Ok, this is the last drop. Highlights are a little funky but I thought it still made for an interesting picture, especially the little drop meteor coming in from the upper right.

Actually the drop was leaving but in my infinite lack of wisdom about such things I had the flash set to slow sync, which means the shutter opens and flash fires, and then the shutter stays open for a little while longer. There was enough ambient light to explain the faint trace as the drop kept moving out of frame.

That's also what caused the faint red ghosting around the middle, smaller drop. After the flash it kept expanding.

Keep on learning, that's what I always say...

Here, check out Abel's Water Dancer.

Dear Fellow Snack Food Lover,

First off I must thank whomever brought in the Mixers Cheddar snack mix bag to work yesterday. Wow, “A party in every bag!” Free food is great and free salty snack food at the end of a long day is even better.

It was a happy surprise to find the half empty bag on the kitchen counter this morning. I don’t normally make a habit of eating snacks first thing in the morning but we’d just finished a long hike and the salt was strangely refreshing.

Which brings us to the point of this message.

As I am sure you realize, the snack food industry has been completely revolutionized in the last few decades. Trailer house sized stainless steel machines crank out millions of bags of salty snackiness a day without breaking a sweat. Snack food engineers have harnessed the power of chemical engineering to create “natural flavor” without all of the actual expense and inconsistency of using natural materials. Preservatives, emulsifiers, mono, di, and tri-sodiums lock in all of this pseudo freshness while keeping taste buds longing for even more.

Snack packaging has also undergone radical changes. Ultraviolet light blockers and inert gases help to guarantee that you and I will get the same level of snacktastic enjoyment whether we eat the bag one week or two months after it leaves the factory. And of course the latest in snack technology, the flavor-lock bag, has an integrated ziploc so we can quickly and efficiently seal up that freshness between snackings.

With all of this technology converging to optimize our snack time pleasure you can imagine my surprise to find the bag left wide open on the kitchen counter this morning.

Snacky freshness has left the building.

Yes, “flavor fresh bag” is not a magical code word that invokes an invisible forcefield of protection around our precious salty snacks. It actually has to be CLOSED in order to fulfill the whole flavor fresh trick.

You are probably as surprised as I that the snack food industry isn’t protecting us from ourselves. Surely there’s a chemical solution in sight? A spray-on, melt in your mouth snacky wax coating?

Considering the already burgeoning list of ingredients on yon snacky pack I propose we not invoke the gods of chemical engineering for this one and just close the bag instead.

Thank you.

-Snackmeister Halstead