Heh!

 Today's cover story for the Piker Press was an anxiety-producing short story called "For Sale."

No you won't see the pic there until next week -- it only appears on the cover until October 8th, then I'll move it to accompany the story in the archives. Hey, I didn't set up the system, I just try to work with it.

Anyway, I took this photo of a for-sale sign, and then brought it home to play with Photoshop.

I changed the colors a tad, adding yellows and dimming agents to the whites, darkening the overall picture a little.

And then I really began to have fun with it -- I erased the logo and real lettering and made up my own stuff to put on the sign.

For several weeks in a row now, I've known in advance what I wanted to do with a cover image, and was able to carry out my plan adequately. That's some progress for me. Having a plan that works shaves some five hours of work off each effort.

I'm feeling a renewed interest in art work -- could it be that the weather is more conducive to hours in the studio? So much more interest is percolating that I wanted to find a carpet for my cement garage studio floor. (Standing on cement kind of gets painful on the old feet.) Today Bernie took me to a flooring liquidation store, and we came home with an inexpensive carpet piece that will be easy to clean and has a carpet pad for added cushioning. I can hardly wait to install it, and see how it changes the look of the studio.

Cheers!

Fly

Although Flickr has entered a sucksome phase, new-and-improving itself into suckicity, I uploaded pictures of flies today.


Fly Portraits (which didn't work as a set in my Flickr gallery because of a lack of instructions for the new-and-improved suckicity) was inspired by Pete McArdle's cover story for the Piker Press this week, "Shoo Fly." I love Pete. He's so warped that my own weird penchants seem mild by comparison.

I don't know why flies are funny. I remember being about giggled to death over Gary Hockenberry's capture of a fly in seventh or eighth grade; he pulled one wing off (not the capital crime it is nowadays) and named the fly "Charley the Diving Fly" because he'd allow the fly to climb up his fingers and then take off, only to land abruptly on the floor by Gary's desk. I think Charley lasted through two classes, both American History and Math.

And of course there was my mother's take on faith formation during the Canon during Mass at church when I was young and impressionable: a fly landed on the pages of our hymnal, and she snapped the book shut on the insect with a loud retort, squishing it between the pages, her facial expression unmoved like a deadpan statue of an Aztec bystander. Did the priest notice the sound, or the tears of hilarity that poured down my face in lieu of laughter? I never knew.

Leap forward thirty years, and imagine with me the flies of Manteca, California, where we lived for eleven years. I swear to you, and don't even care if you believe it, the flies in that area would land in front of you, and do this really rude hoocha-hoocha thing with their legs, rising and falling in a dance that never failed to enrage my emotions. Why did they make me so angry? Why did they dance like that when the flies we have here in Ripon, only six miles south, do not?

I had as much fun photographing flies on the back patio as I did snapping pics of "Things on the back of trucks."

Yes. I am easily amused at times.