A couple of photos from around the house.
Chez nous
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Milky Way: August 1st
About 20km from my house, it’s dark enough for photos like these.
Nerdy details: all photos were shot at 11mm, f/2.8, 30 seconds, 3200 ISO. The landscape-oriented image is a panorama stitched from 12 photos (which explains the gravity-defying hydro lines).
Compare and contrast: Last month.
The meadow
A little over 5km from my house. The above photo is a panorama of 18 photos, each 24mm, f/2.8; the resulting photo (if the online calculator is correct) is effectively 15mm, f/1.8.
Also: I like fence posts.
Michelle Yeoh Double Feature
Last night we checked out the movie everyone’s been raving about: Everything Everywhere All At Once. It was a great film, hilarious and heart-rending, touching on complicated themes[1]I kept thinking about some of Borges’s “games with infinity” stories, especially when Joy was talking about her experiences with the multiverse.. I never thought I’d feel emotional watching a stone with googly eyes roll off a cliff, but here we are. If you’re looking for a film filled with love, despair, tax problems, kung fu, multiverse-hopping, and wild costuming, this is the one for you.
Then, standing in the lobby after the show, we decided to also watch Minions: The Rise of Gru. This was a much less complex film, but fun in its own way. I thought it might be a “How Gru Met His Minions” origin story, but they were already together at the beginning; it’s more of a “Gru’s First Crime” tale instead. If you want a silly caper filled with yellow nonsense-spouting blobs in denim overalls, this is the one for you. (I appreciated some of the sight gags: in one scene, three Minions construct elaborate disguise—including one painting itself like a brick wall—to infiltrate a villain’s lair, even though there’s a stack of blue-and-yellow bags of fertilizer lying on the lawn; in the end credits, there’s a drawing of the Minions’ Halloween costumes—Oompa Loompas.)
The connecting thread: Michelle Yeoh, who played Evelyn Wang (the main character) in Everything Everywhere All At Once and voiced Master Chow (who taught the Minions kung fu) in Minions: The Rise of Gru.
I enjoyed both movies for vastly different reasons. Good times.
Footnotes
| ↑1 | I kept thinking about some of Borges’s “games with infinity” stories, especially when Joy was talking about her experiences with the multiverse. |
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An hour in Killarney
I went for a stroll up Lakeshore Drive the other day while my darling wife was getting a massage.
Yard birds
…not the band but the visitors eating bugs in my lawn.
The Late Show
There was a 3 AM thunderstorm. I decided that, if I wasn’t going to be able to sleep, I might as well set up my camera.
These were the two shots where I captured lightning (out of about 150 frames). This was as the storm was waning.
Bike Ride — July 17, 2022
I went for a 25km bike ride this morning, before it got too hot outside. I ended up going a bit east of ACC’s North Hill campus, which once upon a time was the Brandon Mental Health Centre, or BMHC.
I found the BMHC cemetery, and took a few photos.
There were a lot of names on that cairn. All four sides had a plaque, and each plaque was about that full.
I even found a Johanneson on the cairn (though I doubt we’re related).
Clouded Aurora
After I watched the new Top Gun talkie, I checked the data in my aurora app while I was still in the parking lot. It looked good[1]The Bz reading was ‑11, where the further into the negative, the better; I usually see a decent show if it’s at ‑4 or so., so I hurried home, grabbed my gear, and went out of town.
Unfortunately it was cloudy to the north. I set up anyway, hoping the clouds would move off, and started snapping photos.
Long story short: the clouds didn’t move off. I gave it about 45 minutes, and then packed up and went home.
Here’s a timelapse of about 20 minutes’ worth of my attempts. Each frame is a 10-second exposure.
And here’s a handful of my favourites from the photos I got. (I think I caught a meteor in the first one, on the far left.)
Footnotes
| ↑1 | The Bz reading was ‑11, where the further into the negative, the better; I usually see a decent show if it’s at ‑4 or so. |
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Top Gun redux
I watched Top Gun: Toppest Gun[1]OK, fine, Top Gun: Maverick. last night. The movie, once it got going[2]It was 25 minutes late starting; at least three different people, myself included, went to ask when they planned to start the movie., was—
Well, it was a Top Gun movie, that’s for sure.
(For context, I was in Air Cadets as a youth in the 1980s, and so I was legally obligated to see Top Gun approximately 6.02×10²³ times.)
There was Tom Cruise flying planes worth quajillions of dollars. There was Tom Cruise charming a lady. There was Tom Cruise riding a motorbike with no helmet because that’s what heroes do. There was Tom Cruise, being brash and breaking all the rules. There was Tom Cruise grinning boyishly, endlessly. (“This is my only look,” indeed.)
Aside from Tom Cruise, there were other items in this movie. There was Val Kilmer in the Admiralty now. There was a shirtless game with balls (more oval this time). There was a smirking jerk pilot and an elite fighter pilot who needed glasses (wait what)[3]If they explained why his callsign was “Bob”, I missed it.[4]Also: as I mentioned, I was in Air Cadets in my youth. I applied to learn to be a glider pilot. Not a fighter pilot, a glider pilot. I was turned down because my glasses were too thick.. There was a very very tight timeline that they still interrupted for an important funeral. There was dogfight training and a barroom singalong and some very very handwaved geopolitics. There was a trench run with a target not much larger than a womp rat[5]Wait, that might be a different franchise with a sequel 30+ years in the making.. There was dogfighting—good thing they trained for it.
There were jet planes. Oh my word, there were jet planes. Some of them were fifth-generation, whatever that means; better than F‑18s in every way, apparently, though (spoiler alert) it sure didn’t end up seeming like it. There was a single, incredibly convenient F‑14.
There were tailhooks and catapults and missiles and chaff and “out of missiles, switching to guns”. There was a yellow-tinged montage of fighter jets departing a carrier to the dulcet tones of Kenny Loggins’ “Danger Zone”.
I went into this movie with a bad attitude, I’ll admit it. Most of the mol of times I watched the first movie weren’t my choice; at Cadet camp, the first person to get to the staff lounge got to pick the movie for the night, and most everyone else wanted to watch Top Gun again[6]And again and again and again..
The movie delivered in a lot of ways. I can see where people and critics like it. The actors are all very very good, the bit of necessary exposition when we’re introduced to The New Crop of Top Guns is handled about as well as it could be[7]Exposition is always a tightrope between eye-rolling “as you know, Bob” dialogue vs. the audience later saying “OK, now who’s this person?”, and the stunts are breathtaking. I admit I laughed a few times (the “What were you thinking?” “You told me not to think!” “…Touché.” exchange was well-played, I thought).
I got what I expected. I got a Top Gun movie. I still don’t know if that’s what I wanted.
Cover photo by Darren Nunis on Unsplash. This is not one of the F‑18s in Top Gun.
Footnotes
| ↑1 | OK, fine, Top Gun: Maverick. |
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| ↑2 | It was 25 minutes late starting; at least three different people, myself included, went to ask when they planned to start the movie. |
| ↑3 | If they explained why his callsign was “Bob”, I missed it. |
| ↑4 | Also: as I mentioned, I was in Air Cadets in my youth. I applied to learn to be a glider pilot. Not a fighter pilot, a glider pilot. I was turned down because my glasses were too thick. |
| ↑5 | Wait, that might be a different franchise with a sequel 30+ years in the making. |
| ↑6 | And again and again and again. |
| ↑7 | Exposition is always a tightrope between eye-rolling “as you know, Bob” dialogue vs. the audience later saying “OK, now who’s this person?” |