De mortuis nihil nisi bonum: “Of the dead, nothing unless good.” As I grow older, I attend more and more funerals. This is common, I guess, as anyone gets older and has closer relationships with older people. With every funeral I attend, they grow increasingly disappointing. They are usually prepared by funeral homes for people in their darkest…
Continue reading →I have a very regularly recurring dream that in my job as a photographer, instead of digital, I shoot something on black-and-white film. The rest of the dream is spent in attempting to get the film processed and failing to do so.
Continue reading →Since buying my MacBook Pro and my iMac in 2009, computer processing power has stagnated somewhat. My iMac has a 2.8 GHz processor, for example, while the hottest Intel processor sold today, three and a half years later, is 3.8 GHz. Processor speed isn’t the only benchmark of computing power, since new computers use stacked…
Continue reading →Everyone who knows me or reads this blog knows that yesterday in the presidential election I “stamped the rooster.” I went to bed last night before finding out any results, and only found out after I got out of the shower and asked my wife. “Obama.” she said. “Is it certain? I am so relieved.”…
Continue reading →Bainbridge, Oregon (AP) – Fallout from Superstorm Sandy has influenced conduct of the 2012 election. Due to delays in infrastructure repair and the abilities of voters to get to the polls, the election has been split into two phases. Those voting for Democratic candidates are slated to vote today, while those voting for Republicans are…
Continue reading →This could be about 09/11, the day the stock market crashed in 1929, the day Archduke Ferdinand was assassinated, the day of the Murrah Building bombing in Oklahoma City, or any other landmark day in the history of human cruelty. While the tragedy of 9/11 had a catastrophic effect on the morale and psyche of…
Continue reading →I knew a guy who was making some kind of “stick it to the man” point by not rinsing his dishes before putting them in the dishwasher. The result was serving food to us on dirty dishes and him looking like an idiot. He never caught on why we stopped having dinner with them. This…
Continue reading →A recent comment I made on a friend’s blog: …the Smart Phone era is one of the things that makes being a professional photographer difficult. People are actually happy with the crap they get out of a lens the size of a match head, as long as they can pass it around at work and…
Continue reading →Some of you may have noticed that there is a blog seemingly missing from the links list here at richardbarron.net. It was The Knowledgeum, a blog I had intended to use primarily as my “angry rant” blog as well as my “avant garde” blog. The blog you are viewing now, The Giant Muh, was my…
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As my readers know, all my life I have been motivated by the idea of being creative. Non-creative people baffle me. Why do they even exist? How can they find meaning in life, I wonder, since creativity gives so much meaning to my life? In the fall of 1979, when we were juniors in high…
Continue reading →Based on the play Sexual Perversity in Chicago, the 1986 dramedy About Last Night… stars Demi Moore as the shallow, good-looking bitch like the ones who wouldn’t go out with me in the 1980s, and Rob Lowe as the shallow, good-looking douche who those women went out with instead. It co-stars Jim Belushi as the…
Continue reading →My problem with most people isn’t that they are hateful douchebags, but that they are so unimaginative and boring. I looked at someone’s blogger.com blog this morning, and blogger.com features a “Next Blog >” link at the top of the page. The link sends you to a random blog in the same genré as the…
Continue reading →Someone asked me the other day, “Don’t you feel kind of vulnerable when you hike in all those remote areas?” The answer, of course, is yes, but more significant is my feeling of self-reliance. I am trying to temp a photographer friend of mine into joining me for a hiking trip later this year, and…
Continue reading →Again I am going to talk about the long ago past and my mistakes. Live with it. I do. This is another story about hanging out with douchebags in high school. In the spring of 1981, my friends and I went to Oklahoma University for the day to tour the college and pre-enroll. In my…
Continue reading →Like most high school seniors, I got some senioritis. We didn’t drink or get high, but we stayed up late and stayed out late. We “cruised” a lot, meaning we drove in circles in the vicinity of Wayne’s Drive-Inn, trying to infuriate the “goat ropers” (our term for urban cowboys), who we regarded as inferior…
Continue reading →The veil of anonymity is something relatively new in human culture. The internet has brought it to everyday life, from tacky sexually-oriented chat rooms to comments on news articles to cyberstalking. The last 20 years have relieved us of the burden of accountability, such that in 1985, a letter to the editor might be signed,…
Continue reading →In the summer when I was 13, my dad was using television for instructional purposes at the Federal Aviation Administration’s management training school in Lawton, Oklahoma. Based on the campus at Cameron College, the school had a small tv studio where faculty could produce short films for classes to watch. Knowing that I was interested…
Continue reading →In the truest sense of egomania, I believe that the mere act of my discovering something on the internet means it is about me and I must respond to it. Everything is a challenge, not especially of the validity of my opinions (though it usually is), but more of my ability to be more clever…
Continue reading →In ancient Rome, a Forum “was a public square in a Roman municipium, or any civitas, reserved primarily for the vending of goods; i.e., a marketplace, along with the buildings used for shops and thestoas used for open stalls. Many fora were constructed at remote locations along a road by the magistrate responsible for the road, in which case…
Continue reading →I was young once, and as a youth I possessed a certain recklessness that is common to the young. I think we are all prone to this behavior, and I sometimes think it’s amazing we survive those years. In the summer of 1981, I hung out with some guys who drove fast, expensive cars. Friends…
Continue reading →It was in Centrahoma, Oklahoma, August 1992. It was my second time to visit the double-wide trailer in this tiny town, so tiny that its only road was unpaved. The first time was two years earlier, when a reporter named Judy and I came to investigate claims there was a poltergeist in the house, who…
Continue reading →From 1979 to 1993, Santa’s sleigh delivered large quantities of yellow-cake uranium to North Korea. Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer was originally created as a story of a drunk reindeer who ruined Christmas by crashing Santa’s sleigh into a gasoline tanker on Britain’s A4 motorway, but the concept didn’t float well with focus groups. If…
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I was a freshman at The University of Oklahoma. At the beginning of the spring semester, my roommate Jeff dropped out, so I had a dorm room to myself. I brought my enlarger from home, and managed to make my room dark enough that I could make prints at night. And it was all about…
Continue reading →There are those of us who spend their whole lives waxing rhapsodic about autumn. I once had a college professor at OU, a man named Clay Lewis, who told us about one time he was watching the marching band practice on an autumn day in October, causing him to burst into tears. This afternoon, while…
Continue reading →I thought it was really cool that when I Googled “neil diamond jonathan livingston seagull” I got this image…
Continue reading →As any YouTube user knows, the site watches what you watch, and makes recommendations based on the kinds of things you like to watch. In my case, YouTube steers me to a lot of aviation videos, some firearms videos, and a few World War 2 videos, but mostly to videos about the unending debate about…
Continue reading →Like a lot of writers, I tend to gravitate toward a word that I find interesting, and then use it ad nauseum. Lately I have been labeling anything I find to be slow moving or boring “ponderous,” particularly if it is attempting to express an intellectual construct, even unsuccessfully. This paragraph, for example, is ponderous….
Continue reading →Okay, I have been telling people at work all day about this, but no one seems to get how cool it is that logical paradoxes exist. Imagine standing in a room with a bow and arrow. At the other end of the room is a target. If you shoot the arrow, it will travel to…
Continue reading →“Governments tend not to solve problems, only to rearrange them.” ~Ronald Reagan I am against prayer in the schools, but not for the reason you might think. You might think that I oppose it because of my staunch atheism, but no. I am against prayer in the schools because I am against the idea of…
Continue reading →The United States is fighting two wars. The global economy is in tatters after three years of recession. The environment is endangered by humanity’s arrogance and short-sightedness. Drought cripples the south. Floods cripple the north. Unstoppable diseases kill millions. But what is in my Facebook news feed? XXX is at Krispy Creme. XXX made kitty…
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