I went on a photowalk with my friend James at Bear Mountain State Park and then at the New Croton Dam. The lake at the park was okay, but the dam was spectacular. (It usually is.)
Someone seems to have bad luck when fishing.
And now, the dam.
The dam has a rather beautiful spillway.
The sun was at the right angle to generate a rainbow on the mist from the spillway.
We went up to the top of the dam.
It was shady next to this wall, so the leaves still had a thick covering of ice from the dam spray.
Removing the leaf left this piece of ice.
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To make myself feel better about starting a new year, I went through Lightroom and picked over a bunch of shots from the second half of 2009 that I hadn’t gone through yet. Here are some of the better ones, in ~chronological order.
The Capitol building in DC, from a trip to visit Dad.
From the other side and farther away.
A robin, perched on a fence on the Capitol grounds.
W 4th St and W 11th St intersect in lower Manhattan. This, to me, constitutes a tear in the fabric of space-time.
Going the wrong way, but it seems justifiable.
These old call boxes for the fire department are scattered across New York. It was nice to see someone come up with something to do with them.
The Plaza Hotel and its reflection in the Pond at Central Park.
A very hot light being used at a film shoot in Washington Square Park (Manhattan).
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(Background: On December 25, 2009, a man was caught attempting to ignite an explosive device aboard an airliner as it was about to land at Detroit Metropolitan Airport. Nobody was hurt, and the plane landed safely.)
This foiled attack was accompanied, as have been each of the ones before it, by a “temporary” increase in security posturing by the Department of Homeland Security and the Transportation Security Administration. I say “posturing” because I refuse to call it actual security, because it isn’t. It’s security theater, as Bruce Schneier is so fond of saying. He’s written an article for CNN denouncing the latest round of measures being taken “for our security”. It says pretty much everything I want to say on the subject, better than I could ever say it. Go read it. Then come back here and see if you had the same question I did.
Schneier is a very intelligent man saying exactly what needs to be said at this point in time. Why isn’t anyone listening to him? He’s been saying this stuff for about a decade now, and our “security” practices have just gotten worse and worse, while we continue to see attacks get stopped at the last second or, worse, succeed. I suppose it’s a good start that CNN is publishing an article from Schneier, but, frankly, he’s a single voice of reason shouting into a hurricane of idiocy and fear. So I want you to pass his article on to your friends, and your families, and I want you to tell them to do the same. If enough people start reading and thinking like him, we might have a chance of stopping ourselves before we turn this country into Orwell’s 1984. (An excellent book, but, as some snarky anonymous person on the Internet once put it, “it’s not an instruction manual.”)
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Go talk to your parents.
Ask them how they voted on Proposition 13. Ask them how they feel about paying taxes.
Ask them who they've voted for in state assembly and gubernatorial elections for the last 20 years.
And then ask them if they realize that the real reason your college education is so damn expensive is that the State of California is unable to get its revenue in line with its spending because it cannot set reasonable taxes on its populace. Ask them if they've thought about how much they've paid into the system in taxes as California residents and how some of those taxes were originally intended to fund the University of California so that attendance could be free for all qualified Californian students. And then, ask them who they really think is to blame for the UC fee increases, furloughs, and layoffs.
After that, talk to your neighbors. Your friends' parents. Your grandparents. Your hairdresser, your grocery store clerk, your doctor, your lawyer, and the person next to you on the bus. Let them know that you, as a UC student, are paying for their dislike of taxes, their greed, and their unwillingness to realize that real public services cost real money. Let them know that the only way to fix this is for them, and us, to elect a new government that will reverse the last three decades of failed conservative fiscal policy. Let them know that they should be calling their representatives and telling them to pass a real budget, one that funds the state's services, and to raise some taxes to get proper revenue for these services.
And let them know that you are angry.
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Corks piled up at the bar at Wilson Vineyards' tasting room.
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