We’re getting to that time of year when darkness falls in Milwaukee well before it’s time to leave work for the day. I took this photo yesterday at 4:17 pm.
And guess what? Little did I know, that was the exacttime of yesterday’s sunset!
Anyway, as I crossed the street I noticed all the contrasts between light and dark, and also the geometry of the different lighting configurations, so I stood at the corner once I’d arrived and took the picture.
And I just noticed the security camera at the bottom center of my photo taking a picture of me back! I guess we’re even now 🙂
Truly enjoyed this fascinating and substantial Hollywood Reporter profile of Reese Witherspoon, especially how she took charge of her career when the entertainment industry’s existing system offered limited opportunity.
While buying paper towels and other staples at Target last night, I decided to swing past the books and maybe treat myself if anything caught my eye. Well, these did catch my eye, LOL. But they seemed a bit too high strung to serve as a relaxing escape from the holiday whirl 😂
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WIRED (which styles itself with all capital letters) just posted this 40-minute video on its YouTube channel, featuring commentary from the chief curator at the Strong Museum of Play in Rochester, New York, about the most popular toys each year over the past 50 years.
I love learning about history and culture via oblique avenues like toys, food, clothing, tools, etc. And it’s sort of cool to realize that there’s a “play” museum counterpart to the “work”-focused museum (the Grohmann Museum) my office is in. So many interesting museums to visit in this world!
Here is a great article from Rolling Stone from five years ago (link HERE) celebrating the 50th anniversary of Arlo Guthrie’s hilarious 18-minute musical saga recounting the consequences of taking out the garbage after Thanksgiving dinner.
And here is the “video” of that song (just the album cover and the original recording).
The church where Alice lived is now the Guthrie Center. If you’re ever in the Berkshires area of Massachusetts, you can visit it. You can hold your wedding or meeting there, enjoy a concert (with dinner and drinks), or take a yoga class. Every now and then you can even see Arlo Guthrie perform the song that made it famous.
Finally, here is a photo of the original page 25 Berkshire Eagle news story reporting the crime at the heart of Guthrie’s musical legend.
I pass this abandoned playground frequently, and during the late summer, as weeds grew up around the play equipment, I often thought about stopping to take a photo. Sometimes in slanted morning sunlight, mist hanging in the weeds among long shadows, the site looked almost haunted.
But the timing for a picture was never right. I was always on my way to places I needed to be. To park and slip through the fence to make my way over to the playground (through the weeds) would have taken like five minutes I never felt I had.
This past Saturday, though, I finally had some extra time and stopped—even though I didn’t really have decent light. Life is always about trade-offs, right? So, better than nothing😄
The little crinkle-flashes you see along the sidewalk are literally heat waves. There’s a set of vents about seven feet up the wall on the side of our Campus Center building that exhausts (exhales? like the building is alive and cares for us?) warm air.
On the bitterest days of winter this spot, about two-thirds of the way down the block, serves as a way station—an oasis, even—for me and a couple of other professors who need to escape the cold. If we’re walking from the CC to our building and the traffic light turns red as we approach the intersection, we turn right back around and go bask in the warm air under these vents until we get the green light.
Because why would anyone stand at the corner all exposed to the wind when they could linger beneath this vent’s tropical breezes about twenty yards away instead? It’s like getting a big, warm hug of encouragement—Hang in there, you can do this winter thing!—so that when the light changes, we have the fortitude to brave the cold again and hustle across Broadway to our offices.
As part of my prep, I found a short film, Nazi VR, which tells the story of Reinhold Hanning, a 94-year-old former SS guard at Auschwitz who last spring was tried and convicted of war crimes (170,000 counts of murder, which covers the number of people who died at the camp during Hanning’s time there). Hanning claimed that because his job did not place him in a position to have seen what was happening at the camp, he could not have known about people dying in the gas chambers and was therefore not guilty of murder.
I had already read articles about this trial last spring and found it fascinating that forensic VR engineers were able to use current film footage of Auschwitz along with blueprints of the original (now long vanished) buildings to construct a virtual reality reincarnation of the death camp as it would have looked during Hanning’s tenure. The VR model allowed the judge to see what Hanning actually could have seen from his post, and that was convincing enough to lead to the “guilty” verdict.
Here is a very short clip I found on YouTube demonstrating the VR replica. As you can see, the graphics are very similar to what you’d see while playing a video game.
And here is the longer film, clocking in at around 16 minutes. This one also shows VR’s capabilities for 3-D crime scene recreation, which I think is really intriguing because once you’ve done the scan, investigators can return too the scene again and again to examine the evidence, and even use algorithms to calculate bullet direction and pinpoint where shots came from, even superimposing the bullet’s path onto the VR image.
All this is only tangentially related to the philosopy and description of logotherapy at the heart of Frankl’s book, but because he was imprisoned at Auschwitz and spends the first part of his memoir recounting the horrors of that place (and other camps he spent time in), it’s relevant. So I imagine some of this will wind up in my booklet of background materials I always distribute to participants.
In any case, I’m feeling rather pleased with myself for so very efficiently managing to get a blog post up while at the same time prepping for my discussion 🙂
Took these pictures yesterday on my way back to the office from a meeting. These leaves must have been frozen to the ground when the wet, slushy snow hit. Then the salt went down, the temperature dropped, the air dried, the wind picked up, and the leaves blew away . . . leaving behind their clear outlines on the white-stained sidewalk.
I walked around with white salt powder smudged all over the front of my black coat yesterday, thanks to leaning into the rear of my car to get my briefcase out first thing in the morning. I’d forgotten that aspect of winter. So it was kind of nice to see salt stains on the sidewalk serving as a frame for the autumn we really didn’t have this year. At least there was something artistic about the effect it created. Unlike my coat, which just looked filthy.
Katherine Wikoff 