Posts
03.18.2010My wife doesn’t share my compulsion for jumping into camera frame with, well, just about everything. But she does dig visiting O.T.I.S. sites with me. She’s been my companion on probably 95% of what’s on this site and, since she’s into photography, is responsible for most of the pictures you see on the site, as well. O.T.I.S. doesn’t have a lot of scenes for you to look behind, but here’s one of them...
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Anti-Gravity Monuments
New England03.11.2010
Scattered throughout the campuses of various colleges along the East Coast are a series of oversized tombstones. Far from marking the giant dead (since that would be silly), these memorials are monuments to anti-gravity. That’s right. Large upright granite slabs have been erected in multiple places of higher learning as testaments to all the hard work and diligent research that went into the invention of the world-changing technology that helped us defeat gravity...
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Photo Essay: Patrick Dougherty's So Inclined
Middlebury, VT03.05.2010
As promised, here is the third of the three Patrick Dougherty art installations that I've visited so far, the first two being Square Roots and the second Twisted Sisters. This one, So Inclined, was created in front of the Mahaney Center for the Arts building at Middlebury College in Middlebury, VT, in September of 2007...
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Photo Essay: Patrick Dougherty's Twisted Sisters
Norton, MA02.27.2010
About a year and a half ago, I wrote about stumbling upon a strange work of art at Brown University in Rhode Island. It was a building-sized series of hollow geometric shapes made out of thousands of dried and woven tree saplings. At the time, I threw around words like hobbit-like and Ewokian. These days, I can throw around Wild Things-like, and be a lot closer to the mark, even if that gives you images of Neve Campbell and Denise Richards in a pool. After researching the artist, Patrick Dougherty, I checked out some of his work on purpose. For example, Twisted Sisters, on the campus of Wheaton College in Norton, MA...
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Temples of Abu Simbel
Southern Egypt02.22.2010
Abu Simbel is the location in southern Egypt of a pair of sandstone temples that were built by Ramses II, the 13th Century (BC) pharaoh who ruled for almost seven decades and built tons of cool stuff that Percy B. Shelley later made fun of in his poem Ozymandias...
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Photo Essay: Woodman Institute Museum
Dover, NH02.16.2010
The Woodman Institute Museum in Dover, NH, is one of those places to go when you want to see a polar bear, Abraham Lincoln's saddle, and a Nazi flag all in one day. The contents of this three-story historical home are exactly what I would have purchased had I been bequeathed the large sum of money that jumpstarted this institution a hundred years ago...
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Jonestown Massacre Mass Grave
Oakland, CA02.08.2010
So I did the one thing you’re not supposed to do when visiting San Francisco, CA. I crossed the Bay Bridge into Oakland. That’s how much I wanted to see the mass grave of the Jonestown Massacre. So put your funeral face on...it's going to be one of those O.T.I.S. articles...
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Jim Henson Statue and Memorial Garden
College Park, MDPeople do important things every day. Few, though, have done anything as God-like as imbuing a limp piece of fabric with an animate life that has, in turn, enriched the actual lives of millions in this world. Although I don’t live there anymore, I grew up in Maryland, and while I rarely have reason to be proud of that, near the top of the list of the reasons is that MD was the first and so far only one to honor him with an anthropomorphic piece of stone graven in his image...
