Tvindy

Ancient TV Pics

Recently I got a bunch of old negatives scanned at ScanCafe.They were pictures that I had taken on a very inexpensive camera when I was between six and eight. Today I'll share with you my adventures in photographing the TV.

The image below shows our first color television. If you look closely at the screen, you'll see that the program being aired is The Munsters, with Lilly and Herman in bed.

I have a vague memory of my mother telling me that it wouldn't turn out, because of the reflection from the flash. I decided to try again without the flash, my logic being that one of the two pictures would probably be acceptable. This is the result with no flash:

Clearly the first photo is the winner, although you can still clearly see the contents of the screen in the second, which is the end credits to the Munsters. It is truly astonishing to me how blind that camera was without a flash for indoor photography.

This final photo (of another TV set in the house) was a decades-long mystery to me. The original print was not clear enough or large enough for me to ever be able to determine what was on the screen. It looked like some sort of odd tropical fish. Once I saw the 21st-century scan of it, I very quickly recognized it for what it was. Can you identify the program?

Sketchpad

While sorting through the contents of old boxes, I came across a very old sketchpad of mine. Carbon dating reveals that it was used when I was twelve. The following are two of the more intriguing images:

Romanian Presentation

As most of you probably already know by now, I study Romanian at the U of O through the Yamada Language Center. The curriculum requires that every class put on some sort of presentation for the other classes at the end of each term. Last quarter, I put together my own presentation. (There were only two students in the class.) It was the first time I used my iPod photo to do an in-class presentation. I made up some slides and then showed them on the TV. My teacher liked what I did and said I should make a permanent written version of it, so that's what I've done here. Please bear in mind when reading it that I know my scholarship is kind of sloppy (no footnotes, gross generalizations, a few sprinkles of BS), but most of the other classes just put on skits. The other student in my class taught the audience to do the Hokey Pokey in Romanian.

My First Romanian Composition

Today my Romanian teacher needed to give me something to do while she worked with the lower-level students. She took a couple of her six-year-old's toys out and told me to write an essay describing and comparing the two cats. This is what I wrote:

Două pisici sunt aici. Una este mare şi una nu este mare. Este mică. O pisică mică nu este un caîne, şi o pisică mare nu este paîne. Un leu nu este aici.

Me No Tired

I got up sometime yesterday morning and haven't slept since. The fact that I am still awake and alert is kind of alarming. But I have been remarkably productive. Many hours were spent last night working on a take-home final. I can't believe I did almost all of that writing in one night. Well, I'm in no condition to blog, so I'll just let you read the answers I wrote to the exam. The instructions, and my diagram for question B1 can be seen by clicking on the thumbnails. The tome I wrote last night can be accessed here. Enjoy!

More Old Stuff

Here's an old site of mine I quickly whipped up in 1999 after returning from a five-month backpacking trip in southern Africa:

http://geocities.com/tvindy/

I never did finish it, and it has remained unchanged for about five years, but it's still got some interesting stuff. Most people like the page about the penguins. (That was the first time I ever used a non-scrolling background.)

Another Paper

While I'm recuperating and catching up on my studies, feel free to peruse the paper I wrote for one of my Spanish classes. Probably that's what made me sick in the first place.

German Club Site

Way back in 2000 I was an officer in the Ball State German Club. My main contribution to the club was the creation of a website, which is still up and can be viewed here. In the end it was a disappointment, because almost never would a German student consult it, even though, at that time, it had its own domain name. For some reason, members of language clubs never visit their club's site. And the next two administrations failed to update or maintain it.

Still, it's an impressive website, representing dozens of hours of work. To find out more about the officers, you can click on each side of the rotating cube. Also recommended is the link entitled "Die Physiker" which leads to another related site I did documenting the German Club play for that year and in which I landed a starring rôle. (I played the part of a spy pretending to be a mental patient who believed he was Isaac Newton.)

Since I no longer attend Ball State, and the site is hosted on the university servers, it will probably soon disappear. Enjoy it now while you still can!

My Great Poem

Once again it's the day of the week when I post some old writing or creative work from my past. All the good stuff has already been posted. Now I'm just scraping the bottom of the barrel. Just when I think the barrel has been cleaned out, I find another patch of crud stuck way down on the bottom.

Today I will post a never-before published poem I wrote when I was ten. It is the second poem I ever wrote. (The first one was written in second grade and was something along the lines of a cat wearing a hat that sat on a mat that was flat.)

So without further ado:

Once there was a piece of shit,
That lived in someone's big fat pit.
One day someone had to shit,
Only the shit wouldn't fit.
So they took some Ex-lax
And a bowl of tacks,
But all they got was a bunch of cracks.

The genius of this poem is that you can substitute any two-syllable name for the word "someone" and have the poem be about them.

None of my friends was ever that impressed with my creation, and it was even pointed out to me that it didn't really make sense. Therefore when I was eleven, I rewrote the last three lines as follows:

So they bought some Ex-lax
And paid the sales tax,
And the shit split.

Strangely, even with the improvements, it never really caught on.