Jephnol

It was high time for an overhaul so without further ado, here's the new Jephnol. I'm hosting with Hosting Matters and using Movable Type blogging software. The design end of things will follow, but for now I'm going with the "minimalist" style offered with the Movable Type StyleCatcher while I set up shop.

I pointed my domain name to the new nameservers—not a problem.

The Movable Type installation went smoothly, except for my having negelcted to associate the user with the MySQL database. The blog software wouldn't initialize (create tables in the db and set up the user interface) until I rectified the problem. I opened a ticket with Hosting Matters, and Mitchell quickly assessed the situation. Thanks Mitchell!

The whole transition was a snap. So here we go now....

Shortly after I launched Jephnol my buddy Byron was diagnosed with cancer, and the blog focused on his illness. He passed away on May 3, 2007, and I wouldn't feel right if I didn't include "Bug" in the new Jephnol.

I'm going to have a section of the blog devoted to Byron, with photos, stories and reflections. For now, here's a beach photo:

After the loss of Byron, my wife and I decided the house was empty without our Bug. We found an orphan looking for a home and we opened ours to him. His name is Mowgli. I'll be writing more about him in the near future.

Here's a photo of Mowgli and my wife on the day we adopted him:

I’ve found an old journal I had tucked away and I was looking at a few quotes I had pulled from different sources. I thought I’d post one or two on occasion. Here’s the first:

A cannon, a syllabus sifts and winnows so as to direct our time and resources of sensibility towards certified, plainly-lit excellence.

In 2005 Hurricane Rita was churning up the Gulf of Mexico; she made landfall in Louisiana on the Texas border on the twenty-forth of September. I emailed Tarik, a wonderful man, a brilliant writer, and a friend, to express concern for his daughter who was in Texas. He responded in turn with his signature, avant-garde style, and I countered with this shot into the literary realm:

Ah, Rita. She was liquid when she danced, spinning like a fallen angel across the sea. She entertained sailors for a time—obviously not the sort of girl we want darkening our doorstep.

Go away, Rita. And leave us to pleasant dreams of a gentle sea lapping a somnolent shore.

It was just a little fun, but I was rather pleased with it.

Ham.- My excellent good friends! How dost thou, Guildenstern? Oh, Rosencrantz! Good lads, how do you both?
Ros.- As the indifferent children of the earth.
Guil.- Happy in that we are not over-happy. On Fortune's cap we are not the very button.
Ham.- Nor the soles of her shoes?
Ros.- Neither, my Lord.
Ham.- Then you live about her waist, or in the middle of her favors?
Guil.- Faith, her privates we.
Ham.- In the secret parts of Fortune? Oh, most true; she is a strumpet.

Hamlet
Act II, Scene II
Verses 242 - 253

Have a look at my photoblog by clicking the link at the top of the page or Jephnol Links on the right of the page.

Byron Blog has some great photos, too!

Reading the introduction to The Portable Jung, I found something which was all too predictable. Jung was relating a story of meeting Freud in Vienna. Accompanying Jung was his wife, who was particularly aware of her husband's work. Freud's wife turned out to be utterly in the dark as to the nature of his industry. Not so with her attractive young sister. Jung remarked, "Soon I met Freud's wife's younger sister. She was very good-looking, and she not only knew enough about psychoanalysis but also about everything Freud was doing."

Does the rest of the tale need telling? Sometimes a sister-in-law isn't just a sister-in-law.

I picked up a New Hampshire unit-M antlerless deer permit online tonight, which is why I'm looking ahead to the season. The permit allows taking an additional doe on top of filling regular tags. I'll be hunting bow, muzzle-loader, and regular firearms this year, so there should be a little extra meat in the freezer. I'm looking forward to getting into the woods!

Mowgli has learned a few tricks. He sit-stays, down-stays, comes (mostly), speaks, and gives paw. He's not doing too badly. At night I leave him at the bottom of the stairs in a sit-stay until I get to the bedroom and shout "crate"! He jets up the stairs, scoots right past the cat, and runs into his den. It makes me smile every time. It's not bad for a four-month-old puppy, but this morning was a test of my training skills; I put him in a down-stay and trimmed his nails. He squirmed a little—I nearly cut him to the quick—but he did well considering. I'm pleased. He has a dominant temperment, so originally I was concerned he might be more than a handful. Thankfully, he's just a handful.

Here's a gratuitous puppy photo:

Mrs. Jephnol and I went to see Away from Her at the Music Hall in Portsmouth a night or two ago. An aging couple struggles with Alzheimer’s disease and they come to understand the depth of their love and the true nature of the bonds that held them together through the years. It was a touching and surprising film. I recommend it.

Since then we took in Live Free or Die Hard. There was a lot of shooting and car crashes. We ate popcorn. I recommend it.

"What is a man, if his chief good and market of his time be but to eat and sleep and feed? A beast, no more. Sure he that made us with such large discourse, looking before and after, gave us not that capability and godlike reason to fust in us unused."

Hamlet
Act IV, Scene IV
Verses 34 - 41

I liked how this image affected the flow of my index page, so I added it under the Heinlein quote to see how it settles.

I'm feeling pretty good about how it looks.

I settled on one over-arching design for the various sections of Jephnol, so I had to make some changes on the back-end of the site. There's one designated banner now to solidify the Jephnol brand. Also, styles will be universal on the site, which allowed me to designate a common style sheet rather than using one for each section.

The blogs aren't new Movable Type installs, but instead they each share the common MySQL database with Jephnol proper. (I don't expect traffic).

The image paths were a bit messy in the Photo Blog and Byron Blog, so I created new image folders for each root file, and cleaned up all the corresponding code in previous postings. This won't make much of a difference to readers, but it makes administering the blog easier for me.

Anyway, that's what I've been doing.

Polonius - What do you read, my Lord?
Hamlet - Words, words, words.

Hamlet
Act II, Scene II
Verses 209 - 210

Méconnaissance: In Lacan, applied to Freud's apparent misrecognition of 'everything that the ego neglects'. The term carries with it a suggestion of ideologically derived blindness perhaps bordering on bad faith.

A Concise Glossary of Contemporary Literary Theory
Jeremy Hawthorn

(If I could pronounce it, I'd use it regularly).

I finished my bow hunter's safety course yesterday, and I'll get my New Hamphire state archery license tomorrow.

This will be the first year I'll bow hunt for Whitetail. I'm using a friend's Hoyt Havoc compund-bow, which I took to the Kittery Trading Post today and had tuned up. It's a little behind the bow-tech curve, but it's reasonably quiet, and with a sixty pound pull it'll knock down deer. My draw length is the same as my buddy's, so no need to do anything there. I put a kisser button on the string, a new rubber for the peep sight, removed the nocks, and added a release string. I'm in a four-inch group at twenty yards and a pie plate at thirty; that'll tighten up before the season begins.

Booha!

Last Fall D— found a tiny Snapping Turtle on the side of the road. I didn't think he had a good shot at surviving the coming winter, not to mention the traffic he'd have to negotiate to make the pond, so I gave him shelter. Much to the displeasure of my wife I used her coffee cup as an improvised turtle-carrier.

Here's a photo from the day we found him:


He's growing like gangbusters. He's easily tripled his size and with the warm weather he's eating to match or beat that pace.

His name is Findik—it means hazelnut in Turkish. He was named after Tarik and Füsun's turtle. (The poor little guy passed away shortly after we visited them in Istanbul).

While I was writing my last post Sarah McLachlan's Angel was playing in the background. It's a lovely song. It beautifully conveys the warm, suffocating embrace of a vicious addiction.

Years ago one of my friends had a heroin habit. It used her up. She grew emaciated and scarred, and in the end she slipped into a coma. She stayed on earth for one more year and then she went away.

D— wanted to know if I was breaking copyright laws by displaying Sarah McLachlan's lyrics in the previous post. I don't think I am, because there's no commercial aspect to this website. But I could be wrong. If anyone has some information on this let me know.

The background to the lyrics is a photo I shot in the Museum of Science in Boston. Now there's another question of copyright law, right? Let me know what you think.

In the mean time here's another photo from the museum:

I've been stroking the graphic from the Blue Music, Bitter Memories post pretty hard. The feeling the writing left me with was in a different place than the art, so I was trying to find a balance that worked for me.

I added texture and shading to the background, darkened the original lyrics text, added depth to the text as well, jogged the background to the left (because it looks more sinister), and antiqued some text I tossed over the background to pull the whole thing together.

Remember to clear your browser cache or hit refresh if you looked at the page yesterday.

I couldn't stay away from that graphic. I tweaked it again.

Working out on the treadmill and listening to something on the CD player, I began to lament having left my Brandenburg Concertos CD at the house of a woman whose company I once kept.

One day later a package arrived, from my dear friend in St. Thomas (USVI). It was a months late birthday present consisting of a card, a Señor Pizza bumper sticker, and a copy of the Brandenburg Concertos.

Beauty! The fates have been kind.

Last night I cooked a fish I caught and froze last summer. The problem is I have no idea what kind of fish. I broiled it with garlic and herb breadcrumbs, a touch of butter, and pepper. The breadcrumbs were too seasoned for the mystery fish, but the meal was decent enough. D— liked it.

The type of fish was the least of my worries. I’ve named my oven The Inferno because it runs about one hundred degrees too hot. Set to broil, the damnable appliance warped my cookie sheet, set a pat of butter on fire, and sent plumes of smoke into the kitchen setting off fire alarms. The racket sent my puppy into crisis mode just as the timer went off for the fish. He ran into his crate and barked, while I repositioned a fan to quiet the alarms and tried to save the fish from the threat of incineration. The fish was cooked perfectly. I have skills.

The fish I mentioned in the last post was a little too mysterious, at least as the tale was told. It didn't just jump into my freezer. (I amended the post just today to say I had caught the bugger). It was a denizen of the Atlantic Ocean caught over Jeffrey's Ledge last summer. The origin is known, only the species remains a mystery. (I do enjoy a tasty mystery now and then).