Sidetracked Charley

My Cat Thicke Because I am an artist, and a blogger, and on several social media sites I Google well. But Thicke leads me in likes. Paws down. And my photographs of Thicke do very well on several photographic pages I participate in. He certainly has fan appeal. Wondering if he should be my logo. Should I take advantage of him being my unofficial studio cat and make it formal. Yesterday I attended a workshop on how to put my business on the map. Yes, I Google well, even Google image well, but Google maps has trouble locating me. Evidently it also has a great deal of trouble locating a lot of others in my neck of the woods. Literally. But would they zero in on my location if I listed it as the home of Thicke? Tag words or labels help your posts, be they photos or blogs, score high in Google ratings. I use New Mexico a lot. But I am wondering as I am trying to put Binford-Bell Studio on Google and the map should I be using Thicke as a tag word? You got my spots right? In t...

Out of Sync I have been feeling out of sync this summer. I blamed it at first on just being too busy with things out of my comfort zone. And figured it was just a matter of scheduling my life better; paying more attention to my physical and emotional self. Doing those things seemed to take entire too much time. And money. And they also got me overly involved with things like teeth and numbers on cholesterol and blood pressure and calories and sodium. If schedules are tight to begin with then something has to go. One area I almost immediately noticed was art. Even time with my camera ebbed. Since painting and photography are my means to Zen then I was defeating my purpose of paying more attention to my emotional self. But then I began asking myself if all the syncopation was internal. We are part of the universe and certainly our communities and when both are on wobble it is natural to be effected. Some conflagration occurs on the heels of change. Change can be good but it can ...

Holidays are traditions long observed and in a lot of cases very out dated. Take Thanksgiving, for instance. Yes, take it away. Christmas decorations have generally been up for almost a month by the time Thanksgiving rolls around. It is recognized as officially the beginning of Christmas buying and nothing more. Few of us are thankful for much beyond the sales, a day or four off work, and football games. I am not even wild about Turkey. Stuffing yes, turkey no. And in a country dedicated to separation of church and state a holiday that includes praying seems a contradiction. Speaking of contradictions, consider Columbus Day. An Italian that sailed for Spain and never actually made the shores of what is now the United States. And had he, then he would have simply claimed it for Spain. A couple other nationalities made it first we have now determined. And that is if you do not count the three waves of the earliest immigrants to our shores. Note: nobody is indigenous. But I guess yo...

Shooting for the Moon At sometime in my life I was introduced to logic. Maybe more than once. Lewis Carroll, under his real name of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson supposedly invented the logic puzzle . But Einstein got credit for the famous Zebra Logic puzzle  that Dodgson did. His writings under his pen name of Lewis Carroll are laced with logic and illogic, riddles and unanswered riddles like "Why is the Raven like a writing desk?" The mere question assumes it is. And the answer? "Because it can produce a few notes, tho they are very flat; and it is never put with the wrong end in front!" Frankly, always liked it not having an answer. Or Poe wrote on both seemed logical. Logic is the offspring of the Greek syllogism . All men are mortal, Socrates is a man, Therefore, Socrates is mortal. Syllogisms are the core of deductive reasoning  or top down reasoning. The conclusion is valid only if the premises are valid or true. But there are valid arguments and sound ar...