I really like my iPhone, even though it’s not the newest generation and doesn’t have all the bells and whistles. It lets me check email and Facebook and Twitter and, oh yeah, text and make phone calls.

And while it might be too much to expect that a complicated collection of plastic parts that does all those things also takes good pictures, the iPhone takes pretty good ones. Maybe nearly as good as a standard digital camera.

Here’s a couple I’ve taken this summer. One is of Chinese terra cotta warrior replicas at the Children’s Museum of Indianapolis and the other is of the interior of the Grove Arcade in Asheville, North Carolina.

If you’re in Asheville – a very cool city – you should check out the Grove Arcade. It’s a monument to how the best-laid plans etc., etc. In the 1920s, Asheville millionaire E.W. Grove wanted to construct “the most elegant building in America.” It was to be a 14-story tower and one of the largest buildings in North Carolina. But Grove died and the tower was never completed. In fact, only the base, a couple or three stories high, was completed.

Most of the tenants were evicted and the building was taken over by government offices during World War II, then the building sat empty for decades until it was finally restored and reopened with shops and offices in 2002. This photo shows the building’s main atrium.

There’s a subset of the mystery genre called the “cozy” that features genteel detectives and killers and then there’s the type of mystery I like to call a “crusty.” These stories feature a cop or investigator – usually middle-aged or older – who would rather be hunting or fishing and drinking a couple of beers than solving crimes. These guys are often loners, maybe even misanthropes, but often have a small group of cohorts on whom they can depend. They’re usually softies at heart but show it only through their affection for their grown children or dogs.

There might be no better representative of the crusty right now than Walt Longmire, the Wyoming sheriff who is the central character in a series of mysteries written by Craig Johnson. The first is “The Cold Dish” and the latest is “Hell is Empty.”

Longmire is sheriff in the kind of town where everybody knows everybody else’s business but rarely sticks their nose in it. He’s no spring chicken. The series is set in the present day but Longmire is a Vietnam vet, and at least one of the mysteries springs from his time as an investigator there.

Although he’s a loner – living in house mostly unfinished since the death of his wife – Longmire has friends, including Henry Standing Bear and Victoria, his big-city born deputy and sometime love interest. His daughter and his dog further humanize him.

Johnson, who lives in a town of 25 in Wyoming, writes clear and concise stories that draw you in immediately. While they’re crime novels not unlike those that Robert B. Parker wrote, there’s enough of the feel of a western to them to appeal to fans of that genre.

Inspired, no doubt, by the success of the Elmore Leonard-based crime drama “Justified” on FX, the A&E cable network is making a “Longmire” movie starring Robert Taylor as Longmire, “Battlestar Galactica” star Katee Sackhoff as Vic – inspired casting there – and Lou Diamond Phillips as Henry.

They’ve de-aged the characters a bit for the movie but if they hit the kind of solemn tone that CBS has found with its adaptations of Parker’s Jesse Stone books, they could have a winner. I’ll be watching and I’ll be reading Johnson’s terrific series of books.

My family ate out tonight at a Muncie restaurant and had a perfectly fine experience. We like to patronize both local and chain restaurants, mixing it up when we go out to eat. A favorite is a favorite, whether homegrown or the bright idea of somebody elsewhere, but we feel good when we’re patronizing locally-owned eateries.

While we – like a lot of people – have been eating lunch and dinner at home more in the past couple of years in large part because of the economy, eating out is still a part of our lives.

But I’m startled sometimes to remember how little my family went out to restaurants when I was a kid.

It’s not uncommon for us now to eat dinner out two or three times a week, but going to a restaurant was a rare thing when I was a kid. I’m not even talking about special occasion-type dining out. Maybe it was because my dad – a factory worker and farmer – was the sole wage-earner in the house and money seemed dear if not tight. There were not a lot of special occasions that involved an expensive meal out.

But maybe it was because there just weren’t that many restaurants back then.

Is that possible? I know there were restaurants around Muncie – several downtown, including the Rivoli diner and the Chinese restaurant, among others – and several on the southside, where we lived, including the Pixie Diner, Jimmy Carter’s Skyline, the near-downtown Big Wheel and a smattering of others.

But I honestly can’t recall a restaurant my family patronized on a regular basis … except for McDonald’s. I still vividly remember my dad driving into town to get hamburgers and French Fries at McDonald’s on the occasional Friday night. He would bring home the sack and my brothers and I would fall on it like wolves.

And my mom, bless her, would hold back a hamburger to offer me late that night when “Sammy Terry” was on Channel 4. I really wanted to watch Sammy’s old movie offerings but it was hard for me to stay up that late. So mom would offer me a nearly-midnight-snack of a McDonald’s burger as a waker-upper. I will forever associate McDonald’s burgers with my mom and Sammy Terry.

My parents ate out a lot more after I was an adult, partly because they felt like they could afford to and partly because my mom in particular felt like she had cooked enough for one lifetime.

But my dad was still inclined to cast a skeptical glance at the prices on the menu, even when he wasn’t picking up the check. I think growing up during the Depression, scratching for a living and putting in long hours in a hot factory for most of his life left him less inclined to throw a lot of money around in restaurants. Except for the occasional bag of burgers from McDonald’s.

I’ve just finished reading “I Am Not a Serial Killer” by Dan Wells and enjoyed it a lot.

I didn’t know quite what to expect when I started it, even though I got a hint from looking at the dust jacked for the latest in the series about teenager John Wayne Cleaver. The cover blurbs suggest that Cleaver, 15 in the first book, is a sociopath and serial killer who, like Dexter in that book and TV series, turns his murderous attentions to victims who deserve to die.

There’s a bit more to it than that, however, and I’m not going to spoil it for you by spelling it out.

Suffice it to say that if you remember those darker episodes of the TV series “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” in which the authorities believe that Buffy is a psychotic killer when, really, all she’s doing is destroying demons and monsters … well, this book will resonate with you.

Wells is a clever writer. He maintains a propulsive momentum and very appealing characters. I could totally imagine this book being adapted as a TV series despite John’s graphic homicidal tendencies.

Besides, what teenager hasn’t imagined committing a gruesome murder or two?

Wells, like steampunk writer Cherie Priest, also maintains an interesting and varied blog if you want to check it out.

I’m switching up my reading and going into the next installment of Craig Johnson’s Walt Longmire book series, but I’m looking forward to starting Wells’ next John Wayne Cleaver book soon.

I wrote the other day about my history with Captain America: Discovering the character when I was in elementary school and an older neighbor gave me some of his comics; admiring Cap and feeling some kinship to him because he fought in World War II, like my dad.

So the “Captain America” movie that came out Friday was kind of like seeing a comic book geek circle completed. Someone – everyone – else has rightly pointed out that the little kids we were back then certainly never expected to see the comic characters and stories we knew and loved turned into big-budget, big-time movies.

Seeing “Captain America” last night I found myself experiencing that same sense of disbelief. To see characters like Captain America, Bucky Barnes, the Red Skull, Dum Dum Dugan and (spoiler) Nick Fury on the big screen makes it seem as if the geeks have truly inherited the earth.

The movie’s a lot of fun. What happens after the end credits is even more fun.

Most fun of all, however, was watching the movie with my son. He’s not as big a comics fan as I was at his age. How can a modern-day kid possibly be, with other interests – video games, the Internet, his own phone for criminy sake – at hand? But he knows the characters and enjoyed the movie. And he enjoys the opportunity to tease me about my geeky interests.

I told him when I tucked him in last night that I never thought, when I was a little kid, that I would be taking my little kid to take to a Captain America movie.

“A little kid?” he responded. “I’m not a little kid.”

I’ve been to the Delaware County Fair here in Muncie three times so far this week. Twice was for work and once was to take my son and one of his friends so they could ride the Screamer and Freak Out and all the other rides.

I still enjoy the fair, but I’m saddened by how small and ordinary it seems now. I know my memories of the fair in the past are filtered through the haze of years, but I swear the midway was bigger and everything seemed more … dangerous in the old days.

By dangerous I don’t mean the possibility that a fight will break out between various groups of young toughs. Frankly, most of the young toughs seem to be pushing strollers these days. Parents seem younger and more tattooed these days than in years past. And while you’re at it, get off my lawn.

But there seemed to be an aura of danger and the forbidden about the fair back then. As recently as the 80s or 90s there was a sideshow that featured performers who could drive nails up their noses – even if there were no two-headed calves.

Casting back even further, I dimly remember attending the fair with my family and glimpsing, over in the distance, what appeared to be women dancing in backlit windows on a carnival facade. Even as a kid I had the impression that there was something taboo about that attraction. I dimly remember some of my more adventurous older male relatives peeling off from our group and heading in that direction. I also remember being herded away from it by my mom.

I still remember vividly a caustic clown in a dunk tank taunting my family members as they went past. Of course, he was just trying to get some of us to come over to pay to throw balls in an effort to soak him. To accomplish that, he called out, “Look at those hillbillies! It looks like they don’t get a lot of practice walking on flat ground.”

Can you imagine the fair offering an attraction like that these days? As much as we might joke about carnies and their propensity for annoying male fairgoers and hitting on females – one year at a local fair a female friend of mine was encouraged by a game operator to pack her bags and join him in his trailer – the modern-day fair is not only smaller but blander. The freaks, geeks and weirdos are gone and the sideshow has been relegated to a pop culture museum.

… as is obvious to those seeing my photographic work.

Nonetheless, I like to take pictures. I take ’em with my phone and point-and-shoot cameras and whatever is handy.

This is one of my favorites, taken in 2009, a few months after BorgWarner closed its transmission plant in Muncie. An auction of tools, equipment and what-have-you was held and I got to go into the plant to look around. And take pictures.

The enormity of the plant – 1.2 million square feet and a half-mile long – is amazing but can be hard to communicate in pictures. Here’s one anyway.

If you’ve been near a TV or movie theater this summer, you might be aware that “Captain America: The First Avenger” opens Friday. The movie adaptation of the classic Marvel Comics character is intended to introduce the patriotic warrior – introduced in the 1940s, revived in the 1960s and a staple of comics ever since – to moviegoers. The character will be a main player in “The Avengers,” a big-screen movie of the Marvel superhero group that opens next May.

While I reviewed and wrote about movies from 1978 to 1990 (first movie reviewed: “Animal House.” last: “The Two Jakes.”) and sometimes got to see them in advance, any inside track I had on movies – other than insight from some friends – is long gone. I haven’t seen “Captain America” and don’t know if it’s good or not.

I hope it is (and early word of mouth appears to be good) in part because Cap – Marvel’s writers and editors were adept at creating an intimacy among themselves, their characters and their readers – was always one of my favorite characters.

When Cap was reintroduced in the 1960s – found frozen in ice and thawed out by Iron Man, Thor and the other Avengers – I was an early comics reader. Even at a young age, I found the character appealing. Like my dad, Cap had been a U.S. soldier in World War II. The war was less than 20 years gone by that point and to many of us seemed like just yesterday.

But the comics, which were often melancholy, established Cap and his alter ego, Steve Rogers, as a man outside of time. Twenty years out of date – now 70 years! – Rogers awoke to find that most of his associates were long gone and that society had changed. Rogers was not a flag-waving stick-in-the-mud – there was a period in the 1970s when, disillusioned by government corruption, Rogers even gave up the Captain America identity and became a man without a country – but he was a man of honor who stood up for his beliefs.

He was an outsider but a leader of men and women, a symbolic figure who disavowed jingoism (for the most part; it was the early 1960s, after all) and a heroic figure who, if he didn’t always know exactly what to do, figured it out.

Cap was a prominent player in one of my earliest comic book memories. An older neighbor, Mike, gave me his copy of Avengers #4, in which Cap is reborn into the then-modern world. I don’t have that comic anymore – boy I wish I did – but I still think about it. It helped introduce me to a world of the fantastic leavened by real, everyday concerns and cares.

If the movie evokes some of those memories, it’ll be a success for me.

The Interwebs were abuzz this weekend with the news that Tom Cruise, actor and couch-jumper, had signed to play Jack Reacher, the military-police-officer-turned-drifter in a series of 15 (soon to be 16) books by author Lee Child. Cruise and director Christopher McQuarrie will adapt Child’s “One Shot.”

Child’s books fall into the crime novel genre, although Reacher is no standard PI or cop. He’s more like a modern-day Japanese warrior, traveling (usually on foot or by bus) around the US. He carries little more than an ATM card and a toothbrush. He doesn’t believe in the ties that bind. He doesn’t even believe in luggage: Reacher travels with nothing more than the clothes on his back, wearing them for a couple of days then buying new ones that suit whatever his locale is at the time.

Of course, like Lassie and the TV version of the Hulk, Reacher’s travels usually bring him into contact with someone who needs his help or a wrong that needs righting. Sometimes he works with local authorities, sometimes against, always exacting justice. But you always get the feeling that no matter how efficient a killing machine Reacher is, he’d rather just be left alone to travel around the countryside.

I can totally see Cruise – who has become more of a celebrity oddity and less of an admired actor in recent years – playing this type of character. But he can’t play it as a typical Cruise “high beam smile” character. Reacher is as quiet as he is capable.

The casting is odd, however, in that much of Reacher’s character is established by how he looks. To quote Lee Child’s website:

Name: Jack Reacher (no middle name)
Born: October 29th
Measurements: 6’5″, 220-250 lbs., 50″ chest
Hair: Dirty-blond
Eyes: Ice blue
Clothing: 3XLT coat, 95 cm. pants’ inseam

Hmmm. Anybody see any discrepancy there? Possibly the idea that Reacher is supposed to be 8-10 inches taller than Cruise and 100 pounds heavier?

Child is said to be pleased with the casting, and I’m sure he is. Cruise will likely draw a lot of moviegoers. And the fact that we’re already talking about the movie, which hasn’t even begun filming, says a lot.

It’s possible that the millions of people who will see the movie won’t care about the physical differences between the character on the printed page and the actor. And Cruise might just bring it. I hope so.

A longtime buddy out in LA posted something on Facebook this morning about the upcoming “Captain America” movie – which opens Friday – and how it ties in to the “Avengers” movie coming out next May.

And the Twitterverse and blogworld are full of spoilers about the two movies this morning. Obviously some screenings have been going on and people are spilling secrets.

I’m wading through the Internets kind of cautiously. I do enjoy spoilers, to some extent, but mostly as an appetizer for a movie, TV show or even book. I don’t want them in place of the main dish.

But I’ll admit all the geeky goodness is building my anticipation for “Captain America.” My loved ones are already sick of hearing me say how, when I was an elementary school kid, the earth was young and dinosaurs roamed the landscape, I never expected big-screen versions of the comic book heroes I loved as a kid. Sure, cheap cartoon versions. Maybe low-budget TV shows where Superman’s flying scenes were accomplished by having the actor lie on a glass coffee table. But big-budget movies? That just didn’t seem possible.

Anyway, I’ll try to keep my geekticipation in check this week. Still five more days, after all.