That Precious Time of Day, when the dumb things are funny

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Photo #796: Carrying ElkLocation Taken: Yellowstone National Park
Time Taken: October 2012

It is a special time of day, when you sit up, looking at the time tick away, knowing that your alarm will go off in a mere five hours.

It is only during those very special times when you can’t sleep and if you try you only lay there calculating how much time you have left to sleep over and over again that certain things become obvious.

For instance, look at this photo! Doesn’t it look like the elk is carrying that water pump around?! It just lines up so perfectly!

At these special times, this is the sort of thing that is funny beyond all belief.

  

The Greatest Microfort Ever Built

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Photo #795: MicrofortLocation Taken: Cahokia, Illinois
Time Taken: November 2012

Look, we’ve got a good start on this fort.

Nice job on packing the posts together tightly, Simmons. That’ll hold against any of the animals we keep hearing.

And Jones? Fantastic work on the bindings. That’s top-quality work there. They won’t come apart for decades, I’d say.

Ah, of course, couldn’t forget Fitzgerald, who did a marvelous job cutting all the logs the exact same length. And it only took you, what, an hour per log? Impressive!

Now, team, it’s getting dark out. Where did we set up the beds again? I’m not seeing them. And did we finish the kitchen yet? Ah well, I’m sure we’ll be fine tonight!

  

I’m Weird, You’re Weird, Those Trees are Weird…

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Photo #794: Weird TreesLocation Taken: Montana
Time Taken: October 2012

Trees are weird.

I mean, look at this treeline!

They’re only on the mountains!

Usually you see lots of trees down below and none on the mountains, but not here.

Admittedly, these are more on the foothill side of mountains, not exactly tall enough to have the upper treeline due to overly cold altitudes.

And perhaps there’s something odd about the water cycles in this area. Lots of it fall on the mountains, but little collects down below. Could be something to do with the particular soil, as well. Half a chance it’s human caused, could be cattle fields there that end at the hill, keeps saplings from growing.

But still, dense trees on the hills, fading away once you hit the wide plains? Totally weird.

  

A Random Look at Randomness

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Photo #793: Yellow CliffsLocation Taken: Yellowstone National Park
Time Taken: October 2012

Some days I just don’t feel like carefully picking out a photo. Some days I want to just pick at random.

So today, I did.

Well, not completely random. I chose by scrolling up and down randomly in the folder of photos I had open. That meant I limited my choices to that one folder from the first move, cutting out some 90% of my photos from consideration.

This selection method also inclined me to not pick near the top or the bottom. I tended to scroll the opposite direction when I saw I was getting close to one of the extremes, just because it was mildly jarring when the screen stops scrolling when you hit the end. Also, the random up-and-down method tends to have you spend a lot of time in the central third of the folder, purely because to get from the top to the bottom you must pass through the center, but to get to the center from either the top or the bottom does not require passing through their opposite.

I was doing something similar on a smaller scale for deciding which exact photo I’d choose in the row of images. I was wiggling my mouse back and forth as the images scrolled by, but again, tended to veer away from the edges and tend towards the center.

So, how random was this? Well, I selected a photo a bit less than two thirds of the way down in the folder, well within that comfortable range I was frequently covering. And it was the third photo out of seven in its row. Again, centralized.

I guess this isn’t a very random method after all. Such a pity. Perhaps I’ll have to play with a number generator next time or something.

Until then, enjoy this not-so-random photo of the cliffs of the Yellowstone River Canyon!

  

A Storied Place

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Photo #792: Storied BuildingLocation Taken: Washington DC
Time Taken: November 2008

It struck me the other day that we refer to both tales and levels of a building as a “story”. You know, “tell me a story” and “I live in a two-story house”.

It seems odd at first. What could a fairytale and how many layers of floors a place has have in common? Is it just a coincidence, two words with very different meanings that happened to end up with the same spelling at some point?

It’s not a coincidence, though, which is even odder. Both words come from the latin “historia”. As you may guess, that became history as well, which at least tells you where the tale version came from. Going from “telling of things that did happen” to “telling of things that could happen” isn’t a big leap at all.

But the building thing? How is that at all related to history?!?

According to the various etymology sites I looked at, during the middle ages, they decorated houses with painted pictures which, well, told a story. And going from “He lives on the floor with the story about the goat, you know, the second one up” to “He lives on the second story” does make a certain amount of sense.

There’s another odd poetic element to it, though. We tend to live our lives contained within certain stories of certain buildings. If you live in an apartment, or work in an office in a skyscraper, how many times have you gone to a different story in your building. Perhaps some of them, where friends or business associates hang out, but all of them? In the narrative of human lives, how each story of a building acts, what cast of characters it has, what tales it tells, they’re surprisingly varied.

So perhaps we’ve retained some of that old meaning. All the people and doings on one floor form a story, which is fairly different from that of the story above. Or below, I suppose.