Turtle Tchotchke Tuesday

Remember our new Pokey Park sculpture of a Navajo-Churro Sheep dancing "La Bamba"? And remember how I mentioned that she does turtles, too? It turns out that she had a turtle in her Works in Progress section. If you buy one of her pieces before she turns it over to galleries you get it at a discount.

Who could pass up a turtle?

Yesterday, "El Pensador" arrived! Just in time for Turtle Tchotchke Tuesday.

El Pensador (plastron view)

El Pensador (carapace view)

Of course, this isn't a mere tchotchke...it's art.

Pancho Villa Car

The most common way that people, other than friends and family, find posts on my blog is through Google's image search for "pancho villa death car." The first result is the Wikipedia image I linked to in my story about our trip to Chihuahua, Mexico. I didn't include the photo, I just linked to it. When the searchers click on that image, they're taken to the August, 2008, archive of my blog. The image isn't there and the link to it buried deep down in the page. This probably leaves them confused and dismayed.

So, for the possible convenience and pleasure of people searching for it, here is...

Pancho Villa Death Car

This is taken from Wikipedia's article of Pancho Villa (where we're told we can copy, distribute and transmit it).

Turtle Tchotchke Tuesday

A turtle we got at a Native Americans' market in Balboa Park.

I don't know who made it. Its glaze looks a lot like the Navajo pieces Poss gave us.

Turtle Tchotchke Tuesday

A clay ball hanging from a string of wooden beads.

The ball.

This came from one of the artist cooperatives in Balboa Park's Spanish Village Art Center.

Time for a Shower

Last night I ventured away from the glow of the cities to watch the Perseid Meteor Shower. I took my new, folding, reclining lawn chair, a warm blanket, a CARE package of snacks (thanks, Jerry!) and my camera. I went to the same spot where we watched one of those amazing displays of the Leonid meteors around 10 years ago.

I got to my spot at about 9:00pm. There were already several cars parked there and people sitting in their camp or lawn furniture. I parked my car and quickly got my equipment out so I wouldn't have the interior light on to bother my neighbors. I had tried to have them just not come on but it isn't obvious how to do that.

I left the windows down so that I could get things in and out of the car without opening the door and turning on the interior lights. But my helpful car thwarted that plan. When you walk up to it at night with your smart key in your pocket, it turns on the interior lights to let you see that intruders haven't infiltrated it. Or perhaps to let you know that you have approached your car instead of someone else's.

So, instead of setting up shop beside my car where I would have been shielded a bit from the headlights of cars that were to come and go through the night I had to set up in front of it.

Another thing that my intelligent car did for me is lock itself when I left its side. How nice of it! Locking up after me whenever I forget to lock it myself is a good thing. The problem with that now is that it has an alarm and to warn intruders that it's going to scream at them if they bother it, it has a bright, blinking light. So the car blinked all night. It wasn't so bright that it ruins people's night vision so that wasn't too bad. It was just annoying.

It was a beautiful night and location for watching a meteor shower. The sky was completely clear. And dark. I didn't know that the Milky Way was so bright anywhere in southern California.

It was rather chilly and quite windy. I am glad that I took a warm blanket with me.

There seem to be two kinds of people who go out to good meteor shower watching spots. There are people who watch good meteor showers. And there are people who go because it is, they've heard, a good thing to do.

There were many people in the second category there.

Some time after I got there in rumbled a convoy of four huge SUVs. A large extended family or circle of friends brought their kids to experience this event. Of course, the kids weren't all that interested. It took them about 20 minutes to get set up meaning the doors were open all that time and the lights were on all that time. After they kind of settled down they made many trips back to the cars. More lights. There was loud talking between the people getting stuff out of the SUV and the rest all this time. Fortunately they must have gotten bored and left after about an hour.

Then two couples came and set up very close to me. One was a non-stop know-it-all talker. She simply hates the Olive Garden. But she'll go if there's nowhere else to eat. (Question: Where on earth is there an Olive Garden that has no other restaurant nearby?) One of the men had had several long-term relationships with women with histories of suicide attempts. At least the know-it-all was watching the show. She'd frequently interrupt what she was saying with "there went another good one!" The others didn't seem to care.

Their conversation was entertaining to listen to. But then one of the women needed to pee so she and one of the men went off to find a place to go. They quickly came back. Wherever they had gone was occupied by something that moved and freaked her out. They left in search of a place with a toilet.

One person in another group was reading his iPhone or some other lit up device. That's great for night vision that's needed for watching the sky.

Those of us who were out there to watch meteors had a very good time. There were a lot of bright meteors. There was one very bright meteor that left a trail that was visible for more than a minute. I'm not a counter of meteors. I'm out there to say "ooooh!" and "ahhhhhhh!" I said "ooooh!" and "ahhhhhhh!" a lot.

I set up my camera and had it take pictures of the sky. I set its ISO sensitivity to 2000, opened the aperture all the way and had it expose each shot for 15 seconds. I had it take a picture every 16 seconds. (Could there be a movie in the making? Time will tell!)

Several hours into this I was sitting there watching the sky and noticed that I didn't hear the periodic noises from the camera. Its battery had died. I had a backup battery. I managed to get the dead battery out and the new one in in the dark (except for my helpful car turning on the interior lights when I reached in to get the fresh battery out of the camera bag and again when I put the dead battery in the bag). It turned out that the last picture from the first battery was taken only about two minutes before the first picture with the second battery.

Here are a few pictures that captured meteors. The camera was pointing nearly north. The glow seems to be coming from the Palm Springs/Palm Desert area. I tried to make the horizon horizontal but didn't quite succeed.

August 12, 2010, 10:47pm

This must be a sporadic meteor since it doesn't point back to Perseus which has just risen above the horizon on the right side of the picture. There were a bunch of impressive sporadic meteors all through the night.

August 13, 2010, 12:33am

August 13, 2010, 1:35am

August 13, 2010, 1:56am

I packed up and headed for home around 3:30. My eyes were blacking out on me. I guess my brain was staying awake but the eyes were insisting on sleeping. I wasn't seeing any meteors. I figured I'd better get home while I could keep awake for the drive. I saw one more meteor shoot toward the horizon while driving home.

I love meteors. But I just can't stay awake all night. My brain is still a bit fuzzy from lack of sleep.

Like a river that don't know where it's flowin'...

...we took a wrong turn and we just kept goin'.

Jerry and I took a hike through Daley Ranch in north Escondido. It contains a number of natural vegetation communities including lush oak woodlands, coastal sage scrub and chaparral, grasslands, and riparian areas (as the linked page tells us).


It's got some views of distant hills and freeways. But mostly it's got hiking through the chaparral.


They tell us that there are over 20 miles of trails. Jerry and I walked along a lot more of the trails than we had planned.


Jerry remembered to tell me to take my hand-held GPS device. That was a good thing. I had intended simply to record our walk and maybe post it here. But it turned out to be much more useful.

We made a wrong turn.

And we kept on going.

Here's the map of our walk.

At the top, is a track from where we started (the top left end) to a loop that has another little loop on it. We continued clockwise from the little loop. We meant to continue where the track turns to the northwest.

But first we mad a little detour to the south.

We weren't familiar with the trails so we didn't know that we were seeing completely new scenery instead of going back the way we came. Finally I had Jerry get the GPS out of the backpack where it had been recording our journey. Sure enough, it showed that we were way off track.

So we followed its track back to our missed turn. Three miles back. The GPS saved us from my becoming a very grumpy boy.

I had taken a picture of a sign at that junction the first time we passed it.

I should have paid attention to the trail marker next to it.

On our side trip we saw a rock that looks like a reclining man.

And some nicely zhooshed socks.

Here's a picture of Burnt Mountain. It gives you a feel for the scenery we saw. All 11 miles of it.

It was a nice hike, just a bit longer than we had planned on. We need to see the south end of the ranch some day.

(Why is Blogger sometimes making such large amounts of space between paragraphs? It's making me grumpy.)

Blog Overload

Sorry about this.

Last week in Short Ride in a Fast Machine, I said that I wasn't going to post every time-lapse movie I make. Colleen wondered if that meant that I plan to make zillions of movies. I do plan on making a zillion movies but I don't want to devote What's Up, Chuck? to these things.

I thought that it might be kind of fun to show the world what I come up with. So...

I've started another blog that is devoted to my time-lapse movie making. If you want to follow along just click and go to The Barista's Cut. You should read from the bottom up.

I hope the name works. It's a play on "director's cut." Get it? The movies are caffeinated.

Does the name work? Should I change it?

I hope I make a zillion movies.

Turtle Tchotchke Tuesday

Some tchotchke turtles sitting on a hummingbird tile.

Short Ride in a Fast Machine

Here's a little time-lapse movie I made this evening. No music to this one.



If you want to hear John Adams's Short Ride in a Fast Machine, here's a YouTube video of a performance.

I'm not going to blog every video I post to YouTube. You can subscribe to my channel if you want to be notified when I post new movies that don't show up here. Or just see them show up on your Facebook News Feed (if you're my friend there).

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Turtle Tchotchke Tuesday

An turtle by Candelaria Suazo, Santa Clara Pueblo.

Give me a second

In my last post I showed you my first time-lapse movie. Here it is again for your convenience.



I got a new gadget! I got myself an intervalometer. This is a device that plugs into my camera and triggers the shutter at a regular interval.

I got a Pclix LT. This intervalometer lets me have the camera take shots anywhere between every 0.4 second to once every 100 hours. I'm guessing you can really set it to fire the camera every 0.1 second but no digital SLR camera can respond that quickly.

After Izzy asked how long the roast took in my first Hottop roaster video, I looked at the timestamps on the segments from that video and found that from start of the preheat to the end of the cooling was about 25 minutes. So I figured that's how long it would take to roast the batch for this video. That turned out to be very close.

I then needed to come up with a bit of music to accompany the show. It needed to be short and evoke caffeinated hyperactivity. Rimsky-Korsikov's "Flight of the Bumblebee" seemed to cover all that. My recording of it lasts a minute and 33 seconds.

I decided to make my video at 24 frames per second.  I needed 93 seconds (the length of the music) at 24 frames/second. That meant that I needed around 2200 frames. I planned on shooting around 1500 seconds of roasting (25 minutes times 60 seconds/minute).

Now, I just had to divide my 1500 seconds by 2200 frames and came up with 0.68 second per frame.

I set the intervalometer to have the camera shoot a picture every 0.7 second.

I turned on the intervalometer as the second hand approached the 12 and hit the start button on the roaster when it reached the 12. My hand makes appearances when I dumped the beans into the roaster after the preheat period and when I needed to make adjustments to the heat element and the fan. When the cooling finished and the roaster shut off I let the camera take a few more shots then turned off the intervalometer.

I used QuickTime Pro on my Windows system to paste the resulting frames together. It is easy to do. You just point at the first picture in a folder that contains numbered images that all start with common letters and it makes a QuickTime movie. A minor problem with that is the camera makes a new folder after 999 images. It turned out that I just needed to make a segment of the movie for each folder the camera made.

(I have the QuickTime Pro license on my Windows system because I started making my little videos before I got a Mac. I don't want to spend another $29 to get a Pro license for my Mac.)

I also made a short segment from five frames (at one frame per second) before I pressed the start button for the countdown.

I pasted the four segments together using iMovie on my Mac and added the title. I added the music track and had it kick in when the time-lapse part of the movie started. Amazingly, the music lasted exactly the right amount of time. Such planning!

When the roaster turned itself off, I let the camera shoot about 10 seconds longer. I was going to finish the video with a fade-out of the clock back to ticking once per second. But I wasn't paying attention to the roaster and didn't realize that the drum was coasting to a stop during those 10 seconds. So I didn't have even five seconds of a motionless roaster and a ticking clock. Drat!

So, that's how you make a time-lapse movie of your Hottop Coffee Roaster.

It might have been better if I had used uniform, studio lighting. The sun being covered up by clouds sometimes was annoying. But maybe they added to the sense of weird time.

Now I have to make movies of things like sunsets. Last night's sunset was very pretty and I tried to record it. It didn't work. It was completely washed out. I have to figure how to set the exposure better. I made a movie of the fog lifting yesterday morning. A time-lapse movie of fog is boring. (Distant fog would be interesting but this was right across the highway.) We needed to leave shortly after it burnt off so I have only a very brief bit of clouds moving across the sky. It shows potential.

I love my camera.

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