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Author: Emory Schley Created: 10/4/2006 3:15 PM


Readers are invited to comment on any of the items or discussion seen below, or any matter of concern here in Beautiful Marion County!
A sound studio in the palm of your hand...
By Emory Schley on 10/31/2007 4:54 AM
    It’s amazing what modern-day technology can accomplish. For my recent birthday, I bought myself a small portable audio recorder, a Zoom H2. Not much bigger than a package of cigarettes, it fits comfortably in the hand. It has not one, not two, not even three, but FOUR built-in microphones which offer an amazing number of choices in recording sounds. It will record in stereo from either the front or the back, offering 90-degree coverage one way and 120-degree coverage the other. Or you can record four-channel audio using both front and back simultaneously.
                You’re not restricted to just the built-in microphones either. You can plug in a mic. I have a small binaural mic I use with mine quite frequently. A binaural microphone is a dual microphone with two separate heads. The two ...
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A rather glum day features a sparkling event!
By Emory Schley on 10/31/2007 4:50 AM
    Over the weekend, I went to the Ocala Festival of the Arts at McPherson Governmental Complex. The weather was threatening, but artists turned out by the dozens chancing their carefully-wrought works of art to the elements as thousands of eager attendees strolled through the grass covered lanes between the display tents, ogling the sculpture, photography, musical instruments, and brightly hued paintings representing just about every possible genre imaginable. The murky weather produced the occasional mud puddle too, as the ground mushed and squished under the patrons’ feet.
               Jack Thursby is a retired Central Florida Community College professor of art who brings considerable skill and enviable talent to his acrylic paintings. I’m always attracted to his work because he produces shadowy a ...
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Aiming for a goal is no guarantee you'll hit it
By Emory Schley on 10/29/2007 4:56 AM
       Have you ever stopped to consider what a huge role simple coincidences play in the average person’s life? It’s almost stunning to realize that any number of steps along the way to wherever we find ourselves today could have resulted in a change of direction for our entire lives. It was only by the greatest of coincidences that I met my future wife, some 41 and a half years ago. We never should have met at all, but because of various mis-steps along the path of life, we did finally meet, sparks ignited and soon we were married.
                I’ve spent almost four decades in the newspaper game, and that never should have happened either. If not for a few little insignificant steps off the pathway of life, I probably would have wound up in a totally d ...
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Getting acquainted with an old and simple craft
By Emory Schley on 10/24/2007 4:48 AM
            I’ve always wondered what it would be like to work with papier-maché. For some reason, that’s one of the activities I missed out on in school somehow. I’ve always thought of papier-maché work as rough and primitive, and much of it does deserve that reputation, I suppose. However, recently, an opportunity came up for me to get some firsthand experience with the stuff.
              Of course, I went to the Internet first to check out the available opportunities. I was shocked to find that papier-maché can be worked down to an almost glass-smooth consistency, and one fellow in Russia produces sculptures (or bas-reliefs) with the material that look as good as anything ever created in the fi ...
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A question that repeatedly arises throughout life
By Emory Schley on 10/22/2007 4:47 AM
    When I was a child, I used to wonder if I would ever live long enough to make it out of elementary school and into Junior High. Once I did, those thoughts were replaced by wondering if I’d live long enough to make it to Senior High. And when that time inevitably rolled around, I found myself wondering if I would make it long enough to finish high school.
               That particular thought, in an unending variety of permutations, has dogged me most of my life. When I was in the Army, I often wondered if I would live long enough to be a civilian again. When my time with Uncle Sam was completed just shortly following my marriage, I used to wonder if I’d live long enough to become a father. With the birth of our firstborn, I distinctly remember wondering if I would live long enough to see her grow t ...
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Flying "TV Tower" gives world a different perspective!
By Emory Schley on 10/19/2007 4:50 AM
             Many years ago, I was talking to a fellow on the phone, and when we had concluded our business, he nonchalantly asked, “How’d you like to take a ride Sunday – in an open cockpit airplane?”
              “Would I? You bet,” as visions of one of those old bi-planes, like a Sopwith Camel, danced through my head. This guy was a long-time pilot, and a flight instructor, as well as a certified airframe mechanic, I think it’s called. Needless to say, he knew his way around an airplane. The following Sunday, at the appointed time, I showed up at his place, a small airpark he owned in Citrus County just over the county line when you go out State Road 200.
 & ...
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Here's something you just can't do in Florida
By Emory Schley on 10/17/2007 4:49 AM
    Having been born and raised in Florida, I missed out on some of the simple joys of childhood: activities like building a snowman, tobogganing, sledding, skiing, ice-skating and having snowball fights. That’s all OK, because you never miss what you never had. I used to watch all these winter activities on television, and sometimes in the movies, but it was kind of difficult to relate to any of it because of the foreign concept of having anything fall from the skies except rain and occasionally –very occasionally– a bit of hail.
              Right after I turned 21, I found myself in a foreign land, far from home and warm weather. I was in Germany then, thanks to the U.S. Army and the communists who built that notorious wall in Berlin.
     & ...
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Sometimes, you just have to settle for 'close enough'
By Emory Schley on 10/15/2007 4:49 AM
    On Friday, Oct. 5, 2007, I wrote about once seeing ol’ Harry S Truman,  in the flesh, when I was just a little guy. He was on his way to Key West on one of his fishing trips. This would have been sometime back in the last half of the 1940s.
             Some 20 years later, I found myself living and working in Washington, D.C. where I was managing a camera department in a large membership department store named GEM, for Government Employees Mart, or maybe it was Market, I don’t remember for sure.
              Anyway, at Christmas time, business was quite heavy, as you might imagine, so I had put on some part-timers to help with the holiday madness. As luck would have it, one of t ...
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It all happened 515 years ago today
By Emory Schley on 10/12/2007 4:57 AM
             Five-hundred and fifteen years ago this very day, an excited crew aboard Christopher Columbus' small flotilla sighted land after tossing about for months on an angry, vengeful ocean. At that point in their extended voyage, land must have been the greatest sight they could have been afforded, second only perhaps to an appearance of the Blessed Virgin herself.
               And with that sighting, a whole new era opened up for Mankind. Three small ships, the Niña, the Pinta and the Santa Maria, opened a path from Old World to New, bringing Western culture to a paradise of forested lands with strange peoples, rolling savannas, mighty rivers, towering mountains and treasures beyond belief. Much has been written about that ...
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The eternal parade that takes place well above our heads
By Emory Schley on 10/10/2007 4:55 AM
   Clouds are fascinating entities, don’t you think? They can hug the earth or soar to dizzying heights. They come in lots of different types, and they constantly transmogrify themselves. Clouds are the original “shape-shifters” that one sometimes reads about in science-fiction novels. Watch a bank of clouds for a few moments, and you can see a never-ending parade of new shapes forming as wind, in little puffs and jets constantly impress themselves on the compliant puff-balls.
              No human sculptor ever had a more willing material to work with.
              It’s not just shapes that capture our fancy with clouds, they come in a dizzying array of colors, too. Have ...
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Faster than the eye can follow
By Emory Schley on 10/8/2007 4:57 AM
    A few years back, I was watching television one afternoon and saw the most amazing demonstration. This was a documentary on one of the cable channels. The program was about fast-draw shooting contestants, people who dressed up in their Old Wild West finery, strapped on six-shooters and settled the question of who’s the fastest draw in the West.
             The show focused on a few “Hollywood cowpokes” as they competed. Then the show’s focus switched to another guy, a middle-aging, little short guy with a big belly who looked like he’d be more at home standing at the bar in a saloon than he would in a showdown.
             The announcer said they were about to show t ...
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A very special trip to see a very special person
By Emory Schley on 10/5/2007 4:50 AM
   When I was about  7 or 8 years old, I hopped into my father’s car. He started the engine, and pulled out into the roadway. “Where we goin’, Daddy?” I remember asking. Actually, I really didn’t care where we were going, I was just thankful to be able to spend a little bit of quality time with my father. My mother had left him a year or two before, and she took me with her.
            After the divorce, I still saw my father occasionally, and those visits were always special to me, because I realized that they would only last an hour, maybe two, and then he would be gone again.
            To my question, he said, “Well, how would you like to see the President of the United Stat ...
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Something I've always wondered about...
By Emory Schley on 10/3/2007 4:56 AM
 When I was just a little guy, there was a war going on. It was a big one, too. World War II. My memories of that conflict are thankfully quite fleeting, but I do remember a few details; like all the cars were black. Years later, I remember staring at the first red car I had ever seen, like it was something surreal or out of science-fiction. Anyway, all the headlights on all the black cars had the top halves of their glass covers painted black, too. Blackout lights, they called them. When I asked my father why all the headlights were painted that way, he said it was so bomber pilots couldn’t see them at night. That was an explanation that made little sense to me, because I thought the headlights, though degraded in their performance, still lit up whatever was in front of the car, so surely the pilots of Nazi aircraft could see that. But I didn’t say anything about it, so it remained a mystery to me.
    & ...
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This is the greatest time of the year here in central Florida!
By Emory Schley on 10/1/2007 4:50 AM
          Ahhh... the weather is moderating, the temperatures are going down, and if you pay close attention, you can actually feel a bit of the fall weather in the air from time-to-time. We’re creeping into the annual Festival season here in Beautiful Marion County!
           Weekend before last was the Marion County Springs Festival, last weekend featured the Nine-Mile Pond Festival in Belleview, and lots of other festivals are popping up on our calendars to carry us through to the Christmas season. A big favorite which I try to attend each year is the McIntosh 1890s Festival held in northern Marion County in one of the most delightful and beautiful small towns you’ll ever see. The 1890s Festival is planned for Saturday, Oct. 20 this year. It runs from 8 a.m. until 5 p.m. You&rs ...
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Curious-looking rig draws glances – and questions
By Emory Schley on 9/28/2007 4:56 AM
          Last weekend, my wife and I traveled over to Rainbow Springs to attend the sixth annual Marion County Springs Festival activities held there. It was a beautiful autumn day though it was actually the final day of summer. Crowds were out in abundance, and every parking space in the park was filled, with still more cars having to park along both sides of the roadway leading out of the park.
           As I usually do when I go to Rainbow Springs, I took my camera rig with me. I call it a camera rig because it’s actually two digital cameras mounted on an aluminum bracket with an electronic flash secured above them. Wires go from a controller to each camera and to the flash unit. The cameras are in a side-by-side configuration and are both aimed in the same direction.
  ...
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Lessons my mother never taught me
By Emory Schley on 9/26/2007 4:51 AM
          Lots of card tricks seem too mysterious for an ordinary mortal to figure out, but that’s exactly what makes them so appealing. Bob Schmitz, Belleview, sent me an e-mail a few days ago mentioning a Website that offers on-line card tricks. You can find it at www.ecardtricks.com along with a few entertaining examples suitable for the Web.
          The few I went through seemed pretty simple to figure out, but without the manipulating hand of the card trickster, I suppose there’s a limit to what you can do just on a computer screen, while trying to make it seem interactive.
          I knew some people in the Army decades ago, who were pretty adept at such trickery. Only problem was they didn&am ...
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Man of many talents knew how to juggle Life and its many facets
By Emory Schley on 9/24/2007 4:54 AM
          William Claude Dukenfield died on Christmas Day 1946.
           He was perhaps, at least at the time, the world’s best known juggler. His career ranged all the way from the old vaudeville days to radio to motion pictures. At one time, he may have had the most recognizable face in the entire nation. His asking price for making a movie was $100,000 and many times, he got it. This was when a new home might cost $2,500 and a new car around $900 or so. That’s not bad money, even today, but back then it was a true fortune.
           Dukenfield was a man of many talents, and today, he’s remembered more for his comedy routines and movies than for his juggling prowess, bu ...
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The mind is an easy thing to fool
By Emory Schley on 9/21/2007 4:54 AM
    Close-up magic is, I think, a fairly new phenomenon in our society. I suppose the original close-up magic tricks were the hundreds, perhaps thousands of card tricks that have been invented by clever, but devious minds. When you look into the inner workings of some card tricks and learn their secrets, it seems almost impossible that some of them can be thought of as anything mysterious when seen by an observer, but the mind can be awed by the simplest of ruses, at times.
           Here is a trick that long baffled me, even though I knew exactly how it worked. It sounds so simple, and it truly is, but your mind keeps searching for some highly complicated sequence to help make sense of it all, when it’s just simplicity itself at work here: Sort a deck of cards into its various suits, then arrange each suit in numerical order, then stack the suits ...
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Changing patterns among readers, TV watchers
By Emory Schley on 9/19/2007 5:05 AM
     I’ve been reading in some sources lately that people aren’t reading books, magazines and newspapers as much as they once did. TV-watching is reportedly down, too, so it makes me wonder just what is taking up so much of people’s time lately – what it is they’re using to fill the void in their schedules.
             I’d guess that it’s probably the Internet, that multi-fascinating be-all and do-all to many of the world’s residents. The Internet is so remarkable that I marvel when I hear of the occasional soul who has no familiarity with it at all. My wife belongs to that category. She does not know how to access the Internet, and if she clambered over that obstacle, she probably wouldn’t know where to go once she logged on. She has started ...
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Separating the facts from the fiction
By Emory Schley on 9/17/2007 5:13 AM
  Do you get as tired as I do of receiving all those urban legend e-mails that seem to be perpetually circulating around the Internet? You know, the ones about Target being owned by the French, the millions due you from some saint in Nigeria, and how Lee Marvin said Bob Keeshan (Capt. Kangaroo) was the “bravest man he’d ever met”? It seems like every week, there’s some new, at least to me, story going around as outrageous as one might hear in a liars’ round-robin contest.
              I’ve gotten into the habit of checking out many of these stories that clog our e-mail facilities. One I frequently use is www.snopes.com which seems to have the low-down on just about anything that pops up into my e-mail box. Checking stories I receive through snopes.com has saved me the embarrassment of forw ...
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