One of the best delights of the newspaper business is its unpredictability. Events, often unforeseen, dictate the course of the day. This can be exciting. Or, sometimes, it can be mortifying.
For some reason, talk turned to the 1964 New York World’s Fair. You may remember the remnants of that event, especially if you saw the movie, “Men In Black.” The centerpiece of the fair was a huge, skeletonized globe, called the “Unisphere,” and there were two tall, modern-looking observatory towers that in the movie were actually captured flying saucers. My favorite line of the movie has to do with the fair having disguised an alien invasion: “Why else would they hold it in Queens?”
The sheer vastness of the devastation in Haiti, a nation that was not a garden spot to begin with, is such that it is almost impossible to grasp. It appears that at least as many people as populate all of my county — every man, woman, child, and out-of-town college student — were killed. The mind lacks perspective for such things, even as a phrase like “a trillion dollars” is so big as to be meaningless.
Here we are, a third of the way through January and well into very cold weather, and I still haven’t fired up the furnace this winter. I don’t know if I will.
The article caught my attention — how could it not?
It seems that the Russians are going to get busy and, if they work hard and fast, they will push an asteroid away from Earth before it comes close — maybe too close — in 2032.
When Charles Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol In Prose, Being a Ghost Story of Christmas (the full title) in 1843, he chose to make the least frightening of his apparitions the Ghost of Christmas Past. That makes sense. Christmas memories tend toward the sweet.
The assault on, with, and by music continues, and grows. I love music, but I don’t know how long I can hold out, in a world in which escaping from music has become increasingly difficult.
Imagine, if you would, that a few weeks before Easter it were announced that the body of Jesus had been found, that it had been kept in an oh-so-secret crypt in the Vatican lo, these many years. That disclosure would be big news, wouldn’t it? It would put quite a crimp in the most fundamental tenets of Christianity. It would be pretty difficult to sustain the religion after that.
Having been raised as a photographer, I’ve always felt a little vulnerable if I didn’t have a camera on my person. For years I carried a Nikon or Leica film camera with me pretty much wherever I went, often as not along with a big camera bag made by Jim Domke, all crammed full of spare camera bodies and lenses and film and a few filters and more film and a strobe (which is what we used to call electronic flashguns). I didn’t need to go to the gym.
One of the best things about winter — yes, there are some — is how clear the sky gets at night.