The remasters

 

The abrupt loss of my computer a few years ago, combined with a poor system for keeping photographs, means that many of my best pictures from the past years were lost to me. But of course everything I have ever done is recorded on here, on clerkmanifesto, so they weren't totally lost. They were just a bit hard to find. 

The other problem with resurrecting some of my old, mostly nature related, but not entirely nature related, photography, is that the pictures pulled from clerkmanifesto are compressed, poorer versions of the originals, which is something that happens automatically in the posting of them here. But fortunately, in some experimenting with a recent round of macro photos of flowers, I stumbled upon an intriguing method of bringing my old photos to new life. You have already seen some of this with my old flower photos. 

And so, over the past couple of weeks, I have been remastering many of my old photographs, or at least the ones suitable to this system. These pictures are not just upscaling, that is, higher resolution versions of the original downgraded photos. They are also reimaginings of the original image. While every image in this series would be a recognizable version of its source photo, some travel farther than others from where they began.

Over the next several days I will be showing these pictures grouped according to general common subject matters. Today I am going to show you what each subject is going to be while giving you a sample picture from that subject.

I hope you enjoy them.

The Remasters:

Birds

Animals

Water

Fox and Skunk

City

Cats

Wildland

Ice and Snow

Macro Photos

The final season of Sesame Street

 

There was apparently some concern about the future of Sesame Street. I didn't follow the news, though I'm pretty sure I also heard something about Netflix picking it up for the future. But that's not what we're talking about here. Or, not exactly. We are talking about my Sesame Street. Because I work on Sesame Street, at my library. And this is my final season.

This is an analogy I have made in the past, where I likened the library to Sesame Street.  Indeed it has been decades since I first looked up and noticed how much all my co-workers were like muppets. From that it was an obvious leap to how the very environment and focus of my large library was a bit of a ringer for the world of the legendary children's television show. As soon as AI generation was remotely up to it, I did my best to come up with some rudimentary 'muppet at the library' photographs from those earlier days of photo generation, because, on its best days, and even just its pretty good ones, my library is so much a Sesame Street kind of place. It is full of its regular denizens, stock characters that are still unique, and a kind of sheltered community removed a little from a world that's a little harsher than it usually is here at a library.

My library is also keen on numbers and letters, sometimes obsessively so!

And so today, feeling a little peaceful about everything at my job I once again thought it was time to try to make everyone into a muppet, that is, into a sesame street character, if I could.

And I can.

Some of these pictures are downright uncanny in portraying the person they are of. If you are a reader with no familiarity with these people, perhaps it will be missing some of the magic in these strangely perceptive renditions, but maybe not. There's still a lot of personality here to enjoy. After all, wouldn't anyone want to visit a library staffed by all these muppets?

The softness of my latter days

 

I helped a library patron at the front desk of my library. She looked around adoringly at our library and said "This is such a wonderful library! You must love working here!"

As in the stories of people dying and having their whole lives flash before their eyes in an instant, so a hundred thousand feelings and responses came flitting through my brain at the speed of light. 

But all I said was "Absolutely. It is magical."

And I twenty percent meant it.

Here's hoping the end of the world looks like this

 

Corrections and cartoons

It’s not that this has never happened before, but it’s certainly rare for me to be so far ahead in Clerk Manifesto that, by the time I get around to posting something, it’s already outdated and irrelevant. Yet here we are. Today, I had to swoop in and delete a blog post I wrote just a week or two ago—a post where I wryly observed how Clerk Manifesto seemed to have become little more than a daily cartoon of me.

At the time, that felt perfectly on point. But now, surrounded by endless floral extravaganzas and frantic content stuffed into every available corner of Clerk Manifesto, that old post just looked… silly. And so, with a touch of regret, I’ve removed it and replaced it with—well, this.

The cartoon itself, mercifully, survives unchanged. Strangely, it fit better with the original commentary and now feels like it needs no introduction at all. But honestly, I couldn’t bring myself to delete both things. That’s just too much erasure for one day.

So how about this: pretend you didn’t read any of this. Start fresh. Scroll down. Enjoy the cartoon.

Thank you.

A bunny among the flowers

 

I know I said in the title that this was a bunny among the flowers. And he is. There were lots of flowers around here. But this bunny is also in a flower, which is not the sort of thing one expects to see when one looks into a flower, but, truth be told, might be exactly the sort of thing one might expect to see when one opens up clerkmanifesto.

My advice to you!

 

Castles in my stream

 

The last time we visited the short and wonderful Shadow Falls Creek and its attendant bluffs along the Mississippi River, we saw me kayaking in it. 

Today we take a more bucolic approach, and we explore its ruins, villages, and dwellings.