The Influencer

I am going to tell you a story of what I observed on the flight today.  I don't want this to feel like in any way involves any judgement at all, because that is not my intent.  I am always fascinated with the work that people do and how it works and what is involved. So here is my story.  I had the window seat, Kathy the middle seat and this woman the aisle seat.  As the airplane pushed back from the gate this woman plugged her phone into an auxiliary battery but I was not sure why.  Then holding the phone in two hands she started typing with both thumbs at a really fast pace.  Then after a while she began swiping her fingers across the phone, I am assuming she was visiting websites.  Then back to typing, and typing and typing.  The short version is that for the entire flight, from before takeoff until after landing in Los Angeles, a period of 5 hours and 30 minutes, she continued typing and swiping.  I was stunned at how hard she was working with her phone.  I have never seen anything like this in my life, the concentration and the intensity!  I guessed that perhaps she was in "influencer" who probably has a large audience and so keeps needing to feed her followers.  I asked Amy about this and she said that a really good influencer will take the time to personally answer some of her follower's questions, and who will also take the time to visit other influencer's sites and compliment them on something they posted, and usually that person will return the favor by visiting her site and leaving a compliment.  So clearly being an influencer is a LOT of work.  I mean, this young woman had to have been the hardest working person on this flight!  It was an amazing thing to see.  I was hoping that I would have time to talk to her for just a bit, but she was out of her seat and down the aisle to the exit before we got out of our seats.

Ted Turner Died Today

"Ted Turner, Creator of CNN and the 24-Hour News Cycle, Dies at 87. As one of the most important figures in media history, he oversaw a vast cable empire of news, sports and entertainment channels."

I got to meet him in 1974 when he was chosen to defend the America's Cup, as skipper of a radically new 12-meter design by Britton Chance.  He was an astounding sailor, one of his great passions in life.  The boat was sponsored by the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy and we were doing a story about him and the defense of the cup.  So I went to the Merchant Academy and thought I would be riding along in one of the other boats so that I could get to photograph him, from a distance.  We were all standing around on the dock and he was figuring out who would crew which boat.  Mariner was going to be sailing alongside Valiant, a 12-meter from years before.  You always sail against another boat to see how good your new boat is.  So he needed a crew for Valiant as well as Mariner.  So he is counting crew members and I am standing there with cameras hanging off of me, and I hear him holler out at me: "Youngblood, can you grind a winch?"  I immediately replied "Yes Sir" and with that I was going to be on the crew of Valiant for the day!  I was only needed as a winch grinder when the boat was running before the wind, and I would go down below and man a two man winch with another of the crew!  The rest of the time I was up where I could photograph to my hearts content! What a thrill that was.  He was a funny guy and kept cracking everyone up while sailing.  "You two guys go back where you came from, the pointy end of the boat." which is hysterical for a sailor who had sailed through some terrifying storms and you would think would use the correct nautical terms!  It was one of those unexpected great moments in life.

 

Flying a 727 Airline Flight Simulator!

                             

This is an incredible story!  Years ago I got to fly a TWA flight simulator, and did takeoffs and landings for three hours!  Do I look happy?  The grin says it all!  The way it happened was that we had a new visitor at one of our astronomy meetings.  He was a friend of a member.  After the meetings we used to go to a diner for coffee and dessert.  I got talking with Lou and it turns out he was a "Check Airman" for TWA which meant he flew with pilots to evaluate them.  And he also did stints as a simulator instructor!  When he found out I was a pilot he asked if I would like to fly a simulator some time.  I immediately said "Yes!" but never dreaming it would happen.  He called and said to drive down to a hangar at JFK.  An instructor for flight engineers was working with two new flight engineers, but someone had to fly the plane so the engineers could work through emergencies.  So since he was not training pilots or first officers, he said that basically all he did was fly arountd while the instructor failed systems and the engineers had to run checklists. So after we "took off" he said "the airplane is yours. Go anywhere you want.  The really nice thing was that when the engineer training was over, we stayed in the simulator and he let me do takeoffs and landings at LaGuardia airport!  Simulated, of course! 

This is a photograph of the TWA full motion simulator.  What that means is that the cockpit is up in the air in the building and is supported by hydraulic activators, moves with the inputs that are put in by the flight controls.  If I pulled back on the wheel the whole sim pointed it's nose in the air.  If I pushed foraward on the wheel and turned left, the sim pointed down and tilted left!  It was so realistic that it was not funny!  And of course for this kid, fascinated my whole life by airplanes, it was the dream of a lifetime.  What an incredlbly generous gift Lou gave to me on that night!

From My Archive I

I have been digging around and finding old 35mm color negatives, which, when you look at them, is hard to know exactly how good the photo is.  So I have this system where I photograph those negatives with my SONY camera and macro lens, and then open the image in Photoshop, and then do an "Invert" which makes the whites black and the blacks white - so I am making a "postive" from a negative. So fortunately these negatives in an envelope mentioned where this was taken.  Mt. Ascutney in Vermont.  My friend Mike Terenzoni and I hiked up here on one of our visits to Stellafane in 2001.  I thought this would be more interesting than another photograph of the harbor down the street.

 

Ferns in the Ivy

We have ivy all around the property, and most obviously on the front bank from the lawn in front of the house, down to the street.  But those ferns are not up yet.  But some of them have migrated over underneath the Japanese maple tree.  They are pretty, rooted within the ivy because they sit isolated and surrounded by the ivy.  I tried this photograph in color but the green ivy blended into the green ferns.   So I got out my modified old SONYcamera that is sensitive to infrared light, and photographed them with that.  I love using this camera from time to time because it sees the world, and particularly plants that have clorophyl in them, in a completely different way.  Those plants reflect more infrared light and you can see the effect, above, that they appear brighter white in tone.

 

Judy's Dogwood

This is the Dogwood tree in Judy's yard, our next door neighbor.  It is such a joy and a beautiful thing to see in early spring each year.  There is a history of Dogwoods between three houses next to each other.  We had two Dogwoods in our yard when we first bought the house.  One was next to the garage, growing out of the ivy and it was gorgeous!  We had another one on the west side of our property right by the front porch.  Our neighbor for so many years, Larry, had one on the other side of our property line, near our back door.  In the spring it seemed that there were Dogwoods everywhere.  Well, there was some kind of disease going around.  We lost our largest and most beautiful tree by the garage first. Then Larry lost his by our back door, and finally we lost ours by the front porch.  It is amazing that Judy's tree survives and we are thankful for that.

 

Good as New

The Adirondack chairs are done!  I finished putting the last parts on the second chair today.  For the second chair, on the right I had to repair two of the vertical slats that make the back.  The bottoms of the slats had rotted and so I cut off the bad parts and glued in replacement wood.  For the seat, I had to make two new slats that had completely rotted. But now both chairs are as good as new.  I never realized how much work it would take to do the repairs!  That was a surprise to me. But there's a great deal of satisfaction in restoring something to make is look like new again.  By the way, there are some faint shadows on the chairs, so they don't look perfectly white in the photo.

This was what the second chair looked like before I began my restoration process.  As you can see it was in pretty bad shape,