More memories...

More memories ... from my mom's photo collection...

First up: a photo I'm not sure how my sister will react to!  This is my sister Holly and her high school prom date (I have no idea who he was).  The photo isn't dated, but Holly must have graduated in '70 or '71, so presumably that's when this was taken.  On the back, in my mom's handwriting: “Holly Prom, Mom made dress”.  Somehow it reminds me of Hermione Granger entering the Yule Ball with her date. :)

 My mom wrote “Holly” on the back; I guess she thought we wouldn't know (really, mom?).  It's another of those undated studio portraits, probably from school.  I'm guessing she's 13 or 14 in the photo, making this circa '69.

It must be a Holly day, because here's my sister again!  This one is (obviously) much more recent than the two preceding photos.  It's undated and unmarked, and I've no idea what the location is, or anything else about the photo.  Maybe Holly can enlighten us?

Oh my gosh, here's yet another Holly photo!  Again, my mom must have thought we wouldn't recognize her: she wrote “Holly” on the back.  It's another one of those undated, unmarked studio portraits, I'm guessing from the year prior to the second photo above, so circa '68.

This is my brother Mark and his wife Gina, I'm assuming from their wedding in Cancun.  This reminds me very much of my favorite photo of Debbie and I, walking together down the sand in Solana Beach, California.  The photo is dated (by the lab) October 2007, which may actually be correct.  Maybe one of my siblings can fill me in on their wedding date.

Finally, here's a photo of a good family friend.  On the back, in my mom's handwriting: “Tillie Bard Lincoln Maine”.  The photo is undated, but the sticker in the upper right says “Class ‘61”.  That must be her high school class, and I'm assuming this is a photo taken during her graduation year.  I have lots of good memories of Tillie, mainly from the mid-to-late '60s – one very nice lady...

Salt-lick camera captures...

Salt-lick camera captures...  At right are three girls from our neighbors.  The oldest, in the middle, is actually our neighbor's kid.  The other two are twins, cute as can be, kids of the sister of the mom of our neighbor.  Shortly after I moved into our house here, while the remodeling was happening, the smallest girl (on the left) saw me one day – and came running over to me, wrapper her arms around my legs in a big hug, and loudly said “I love you Tom!”  So far as I know, I had never done anything worthy of such affection.  But it sure put a smile on my face! :)

We also captured a buck, early yesterday morning:

Academic self-censorship...

Academic self-censorship...  I read things like this and despair ... until I remember that there are places still in the U.S. – like here in northern Utah – where testosterone is still abundant and normative.  One doesn't hear about “trigger warnings” and “safe spaces” around here.  Any student who couldn't take (say) the sight of a historical photography of Nazi concentration camp victims (as in the linked article) would most likely be laughed right out of a classroom.

The testosterone-depleted “delicate snowflake” world that apparently exists in a large part of our academia is so different than our experience here that it is sometimes difficult to believe it really exists – until I run into it head-on.  That first happened to me about two years ago, when I started to get comments on my blog posts from offended people; now these are the majority of all comments posted.  I used to answer them, but that was a futile endeavor.  Now I simply delete the post and block the author.  Much easier.  I see the delicate snowflakes on Twitter all the time; so far as I can tell, the tweets aren't satire, they're serious.  So they really must exist, despite their non-existence around here.

What happens to the U.S. when the delicate snowflakes are adults, and in the majority?  That's really hard for me to fathom.  Do we end up with a bifurcated culture, wherein one isolated group of people (possessed of the majority of the testosterone) do all the jobs too rough-and-tumble for the delicate snowflakes?

Camoufleur...

Camoufleur...  That was a new word for me, until this morning.  It means “one who camouflages”.  I came across it in the context of an article on U.S. women camoufleurs of WWI who practiced in the parks of New York City.  That was an entirely new piece of WWI lore for me!  This article is quite interesting, and includes a number of photographs (like the example at right) of camouflaged women testing various techniques.

Camouflage is one technique for military deception.  The success of deception programs in general has fascinated me ever since I first read of Patton's ghost army in WWII.  That was an incredibly successful deception that contributed significantly to the Allied victory.  Such military deceptions have been a vital part of strategy since the earliest recorded wars, though they perhaps reached their peak in WWII...