April Fools

Asmall gallery of some of the more unusual vehicles seen at Deming's annual "Smokin' Oldies" car show, because I suddenly ran out of time to write a clever April 1 post....

Easily the most unusual vehicle at the show.. and it wasn't even in the show!
 Honda GoldWing  powered trike.

Gotta love the coolant overflow receptacle!

Waiting for the intrusive wand ultrasound.

"Girl I'm just a Jeepster for your love"

Several visitors were fatally impaled on the fins.

Insert toilet seat joke here.

Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes..

As promised, (though not as expeditiously as previously implied..) a story about the completely new direction our lives are about to take.

First let's back up to some time last Spring.. or maybe it was Summer.  At Margaret's usual monthly trip to the auction, she met a lady from Madison, WI who happened to live near us.  As they became better aquainted, Sam (Samantha, I presume) told Margaret about a conversation she'd had with the owners of the little, used bookstore in town.  She was interested in buying the store, and wondered if we would be interested in going in on it with her.  We were intrigued, did some digging around and some research and decided that yes, we would be interested.

As our interest increased, Sam's seemed to wane.  So much so, that she left town last Summer to return to Madison, but is now residing also in Florida.  That did nothing to dampen our (Margaret's) resolve.  Roping in a family member to be a "silent partner", we set the wheels in motion to become book store owners.

The first thing we needed to do was buy the building from the person who was leasing it to the book store business owners.  We didn't want to be at the mercy of a stranger who didn't even live in New Mexico.  That was accomplished a week ago, Tuesday, when we closed the deal on the building and property.

The business owners' lease expires at the end of May.  At that time, we'll purchase the inventory, and take over the business, while the current owners retire to the house they're building in the wilderness of Datil, NM. (Look it up).

While we won't change the name of the store, we'll be doing business as Dog-Eared Enterprises, LLC.  We'll also be creating some gallery space in the store for my local landscape and nature images, so Shot On Site Photography will also be folded into Dog-Eared Enterprises.

The store features extensive titles on southwest history, New Mexico, the borderlands, plus all the other topics you'd expect to find in a bookseller's.  We expect to have an increased internet presence over what they're currently doing, including a Facebook page, which I expect everybody to "Like".

The dusty backyard visible in the pictures, will have a chain link fence installed to complete the enclosure, and will become 1) a dog yard for the daily "store dogs", and 2) a space to rent out for "events" such as weddings or receptions and such.

So with that, we are truly, once and for all, completely retired from the "traveling to dog events" business.  It was fun, but we're moving on.

Future Headlines

Posts coming up by the end of the weekend...

This happened yesterday.

This happened today.

This will happen tomorrow...

Willow Plays at Being an Otter

Trying out a new, simple, animated GIF creator..  Had this sequence of pics from this morning of Willow discovering snow for the first time.. (or the first time in a long time).

Facebook Favorites Calendars!

It's that time of year again!

Each year, we take the 13 (or more) most liked images from our Shot On Site Facebook Page, and put them in a calendar, which we then sell in the hopes of turning a couple dollars of profit, and in turn, brighten up your offices, kitchens, kennels, or outhouses, or the homes of those to whom you gift them.

This year, we're doing something a little different.

We have two calendars! A Dog-themed calendar, and a Not-Dog-themed version. One for the kennel and one for the kitchen, eh? Or one for a gift for that rare non-dog owning friend on your gift list.

We have a limited stock of both, that we will sell for a mere $15 each, postage included. All you have to do it email either Margaret (margaretfairman@gmail.com) or me, (dan@shotonsite.us). We'll then send you a PayPal invoice, and upon payment, will mail out your calendar.

If we run out of our stock, all is not lost. If you'll look over to the right sidebar, you'll see display links for both calendars. These links will take you to Lulu.com, where you can review the calendars before buying, and you can also buy calendars for $17 plus postage.

See? Time is of the essence if you want to save about $6! We're waiting for your emails.

The Buckeyes' Summer of Schadenfreude.

Click to animate.



Starring ~ Terrell Pryor as Hogan "Tats" Hero

               OSU Prez  E. Gordon Gee as Klink, the Bell Captain Colonel

               

Disgraced former OSU coach, Jim Tressell as Sgt. I. C. Nutting-Schultz.

"LSUfreek" appears regularly in the college football blog, Every Day Should Be Saturday .  Follow him on Twitter.

Buy lots of popcorn.. it's going to be a long, fun Summer!

The Latest Cool Thing.

The Library Of Congress presents The National Jukebox.



Explore!



..and more!

Beyond The Sea

The parents.. Otis/Fada.  Image ©Camilla Colleen

Earthly arrival early June.  Hare-Brained Homestead arrival anticipated late-August or early September.  Watch this space

25th Annual SRAM Tour of the Gila

Went out to shoot Stage 2 yesterday, on Hwy 152. Different location than last year, because I wanted to get some images at the feed stations. These are in no particular order, and include both Pro Mens and Womens races, and the other classifications as well. And candids. Always candids. You can click on the slide show to see larger versions at the Picase Web Albums page.

Scientists Just Wanna Have Fun

Music awards you never heard of.. "Best Lab Song". And the winner is:



..as judged by the editors and writers of BioTechniques, The International Journal of Life Science Methods. Isn't Baylor a Baptist college? They're dancing! I won't tell.

Other finalists in the competition can be found at EarthSky. I didn't watch them, but I'll assume they're as good as the one above.

Actually, I have watched one of the other finalist videos. I even posted it here.

The Finest In Automotive Spy Photography

Several times over the past 25 years, I've been fortunate enough to be in  the right place at the right time to photograph upcoming automobile models on public roads, doing "real world testing".  Most often the vehicles are disguised, with outlandish extra body panels, or wild graphic paint schemes, designed to misdirect the viewer's eyes so as not to determine exactly what the shape of the car really is.  Other times, when they're closer to production, only the badging, and other identifying marks are stripped from the cars.


I first got lucky in Anchorage, Alaska of all places.  Engineers apparently experienced a stalling problem, and left what would later become the Subaru Impreza abandoned in a hotel parking lot, with the hood up.  I snapped away. I couldn't help it.  Those pictures ended up in AutoWeek Magazine.


Jump ahead several years, and I'm working as an independent representative for a firm which required me to visit a lot of backroads businesses.  I was in Livingston County, Michigan when a convoy of overly clad vehicles was leaving a rural gas station.  Again, I fired away, and again the images ended up in AutoWeek.  It was America's first look at the Oldsmobile Alero and Pontiac Grand Am.


Recently, I happened to capture images of the 2012 Audi A6 on nearby back roads.  These were brokered to several automotive online journals by the "Doyenne" of  automotive spy photography, whose name you would recognize instantly.


What follows, is the published account of my most recent discovery.  It was late at night, at a gas station in Abilene, Texas......

§    §    §    §    §    §    §    §    §    §    §    §    §    §   §

Our intrepid, tireless, ambitious, poverty-stricken, Instamatic®- toting, weasley, automotive paparazzi have been at it again.  Caught real world testing, without so much as a single fig leaf of disguise is Ford’s upcoming retro spectacular, the 2014 Edsel Redux!  (pronounced Ree-doo).

Word has been out there among the automotive cognoscenti for several months now, that this masterpiece of backward-thinking was in the works, but this is the first time it’s been captured on film, as it were, and we here at AutoLuddite were victorious in the bout of feverish bidding that ensued to be the first to present this image to the public.


Our sources in the industry tell us this fantastic retro-sled weighs in at an astonishing four-and-a-half tons, due in part to the extensive use of carbon fiber in the floor mats, and turn signal indicator.  Power to overcome massive amounts of inertia comes from the technologically advanced cast iron, straight 6 cylinder EcoBǖst, (pronounced boooost), engine, which produces upwards of 175 BHP when using 102 octane unleaded fuel.  Naught to 60 times are expected to be in the range of sometime before dark, therefore, no convertible model is expected to be produced.  Our sources tell us that an optional 3-speed manual transmission, mounted on the steering column (!), has never, ever been considered.

The designers have really outdone themselves in recalling the essence of the original, right down to the extremely wide white sidewall bias-ply tires, to the rust spots on the quarter panels.  One wonders why, with all of these styling cues resurrecting the marque’s illustrious past, the “toilet seat” was left off of the massive chrome grille?  Perhaps it will appear on a higher trim level model.  We can only hope and pray.


Unfortunately, prices are not expected to fall in line with those of 50+ years ago.  You can expect to pony up around $25,000 for a base model, to a staggering $55,000 for the super deluxe, although to be fair, that price does include your own personal dwarf mechanic in a satchel, so you will never have to worry about breakdowns, or even regularly scheduled maintenance.


The Edsel Redux will be produced in limited quantities, by Ford of Honduras, and for reasons known only to those at the very top of the Ford hierarchy, will only be sold through Kia dealerships.   We look forward to our first test drive!


- Peter S. Tingly,  AutoLuddite




....Y'know... I've been thinkin'... I might just could be wrong... about all of this.  Just sayin'.

Paper Trail..

Everything but the Paper Cut: Eye-popping Ways Artists Use Paper | Fast Company - StumbleUpon

Between the Lines, by Ariana Boussard-Reifel

Having recently discovered StumbleUpon, I find that it is yet another exquisite time waster.  The above piece on ways contemporary artists are re-imagining paper is a great example.

This blog, and it's "sister" blog, Scanners! are both registered with StumbleUpon.  You can help create traffic when you click on the StumbleUpon logo. It's found on this blog on the right hand side in the subscription area, and on the Scanners! blog at the upper left side).  Increased traffic means potentially increased ad revenues.  Maybe.  Hey, it's worth a try!

UPDATE: As I continued my morning "Stumble", I discovered yet more amazing paper art.  To apply the term "painstaking" to this work doesn't even begin to cover it.

It’s A Game of Keepaway..

Generally, a hound packing a hare back will walk, or at the most, trot. Not Willow. With the rest of the dogs hot on her trail, she came rushing back to show me the prize. With enthusiasm.

Scanners! Harleys & Hooters

The title of this post alone should drive tons of traffic from repressed nations all around the globe, á la the Victoria's Secret post. Thank You Google.

This was taken ten or eleven years ago in Chelsea, MI. Some friends with a studio thought they had the biggest money making scam ever. The event was a charity motorcycle rally, and the studio was set up in a tent on the grounds, with models trucked in from a Detroit area Hooters. The bikers would ride into the studio on their hogs, have their pictures taken with the models, pay up and ride out. We would make thousands of dollars!

What we made was a lot of pictures of models on a loaner motorcycle when the attendance at the event was less than 10% of the anticipated total, and 2 people came through the tent.

I'm still happy with the results.

Snipe Hunt?

Taking off later today to meet up with Dutch and head to Arizona. We're taking a couple of dogs and will be on the hunt for the famous, elusive Jackalope! I've never seen one, and Dutch hasn't hunted them in a long, long time. More than 25 years, in fact. Everyone's seen pictures, of course, and.. um..

Oh.. hold on a second..

It seems I've made a mistake.

I'll get back to you on this in a couple of days.

Field Of Dreams.

This coursing season started back in October, with a few posts, like this one, about the lack of jackrabbits in all the usual places.  We had days where we'd walk and walk and only scare up one in a couple of hours, and it would usually suffer a quick fate, because it couldn't move any faster than the dogs in the unusually thick and high cover.

Things were looking grim.

Then, towards the end of October, I piled the crew in the Mitsubishi and headed out to explore an area that Margaret and I had found almost by accident last Spring while attempting to take shortcut from the highway by the Aerostat station about 20 miles southwest of Deming, to the Victorio Mountains some 25 miles west of Deming.  As it turned out, it was shorter, but took about 90 minutes longer than if we had just driven around on the normal highways and county roads.

The area is huge, and is about 99% Federal and State land, leased for grazing some pretty large herds of cattle.  The cover is much more reasonable than any of our usual fields this year, and the ground is as walkable as a walk in the park, meaning there's no "bunchgrass", or big holes, or boulders.  It's flat.

That's all well and good, but is meaningless if there are no jacks!  My first exploratory trip was to the area we'd first driven through in the spring.  Jackrabbit "sign" was plentiful, but I saw no jacks.  I did some more exploratory driving and discovered that there were at least a half dozen distinct separate areas where one could hunt, including  a mammoth, flat plain that seemed to stretch out forever in all directions.  It was time to bring in Dutch and his dogs to see if there were, indeed, rabbits in this ideal area.

The first couple of trips were fruitless, and I think Dutch was losing faith as he would prefer to go back to the old places, rather than make the long drive out to this field.  But I kept at it, trying out new, different sections, and finally started getting some races.  Got Dutch back, and for the last two months we've been getting in some really exciting races, with about a 25% catch rate.  In that time we've probably seen and/or run close to 40 jacks, and we're really only scratching the surface.  Dutch is now so confident in the fields that he has decided to run his famous Pack Hunt and Desert Hare Classic on them.

The new fields also came with an unsuspected bonus!  With such a large expanse of flat, open land, the opportunity for great coursing photos was like nothing we've experienced in any of the other fields we hunt in southern New Mexico!  The hounds actually have an opportunity to turn the hare many times, and often back in the direction of where they started.... where I wait with my camera.

The images below, are all from a single run on January 5, 2011.  The dogs weren't lacking for opportunities to catch this jack, first with Willow in the lead, and later with the black and white Saluke, Bisa, who had several opportunities, but as we saw with the  hare in the previous post, this field is starting to establish a reputation for strong jacks that will take anything your pack of hounds can dish out!  This was another 3 minute marathon, that ended when the hare made it to the safety of the creosote bush patch on the north side of the draw, and Willow with a very sore foot.

Perfectly Executed 180° Turnaround.

We had one of those runs the other day that tend to get more spectacular, the more time separates it from the actual event.

Dutch brought along "the incorrigible Bob Schulz" (Gazehounds & Coursing, pg 142), and Bob came with his truck box full of young, old, black, red, and silver staghounds. I brought the girls, Willow and Ashley. Dutch's gang included Phyllis, and Stretch (his new hotblood). We were at the big, open field that has produced some very photogenic runs already this season.

We had a couple of 30-second sprints that ended with a spectacular, diving grab by Willow that ended with her muzzle on the hare on the ground and her back legs straight up in the air in the first, and Dutch's Phyllis making the most of the second.

Now, Dutch has a bad back, which has curtailed a lot of his walking in the field over the last month or so. He generally walks with us as far from the trucks as he feels comfortable getting, then waits while the rest of us make big loops in the desert, looking for more jacks to chase. He then watches with his binoculars, and kind of acts like a de-facto "judge". It was during this "resting" period that the third jack jumped. Immediately in front of me, as it turned out, and it wasn't the most fortuitous of starts, as there were no less than two hounds right in front of him.. in his path of travel.

Somehow, the hare negotiated that obstacle, with a hard left turn that left the dogs with their jaws snapping at air.  And the race was on.

When you hear the term, "survival of the fittest"... this is the kind of critter they're usually talking about.  For nearly three minutes- more than a mile and a half- the hounds chased, and turned this jack until they ran out of our site into the draw to our south.  Even then we knew the dogs were still turning it, because we could see periodic puffs of dust arise from the horizon.  Finally the dust stopped, and we knew that either the jack had been caught, or it had made its escape into the heavy creosote bush field across the draw.  It was several more minutes before the very knackered pack of hounds made it back to the trucks. Bloodless.

Later, when we were reliving, and embellishing the tale of the third race over steak and enchiladas at The Campos' Cafe, Dutch remarked that there was one time when he saw Phyllis running right next to the hare, and was looking right at it, when it doubled back, and gained some serious separation from its pursuers.  He thought that was pretty spectacular.

When reviewing my images from the day, I was very happy to find the exact sequence that so impressed Dutch.  And so, without further ado-

We can only hope that this hare, having survived the best our hounds could throw at it, survives further attacks from coyotes, and golden eagles, and bobcats, and other predators, to procreate, and pass these amazing survival skills on so we can continue to have  exciting chases for years to come.  Here's looking at you, kid.

Scanners! Margaret. And Women Who Are Not Margaret.

I have a lot... a lot... of black and white images and negatives, and recently I've begun to manipulate them using the tools available on an editing website called Picknik. I may be on to something here, which I'll call selective coloring. It's easy, but mostly it's fun! I see no reason I couldn't also manipulate color images as well, once I've converted them to black and white. I can create my own reality. In fact, the Hooters model on the Harley, below, began as a color print.

A quick note on the image above. My memory is sharp! 45 years or so after I took that picture, I still nailed the correct color of the dress! Margaret confirmed it. Is that love, or what? And the cigarette? Everybody did it then. Don't judge.

The inset is the original black and white image, which was taken with an Argus 75 and (now defunct) 620 roll film. Also, off topic but interesting, is that the clothing Margaret is wearing in this and the previous Scanners! images, were made by her, and that includes the swimsuits. She was, and is, hell on a sewing machine! Now if I could only get her to move the buttons on all my trousers.

Following are more selectively colored images of women who are not Margaret. If I can build a big enough collection, maybe we'll work on prints or notecards.

One Magical Night in December, 2010

Last night was a night to stay up and enjoy (and capture) the show.

Soundtrack provided by the Paul Winter Consort and their iconic composition, "Icarus". It would not surprise me at all if the Consort was playing at the Cathedral of St John the Divine in New York last night, as they do most Winter Solstices.

Enjoy.

UPDATE Dec 22: I was close. I just checked the schedule, and the Winter Consort played the cathedral on the 16th, 17th, and 18th. But I also found a free music download while on the website!

Cabinetlandia.

Yesterday, I posted about the Cabinet National Library, discovered while geocaching. Since then, I've done a lot of reading and discovered there's much more to this astonishing little half-acre in the middle of nowhere in Southern New Mexico. I decided it deserved another post.

While the library was built by members of Rebar, the rest of the features of the half acre plot, were created by editorial staff of a magazine called Cabinet, which curiously has nothing to do with cabinets, but art!

Their story can be found here. Be sure to read about the rebuilding of the library after the ravages of the great flood of 2005, and definitely don't miss the photos at the bottom of the page of the celebratory "Prom Night", when the reconstruction was completed. Also beware: "plumber butt" image exists.

The more I dig, the more impressed I become with both the artists from the East Coast who created Cabinetlandia, and those from the West, who built the Library. What can you find?