I got all artistic with my camera last night and took some shots using the night scene (long exposure) feature in my darkened bedroom (yes, I am a complete dork). I recently picked up a small tripod and took the following pics by twirling my mini-headlamp around to various effect.
This one reminds me of the rings of Saturn or something:
While in this one we see that my laptop (iRene the iBook) is so heavenly that she boasts a halo:
Here’re a few more similar images.
My diary for the last five days looks like this. I had Thursday and Friday off of work so it was an extra-long weekend for me.
On Thursday, I took Wendy’s advice and went to see the Hirshhorn Museum’s Visual Music exhibition. Interesting stuff. I was only disappointed that they weren’t playing “Dark Side of the Rainbow.”
Here’s a pick I took of a some swirling lights projected onto a screen:
Then I strolled down to the National Museum of the American Indian. An absolute disappointment. A bunch of crap crammed into a funny-looking building. I couldn’t tell one exhibit from the next — it was as if the building were jammed with relics and dioramas and video displays, turned upside down and shaken about, and then set back down again for visitors to pick through. Talk about cognitive dissonance.
The weather was gorgeous on Friday, so I went out to hike the Billy Goat Trail in Great Falls, Maryland. Nice to get outside. I snapped this pic:
That night I went out with some friends to Local 16. Nice place. But very crowded.
On Saturday I had lunch with my grandmother in Falls Church, VA, and then went to meet my old pal Mike F. for lunch. You’ll recall that Mike has provided commentary on these pages regarding Ecuadorian politics; he and I taught English there, and he recently returned to the States. We hadn’t seen each other in nearly two years (for those of you who don’t know me, Mike’s on the left):
Then, that night, I had the pleasure of going to a neighbor’s BBQ and watching the exceptionally funny “Team America: World Police,” a film I’d been meaning to see for a while. Warning: steer clear of it if you’ve got a problem with graphic scenes depicting marionette sex.
I got to see another great movie — one of a much different ilk — on Sunday night: “Born Into Brothels: Calcutta’s Red Light Kids.” The director, a photographer, gave cameras to prostitutes’ children; the movie’s about the photos they take and their struggle to escape the slum. Worth checking out.
And finally, to cap off a fine weekend, I had the pleasure of dining yesterday at Five Guys, purveyors of the best damned cheeseburgers I’ve ever tasted. Here’s what my meal looked like (click the photo for notes):
Sigh. Now I need a vacation.
…one more thing: here’re some pics of the sky outside my office window yesterday afternoon. And yes, I have been communing with my inner Ansel Adams of late.
There was a beautiful sunset here in DC tonight. I snapped some pics of it from our second-story balcony. I like ’em a lot. Note that I haven’t altered the colors in any of these. Beautiful, if I do say so myself. A couple of my favorites:
And a this one, of the scene as reflected in my window:
Some truly stunning pics. Click on thumbnails for related galleries and narration.
(Via Gridskipper.)
As I’ve mentioned before, I collect metro cards from around the world. And I received a nice item in the mail yesterday from Miles B. and Susie: a Boston T card. (I’ve ridden on the T a few times but have always forgotten to snag a card for my collection.) Many thanks, you two.
I decided, for your viewing pleasure and for archival purposes related to the future Newley Purnell presidential library’s ephemera exhibit, to document my cards.
Here’s the full gallery with pics of each card, notes on their design and material, and dates of acquisition. (I always thought my collection was huge, but I’ve actually only got seven cards. I really need to beef it up…)
During my time teaching small kids (ages 5-10) in Taiwan, I was continuously searching for ways to entertain them — silly games, jokes, physical comedy routines incorporating juggling, etc. After a month or two, I hit upon a brainstorm: I needed a classroom mascot.
In the teacher’s room one day during a break, I came across the perfect candidate in the recesses of an old bookcase: a plastic spider left over from the previous year’s Halloween celebrations. I scooped him up and, when class resumed, introduced him to my students.
Miles the spider was born. (I named him after one of my best friends from college, Miles B., who in fact doesn’t resemble a small arachnid at all, for he is 6’6″ tall weighs about 280 pounds.)
The kids took to him slowly; they thought I was certifiable when I insisted, time and again, that in fact Miles was not an inanimate toy, but instead a 29-year-old lifetime pet (I said my parents gave him to me as an infant, and that he’d made the journey with me to East Asia). Once my ever-serious students finally warmed up to Miles, I incorporated him into various classroom activities — for example, I’d have my more advanced classes write 10 sentences about Miles using adjectives (Peggy, one of my more stubborn pupils, would invariably submit sentences like “Miles is Teacher Newley ugly stupid toy spider.”)
In one of my older classes, a feisty girl named Chia-ling constantly insisted that I was nuts; she insisted Miles was not a real spider. One afternoon, we were talking about our weekends; the students asked me what Miles did last weekend. I said he’d told me that he’d managed to open the classroom’s sliding glass door, venture out onto the balcony, and stare at the beautiful stars one night.
“Teacher, you a liar!” Chia-ling said. “You cannot see the stars at night in Kaohsiung! Miles is not a real spider — he is a toy!” (Indeed, Chia-ling was right: the city’s air pollution made the
prospect of star-gazing ludicrous.)
Toward the end of the year, the students really became enamored of Miles; I let him take our daily “oral tests” (I’d hold a book up over my face and repeat vocabulary words in a squeaky voice, and the students would always scurry out from behind their desks and attempt to catch me out in my ventriloquism). I’d even write Miles’s name up on the board, along with all the other students’, and assign him an oral test grade. The more studious children would always listen intently and rat out Miles’s pronunciation gaffes in an attempt to lower his grade sufficiently so he’d have to stay after class for “extra practice.”
Miles, in time, became perhaps the best-loved class mascot in the history of Taiwanese private English language education. One day, a quiet girl name Annie even brought in one of her Barbies from home and proclaimed the doll to be Miles’s girlfriend. (I did not draw attention to the sexual perversion of such an intra-species romance.)
Here, alas, is a photo of one of my classes in front of my whiteboard. Miles is visible in the upper left-hand corner (though I’m afraid he’s a bit blurry):
