It’s not technically winter but damn close to it, and nature photography has ground, if not to a halt, at least to a low enough speed that I can step off and pick up the tortilla chip that I dropped. Which means this is the time to post about stupid shit – lucky you.
One of the other people that I check out semi-regularly, over there in the sidebar, is known for being a little bit of a fashion horse, to the point where they’re asked for advice from time to time [that was originally written, “from tie,” a mere typo that I almost left in]. And I have to admit, this is one of these places where I have to disagree significantly.
The bare premise is, we judge others on how they look, and if we want to be judged favorably ourselves, we have to look good. While most of us can only do trivial things to our physical appearance, we can at least dress nicely, to make better impressions in this manner. Truth be told, this usually works.
And yet, it shouldn’t, and it’s one of those things that makes me itch. It’s one of the most superficial ways to judge someone that we can imagine, and yet we engage in it constantly. Let’s face it, some of the biggest crimes ever committed in the past century were done by people in the ubiquitous and ridiculously unoriginal tie-and-jacket, and somehow we still find such things ‘respectable’ – males are still expected to wear them to weddings and funerals and a good percentage of job interviews, still expected to have them for many office jobs and certainly many meetings, and so on. And the variation in them is minimal at best – different styles and widths of ties come around, different size lapels for dog’s sake, but even colors are pretty damn narrow in scope. And don’t get me started on neckties – stupidest goddamn piece of clothing to ever exist, much less be considered important. What does this even do? “Well, it adds color to this ridiculous cookie-cutter getup that we consider proper…”
And don’t let me harp solely on men’s fashion; while women have a broader range of what’s ‘acceptable,’ especially in the office, there tends to be a lot more emphasis on it, with a very narrow time frame of acceptability too, otherwise we wouldn’t have such phrases as, “last fall’s fashions.” Among the myriad reasons why I wouldn’t cut it as a female, my inability to keep up with or even understand what colors go with which seasons would doom my social standing in such populated environments.
Clothes have a distinct purpose, and first and foremost, should fulfill that purpose. After that, it really should be up for grabs, with little if any attention paid to them. They reflect absolutely nothing about who someone is, how valuable we might find their advice, how forthright or honest they are, or anything else at all, and forming even a simple opinion about someone over their manner of dress is far more likely to be a product of manipulation than an accurate evaluation. Now, granted, for a lot of people it’s much easier to buy nice clothes than to develop a personality, much less a respectable demeanor within society, so perhaps I shouldn’t be so harsh. But then again, nothing worthwhile is ever easy.
Listen, I know society isn’t going to change overnight, even with the overwhelming influence that this blog has. But we can at least try to make the effort to notice how someone treats others, or the issues that they find important, or even just their basic competence, rather than if their shoes match their jacket or whatever damn thing – if you’re buying clothes for your clothes, there are probably better things to spend your time and money on. Relax, be comfortable, wear something useful, and stop thinking about petty things. Most especially, dress for the weather. I’ve been lucky enough to work at places without demands, which was good when the warehouse wasn’t air-conditioned (and that’s noticeable in North Carolina summers, to say nothing of further south.) And I’ve also been unlucky enough to work for a corporation that worried more about dress code than it did about actually producing quality products. It’s the only time that I actually wore a tie (save for a clip-on during some catholic hoohah when I was six,) and when I quit that job after several months – over more than the dress code, trust me – I was happy to destroy the ties. Except for one, since that one had already been destroyed by getting caught in a fucking machine, because only complete and utter morons require dangling cloth wrapped around your neck when you have to maintain machines with gears. That corporation, by the way, was a photo lab, CPI Photo Finish, and is long gone now because this was far from the stupidest thing they ever did…
I understand the idea of, you know, employees having a specific uniform so they’re easy to find when assistance is needed, and I understand a certain neatness of appearance helps a lot when it comes to things like wait staff – we’re not going to escape superficial impressions (but if you’re an employer that requires it, don’t be a cheap motherfucker and provide it, at your expense. If it’s that important to you.) But overall, let’s get over the whole concept that how someone dresses reflects who they are as a person. Let’s exercise just a little deeper understanding, a little more attention paid to a person’s actual demeanor and work habits, rather than some idiocy about padded shoulders or pleats or some transient stitching practice. And for ourselves, let’s wear what we want to wear and like wearing, what’s comfortable and functional, and stop worrying that someone will judge us on something so shallow that they must not be able to handle anything more complicated. We really shouldn’t value such opinions anyway.
Thanks – I feel better now.
If you’re not familiar with the name, Ken Ham is a notorious Young-Earth Creationist, known for his debates with Bill Nye and his cute-as-buttons ark park in Kentucky, where he espouses his ideas about biblical literalism – essentially, the [christian] bible is absolutely true in all regards, even when blatantly contradicting itself. And of course, one of those absolutes is the timeline of creation, establishing that the Earth is only around six thousand years old because that’s all the generations that have been outlined therein. We know this because… because. It says so right there in the bible, and unlike every other book in the world, the bible cannot contain prevarications, myths, or self-serving fables. You may think I’m being snarky, but Ham says as much himself right in his book.
First off, no one is going to mistake this for a book on dinosaurs, despite Ham’s best efforts to list a lot of them. This is evangelical indoctrination, pure and simple, a hamfisted (a ha ha) attempt to use a subject that kids find popular to try and instill his own concept of biblical literalism. We’re not even talking the hoary old ‘Teach the Controversy’ idea, because he does not present controversies, only the idea that scientists are wrong, because bible. When he is presenting the fossil evidence of body types and habitats, for instance, he is content to simply refer to “scientists,” but when it comes to ages and diet, he begins to make the distinctions of “secular scientists” and “creation scientists,” a division to be found among evangelists and nowhere else, since science is not built around ideology, but around the strength of the research. This research is openly dismissed within the book whenever it fails to support any biblical passages, regardless of how much evidence and interconnectedness it demonstrates; Ham even goes so far as to say, multiple times, that secular scientists “guess” at how old things are, completely failing to address the huge body of work that supports the consensus of a 4.5 billion-year-old Earth.
This is why I never feel particularly threatened by books of this ilk. It is very easy for a questioning child to find all of the flaws in his desperate flailing, and even if their childhood was fully immersed in such selective ‘education,’ interactions with the broader world will soon start to show the myriad problems. As will the progress of (real) science, as his comment that we have never found a dinosaur fossil with feathers was 
The key portion that promoted the whole thing from an idea to a work-in-progress was a front-silvered mirror, and let me explain. Most mirrors are back-silvered, the reflective surface being on the back side of the glass because it’s delicate and easy to scratch. But doing any photography, especially high-magnification photography, with one of those means there are always secondary ‘ghost’ reflections from the front surface of the glass, so the goal is the make the front surface the most reflective. I thought this was going to be a tricky thing to purchase until I came across replacement side-mirror panels in an auto parts store; the unfinished back was exactly what I was looking for, and it was available in larger pieces for truck mirrors. The remainder is all PVC pipe and a piece of clear acrylic for the viewing window. The elbow is actually a T-joint cut on a precise diagonal and sanded flat for the mirror to mount to, and I painted it all green both to reduce its obvious contrast to any undersea denizens that I got close to, and to cut the glow from reflected light onto the photo subjects and surroundings. On the black collar (a simple reducer) was mounted a 1/4-20 threaded insert for a standard tripod screw, as well as a 3/8-16 threaded stud for a mini ballhead to hold a flash unit, which could be aimed to fire into the water just ahead of the scope. Seen behind the camera is a Manfrotto 3028 head, which as far as I’m concerned is a necessary tripod head for anyone into esoteric photography experiments, since it can get into countless different angles, and was the only one that would accommodate the needs here. All submerged seams were sealed with silicone, and the inside of the whole assembly was painted deep matt black to eradicate internal reflections – before the mirror and viewport were attached, of course. Planning ahead a little can make things much easier.
