Tick Tock

There's a commercial on TV lately for some cell phone company, and in it, some guy gets a text too late for him to know he's not supposed to be part of some dancing flash mob right at 12:00pm. Something about the commercial has been bugging me and today I figured out what it is. A shot in the commercial shows the big clock in Grand Central Station with a second hand ticking down to noon. Well, that clock doesn't have a second hand, far as I can remember. And I found this picture from my last trip to NYC that seems to bear out my memory. No second hand.  There are some shadows on the face of the clock at 0:19 and 0:41, but those appear to be internal structure.  Zooming way in, I can see the profile of the hands on the left and right faces, and again, no second hand.  Exposure time is 1/40 of a second, so it shouldn't be blurred out of existence.  It's just not there...

Two Of A Kind

These two red-shouldered hawks were carrying on outside my window this afternoon something fierce. No idea why, but they were flying around, squawking, perching on a tree, then on a pole, one would fly in, then the other, then the first would fly off again. I don't think it was a mating thing, since it's the wrong time of year. I suspect maybe they are a couple of newly-fledged juveniles, out for a good time, getting a little exercise. I also spotted a couple more similar hawks in the air nearby at the same time, perhaps that was mommy and daddy. But whatever their backstory, it was neat to watch them right outside my window here. For a while they were much closer than this, on the same palm frond in fact, but this was the best picture I could get with both of them in the same frame.