A collection of photography and exploration focusing on Upstate South Carolina and beyond.
Well, there I am. Right on the front page of the Greenville Cage liner, with a somewhat bewildered look on my face, and a quote from me about County Council continuing to approve building projects that will adversely affect the flooding situation in our neighborhood. One of our neighbors contacted Representative Gloria Haskins, who arranged a meeting with county officials, DOT, and several others. About 30 of us crowd
Don’t adjust your calendars. It is Thursday, July 14, and that is a picture of me standing with a copy of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, two days before its official release. We had received several copies for our schools.
Don’t worry – I was a good boy and put it back in our vault without peeking. I’ll buy my copy on Saturday with the teaming throngs.
I’ve stumbled across this word at least three times in the last week – once in Umberto Eco’s “The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana”, once in reference to the London bombings, and once in some report on NPR. It’s an interesting word, and now that I’ve heard it several times, and now written about it, I’m sure it will become part of my permanent vocabulary.
Speaking of strange things in churches, the lunatic right wing group, Christian Exodus, made the front page of the Greenville News again. This group is trying to get other ultra-right wingers to move to South Carolina so that it can secede from the Union (again) and form its own Christian Theocracy.
I saw this sign on the way to one of my schools this afternoon. Kind of makes you wonder what goes on at that church.
Since switching over to WordPress, I got my first spam comment. It keyed off the phrase “Fantastic Four” and provided a link to a site where surfers could purchase movies (and probably get their computers locked up with malware.) It was easy enough to delete before it ever saw the light of day, but I worry about how much more of this junk to expect. Back when I had my own home-grown site, spammers couldn’t figure out how to get bots to interact with it, so I was relatively safe. Such is the downside of using an open-source editor.
Is it ever ethical to take a photo of someone without their knowledge? When I was in Philadelphia, some of the best images were of the people. A large city has such diversity, and each individual has a unique story. Pointing a large Nikon at them just seems wrong, even at a distance with zoom lens. Would using a stealth camera be any better? Or perhaps its a matter of intent – photojournalism is OK (think Dorothea Lange’s images during the Depression), security surveillance is distasteful, but seems to have become a necessity in this day and age.
I almost chickened out. TS Cindy flooded most of the Southeast on Thursday. The Tuck was running at 5.8 feet above normal, Hurricane Dennis was scheduled for landfall today, and it was cloudy in Greenville – all ingrediants for disaster. Despite certain doom, I loaded up the kayak and headed toward Dillsboro to meet Bob and Roxanne. After a slight memory slip as to the location of the put-in, I found Bob and Roxanne and unloaded the boats. The river didn’t look too rough, and a local raft company was getting ready to launch with children on board. We figured if kids could take it, we could handle what the Tuck might throw at us.
Justin’s Steakhouse has recently opened in the space that used to be occupied by La Boheme. One evening we passed by, and La Boheme had suddenly become Bistro 40. That lasted about six months before becoming Justin’s. We decided to give it a try before it morphed into something else.
Today geocachers from around the state gathered at Paris Mountain state Park to meet each other and discuss our sport. The hot topic is H3777, which would make geocaching illegal in all cemeteries, archeological sites, and state historic areas without express written permission.