This week’s photo challenge is to take a photo of a sunset. Ironic that I just posted a photo the other day of a sunrise.

My best sunset photo was not taken this week, or even with our spiffy Nikon D90, but a year and a half ago with my wife’s Canon Powershot point-and-shoot.

Golden sunset along the Charles River in Waltham, MA

You can check out more sunset photos in my dedicated Flickr set for sunsets.

(Plus I’d be remiss to forget my crappy “sunset meditation” photos taken by my feature phone from three years ago.)

As for the posting here more often, I would love to, but I have a couple of big projects I’m working on offline. However, I am compiling a list of significant events that have happened this year, and plan to (at least) do a wrap-up and share some insights.

Please let me know what you think of the photos!

You can click on the icon in the lower right of this black box to make this full screen.

A slug slips into a pool of beer in Kathryn Olmstead’s garden. (Photo for the Bangor Daily News by Kathryn Olmstead.)

This is what happens when a University of Maine professor — my former adviser there and the editor who published my first story in Echoes magazine — retires. She experiments with beer. In her garden, with two fists clenching brown bottles of Bud, she slugs it down the garden patch.

Kathryn Olmstead, who hasn't aged since the day I met her, when I was in tenth grade at Houlton High. (Photo by John Clarke Russ of the Bangor Daily News.)

Read more about it in Kathryn Olmstead’s latest column at the Bangor Daily News: Garden slugs prefer Budweiser over imported brands. It’s from just over a week ago, and I just heard about it today on NPR’s weekly radio news quiz show, Wait Wait, Don’t Tell Me.

More info:

• Echoes magazine, the Northern Maine Journal of Rural Culture
• Kathryn Olmstead columns for the Bangor Daily News

Fellow blogger and writer Karen Carlson reviewed “Tiger” recently and I comment there with some of my thoughts, including how this short story is the next in the line of several tiger-themed stories, which marched into 2011 following Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother by Amy Chua and The Tiger’s Wife by Téa Obreht.

I understand Karen’s lament on the writing style, although I did not dislike it. I could feel the longing of Essie, the Catholic Indian matriarch, abandoned in Bombay by her daughter who married an American and has two daughters of her own in the States. I understood the daughter, Marian, who visited her mother on principle and then felt the anguish of returning home on the heels of hearing horrible news of her mother’s health. The half-assed (?) attempt of Essie’s husband at consoling her, at being there for her at a key moment when in all other moments he has been noticeably absent. And, as Karen astutely pointed out, how her grandchildren cry when stray kittens are nowhere to be seen on the day the family leaves, but they do not cry for their grandmother.

Here are some wonderful photos of the wedding, taken by our unofficial official photographer, Allyson Fauver.

To enlarge any photo, click on a thumbnail below. Click the enlargement to move on to the next photo.

The New York Times had that Elizabeth Taylor obit ready for so long that the writer of the piece actually died six years ago. No joke.

Not sure if this is true, but it IS likely. Yes, the media DO prepare obituaries well in advance of a famous or well-known person’s death. Just in case. Gotta be prepared.

Literal typeface

From: Hey, You’ve Got Some Font on Your Face: Typefaces, Literally – The Atlantic

For you typophiles out there, Spanish design company Atipo created this series of posters as an homage to four typefaces: Helvetica Bold, Carousel Medium, Caslon Italic, and Clarendon Bold. Inspired by Erwin Orlaf’s Paradise Portraits — a haunting series of clownish painted faces— designers Raul Garcia Del Pomar and Ismael Gonzalez smeared black and white makeup on models’ faces.

The more that you read...

the more that you read, the more you’ll know,
the more you know, the more places you’ll go.