Personal Power: 2026

Sunday, February 15, 2026

More Crass Manipulative A.I.

AI-generated image of two supposedly Irish men singing a song, one with a Martin guitar (on the left) and another holding what appears to be a pint of Guinness. They appear to be standing outside in the Irish countryside

A couple of days ago a friend re-posted another's Bluesky post which linked to a song on YouTube. The song is obstenibly an Irish interpretation of Bruce Springsteen's "Streets of Minneapolis." The above image, which serves as the thumbnail for the video, suggested to me that I was going to hear two guys from Ireland. Realizing it was a still image and not a video, I listened to the song while doing something else. I even kind of liked the version more than the original Springsteen version, and I was just about to share it on Facebook when I noticed on the page's sidebar recommendations that there was a "France version," which I also clicked on and listened to for a few seconds.

That's when I noticed that there were even more versions, none of which I'm providing links for, only screenshots.

Along the way, I found another account which appears to be posting the same kind of slop.

And another.

As regards the first handful above, I did a web search to see if Ethan Gontar was an actual person. At the moment, I'm not sure I can say so for sure. I found a website as well as social media sites using that name, but "his" website looks very much like it could be AI-produced. If indeed Gontar is a real person, it seems that video production—not music—is his thing.

I found an interview with what initially appears to be a legitimate news site, but neither the interview nor any of the other stories I've clicked through to on the site have bylines. They're all attributed to Ldn-Post... all 22,624 of them, which suggests to me that the entire site is AI-generated. I mean... the opening paragraph:

Ethan Gontar is an Israel-based musician, composer, producer, and a singer-songwriter. We’ve been trusting that Ethan will enlighten us additional regarding his work strategies, what moves him, his opinion on thoughts, and whether he jumps at the chance to work alone or in a gathering for quite a while. We visited with Ethan for some time and got to hear some interesting things from him.

What reasonably intelligent journalist writes like this?!?

"We’ve been trusting that Ethan will enlighten us additional"?

"his opinion on thoughts"?

"jumps at the chance to work alone or in a gathering"?

So this is where we are. YouTube accounts which are full of artificially produced music, likely being mass-produced with very little effort, all for the purpose of monetizing off the music of others. And in the case of Springsteen's "Streets of Minneapolis", capitalizing on a highly emotional moment in time.

Currently, the "Irish Folk Version" has over 120 thousand views; the "Irish Female Duet" (which features a trio in the photo!) has over 57K views; the "Rock Version" has over 33K; the "Live Version" has over 16K. The other versions are in the thousands. Two more "covers" were added to the page today: What if "Here Comes The Sun" were an Irish folk song? and What If 'Yellow Submarine' Was a Country Song? While the view counts on those is rather low at the moment, no doubt thousands of Facebook users will be clicking on them and sharing them, completely unaware of what's going on.

* * *

If you're interested in commenting, please sign up at Blogger to do so. The spammers have yet again found a way to ruin something, so I've configured this blog to accept only comments I've read first.

Wednesday, February 11, 2026

Toledo Window Box

photograph of George Carlin's Toledo Window Box LP
George Carlin's Toledo Window Box

Note: I originally wrote this to describe a "date from hell," but the more I thought about it, I decided that it was unfair for me to pin such a mean sounding label on that evening since ultimately, it was just about two very different people with very different interests who spent a few hours together under circumstances that for both of us were—at the very least—uncomfortable. And comical.

I was not yet 20, and at the time was pretty green in the world of dating. Nonetheless, I confidently bought two tickets to see George Carlin in Toledo, Ohio for his Toledo Window Box tour at Toledo's Masonic Auditorium on 2 March 1975. I was working at Commercial Aluminum Cookware (now Calphalon) in downtown Toledo at the time, and the first woman I'd asked to accompany me—Valerie Bennett, who worked at National Super Service in the same building and whose brother worked with me—turned me down. My across-the-street neighbour, Tina Estrada (whose given name, I just discovered, was Caroline), had introduced me to a friend of hers, a beautician, I think, and very possibly had suggested we go out, so in somewhat of a moment of desperation, and a desire to not waste the ticket, I asked her to go with me.

At the time, I was driving an AMC Gremlin X, and just about everything on the car was falling apart at the same time. Both the driver-side door latch and the rear window latch had broken and as a tentative fix while I searched for a new car, I held them both shut with one of those orange-brown canvas straps typically used to strap a refrigerator to a two-wheel cart, or hold furniture in place inside of a moving van. I had to get in and out via the passenger side door. It was quite the sight to see.

When I arrived at her house to pick her up, she wasn't ready, and, in fact, had forgotten about the date entirely, but to her credit, instead of blowing me off, she went upstairs to get ready. I waited patiently and chatted with her mother in the duration, and when she came down the stairs, I was a bit... shocked? She was dressed in a sparkly silvery lamé big bells pantsuit and wore matching sparkly silver four- or five-inch platform shoes. This was topped off with a fur coat.

For George Carlin.

I was wearing a regular shirt and jeans.

Maybe, maybe, maybe she had no idea who George Carlin was. Maybe she was expecting a rock concert. I can't recall how it came to be that I invited her, actually. Did Tina give me her phone number and I called her? Did I ask her while she and Tina were hanging out one day? Regardless, I'm certain that we didn't talk much about the show in advance other than my asking her, and telling her where and when it would be. I guess I assumed she'd remember.

I have no real memory about the rest of the night except that the opening musical comedy duo was pretty funny, as was Carlin, of course. I can't recall if she laughed a single time throughout the show because I was still somewhat in a state of shock. I have no idea if she enjoyed herself.

After the show, I climbed back into my side of the car, and I took her home. I don't even recall if we talked much about the show or anything else. It was the last time I saw her, and I can only imagine that she probably does consider that night as her date from hell.

* * *

Thursday, February 05, 2026

vanity plates

RJ-44 (courtesy of Christine Power)

my mom's brother
tells the story
of his father
my grandfather
who had vanity plates

rj-44

his initials
plus the year
he regained his
drivers license
after having it
taken away
likely for
drunk driving

rj lived in manhattan
and the story goes
that one day
while stopped
at a red light
someone came up
to his window
and asked him
if he could buy
the rights
to rj-44

that someone
was reggie jackson
number 44
of the
new york yankees

he was refused

* * *

I originally wrote the above poem (or whatever you'd like to call it) based on a prompt I saw on a website I frequently visit, then thought I'd post it here as well, along with a photo of the license plate which my brother Jim obtained after our grandfather, Roy Newton Jones, died in November of 1980. As noted above, we learned about the supposed encounter between Reggie Jackson and grandpa from my mom's brother, Skip, who I can only assume learned about it from grandpa. The story is the reason Jim came home from the funeral in New York with the plate.

A few years ago, I contacted a friend of mine in New York City who used to work for Major League Baseball to see if there might be a way to contact Reggie Jackson to check on whether or not the story was true, but all she could suggest was that I try his Instagram account, which I did, but I got no response.

True or not, it's a great story.

Edit to add: I found an email address on Jackson's Instagram bio website and have sent a query, so perhaps I'll update this soon.

* * *

Monday, January 19, 2026

6 January 2001

Windows
Ducks still gather
not far from the bridge
at the river’s bend.

Snow and frigid air
have narrowed
their hole
in the
ice.

I pass by
as they huddle
and wonder
where they’ll go
when that window
finally
closes.

* * *

Friday, January 16, 2026

Collage

I scanned the negatives for this today. I took the photographs used in this collage in either the summer of 1991 or 1992... leaning towards the latter. They were taken one weekend that Penny and I took the kids to Grand Haven State Park, which runs along the shore of Lake Michigan, about twenty minutes south of Muskegon, Michigan. It's probably the earliest example of my creating not-so-typical "panoramas" with my picture taking. Aside from possibly laying the original prints on top of each other way back then, I'd not thought about creating an actual collage out of them until today.

This second version includes our son, Zachary, but he got up while I was taking the series of photographs, so that's why he appears somewhat to be floating mid-air. Penny also moved a bit during the sequence, as she lowered her left arm and rested it across her right arm before raising it back to her chin. I like them both for different reasons.

At that time in my life, I mostly took pictures of the kids or Penny, or documented family gatherings, which, of course, is why I appear in so few of our family's photographs. I wasn't much of a photographer, really, despite that I had a 35mm camera and had photographed a few weddings. At best, I was a picture taker. Which is not to say that I didn't have ideas about being a photographer. (Many a set of negatives has a frame or two in which I attempted something "artsy"... something that caught my eye for one reason or another.)

In fact, it was about this time that I purchased a used medium format camera, a Mamiya RB67, and shortly after that, an auto-focus Nikon N90, along with a couple of lenses. While the N90 was sort of classified as a serious hobbyist or just-short-of-professional camera, the lenses were adequate only in their combined ability to cover a range from 28mm to 300mm: a Nikkor AF 28-85mm f/3.5-4.5 and a Nikkor AF 75mm-300mm f/4.5-5.6. Neither lens was very fast so therefore not ideal for doing professional work, but I wasn't as informed as I should have been about camera gear when I bought it all.

While writing this, it occured to me that chances are high that I had the N90 by this time as one of the photographs on the same set of negatives was taken by my daughter, and I suspect that since it's in focus, it was the N90. The Nikkormat FTN I'd had been using since 1979 or so (and which I still have) likely would have been a struggle for her to use with her four- or five-year-old hands, especially since it was manual focus.

From the Back Seat

There's a chance, too, that the photographs were taken with Penny's point-and-shoot camera, but judging from the shallow-ish depth-of-field on several other frames (including those which make up the collage), it's not likely.

These negatives have been tucked away in boxes for nearly thirty years—so long that while I recognized the images in the collage, the photograph of me and Penny took me completely by surprise. Mainly because I just have no memory of it, but also because there are so few photographs with both of us in them.

* * *

Monday, January 12, 2026

The Last Christmas

You couldn't possibly tell from the looks on our faces that this would be our last Christmas together as a family. But less than two months later, just before Zachary's tenth birthday, it all would come to a screeching halt.

As I continue to scan negatives from that period in my life—our lives—it is quite difficult to not also continue to process all that happened in the fifteen years leading up to that moment. I recall so many of my own missteps and misdeeds along the way, but mostly, I focus on the lack of real conversation about our marriage. I was, as Maggie Estep has so eloquently put it, an emotional idiot. I was unable to speak to Penny about the things that troubled me, whether it be about work or our relationship. Maybe because I was afraid to appear weak or fragile. Maybe because I was weak. Conversely, she chose not to talk to me, and instead talked to her friends, to an astrologer, and to her therapist. ("My therapist feels sorry for you.") I think she even might have talked to my older brother, who coincidentally left his wife not long before our split.

Anyway, I have been going down this little trip down memory lane for maybe a month or two. It's pretty inevitable, I suppose, to dwell on that period of time as the images appear on my screen, and to think about them and feel something, but instead of continuing to bottle up the thoughts and feelings I've held onto for so many years, I've decided to write about them. I've chosen, however, to not really promote these posts via Facebook... I'll just post and move on. If someone stumbles upon them and reads them, fine, but I'm not going to try to attract eyeballs. These posts are mostly intended for me to put into written form things I perhaps should have been saying with my mouth many years ago.

* * *

Friday, January 09, 2026

28 October 1991

You kissed me this morning
on the lips
I didn't know how to react to that
I would have liked to kiss you too
and hold you
and kiss you again
but I didn't
I couldn't
yes, my feelings (as you say) have been hurt
I feel no different
than a stranger
in this bed
in your life
(hurt feelings indeed!)
"dropped like a tool no longer required"
is more like it
I don't expect that anything I feel
that anything I write or say
has much effect on your life
(but I write and sometimes speak)
I think of you
and us
and this thing we loosely call marriage
I wonder
what do I do?
what can I do to convince you
that I have made changes
significant ones
that I have recognized
things I blinded myself to before
(I think a lot)
then
it hits me
(it always hits me with a clarity
I have never known)
that it
really
really
really doesn't matter
what changes I make
(significant or otherwise)
what feelings I have
what thoughts I conjure
what words I utter—
you will do
what you will do
you will rely on the stars
intellectuals
and counselors
you will believe what they say
because you want to believe them
they will feel sorry for me
you will feel sorry for me
and you will kiss me

* * *

Thursday, January 08, 2026

12 October 1991

I am alone in this bed
I touch you with the trepidation
with which one might put a hand
(or head)
'neath a guillotine knife blade

I am alone in this bed
where once souls danced
now only bodies lie

* * *

The Digitization of Memory

Sometimes I wonder how it is I recall the things I recall. Some of the oddest memories pop into my head when I least suspect them. Case in point: this past week, I recalled a day I had ridden my bike to visit a high school classmate either the summer following our Junior year or possibly the following year. So... either 1972 or 1973. The memory that remains pretty vivid with me is that at some point, we left his house to go to his older brother's place not all that far away. I don't recall the reason we went there as his brother wasn't home, so maybe it was to take his mail in or water plants or something. But while I sat in one of the chairs in the living room, he picked up and showed me a small spray can of mace, the type that postal carriers are known to keep on them in the event of a dog attack. He squirted just a minute amount into the air and it had me gagging. It was amazing how so little could spread so quickly.

I have lots of little memories like that stored in the crevasses of my brain, and they randomly come to the surface for almost no reason at the oddest times.

Another is one that I sort of documented in the above diptych. Because lately I've been doing so much scanning of negatives from photographs taken during the time I was married—mostly of the kids or Penny or family get-togethers—the photographs have spurred memories from those times. But I didn't need to see these two photographs to recall the moment. In fact, it was as I was scanning other negatives that I wondered where this set of negatives were because I had yet to come across them. These two photographs of Penny specifically came to mind, and along with them, the memory of the moment that I long have thought I'd fallen completely in love with her.

Penny and I had just gotten back to her place in Lansing from her parents' house in Laingsburg, which other photographs from that roll reminded me that we had attended her youngest sister's annual Christmas Pageant, a play she put on using her dolls and stuffed animals (featuring Kermit the Frog and Mrs. Beasley). For reasons I can't recall, I wanted to take Penny's picture before she entered the apartment. Maybe it was just how great she looked in her hooded coat against the backdrop of a snowy evening. It might have been that she asked me to. The skirt she wore that night, if memory serves, was one she had recently purchased at a small boutique in Lansing called Kilamanjaro. Again, if memory serves, she had done some artwork for the owner of the boutique, Mattie Robinson, so maybe the skirt was her payment.

What I do recall about the moment was such a small thing, really. Just as I raised the camera to my eye, she told me to hold on. She wanted the dress to be in the photo, so reached down (despite all she was holding) and pulled a small section of it out from under her coat. The photographs memorialized it.

So, I guess that's what I'm referring to as the digitization of memory. Not only am I scanning photographs that are historical visual records of fractions of moments in time, I'm scanning memories of those moments. I could have told this story without the photographs. That is, I didn't need the photographs to recall that moment. But I do like knowing that there is photographic evidence of it.

And now that I'm thinking about it, that moment was also the inspiration for a song I would write many years later:

We were married on a Christmas Day
A very long time ago, I must say
We walked through the snow
And we talked 'til the day turned to night

Time was not friendly, it went too fast
Our future too quickly became our past
It caught me off guard, I thought it would last
That it might

I guess I assumed that you felt the same
It seemed like you could, it seemed you became
A star I could follow, a treasure to claim
As my own

But somehow something clouded my view
I turned my head 'round and I lost track of you
A storm navigated by only a few
Hit my home

So now here we stand at the threshold again
Looking behind us and forward and then
Knowing too well that this might be the end
Of the light

We were married on a Christmas day
A very long time ago, I must say
We walked through the snow and we talked 'til the day
Turned to night

* * *

Tuesday, January 06, 2026

Past Is Present

...or something

Last week, I dusted off and fired up my old Nikon CoolPix 8800 to take it out during what I expected would be a quick trip to the post office, but which ended up being a longer jaunt up to Corona Heights.

It's funny how operating the camera—after having used dSLRs and now my Nikon Z6—was so clunky. First, the screen is about a third of the size of my Z6's and less than a quarter the size of my phone's. Second, it takes so long to write an image to the Compact Flash card—several seconds depending upon the quality of image chosen in settings. I looked at the time stamps of the individual images for the above panorama to find that it took me five minutes to make the sixteen exposures in RAW file mode!

That said, my phone can't zoom in like this (it's a 10x zoom, or 11.8mm to 89mm). I'm guessing that with the fairly small sensor, the 89mm works out to be an equivalent to something like 300mm.

Anyway... I've got but one battery for the camera, so I don't expect I'll be taking it with me when I go out for hours at a time, but I'm considering it for short walks as it's more versatile than the phone, and it's less unwieldy than carrying around the Z6 with several lenses, or one, for that matter. While it doesn't have the fastest of lenses (f/2.8 to f/5.2), it's more than adequate for most stuff I photograph while out on walks anyway. In fact, since I've been working on a couple of projects which involve photographs I took from 2005 to 2007 with the camera, and I wanted to see if it were still viable as an everyday picture-taking device.

Also contributing to this nostalgic bent, I suppose, has been the scanning of negatives and transparencies I've been immersed in for the last several weeks. For a while, many of the pictures I took from day to day were on film, whether with a Rolleicord, a Holga, a couple of Kodak box cameras, or a handful of other vintage cameras I've acquired over the last sixteen years. So many of the photographs I'd taken with the film cameras had floated from my consciousness if I didn't immediately see value in them when I got the film back from the lab, so seeing the images coming up on the screen as I scan them has almost been like seeing them for the first time. And I'm actually pleased with a number of them.

Because I'm nothing if not totally drawn to panoramic images, I even created one with the Holga, likely sometime in 2010. I'm glad I have a record of what that scene looked like before the statue of Christopher Columbus was (rightly) removed.

I took so many photographs with my Rolleicord during the first couple of years I had it that I hadn't spent a whole lot of time looking at them once I got the film back. In many instances, I was most excited to look at only a frame or two at the time, particularly if it was one of my (mostly) street portraits. But now that I've been scanning them and seeing them sort of "up close and personal," I'm re-evaluating their value, and finding more in them than at first glance.

In the first year or so after I received the Rolleicord as a gift from an online friend (whom I later would meet and photograph with the camera—see above photo), I amassed a bunch of expired film to run through it. But the Rolleicord had issues with the film advance mechanism, so I took it to a local camera repair person and for a while, all was well. Then all of a sudden the problem returned. I had a similar problem with a Rolleiflex that I bought on eBay and had that fixed as well, but it also began fouling up shortly afterward, so both cameras fell out of disuse. Since then, the film has gone unused as well, stashed away in the cold confines of the refrigerator.

But... feeling a little bit of a breeze at my back with all the scanning I've been doing, I'm planning to start going out with film again soon. I've had a Holga pinhole camera sitting my my bookshelf for almost as long as I've lived in San Francisco, and I've decided it's time to put a roll in that and give it a try. I also found what looks like a good, working Rolleicord at eBay and I purchased it. I also keep looking at my Nikkormat FTN and my Nikon N90.

So maybe, just maybe, it's out with the new and in with the old!

* * *

Personal Power

Sunday, February 15, 2026

More Crass Manipulative A.I.

Wednesday, February 11, 2026

Toledo Window Box

Thursday, February 05, 2026

vanity plates

Monday, January 19, 2026

6 January 2001

Friday, January 16, 2026

Collage

Monday, January 12, 2026

The Last Christmas

Friday, January 09, 2026

28 October 1991

Thursday, January 08, 2026

12 October 1991

The Digitization of Memory

Tuesday, January 06, 2026

Past Is Present

...or something

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