Zach Eye For The Scared Guy

Zach has a phobia I like to call parciusocuphobia, the fear of creepy-looking eyes. He is especially averse to empty eye sockets, or eyes that hang loose from their owner's skulls by their optic nerves.

So I invented a new kind of eye that I terrified him with all weekend, the poor guy. It's only in jest of course, and he knows it, but it's fun to see him squirm when I talk about the Zach Eye.

The Zach Eye is creepy eye that could be anywhere, but is usually found on very creepy people. The Zach Eye has but one sinister purpose: it trains its gaze on Zach and Zach alone. It will always point towards Zach. If Zach moves, the Zach Eye follows him. If the creepy guy turns around and the eye can't see Zach, it will pop out of his skull and roll around to the back of his head to continue his burning gaze.

At Zach, and only Zach.

The Zach Eye never blinks.

A Walk In The Park, And Then Some

We took off after dinner for a nice family walk in the park. A brief rain shower gave us this beautiful rainbow to start us off in style...

After a trip around the perimeter of Robinwood, there was a good healthy dose of climbing to be done...




...and then some serious giant-leaf-shaking to entertain Brooke...

...which made Brooke so happy she decided to smile and show off her two, yes, TWO shy teeth!

Landscapers

Zach and I spent the first half of our first day of vacation doing yardwork. It feels so good to get something done and we really spiffed up the grounds of Wild House. Here's Z doing some weed whacking...you'll want to be sure to stand well back.

2148

The homestead, in dire need of a good mowing and a thorough weeding, both of which are on the agenda for tomorrow.

Momentum

This was one of those days when I just couldn't stop cooking. I started out making something simple for dinner and ended up with this middle-eastern feast!

Hmm...let's see, we've got pork sirloin kebabs bathed in fiery red chili and scented with cumin, couscous, hummus with pitas, roasted veggies, and a nice fattoush salad dressed in lemon-olive oil with zatar and mint.

Our south-Italian wine turned out sour and corked so we looked to Chile for a nice cab.

Profiling

Here's one I took of Nan a few years ago...I was looking over some old pics and liked it, so I thought I'd put it up.

A Nice Place To Be

Dennis, Wide

A Yummy Day!

Today we celebrated my birthday with my perpetual favorite meal, King Crab legs and a New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc. We had to put this meal off for when we had Zach and all the crabby planets lined up, but it was well worth the wait!!

Thanks Heather, for a wonderful birthday dinner!

T-Rex

This is part of the Dinosauria exhibit at the Detroit Zoo...one big scary mofo!

Waiting For Mommy

Meaghan

Happy Birthday to the newest member of the Wild Clan (well, ok, Brooke is really, but...we'll say newest adult...), Meaghan!!!

"There's An App For Those"

You new mothers out there should be able to figure out what this app is for. They really do have an app for everything.

2 of 300,000

Unless you live under a rock in Uzbekistan, and probably even if you do, you've heard that yesterday was one of those days of coincidence that happens every now and then. You know, one of THOSE days, when people try to attach some significance to the fact that two very public people died on the same day, forgetting that 1) It's only random coincidence, and 2) 300,000 OTHER people died yesterday too, 50,000 of them from hunger. But I digress...yesterday was all about Farrah and MJ.

Farrah I expected, as we all did. MJ went down differently, as we also should have expected. I was at the local pub when the news of MJ came to me via an SMS from Heather. I told the waitress who became very distraught and asked me to confirm it before she told "everyone". A quick trip to Twitter left no doubt: various words related to MJ's death had shot to the top of the feeds, and bumped #iranelection right off the top ten. Even "CPR" was up there.

In fact, this news was dominating everything else on the planet. If a nuclear war broke out at that instant, nobody would know about it because servers everywhere were taking a pretty severe MJ beatdown. I'm not kidding, a CNN.com headline from this morning reads "Jackson dies, almost takes Internet with him".

"Yes", I told her as her eyes welled up in tears, "It's true". Minutes later the whole pub was talking about it.

It is difficult to imagine being known like MJ was. The entire world knew him. I mean, Farrah was well known, but Michael was a worldwide superstar. There were a hundred new posts about him every second on Twitter, in dozens of different languages.

As I pondered all of the philosophical angles of yesterday, as I am known to do, I came up with an interesting connection.

MJ made the best selling album in history, and Farrah graced the best selling poster ever printed. I'm sure others have made this connection, but it's not just trivial, they were both hugely influential icons of my culture. I think the world without them is a little less than it was with them.

Lemon Yellow Smiles

Light Up A Mummy

Most people don't know that I smoke cigars. This is probably because I do it so infrequently: typically once a year at reunion I have a couple, and (very) occasionally with my buddy Howard at a long lunch.

Because of these long periods of non-smoking, and because I have generous friends, I have accumulated a rather large collection of cigars at home. I keep them in a humidifier but I rarely remember to add more water so my cigars tend to be very dry and crunchy, and quite possibly dangerously flammable.

Howard says they are like smoking Ramses II.

A Suite Time

My lovely wife got us into a suite at Comerica Park last night for a Tigers-Cubs inter-league game, and what a good game it was. The Tigers ended up winning with a walk-off bottom-of-the-ninth 2 run shot by Raburn. By that time we had unfortunately already headed through the gates to get the kids to bed, but still...

We ate peanuts and cotton candy, cheered, and generally had a great time at the not-so-old ball park.

Here are a few scenes from the game, including Joel Zumaya dishing out of one of his awesome 102 MPH fastballs.

"Fix It, Zackawy"

On The Lawn

Grilled

Bubble

Detroit Zoo Rackham Fountain, Remixed

Time

Children, blessed with lots of time, make the most of it.

Crop Circles

Photography is surely one of the most jargon-filled and technically confusing of all the activities you are likely to encounter in your daily life.

And how could it NOT be? It's all about optics, which is a doozy of a subject - often lumped in with Relativity in college physics.

One of the newer concepts photographers have had to grapple with since the advent of digital captures is the "crop factor". This is the magnification that is introduced to your pictures when you use a camera with a sensor that is smaller than the size of the 35mm film that your lenses were designed for. You only get the center portion of the field of view in your capture. This is one of those things that is near-impossible to describe to someone, but becomes much easier to "get" when shown visually.

So here's a great diagram that clearly shows why your view is more magnified when you use a smaller sensor, and also why you can't use one of the new lenses designed for these smaller sensors with a full-frame body, such as my 5D II.

The inner rectangle is an APS-C sized sensor from a Canon Rebel or 50D. The size of this sensor introduces a 1.6x crop factor, which is to say, at a given focal length your pictures will look "zoomed in" by a factor of 1.6. So a 50mm lens will appear to be an 50 x 1.6 = 80mm lens.

The outer rectangle is the size of an actual frame of 35mm film, and is also the size of the larger "full frame" sensor on the Canon 5D and 1 series bodies. These cameras show no crop factor because they use the same capture area as film.

The outer circle is the diameter of a standard 35mm lens, and you can see that these lenses are overkill for the APS-C sensor size. For this reason newer, smaller diameter EF-S lenses have been designed by Canon, and they can ONLY be used with APS-C sensors. As you can see from the picture, using this smaller lens with a full-frame sensor would result in huge unexposed areas at the edges of the frame. This is why only full-sized lenses can be used on full-frame sensor cameras.

Clear as mud?

Keeping It All Straight

Although I cannot remember many of the basic tasks required to get me through my life, such as renewing my driver's license, I am required to keep an accurate mental inventory of exactly which members of each esoteric clan of LEGO Bionicles Zach owns.

Does he have Scrall, the Glatorian, or do the red accents belong to the Mistika named Toa Tahu? I truly believe that there are more Bionicles in existence than there are forms of life in the Amazon basin.

You can probably guess how good I am at this extreme mental challenge. I've already got one duplicate frying in its box on my car seat right now, waiting to be taken back to his legions of clan-mates at Wal-Mart.

A Good Run

It is a wistful day for lovers of fine photographs. Probably the greatest color film ever made, Kodachrome, is now officially dead. Kodak has announced that the latest batch of Kodachrome, a film they have been making for 74 years, will be the last they will ever make. This final lonely run will be sold out by early fall, maybe sooner.

My childhood is captured on Kodachrome, so I have a personal connection to this great icon of culture.

Goodbye, my colorful friend.

Fuzzy

Look at what my cute little fuzzy-headed daughter Brooke made for me at school...it's "Shaving Cream Art". She put shaving cream on daddy's face. How cute is that? I also got a plaster cast of her little foot so I can remember down the line just how tiny she once was.

Happy Birthday Dave K!!!

Dead Tired

Besides the fact that it's obviously uncomfortable and gaudy, something makes me uneasy about this couch. Can't quite place it though.

Caught In Time

Maddie blows bubbles like a pro...when you catch her in the middle of a good one, she looks like a master glass-blower.

Weekend Water Fun!

A Day To Remember

I had an awesome Father's Day thanks to my family. I got a nice card signed by everyone who is capable of writing, plus one!

We went to the zoo at my request and it was so nice to have everyone there...I was surrounded by cuteness and laughter the whole day long. Well, that and plastic animatronic dinosaurs.

In the afternoon we went to Grampapa's House and did the BBQ-thing, immersed in more cuteness and more laughter. And pea pods.

I got a gift too: the Blu-Ray Disc of Dark Night whose packaging alone almost scared me out of my shorts!

Here's to my family: I love you girls (and guy) more than you know, thank you for giving me a wonderful Father's Day to remember.

Guess What's Coming To Dinner!

It's THAT time again!

Finger Food

Our little Brookie, who seems intent on racing into life's fun stuff with reckless abandon, has started eating Cheerios! Sometimes they pop out again, and sometimes they go down, but either way she has a blast!

A Pisa Lisa

Happy Birthday, Lisa

Packing Elephants

I don't feel very good today. I had terrible chills and aches last night, and I hope it's not the flu. Right now my back feels like it is supporting the weight of an African Elephant stuffed into a backpack.

At least it's Friday!