Dead Sea Scrolls

The North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences hosted an exhibit of the Dead Sea Scrolls through Sunday of last week. I decided to go the last day and mentioned to my son that we were going to see the Dead Sea Scrolls that day. A couple hours later he asked "what is this dead sea monkey thing we're going to see." So I had him google Dead Sea Scrolls before we went. Crowded with last minute viewers like myself the exhibition was still enjoyable as they strictly controlled the number of people who could go see the scrolls themselves as the room had to be temperature controlled. The leadup to the scroll room was a informative exhibit about Qumran (the place where these scrolls were found) and the people who might have created them. The scrolls themselves seem to have been hidden due to the advancing Roman army who were well on their way to destroying the second temple (and destroying everything in their path, including Qumran). These texts are the oldest known examples of verse from the old testament. Some 1,000 years older than any previously known written examples at the time they were found. Some of these fragments date back to 1 BCE. These scripts were the original books of the old testament in copies, Genesis, Isaiah, Exodus, Deuteronomy along with some communal rules and communal prayers. Those who wrote these believed they were the true people of God and that others were less faithful to the true calling of the teachings in the Old Testament. Turns out Duke University had a chance to buy a large collection of the Dead Sea Scrolls in the 1950s but declined the purchase. Some antique manuscripts from the Duke Collection were on display in this exhibit. Another surprise were that these scrolls were written on leather not parchment. Their preservation in cool caves inside of clay jars made their survival that much more likely than a paper equivalent.

Year End Music Picks for 2008

So Here are the 10 Albums that came out this year I enjoyed the most. I know its predictable to put a mega-act like Coldplay at the top of a list, but its my list so I can. The best live show I saw this year (and there were many) was the Hold Steady at the Cat's Cradle on August 12th. Bar rock never sounded so good...

1 Coldplay - Viva La Vida
2 The Hold Steady - Stay Positive
3 Death Cab for Cutie - Narrow Stairs
4 Schooner - Hold on too Tight
5 Frightened Rabbit - Midnight Organ Fight
6 The Helio Sequence - Keep Your Eyes Ahead
7 British Sea Power - Do You Like Rock Music
8 Grand Archives - The Grand Archives
9 Foxboro Hot Tubs - Stop Drop and Roll
10 Far Beyond Frail - A Girl, Almost

Honorable mention: Bon Iver - For Emma, Billy Bragg - Mr. Love and Justice

Darkroom Printing...

Along with the songwriting lately has been some darkroom printing. When I started shooting black and white film I did it with an eye toward printing it myself. This seem a bit away when I was just learning how to focus and shoot an SLR 6 months ago. But a goal none the less... One of my Flickr contact was selling his enlarger very cheaply and I could not resist the idea of at least starting to collect the pieces required. It came with a very nice 50mm Nikon lens. So I have slowly bought all the other necessary pieces and yesterday I printed my first darkroom print.



Lots of chemicals to mix (its easy like a recipe) and of course you have to agitate the developing image constantly and have a decent digital timer. All of these things added up to the image above. My main problem was I forgot to stop the aperture down after focusing the image in the enlarger and I ended up frying test strips of paper as it had been exposed to too much light. After the first 10 strips it hit me ahh f/8 oh yeah! (f/8 lets in alot less light). Then I was off to the races and it was all fine tuning from there. I can see the focus pretty well, but this is a different kind of focusing and it will take me a while to get good at it. Focusing the enlarger is not as fine control as the camera, (I can see why my friend might have sold this one). Its very good but I bet there must be even better focusing mechanisms. But I'll learn on this. When I finally got the exposure right on the print I did last night and found all this negative dust in the first good print. Must remember to buy canned air! Eventually I printed 4 lovely clean prints of this gatepost.

New Flickr Slideshow Thingy...

And an Island all to Myself... (almost)

One of the illusions we like to create when we look at photographs is that the space is vacant but for us (the viewer) to travel into it. Pristine territory, uncharted and unspoiled. Last weekend I had the opportunity to go to Shackleford Banks with my son's scout troop and we camped on an uninhabited strip of land 9 miles long and at its most a mile wide. A beautiful varied ecosystem with wild horses, marshes, sea and sound. Truly uninhabited and a definite winner for photography and solitary wandering.

The ponies above are what some people in North Carolina call a banker pony. Really a horse but they are called ponies because they are smaller than some horses, as they grow only about 14 hands high due to harsh living conditions. In the 16th century, these horses ancestors came from Spain via Hispaniola to live on one of the islands off the coast of North Carolina that make up the Outer Banks. If you ask the residents of Harkers Island about the horses, they will tell you that they have always been there. That they swam ashore from sinking ships long before the English came. Shackleford Banks, where they live, is only nine miles long and is located just east of Morehead City and Beaufort North Carolina. You can read more about them here

The little island of Shackleford banks is considered an Outer Bank of North Carolina meaning it faces the Ocean on one side and a sound on the other and a trek of a mile or so each way will easily get you from one side to the other. The environments on this island are many as its like a desert in some places a swamp in many others. The ponies prefer the sound side as its not as windy and more grass grows there. The ocean side beach has many thousands of perfect beautiful shells that are not collected by people very often as the island is uninhabited.

The horses roam the dunes and marshes and swim in the small channels between the Shackleford Banks and the nearby tidal flats, which ebb-out on the low tides and disappear again with the next high tide. They have survived where man could not. They have endured through hurricanes, droughts, north-easters, so'westers, and the centuries.

What's Sarah Palin Doing Now?

Ummm, spying in my blog I think...

We Did It! - Now back to work!

I have been involved in the Obama campaign since April of this year. The euphoria we felt winning a long and hard fought primary was only a respite from the longer slog that was ahead. For the run up to the presidency I worked in my area (Norther Orange County) as a data manager for the Obama campaign. Our immediate director Craig Perrin was focused and results oriented to say the least. I spent the last 3 weeks of the campaign making sure the canvas packet data made it into the National Democratic Party voting system. This system along with the primary use of MyBarackObama.com represented real innovation in campaigning in that real time information about voters and volunteers was reported to Chicago and Democratic Headquarters every night. The canvasers had packets of names and knew if the voter was undecided and needed persuasion or just need to be reminded to get out and vote. This made a huge difference. Using this system volunteers could access calling lists and scripts and key the results in real time after each phone call. It was unprecedented organization. Even so it had its interesting moments leading up to election day.

Election Weekend Sign Scuffle

Hillsborough (where I live) is an area in transition. You have alot of Democrats moving into a conservative area bringing their emphasis on organic food markets and concerns about walkability and want to patronize locally grown produce, locally owned restaurants and stores (the Small and Slow movements). When we made a large signs that said "Hillsborough is Obama Country" and posted it on the highway just north of town and on the main street here, they caused quite a stir. The one on the main street caused an accident from gawkers and the one on the highway just made a group of motorists angry. I got a call from Craig Perrin asking what the law was for the signage in Town and I looked it up and drove out to the site. A policeman and a man in Army fatigues were there clearly discussing not only how are sign did not meet the ordinance, but that they did not like it personally. Neutral law enforcement - ummm, not so much. The man in military uniform goes on to argue that we are "brainwashing people" with our sign telling them what to think. We respond that its a first ammendment right to say what you think, we'll make our sign compliant and still say the same thing. The officer and the man in uniform both went on to complain that they fought in uniform so "people like us" could "do that" (pointing). Thanks very much but it is indeed our right and people have been fighting for this right for generations up generations in peaceful and not so peaceful ways. We modified our sign. But overnight the McCain people put up two larger signs that combined were almost twice as large as the Obama signs had ever been. We called the code enforcement but they were still up for an entire day before they were modified.


Election Day

6:30 AM I am up and headed to the polls to be a greeter in the pouring rain. I get there and there is a sparse turnout early. The biggest problems are the rain. The the Republican table across the walkway from us had a nice tent and some interesting characters working there (to say the least - one of them a odd Palinesque woman with an amazingly alarming smile). We finally get a nice awning about 8:00 am. So soaking wet we put this thing up so the our materials and people will stay dry. Poor voters - every one that comes up is approached by someone Dem or Repub. So gentleness is the way to go. Remember that you are a greeter not an accoster.

9:00 AM Door hangers. The amazing computer system knows when you've voted and how you did. So we also know who has not. That's what this effort is about. One of the ways the Obama campaign could win (so I was told) in North Carolina is to turn out 20% more vote in the Triangle and Obama takes the state. So off we go to do door hangers and get the last voters out to the polls. We had done such a good job in early voting that 40% of North Carolina had voted early. My precinct here in Hillsborough - 74% of us had voted by election day! So packets and maps from the computer system and in the car and off you go. At this point the packets are as thin as they have ever been due to the fact that we had hit so many of them so well for early voting. The last holdouts required driving between houses not strolling from house to house.

1:00 PM Lunch break in Carrboro.

2:00 PM Back to Obama HQ in Northern Orange. Still doing door hangers and carrying packets, volunteers coming and going furiously. With an apparent non-entry of packet data the only way to generate new lists of people who had not voted was to read the voting list from the polls (legally obtainable at 3 points during the day) and manually update the packets by reading the names of those who had voted in an area and finding them in the packets, crossing their names off and sending the packets back out. So a large group sat at a table while names were read from the voting rolls and marked off the walk packets. These packets went back out again.

4:30 PM The word comes that the emphasis is on Durham now (Orange county went 72% for Obama in the final tally!) so everyone here is supposed to go to Durham. I stay behind with a data manager from the state Obama organization and do paperwork hand tallying votes from the actual voting record.

6:15 PM Brain fried, very tired (I woke up at 5:00 AM I was so wired about today) I go home, watch returns and very satsifiedly go to bed after it is made clear Obama has won. I was genuinely moved upon hearing this it made me a bit choked up having waited so long.

This is the sea change I think. The majority the Obama voters in NC were under 60. The majority of the Republican voters are over 60. The youth movement is finally here. The movement my generation had hoped it was. My generation has been watching and hoping and taking it on the chin a bit. Clinton was our moment, but he helped lose the future for us in his ill-fated second term. This is a new day its not politics as usual, its not lip-service its plain, solid real-service time. The community networks that Obama inspired (never make fun of a community organizer)hopefully will live on so that the American people, the stakeholders, can have a voice.