(ignore April 30, 2017 publish date – this was published on February 25, 2022)

 

I’ve kind of exhausted the “Collections” category (hey – it gave me something to do during 2020) and while there ARE some collectibles in this post, these items are just random things I’ve found while plowing through my apartment.

But beware – I’ve tacked the number 1 onto the title because I’m sure there’ll be more Stuff & Nonsense to come.

I’ve found two items of note in the kitchen, including the above pair of 6.5” tall Slim Jim mugs. I bought them brand new for 2 bucks each about 20 years ago when I was buying bread in an Arnold Thrift store, of all places.

A quick check of Slim Jim Face Mugs on eBay shows asking prices between $8-$33.

 

Also in my kitchen:

This is an EXTREMELY rare Mrs. Fields cookie tin that I bought full of cookies in San Francisco in 1981 and had it shipped to me from her Pier 39 store.

I have been searching online for years and have yet to find another one like it, so I have no idea of its value.

 

Jumping over to bedroom closet #1, I found a couple pairs of slippers I’ve never worn because one’s literally Goofy-looking and the others are a bit big and also kind of goofy-looking (but in a Giant way):

I’m pretty sure I got both pair at a church rummage sale across the street years ago – probably for about 2 bucks each.

 

Deep in an upper corner, I found a Clever Little Bag (well, that’s what it told me it was). I don’t remember it at all, but I DID wear Puma sneakers years ago, so……….

 

Lastly, this closet yielded something fairly cool. Remember Bob and Doug McKenzie from SCTV (“How’s it goin’, eh?”)? I had photographed them at various places between 1981 and 1983, including an in-store at Sam Goody’s, Manhattan’s Sky Rink (press conference for the “Strange Brew” movie), and even at the Canadian Consulate with Canadian ambassador Ken Taylor, who was instrumental in helping US citizens escape from Iran during the hostage crisis, which lasted for 444 days.

Anyway, I’m not sure at which event I procured these toques, which have STILL never been worn:

 

 

Sliding over to bedroom closet #2………….I wasn’t sure where this Rockasaurus celebratory goodie bag came from:

Then I zoomed in on the ribbon:

Hot Shot Public Relations was celebrating its 5th Anniversary in March, 1992. That name didn’t ring a bell at all. It wasn’t until a week later when I found this card elsewhere in my room that something clicked:

The woman’s name sounded familiar, but I still had no clue……….until I Googled her and found this:

Motorhead! I know I shot them in 1984………..did I do it again between 1987 and 1992? A trip to the file cabinet shows that I shot them in Bethlehem, PA, in 1988 at a Slayer/Motorhead/Overkill show. I have a pretty good memory, but I’m drawing a complete blank on this show.

 

But I’m pretty sure I know where this goodie bag came from:

Andrea was the daughter of another tenant in my building. She invited me to her high school graduation party at a nearby Elks Club (I think). Hackensack’s school colors are blue and gold. (What? No gold leis?)

 

I don’t recall where I got this 5” x 4” x 3” two-piece, handcrafted native redwood item and still have no idea what to put in it:

 

 

Not sure what the story is with this bag of masks from Party City:

 

But I know that at least one of them came from elsewhere:

(Every Mother’s Nightmare on Arista Records)

 

I can’t even tell you what this is because it seems to have melted/dehydrated into a petrified lump:

 

I’ve mentioned before that I used to shoot for an adult store that would send some lovely young ladies to my apartment for store publicity shots. They also sent over 3 sizes of their tops for them to wear:

For some strange reason, they all wanted to squeeze into the small one (fine with me).

 

If they REALLY wanted to try a VERY small one, here’s one of mine from a very long time ago:

I think it says “Miami Beach” on it.

 

Also from eons ago is my first bat:

 

Moving to a bedroom end table………….

I was a huge Davy Crockett fan when I was a kid – had the coonskin cap and everything………….but not this lamp:

I found this on eBay at around the turn of the century for $100 and grabbed it. It’s in perfect shape and if I had this as a kid, I would still have it now………oh, wait – I DO!

I’ve looked all over online to see what they go for, but as is – this doesn’t exist. Some have the metal base with crappier DC shades and some have this shade on crappier, non-metal bases.

I’m convinced I’ve got the best one out there (corrections always welcome).

 

There were a few collected matchbooks in the drawer:

“Terminal” is a fitting name for a lit cigarette. I got invited to the Kit Kat Klub for a Circus of Power (band) party in 1990…………friendly employees there! Uncle Sam’s in the next entry. I shot the Uncle Floyd Show at the Brooklyn Zoo in 1983. I stayed at the T&C Motel in Richmond, Indiana the night before I shot Van Halen in Indianapolis in 1986. I’ve never been in the Saints Café in my hometown of Teaneck, NJ, so I don’t know how I acquired this matchbook.

 

Uncle Sam shows a bold statement inside their matchbook:

I listened to a couple of their songs on YouTube…………early GN’R has nothing to worry about.

 

This was a surprise to find the 3 photo passes for the last official show I ever shot (KISS/Faster Pussycat/Trixter on October 9, 1992) in a drawer instead of being on my file cabinets:

 

Back to matches………….

Another surprise: half a box of matches from a strip joint in Dania, Florida:

I was in nearby Fort Lauderdale in 1982 with the woman I was living with and I seem to recall being aware of this club somehow, but I never went there (believe it or not, I don’t like strip clubs). The best possible story that I can come up with is that this half-empty box was on a counter somewhere as advertising and I, um……….borrowed  it. Looks like I really did a lot with it over the last 40 years.

 

Wanna see a picture of a hot chick and her………um, toys? Actually, this is my old friend (and favorite model) Donna and they’re not her toys. A rare toy dealer friend wanted me to do a perked-up shoot of his wares in 1990 and………..hello, Donna!

Wanna play?

 

Dick Clark in the Sunday funnies? I don’t remember that, but my mother saw it in the Sunday Daily News comics section in 1995 and sent it to me:

 

Let’s finish up with some slightly electric semi-symmetry I somehow came up with when I was a kid………….a long time ago (I wish there was a date on it):

 

’til the next nonsensical pile of stuff…………..

 

 

…………………………………………….(ignore April 30, 2017 publish date – this was published on March 1, 2022)

 

Remember this from a few months ago?

 

It was the accidental result of using iPhone’s PANO photo setting – in which you have to pan from left to right – but in this shot, a truck was moving from right to left, which kind of condensed it.

I wrote: “Awwwww…………..ain’t it cute? Even if it DID get squashed? You KNOW I’m gonna be exploring this phenomenon a lot more in the future.”

 

The future has arrived.

 

One recent Saturday morning, I went to a one-way turn from Main St in Hackensack that’s 2 blocks from where I live. From where I was standing, cars could only go from right to left. I picked this spot because even the advertising for a dental office smiled when it saw these cars:

That last car looked almost normal if you ignore the rear wheel/tire.

 

Turning 90 degrees to the right, I saw this car making a left:

So if that car got shrunk, why wasn’t the truck similarly affected?

Turns out it WAS. It was a much larger truck and it got shrunk a bit to appear to be normal size, but look closely at the writing on the side (nonsense words) and at its rear wheel – both signs of shrinkitis.

 

Moving down one block east behind the truck to River St, this car looks especially strange against all the normal-looking cars on the lot:

 

Heading back home, I’m a block west at the continuation of that Main St turn-off:

Some of these drivers look like they’ll need the Jaws of Life to get out of their cars.

 

The next day, I took a stroll down Main St and the little buggers were everywhere:

 

A little later, I was on a bridge crossing the Hackensack River and, for some reason, the cars came out looking more like unicycles:

There’s a certain panning speed to the right vs. car speed to the left relationship that I wasn’t having any luck figuring out on that bridge.

Maybe cars are too little. Let’s see what happens with buses and trucks.

 

Here’s what a NJ Transit bus normally looks like:

 

And here’s what 3 pan-pummeled Main St buses look like:

I like how the tri-color design suddenly looks like lightning bolts and – in the last case – gets moved to the rear of the bus. And it’s strange how “NJ Transit” loses most of its letters, but never the same ones.

 

A couple of trucks on Main St:

Cute  Postal Service truck……………..I wonder how much mail was lost during its shrinkage.

 

The River St ones are even better:

Two of the three trucks appear to be missing a wheel and a tire while the third one seems to be riding on pinpoints.

 

Here’s what a somewhat bigger PSE&G truck that’s similar (the wording is the same) to the two images below it looks like:

NOTE: what’s on this one’s door (“We make things work for you”) is behind the door of the two that follow.

 

When I was standing by that Main St turnoff, I saw it going by and took this shot:

 

About a minute later, another one (or was it the same one?) came by and I took THIS shot:

Look at the driver and his coffee cup…………same truck. But look at the difference in what the side of the truck says when compared to the original………….and to each other! I could take this shot a dozen times and get 12 differently-worded messages.

 

OK – that’s enough of this right-to-left subject direction. Wait’ll you see what happens when that gets reversed……………….in the next post.

 

 

 

 

 

…………………………………………………(Ignore April 30, 2017 publish date – this was published on March 2, 2022)

This time around – as promised – everything is moving from left to right: iPhone and vehicles – no more squashed cars/trucks/buses.

The colorful above image shows a (formerly) small delivery car for a local Colombian restaurant called “Noches de Colombia”. This little car would have been a disaster to shoot if it was traveling from right to left – it probably would have turned out looking like a pencil.

 

Believe it or not, this image does NOT show two vehicles pointing in opposite directions. It’s one car moving from left to right as it goes around the corner I’m shooting from. You really have to look at little details to convince yourself of that, starting with the two extra tailpipes to the left of the crosswalk: they point in the same direction as the one on the right:

 

Everything else looks like stretch limos on steroids (NOTE: the next 5 images are big ones – click to enlarge them):

 

 

BUSES

Feeling lazy, I wanted to see what I could shoot from my living room that would come out ridiculous-looking………….how about a bus!

I’ve got almost a full block of visible straight road at the other end of the lot behind my building. It’s the perfect place to see if I can make a bus fill that block. Here’s my first attempt:

What you see here looks like two buses, but it’s all one bus. I can’t explain the gap between them other than to say that my hand motion didn’t track well with the bus’s motion. But it was a decent-enough first attempt to make me wanna try again.

 

So I did, the very next day and here’s what I got:

You know, the engineers who built this monstrosity really should have distributed all those wheels more evenly to support that width-of-the-parking-lot section.

But I got my block-long bus on the second try, so I’m happy.

 

The buses have to bend around a corner to get to that block, so I thought I’d try and see what I could do with that at ground level:

In each picture, there is only ONE bus. They got the wheels more evenly distributed in the top one and really made a mess out of the letters in “NJ TRANSIT” in the middle of the bottom one.

 

Two days later, I was in the vicinity of the Hackensack bus station and saw two buses that were waiting to leave. To do so, they would have to turn around a corner right in front of where I was standing (click to enlarge this file):

I was too close to get the whole bus in a turning motion, but the bottom one DID manage to produce 17 kids in the mid-bus ad where only 5 had originally been.

 

Overall, that experiment was a failure and not a great way to end a post, but it’s only Part 2 of 3 and the finale will have some unexpectedly-cool results (he says modestly).

 

Stay tuned.

 

                ………………………(I((Ignore April 30, 2017 publish date – this was published on March 3, 2022)

 

(I had to lead off with the money shot that I’m proud of. Continue reading to see how I got there. You’ll see it again later, so make believe you didn’t see this.)

 

NOTE: most of these images are large files. Click to enlarge all but the two vertical shots. Some of them need two clicks to fully-enlarge, but then you’ll have to do a bit of lateral scrolling. In either event, just hit your return button to get back to this page.

 

After exhausting the street vehicle option, I happened to look out my LR window last Sunday morning and noticed that planes bound for Teterboro Airport – about 4 miles south of me – were approaching it from the northeast because the strong winds that day were coming from the southwest. The planes were traveling left to right – just like the block-long bus from two days earlier.

Great – something else I can shoot from home. They were nowhere near as close to me as the buses, but maybe I could create noticeable sky-snakes out of each one.

The first attempt was not encouraging:

This one pic I took made three planes out of one and the mental extrapolation of that didn’t appear to be all that interesting if it DID work the way I envisioned. The most interesting thing in the image was the Manhattan skyline down to the WTC.

I had to get closer.

I knew that there was a section of the Hackensack River Walkway a couple of miles south of me that I recall where Teterboro-bound planes came close to passing overhead, so I drove over there.

The first attempt there gave me three separate planes again – just like from home, but a little closer:

 

The second attempt gave me more snakey-ness, but it was still too far away:

 

I HAVE to go to Teterboro!

 

The northern end of the airport borders on Rt. 46 and when planes are coming in from the north, that’s the place to be.

Unfortunately, it’s not the safest place to be. As you’ll see in some of the pictures, three lanes of east-bound traffic don’t even have a curb on the right edge. There’s road asphalt, then dirt punctuated by muddy holes, some sloping grass, etc, into a ditch and then the airport’s metal fence. The only place to walk, stand and shoot from is on the roadside dirt/mud.

And it was a very windy day. At one point, as I was maneuvering around a mudhole, a sudden gust practically blew me into the ditch. Oh well……………better that than onto the highway.

There are a couple of highway traffic lights at either end of the airport on 46. The distance between them is about ¼ to ½ mile. I parked on the northern side of the highway, crossed at the eastern light and walked westward to a point where I thought the planes would cross the highway.

I didn’t have to wait long.

 

Unfortunately, from this location, the planes were moving right-to-left as I was panning left-to-right…………..and remember: there is only ONE plane in each image. Predictably, these 3 shots are pretty useless:

Some of the cars got a bit squashed in this one.

 

I knew I’d have to hike more to the west to shoot the other side of the plane (and get the left-to-right motion to match my panning).

 

Before I got to where I needed to be, I saw a plane approaching, coming from over a building on the north side of 46. I was too “underneath” and only got a shot showing two images of the plane (and the lead one is missing a wing tip):

 

I saw a helicopter in the distance and wondered if I could get a stretched-out shot of it, but – once again – only got two images of the same chopper:

It looks exactly like two helicopters in the air – also useless.

 

 

Finally, I got where I needed to be, but – as you can see – I still needed to match my panning motion to the plane’s motion: Plus – you have to remember that this plane is still traveling pretty fast. From what I can find online, private jets can land at speeds up to 150mph:

(My panning hand needs some jet fuel)

 

Getting better:

 

Almost there (gotta cut down on those 43 wheels):

 

Bingo! Tip-to-tail!

(Even if the plane had to disconnect from its train to land safely…………..and it has a nice, balanced arc over the highway and fence)

 

I cannot find anything like this on the Web. If you can, let me know.

 

I had something to do at home, so I started to head back. When I had almost finished my walk back east to cross at the light, I happened to look back and saw a plane coming in and took this shot:

I held the phone upside-down so I could pan right-to-left and match the right-to-left plane motion. I just wish I stopped it before it reached the bush so I could have gotten the front of the plane.

 

Anyway, I already had what I came for, crossed the highway and went home.

 

 

I hope you enjoyed this 3-part series that was inspired by a truck that was squashed by its motion in the background of a panoramic shot I took last year.

 

So what else is there to shoot that this technique might work with? Trains are too long…………..maybe speedboats? Track and field? Horse racing?

Suggestions always welcome. And if you have an iPhone with a panoramic setting and feel inspired, I’d love to see what you come up with………….but be warned – it might inspire me to do another series.

 

In any event, I promise that you won’t get another post from me for a fourth day in a row.

 

But the day(s) after that?

 

Who knows?

 

 

                                  (ignore April 30, 2017 publish date – this was published on March 17, 2022)

 

 

I grew up in Teaneck, which is right next to Bergenfield, so it’s a pretty familiar place.

For the last 40 years – minus the two Covid years – Bergenfield has had a St. Patrick’s Day Parade (and they resumed this past Sunday). I had never attended it…………..not that Irish, I guess, but I did want to get some interesting photos, but without having to stand in the sun for hours amongst hundreds of people cheering for passing fire trucks from multiple towns.

Plus, I didn’t have a whole afternoon to spend………..maybe a half-hour or an hour. So I decided to go backstage. Oops! Old habits (and sayings) die hard………….I meant go to the staging area, where all the various groups gather to get ready to step off.

Lots of streets were blocked off, but I knew a back way to avoid that. I parked about a block away from where parade participants were grouped and headed up the street.

 

Ah! Here’s a great vehicle: it’s all Irished-up and has QQ plates (historic). AND there’s a gentleman in Irish band garb to add the proper flavor to the shot:

 

When I first saw it, the green-hatted figure on the roof was upright. No such luck now. Perhaps he just got back from a St. Paddy’s Parade pub crawl. Maybe I should see if I can revive him upward:

Nope.

 

At that moment, a group of glittery, golden-sheathed young ladies and ebony-attired young men in band hats came around the corner, heading who knows where:

 

A blue and white car is full of green as the man in the Irish band garb heads up to South Washington Avenue – the parade street:

 

No – it doesn’t say “drunken”……….it’s Junkin and I’m trying to figure out where this truck would fit in the parade. Oh, I know! Attach a big scoop to the front and keep it right behind the horses. What’s that? There are no horses in this parade?

 

If anyone wants to see northjersey.com’s parade coverage:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XURL-_KgdP0&t=3106s

I saw the live stream from home as I edited the staging area photos. I’m glad I did this the way I did because it saved a lot of time. There was at least a block of empty space between most of the parade participants – too much dead air.

One thing the video showed me was that there were TWO Junkin trucks – a parade within a parade! The coverage didn’t show what was in front of them, but a bunch of little kids followed the trucks.

Back at the staging area, I started walking around. On the next block, I saw some police motorcycles lined up curbside.

 

(Note: from this point on, ALL photos are panoramic shots. Click to enlarge and hit your back button to return.)

 

“Can I take a shot of them?”

“Sure.”

Click!

I don’t know where the officers were going, but it looks like they were heading for the Village Laundromat:

 

Just down the street from them (and in front of the same long building), a large group of about 60 Bergenfield High School Marching Band members gathered:

 

To their right (and inside a parking lot) were the BHS Color Guard, which I believe preceded the band in the parade:

I’ve gotta capture those twirls right:

Much better:

 

I thought I had photographed the whole band earlier, but when I turned around after shooting the Color Guard, I saw about 15 MORE band members (and their truck):

You can see part of the original 60 I already photographed on the far right under the building overhang.

 

I didn’t see much else to shoot, so I retraced my steps back. When I got back up the street where the police bikes were, they seemed to already be posing for someone, so I asked if I could take a panoramic shot of them all and this is the result (and last picture I took that day):

 

I noticed that one of the bikes said “Fort Lee” on it. It turns out they were ALL from Fort Lee.

I’m going to send them a full-sized file of this shot because I feel somewhat indebted to them.

Why?

 

Twenty-five years ago, on the day of my mother’s funeral, the cortege had left the funeral home in Teaneck and started heading for the funeral Mass in Hackensack.

There was a slight detour that I didn’t know about in advance as the cars turned into the driveway of the Teaneck Municipal area. The first building we went by was the Teaneck Police Department. Every cop was lined up in front of the building and stood at attention while saluting my mother (she worked for years in the Violations Bureau and every cop knew and loved her).

We then passed the Municipal Building and all of the employees were lined up outside. They had been given the morning off in case any wanted to attend the Mass and burial.

As we got back on the street to Hackensack, there was another surprise honor. My cousin, C.J. Mulligan, was THE Teaneck motorcycle cop. For his beloved aunt, he arranged for motorcycle cops from other towns to help him escort the cortege.

From our car, I could only make out the town name on one of the motorcycles:

Fort Lee!

 

This picture alone tells me I made the right decision to skip the parade and spend a half-hour shooting in the staging area.

 

Maybe I’ll do it again next year.

 

 

                               (Ignore April 30, 2017 publish date – this was published on March 25, 2022)

 

My First Car (as opposed to my first REAL car):

 

I don’t know who gave me this, but my father – who worked in a Chevy dealership in 1959 – is most likely. We were all in love with the design of this car:

 

I’m guessing it was a kit that I/we put together and that all the decals were included:

The front seats say, “California Custom” And the back ones show two words that I can make out: “Plating” and “Highlands”.

 

 

Around the same time in my life, I was very into Little League. Here are the two trophies I got:

The plastic insert label on the left one is unreadable on the trophy, so I took a separate picture of it and placed it at the bottom.

The label is gone from the other one, but I had scrawled what it said on the dried glue: “1960 All-Stars” (I made the All-Star team in my third and final year).

 

 

In high school, I was a bowler in the BCBL (Bergen Catholic Bowling League). We bowled after school on Fridays at a place called “Ten Pin On The Mall” in the Bergen Mall in Paramus, NJ. In my senior year, I apparently had the “HI SERIES” (I guess it wasn’t in the budget to add the “G” and “H” to “HI”) and made the “200 Club”:

And that was the extent of my sporting prowess.

 

 

Moving on to my one semester at Seton Hall University in the Fall of ’65 (I hated the place for reasons mentioned previously in this blog)…………….

I didn’t mention this in those reasons because I had forgotten all about it. After recently finding these items in a large box of family history…………I STILL don’t recall it, so I must have either avoided or ignored most of it.

This is really stupid:

 

I should mention that I also found a plastic bag with a paper bag inside it, a name tag and a small WHITE rubber ball (not a blue one – since SHU’s colors were blue and white, I guess this was my way of thumbing my nose at them because I picked SHU’s OTHER color [yes – I know white is not a color]).

 

I did find one other item that I also don’t remember:

Since the date was early in the semester, Kangaroo Court must have been where they administered “justice” to all the hazing-rule-breaking freshmen. Obviously, I didn’t go……….and besides – who would want to go to a mixer at a university that had only just started admitting women?

In my 825-member freshman class, SIX were women! And two of those six were NUNS!

I made the right decision to leave SHU after that semester – when I had NO idea what I wanted to do with my life or what I wanted to major in. I spent a couple of years figuring out that it was chemistry, got my degree, worked at it and dumped all of that for the ability to create https://bobleafe.com/.

 

I found all this stuff in a box of family history that I’ve been working on for months. The same box also includes all of the pictures shown in the two “Mom Shoots The World” posts from last year.

I just found 3 other items from that box that I’ll post below so I can put this box back in storage. (Actually, I also found small collections of stamps and rocks, but I won’t tell you about any of that, lest you think I’m a nerd or something.)

 

I apparently went to this exhibition at the New York Coliseum in 1959 that I think was inspired by the Sputnik satellite (shown on the cover):

 

If you want to know what that was all about:

https://kcmeesha.com/2012/04/08/soviet-national-exhibition-in-new-york-city/

 

I should have sold these booklets last year when they might have had some value. Now?

Zilch.

 

One of the biggest high school football rivalries in New Jersey is Bergen Catholic vs. Don Bosco.

This is the program from the game during my first semester at BCHS:

It looks like I did some math homework on the top part of the cover.

 

Lastly, I found my ticket to hell, as written by my mother.

When I graduated from Holy Trinity Grammar School, my parents gave me “My Sunday Missal” (a missal is a book containing the texts used in the Catholic Mass throughout the year.) – everything you ever wanted to know about Masses:

 

When I recently found the missal, it had a note inside:

 

Anybody want to buy a missal? It’s in excellent, never-read condition. And – if you act fast – I’ll include a free 1959 USSR exhibition booklet.

 

 

                            (ignore April 30, 2022 publish date – this was published on March 30, 2022)

 

Here’s my neighborhood, courtesy of Google Earth in 2018:

You can see my separate apartment sitting on the roof of my 6-story building (and why I’m the 7th-floor tenant in a 6-story building). You can also see that I’m surrounded by 3 churches and a parking lot that my living room looks out on.

If that’s not enough religion for you, you might have also noticed a convent in the lower left. That’s where the nuns who tortured me and my siblings for 8 years lived. That school and church were just north of the convent.

Other structures in the image include apartment buildings and a school.

 

In the middle of all this sits Anderson Park, which – for some odd reason – used to be called “Church Square”. Why would that be odd? Well, it’s obviously a rectangle.

In the middle of the park, you can see what looks like a pool. Actually, it’s a fountain.

This is a picture of the fountain that I took from the closest corner of my roof in 1996 (before the fountain was painted blue):

You can see a square structure in the middle of the fountain from which the water shoots skyward. Keep that square in mind, as it is literally central to this post.

 

Last Saturday, I saw signs all around the Baptist Church and school across the street advertising a crafts show. Since I had never attended any function at that church before, I decided to take a look.

On my way back, I happened to look over at the park, saw the waterless fountain (off during cold weather) and the bare trees and the thought popped into my head that maybe I could shoot something interesting with my new toy: the PANO setting on my iPhone.

If no water had collected in the pool part, maybe I could climb in and stand on that square structure in the middle and take a 360º panoramic shot of the neighborhood.

There was no water in it, so I climbed in and on.

 

I decided to start by pointing east at the Second Reformed Church because that frame would also include the park’s American flag. I would start and finish with the same image, making it 360º+.

One problem………….

The PANO shut off when I had only made half a turn. I tried again…………same result.

I decided to try to spin super-fast on the fountain square without falling.

I didn’t fall, but this is what I got (click to enlarge):

Friggin’ useless.

 

The only thing left to try was two halves…………but who knows if they would line up?

Of course they didn’t, but an afternoon of a little off the top of one and maybe a bit off the bottom of the other combined with not having a dividing line that went through anything unlineupable AND eliminating all traces of fountain edges finally produced this (click TWICE to fully enlarge and get to scrolling left to right):

Note that there’s a second flag in the background in the first and last frames and that the breeze was different in both, so I didn’t have the “luxury” of fudging the same frame into both places.

SUCCESS!!

 

But I feel bad that I couldn’t include the central ingredient – the fountain – in the finished product, so to make up for that, I’m going to borrow from my 2016 “Best of” post and show you my two favorite fountain shots (and text):

Across the street in Anderson Park, they turn on the fountain every spring. What the workers didn’t know was that someone had apparently gummed the works up with detergent, making the wading-pool area into a soapy bathtub. It took them two days to get it all cleared out, but it was a definite first to see soap suds reach as high as the flag.

 

 

…………………………………………….(Ignore April 30, 2017 publish date – this was published on April 15, 2022)

 

 

Happy Good Friday!

Did any of you Christians – fallen or otherwise – have to observe the Day in any special or unusual way? All I remember was that my mother didn’t let us do ANYTHING between 12 noon and 3pm – no TV, no radio, no food(?)………….I don’t think we were allowed to actively play, either. Unfortunately, “quiet contemplation” was not in any kid’s vocabulary.

Although what’s described below occurred on the Sunday before Good Friday, its content was about what supposedly occurred on that day – what we were supposed to contemplate………..quietly.

As a result, I’m launching this post on Good Friday. Now you’ll have something to do between Noon and 3pm (read V-E-R-Y slowly).

 

This occurred about a block from my home. I had been out shooting a construction site for my work on hackensacknow.org – the site of the Hackensack City historian – that I moderate. He also is the director of redevelopment for the 346 projects going up in and around the downtown, so my purpose is two-fold.

On the way back home, I heard loud, live music and followed it to the Holy Trinity Convent – a place not EVER known for music. I also saw a couple of these along the way:

 

I recognized them. The Second Reformed Church – next door to me – has one every year in front of the church. Its cloth becomes white on Easter Sunday. Oh wait………..that means that today is Palm Sunday! (I’m a little behind in my religious fervor).

As for Holy Trinity, I was baptized in the church, attended the school for 8 years and – like everyone else (including my siblings) – was more or less tortured by the nuns who lived in the convent.

The school is now a non-religious County charter school and the nuns no longer occupy the convent (it’s now an Archdiocese of Newark Mercy House).

 

I wasn’t sure what was going on and the singing was in Spanish. At a certain point, people in costume started coming out of the convent, the music stopped and everyone headed in the direction of the church………….except me. I headed home. Whatever it was, it was short and sweet (click to enlarge):

 

Or so I thought………..

 

Later on, I could hear music again, so I looked online for the church’s calendar of events and found an ad for something happening on April 10………….today:

It mentioned “calles de Hackensack” and showed a man dragging a huge cross. I knew enough Spanish to know that it said, “streets of Hackensack”. I realized that this was Via Dolorosa – the processional route that represents the path Jesus would have taken to his crucifixion. It also showed a very local map that I was quite familiar with because it was almost the exact same route that an Ecuadorian part of the parish takes every January 1 at around noon on their “Our Lady of the Cloud” procession that goes right by my apartment building. Hung over or not, I’m usually out there shooting it.

 

OMG! That loud music I just heard 20 minutes prior must have been the Jesus and cross procession going by my building! (I’m on top of the building away from the street, so there was no way to see it…………and besides, shouldn’t that occur on Good Friday, so Jesus can rise from the dead on Easter Sunday?).

I grabbed my coat and camera, went downstairs and outside. No one there………..but I DID hear more music coming from the convent area.

I got there just in time to see Jesus getting “nailed” to the cross. Already crucified and upright were the two thieves who would be on either side of him. All 3 were right in front of the convent door – a VERY strange sight to see:

 

At a couple of points during the event, centurions and others in the crowd kneeled down. The photographer, however, stood tall to take advantage of having fewer heads in his way – while the band played on:

 

There are a number of captions that would fit this pic, but I’ll refrain (hey – I have to live here):

 

This photo pushes me WAY past the limit of my restraint…………I’ll bet you didn’t know that Geraldo Rivera interviewed Jesus on the cross!

 

Something else I noticed……………did you know that Jesus had INK?

 

Initially, I thought the tat might have something to do with Aerosmith, but a couple of online images suggest otherwise:

 

You may have noticed all the blood on Jesus’ feet. I happened to be passing by the convent the next day and took a look to see whether any occupied crosses might still be laying around (or standing), but the place was spotless…………..almost.

Ladies and gentlemen, I am fortunate enough to have preserved for all time the EXACT spot where Jesus died for your sins (and maybe a couple of mine) – right in front of the Holy Trinity Convent on the sidewalk that leads to the front entrance in – of all places – Hackensack, NJ! I’m sure the City Historian will also be thrilled (guess where HE went to school for 8 years):

(Note: it rained the next day and washed away every trace of the blood, so this pic is IT!)

 

Lastly (and quite unobviously), I should mention that the street that nuns lived on for decades is called Pangborn Place. I should also mention that you should NOT – under ANY circumstances – look up “Pangborn” in your Urban Dictionary.

 

‘Nuff said!

 

Instead, here’s a video of little tidbits I shot during both visits:

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZd9ACo_zkU

 

 

 

And if you’re in the area tomorrow, visit my next-door neighbor – the Second Reformed Church – for lots of fun:

Unfortunately, I have to wash my hair or something on Saturday, so you’re on your own.

 

 

Happy Easter!

 

 

Ooops! Almost forgot: My favorite Good Friday/Easter Family Story (yes, I actually have one, though it’s not particularly happy) happened 25 years ago this week.

 

In late 1996, my mother was diagnosed with stomach cancer. I was her executor and caregiver. On a couple of occasions, I would have to get her admitted to Holy Name Hospital in Teaneck when problems popped up.

 

One such instance occurred on Good Friday, 1997. Did I mention that nuns ran the place? I told one of them that I wanted my mother resurrected by Sunday.

 

Of course, the nun was not amused.

 

 

 

                                (ignore April 30, 2017 publish date – this was published on May 4 , 2022)

 

So I took a little license with that title – sue me – but I’m really starting to like this stuff.

The few examples of this particular type of photography that I can find online usually list them as “panoramic fails” and caution you to stay away from any images that show motion, lest your subjects become “elongated and distorted”!

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Oh, horrors!

Are you kidding me? I spent a couple of decades capturing hundreds of performers whose minds and motions could be labeled “elongated and distorted”. Motion was my specialty. If anything, I run towards this stuff – not away from it.

And now I suddenly have a whole shirtload of these images and find myself constantly thinking about where I can find other roads/places where I can really make these images stand out.

I hope you guys like this stuff because I’m gonna be doing it for a while. I’ve already got about 35 images lined up from April and another 22 just from the first day in May, when I did a highway exit shoot (lots of curved, snaky vehicles).

So let’s ease into this with about a dozen from March 30 when I took a walk around town on some busy streets (truck traffic is fun to shoot this way).

Note: These are ALL large files (well, not so much for the first one), so click them all to enlarge (some will go two clicks, but then you might need to scroll a bit).

 

Let’s begin…………

I’m facing south as a northbound car makes a left. Its front end appears to have been absorbed by the traffic light pole:

 

A southbound bus at the same intersection:

 

Everything you see here is all the same SUV. I’m not sure how this happens, but at least you can tell what the long part originally came from:

 

It’s fun trying to read what the sides of the trucks actually say. This one says “Parkway Toyota”:

It appears that my camera may have visited the liquor store behind the truck just prior to this shoot and imbibed enough to come up with an image that looks like this.

 

Here’s your first view of the new, sort-of-familiar-looking SPU delivery truck:

 

Despite what you see on the left end, the front of the truck is on the far right:

 

This one won’t enlarge too much, but look at the “wheels” – especially the back ones (which are actually the front ones). Despite appearances, this vehicle is actually moving from right to left. The only indicator of that is the outside mirror, which is facing right:

Maybe it’s a good thing that this occurred in front of an auto body shop.

 

Here are 3 cars making left turns at the same intersection – one away from me and two towards me:

 

Two blocks away, two vehicles are heading to the right:

Good luck trying to read what’s on the white one (though I DID make out “Watch Your Step” in the lower left).

 

Going around a corner on a one-way street a block from home – once again, these are all the same black SUV:

 

 

Now that wasn’t so bad, was it? If these are “fails”, I don’t wanna pass.

Does anybody else like this stuff? April’s should be a bit more imaginative with maybe a couple of crunchmobiles thrown in.