Music Photo Challenge Week #2

This week, my iPod in all its random glory, has chosen "Boulevard of Broken Dreams" by Green Day. There is some really powerful imagery in these lyrics, and hopefully I can come up with a powerful photo.

Mad World

The first song in my new photo challenge was "Mad World" by Tears for Fears. For the photo I was thinking something from the everyday world, twisted slightly. My first thought was a busy street with a slow shutter speed. But the only place I could think to find that was Rochester and we didn't make it there until yesterday. And there weren't enough people out and about to make it work, I'm blaming Hurricane Irene, it was really windy. So I did a house in the suburbs from the car at 30 mph. Then I upped the saturation to give it that '80s pop feel.

Run in Circles

"Mad World" by Tears for Fears

All around me are familiar faces

Worn out places, worn out faces

Bright and early for their daily races

Going nowhere, going nowhere

And their tears are filling up their glasses

No expression, no expression

Hide my head I want to drown my sorrow

No tomorrow, no tomorrow

And I find it kind of funny

I find it kind of sad

The dreams in which I'm dying

Are the best I've ever had

I find it hard to tell you

'Cos I find it hard to take

When people run in circles

It's a very, very

Mad World

Children waiting for the day they feel good

Happy Birthday, Happy Birthday

Made to feel the way that every child should

Sit and listen, sit and listen

Went to school and I was very nervous

No one knew me, no one knew me

Hello teacher tell me what's my lesson

Look right through me, look right through me

New Photo Challenge

365 days and 2,728.8 miles separate these two photos, they were my first and last photos for my 365project.

And I loved doing the 365project, but it was time consuming and hard. Toward the end of it I felt I was just sucking, struggling to get a photo before going to bed each night. But, for the most part, I liked that it made me get out the camera every day. Since I've finished I haven't taken as many photos as I would like. So I've decided to set myself a new challenge. I hated that I started the 365project on just the random day I found the site, so I've decided to start this new challenge on a day that means something, my birthday, which is today!

Because of my work schedule, my week starts on Tuesday (luckily today is a Tuesday). So on Tuesdays I will set my shiny new iPod (awesome birthday present by the way, thanks Dad and Linda) to shuffle all my music and whatever song pops up will be my photo assignment for the week. I will illustrate either the song as a whole, or a passage from the lyrics, and post the photo to this blog by the following Monday. I will set some limits on the music selection, no repeat songs, no two songs by the same artist on consecutive weeks, etc... But other than that it will be completely random.

The first song selected by Apple's infinite wisdom is "Mad World" by Tears for Fears. Photo to come by Monday and next weeks song by Tuesday.

Requiring Drug Tests for Welfare

It's one thing to get upset when a stranger or someone I barely know posts a stupid and false copy-and-paste Facebook status about welfare benefits and drug testing (reproduced below). But when my own family does it and then starts spouting Regan era, Fox News talking point bullshit defending it, I get pissed, but it also makes me sad. And any attempt I make to defend myself on Facebook just gets me attacked by people I don't know (friends of family members) and I really don't care to defend my position against people I don't know and who, frankly, seem pretty uninformed and simpleminded.

Thank you FLORIDA and KENTUCKY!! Florida and Kentucky are the first states that require drug testing when applying for welfare, effective July 1st. Some people are crying this is "unconstitutional"... How is this unconstitutional? It's OK to drug test people who work for their money, but not those who don't? Re-post this if you'd like to see this done in all 50 states !!!

So I left it alone. But it just kept gnawing at me. So I was going to lay out my position here, to at least get it off my chest. But then I realized I don't really have to do that, it's been done, and is documented better than I would have been able to do. I found this article which does a wonderful job of documenting my points, thank you ACLU. I kept finding myself paraphrasing from it so I thought I would just link to it move on to what pisses me off that isn't addressed in the article. (Plus it's nice to get back to the cathartic side of blogging, not just posting pictures of places I go, like I have been lately.)

Drug testing as a requirement for welfare benefits is not just unethical, it is unconstitutional. And the ACLU article documents this very well.  But the Facebook post pisses me off for more reasons than that. First and foremost is that people will copy and paste anything that uses capitol letters and exclamation points and says the words, "repost if you agree" at the end of it. This leads to a lot of people posting things that are stupid and that, if they actually thought about it, they wouldn't agree to put on their wall. And not just this one about welfare, there are dozens of them. It's the new, ridiculous email forward, the kind of thing Snopes was invented for. So many of these copy-and-paste statuses are false, four words typed into Snopes proved this one false in less than 10 seconds. 

Another thing that annoys me about this post in particular is the ludicrous idea that the majority of people on welfare either abuse drugs or are abusing the system. It's not in the post itself, but in every discussion I've participated in, this is the first thing brought up. The term "welfare queens"was a Regan catchphrase, used to refer to women who committed welfare fraud. While the term isn't used very often these days, the Fox News wackjobs still cling to the idea that every single person who receives welfare benefits is a drug-abusing, lazy ass who does nothing but take advantage of hard-working Americans. And since everything that Glenn Beck says is the perfect, unadulterated truth, that must be the case. Never mind the studies that say otherwise, never mind common sense. "Poor people are bad and they're taking MY hard-earned money." This bullshit wasn't true when Regan was saying it in the '80s and it isn't true now, but because it plays into the "me, me, me" attitude, people are willing to buy into it without actually using their brains. That isn't to say that welfare fraud isn't a problem, it does happen, but not nearly to the extent that the people who post this stuff on Facebook seem to think.

A stereotype is, according to Merriam-Webster, "something conforming to a fixed or general pattern; especially : a standardized mental picture that is held in common by members of a group and that represents an oversimplified opinion, prejudiced attitude, or uncritical judgment." The reason I hate this post so much is that it perpetuates the stereotype. It takes something complex — people who receive financial benefits from the government for a variety of reasons (including but not limited to; a poor economy, mental/physical disability or a job that doesn't pay well enough) — and oversimplifies it into "people who are poor don't deserve a handout because they'll just use it on drugs." It is a prejudiced attitude and it is an uncritical judgment.

This type of thinking, or non-thinking, in stereotypes and talking points is all too common right now. It is true in the email forwards and the copy-and-paste statuses. It makes people feel like they are informed on the issues and taking a stand in politics. But if you are just repeating what other people are saying, if you aren't actually researching the issues, how can you consider yourself involved? Maybe the people who forward or post are informed, but then why are they perpetuating false information? It is my opinion that if you aren't going to take the time to inform yourself about an issue, you shouldn't put your opinion of it out into the world, because you just come off sounding ignorant. (And by that I mean the dictionary definition of ignorant and the Utah definition of "ignernt.")

Vermont Vacation

Back in June Les and I took a short vacation to Vermont.  I have been meaning to post about it and share photos for a while. But I took a ton of photos and the task was rather daunting. So I've decided to split it up. I already posted my theory about Vermont being the Oregon of the East Coast, this post will be about the basics of our vacation. I have another post in the works about our trip to the cheesiest, corniest museum ever and one documenting our exploration of the covered bridges.

View of Lake Champlain from the deck.

First off, thanks are in order to my wonderful coworker (and sadly, basically my only friend in this ridiculously overpopulated state) Mary. She graciously allowed us the use of her cabin on Lake Champlain. In great vacation tradition, it rained the entire trip. And the cabin has a tin roof and no insulation. It was a wonderful sound... for about the first two hours. Then it was incredibly loud and hard to sleep, at least for me Les has been known to sleep through much worse, including earthquakes. But the rain made for some beautiful scenery.

Breakfast on the deck was lovely. Les spent all morning playing some color/shape block game on his iPod.

And when we were done eating, it was raining so hard we were able to wash the dishes in it. (Don't worry Mary, we used soap and the sink later, this was just to show the amount of rain.

Les walking out from the "driveway."

One of the best things about Vermont is, of course, Ben and Jerry's. We took the factory tour and tried a sample and purchased a few souvenirs.  It was really cool not so much to see how they make ice cream, learn about a socially responsible company. I was also intrigued by all the different flavors they have, and have had over the years. Some I wanted to try and others just sounded disgusting.

A replica of the Ben and Jerry's tour bus, the original burned to the ground in 1986 (we learned that in a slide show).

At the end of the tour they give you a sample.

Bad lighting, but good samples.

They have a graveyard for discontinued flavors.

I found this interesting.

Tanks of ingredients, soon to be Stephen Colbert's Americone Dream.

Really cool-looking rusty tower, terribly back-lit.

If amazing ice cream wasn't enough to make a rainy vacation super-awesome, beer is. Since we were in Burlington anyway, we stopped in at the Magic Hat brewery. I don't drink beer (it's a smell issue) but Les is on his way to becoming quite the fancy-schmancy beer drinker. The brewery was really cool and Les got a great deal on a case of summer ale.

Les tried to pull it over, and the color is more accurate on this one.

That's a lot of beer.

This is the only photo I took of the Cabot plant, I was too busy eating cheese.

This was a factory heavy vacation, it probably wouldn't have been if we had gone hiking or canoeing, but it was just too rainy for that. In addition to the ice cream and beer, we saw the Cabot cheese factory. The tour wasn't as interesting as Ben and Jerry's, but they gave us samples of dozens of different kinds of cheddar and it was amazing. I had never heard of Cabot before moving to the east coast, but I love it! We also did some sightseeing and saw the Vermont capitol building, for some reason I don't really remember.

Capitol building in Montpelier.

There were cannons and odd, skulky-looking statues at the capitol, Les climbed on one of them.

Taking scenery photos on the side of the highway.

Falls in Middlebury, where we had a great dinner.

We also visited the New England Maple Syrup Museum and hunted down some covered bridges but both of those things have enough photos to deserve their own posts. Overall a great trip!

And a goodbye scoop for the drive home. Les's was chock full of coffee flavors and mine had more chocolate then I've ever had in my entire life.