Saturday, September 17, 2005


My first chance to take some serious pictures here in Ohio was today at a place called Stan Hywet Hall And Gardens. This place used to be the estate of one of the founders of Goodyear, so you can imagine how luxurious the place used to be. Over the years, they've added lush gardens to the property, and a greenhouse which happens to be hosting a butterfly exhibit at the moment. I was pretty impressed with the variety, numbers and size of the butterflies and moths they had on display. The upside down fellow above is a Royal Blue. There were probably 20 other species on display, including a moth that was bigger than your hand. It had spots on the wings that looked like holes, they were actually clear windows. These fellows were called Atlas moths, and they make my moths look pretty poor by comparison.

Out Of Office

Sorry I haven't posted anything for you in a while. I am in Ohio at the moment, doing some computer upgrade work, and it's going poorly. So I'm not left with much time to shoot any pictures. I did finally have time this evening to figure out how to connect to the internet from my hotel room, so here I am giving you an update. If I can get my laptop up to speed, I may post a couple of pictures from my travels today. If not, you'll have to wait another week for any updates. Either way, there won't be any doodles until I get within spitting distance of my scanner and my record collection. Sorry. We now return you to your regularly scheduled diet of boring political blogs...

Monday, September 12, 2005

The Middle Of September

My calendar page for this week is a night shot of downtown Atlanta, Georgia. I was up there visiting some old college buddies, and I made one of them drive me downtown for what I hoped would be a good shot. Luckily, my friend was a fellow photographer, so he had a good spot in mind. I spent maybe 10 minutes shooting from the top of a small hill, and this is the best one. It's hard to get dark skies in a shot like this. There's too much stray light bouncing off dust in the air. I don't know how real photographers do it. Photoshop, I guess.

Sunday, September 11, 2005

Oodles of Doodles CXXX

Here's a set of doodles from the backside of Francis Scott And His Orchestra-Moods For Firelight (Capitol T529). First you get the standard doodle inspired by the title, in this case a nice fireside scene. This one is a little odd in that the point of view seems to be from inside the fireplace. You don't get that every day. The second doodle is a drawing of the artist. I'm having to assume that this is not the same Francis Scott that wrote the Star Spangled Banner. Oh, wait, that was Francis Scott Key. My mistake. The last doodle is odd in that it's a sketch of another LP from Mr. Scott. I don't think I've seen that before. That's the beauty of collecting this LP ephemera, there's always something new coming along.

Oodles of Doodles CXXIX

I got lucky at the Goodwill store today and found an Esquivel record! It's not quite the same as finding that rare Elvis record, but it's not bad. So here's a doodle and a tagline ("New Sound Sensation", how appropriate) from Esquivel And His Orchestra-Strings Aflame (RCA Victor LSP-1988, 1959). Speaking of Elvis, RCA was releasing his music at about the same time as this. Does that mean some of those old rock and roll LPs may have had doodles on them? I so very rarely find them, I may never know. You most recently saw Esquivel at Ernie (Not Bert) here.