Dr. D, you are on a roll this morning! I loved the peek into your family, Cindy's blog and your article about Norman Rockwell and his Jury Room painting. No dry eyes here. Every morning I check your blog over my coffee, and to find a new posting is like a starving man preparing to sit down to a sumptuous feast. I love your baseball insight and analysis, and I really don't think there is another baseball blog that measures up to SSI, but it is the seasoning of love, joy and peace on the feast that really makes it special for me. I am a very grateful partaker of these meals that you and your fellow writers are faithfully preparing. I have been feasting at your table a long time, free of charge, and this appreciation of your very real ministry through baseball is long over due. So, thanks so much and continued blessing on you and your family.
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This one contains nothing but off-baseball, family stuff. Once every 3,000 posts we do an About the Author page, whether we need to or not. If the shtick is a little too cheerful, wait until you've had your second cup. I do. - Jeff.
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Time for a bit of whimsy. If you've been assuming that Dr. D and Son are photogenic enough for the ESPN studios? Yer half right.
John was a defensive lineman in high school, not one of the Cullens, as you probably figured from the teeth and eyes, the complexion and the 8x10-a-bility. He does have crazy incisors, and a row of shark teeth behind the visible teeth. There's a parable in there somewhere, about more bite than bark.
Looking at my own Mariners and Arsenal dri-fit shtick, I'm having second thoughts about it. Might be more the time to get a flannel shirt, a rocking chair and throw a blanket over my legs. Hey, Moe and I don't call you "kiddies" for nothing.
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Here is John's YouTube channel ... start with a deep 3-point basketball shot ... behind the back. He shoots maybe 20% on these. It's kind of a fun 18 seconds if you're avoiding Monday morning work.
Here's a bowling shot behind the back. He's maybe 30% strikes this way. That's a clean stroke.
Nerf shot, no-look. That's funny right there. He can do practically anything behind the back -- in flag football, he's maybe better throwing that way than throwing regular. "What all else can you do behind the back?" "Lotsa stuff."
The lead photo was after the Boston concert in Wenatchee. He was standing in the side bleachers, a cool young dude arms folded, standing among all of us 50-somethings, and I tell ya Tom Scholz shot him a grin or two. Prompting him to quick-sketch this ...
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Pretty pictures of nature more your speed?
If you are inclined to nature photos and/or to scripture generally, Dr. D's wife Cindy is trying to boost her Facebook blog entitled "Encouraging Words from the Word." That's all her personal photography, and it can be upsized in pretty good resolution. I think she's got a pretty good feel for the genre.
Mojo keeps graciously saying that we oughta get a little compensation system going. Here's one way you could do us a solid :- ) If you hit her up with a Like, she'll be thrilled. She like counts every single Like, like daily.
Another way you could help us out: a little advice. Cindy is trying to figure out how to get a little business hobby going .... make calendars out of her stuff? Hustle the Hallmark stores? Or ? ... that notwithstanding, most of her friends think her stuff is a cut above, within the genre.
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If you're still stalling for time before hitting it at work, here is a Dr. D piece for JBLM on art appreciation, a Rockwell piece. Who said dri-fit sports gear was all there was to life.
So sue me,
Dr. D
Comments
On my first read of this article this morning, I became alarmed for Doc's health. It looked like he was rolling the credits at SSI. After I mulled it for a while, I realized that Doc would have said so if that was what he was doing, and I felt better.
So here's a photography business idea:
It requires:
A digital SLR camera
A good computer
A $300 computer program
A tripod
A fisheye lens
An artistic touch
I imagine that Cindy possesses all of the above except the fisheye lens and the computer program. So, this business venture will cost about $1,000 for start up. But, since she's starting a photography business, she'll get to write off these materials, along with all the cool photography equipment that she buys, including that new quadcopter and action camera combo that Doc's been wanting for Christmas.
It is a status symbol for a business that has a good campus to have a virtual tour of the campus. A virtual tour is a series of photographs that are stitched together to make a 360 degree picture sphere. A viewer opens the virtual tour in a window on a web page, and then drags a curser or his finger to rotate the view within the sphere. For the ultra fancy, there are links or videos embedded within the virtual tour, so a virtual tour can be part still photography and part videography. That is, in the middle of the virtual tour, can be a video that is the only thing moving in the virtual tour. This is usually a fire burning in a fireplace, a waterfall, or a tourguide talking.
Here's how it works:
You take the DSLR with the fisheye lens and take a series of swiveling shots on a tripod. Then, you export these pictures to your virtual tour program, and stitch them together until you have created a 360 degree globe photograph. Then, you add links, video, and Enya music as appropriate, and export to Flash or HTML 5 which can then be embedded into a Web page.
In practice, a virtual tour of a building takes two or three full panoramic views of the most prominent or sightly rooms, and flat shots of the rest of the building. All of these rooms are linked together, so the user can click through the entire building and dawdle at the most interesting parts.
The consumer of this sort of product would include large businesses, museums and realty companies. Cindy could do a few virtual tours to get started, then have a batch of her own USB business cards printed, with her two best virtual tours loaded onto them.
Note that you will want a program such as Tourweaver that can write in both Flash and HTML 5 as iOS does not support Flash. That means your Flash virtual tour will not work on the iPhone or the iPad which are still all the rage these days.
Cindy can still take nature shots as she has done on her page, but it is much more difficult to make a compelling 360 degree nature photo than it is to take a narrow field of view shot. This is because you need to be way out in the woods or that telephone pole or Slurp N' Burp Mart in the background will mess up the ambience of the scene.
My two cents
Such a heartfelt bouquet of flowers like that. Pretty generous of you mate.
A lot of times, y'don't feel like opening up the edit box to do an article, but then you'll remember a few guys who said they sit down with their coffee hoping to read something new. And that's the difference.
Thanks for taking the time!
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Yeah, that Rockwell painting is a masterpiece in my book. Critics undersold him by about 9 miles. Glad you enjoyed the piece.
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Considering where you are coming from in that comment, you might (or might not) be interested in yesterday's exposition of John ch. 9. Here's a 35-minute audio file. In any case, thanks for the encouragement :- )
More sincerity from good e-friends. Such sincerity commands the respect of a serious answer.
Alarm for my health ... thanks for caring. We were a whale of a lot more alarmed, six months ago. I feel pretty on top of it nowadays. From a medical standpoint, per the UW surgeons, my chances have moved from (maybe) 5% to (maybe) 50%+ ... I dunno whether Dr. Grumpy would agree with that, LOL ...
The lead photo, above, was after the final surgery. As you can see, I'm not a pity case by any stretch. My spirits are good and I could whoop any ten men.
From a spiritual standpoint, my own perception is that there has been indicator after indicator towards good health in the long term. I count 7-10 crossroads points, totally out of the doctors' hands, and at each specific crossroads we got back the ideal news.
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The SSI community is something I give serious thanks for. The blog seems frivolous, in the grand scheme, but IMHO there's nothing frivolous about people talking and connecting, nor anything frivolous about the life lessons we wind up discussing. PLUS we get the entertainment, which is an important part a' life.
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Amazing perceptiveness on your part Mojo, to read a subtle mood in such a decisive way. Must be the 9,000 jurors you selected ;- )
Warm regards,
Jeff
What do you bill your time at? Man, to take the time to coach us 1-on-1 like that ... no small thing. Sure appreciate it.
This virtual tour idea has been a scheme of mine for a while now. I got a new Samsung phone, and the camera had a virtual tour setting. This kind of sort of worked, but I became interested in the process for creating the real thing as virtual tours seems like tomorrow's news today, which is what we're all about around these parts. I'd do it myself but I don't have a DSLR, or any reason to create a virtual tour, because I don't think a stitched photograph will ever be allowed in court as evidence. I told a realtor this virtual tour scheme as well, and he thinks it is a great idea, but he hasn't implemented it yet as it is a lot of work, and he doesn't have a DSLR. You can't do this without a DSLR, as a fisheye lens is the key to the whole thing, and point and shoot cameras are not sold with fisheye lenses as the default, except for Go Pro videocameras.
Anyway, it sounds like a fun project.
The other sure fire way to make money at photography is to do weddings and sporting events. People will pay some big money for fridge magnets of their kids. I have several of them for my kids.
Christopher Hitchens once opened a speech by saying, "My view is, and will always be, that it matters not *what* you think -- anyone can have thoughts; many people content themselves with feelings -- it matters *how* you think." Your shtick is one of the first things I think of when I hear that line. The contributions you've made to my life, and I suspect to the lives of many others who have frequented your haunts over the years, have been significant in that regard.
Your '30,000 foot view' vs. 'field level' (if that's what you called it...can't remember off the top of my head) is incredibly demonstrative, especially in today's world of segregated knowledge and group-think-tanks posing as legitimate centers of debate and knowledge acquisition. I have also enjoyed your frequent 'If you were wrong...how would you know?" challenges. But above all, your attitude toward fostering genuine, open, debate and discussion is an increasingly rare one in today's world, and I'd like to applaud you for making a place (several, in fact!) where people are encouraged to do just that.
I gave up on the baseball side of things a few years ago. But I keep coming back ~once a day to see what this community's thinking :-)
.... I think this is the first time I've seen a picture of you. And you look just about exactly how I expected. On second thought, maybe not as fat as I had imagined but everything else is spot on, haha.
The personal update is much appreciated. You are exactly right when you refer to this site as a community. This is not some message board with hundreds of anonymous posters battling it out. Would venture to guess at least 75% of the participants have been here for years. There are many alternative M's sites with much larger audiences. People stick around here because of the quality of discussion that goes on and a culture of respect on an individual level that you don't experience on other sites. The personal contributes a big part to that, perhaps as much as the sports talk.
Dang-nation Doc,
You've taught your son well: He appreciates Boston! And not the BoSox, of course....but "Just Another Band out of Boston" Boston!
Of my two daughters, the youngest is in to new C & W, and the oldest (now at the University of Montana) listens to 80's stuff (her mom's soundtrack of life) and some 70's stuff (My soundtrack).
Back in the day, I had to buy the first Boston album twice (vinyl, of course) as the first one was warped. Happened to Billy Joel's "The Stranger" (w/Only the Good Die Young) and a couple of other albums, too.
All my Jimmy Buffett and Jerry Jeff Walker records were perfect, every time. Good news, there!
Two thumbs up for the good Doctor, his continued good health, family, and classic "back-in-the-day" music!.
My yearly physical is tomorrow. I'm anticipating good news, of course...but don't we all, always?
Family, of course, is the ultimate good news. I see my dad nearly every day. Two times on most days: He's 86 and lives 1.5 miles away. He mowed his own yard today (which I cussed him out for)! The pair of us enjoyed a smooth Glenlivet (just the 12 year old stuff) tonight on my way home from a budget meeting. How good is that? Priceless of course.
Drove to Missoula on Thursday and Friday to attend a sorority fundraiser with my daughter. Priceless.....
14 hours of roadtrip home yesterday with my wife and youngest daughter. Priceless....
Get to work out several times a week with my youngest daugther. Priceless, too.
And I have some sort of "family" here on SSI. OK, I admit it, I'm probably the fam's Uncle Fester......or is it Gordon that fills that role? It doesn't matter......this place is strong medicine. Wellness abounds here.
Eat this place up......it is good for the soul.
Priceless....
moe
I remember 1995 as the year that the GumbyMan crew was goin' at it on STATS AOL. The Whiz Kid must surely be well into his 30's now.
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As a matter of fact I did used to draw quite a bit more respect from the ol' bathroom scale :- ) until I got into a P90X kick a few years ago. That training came in great handy after 2014 rolled along and we had to try to 'crush' the medical stuff instead of the Tony Horton stuff. Mentally, a day at the doctor's is like plugging in a DVD for a workout ...
At long last, I get it, as to why Bat571 and his fellow commanding officers insist on such tough boot camps. The mental training is 10x more important than the physical fitness.
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Thanks for the remarks re: the community. Personally I look forward to clicking on the site in the morning, definitely do, and the people are the reason why. Sure wish you had time to jump in more.
:: low five ::
Your 'about the author' post was a lot more enjoyable than mine.
Man, that is one crazy list of family 'outings.' Let's grab all the good folks who "work in" their "quality time" on a Friday night at 7:45 pm and get them with Moe.
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Uncle Fester? :- ) Oddly, that show was just on the Clarkes' TV a coupla nights ago. Moe is much more an Uncle Lee Trevino or Jack Nicklaus, sittin' around the TV room, than any kinda Uncle Fester. Maybe Greg Norman or Gary Player are more your personality type than the Golden Bear. Nicklaus is a little imperious. I think I'd go with Trevino, though he might not be your fave? Trevino brings the gusto for life, the love of family, and the lack of apology for what he says.
That would be kinda funny, an SSI thread in which all the regulars were comp'ed to some celeb or other.
If Hitchens had actually held himself to that standard ;- )
Jonezie, thanks for that. That's like the highest praise possible, from about 4 different angles. "Most kind," as Spock told Sarek ...
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You're one of the guys I wish would chime in daily, or semi-daily, even if you only had time for a couple of sentences. My one wish about SSI is that the top 50 posters would take a minute like every day and toss a potato into the hobo pot. I unnerstan' why they don't; somebody else got there first and said what they woulda.
Have a good one Jonezie :- )
... and concluded that she doesn't really want a photog biz, as such - just is curious as to whether she can do anything with the nature photos / proverbs that she does for fun.
Precious few people get paid for doing what they do for entertainment, as we all know. That Dr. D character is the only one I've ever come across.
Jeff, somehow my earlier comments must be lost over the Rockies someplace! Thanks for the family touch! Much appreciated! I pray that the Lord will continue to sustain you for far more important things than this site, but know that your friendship here is greatly appreciated!
Uncle Fester? I actually met him at a golf tournament years ago. He was wonderful. Actually Fester and Trevino would have loved each other, imo. And Moe, I am glad your daughter is doing well in Missoula!
Always a treat when you get time to post, and the Rockies don't catch your comments on an outcropping :- )
That's what you hear about Christopher Lloyd, that he's quite the good guy. A pretty cool memory for you, no?
I think Jeff and I go all the way back to Jackie Coogan, Doc. Back before there was dirt......
Christopher Lloyd is just a Fester-come-lately. He will always be "Doc" Brown in Back to the Future, though!
Yes! The real Fester, Jackie Coogan! Moe, I got to meet the real Fester and now move more like the real Lurch! The kids on the golf team bought me a ball scooper....not so much for the water but so I never have to bend over to pick up the ball again. Scary! But I did get to watch my son finally pitch last Saturday, first time since July....too busy! He has it at about 92-89 during the game so continues to get stronger. Fun to see. Have you been able to get to Missoula for volleyball games?
Jeff, my Dad played during the '60's at the Pat Boone Celebrity Golf Classic at Ocean Shores. I got to meet all of the sitcom heroes. Great memories. And Rockies? I went to about a dozen Pilot's games as a kid. Went to the second game for the M's where Nolan Ryan shut them down (shock). I get to watch the Rockies here but love the M's. M's fans can't stand the front office. No different with people here!
I am thankful you are doing better! Keep at it...you are a wonderful example of a thankful humble attitude!
regarding HItchens' sophist tendencies. Too many times you see people construct self-defending arguments, and he was one of the worst at that. But there were times when he was discussing subjects relatively dispassionately (basically anything that was three steps removed from religion/theology) and he could produce thought gems at an impressive pace when doing so. When he got to rambling about his anti-theism positions, it really just became self-service and diatribe cloaked in pseudo-logic. Not saying he didn't have points buried in all the hate he was spewing, but I'm generally not interested in sifting through so much anger and vitriol when searching for wisdom.
Regarding posting here more often, I'm just a slacker :( Although in fairness I've had some pretty major network issues which often make it difficult to load the site from where I live in the Philippines. Sometimes it's been a Klat deal (it seems that is pretty much behind us now, thankfully) and more recently it's been a local ISP blockages.
But one of the biggest obstacles is that I'm just 33 years old and don't know anywhere near enough about so many subjects which get broached here. I'm generally content to listen to the 40- and 50-somethings who look to be cut from a similar cloth as myself provide perspective, but every now and then I think my opinion worthy of boarding the thought train ;)
Amazing community you've amassed here, Doc. It's a testament worthy of recognition as far as I'm concerned. I'll try to whip up a few paragraphs on a regular basis and start giving something back.
Thanks for sharing this Doc. I know very little about the specific genre of your wife's art and what the best specific marketing approach might be. However, one starting point to look into if you haven't already (and I don't see it on her FB page anywhere), is setting up some sort of online store where folks can order the artwork. A couple big sites that will allow you to set up a store with a variety of products printed/delivered on demand are zazzle.com and cafepress.com. I am sure there are many more, these are just two well established general sites that I've worked with in the past. Googlng "Christian art" or related keywords may turn up some more genre-specific options. Or eg if she wants to do a calendar, there may be more specialized calendar websites.
The sites like Zazzle are for the person who doesn't want to run their own full scale online retail business. They are quick and easy (and inexpensive) to get started, and handle most aspects of the fulfillment process without need for your involvement. The main tradeoff is, the retail pricing you have to charge will be higher than if you DIY, as these sites add a lot of cost especially for small orders. There are much more cost-efficient ways to get product produced in bulk if she is looking to sell them herself (online or off). I'm not too knowledgeable about that but I'm sure the production services aren't hard to find online. It really depends how much time and effort she wants to put into the business side of things. This approach could at least be a starting point to tinker with different product designs and have the capability to sell her art, as a step toward expanding to something more involved in the future.
Ya you betcha. Get somebody off their personal hot buttons and they can be a completely different person.
What I mourn, is the impression that if you're a scientist or a member of the intelligentsia, then you have "learned" how to be unbiased. If I had to pick a single group on earth that was the most hardened in its bias, the most repressive of minority views, it would be biologists.
Who represent, for me, materialistic scientists who respond to unorthodox theories by suppression, rather than inquiry. They'll yell at Rupert Sheldrake to shut up, rather than conducting experiments that might simply disprove Sheldrake's theories. And they're very emotional about it.
Science is supposed to be about inquiry. Not "consensus" statements about what is possible or impossible. Science by vote is humankind at its worst, as Galileo could tell you.
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"Amazing community we've amassed here" ... never thought of it in quite that way. You wouldn't need to type 200 words if you could type five like that ;- )
in the modern scientific community. It's such a strange thing to witness that, at first, you sort of double blink as you're unable to process what you're witnessing. These people are supposed to be the most open-minded in the world, and yet so many of the most visible members of those communities are more intractable in their thinking than the most devout Christians, Muslims, or Buddhists that *I've* ever known.
Your specific critique of modern biologists - especially evolutionary biologists in my humble opinion - does indeed ring true. Richard Dawkins, when he's describing something as he understands it, can be absolutely amazing in enabling the rest of us to glimpse a facet of nature's beauty. He has a monologue in a panel I saw which I think was hosted by Neil deGrasse Tyson, and in it he explained how he sees evolutionary biology as a kind of historical record. He used cuckoos as an example of how precise the information gleaned from a species' evolutionary record can be, and I was absolutely spellbound by him during that presentation.
I set out to hear more from him via Youtube but unfortunately it was pretty much all downhill from there, at least in my experience. After sorting through hundreds of hours of youtube speeches by leading scientists in their fields, including Dawkins, the thing I've come away realizing is that no matter how great an individual's capacity for learning they're still human just like the rest of us. Bias is just part of who we are.
I once saw a study regarding the record of breakthrough research in STEM fields and how it was essentially all accomplished by
When Antony Flew changed his mind about atheism, the reaction was reflexive and almost unanimous. "He's a doddering old senile fool."
The point isn't even whether Flew had good arguments or whether he didn't. The "blink twice and can't believe what you're seeing" aspect comes when you witness this reflexive character assassination, coming from most (outspoken) scientists, every single time.
I'm delighted to spend my life -- and the occasional thread on my baseball site -- opposing this scientific Stalinism, if that's what it takes.
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... and, agreed -- there are many areas in biology which are non-controversial. Sciencists, when on point, can be men and women of such great beauty.
And got three likes for Cindy's page while at it. Got some real insightful comments regarding Rockwell's work from family members, including a museum copy editor from the SF Bay Area who waxed fairly eloquently on his genius.
I am at a biobanking conference in Leipzig right now. Biobanking, biopreservation, cryology, and biospecimen science are thankfully fairly non-controversial sub-disciplines and vital areas of biology in which we strive to preserve the "stuff" necessary for making future advances in scientific knowledge that will preserve and enhance our lives. Not much controversy here, but there is a strong belief in the necessity of preserving both the stuff and the data that makes it valuable. The more data, the more value.
Look for Rick Michels, and find the one that went to the University of Washington, and who posts all the New Yorker cartoons. :-)