Still Gravity

Footprints on a sandy trail of Florida - License our images  here .         We found them on the Military Trail of the Kissimmee Prairie close to the Kissimmee River. The footprints crossed the trail. Probably a coyote. We heard them every night from our comfy campsite.

Closed barber shop in White Springs, Florida - License our images  here . Modernity and the big cities left the barber behind. The exodus from rural America stole most of the clients. Closed businesses are a common sight in many towns of the countryside.   Do you know the meaning of the colors in the barber poles? I didn't, but this picture made me look for it - I learn a lot taking photos.  These poles are red and white in Europe and tricolor in the United States. The old-time barbers were "quasi-doctors", providing services as sort of "surgeons" and "dentists". It's said that the red stripes in the poles are about bloodletting , and the blue of the American barbers was added for patriotism - read more  here . 

If you know about the 1980s novel The Name of the Rose , you know about Umberto Eco  - well, the Italian knew one or two things about semiotic and the Middle Ages too. What did he say about social media?  Social media gives legions of idiots the right to speak when they once only spoke at a bar after a glass of wine, without harming the community ... but now they have the same right to speak as a Nobel Prize winner. It's the invasion of the idiots.  Hilarious.

Do you remember this? Trompos  - License our images  here . If yes, you are old enough. We tried them in the campground of Standing Stone State Park in Tennessee. Amazingly, we still could play them. Muscle memory.

Southern black racer on a road of the Everglades - License our images  here . The swift racer is probably the most common snake in Florida. They are active during the day and feed on rodents, frogs, toads, and lizards.  This encounter happened in the dirt road of Dinner Island Ranch. They are fast and flee when you approach. Black racers will strike if caught, but they don't have venom. Harmless snakes.

Hiking in the Swiss Alps - I took this image with a Kodak 35mm film camera.  Old memories from another century. Times before the digital revolution.  Blue, brown, and the white of the mighty Matterhorn piercing the Swiss skies across Gorner glacier -  map . Perfect winter day in "the land of stillness" - this is from  Sir William Francis Butler's   The Wild North Land . Snow plunges from a cliff. Avalanche! Stop at the trail waiting for the roaring sound. Just another day on a tiny planet reminding us of our insignificance.

Our camp in the river canyon - License our images  here . Nice camp close to the banks of the  Rio Grande . Windy, windy, windy. Dark nights with a shiny moon. Wild echoes on the walls of the gorge.

I was not the smarter one. I remained trapped in the funhouse for a long time. Took me a while to find the exit. Now I'm free. Behind are the colors and the whistles and the mirrors and the noisy fakes.  And the funny part is that everybody thought that I had a cool job. They only looked to the posters of Hollywood. They didn't know about life inside the funhouse. The world of apparencies.  Thank you, Mr. Barth, for your short story "Lost in the Funhouse".  He wishes he had never entered the funhouse. But he has. Then he wishes he were  dead. But he’s not. Therefore he will construct funhouses for others and be their secret  operator — though he would rather be among the lovers for whom funhouses are designed. 

Resistance to vaccines is old history. We fear what we don't understand and resist change. Even the military resisted the introduction of the tank in favor of the horse. Major General  Sir Louis Jackson  said in 1919: The tank was a freak. The circumstances which called it into existence were exceptional and not likely to recur. Check the battlefields two decades later.   The beginnings of electricity also commanded fear. It can be seen in this  anti-electricity cartoon  from the 1900s. And the birth of the  automobile  followed through. But in the ’90s, even though I had a successful bicycle business, and was building my first car in the privacy of the cellar in my home, I began to be pointed out as "the fool who is fiddling with a buggy that will run without being hitched to a horse."             (Source: Alexander Winton, Article from 1930.) Looks like now everybody is a fool. Let's not ask about living without electricity.  Then, why to be surprised with anti-vacc

Ant's nest in our campsite - License our images  here . Ants are interesting creatures. A strange thing in their behavior is the ant mill or "death spiral". When a group got lost, they follow one another in a circle until their death. It reminds some human behaviors.  We marked the nest to avoid disturbing them. A couple of times forgot about the marks and brought havoc on them, but they fixed the damages and recovered. The art of resilience.