This is satire. Humor. Funny. Don't take it seriously. I just can't resist.
Voter registration: $0
Cost of the Arlington Register: $1
Seeing John Worden in the paper with a parrot on his shoulder: priceless.
I heard the Onion editors talking about picking headlines and they made a very funny and relevant point. Some things
are just funny. Like, a guy walking into a pub is not funny. But a guy walking into a pub with a penguin, that's
funny. I'm just sayin'
OK, since I really can't resist, here's a Top-10 list:
Top Ten Reasons Not To Wear A Parrot When You Are Running For Political Office
10) Makes a real mess of the campaign bus
9) The pirate look doesn't go over well with the kids
8) The parrot's incessant "Vote For Worden. Rrrraaaaak. Vote for Worden." gets old pretty quick
7) Parrots are terrible at keeping secrets
6) Parrots don't poll well amongst voters 18 and older
5) You'll lose the all-important PETA voting block
4) It's hard to find freeze-dried bugs at three in the morning after a long, hard day on the campaign trail
3) People start performing Monty Python. This parrot is deceased. It has ceased to be. If you hadn't nailed it to the perch
it'd be pushing up the daisies right now. See.
2) It's hard to be hawkish with a parrot
1) Some people just won't vote for a green candidate
John, hopefully you are a good sport -- you certainly brightened up my day. Good luck to all three of you.
I'm going to share a couple of photographs that normally wouldn't make it onto the site to illustrate an epiphany I had
the other day. The epiphany occurred in part because I spent some time staring at this photograph rather uncomfortably:
The epiphany comes at the end, though. First, the uncomfortable part. I had no idea this photograph was so
full of tension until I got in into Lightroom. I just didn't see it when I was taking the photo. I saw it when I cropped it
to straighten the fence. It was then I realized how terribly wrong this picture is. I don't know that I can actually
explain it. There's some obvious things: the severe contrast, the jaggedness of the fence, the leaning of the snow cap, the
rumpled snow and so forth. Ultimately, if the snow cap is going to fall, it's going to fall on what looks like unbroken snow.
That seems peaceful except it signals the end of the snow cap. I don't know, it just bothers me. So I like it.
Then I realized that in the same session, I had taken a picture of the imprint of a wing on a neighbor's rooftop.
It suddenly seemed interesting to take that photograph and crop it to create the most tension possible. It's not anywhere
near the same impact, but still an interesting experiment.
Now that you've sat through all that, here's the epiphany: I realized that when I am actually taking the photograph,
I am not able to concentrate on the emotive content - I'm too preoccupied with light, exposure and composition. Said a much
nicer way, I'm comfortable seeing in light and composition, but I'm still working on the emotive part.
This truck is the subject of my post this evening - and the snow on top of it. But before I get there, isn't the advertising
on the back of this truck really cool? This is a good angle for it - it doesn't work nearly as well if you are to the right
of the truck.
OK, so here's the deal. If you don't live in an area that is snowy and cold from time to time, you might not
have experienced the exploding snow-roof. I can't show you that today, but I can show you its little cousin: the big snowpile
on truck falls off. There's also the front slide-off, but I'll get to that later.
So here's the setup. It's winter. It has snowed recently. A lot of people don't like to clean all
the snow from their cars. The most lazy just clear a hole in the front windshield, turn the heat up as high as it will
go and drive off to experience time-delayed vision enhancement. At the start, vision is, well, pretty unenhanced. Of
course, there's no peripheral vision until you use the power windows to lower and raise the driver and passenger-side windows
- just to clear the snow off. It doesn't work very well. Then there's this: the ambient light inside a car that is covered
in snow is creepy.
But anyway, the more industrious pursue the 'mohawk' technique. This is where you take your snow brush and
walk along each long side of the car removing snow within arms reach. You are left with a snow mohawk.
But I really don't know what the story is with this truck. It looked like one of two things happened:
-
Someone tried to back it under an object to push the snow off and then realized what a terrible idea that
was and stopped
-
Someone climbed up the back and tried to push the snow around with a shovel and then realized what a terrible
idea that was and stopped
At any rate, the truck has a normal snowfall along the top until you get close to the back, then it has this
hump of disorganized snow sticking up. Now there are a couple of ways that this snow can come off the truck. In this case,
with a lump of snow near the back, it's going to come off when the truck bounces.
The wind will help a little too, but I think there is a pretty significant slip-stream on one of these things
coming up over the hood, so I don't really know how much it helps. But look, here's the deal. The snow is going to come off.
It always comes off. There's a very simple reason: your vehicle gets warm as you drive it. The roof heats up. A layer of water
forms between the snow and the rooftop. You hit the brakes and the next thing you know the entire contents of your roof are
lying across the hood and windshield. Boy is that dangerous, especially since it's heavy enough that your wipers might not
clear it. That's a front slide-off, by the way.
Equally concerning is the exploding snow-roof. This occurs in your typical passenger vehicle when you have a
snow covered roof and several conditions occur. The first is that you have driven long enough to get the water wedge between
the snow and the car. The second is that you get enough wind from the car's motion and nature that it starts to catch the
underside of the snow in the front of the vehicle. I kid you not about what happens next. The snow on the roof turns into
a wing. The wind gets under it and since there is nothing but water there, the wind wedges all the way through and lifts the
snow as a single unit up into the air. Once that happens, if you are at highway speed, the snow-unit will shoot upwards, spinning
and then crash down on the road behind the vehicle.
But that didn't happen today. Today was a standard snow-lump drop-off kind of event.
