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I have been watching the Clifford Ball boxed set for the last few days. It’s 7 freaking DVDs long, which is why it is taking me days to watch it.

I like what I have seen so far. The first couple of minutes of the first set is astonishing. It’s in the daylight and it shows the crowd from the stage – 70,000 people. When the band sees the crowd, they grin. What a thrill that it must have been for them.

I have no regrets about buying it, but I am a “head”. I was recently called one of those on a Phish message board. For those of you who are not cool, that’s short for “Phish head”. I am also a  ”clear head” (depending on who you ask), but I am most definitely a “head”.

I’m still alive, but lately I haven’t been interested in “hanging out” on the web.

I haven’t touched a fractal in a few months, but I have given them some thought. My views about fractals as art have shifted back to the way that I felt several years ago. That is that fractal art is mostly for the enjoyment of fractal artists and not much else. The implication of this is that there really isn’t much to talk about. There are no fractal masterpieces or master fractal artists. There is no good or bad fractal art. It isn’t about marketing, mainstream art or going to some next level. Fractal art is just a bunch of people enjoying the process of creating fractal art and that’s about all there is to it.

There was a recent discussion on OT about fractal animation that I found interesting. Unfortunately, I don’t get along too well with the writers of that blog, so I will put my thoughts here.

I found it intriguing that they would conclude that an animated fractal is less interesting than a still fractal. You would think that it would be the other way around. Movement is always more interesting than non-movement. When something moves in a scene, it catches our attention, so why would a moving image be less interesting than a still one?

I think that it has a lot to do with the fractal that is being animated. Animation is nothing more than a series of rendered still images. Coming up with a fractal movie that has any substantial content requires a tremendous amount of rendering. Most of us don’t have the patients to wait around for days or even weeks for our computers to spit out an animation, so we start with simple and boring fractals that will render faster. A boring fractal is a boring fractal, moving or not. But that’s not the real problem.

When it comes to animation, we have high expectations. The movie Avatar is animated digital art. I saw the 3D IMAX version of it twice. The second time was just as visually stunning to me as the first. How can an animated fractal compete with that? When I walked out of that movie, I found myself wondering how any fractal art could compete with that, but that’s another topic.

I have just enjoyed 2 full weeks with my family.

Except for a little shopping and e-mail checking, I avoided the computer with no regrets. In November I even disconnected the Ultrafractal mailing list.

I hope that everyone reaches whatever goals that they set for themselves this year.

By mid September the Rufous hummingbirds were gone. I didn’t want to bother with the feeders anymore so I took them down. They were down for about three weeks and I noticed several Anna’s hanging around the yard as if the feeders were still there. I couldn’t handle the guilt, so I put a couple of feeders back in the yard.

Last year’s hummer

The feeders have been taken over by a shy male. Last winter’s male allowed me to get within about 6 feet of it before it buzzed off. This one won’t even allow me into the back yard before it disappears.

Pretty much everything in the U.S. is frozen right now, including my feeders. The birds are obviously desperate for fuel and the male Anna’s is being very territorial. It’s fun to watch that sort of action in the summer, but in this weather there is nothing cute about it. That male is trying to be the only survivor around my feeders. It’s cold survival of the fittest in action.

I have noticed a few birds buzzing around the area where I used to have a feeder in the front. I guess that I’ll have to put one there too. These birds are good at laying down guilt trips. The bird in the back can’t see the feeder in the front, so maybe at least one more bird will be better off.

I’ll see if I can get some pictures of this year’s hummers…

Everyone around here has been thinking about the 4 police officers that were shot on Sunday morning and hoping that they would catch the guy that did it. He was more than caught last night. He was shot by a police officer. It’s not my intention to re-report what you can read for yourself.

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2010393433_webarrest01m.html

Sometimes I wonder if miracles still exist. I couldn’t help but be impressed with the circumstances that allowed the suspect to get what he deserved. A stolen car was found by a police officer. It ended up that it was stolen by the guy that shot the cops, and he was still around when the police officer found the car. What is interesting to me is how quickly the car was found. I have had a car stolen from me, twice. Both times it was from my driveway. Both times I didn’t know that it was gone until I attempted to go to work in the morning. Both times it took over a week to recover the car.

According to the Seattle Times article, Harvey Lagon heard his car start and watched it being stolen. He called the police but didn’t chase the car. I would have chased the car and called the police while I was chasing it. There are two potential miracles there. One that he heard the car being stolen and the other that he didn’t chase it.

The car was found, just a couple of hours later, with the hood up and the engine running. Harvey said that the car was “not a very reliable car”. If the hood was up, it was obviously broken down and the cop killer was either trying to fix it or looking for another car to take.

From my experience, this string of events is pretty amazing. What are the chances that a car would be immediately reported as stolen and that it would break down in a place that the police would be able to find it? I didn’t report my car as stolen until hours after it was and it took several days to find it.

I am not trying to distract from the tragic deaths of 4 police officers. I feel grief for them and their families. The real miracle would be for that to have never happened, but it did. I just can’t help but wonder if collective thoughts, prayers, energy or whatever that you want to call it, might have had an impact on the events that allowed the cop killer to be taken out.

I was tempted to do a 5 o’clock in the morning thing, just to see what it was like. I get up that early anyway for work so it’s not that big of a deal, but I didn’t make it until 8:30.

I went to Walmart. They advertised a $200 laptop that I wanted to check out. Of coarse it was gone.

The Walmart crowd was intense, even at 8:30, some 4 hours after the doors were busted. I am not a shopper. I am definitely a hunter, not a gatherer. I have a target prey and I go in with the goal of killing it and dragging it home. There’s no way to find prey when everybody around you has blood in their eyes. When I saw those people pushing around their shopping carts like they were armoured personnel carriers, I had to leave.

I decided to lay low for a few hours and then try Fry’s. I love going to Fry’s. It’s the happiest place on earth.  They have everything that I, umm, or my family, could ever want (they even have a stunt kite). I approached Fry’s from the back, you know, where the loading dock is. There were cars parked back there – not a good sign. When I made it into the front lot I saw cars streaming up and down the rows. That was enough. I drove away.

I am a shopping coward, I know that. There’s no way set up a hunting strategy on Black Friday. You just have to jump in there and fight, and I couldn’t do it.

I went back to Fry’s this morning, hoping that yesterday’s shoppers were home licking their wounds. It worked. I killed what I was looking for and drug it home. I can’t say what it is because it’s a gift for my wife, but it’s cool. It has to be cool if I bought it Fry’s, right? She’ll like it, right? It was expensive but still a good deal, so I am sure that she’ll like it… I guess that I’ll find out on Christmas morning.

I also bought something for my daughter, online. Amazon can read my mind. I don’t know how they do that. It’s weird. All it took was a couple of clicks. There were no scary ladies with blood in their eyes, no shopping carts or parking lots, and it came with free shipping and no sales tax. There is something to that.

An Apophysis flame image imported into Untrafractal

Last night I had a look at the new Kansas DVD, “There’s no place like home” and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

They had an orchestra backing them up and they selected songs that played well with the orchestra, like “Nobody’s Home” from the album “Point of No Return”. It’s obvious that Livgren and Walsh wrote those songs with an orchestra in mind.

It was great to see Kerry Livgren playing with them on a few songs. It seems like he wrote many of my favorite Kansas songs, including the ones that had religious overtones, like “Carry On”.

Steve Morse played with them too on a few songs. I have never been much into Morse (Dixie Dreggs, Deep Purple), but after seeing him play on the DVD I can appreciate his recognized talent as a guitar player.

I met Steve Walsh, Billy Greer and Steve Morse years ago in Park City when my wife won a “party with Kansas” contest that was promoting “In the spirit of things”. That’s when I learned that even rock stars are normal people. I was particularly impressed with Billy Greer. He seemed like a good guy to me.

Kansas has a unique style. This new DVD emphasizes that nicely.