Are the sticks in a pool of milk? Either it was staged just for the photo, or it’s AI. On something like this I look at focus; two things at the same distance should be equally in focus. The 2nd row donuts are fairly sharp while the sticks are extremely blurry. It’s not certain, but I vote AI on this one.
Looking closely, I believe they’re stuck in a clear plastic tray, which has short, tubular projections, closed on the bottom, to hold the sticks.
They look like they’ve been dipped in a coating, so that sort of tray would be useful for letting them harden.
There’s an empty such tray above them, which also seems to be refecting the doughnuts below.
…
It’s quite possible he grabbed the shot from the street, or across the street, using a fairly short telephoto lens… That would explain the discrepancy in focus.
I just said “alleged photographer” to be funny, because I had talked in other posts about people claiming to have taken photographs.
I certainly could be wrong, but I believe it’s real. And I don’t see anything that I think would be common for AI. Remember it riffs on things people can describe and uses techniques in it has seen.
There is a green rose, but it looks noting like that. My sister had one. It is a rose that has a genetically failed flower mutation that showed up where the whole flower is made up of the part of the flower called the sepal. That’s the outside guard leaf part of the flower that protects the growing pedals. Actually what it looks like is a mess. 🙂
I’ve always liked Yakety Sax but I never made the connection to a chickens before (why, I don’t know we had chickens for eggs when we lived in the tropics and their squawking is very similar).
The tree obviously didn’t grow through the piano… Trees don’t cut nice, neat holes around themselves as they grow… even following the contours of their trunks.
The piano would be shattered and splintered, the sides knocked apart, and the keyboard broken, if a tiny sapling had started inside, and become a 30 foot tree…. Not to mention all the years that would take.
….
I figured it must be someone’s art project… so I started to search the image.
It’s amazing how many sites only said it was a photo of a tree that had grown through the piano.
A few said, no, the piano must have been placed around the tree… but offered no info about it
Mostly, people were more interested in claiming to have taken the photo than in having placed the tree there, but none of them said where it was…
Not even when I found one fellow on Imgur whom I believe was the real photographer, judging by the camera details, and his talking about other people claiming his work.
(True to form, I did find one such claimant on DeviantArt.)
….
Near the bottom of my search results…
Ta dah!!!
I finally found a Facebook page from 2014 that said…. (Emphasis mine…)
“California state University, Monterey Bay “Piano Tree” in a forested area on their Disc Golf course. A living installation by artist Jeff Mifflin.
Watch a video interview with the artist and more pictures here:
I would say photoshop. Some areas have heavy black outlines, common with cut & paste; other areas appear to have been “smudged” slightly to blend together.
But there are several photos, from different angles… some on that website I linked, or in the link you find there to the university site, plus a few by different people elsewhere on the web….
And that description on Facebook turned out to be taken from the CSUMB website. I don’t think they’d lie.
If the photographer touched up this photo, I’m sure he didn’t touch up all of them… And I saw comments from people remembering the installation.
Or who knows…. some darkening or smudging may have been done by the artist, to the actual construction.
Some were on the page I linked to, some in other results of my search.
I was too tired to describe the entire contents of that page, and my post was already long.. but i said something about the piano cos I expected someone might wonder.
I couldn’t foresee that someone would question the reality of it, especially after the description I gave, naming the artist and the university campus….
So I thought my work was done…. but I did provide the link for more information.
I knew it was an installation almost instantly … the trunk of that tree would have pushed the sides out and they are straight from top to bottom. Another clue was that the front of the piano wasn’t cut out perfectly .. there is a gap between trunk and the piano right in the middle. Close but no cigar … thank you for playing …next .
In San Francisco, in the late 1930’s. A policeman patrolling an anti-Nazi street remonstration, several years before the US entered WWII.
Taken by Dorothea Lange, famous for her photos of dustbowl migrants, farm workers and rural families in the Great Depression.
She looks to be about 5 years old… Not likely less than 4 or more than 6.
The photo was said to be 1937 on one site, 1939 on another.
Using those figures would put her birth between 1931 and 1935; her age today between 94 and 98.
Sadly, only 4 or 5% of the US population lives past 90, depending on what data you look at. Very few reach 98.
However… an old friend of mine turned 96 in January, though in a care home… and my mother in law reached 97½. Both still mentally sharp at those ages.
So the odds are poor, but you never know.
….
The interesting thing is that if you were actually close enough or curious enough to really want to know, you might be able to find out.
That’s because a lot of Ms Lange’s photographs were taken for government projects, and some included data or interviews.
There’s a slim chance that the little girl’s name is in a document at one of the agencies, and if you found it, you could Google it… And if her maiden name turned up in a search….
The caption below comes from the L.A. Times of July 24, 2013.
The area near the Utah-Arizona line is a place of strange and delightful rock formations. In the Paria Canyon-Vermillion Cliffs Wilderness, the renowned Wave formation is made of Jurassic-age Navajo sandstone — 190-million-year-old sand dunes turned to rock. Stacked one atop another, the dunes calcified in vertical and horizontal layers. (Spencer Weiner / Los Angeles Times)
Never having been a fan of heavy metal, I admit that I’m not as familiar with Black Sabbath as no doubt some of you are.
Of course I’ve heard some of their music. Given my age and my lifestyle, it was inevitable… but I certainly don’t associate them with anything like this.
The story that i herd was that it wasn’t Ozzy, it was Alice Cooper. And it didn’t actually happen.
At an AC concert someone through a live chicken onto the stage and being a city boy he didn’t know that chickens couldn’t fly, so he threw it back over the audience expecting it to fly away over the crowd. Pieces of the chicken ended up everywhere. A newspaper reported that Alice had bit the chickens head off.
At a later date Ozzy asked Alice if it was true and Alice said no and told Ozzy the story.
Ozzy told Alice not to deny it as it was great PR for their brand of shock rock. 😀
Interesting… cos I’ve heard the Alice Cooper story, but not that it was Ozzy who advised him.
Cooper was doing that stuff long before Ozzy… Even though the latter’s Wikipedia page calls him a pioneer.
The reason I posted about the bat was that I read that page last night, trying to find out about Fluff.
Just went back now to find this… sorry, didn’t realize it was so long. I edited a little:
“In 1981, after signing his first solo record deal, Osbourne bit the head off a dove during a meeting with CBS Records executives. Apparently, he had planned to release doves into the air as a sign of peace, but due to intoxication, he instead grabbed a dove and bit its head off.
He then spat the head out, with blood still dripping from his lips. As security was escorting Osbourne out of the building, he grabbed a second dove and also bit its head off. Due to its controversy, the head-biting act has been parodied and alluded to several times throughout his career and is part of what made Osbourne famous.
On 20 January 1982, Osbourne bit the head off a bat that he thought was rubber while performing at the Veterans Memorial Auditorium in Des Moines, Iowa. According to a 2004 Rolling Stone article, the bat was alive at the time; however, 17-year-old Mark Neal, who threw it onto the stage, said it was brought to the show dead.
According to Osbourne, the bat was not only alive but managed to bite him, resulting in Osbourne being vaccinated against rabies.
On 20 January 2019, Osbourne commemorated the 37th anniversary of the bat incident by offering an “Ozzy Plush Bat” toy “with detachable head” for sale on his personal web-store. The site claimed the first batch of toys sold out within hours.”
Then again, anybody can edit Wikipedia, and things do get mixed up and exaggerated in the rock world.
now , as far as the intentional dismantling of the postal service to make him and his fellow billionaires even wealthier (De Joy was a competitor of the USPS before being named postmaster general)—yes that is well known.
it is apparently ok with the rest of us.
nothing to be alarmed about. nothing to see here, move along, move along
if it was mailed in the same city, it more than likely got there the next day….the sheer amount of mail was not what it was in later years,
In some cities, mail was delivered twice a day …
At first I wondered if literacy rates had something to do with the speed of delivery, then I thought of all of the adverts that went in the mail in the early part of the 20th century. Probably the latter.
We expected same day delivery in the same town or city, even if the envelope said “City” instead of the city and state.
(I never did that though cos our mailman said please don’t. In fact I always used the “postal zones” that we had before zip codes.)
But I expected Wisconsin or Illinois to California to take two days, occasionally 3. Three days to my sister in BC.
Now double or triple everything.
When Priority mail started, they had signs at the PO that said (I may have the order wrong) Two Pounds, Two Days, Two Dollars. Some had a tall numeral 2, with the words listed beside it.
Now the weight isn’t specified for a flat rate box. It goes by size…but the smallest, only about as big as a VHS tape, is over $10, and good luck with their estimate of 3 days.
We also got two deliveries a day in Cleveland when I was little.
I thought mail volume was way down now because of the Internet… Isn’t that one of the excuses for raising rates?
Nobody’s mailing letters… Let’s reduce service and make it $6 to pay our salaries!
.
OMG!!!
“She said THAT?!!?!“
I’ve gotta tell Phyllis! She’ll never believe it! But it’s a secret, right???
Don’t worry. Phyllis will NEVER tell.
(rrrrriiiiiggggghhhhhttttt.)
..
He looks like Chuck from today’s Ballard Street!
Let me guess…
I recognise top left.
Am I supposed to be hearing “Eye of the Tiger?”
Well, of course, but only after you run up those steps!
Yeah, don’t know about you, but I’d have a hard time of it!
I’d have a hard time running down those steps, forget about UP.
Much easier for me to run up stairs than down.
Bad knees beat out weakness.
Not saying I could do either!
What is this “running” of which you speak?
“Dough or doughnut. There is no try…”
{to be spoken in your best Homer Simpson}
“O-o-o-o-o-o-h-h-h-h-h. Donut on a stick. O-o-o-o-o-o-h-h-h-h-h.”
I’ve never seen doughnuts like this, lined up on sticks, and almost candy coated. The (alleged) photographer said it was taken in Greece.
Are the sticks in a pool of milk? Either it was staged just for the photo, or it’s AI. On something like this I look at focus; two things at the same distance should be equally in focus. The 2nd row donuts are fairly sharp while the sticks are extremely blurry. It’s not certain, but I vote AI on this one.
I think he mentioned it was in a shop window.
Looking closely, I believe they’re stuck in a clear plastic tray, which has short, tubular projections, closed on the bottom, to hold the sticks.
They look like they’ve been dipped in a coating, so that sort of tray would be useful for letting them harden.
There’s an empty such tray above them, which also seems to be refecting the doughnuts below.
…
It’s quite possible he grabbed the shot from the street, or across the street, using a fairly short telephoto lens… That would explain the discrepancy in focus.
I just said “alleged photographer” to be funny, because I had talked in other posts about people claiming to have taken photographs.
I certainly could be wrong, but I believe it’s real. And I don’t see anything that I think would be common for AI. Remember it riffs on things people can describe and uses techniques in it has seen.
,,
Call me a pessimist, but this could be trouble.
Well, if it wasn’t for all those telephone and electrical poles, the sky would have taken over by now. Be tough, boys!!!
Funny you said that, because my eyes refuse to see any distance between the nearest wires and the clouds.
My first impression was that the clouds are lying on them, like on a netting, and sagging a bit through the spaces.
Green roses? Why bother?
Why climb Mt. Everest?
…Because it’s there….
Because it’s green?
There is a green rose, but it looks noting like that. My sister had one. It is a rose that has a genetically failed flower mutation that showed up where the whole flower is made up of the part of the flower called the sepal. That’s the outside guard leaf part of the flower that protects the growing pedals. Actually what it looks like is a mess. 🙂
There are several real cultivars of green roses.
I found this one last night, but got too tired to post it…. it looked like the greenest of all.
Had to look again… It’s called Chuxay Garden.
There are some with paler green petals, and a couple like your sister’s where the “petals” are really overgrown sepals.
Mostly not naturally occurring, they result from horticulturalists’ attempts to create them… I, too, wonder why.
,
…https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zcq_xLi2NGo
I’ve always liked Yakety Sax but I never made the connection to a chickens before (why, I don’t know we had chickens for eggs when we lived in the tropics and their squawking is very similar).
Benny Hill?
Darn! I was hoping it would play play while the video ran1
Don’t play chicken with a chicken…. they have no patience for attempted fowl play.
And you might end up a patient…
Oh look! A piano fir tree…
No strings attached?
Not any more.
The tree obviously didn’t grow through the piano… Trees don’t cut nice, neat holes around themselves as they grow… even following the contours of their trunks.
The piano would be shattered and splintered, the sides knocked apart, and the keyboard broken, if a tiny sapling had started inside, and become a 30 foot tree…. Not to mention all the years that would take.
….
I figured it must be someone’s art project… so I started to search the image.
It’s amazing how many sites only said it was a photo of a tree that had grown through the piano.
A few said, no, the piano must have been placed around the tree… but offered no info about it
Mostly, people were more interested in claiming to have taken the photo than in having placed the tree there, but none of them said where it was…
Not even when I found one fellow on Imgur whom I believe was the real photographer, judging by the camera details, and his talking about other people claiming his work.
(True to form, I did find one such claimant on DeviantArt.)
….
Near the bottom of my search results…
Ta dah!!!
I finally found a Facebook page from 2014 that said…. (Emphasis mine…)
“California state University, Monterey Bay “Piano Tree” in a forested area on their Disc Golf course. A living installation by artist Jeff Mifflin.
Watch a video interview with the artist and more pictures here:
http://weird-wood.blogspot.co.uk/2014/05/piano-tree.html ”
( if you can’t be bothered… And i don’t blame you… It says the piano was an old stage prop.)
I would say photoshop. Some areas have heavy black outlines, common with cut & paste; other areas appear to have been “smudged” slightly to blend together.
I really don’t think so.
Dunno whether you read my post… I know it’s long.
But there are several photos, from different angles… some on that website I linked, or in the link you find there to the university site, plus a few by different people elsewhere on the web….
And that description on Facebook turned out to be taken from the CSUMB website. I don’t think they’d lie.
If the photographer touched up this photo, I’m sure he didn’t touch up all of them… And I saw comments from people remembering the installation.
Or who knows…. some darkening or smudging may have been done by the artist, to the actual construction.
I read your entire post before responding above; I didn’t see anything about other pics and different angles. I didn’t go to your link.
You’re right, I didn’t mention them.
Some were on the page I linked to, some in other results of my search.
I was too tired to describe the entire contents of that page, and my post was already long.. but i said something about the piano cos I expected someone might wonder.
I couldn’t foresee that someone would question the reality of it, especially after the description I gave, naming the artist and the university campus….
So I thought my work was done…. but I did provide the link for more information.
Sorry… Only so much I can do!
Been there a while, has it?
I knew it was an installation almost instantly … the trunk of that tree would have pushed the sides out and they are straight from top to bottom. Another clue was that the front of the piano wasn’t cut out perfectly .. there is a gap between trunk and the piano right in the middle. Close but no cigar … thank you for playing …next .
.
The car-chase scene is one of my two favourites; the other being the one in “The French Connection.”
In San Francisco, in the late 1930’s.
A policeman patrolling an anti-Nazi street remonstration, several years before the US entered WWII.
Taken by Dorothea Lange, famous for her photos of dustbowl migrants, farm workers and rural families in the Great Depression.
I wonder if that little girl, the only one looking at the photographer BTW, is still alive. She would have to be approaching 100 by now.
A friend of ours was born 1931…
Still very much alive.
She looks to be about 5 years old… Not likely less than 4 or more than 6.
The photo was said to be 1937 on one site, 1939 on another.
Using those figures would put her birth between 1931 and 1935; her age today between 94 and 98.
Sadly, only 4 or 5% of the US population lives past 90, depending on what data you look at. Very few reach 98.
However… an old friend of mine turned 96 in January, though in a care home… and my mother in law reached 97½. Both still mentally sharp at those ages.
So the odds are poor, but you never know.
….
The interesting thing is that if you were actually close enough or curious enough to really want to know, you might be able to find out.
That’s because a lot of Ms Lange’s photographs were taken for government projects, and some included data or interviews.
There’s a slim chance that the little girl’s name is in a document at one of the agencies, and if you found it, you could Google it… And if her maiden name turned up in a search….
Um… as I said… you’d really have to want to know.
We recently lost the oldest member of our church at 103.
My cousin’s aunt (other side of the family) turned 100 in May.
I had two neighbors… No, three.. who turned 100 living near me, back in the 90s… One man and two women.
Jimmy got married at 92… his wife was in her late 70s. He outlived her… though his horrid daughter broke them up before that.
One of the women at 104 went to live with her 60-something granddaughter.
And my (non biological) Dad had 3 maternal aunts over 100… but his mother, my grandma, passed at 91. We think. She lied a lot.
can you find five horseshoes?
I didn’t think I could… I wasn’t even sure it was the whole image, cos it looked too small.
Then my eyes just kept finding what I thinkare horseshoes… 
There are also a cute mouse, a four leaf clover, a heart… and something that’s either a ball of yarn or the moon?
The official solution.
But save yourself some time and just look at Susan’s.
I found a mouse.
And a pole cat.
I’d be lucky to find one.
The caption below comes from the L.A. Times of July 24, 2013.
The area near the Utah-Arizona line is a place of strange and delightful rock formations. In the Paria Canyon-Vermillion Cliffs Wilderness, the renowned Wave formation is made of Jurassic-age Navajo sandstone — 190-million-year-old sand dunes turned to rock. Stacked one atop another, the dunes calcified in vertical and horizontal layers. (Spencer Weiner / Los Angeles Times)
I looked it up, just for you….
Apolosophy is a Swedish brand of (supposedly) affordable skin care products.
That’s great!
R.i.p.
R.I.P. Ozzy, July 22, 2025
Never having been a fan of heavy metal, I admit that I’m not as familiar with Black Sabbath as no doubt some of you are.
Of course I’ve heard some of their music. Given my age and my lifestyle, it was inevitable… but I certainly don’t associate them with anything like this.
Did they actually play this in concert?
yes, with Perry Como as the opening act
Gee thanks.
I really appreciate your trying to help me.
my pleasure
I don’t know if they ever did Fluff in concert.
It’s off of one of the earlier albums.
We tend to forget the talent-honed-to-a-skill side of rock musicians.
A bat is just a goth butterfly.
So Ozzy really only bit the head off a butterfly?
I’m not sure that helps.
The story that i herd was that it wasn’t Ozzy, it was Alice Cooper. And it didn’t actually happen.
At an AC concert someone through a live chicken onto the stage and being a city boy he didn’t know that chickens couldn’t fly, so he threw it back over the audience expecting it to fly away over the crowd. Pieces of the chicken ended up everywhere. A newspaper reported that Alice had bit the chickens head off.
At a later date Ozzy asked Alice if it was true and Alice said no and told Ozzy the story.
Ozzy told Alice not to deny it as it was great PR for their brand of shock rock. 😀
Interesting… cos I’ve heard the Alice Cooper story, but not that it was Ozzy who advised him.
Cooper was doing that stuff long before Ozzy… Even though the latter’s Wikipedia page calls him a pioneer.
The reason I posted about the bat was that I read that page last night, trying to find out about Fluff.
Just went back now to find this… sorry, didn’t realize it was so long. I edited a little:
“In 1981, after signing his first solo record deal, Osbourne bit the head off a dove during a meeting with CBS Records executives. Apparently, he had planned to release doves into the air as a sign of peace, but due to intoxication, he instead grabbed a dove and bit its head off.
He then spat the head out, with blood still dripping from his lips. As security was escorting Osbourne out of the building, he grabbed a second dove and also bit its head off. Due to its controversy, the head-biting act has been parodied and alluded to several times throughout his career and is part of what made Osbourne famous.
On 20 January 1982, Osbourne bit the head off a bat that he thought was rubber while performing at the Veterans Memorial Auditorium in Des Moines, Iowa. According to a 2004 Rolling Stone article, the bat was alive at the time; however, 17-year-old Mark Neal, who threw it onto the stage, said it was brought to the show dead.
According to Osbourne, the bat was not only alive but managed to bite him, resulting in Osbourne being vaccinated against rabies.
On 20 January 2019, Osbourne commemorated the 37th anniversary of the bat incident by offering an “Ozzy Plush Bat” toy “with detachable head” for sale on his personal web-store. The site claimed the first batch of toys sold out within hours.”
Then again, anybody can edit Wikipedia, and things do get mixed up and exaggerated in the rock world.
‘Point Lookout’, Tennessee, 1880’s.
Yeah… “Look out!!”
Once more… Great job on the Dogfather!
A fish in the mail. Back in those days, without today’s technological advances… Wow, it probably took 3 days.
No wonder Sonny wants to roll in it. I’m sure it’s nice and ripe.
Today, with computers and tracking and all… It would probably take 5 or 6 days, and stink up the house by the time it gets there.
Why? You tell me.
A card to the other side of the country used to take 2 days… Now they’re taking at least twice that.
Why? Louis DeJoy.
now , as far as the intentional dismantling of the postal service to make him and his fellow billionaires even wealthier (De Joy was a competitor of the USPS before being named postmaster general)—yes that is well known.
it is apparently ok with the rest of us.
nothing to be alarmed about. nothing to see here, move along, move along
if it was mailed in the same city, it more than likely got there the next day….the sheer amount of mail was not what it was in later years,
In some cities, mail was delivered twice a day …
At first I wondered if literacy rates had something to do with the speed of delivery, then I thought of all of the adverts that went in the mail in the early part of the 20th century. Probably the latter.
We expected same day delivery in the same town or city, even if the envelope said “City” instead of the city and state.
(I never did that though cos our mailman said please don’t. In fact I always used the “postal zones” that we had before zip codes.)
But I expected Wisconsin or Illinois to California to take two days, occasionally 3. Three days to my sister in BC.
Now double or triple everything.
When Priority mail started, they had signs at the PO that said (I may have the order wrong) Two Pounds, Two Days, Two Dollars. Some had a tall numeral 2, with the words listed beside it.
Now the weight isn’t specified for a flat rate box. It goes by size…but the smallest, only about as big as a VHS tape, is over $10, and good luck with their estimate of 3 days.
We also got two deliveries a day in Cleveland when I was little.
I thought mail volume was way down now because of the Internet… Isn’t that one of the excuses for raising rates?
Nobody’s mailing letters… Let’s reduce service and make it $6 to pay our salaries!
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