This morning I mixed the chemicals I got from Photographer’s Formulary I wrote about the other day. I was very careful to follow their instructions on mixing To The Letter. Which was good because lawd have mercy when they said to mix in a Well Ventilated Area because some of it would give off fumes they weren’t frikken kidding!

But I had a difficulty. The powdered chemicals they supplied me with did not dissolve nearly as quickly as the instructions said. At one point the instructions called for patience when adding the boric acid because it would take up to five minutes to dissolve. Try more like 20. All if it was like that except for the liquid ingredients. And I kept stirring the entire time. I used only distilled water, and at 68 degrees as instructed.

What I ended up with was a mixture that never got completely clear. Everything finally seemed to have dissolved but it still has a sight cloudy appearance to it.

So I did some tests with a few small strips of 35mm film I sacrificed for the cause. They seemed to clear just fine but there remained a slightly pinkish tint that should not have been there. That worried me until I realized I was still seeing the anti-halation layer which is normally removed by the developer. Since I was just dipping the film strips into the fixer I wasn’t removing that layer.

For comparison I mixed up my last good bottle of Kodafix that I used for paper processing. The Kodafix working solution I mixed up was pure and clear like water. Those strips came out exactly like the strips I did from the rapid fix I mixed up.

What I mixed is a bit cloudy, but it seems to work. But I would like a second opinion from anyone reading this who is more familiar with mixing and working with raw chemicals than I am. What could have happened here? Why was it taking so much longer than the instructions said to dissolve the chemicals? I mean, several orders of magnitude longer. What could have happened, what could I have possibly done, to leave the mixture a bit cloudy. As I said, I used only distilled water, and I mixed in a clean glass Pyrex dish.

I’ve no idea.

This is not making me feel comfortable about mixing up some H&W Control developer from raw chemicals.

I took a fancy to my cameras a few days ago, went to York to visit some favorite places, finished off a roll of film which give me the urge to start working on the backlog of film in my darkroom waiting to be developed. But it had been a long while since I did any of that and I knew my chemicals were past their expiration date. So I went to my local photography store, only to be told (rather coldly by a young staff member), that Kodak was no longer selling chemistry, and they weren’t interested in ordering the raw chemicals I needed to make H&W Control developer.

(Fuck!) So I began scrambling for any unsold stock, only to find that it was already gone. Now I need an alternative source. Well, long story short I think I’ve found one (two) but it was stressful. I have a black & white workflow that’s worked for me since I was a teenage boy and I really Really didn’t want to have to spend a lot of time and waste a lot of film experimenting to find a new one.

My Go-To developer is HC-110. You make a stock solution from a concentrate and then dilute it further to process film. I used the dilution ‘B’ as a one-shot developer. I have a copy of the Kodak Darkroom Dataguide that had the development time calculator wheel on it instead of the table later editions had. Over those pages I’ve stuck a bunch of Post-It notes with data for Fuji Neopan, 35 and 120, and Agfa Rollei Retro film 35 and 120. I stick a Weston thermometer into the developer, then using the dial I align whatever temperature I see on the thermometer with the number for the film I’m processing and the bottom of the dial gives you the time to develop. Then it’s a brief stop bath, then into a solution of Kodak Rapid Fix. Then wash for thirty minutes.

I found a source for an HC-110 substitute at The Film Photography Project, tried it out on a single roll and that came out to my complete satisfaction. So there’s that. But I still needed a good substitute for Rapid Fix. I took a chance and developed a couple rolls of film using the Kodak product I had which was a year past it’s expiration date, and the result was not wonderful. It worked but I had to fix for twice as long to get the film cleared. So no more of that. I needed fresh.

To that end I ordered some Ilford Rapid Fixer, which came oddly without a top cap (the bottle was sealed). So I made plans to use that, but first I did some research because I wanted to be sure it worked enough like the Kodak product I could just keep to my standard workflow. That’s when I saw it wasn’t a hardening fixer.

There is religion about that. A hardening fixer hardens the emulsion has it removes the unused silver nitrates. You really want to use one of these only on film, it does nothing much for paper. But some people think a hardening fixer is bad for film. Long story short: I don’t. I think it’s Good for film. So now I need to find a hardening fixer that works like Kodak Rapid Fix.

I found a source at the Photographer’s Formulary. They also had and were willing to ship to me (unlike B&H) the raw chemistry to make H&W Control developer (more about that some other time). So I ordered their Rapid Fix with Hardener. Days later they still hadn’t shipped (apparently) so I ordered it again from B&H, which resells chemistry from Photographer’s Formulary (just not all the raw chemicals to make H&W Control developer (later…later…). That came yesterday as I type this.

And it’s…interesting. What I was expecting was the usual two-part concentrate and little bottle of hardener. What I got was…this…

By the way…that’s my basement chest freezer, or as I say when that part of the basement is my darkroom, the table where I put my paper developing trays. Next to it is the dryer which just happens perfectly to be the same height as the freezer, and between them that’s my workspace for doing silver paper enlargements. The enlarger is in the shower stall in the bathroom next to the freezer. When you grew up in a series of small garden apartments you learn how to make every space server multiple purposes. I don’t have enough space in my little Baltimore rowhouse for a dedicated paper darkroom, but I can make that corner of the back basement work as one.

So what I got from Photographer’s Formulary isn’t a hardening rapid fixer, but the raw ingredients for making hardening rapid fixer. All packaged in precisely the right amounts…

…to mix up some hardening rapid fixer if you follow the included directions. I’ve no idea why it comes like this instead of packaged as ready made concentrate, other than maybe with them it’s The Way. But this is good, it gives me some practice for when I get the raw chemistry to make some H&W Control developer.

The end result is you get concentrate and hardener which you then mix together to make a (nearly, they measure in metric) gallon of working solution. I’m going to mix it all up today. I’m told when I add the acetic acid fumes will result, so I’ll mix it up in the kitchen where I can open some windows. Progress report later…

I completely forgot that today is Christmas Eve. I reckon that comes with being solitary and retired.

I could have sworn it was middle of next week. So the plan today was to buy a few groceries this morning and sit back and wait the holiday traffic out. But my street is pretty empty of parked cars and it’s not a workday for most of the folks here I’m sure. Plus, the entire neighborhood actually pretty quiet.

I have this horrible intuition that the main roads and jammed with last minute shoppers, and the stores are being mobbed, and I am not going anywhere until after Christmas.

Spending Christmas as I usually do being a gay guy who has failed miserably at love, and because the family I’m closest to now is on the other coast, by myself. I’ll give myself a nice Christmas dinner at home and try not to drink too much.

I’ve said elsewhere here that I couldn’t make it professionally in the arts because I never had the kind of focus it take. Case in point: just a few days ago I was all about my art gallery, and now it’s pretty much back to the photography.

I have two routes I use for my morning walks, one of which is to zig-zag through the new “luxury” rowhouse development nearby, where the container factory used to be. That development has been a muse ever since they started building it. Today on my morning coffee walk, while going through one of the narrow alleyways between the rows, I saw the sort of slightly cloudy, sun streaked sky overhead I love to work with, and just then it was making that narrow alley look really interesting to my photographic eye.

I had to have that shot. But at that moment all I had was the iPhone. Olay…it can can do a good job with my art photography, I have lots of examples. So I snapped off an iPhone shot just to get it. Then I hightailed it back home and got the Petri out.

I see now I haven’t written about this here, but probably on my Facebook page and I was neglecting this blog. But some time ago I found a Petri FT for sale on one of the used camera sites, that looked to be in very good condition. So I bought it for its nostalgia value to me. The Petri was my first SLR camera, simple and affordable to teenage me, and it opened a new world to me artistically. Now I could precisely compose to the frame in the viewfinder, because now I’m looking through the same lens that will take the photo. It was what you see is what you get, and I could be as specific about composing a shot as I wanted to be. Plus, you could change lenses from wide angle to telephoto, and no matter what lens I had on it I was still seeing exactly when the film saw when the shutter opened. You just don’t get that with any other sort of camera.

When I first got the second hand Petri I ordered I took it to Ocean City New Jersey for an ultimate nostalgia trip. OC became one of my photographic muses back when I was a teenage boy, and it still is. Many of what I consider my best shots from that period were taken with the Petri. Back then I could not afford its native 28mm or 135mm lenses, so those were third party compatibles from Soligor and Vivitar. Now I can, and that is what I shoot with on that camera.

Last summer I took the Petri with me because, perhaps irrationally, I wanted that example of my first SLR camera to see and photograph the land of my birth. I bought it back home to Baltimore still loaded with some Tri-X Pan I’d taken to California with only a couple shots on it. So I had the roll to finish. It still had the 28mm Petri lens on it. I put a red filter on that and gave the camera a fresh battery. Fortune smiled on me and the sky was still pretty interesting when I got back to the rowhouse development and that narrow alleyway, and I finished the roll pretty quickly.

That makes 7 rolls of Tri-X I have waiting for me in the darkroom. I have another partial roll of Tri-X in the Canon F1N that also came back from California. I finish that and it’s an even eight which works out for the four reel tank I have. Still have three rolls of 120 NeoPan 100, three or four of 35mm NeoPan 100 out of the Leica, and five rolls of Agfa Copex to develop when I can mix up some H&W Control developer.

Obviously my inner compass has swung back to the cameras. So it goes…

…even though the old hardware still works just fine.

I’m almost two years retired now, and computers can still take a big bite out of my day. Today’s exercise in spinning my wheels trying to get things work comes courtesy of Apple. No surprise there. It just works…except when it doesn’t.

Apple really Really wants you to keep up to date on not just their software but the hardware it runs on too. And the longer you delay buying their latest and greatest hardware, the more you find that out. And I’m still on some very old Apple hardware, because I need to stay on a very old version of MacOS. And I need to do that, because Adobe makes you rent their software now, instead of offering upgrades. I use the Macs almost exclusively in the art room for my photography and scanned in artwork from the drafting table, and I won’t rent their software for the same reason I don’t rent my brushes, pens, charcoal sticks and the drafting table.

And especially after Adobe screwed me out of 850 for the Windows version of Photoshop that I had, and was able to use for just over two years until Adobe decided the license I had was incorrect and they remote controlled shut it off.

So I’m stuck, but slowly getting unstuck. GIMP does everything I need that Photoshop did for me. The only stickler is Lightroom, but I’m almost free of that too.

In the meantime, if you have an iPhone and you’ve been keeping up to date with the OS upgrades and security patches on that, and you have an older Mac, you are getting more and more distant from any version of iTunes you are running to sync your iPhone with. Especially your music library.

A few days ago I ordered a CD of the Jerry Goldsmith soundtrack to Logan’s Run. I have had the LP version for decades, but only realized I never got a digital version when I wanted to listen to it on the iPod and it wasn’t there. So that CD came in the mail and I put it into the art room Mac, which also holds my iTunes library, and copied it over so I could put it on the iPhone, and the iPod Classic.

No sweat right? I’ve done this hundreds of times before. Then I found the soundtrack to the new Percy Jackson TV series and bought that off the iTunes store since it isn’t currently available on CD. Now I have two albums to copy over to the iPhone and iPod.

The Percy Jackson one actually downloaded to the iPhone as well as my iTunes library. Fine. I plug the iPod into the Mac and it syncs both albums no trouble. Bear in mind this is a Much older piece of Apple hardware than the iPhone I currently have. Then I try to sync the iPhone and that’s where the trouble began.

I plug the iPhone into the Mac, and iTunes says it needs a software update before it will connect to my iPhone. Fine. I’ve seen this before, after every security patch. Apple still supports my older hardware and the older version of MacOS it’s running with security patches. But now I experience a new problem; an error message saying it cannot download the iTunes update.

So I go looking around the net and lo and behold lots of people are complaining about this happening after the most recent iOS updates. And the thing of that is Apple says it should all be compatible with the older versions of iTunes. So their solutions are to either reinstall iTunes…except the version of iTunes you need for the older MacOS isn’t available anymore, even though it’s allegedly still compatible with the current version of iOS…or reinstall the operating system. Because you really wanted to spend an entire day installing MacOS and all your apps and configurations just to copy over some music to your iPhone.

I spent an entire morning today trying this and trying that to no avail, and swearing loudly that I would never put another update on any of my Apple devices ever again. You cannot downgrade iOS…that’s Apple’s policy. Now it seems, I cannot sync my iPhone with iTunes anymore, which means I can’t back it up, in addition to not being able to sync my music library.

Eventually among the wail of pain out there I see a link to a third party program that claims to run on my Mac Pro version of MacOS, and connects to my iPhone to allow backing up, file copy and music copy from the iTunes library. So I download a copy and give it a try. There was trial version functionality which allowed me to prove it did what I needed and I finally got my music copied over. Then I bought a license for it. It wasn’t expensive and it wasn’t subscription only.

This is it. It’s called iMazing and I can verify that it works…at least on my 2010 Mac Pro and iPhone Xs running iOS 17. So now I can make backups of the iPhone and copy music files over. It isn’t automatic synchronization but I can deal with it. They say it will also let you move your music and other files to an iPod Classic, which gives me some security there because I still like that little dedicated music player.

So that was my morning today. How was yours?

I see a hit from Nigeria in my website server logs today. Hopefully it’s that Nigerian prince that wants to leave me money and he’s finally found me.

Hahahahaha…no. More likely it’s Nigerian authorities looking for gay websites to block.

Since Kodak has gone out of the film developer chemistry business now…at least to the degree they sell it to film photographers as opposed to commercial processors…I’ve had to scramble for a source of a good HC-110 substitute. I found it at The Film Photography Project. They sell an FPP-110 developer that appears to be a functional clone of the new now discontinued Kodak product, that is, not the old HC-110 concentrate but the new version that had a limited lifespan. Fine…I worked with the Kodak product once and it behaved like the old concentrate did. So I was hoping this product from the Film Photography Project did the same.

I have tanks that hold 1, 2 and 4 reels of 35mm film. I loaded a single reel of Tri-X from my California trip as a test, and kept my fingers crossed that I wasn’t sacrificing a roll of good Leica shots just to prove the thing I got in the mail didn’t actually work like HC-110. But it was a complete success. So now I can finish off all the rolls I took in California.

Except for the Agfa Copex Rapid, which I intend to develop using the old H&W Control developer recipe. I ordered the raw chemicals for that from The Photographer’s Formulary. B&H didn’t stock most of what I needed and wouldn’t ship half of them anyway. Photographer’s Formulary ships but you had to specify UPS Ground shipping for two of the chemicals, since they’re declared to be hazardous. Most likely won’t get them here until sometime in mid January.

Still need a scale good to .01 grams.

The thing about good fantasy fiction is it’s modern myth making that you can appreciate on many different levels.

I watched the premiere first two episodes of Percy Jackson and The Olympians on Disney Plus as soon as they were released, and all throughout the story I felt an intense kinship with the characters in it and their struggles, so distant in time, age, and circumstance though they were to me. I’m a gay man who came out to himself in December of 1971. I know how it is to become a target for monsters of the human kind when I reached a certain age. I know how it is to be part of a minority that is not safe in the world.  And I know how vital it is for us to have our safe spaces. And given my family background, I know just how it is to feel estranged from my own dad, although he completely accepted me once we were allowed to be together. I didn’t have to fight my way to it like Percy does. But my own dad had…his own issues. Like Percy, it was my mom who raised me, loved me unconditionally, and set a good example for me. At the end of the second episode, I knew just how he felt.

I came to the Percy Jackson books by way of The Sun and The Star, which is about the same sex couple Nico and Will. I began reading the books, in a backwards kinda way, to find out more about the couple, how they met, how they have navigated the world Rick Riordan created. This production feels very much like the Riordan books that I have read so far, and the production values are top notch. Definitely watching the entire thing.

I got Disney Plus a bit over a year ago so I could watch The Mandalorian and the documentary about Disney song writer Howard Ashman. It’s been worth the money to me.

This is making the rounds on certain social media sites…

It’s a good reminder. More than one classmate from my past has surprised me by declining when I offered them a lovely German ice wine as a Christmas gift, and I was embarrassed for making assumptions, especially given my religious upbringing. I think the second time I did that really drove it home: Do not assume. 

People can have many reasons for not drinking. Maybe they’re on the wagon, maybe it’s a religious thing. Having been raised in a Yankee Baptist household, I can appreciate the religious reasons even if I don’t buy into it anymore. Skepticism regarding alcohol is a Good Thing actually. But as is said above, it’s not really any of my business why, and it’s good to keep it in mind during the holidays, especially as New Year approaches. 

I drink, but sparingly. I don’t seem to have the gene that makes beer taste good, and spirits, which I prefer, have always had an exaggerated effect on me. That was great when I was younger because it meant I didn’t have to spend a lot to get thoroughly toasted on good stuff which doesn’t come with a killer hangover. But as I got older it became tiresome. Literally. In my 60s two stiff drinks and I just want to go to sleep. I’m 70 now, and having more than one drink at a time, or one drink on consecutive days, makes me very fatigued. I might also get heart flutters.

I accept this and dole it out accordingly. The point being just because you know that someone partakes it doesn’t mean they’re up for it right then so don’t assume. Ask please, and don’t push it if I say no thanks. I may have already had my couple drinks for that week.

Sweet ice tea is Always acceptable.

Those of you who browse my website every now and then might notice a new link on the main page. It goes to the art gallery I’ve been meaning to put up for years now. This is a place for everything I do at the drafting table that isn’t a cartoon. It’s a gallery for my serious “pure art” artwork…stuff I do to express feelings I need to get out of me.

I don’t have any of my oil paintings up here yet, and not all of it is finished artwork. Some of what I’m putting up there are sketches I did leading up to a finished piece, some of it are pieces that I stopped working on for one reason or another, usually because I got stuck trying to figure out how to move forward with it: unfinished works that I might copy over to the iPad and finish digitally. I’m putting that up because I’m still proud of the work I did, but also because I want to give people an idea of how I work, and that there is no magic to it, just persistence.

The Art Gallery is Here.

Back when I was a teenager and big box department stores were a thing, I used to go shopping, mostly for LPs at the E.J. Korvette’s across Rockville Pike. It was classic suburban car culture retail, with a massive, and I mean Massive, parking lot surrounding a huge store that sold everything from lawn mowers to blue jeans to jewelry and watches to TVs. They had a legendary record department, and I would go there often to browse the movie and TV soundtrack titles. In their day they had a bigger soundtrack selection than anyone else.

I would also browse the book department. One day I saw this paperback title on the shelves and my jaw dropped, completely taken by surprise and completely embarrassed.

I don’t think I was more embarrassed by the Sticky Fingers album cover when I first laid eyes on it. I could not believe a book with thAT title was allowed on the shelves, even if I knew it was obviously not, could not possibly be about…er…those kinds of dicks. I picked it up and looked at the back cover blurb and saw that it was, yes, a collection of pulp detective stories, which I wasn’t much interested in at the time.

I briefly considered buying a copy as a joke. But I was probably still struggling with my emerging sexuality and didn’t want mom seeing it because she was already questioning my lack of interest in girls and my stash of 16 and Tiger Beat magazines.

Time passes, the universe expands, and along comes the Internet and email and social media and and smartphones and this cover became something of a running gag with me whenever the topic of sexting and dick pics came up. The little inner Baptist boy in me will in no way allow the grown up me to engage in online conversations like that. But the Mad Magazine inner tweenager in me loved joking about it with photos of Dick Tracy, Dick Nixon, Dick Clark, and this book cover.

Once, a certain someone down in Florida told me during one of our conversations not to be sending him any dick pics (I’ve often wondered later if he wasn’t actually trying to give me ideas) and I made the usual jokes back at him. Maybe that’s what started our downhill slide. My sense of humor often irritated him, which irritated me.

So when the other day a friend joked when I was bellyaching about Facebook unilaterally removing one of my posts, that I was posting too many dick pics, and I replied with the cover of this book. He laughed, I laughed. And then I began thinking about it more.

I never really got into hard core noir detective fiction but I have loved some of the movies in that genre. After watching and loving the 1975 Robert Mitchum version of Farewell My Lovely, I decided to pick up a random Raymond Chandler book…he was said to be the gold standard of detective noir…and see if I might want to read him.

At the Crown Books in Congressional Plaza I saw and picked up a copy of one of his novels, I forget now which one, and I Just Happened to flip it open to a scene in it where Marlow is roughing up a young homosexual for some information. Chandler writes that the kid tries to swing back but those little queer boys just don’t have the muscle or the skeletal hardness to put up much of a fight.

The contempt was just dripping off the page and I put it back, and never picked up another Raymond Chandler book. But I still love that film version of Farewell My Lovely. I even bought a copy of the soundtrack by David Shire, which set the tone for the movie perfectly.

But the book I often joked about still intrigued me for, perhaps, a different reason: it’s alleged pulp fiction roots. I have long been a big fan of a particular pulp fiction character: The Shadow. I have a bunch of paperbacks, written by Walter Gibson under the pen name Maxwell Grant, with those amazing pulp art covers.

The only other artist to do the character justice was Michael Kaluta in that amazing series of DC comics that are now collector’s items, and really every time he does the character…

The Shadow was the only pulp character I ever enjoyed reading. For some reason I never got into Doc Savage stories, although those are also said to be a gold standard in pulp fiction. But given how much I’ve enjoyed pulp stories about The Shadow I knew I could actually digest pulp fiction…it just had to be good pulp fiction. If that’s not a contradiction in terms.

So after Yet Another dick pics joke about that book I thought, let me actually try reading it. It’s an anthology so maybe I end up hating some of it, but liking others. So I did a little digging and came up with this hardbound first edition in like new condition, for not very much money.

I posted a version of this to my Facebook page, because most of my friends and classmates still don’t seem to get blogs. Now I wait to see if Facebook deletes this post too. Who knows what evil lurks in the heart of social media…hahahahaha…

My annual reminder of why the various faiths and secular peoples celebrate Solstice this time of year, under various names. Or as I wrote some years ago: …because a friend is uneasy about saying “Merry Christmas” this year. There was more to this post but I won’t repeat it because it’s irrelevant. However it began with a slam at Andrew Sullivan via Matthew Yglesias who noted that Sullivan seemed to think holiday cheer is a liberal conspiracy. Why not say “Happy Christmas” (it’s an anglicism apparently) Too much diversity. “Don’t despair. It will all be over soon enough.” Just shut up Andrew. There’s more to it than the trappings of any one religion. Something deeper, more ancient, and more reverent. Something perhaps only those of us in the high northern latitudes get to appreciate this time of year…

(The following is edited a tad from previous versions…)

The holidays have always been a semi-solitary time for me. Being an only child probably made the holidays in my house quieter then most. After present opening I basically sat on my hands the rest of the day. I was always told it was impolite to call up my friends to play. They were supposed to be spending Christmas with their families. So for me, the best day was always the day after Christmas, when all the neighborhood kids would get together and compare our loot. That’s still basically the way it is for me. I get together with friends and family before and after the holiday, but the day itself is my quiet time.

I am not a misanthrope, but a hate phoniness. I dislike advertising, intensely, and especially when that advertising takes something real and wonderful, like love and sex, and turns it into a gimmick to sell cheap junk no sane person would want in their house. Every year of my life I have watched the holidays become more and more commercial. But this one time of year I make an exception. I will never hate the Christmas trimmings, the Santa Clones, the plastic holly, shopping mall creches, plug in candles, and mass marketed holiday spirit. For this one time of the year I am willing to let it all in, and even relish in it.

I remember one Christmas day when I was a kid, while my folks prepared dinner, I walked way out past the apartments into a field by a small creek. I wandered further then I normally went and sat down by a big rock. It was cold, and gray and there were no other kids outside because they were all inside doing whatever they did with their families that day. There weren’t even any birds or animals that I could see. The temperature was something like in the teens and nothing moved. The only sound was the wind which was gusting very strongly through the trees; even when it wasn’t blowing in my face I could still hear it howling somewhere not far by, as though it was looking for something.

The trees surrounding me were bare wooden sticks held against a grey sky. Their fallen leaves on the ground had been compacted by several rains and at least one snowfall that had only partly disappeared. There were some ice patches left on the ground and the creek was frozen solid. I was a very slightly built little kid and even now being warm when I’m outside is something I take care about. I turned my face towards the sun and I couldn’t feel the slightest shred of heat.

I remember thinking that if I was a caveman who had never seen the likes of this before, I would be sure that the world was dying. I had a pretty good idea then of how the motion of the Earth worked to produce the seasons; I tried to block that knowledge out and think of what it would be like to experience winter without knowing, to watch everything get colder and colder until there was nothing left but the wind restlessly looking for something else that moved. I think I understood then why some people are such sourpusses, and why I wasn’t one of them.

Solstice are the most ancient of rites for a reason. I don’t mind the plastic lighted Santas or the relentless Christmas muzak in the shopping centers, or the wire reindeer with motorized heads. I don’t mind the relentless crowds of shop til you drop shoppers. I will even accept manufactured exuberance side by side with the heartfelt joy of total strangers this time of year. I walk among it all, drinking it in, taking time to find something, some little gift or card, to give to the ones who make my life sweet, even if it means wading through forests of vinyl pine. Tell yourself that it is tradition and all in good fun if you want, but it is really nothing less than an ancient reflex that arises when the earth grows cold and still and the sunlight wanes and you are surprised by how quickly the night comes, to be good to your neighbors, and tell the ones close to your heart that you love them, and blaze defiantly into the night.

One of which is the pleasures of walking here and there and happen chancing across someone you know.

I needed some groceries I could only get at the local organic food store, so I take a short walk there. On the way back I pass a guy who is looking at me so I give him a polite wave. Then I hear him say that he knows me and I turn and look more closely. I’m usually horrible with names but pretty good with faces and I recognise him as one of the STScI cafeteria staff from way back when.

He has apparently become a teacher in one of the local schools, encouraging his kids to believe that a life in the sciences is possible to them. He tells me they grow up thinking Baltimore isn’t the center of the universe, and he tells them actually, in one sense, it is. And he talks to them about working at the Space Telescope Science Institute and Hubble and James Webb. We chat for a while, and it’s clear we both have very fond memories of working at STScI.

That really perked me up.

This entry today in my website server logs comes from Hohhot, Nei Mongol, China, where Baidu, a Chinese AI company, seems to have pointed to my website with the following search string:

“Pornographic movies of little boys around the world”

What the hell!? Here’s their mission statement:

Our mission is to make the complicated world simpler through technology. Founded in 2000 as a search engine platform, we were an early adopter of artificial intelligence in 2010 to make content discovery on the internet easier. We have also used “Baidu Brain,” our core AI technology engine, to develop new AI businesses. 

Today, Baidu is already a leading AI company with a strong Internet foundation. We are one of the very few companies in the world that offers a full AI stack, encompassing an infrastructure consists of AI chips, deep learning framework, core AI capabilities, such as natural language processing, knowledge graph, speech recognition, computer vision and augmented reality, as well as an open AI platform to facilitate wide application and use. We have put our leading AI capabilities into our products and services, as well as innovative use cases. 

So it looks like yet another AI scraper, but all they got was my blog link. I’ve no idea why that search string got them my blog but it’s disturbing. Also in a very dark way, amusing, given the puritanical nature of totalitarian states. When you suppress normal, wholesome, sexual expression in people what you usually end up with is a lot of broken sexuality, deranged sexual predation, and depravity. Orwell nailed why totalitarians like to suppress natural wholesome sex in this passage from 1984:

Unlike Winston, she had grasped the inner meaning of the Party’s sexual puritanism. It was not merely that the sex instinct created a world of its own which was outside the Party’s control and which therefore had to be destroyed if possible. What was more important was that sexual privation induced hysteria, which was desirable because it could be transformed into war-fever and leader-worship. The way she put it was: “When you make love you’re using up energy; and afterwards you feel happy and don’t give a damn for anything. They can’t bear you to feel like that. They want you to be bursting with energy all the time. All this marching up and down and cheering and waving flags is simply sex gone sour. If you’re happy inside yourself, why should you get excited about Big Brother and the Three-Year Plans and the Two Minutes Hate and all the rest of their bloody rot?”

That was very true, he thought. There was a direct intimate connection between chastity and political orthodoxy. For how could the fear, the hatred, and the lunatic credulity which the Party needed in its members be kept at the right pitch, except by bottling down some powerful instinct and using it as a driving force? The sex impulse was dangerous to the Party, and the Party had turned it to account. 

So why is it not surprising I’m getting searched for pornography from China? And the worst, most crudest predatory kind of pornography at that. Because this isn’t the first time I’ve seen it coming from that direction. Also from Russia, Singapore, Indonesia, and certain eastern block and middle eastern countries.

There’s nothing porngraphic in my blog or anywhere else on my website, unless you think anything gay is by definition pornographic like homophobes do. So maybe that’s why they think I’ve got some of that here. I’m an openly gay man so of course I must be into that. That’s how bigots think.

I don’t do pornography, let alone child pornography which is evil. I do sexy, and in fact I’m working now on a new set of pages for this website to showcase my pure artwork, apart from the cartoons, only some of which will be beautiful sexy guys. I try to make those drawings playful and joyful. Sex is wonderful. Pornography is sexual junk food. Maybe having some every now and then is fine, but a steady diet of that stuff can’t possibly be good for the soul.

Maybe I should just block everything coming out of China…

Photo I pinched off one of the social media sites just now…

This is DeSantis talking to the voters. Notice anything about his boots?

Some would say he’s wearing lifts that are so extreme his toes aren’t even going inside the vamp let alone the toe. I would suggest that he doesn’t actually have feet. He has hooves. Cloven hooves.