A moon by any other name…

Would still be made of cheese? At the risk of getting totally off track. That one always bugged me. Even as someone who is a fan of the absurd and outlandish, I never cottoned to that joke that the moon was made of cheese. One can only handle so much preposterousness.

But we are not here to talk about silly stories for children. We are talking about alternative names for the February full moon. The answer we were looking for was “Snow Moon”. But we also would have accepted “Hunger Moon” or “Storm Moon”.

Where these names come from seems to be up for debate. They could come from Native American traditions, or from Europe through New England as the US was settled. Whatever the case, it turns out there are a host of names for the moon each month. Personally, I am partial to the “Thunder Moon”, which could be June or July, depending on your perspective.

Today’s photo is not the snow moon from the past weekend, because I was too busy editing photos to take photos. But it is a genuine photo of the moon that I took at some point. 🙂

Where did I put that silver lining?

Admittedly, I went into this one with preconceived intentions. The thought was that Seattle would be much lower on the list than anyone expected, and that would make it interesting.

Oops.

It turns out Seattle is the third cloudiest city in the US with approximately 2170 hours of sunshine each year. But that is still 150 more than Pittsburgh, with 2021 and Acchorage with 2061.

Amazingly enough, I got caught out by this over the weekend. We have had rain, rain, and more rain for the past month, which meant a dearth of sunshine. And I had an outdoor shoot for a theatre company in a local park. I brought an umbrella and made plans for how to get these photos done while managing clouds and rain.

It was as if mother nature was playing a trick on me. 30 days of rain. Oh, you’re doing an outdoor photoshoot? Let me clear all the clouds to the side and shine this blazing sun right in your face! Shoot’s done? You’re heading home? Have some clouds and more rain!

That is how we ended up with the photo above. You’ll notice in the right of the teapot that blazing ball of fire. And that’s me in the middle! I did remove myself, the umbrella, and that oddball tower from the final image. 🙂

Water water everywhere

Our month of rain in January has given way to a rain soaked February, and we are starting to see some flooding on the road leading in to the office. Of course, in the big picture, this is nothing.

The most destructive river flood in history was the 1927 Mississippi River flood. The sheer size of it is boggling. It stretched across Illinois, Missouri, Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Mississippi and covered 26,000 square miles. In Vicksburg MS, the river was 80 miles wide!

That makes the little scene from above almost laughable. Well, laughable, but still annoying. This is what greeted me on my way in to work.

That is so much hair!

I’m sure most of us were pretty close with this one. Hitting the exact number might be hard. But it is pretty easy to reason out that it’s going to be the vast majority.

The actual percentage of people with black or brown hair is 90. That makes sense, because brown and black hair is the dominant trait in humans. Red and blond hair come from a recessive trait, so are far less likely to appear. You will find the same thing with brown eyes.

That’s a rough commute

There is an old saying in photography circles. The best camera is the one that you have with you. You might have a big fancy DSLR with all the bells and whistles, but if you don’t have it on you when that moment happens, the cell phone cam wins.

Such was the case yesterday. I stepped out the back of the warehouse and heard this crazy cacophony of duck sounds. I looked up and saw row after row of ducks going somewhere. It would have been great to have one of my Canons to get that shot with, but there I was with just my Motorola phone on hand. So, this photo isn’t as good as it could be, but it is a far sight better than no photo at all.

It got me curious about which bird migrates the farthest. It turns out, it is the Arctic tern. They breed on the shores of the Arctic Ocean in the Northern Hemisphere summer, and then make their way to to the oceans of the Southern Hemisphere for the other half of the year. It’s the bird version of Endless Summer.

Rain rain go away

Ooof. Seattle managed 30 days of rain in January! That’ll weigh on you. Realistically, you know that it can’t possibly just rain every day forever. But after about 30 days in a row, some part of your mind starts to question that fact.

This came to mind today when I read about Chile’s Atacama Desert. It is considered the driest place on Earth. It’s said that there once was a city there that didn’t have any rain for 400 years!

In that light, having to manage 30 days of rain in a month isn’t so bad.

To be or not to be… a woman

Ohhhh Shakespeare… I don’t want to get off on a rant here…

But here’s my hot (and not well received by the theatre community) take. Nobody should ever produce Shakespeare! Now, you might clutch your pearls and say, “Hold on now. Shakespeare. The bard. Greatest playwright.” Or something to that effect. I don’t care.

The harsh truth is that ALL of the plays have been done too much. And some of them have been done too much by a factor of 10. I’m looking at you Romeo & Juliet, Much Ado, and 12th Night. You see, here’s the thing. There are only so many productions of plays that can happen in a given time. And there are already way more plays than can be produced.

So, when another theatre company decides to trot out another production of Romeo & Juliet, they are not just deciding to produce Romeo & Juliet. They are actively deciding to not produce every other play that they could be producing. I would wager there have been countless plays and playwrights lost to history because everybody was too busy putting up another production of Much Ado.

You might suggest that maybe there just needs to be less Shakespeare. Surely we don’t need to just ban it all together. Here’s the thing though. Everyone has known that there is too much Shakespeare for decades. In fact, American Theatre magazine produces a list of the most produced plays every year, and they pusposely don’t count Shakespeare, because it would dominate.

The problem you see here is that the theatre community is not capable of policing itself. Shakespeare is the low hanging fruit. Your audience knows what it is. There is no royalty payment for the author. And while it might not win an AD accolades, it’s a safer bet than taking a chance on an unknown playwright that just has a new and original idea to offer.

And don’t even get me started on all of this, “Still relevant today” junk. Every time I hear a theatre company trying to justify how Henry V (or any of them!) speaks to some random part of present day society I shake my head. You really want to do work that focuses on current issues? Those plays are being written now by writers living in those places! That is much better than trying to shoehorn the meaning into a 400 year old play.

And that all gets us to the answer to the trivia question. It’s 17 percent. As if there weren’t enough reasons to not produce Shakespeare. There’s also that. Our photo today is a bunch of random postcards for shows that are not Shakespeare that were in my desk.

Enhance…enhance…

I do love my macro lens. It is so interesting to look so very closely at the things we interact with every day. We are so often focused on the bigger picture, that those tiny details often blur into the whole. This is a case in point. We have all seen this countless times. But when viewed this close, it becomes very hard to place.

The wider shot reveals that this is the treasury seal featured on all of our bills. Granted, this particular one is a bit more obscure, because it is from a two dollar bill. But the seal is the same across bills, with the overlayed text changing.

A real cliffhanger…

Ah, the dime. It doesn’t get much respect today, but it does have an interesting history. Details like the grooved edges. Those are a relic from when coins were made from precious metals. The dollar, half-dollar, quarter, dime, and nickel were made of silver. In addition to making them harder to fake, those grooves were there so it would be obvious if someone tried to file the edges and collect bits of silver from the coins.

And, of course, there is the legend of the missing dime shipment. As the story goes, in the early 1900s a shipment of dimes was en route to the San Francisco mint and was attacked in southern Utah. The dimes, supposedly, fell over a cliff. To date there has been no evidence that this shipment has ever been found, but I think it has the makings of the next installment of the National Treasure franchise. 🙂

Physica and chemistry and radiation, oh my!

I suspect a lot of people could reason this one out. Marie Curie is still a big name in pop-culture. Even if you don’t have experience in physics or chemistry, you have no doubt crossed paths with her story. It’s also worth noting that not only was Marie Curie the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, she is also the only woman to have won multiple Nobel Prizes.

It’s worth taking a moment to go read through her wikipedia entry and get a picture of all the things she did over the course of her career. Her accomplishments in her field would be impressive today. The fact that this was all happening in the early 1900s is a bit mind boggling.

Our picture today is radiation free. It’s just a rando connector I had in the shop that I thought would make for a cool black and white shot. 🙂