Category Archives: Dawn

Sadness Ensues

It is the time of year that is filled with sadness. Another college basketball season has come to an end. But despite the gloom that will set upon the land for many more months, it is a time of joy as well. We get to crown a new King of the Roundball Oracles. A new name goes on the plaque of immortals with these past champions:

Roundball Oracles Past Champions.

2011 – Carrie Baier
2010 – Mark Wolfram
2009 – Mark Wolfram
2008 – Mark Wolfram
2007 – Tim Peterson
2006 – William McAlpine
2005 – William McAlpine

The latest immortal is…

Lowell Davis

In the closes Roundball Oracle competition ever, Lowell beat Corey Faust on the tiebreaker.

I will be ordering Lowell’s trophy soon and will be presenting it to him in the very near future. I’m sure there will be photographic evidence to back this up presented in this forum in due time.

Another reason why it was a good year for the Roundball Oracles is that we set a new record with 29 combatants. Shattering the previous participation mark by several people.

Without further adieu, here are the final standings of the 8th Roundball Oracles Challenge:

Rank/Name/Points/National Title Choice/Last Year’s Finish

1. Lowell Davis – 275 – Kentucky – 13th
2. Corey Faust – 275 – Kentucky – 6th
3. Jason Baier – 265 – Kentucky – 5th
4. Angie DeWaard – 255 – Kentucky – DNP
5. Robert Henning – 245 – Kentucky – 8th
6. William McAlpine – 236 – Kentucky – DNP
7. Mark Wolfram – 235 – Ohio State – 15th
8. Jason Stensland – 229 – Ohio State – DNP
9. Dawn Krause – 228 – Kentucky – 4th
10. Jesse Howard – 225 – Kentucky – 2nd
11. Jon DeWaard – 222 – Kentucky – DNP
12. Derrick Gorshe – 220 – Kentucky – DNP
13. Nader Parsaei – 216 – Connecticut – 14th
14. Jackson Faust – 214 – Michigan State – DNP
15. Bill Wentworth – 211 – North Carolina – DNP
16. Tim Peterson – 209 – Kansas – 11th
17. Mike Donner – 206 – Michigan State – DNP
18. Jen Ensley-Gorshe – 199 – North Carolina – DNP
19. Michael Augustin – 196 – North Carolina – DNP
20. Carrie Baier – 194 – Michigan State – 1st
21. Shawn Lockner – 189 – Baylor – DNP
22. Russell Kennerly – 176 – North Carolina – 9th
23. Shaun Kirsch – 175 – Iowa State – 16th
24. Teresa Kahler – 173 – Iowa State – DNP
25. Yours Truly – 164 – North Carolina – 7th
26. Toby Sebring – 157 – North Carolina – DNP
27. Brandon Kahler – 142 – Kansas State – DNP
28. Jordan Toot – 119 – North Carolina – DNP
29. Becky Perkovich – 0 – Undecided – DNP

Some people might think that I need to explain why somebody with my nearly infinite basketball knowledge could have fared so poorly, but I will not defend my lowly ranking. Truth is that my goal is just to beat Russell and the fact that I didn’t this year means that I will have to try harder next year. I cannot let RMK get the best of me two years in a row!

Even though the dust has barely settled on this year’s NCAA tournament, I am already very excited for next year’s season. I think that the Cyclones will be even better next season and I can’t wait to see them prove me right. I guess until the season begins anew, I will look forward to the Spring Football Game that is only days away!

Roundball Oracles Year 8

It is the time of the year known as March Madness. That, of course means it is also time for me to run my annual NCAA Tournament Pool.

It is open to all interested parties (I’ll take a few uninterested parties as well) regardless of their basketball knowledge. After all, this pool was won by a woman last year* and the 3 years before that is was won by a dude living in Taiwan. You couple that with the fact that somebody with my immense knowledge of the greatest sport ever invented has yet to bring the title home to Union Street means that there is a certain degree of luck involved, so you shouldn’t be too intimidated by my intimate knowledge of the pick and roll.

As always there is no entrance fee. The winner does get a trophy. The only thing one has to risk is pride.

Pride, it would be pointed out by C.S. Lewis is the greatest sin, so you are out of excuses for not getting in to the fray with the combatants from last year.

2011 Final Standings

1. Carrie Baier
2. Jesse Howard
3. Linda Toot
4. Dawn Krause
5. Jason Baier
6. Corey Faust
7. Your Humble Narrator
8. Robert Henning
9. Russell Kennerly
10. Andree Jauhari
11. Nate Buckingham
11. Tim Peterson
13. Lowell Davis
14. Nader Parsaei
15. Mark Wolfram
16. Shaun Kirsch
17. Frank Meiners

The pool of entrants atrophied last year slightly, so I hope to garner more participants this year so all you have to do to get in is email me at:

bennett@photography139.com

And I’ll email you instructions and in no time you’ll be on the road to having your name on the Plaque of Immortals:

Previous Champions

2011 – Carrie Baier
2010 – Mark Wolfram
2009 – Mark Wolfram
2008 – Mark Wolfram
2007 – Tim Peterson
2006 – William McAlpine
2005 – William McAlpine

*I hope that sounded at least half as sexist as I hoped it would, but already two members of the fairer sex have thrown their hat into the arena.

RWPE Y2 #42 – PATHS

An old timey contributor came back to the fold this week. Hopefully she makes it a consistent habit down the homestretch of the failed Random Weekly Photo Experiment.



Dawn Krause of Impassioned Versifier


Christopher D. Bennett


Mike Vest of Waxen Media

You might be wondering if I am going to contribute a picture of my dog or bunny every week for the last 10 weeks of this failure.

What if I do?

This week’s theme:

LOVE

Last year’s submissions for LOVE:

LOVE – 2010

Hopefully a few more people can submit a picture of something or somebody that they love this week. I hate to think there isn’t very much love on the outskirts of my world.

Giant Steps

I hate the phrase “things happen for a reason” more than I hate any other phrase in the world. That doesn’t mean that I don’t necessarily believe in fate, but for the most part I don’t like fate. Its plans run contrary to my plans, no matter how hard I work on my plans. So fate can go suck an egg.

However, sometimes fate works out in my favor, even though I don’t know it.

One of those fate just screwed me over, but it ended up working out pretty well for me moments was when my wheel flew off my car on my way to Minnesota a few weeks back. I had a pretty sweet vacation planned, but it all went into the ditch with my wheel and more money than I care to think about.

I rescheduled my vacation for the last week in August. That movement of my vacation just a few days allowed me to complete Operation Puppy sooner than I anticipated.

I knew when I finally got a puppy, it would be while I was on vacation and I didn’t think that I would be taking a vacation for several more months, but I still checked several websites and newspaper (okay newspaper websites) for the puppy that I wanted. A female golden retriever.

A simple enough request, but there weren’t many in the area. Then an ad for a bunch of puppies showed up in the Des Moines Register.

I wrote them and they gave me the sad news, all of their female puppies were probably claimed. 2 were for sure. The other two were most likely claimed.

I wrote them back and let them know that if one of the females became available, I wanted to be at the front of the list. That was on a Wednesday. I resigned myself to the fact that I wouldn’t be getting a puppy for several more weeks or months.

Then on Friday they wrote me to tell me that they thought that one of the females might be coming available, but could not make any promises.

I made plans to drive up near Hubbard on Saturday to see the puppies. I figured that it would be a fruitless trip, but it wouldn’t hurt to see some puppies. The cutest most adorable kind of puppy: golden retrievers!

Then on Saturday morning I got an email saying that they had a female for me.

That afternoon Jason, Alexis, and I drove up to see the puppies. I put down a deposit and set up a day and time to come pick up my puppy. I worked it out so that I could pick her up on the Wednesday of my vacation as I came back down from Minnesota.

The next step was coming up with a name. I struggled with a name, but eventually with the help of friends a name was found. Here are some of the suggestions I received:

Willy: Cuddles or Miss Wiggles
Faust: Steele & Melanie
Jen: Mila
Jill: Daisy
Sara: Astrid, Mahtob and then she sent me a list of about 200 other suggestions.
Carla: Chloe, then she went out and bought a puppy and named it Chloe.

But it was actually a suggestion by Derrick that put me on the road to the name. While we were sitting on a bench at the State Fair resting, he asked if there was a female character from a Kubrick movie that I liked. I have to confess that Kubrick movies aren’t filled with extremely strong female characters. If you take out the prostitute from Eyes Wide Shut or the sniper from Full Metal Jacket, that really leaves you with Lolita and I’m not naming a dog after Lolita.

I toyed with the idea of Kubrick and then Coltrane as a name, but those were just too male sounding names. I was stalled.

Then fate took a hand again. Every morning I run shuffle on Media Player and then post whatever the first song that comes up to Twitter. Now, I know that nobody in the world cares at all what song I am listening to during that exact moment of the day. I do it as a reminder to the world that I have better taste in music than they do.

On August 24th a Miles Davis song was the song that shuffle landed on and I posted the following to Twitter:

“In a Silent Way/It’s About That Time…”-Miles Davis-In A Silent Way-If I were getting a male (puppy), I would name it Miles, Coltrane or Kubrick.”

Dawn replied to my tweet with this tweet:

“How about Naima? Unusual & fits the jazz theme…”

It was a great idea and while I marinated on the idea for a couple of days, in the end, I decided it was too great of an idea to pass up. So I named my puppy after one of my favorite songs by one of my favorite musicians.

I had a name and a week later I had a puppy. Here are a few of the pictures from my first few days with Naima:




















Next week’s Wednesday randomness will feature pictures from the mini family reunion I hosted Labor Day weekend.

Pufferbilly Days Photo Contest

These are the pictures I entered in the Pufferbilly Days Photo Contest and the person that selected the picture:



Derrick Gorshe


Jen Gorshe


Russell Kennerly


Dawn Krause


Scottie D.

The Girl in the Blue Skirt
Rebecca Peterson

Thanks to everybody who took their time and energy to select pictures for me this year!

The picture that Dawn chose got 2nd Place in Black & White. My original intent for next year’s selectors was to bring back all of the people that had chose an award winning photo in the past few years, but my fire for photo contests has kind of been extinguished. Not that I might not reconsider, but I think that this might have been my last photo contest. Or at the very least the last time I enter the Pufferbilly Days Photo Contest.

RWPE Y2 #30 – NIGHT

I’ll just confess that my picture this week was not the intended picture. But I did what I could after I had some kind of memory card failure where I lost my original picture.

Here are the submissions for NIGHT:


WEEK 30 - NIGHT - CHRISTOPHER D. BENNETT
Christopher D. Bennett

IMAGE LOST
Dawn Krause

WEEK 30 - NIGHT - MIKE VEST
Mike Vest A

WEEK 30 - NIGHT - MIKE VEST
Mike Vest B

Next week’s theme will be:

LEADING LINES

A look back at last year’s submissions.

LEADING LINES – 2010

I am going on vacation next week, so next Monday at noon the theme for next week will publish, but none of the pictures will be published until I return from my sabbatical. Unless you get your picture in by Friday.

Post No. 1,101

It is time once again for me to to do a random look at some of the statistics on the website.

First up is what are the 10 Most Popular Images in the Artistic Galler.

This one is actually somewhat of a shocker. A picture of Brandon has went from nowhere to be the most popular picture and the long time reigning champ Outburst of the Soul has fallen all the way to a tie for 6th Place. Although admittedly, I think spammers might have something to do with the rather large shakeup in the standings.


Brandon Kahler Senior Pictures
1. Brandon Senior Picture

Johnathan Stensland Senior Pictures
2. Johnathan Senior Picture


3. Battered School Bus – Hamlin, Iowa


4. Self-Portrait

Jen Smoking
5. Jen Between Sets of an UnHingd Show

UnHingd Publicity Still Alpha
6. UnHingd Publicity Still

2006 Pufferbilly Days Photo Contest - Outburst of the Soul
6. Outburst of the Soul

2008 Iowa State Fair Photography Salon - 1900>
8. 1900

Rebecca Peterson
8. Becca – Senior Picture

Piano Ruins
10. Abandoned Piano – McCallsburg, Iowa

There has also been quite a shakeup in the Snapshots Gallery Top Ten.

Here are the 10 Most Popular Pictures in the Snapshots Gallery:


Iowa State vs. Nebraska
1. Me White Trashing It

Iowa State vs. Nebraska
2. ISUCFVMB

Be Aggressive!
3. Alexis Cheerleading

Inebriated Saints Concert
4. Shannon and I at an Inebriated Saints Show

The Big Jesus Road Trip
5. Jesse and I with the World’s Largest Cheeto

Mother's Day - 2009
6. Logan’s Tree-man

The Big Jesus Road Trip
7. Jesse and I at the Surf Ball Room

The Big Jesus Road Trip
8. Jesse Endorsing the Bob’s Dog

Iowa State Spring Game - 2009
8. 2009 ISU Spring Game

Shannon at Backbone State Park
10. Shannon Reading Map at Backbone

Eastern Iowa Road Trip - 2006
10. Jesse and I in Clinton

Finally, a look at the Top Ten People to either contribute or be written about in An Artist’s Notebook.

1. Jesse – 163 – (+20)
2. Jay – 151 – (+7)
3. Shannon – 146 – (+6)
4. Derrick – 123 – (+6)
5. Teresa – 109 – (+13)
6. Jen – 107 – (+6)
7. Willy – 101 – (+8)
8. Sara – 96 – (+8)
9. Vest – 80 – (+19)
10. Dawn – 73 – (+9)

Wondering who the biggest movers were outside of the Top Ten?

1. Dad (+19)
2. Carla (+14)
3. Jill (+10)

In case you were interested in what the standings looked like 100 posts ago:

Journal Entry One-Thousand