Caves. Ah yes, the humor of the unexpected. Yes, yes there has been a mostly naked individual in high heels on this blog since Friday. I’m glad he’s here. I can add him to the unending list of people in bear suits, drag queens, costumed dogs and joke telling acrobats (among others) that I have photographed over the years. Unlike all the rest of those things, the mostly naked high heeled wearing dance enthusiast has brought this blog the biggest audience it has ever had.

So, while I have everyone’s attention, I’d like to say something and that thing is… I LOVE NEW HAMPSHIRE!!! Oh why not? Anyway, so yeah, so that is my big announcement. I love New Hampshire.

Yesterday I watched the stats on this blog jump to stratospheric heights after the publication of the naked man photo. I did this from inside a cave. Nope. But I did this in New Hampshire on an extremely great trip I took to the Lost River Caves and Gorge. ADVERTISING!!! I’d mention them here anyway because the whole thing was spectacular.

I visited the White Mountains in 2012. I go on vacation with my parents sometimes and my mom told me “we’re going to New Hampshire” and my reaction was “NEW HAMPSHIRE???” Seriously. What is there? Oh, I soon learned. What an amazing place that I had never visited despite living on the East Coast of America for my entire life. Yesterday I visited a network of caves that are part of the White Mountains and got to see some parts of the White Mountains.

When I heard that the trip would involve visiting caves, I thought we would go inside a wide cave and look around, as I once had on a trip to Poland. Good lord, this was so different. The caves were TINY. There was one I couldn’t even go into because I was too big (fewer candy bars from now on!!!). In the other ones, you’d basically walk through on your hands and knees and there would be all sorts of things to see or there would be a view at the top of it. All together it was quite beautiful and added an active thing to the whole thing. Not just “look and see” and look and see and kind of participate.

Anyway, enough about caves. Let’s see some photos of inside the caves and the magnificent White Mountains:

You know, just another day at work in Downtown Crossing.

So today marked the ceremonious end of a month where I only ended up getting soaked in water once and walked 180 miles. No, not continuously, but my little Garmin told me that is how many steps I walked this month. I’m going for 200 miles next month!!!

Nah, I’m kidding. Well, it was nearing the end of the day and I was walking back to work to take care of something for a couple of minutes. As I neared work, I noticed a weird commotion going on. Some kind of performance seemed to be taking place in front of Macy’s. I figured it was some kind of living statue or maybe some acrobats. Well, it most certainly was not that.

It was, well, what you see in the photos below. Brave soul I have to say. I can’t walk in heels half as well as this guy and well, it was all fun and games until the fuzz showed up and he rolled his speaker away, to go and entertain others, I guess.

It was fun while it lasted, man in thong. God love you, wherever you are:
(Edited to add that I was informed that his name is Qween Amor.)
God love you Qween Amor:

Years ago, even before I started this blog, which celebrated its eighth birthday in April, I was a political reporter in Washington DC. In a way, this was the job I had always wanted, watching Sunday morning news shows with my parents for as long as I could remember.

Then I actually went to Washington. Seeing all of them up close was kind of a strange experience and not in the way that most people would think. On television, they are larger than life. When you see most of them in the flesh, they become human sized. Any politician that mattered in American political life between 2000 and 2005, I saw. Dick Cheney, politics aside, was a stocky, stooped man with hunched shoulders. George Bush (yes I saw him too) was kind of goofy and moreover, quite tired looking. Trent Lott looked like his hair had never moved one inch even for one minute. God rest his soul Strom Thurmond who began serving in Congress when Eisenhower was president and lived long enough to have a website looked, unsurprisingly, very old when I saw him. Tom Daschle, majority leader of the senate for a good part of the 2000s is a rather short man. Ted Kennedy was a particular favorite of mine. Quite a wonderful speaker who was redder in person that I had imagined, he always traveled with his dog. I saw President Clinton a couple of times too. One time, everyone on Pennsylvania avenue just stopped doing whatever they were doing to wave to him. He always seemed quite thrilled to be doing his job.

I gave up the political job and obviously no longer run into Trent Lott while in an elevator anymore. But I do like Boston’s politicians. Now I don’t mean to stir up any sort of political talk up here. I’m not really into that on this blog, but Boston’s politicians, no matter which side of the political aisle you are on, are like holdovers from another era. Michael Dukakis actually rides the green line. Tom Menino met about 80 percent of Boston’s residents. My favorite Boston politician (interesting relative aside) is Billy Bulger. A sassy, compact Irishman with a tongue like a razor.

Boston politicians really seem to revel in getting out there and shaking hands with people and actually meeting them. Does it mean everything in this city is perfect? Well, no, not really? Are our government services perfect? No. But somehow, these guys seem genuine. How do I know this? I went to the opening of the Boston Public Market today, attended by Marty Walsh, Boston’s mayor and Charlie Baker, the governor of Massachusetts.

They were both there to mark the opening of the market, with Baker actually purchasing something from the market. As I found with the other politicians, Walsh was different in person than I had thought. First of all, he’s an extremely tall man, taller than I had ever even imagined. He also seemed like he wanted to meet people. He stopped and took a photo with every single person there. I’m sure he takes hundreds of photos of every year, so this isn’t anything new to him. But he seemed genuine.

And now, finally, the photos:

I went to the sand sculpture festival on Friday in Revere. There will of course be a longer entry about that upcoming, as soon as the words flow from my fingers onto this blog, but I did get this one (what I think to be) wonderful photo:

At first I looked at it and I thought “eh, cliche.” Who cares? No use. And it was out of focus anyway, so I was going to trash it, but then I looked again and noticed how kind of off kilter and weird it is, but also kind of wonderful at the same time.

Further fun with the wide angle lens:

Somehow this title popped into my mind when I snapped this photo today. I’m not exactly sure why. Because Vermeer obviously didn’t take photos. He painted, again, obviously not in black and white.

But anyway, yeah. Vermeer me:

Peculiar title, I know, but I’ll get to why it is like that in a second.

I’m going to use this space here to write a bit, if you all don’t mind. I’m going to write about a very important subject. That very important subject — Instagram, which by the way, gets a capital I because it is now a proper noun. Anyway, Instagram. So here goes. Instagram came along and as usual, I was ready to hate it. Why would I like something that other people like? Why would I do what other people did? Why would I join some kind of thing that other people had? How boring?

Let me get my philosophical objections to Instagram first of all. Photographically speaking, how hard it is to compose in a square? Instagram does all of the work for you. Composing in a rectangle, you have to be perfect all the time and you have more space to play with. Compose in a square and you have less space to play with and a better chance of getting a good photo. And those moronic filters. First, they are effects, not filters. I hate when people call them filters. A filter is a colored piece of glass that is placed on the front of a camera to change the contrast on a photo. Instagram’s “filters” are effects. They may highlight contrast but mostly they contribute to the uniformity of the photos. Oh look, my Eiffel tower looks like you Eiffel tower. Let’s be friends.

Now let’s talk about the psychological effects of Instagram. Before I got Instagram, I thought it was just a brag wire where people could talk about how great their lives were and how their sunsets were much more awesomer than my sunsets and their sushi just colored that much better than mine. But seriously. There is really the great danger of that. It is a danger. I recently read a story about a young college girl who kept comparing herself to what her friends were doing on Instagram and ended up committing suicide. I looked at her Instagram and I wanted to be her. She looked so happy.

OK, done preaching. Now I have Instagram and I’ve discovered that I get no great fits of envy from the thing. If anything, it is good to keep up with fashion designers I like, gymnasts and some celebrities. I don’t follow any Kardashians, but I do follow Scott Disick, because I am a glutton for punishment.

I also follow two hilarious pages. One is called “You Did Not Eat That” which shows skinny fashionista type people not eating things and I just followed another one called Satiregram. And this is how we tie back, in this late paragraph to the title. Satiregram is just an entire feed of written statements about all the banal shit that people post on their Instagram, me included. Sunsets, clouds, fireworks, food, dogs, etc. All there. Hence my title. I was photographing some yellow flowers today and I thought “how banal is this?” Just some flowers. I mean yeah, beautiful, but not beautiful like the Keytar bear or a man wearing a gorilla mask yelling “Free Tom Brady.” Not that kind of beautiful. Just like normal level of beautiful.

Satire-gram satirical if you will. Yellow flowers. You know yellow flowers thrown off center from the cliche machine I carry with me every day:

Nights on the Charles River watching movies. Does it get any better?