I’m going back to film. I’ll still shoot digital, but I like the look of film images; they are softer, and seem to capture reality more truthfully than digital images. Which is puzzling, because digital cameras take much sharper images. But the softer focus, the dust, the scratches, the unpredictable interaction between light, old glass, shutter speed, aperture, film speed, camera shake, the film developing process, and all of the conditions around one–when one is trying to make a photograph with an old manual camera–all of these things give the film photograph a sense of reality that digital cameras can’t provide.
The viewer of a film photograph instantly knows, mostly on an unconscious level, that the photo before him really happened. He can imagine, briefly, the circumstances that may have occurred when the picture was taken. The imperfections in the image convey information which the mind uses to reconstruct the event captured.
And, therefore, film photographs help you extrapolate from those circumstances to a wider scope of circumstances. Take the photograph of my sister, for example. A healthy, happy 13- or 14-year old girl. Well fed, well groomed, well cared for. Living in a beautiful, well-constructed home, in a nice neighbourhood. Lots of tree-lined streets and boulevards; single-parent families with lots of children everywhere. An economy that supported a fairly stress-free existence. People were well-mannered and polite, and kind. They attended religious services and cultural events and visited each other.
Every decade since then has seen a decline in all of those qualities of living.
Even the means of making photographs has declined. Used to be you would need cameras and film and darkrooms; chemicals and people who would sell this equipment and explain how to use it.
Nowadays, all of that is gone. Most people have a tiny electronic camera built into their telephone and that’s it. And the cell phone of today telephone is a poor substitute for the large, comfortable, analog telephones of yesteryear. The sound quality of those phones was superior to today’s cell phones. The fact they were attached to walls meant you had to have a room with a chair and a table to sit near when you placed or received a call; you would sit down and have a real conversation with another person.
These days you’re lucky if you get a text from an AI. We’ve all been placed in cages in the sky, working for a heartless computer god who will incinerate our remains when we’re gone and dispose of our possessions–all of them digital–in the bit bucket when we die.
Sitting out on my front steps with my cat as I do several times each day, I ponder random ideas as they occur, drifting through my consciousness like the passing breezes.
We’re in a warm spell for late March. I wore my grey cotton onesie over my blue flannel pajamas, and covered everything with a navy blue peacoat. Boot socks and crocs on my feet. No rain at 4:55 AM when Hazel and I took our places this morning, so Hazel was happy. Two days ago we were out at roughly the same time and the temperature was cold; rain was heavy, and Hazel wanted to come back inside after five minutes. But this morning she was content and so was I. Although it was dark I could tell that the air was clean; both by sniffing it and by looking west, down the length of the block across Smith Street, a distance of some 1000 feet, I’d guess. No haze in the air. I could see the cars and streetlights clearly at the intersection of Boundary and Elmwood.
Not so five hours later when Hazel and I once more sat on the front steps. A definite haze in the air, with an organic smell to it. The air was moving with a warm breeze gently blowing. Did the breeze blow some dust or pollen into the neighbourhood. I looked east, to my right, and haze was all around me. Very strange! Hazel didn’t seem to notice, or mind. Then it dawned on me: today was recycle and garden waste day, with garbage trucks moving up and down the alleys.
On my afternoon walk yesterday I noticed neighbours raising Canadian flags here and there. This one, on Kalyk St., was attached to a parking sign by a nice lady who came from Iran after the Shah was overthrown there, back in the 70s. She raised her children and became politically active in her community, enriching us all by representing her neighbourhood when a large “high tech park” was being developed. Nice to see she is still politically aware and making a statement on behalf of her adopted country.
Several days each week I am filling the first of four raised garden beds. Filling them with topsoil, which I dug from the front yard last year. A few minutes ago I was watching a video for beginning gardeners; the topic was raised garden beds similar to the ones I have, and the expert was saying not to fill the entire bed with topsoil, lest it become waterlogged. Oops.
This first bed is only about half-way full, so perhaps it is not too late to mix in other stuff. I might buy a few bags of pumice to mix in. For the remaining three beds I will probably buck some fallen rotted trees, then place the wood pieces at the bottom of each bed. If I have leftover topsoil I’ll spread it in some depressions in the back yard to even out the surface of that lawn.
The northernmost raised bed, pictured above, will be shaded throughout the growing season so I’ll need to plant leafy greens and root vegetables; possibly some broccoli and cauliflower. Rhubarb, too.
When I was finishing my industrial instrumentation diploma at BCIT in 1999, my instructor, Bob, once spoke of the differences between Canada, the USA, and Europe, regarding instrument mechanics. He was speaking on the topic of BCIT instrumentation graduates finding work in the United States.
“They have no idea who or what we are,” he said, referring to America’s understanding of the role that I and my fellow instrumentation technicians were being prepared for. “Down there they only have two types of workers: engineers, and grunts on the factory floor.”
In Canada and in Europe, the idea that you might have an intelligent worker capable of taking an engineer’s specifications and building a mine or a mill is generally understood. But Americans weren’t familiar with this type of worker because in America there were two classes of workers in industrial sites. Smart people (engineers) and stupid people (grunts).
America’s consensus regarding industrial worker capability was that most Americans’ capabilities were limited with respect to higher cognitive functions. Most workers were pretty good at following instructions, if those instructions were simple ones. And this was why, he said, in American industrial sites, everything was spelled out and people followed instructions to the letter. Initiative was not a common quality.
A smaller part of their population had a greater ability to reason things through. To strategize and plan; to evaluate and assess; to solve problems and imagine creative solutions.
Now we see a government in the US of A where stupid people form a majority in the three branches of government that comprise their political system. When it comes to voting, the more capable people—the engineers–tend to vote for the Democratic party, and the less able people—the grunts—tend to vote for the Republican party. Unfortunately there are more stupid people than smart people in the United States.
This partly explains why they elected a man-child into their highest political office; grunts are easily led, and are led to vote for someone they can relate to.
There are other factors at play. Social media gives foreign actors enhanced abilities to manipulate American public opinion. Cyberespionage enables foreign governments to target American politicians in a number of ways. Greed itself, baked into the American economic system, has an insidious corrupting influence of American citizens, lowering ethical standards across the spectrum of civil society.
There’s a saying “That which doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” I hope the upheavals our southern neighbours are experiencing now make their government stronger (by which I mean more truthful, more just, more equitable, more reliable, more charitable, and kinder), rather than the alternative.
I registered the domain name bluesmarties.com in 2003 and hosted it with company whose office was located in Richmond, BC.
At that time, a workmate of mine, who worked in the IT department of our employer (Creo was its name) recommended “mecca.ca” as a good, local, hosting service. The domain name itself I registered with internic.ca. I thought internic.ca was the only domain registering service available to Canadians at the time, but I was probably wrong. In any case, they registered it and I have kept the domain name all these years, even though I haven’t always used it much.
Back in 2003 I was working for this “high tech” company and had big dreams. The company made equipment and software for the graphic arts industry. The company colours were blue and white, which made sense, since one of the founders was an Israeli-Canadian, and Israel’s colours are blue and white. He brought in a CEO from Israel, who probably agreed with the colour scheme.
The first wordmark of the Company drew from the Oreo cookie. Creo just took that wordmark and chopped a bit of the O off to make a C. The font shape, at least the r in Creo was eventually changed to reference the shape of Hebrew characters.
Some of the company’s executive were boomers from Kitsilano, and they brought a hippie-to-yuppie culture. Very inclusive, very much a culture that encouraged people to feel safe in expressing their opinions. It was really a pretty good place to work. In the department where I began—a department of perhaps 100 people—my co-workers came from many different countries. People were clever and polite.
I put blue together with the idea of smart people working together and came up with “bluesmarties.com.” I felt slightly embarrassed about the name, because implying that I, myself, as creator of this imaginary company, was “smart” seemed conceited, so when people asked me how I came up with it I lied and said I named it after my favorite candy (Smarties being a Canadian candy made of milk chocolate surrounded by a candy coating shaped into an oblate spheroid (or a flattened sphere)).
These candies were coloured into eight different colours: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, pink, and brown. The blue, at that time, was a very vibrant blue. It has since been discontinued because a chemical in that blue food colouring was thought to cause hyperactivity in children, or at least to exacerbate hyperactivity in children already prone to ADHD.
One of my “big ideas” was to create a notebook that would be connected via Bluetooth to a device on your person. Smart phones weren’t common. The iphone hadn’t been invented yet. Blackberry phones had Bluetooth in 2004, and Bluetooth was a fairly new thing. Microsoft had a smart watch (I bought one) that used an FM band to sync data between devices (microsoft servers) and the watch, so the idea of syncing things wirelessly was around. I found it intriguing.
I thought maybe I could use my bluesmarties.com website as a journal and somehow sync it to the notebook, particularly with regard to notifications for calendar events. I put a blue led on the cover of the notebook, powered by a battery taken from the inside of a Polaroid S-70 film cartridge, and a simple circuit that made the led blink, and I imagined that when I had an email come in to my email inbox, or a calendar event due to occur, that somehow the blue led would start to blink.
But I never developed that idea. And eventually I stopped using the bluesmarties.com website.
After a few years, I blew it away. I changed the hosting service to Telus Shared Hosting, and re-started it merely to blog, with no pretensions to develop it into a web application, filling it with the same sort of content I would write in any personal journal.
And the years would pass. Sometimes the blog would become moribund, and I would blow it away and re-design it. Moving from basic HTML to fancier HTML, using applications like Dreamweaver, and then, later, WordPress.
I’m not sure how many times I blew away the old website and began a completely new one, always keeping the name bluesmarties.com. I did register other domain names over the years. Chrom.ca, for example. I built a website for a church, once. But I kept bluesmarties.com partly because the hosting service offered email accounts with the hosting package, and I had been using ian@bluesmarties.com since 2003 and didn’t want to stop using it.
The decades clicked away and eventually the internet became so full of cybercriminals and government agencies hacking websites that companies like microsoft and google changed their web browsers so they wouldn’t go to websites that weren’t secure. And by secure, I mean websites that didn’t use secure socket layer technology.
Buying an https:// secure socket layer (SSL) was an extra expense and a bit of hassle to install, so I just let the website be. But hackers–who knows who they were or where they came from–hacked the website and fucked it up, so I had to blow it away again and apply for a secure socket layer, which I did just a few weeks ago.
With help from tech support at internic.ca I bought an SSL and got it installed. Then I rebuilt the bluesmarties.com website using WordPress, and here we are.
The first few posts and pages have just been tests, to see what I can do easily. I won’t likely make this website anything other than a blog. I dislike facebook, for reasons I’ll get into in a later post, so this website will serve me in ways facebook wouldn’t.
I saw another tiny person today. What I call a tiny person is a mature, fully-grown person (not a child) who stands between 3 ½ feet and 4 ½ feet tall; they are proportionate in the relationships between their limbs, torso, and head. They might be “proportionate dwarfs,” which, according to Wikipedia is a case in which “both the limbs and torso are unusually small. Intelligence is usually normal, and most people with it have a nearly normal life expectancy.”
I started seeing tiny people in Vancouver and Burnaby a few years ago, usually when driving. I’ve estimated their size by noting their height in relation to a sign or a walk-signal button at a pedestrian-controlled intersection as they’ve passed by said object. Sometimes I’ve gone back to the lamp-post or bus-stop, taking with me a tape measure to obtain a more accurate approximation of their height.
The people I’ve noticed have always had Asian ethnic features: black hair, dark skin, mongoloid eyes.
Every time I see one I think: damn, why didn’t I bring my camera this time? I usually carry a small camera with me everywhere I go because I enjoy photographing things and then improving the photos, later, on the computer.
I should put a tape measure in the car and leave it there too.
Some day perhaps I’ll be bold enough to stop the car and speak to one of these people. I’d like to know where they came from, or where their family is from. I’d really like to know why they are so small. Did their parents work in a factory, perhaps in China or Indonesia, where they were exposed to some mutagen? Would be hard to broach that subject though.
I always think of the extinct species of humanoid creatures known as Homo floresiensis, who lived in Indonesia somewhere between 190,000 and 50,000 years ago. Could the tiny people I’m seeing be people or creatures from that time? Living secretly among us?
Or perhaps, they are the result of an experiment in evolution, like a science fiction short story I once read about a wealthy billionaire who used his immense wealth to manipulate the environment (via rezoning land and changing the amount of living space people could live in) thereby causing the human species to reproduce in smaller and smaller sizes. Can’t recall the author or the title of that story. And CoPilot is no help identifying the story.
