One Big Spider
On Saturday we caught part of the classic William Shatner movie “Kingdom Of The Spiders,” which features a horde of tarantulas devouring a town. On Sunday we went on a ramble and found a large tarantula sneaking across a parking lot just off of Arkansas 7 north of Hot Springs.
Hacked!!
Wow, the old Post Irony was hacked a couple days ago. From rummaging around in the hundreds of odd files that materialized on my server space, I determined that fake Viagra was somehow involved in the unseemly attack. After stumbling around the Internets for about 24 hours I was able to somehow restore order in the Post Ironic universe. I’m still not sure exactly how I accomplished it. Some stuff is still broken, but I’ll get around to fixing everything some day.
I know what you’re thinking, “Who the Hell cares that Post Irony was nearly unceremoniously wiped from the face of the earth?” But my sister Katie actually noticed that something was wrong and alerted me, the blog owner who had no clue that the precious account of his early middle age had been staked through the heart and left for dead for almost two days. So somebody cared.
On the bright side, this dastardly act got me to change hosting companies. I’ve been dissatisfied with my hosting company since day 1. I think the change will result in the site loading faster.
That is all.
It’s Official, I Know Some New Stuff
My diploma came in the mail while we were touring the West. Anybody got a job opening?
Weirdness
In checking Post Irony’s metadata, I found that in the last two days the blog has been visited based on the search terms “me & the dukes of hazard” and “hee haw set on display.” It’s not even funny.
Intents
I hate putting up a tent. I don’t know why. It’s not that difficult. We’re going on an epic camping trip soon so I got the old tent out to see if was still in good shape and I immediately got a little short with Gina and Abby due to my dislike of tent erection.
We’re headed to Big Bend, which is in a really isolated part of Texas. In anticipation of being in a good area for photographing star trails I bought a cheapo intervalometer for my camera. When I started playing around with it I got the idea to do a time-lapse deal of me putting up our tent out in the middle of the desert. But I needed to practice on something and decided that the dry-run tent set-up would be the perfect time to practice for the real thing. So I set the intervalometer to take a picture every 8 seconds and made two videos, one of the tent set-up and one of the tent take down. The camera shot about 100 frames each time and I combined them in iMovie to make the video. They turned out well and included Abby and Gina in incidental roles, so I felt obliged to include them on this album. They go like this here:
Dude, I Must Be Smart After All
One thing I never expected to happen in my whole life is getting an e-mail declaring I had made an “exemplary academic accomplishment.” Some guy named Larry Burns sent me the e-mail this week (to which he had forged the name of the president of the University of Central Arkansas) informing me that I have been named to the Presidential Scholars List. I assume it’s because I made straight A’s for the summer and fall semesters.
I’ve never made straight A’s before. In fact, I don’t think I ever made straight A’s and B’s. Not even in first grade. Back when I was going to school at the age you’re supposed to go to school I was not into homework and paying attention in class and all that. It’s truly a miracle that I got a college degree from a minor state college in Kansas. I realize we’re not talking Harvard here, but still.
And it’s kinda lame that all I got was an e-mail, no certificate, not even a real signature from a major UCA dignitary. But I’d like to join Larry Burns and possibly Dr. Allen C. Meadors in thanking those of you “who may have encouraged [me] toward this exemplary academic accomplishment.”
Knowledge Is Power
I’ve let the ol’ Post Irony get a little stale the past couple of months, but I’ve got a reason for that: I’ve gone back to school. It’s something I never thought I’d do. I was never a good student to put it mildly. Starting way back in elementary school, I understood that I would have to be educated to get anywhere in life, but my goal was always to do just enough to get by. I found early on that I was smart enough to just get by without even trying. In some classes, I even made A’s and B’s without intending to. Other classes, usually math or something with a heavy math component, needed actual study to do well, which I wasn’t prepared to do. When I was in the eighth or ninth grade, my parents sat me down and told me they were giving up. It was apparent that I was going to do well in the classes in which I wanted to and do very poorly in other classes. No amount of grounding or taking my TV away was going to change that. I remember being quite relieved that I had outlasted them. That all carried over into college. Luckily, after a lost couple of years I discovered journalism, in which I was able to maintain a B average without much effort. It only took 6.5 years, but I got a degree from a tiny state college in Kansas.
Has It Really Been That Long?
Today is Gina’s and my 15th wedding anniversary. I wanted to wear red Chuck Taylors in the wedding and Gina refused to let me, to her everlasting regret.
Happy anniversary, sweet baby.
Flash Play
After my run Wednesday at Two Rivers Park I headed over to Pinnacle Mountain to see if there was anything worth shooting. I stopped at the arboretum off Pinnacle Mountain Road thinking I might get a shot of some cypress knees down by the Little Maumelle River. I did something to my knee during my run and I was limping pretty heavily. (I later made the self diagnosis of ilotibial band syndrome.) I barely made it to the river and to add insult to injury I couldn’t find anything swampy that I wanted to shoot.
On my limp back up he trail I came across this dead armadillo and decided to try my hand at a little Strobist style off-camera flash. I underexposed the ambient light and let the flash provide the correct exposure on the carcass. It didn’t turn out quite as I had envisioned. I envisioned a well-lit corpse with a goodly expanse of dark forest in the background. But hand-holding the flash while trying to get low on a badly hurting knee while enduring the stink of a dead armadillo is harder than it sounds. I gave up after two frames and this is what I got.
Disappointment Canyon
The leaden sky was spitting snow, I had hiked a mile or so over snot-slick moss, rocks and logs, my coccyx was sore, and I was ledged out well short of my destination.
Back in the summer I had read in Tim Ernst’s blog about the slot canyon on Shop Creek upstream of the famous Twin Falls in the Buffalo National River area, and I put it in my mental file of places to go. I spent the day Saturday cleaning up ice storm damage at our summer home near Fayetteville and planned to get up early Sunday and do some waterfall hunting before heading back to Little Rock. Ernst hadn’t given the location of the slot canyon on his Web site but a little Internet sleuthing turned up this blog, which described how to get there. Thanks, Derek. It turns out you just go to Twin Falls, which is easy to get to, and then continue upstream. Derek has some good photos of the slot canyon and Tim Ernst has his usual stellar photos of the place. Both Tim and Derek wrote about the difficulty of accessing the canyon. Both of them even recommended rock climbing gear, and, in fact, Ernst wrote about using a harness to hang out over the creek to get his pictures. But I figured I could get in there a little ways at least. I was wrong.
Journey Rules
For some reason I’m quite taken with this defacement of public property I came across while out driving through the hoity-toity part of Little Rock.
I like that the tagger took the time and forethought to use letter stencils. The stencil allows the unlawful additions to the sign to mesh well with the official stencil used for the word STOP. He or she could have just scrawled the words freehand, but he or she knew that wouldn’t cut it. Not when you’re referencing one of the all-time great arena rock anthems.
This little bit of ephemera has taken my mind off a knotty issue that seems to have no solution. Abby and I generally grow bored and thirsty early in the afternoon and more often than not go to a nearby Sonic to take advantage of their happy hour, during which drinks are half price. I get a large Coke and Abby gets a small Sprite. A bargain at $1.48.
For at least six visits in a row, the straw incisions on my cup lid have been torn, which creates a dangerously sloppy seal around the straw. (These visits have stretched across at least three Sonic outlets.) Abby’s small-cup lid is always pristine. The only thing I can figure is that the large lids are being stored on some sort of rod and are just jammed on there by unfeeling employees. It’s no way to treat an innocent cup lid.
Yes, these are the things that occupy my mind now that I don’t have a job.
I Don’t Have What You’re Looking For
I love checking on what search terms people used to get here. My favorite so far: “crossdresser peeing.” Well, I mentioned seeing a cross dressing biker in one post and I’ve mentioned potty training Abby a couple times, so I guess that’s how Post Irony pops up in that search.
A few other people got here by searching for “sexy crossdresser” and “little cross dresser.”
My second favorite of them all: “grilled plecostomus.” Who wants to grill plecostomus? I actually put this one into Google and Post Irony comes up fourth. I looked through a couple of pages of the search results and didn’t see anything that addressed actually grilling these unappetizing fish.
A couple of posts chronicle my adventures in photographing my Abe Lincoln bust, so it makes sense that searching for “abe lincoln yelling” would get you here. I just don’t know if searching for Abe Lincoln yelling makes any sense.
One post mentions me seeing a middle aged woman getting an airbrushed tattoo in the middle of her back, which drew these searches: “star tramp stamps,” “best place for a woman to get a tattoo,” and “sexy middle aged women.”
In the same post I mentioned the mannequin legs used to advertise the tattoo stand, which match the search terms “sexy legs” and “disembodied legs.” Who’s searching for disembodied legs? Maybe somebody else will do that search, get this post in the results, come here and explain why they did that search.
My New Digs
Welcome to the new Post Irony. I got so bored over the long Thanksgiving weekend, I upped and got some server space and installed WordPress there. Now I’m free from the free WordPress.com service. That means I can use plugins and alter some of the style: fonts and colors and the like. That also means the blog isn’t free anymore. I got my domain name for a year and two months of hosting for about $18. I can live with that.
Then I spent a long evening transferring all my posts from the other blog. I used the same theme but there are some differences. The photo in the header is gone, rendering it pretty ugly, but I’m looking for a new theme, so maybe that will change. I installed a plugin that pops up a fancy box when readers click on photos to see bigger versions. Couldn’t do that on the old site.
I also built a Web site at my new domain, dondailey.com. It’s kitten weak now, but as soon as I learn some actual coding skills, I’ll make it better. It will be a magnificent showcase for my past journalism work. Or something. Uh…
5,000!
If you’ll look at the bottom of the sidebar you’ll notice that the ol’ Post Irony is up to 5,000 hits. It’s amazing that just five people have looked at this thing so many times.
Yuck
You may recall a post of a few days ago that included this pic of the locked gate at our neighborhood pool. I commented on the fact that there was no reason posted for the pool closure.
Well, the neighborhood newsletter came out on Friday and revealed the pool had to be drained because of high ammonia levels. You know what causes high ammonia levels in swimming pools? That’s right, urine. The newsletter implored swimmers to use the bathrooms at the pool and for parents to keep diapers on their babies and toddlers.
Many people make fun of me for eschewing swimming pools as big tanks of pee. They always point out that the chemicals in the water take care of such sewer-like characteristics. I feel vindicated.
Getting Some Play
I’m not sure it means anything, but Australian photographer Neil Creek chose my shot of Pikes Peak to critique on his blog. He liked it. It’s kind of neat for me to see my pic on a blog written on the other side of the world.
Backtalk