they didn't compete with each other?

*Sigh* I guess I'll just have to eventually get the other one too.

I like this one. Even though the double exposure effect is very subtle...almost nonexistent.

Taken by Trina (pixelmama) and Connie (Surfma)

Chuck E. Cheese #545 (closed) [10,578 square feet]

1280 Central Park Boulevard, Central Park, Fredericksburg, VA

Opened September 4th, 1999, closed May 29th, 2020, reopened in July 2021

The Super Bonus machine seemed to be the only trace of Avenger-era Chuck E. left in the building. Any renditions of Chuck E. before the 2012 makeover are nonexistent here otherwise. They scrubbed the place pretty clean of all the older elements!

Went for geocaching walkabout today. I hiked 8.42 miles round trip. The trail up Morena Butte, after it leaves the PCT, is rocky, steep, and nonexistent in places. It's worth every step of the 8.42 miles round trip.

That's Lake Morena down below. It's about sucked dry these days, feeding thirsty homes in San Diego County. That big, flat, green area used to be underwater, a few years ago.

Oolick is a rambunctious little guy that never shuts up! He is the worst gossip in Hollywood. Racing around on those little wheels of his, he can spread news like a wildfire. The only trouble is that his memory is shot and his attention span is nonexistent. So, he gets all his stories mixed up. How did you think Tabloids get all their crazy stories?

Robot sculpture assembled from found objects by Brian Marshall - Wilmington, DE. Items included in my sculptures vary from vintage household kitchen items to recycled industrial scrap. Some of my favorite items to use are old oil cans, aluminum measuring spoons, electrical meters, retro blenders, anodized cups, and pencil sharpeners.

(c) Rebecca Tun | May 2015

model: Jake Chatterton - www.purpleport.com/portfolio/jakechatterton

Manchester, UK

Agoutis have five front and three hind toes; the first toe is very small. The tail is very short or nonexistent and hairless.

STS033-082-021 Ord River and Lake Argyle, Western Australia November 1989

Lake Argyle and the rugged eastern portion of the Kimberley Plateau are visible in this low-oblique, north-northwest-looking photograph. Lake Argyle is part of the Ord River irrigation scheme, which provides a consistent supply of water for agriculture in this region. Because of the monsoonal climate, the region receives rainfall approximately 4 months of the year. The Ord River rises in the high Kimberley Plateau near the Durack Range (not visible in the photograph) and flows generally northward 200 miles (320 kilometers) before emptying into the Joseph Bonaparte Gulf near the city of Wyndham (not visible in the photograph). The Kimberley Plateau, once a limestone and coral bank larger than the present Great Barrier Reef, comprises a number of varied ranges, most of which are composed of rugged sandstone dissected by deep gorges. The aborigine word for the Kimberley is Wandjima, "the land of the wind and the water." Population is sparse, and transportation routes are almost nonexistent in this hot, desolate wilderness.

Last night, Jessica Lo and I met up at the airport to begin our exciting month-long journey to the East Coast :)

At around 11:15 ish, I got up to get in line to board our plane that was departing at 11:45pm only to find out I was in the line to get on the wrong plane haha. Shows you how excited I was to get going!

Slept pretty much the whole way through the plane ride, got to JFK at around 8:30am (Eastern Time from now on!) and met up with Lily Nunez and Nancijane Carolipio, along with two other program-mates who took the same flight. We followed Professor Halle's directions to our dorm:

Air Train $5

Subway E and 6 $2.50

(this was definitely an experience, lugging around 50lb bags + all these carry-on stuff up and down stairs to get from one subway to another... for some reason, most of the elevators or escalators were either broken or nonexistent whenever we needed one! the seven of us had a blast... and that's what Lily calls an "experience" haha)

It was awesome though because people here in NY are so nice - some offered to help us carry stuff when we were struggling, others gave us directions. It is definitely a different environment here!

We got out of the subway station, looked up and there was our dorm / apartment! Looked very nice on the outside, right next to Dunkin' Donuts, Chipotle, Subway, Trader Joe's, etc. When we got in, it wasn't as "nice" as the outside looked... but not bad enough to complain! My roommate, Thieny Nguyen (in the picture above! - btw, she's from UCSD, cool beans!), had already moved in but wasn't in the room. I met this sweet girl later on (in an hour or so) and definitely like her a lot so far :)

Went with Jessica to Walgreen's (around the corner) to get toiletries... came back and showered! Went to lunch at Ray's Pizza with the ladies... shopped at K-Mart for more toiletries and whatnot.

Came back, unpacked... and napped for a good two hours!

We had dinner plans with the professor and our program-mates at The Coffee Shop about 10 minute walk away at 7pm. Had yummy food - coconut shrimp, chicken satay, salad, rotisserie chicken, fruit plate - then walked around Union Square where I saw this guy "tagging" on NYC maps... just like the one featured in Day 5 of my project, with Company! Definitely reminded me of him... and home :)

We walked around some more, then went to Trader Joe's to find a nice cake for Lily's 21st birthday tomorrow! But the line was too long and cake selection was limited, so we walked back to Whole Foods to get her a nice Chocolate Cake (and some fruit tarts for NJ and me haha).

Now, I am sitting here in the commons of our dorm with my roomie, just taking advantage of the internet (we don't have internet YET in our room...)

I'm realizing how important this project is to me, that I would constantly be thinking about pictures, and blogging, and what to write about... what to catch in my photos.

I really like this photo - taken at K-Mart.

Thieny and her watermelon Kleenex box haha :) Really cool cause there was a subway station that went directly into K-Mart. Which brings me to the topic of what Jess and I were talking about at our terminal last night: public transportation really leads to people were are more friendly and sociable... I can see the difference here!

Really can't wait to explore some more :)

It's gonna be great!

I really want to try my best to be healthy here, so if you're there and you think of me, send me some love and text me to remind me to be/stay healthy (no soda, much fruits, sunblock, wash face = no acne, etc.) Thank you in advance.

I finished watching Autumn's Concerto last night. It was so bomb. As long as I have loved, I will leave this world satisfied :)

Good night for now.

Might blog some more on tumblr!

Follow me there.

I miss home, but this is where I am for the next month. I better enjoy it before the four weeks fly by!

A journey awaits!

unicamp.kintera.org/campathon/mwltatertots

www.lucytseng.tumblr.com

Qingdao is China’s premier “beer” city, as the country’s most famous brew – Tsingtao – was founded and continues to be brewed here. (For those who do come to the city, Tsingtao makes a decent dark beer – Yuan Jiang – that is quite hard to get outside of the city.) I guess the easiest comparison I can make would be to say that Qingdao is the same to beer culture here as St. Louis and Milwaukee are in the United States; a town famous for a mass-produced beer.

The Tsingtao brewery and museum (slightly underwhelming, according to my Lonely Planet guidebook) is located on Dengzhou Lu a bit north of Zhongshan Park. Dengzhou Lu is also famously known as Pijiu Jie (Beer Street). During the day, it’s easy to see the nightlife potential. At night, almost every establishment along this stretch of Dengzhou Lu (probably about a half kilometer to a one kilometer long) is a restaurant that opens up with the focus on drinking beer – almost always Tsingtao. (Curiously, in coming by here at night, the taxi took me past Hongjiu Jie – Red Wine Street. It looked quite a bit less subdued as wine culture here is, well, nonexistent. I didn’t have a chance to get back and look around there. Having drunk Chinese wine before…I don’t think I’m missing too much.)

I’ve lived in China for almost three years now; about two years in Shanghai and one year in Tianjin. Shandong province is the province that’s on the sea between the two cities. (From Shanghai to Tianjin by train is around 5 hours; by plane, 2 hours.) Qingdao, probably the most well-known city in Shandong, is a charming city, to say the least. In my opinion, it’s exceptionally photogenic – with very nice beaches, great architecture, good geography/topography, and terrific food.

Qingdao also happens to be known for the most famous of Chinese beers (Tsingtao), which is actually a company started by the Germans. (For what it’s worth, Chinese beers are quite watery and Tsingtao is somewhat like the Budweiser of Chinese beers. That being said, I’m happy to drink an ice cold Tsingtao on a hot summer day whereas I wouldn’t say the same thing about a Budweiser.

So what to make of Qingdao then? Before colonial powers swept in and started chopping up China piecemeal, Qingdao was basically a sleepy fishing village. During the Ming dynasty, a battery was built here. In 1898, the Germans seized control of Qingdao when two missionaries were killed. (Personally, it seems alarming to me that a country could lose a city because two foreigners happened to be killed – and China sure lost a lot that way during the 19th century. I guess that’s the downside to outmoded military technology; the Europeans and Americans basically plundered China…) At any rate, Qingdao was ceded to the Germans for 99 years, but that didn’t last long, thanks to World War I.

During the 15-20 years that the Germans did have control of the town, they managed to build a handful of churches (still standing) and missionaries, in addition to the aforementioned Qingdao brewery. Because of that, a lot of the European architecture has a heavy German influence and there are still a few random signs of German heritage around town.

From the Germans, Qingdao didn’t land directly with the Chinese. It spent 8 years under Japanese control (1914-1922) before being returned to the Kuomintang (aka General Chiang Kai-Shek’s clan). The Japanese took control once again in 1938 (as they swept through northeast China and across half the country) before losing it for the last time in 1945 at the end of World War II. Since then, it’s been in Chinese hands. (Brief history courtesy of Lonely Planet.)

Contemporary Qingdao certainly makes its way as a tourist destination – and it’s a fine one at that. The population (per my LP from 2011) lists it at 1.73 million. The city has a few areas that are quite appealing to tourists: the Old Town (the heart of the city) off the beach and just east of the railway station downtown, Badaguan (which means “eight passes”) is a hilly area with a lot of nice residential architecture to the east of the Old Town. Other than that, there are a lot of parks, a beer street, churches, and a 40 km. scenic walk (which, obviously, most people do not cover from end to end) along the shore which goes by all of the beaches in the area.

All in all, Qingdao is the type of town that, if you get the chance to visit, I think you would find yourself thinking it would be great to return again and again.

Aggie Ring ’84 likes to make his own cultured butter, cheeses, and crème fraîche for various uses in the kitchen. Unfortunately, the local grocery stores don’t carry dairy products that are up to Aggie Ring standards. Aggie Ring ’84 has a buddy who is a retired Army Medic who runs a coffee and espresso business who hooked Aggie Ring up with a special bottle of heavy cream.

The little Aggie Ring was just as pleased as a little Aggie Ring can be when he saw that it arrived in a glass bottle. “Gee!” said Aggie Ring, “This is just like when we’d buy milk back in the 80s when we were living in Bryan, Texas. “Why, yes is is.” I replied. I thought to myself that dairy products seem so much cleaner when they come in a glass container.

This particular bottle of heavy cream was produced by the Apple Valley Creamery in East Berlin, Pennsylvania. It is approximately 40% to 45% butterfat depending on the cows’ diet at the time of the year. Now, this particular heavy cream is pasteurized only (not ultra-pasteurized, a process that kills off most of the milk or cream’s delicious flavor). Also, it is NOT homogenized. Almost everyone in the USA these days can only buy homogenized or “homo” dairy products. When he has a choice, Aggie Ring is a “non-homo” type of ring because that’s the way he rolls.

Aggie Ring’s favorite thing about “non-homo” heavy cream is that the heavy butterfat separates from the milk and floats to the top of the bottle. Aggie Ring has to use a knife to break through that delicious, heavy sweat cream to get to the rest of the liquid in the bottle before he heats it up to a tepid temperature and adds the bacteria that will culture it overnight so he can make the cultured butter or crème fraîche for his culinary requirements.

The Aggie Ring test for a proper bottle of “non-homo” heavy cream is if he can sit on top of the butterfat that has risen to the top of the bottle for at least 30 seconds before sinking in. For “educational” purposes, Aggie Ring asked me to photograph him sitting on top of that delicious sweet cream. Unfortunately, it took me a bit longer than 30 seconds to adjust the lights and set the exposure on the camera. The last thing I heard Aggie Ring say before he began to sink into the delicious “non-homo” heavy cream was, “Oh dear, this is a kerfuffle, isn’t it?” The next thing I knew, poor Aggie Ring had broken through the butterfat and had sunk to the bottom of the bottle.

When I poured the delicious “non-homo” sweet whole cream into the container Aggie Ring uses to culture it overnight, I had to retrieve him with a spoon. No teeth this time. I asked Aggie Ring, “Does it remind you of an old fashioned Aggie Ring Dunking?” Aggie Ring replied, “Sort of, but there was no Shiner Bock.” I told Aggie Ring, “Yes, I suppose you’re right.”

Aggie Ring then said, “It’s a good thing I’m a Genuine Texas A&M Aggie Ring pure of heart and in spirit and not a VMI ring. One of those heavy and fat, gaudy VMI rings would have sunk down into the bottle immediately and its lack of Aggie class would have most certainly soured the cream. Also, the artificial stone in most of the VMI rings might have poisoned it as well.” The Aggie Ring is very good at pointing things like this out.

Now… There’s one other type of dairy product that Aggie Ring likes the most. He didn’t want me to say anything about it because it’s very illegal in New Jersey. However, Aggie Ring allowed me to mention it if I didn’t name names because, as Aggie Ring always says, “Snitches wind up in ditches!” So, the little Aggie Ring’s favorite type of milk and cream is the “raw” stuff. Since it’s illegal to sell raw dairy in New Jersey, Aggie Ring has found “a guy” that can hook him up with the “real stuff.” The closest thing I can compare obtaining raw dairy in New Jersey to would be a “drug deal.” You see, when Aggie Ring wants the “raw stuff,” he has to call his “guy” in PA and place an order during the week. Then, on Saturday morning not long after the sunrise, Aggie Ring’s “guy” meets Aggie Ring and others in back of a local train station in a van that has been driven over from PA. Cash exchanges hands and the raw, illegal contraband gets put into Aggie Ring’s car trunk just in case he’s stopped by the dairy police on the way home.

Aggie Ring used to occasionally milk cows at the Texas A&M Dairy Farm in College Station, Texas back when he was a young Aggie Ring and he’d occasionally try milk directly from the cow. Aggie Ring thinks this is the best type of milk in the world.

Aggie Ring says, “The cows up here in PA and in New Jersey must be the happiest cows in the world. They have four wonderful seasons of weather up here and the humidity is almost nonexistent.

Just before I posted this, Aggie Ring said, “Don’t forget to remind them that the road goes on forever and the party never ends!”

One really can never get enough of Benedict Cumberbatch... most of the planet is still waiting for Sherlock Season 5 to finally be filmed. But in the mean time, there's of course his biggest money maker, Dr. Strange.

Strange was most recently seen headlining the first half of the Avengers Infinity Saga - Infinity War, while coming back for the climactic battle with Thanos in Endgame. Hot Toys and Marvel Legends did their versions of this character a while ago, and now it was time for Figuarts and Mafex, with the latter being out of my price range... for now.

I do get bored, after all.

As the fancy box indicates, this is Strange from the Battle on Titan, before he made that ultimate sacrifice and disappeared for a movie. It comes decently packed, though is missing two key items - the multi armed effect, and a FREAKING STAND TO LEVITATE HIM WITH.

Contents do, however, include the figure, an alternate eye closed sculpt, 14 posing hands, one additional Crimson Bands of Cytorek hand, two small and medium Time Stone hand effects coupled with one "large" effect, two small, medium, and large general orange effects, his mystic sword, interchangeable Eye of Agamoto and Time Stone chest effect, and finally, a giant ass portal effect.

Even from the prototype pictures, it's easy to see that Tamashii Nations improved the figure aesthetically. I say that because I only own components of the first figure. Two major areas of discussion, namely the sculpt and the cape.

The sculpt I'm pretty sure my photos speaks for itself. Like with most of the recent Avengers release.. again.. MOST, because their Loki is made of the stuff I laugh at. Tamashii Nations have done a damn fine job of capturing the essence of the actor. The first one really isn't that great., nailing maybe the hairstyle and general facial structure.

The cape isn't super fancy per se, but it IS a wired cloth cape, though sadly the section that drapes over the shoulder is rigid plastic. The work on the Mafex cape admittedly destroys this, as it really does look like a scaled down Hot Toys version. This cape, however, is far superior to the Wile E Coyote steam roller accident prop that came with the first one. It's truly a sight to behold, possibly being the worst toy cape I've ever seen on any toy, with the only redeeming value being that it's decently painted. Furthermore, this wired cape still allows for some pretty cool posing.

Having said that, we're now free to move on to this figure.

The outfit is multi layered, which does look nice. Unfortunately, those layers are made of some pliable, yet still pretty rigid plastic, which looks great but generally gets in the way of everything. There's even a warning about permanent deformation if you leave Strange in his crossed leg pose for too long.

The Eye of Agamoto is something you want to keep your eye on because there is a tendency for the piece to go flying should you move the figure too quickly. Also, the Eye is connected to two raised and painted lines that represent the necklace strap, rather than being on an actual strap.

The translucent plastics used for the effects are also somewhat concerning, given the fragility of them and all. Especially the sword, where you have to shove the handle into a fist. The larger mystic mandalas are printed on clear plastic, which are less fragile, but more susceptible to scratching. There's also lovely warnings in the manual about potential paint wear as you pose the figure and attach the various mystic effects.

From an articulation perspective, Strange is about the same as Bucky, except that Strange has pull down hips. Based on previous practices and general logic, I'm going to go ahead and guess that they probably reused the actual body. You get ankles, single jointed knees, hips with thigh twist, waist, mid torso, standard shoulders with butterfly joints for lateral movement, single jointed elbows, wrist, neck, and head.

I've mentioned the hips, so here's some other highlights. The ankle joints are terrible, probably due to the bulk of the boot. Basically they're nonexistent. The coattails predictably get in the way of leg movement, as does the solid shoulder piece on the cape. All-in-all, it's a functional body with decent posing options, but I can't help but feel it's an older body that they didn't want to spend money to bring up to Ant Man standards.

Paint is generally above average. Work on the head and body are very good. Even in the areas of finer detail you can make out the masking is pretty sharp. Things like the Eye of Agamoto I can give a pass on as it is hard to get the paint into every tiny crevice. Paint work appears smooth. But, it's the hands that knock it down a peg for me. For starters, paint application is a bit thick, but maybe that's a material thing.

What you might not be able to make out is that wrist at the wrist there's a very small layer of black to help it blend in with the wrist and sleeves. The masking here is horrible.. like, they didn't even try, and it's consistent across all the hands I looked at. I wish they hadn't bothered at all, and just kept them as all flesh coloured.

Build quality, however, is all good. The usual criteria of joints, materials used, QC, tolerances, finish - none of those register a true concern or complaint from me and are up to what I expect from a Figuarts release.

Overall, I'd say this Dr. Strange is pretty much what the WW 84 Figuarts was like, namely its what they should have done in the first place, though I guess I can say that at least WW was better than Dr. Strange. While from an overall perspective the Figuarts certainly looks more like Benedict Cumberbatch as compared to the Mafex photos, you are getting a better articulated body and an outfit that works with you as opposed to against you... and a 120 USD preorder price tag.

To me, it's fascinating that each of the two figures chose a different key moment to include accessories for. Maybe this was planned so they didn't compete with each other?

*Sigh* I guess I'll just have to eventually get the other one too.