Everything is connected to everything else: the world is a seamless web. As Sam put it:
A body might stump his toe, and take pison, and fall down the well, and break his neck, and bust his brains out, and some-body come along and ask what killed him, and some numskull up and say, 'Why, he stumped his TOE.'
--Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
M
More after the jump - click here!
Monday, September 22, 2008
Tuesday, September 16, 2008
Another Riveting Update
For those of you keeping score at home:
I now have eight external hard drives in my home office.
I'm going to give my parents my PC, since I don't use it any more, and it had a big hard drive in it that I wanted to keep. So I took it out and put it in an external enclosure.
I think I'm insane.
M More after the jump - click here!
I now have eight external hard drives in my home office.
I'm going to give my parents my PC, since I don't use it any more, and it had a big hard drive in it that I wanted to keep. So I took it out and put it in an external enclosure.
I think I'm insane.
M More after the jump - click here!
Monday, September 15, 2008
Brief Thoughts and Updates
1) Jill Greenberg is a very clever idiot.
2) The economy is in terrible, desperate trouble.
3) My photo mojo is not workin'.
1) From my comment on Rachel Hulin's blog:
(See http://www.rachelhulin.com/blog/ for the backstory.)
While I dread a McCain presidency even more than I dread an Obama presidency (and I dread a potential Palin presidency far more than either) that was a low-down, dirty trick to do to a subject she was being PAID to shoot by a client, who she then publicly called irresponsible and implied weren't very smart. Not to mention that now the client has to deal with the consequences of sending McCain to Greenberg and having her pull this crap.
Yes, let's all insult our clients, belittle and trick our subjects, and leave the steaming heap behind for other people to have to deal with. THAT'S a good way to encourage people to pay professional photographers rather than just send a point-and-shoot camera along with the interview journalist.
Brilliant, Jill, brilliant.
Also that crap she pulled with the Photoshopping and the monkey poo? Juvenile. Totally juvenile. No wonder she empathizes with little children who've lost their candy so much. She basically views the whole world as one big exercise in stealing her candy and her life is a tantrum in response.
2) We're already at 5x the amount of losses from the sub-prime, excuse me housing, excuse me general risk-management EPIC FAIL, crisis that was first projected less than a year ago and there's no bottom in sight. From five major investment banks we're down to two. The Big Three automakers are going broke at a rate that surpasses human comprehension. The USG has done NOTHING to mend its financial idiocy and whoever wins in November we will spend more, not less, next year than we did the year before and we will take in less, not more, in taxes than we did the year before, guaranteed. There's an old saying that if you keep doing what you've always done, you'll get what you've always got. What we've always done is spend more than we have, and what we've always got is more debt.
There's another saying, however, that receives much less press, and that is that if a trend is unsustainable, it will not be sustained. Accruing more debt is an unsustainable trend. The USG is going to collectively wake up some morning in the same place that Lehman Brothers and Bear Sterns and Countrywide did, and at that point it has two options, no more and no less. Bankruptcy, or monetization of debt. That second one is a fancy way to say, "Print the money to pay the bills." This leads to a phenomenon called hyperinflation. If you want to know what that looks like, hop on a plane to Zimbabwe, or read a book about the Weimar Republic or the economics of the Confederacy. This is not a new story and it always, always, always ends the same way.
If you want to learn a little about how this all works, and don't like math, try PJ O'Rourke's book on economics and business, Eat The Rich. Trust me, any book which discusses cow howitzers and Courtney Love on permanent tour in Japan is worth reading. Your local library will have it, as PJ is quite popular, and it's probably also available in audio form. Read it, seriously.
3) Between the PhotoShelter Collection going teats-up and the fact that I just can't seem to get any joy out of it, I don't remember the last time I took pictures for fun. I take 'em at family things and so forth and they're good, it's not like I don't have the chops, or at least as many chops as I ever had, but I don't seem to be getting anywhere.
M More after the jump - click here!
2) The economy is in terrible, desperate trouble.
3) My photo mojo is not workin'.
1) From my comment on Rachel Hulin's blog:
(See http://www.rachelhulin.com/blog/ for the backstory.)
While I dread a McCain presidency even more than I dread an Obama presidency (and I dread a potential Palin presidency far more than either) that was a low-down, dirty trick to do to a subject she was being PAID to shoot by a client, who she then publicly called irresponsible and implied weren't very smart. Not to mention that now the client has to deal with the consequences of sending McCain to Greenberg and having her pull this crap.
Yes, let's all insult our clients, belittle and trick our subjects, and leave the steaming heap behind for other people to have to deal with. THAT'S a good way to encourage people to pay professional photographers rather than just send a point-and-shoot camera along with the interview journalist.
Brilliant, Jill, brilliant.
Also that crap she pulled with the Photoshopping and the monkey poo? Juvenile. Totally juvenile. No wonder she empathizes with little children who've lost their candy so much. She basically views the whole world as one big exercise in stealing her candy and her life is a tantrum in response.
2) We're already at 5x the amount of losses from the sub-prime, excuse me housing, excuse me general risk-management EPIC FAIL, crisis that was first projected less than a year ago and there's no bottom in sight. From five major investment banks we're down to two. The Big Three automakers are going broke at a rate that surpasses human comprehension. The USG has done NOTHING to mend its financial idiocy and whoever wins in November we will spend more, not less, next year than we did the year before and we will take in less, not more, in taxes than we did the year before, guaranteed. There's an old saying that if you keep doing what you've always done, you'll get what you've always got. What we've always done is spend more than we have, and what we've always got is more debt.
There's another saying, however, that receives much less press, and that is that if a trend is unsustainable, it will not be sustained. Accruing more debt is an unsustainable trend. The USG is going to collectively wake up some morning in the same place that Lehman Brothers and Bear Sterns and Countrywide did, and at that point it has two options, no more and no less. Bankruptcy, or monetization of debt. That second one is a fancy way to say, "Print the money to pay the bills." This leads to a phenomenon called hyperinflation. If you want to know what that looks like, hop on a plane to Zimbabwe, or read a book about the Weimar Republic or the economics of the Confederacy. This is not a new story and it always, always, always ends the same way.
If you want to learn a little about how this all works, and don't like math, try PJ O'Rourke's book on economics and business, Eat The Rich. Trust me, any book which discusses cow howitzers and Courtney Love on permanent tour in Japan is worth reading. Your local library will have it, as PJ is quite popular, and it's probably also available in audio form. Read it, seriously.
3) Between the PhotoShelter Collection going teats-up and the fact that I just can't seem to get any joy out of it, I don't remember the last time I took pictures for fun. I take 'em at family things and so forth and they're good, it's not like I don't have the chops, or at least as many chops as I ever had, but I don't seem to be getting anywhere.
M More after the jump - click here!
Thursday, September 11, 2008
Well, Poop.
PhotoShelter Announces closing of the PhotoShelter Collection.
And after I went to all the trouble to rearrange my blog to use the PhotoShelter Widget, and everything. Damn.
Oh, well. I sold a picture to Richard Leakey. That was pretty cool. I feel sorrier for the staff - having participated, more than once, in the closing of a business, I know how much it well and truly sucks. The Archive portion of PhotoShelter will continue in business and is doing well, but they just couldn't make the stock side work.
Things fall apart: the center cannot hold. First the Patry blog, now this. Bah. Bah, I say.
M More after the jump - click here!
And after I went to all the trouble to rearrange my blog to use the PhotoShelter Widget, and everything. Damn.
Oh, well. I sold a picture to Richard Leakey. That was pretty cool. I feel sorrier for the staff - having participated, more than once, in the closing of a business, I know how much it well and truly sucks. The Archive portion of PhotoShelter will continue in business and is doing well, but they just couldn't make the stock side work.
Things fall apart: the center cannot hold. First the Patry blog, now this. Bah. Bah, I say.
M More after the jump - click here!
Tuesday, September 2, 2008
BTW, Here's Why Bristol Palin is Relevant
Because her pregnancy proves that Sarah Palin is either a bad parent, or stupid, and either way, that's a very relevant thing to consider when asked to vote for the potential vice-president of a candidate who's in his seventies and has a history of cardiac incidents and cancer as well as other serious health risks.
Here's the logic underlying my conclusion:
Sarah Palin has stated unconditionally that abstinence-only programs are the only acceptable sex-education for American children in public school, despite the clear statistical evidence that they don't work and safer-sex education programs do. The only two reasons one could advocate such a proven failure are that one is stupid, or that one believes that sex-education is the responsibility of the parents.
Sarah Palin went to college, has been the governor of a state, and has many other accomplishments (did you know she's a pilot?) I don't think she's stupid. So let's give her the benefit of the doubt and say she honestly believes sex-education is the responsibility of the parents.
Well, Palin, as I said, isn't stupid. She's had several kids. She knows what causes them. But apparently she utterly failed in her duty to her daughter Bristol, who got so little sex-education that she finds herself pregnant at 17. Either Bristol's too dumb to be allowed to run around where there are boys - in which case Palin failed her by deciding to pursue her political career instead of caring for her and, by the way, Palin's own four-month-old child who has Down's Syndrome - or Palin couldn't be bothered to teach her daughter not to let boys put their thingies in hers. Either way, especially for a true-blue social and religious conservative, EPIC FAIL.
And still, confronted with seventeen-and-knocked-up PROOF that such policies DO NOT WORK, Palin is presumably still all about family responsibility and abstinence-only educational policies. Unless she admits either her failure or her idiocy, she's not only either a failure or an idiot, she's also a hypocrite. And ALL of those are very relevant to somebody who is asking to be put a faltering heartbeat away from the Presidency. Bristol's not running for Vice-President, and she should be strictly left alone by the media and the public. What's important is not the choices Bristol Palin made, but what Bristol Palin's choices tell us about Sarah Palin.
And as many others have pointed out, Palin sees no contradiction between pointing out how proud she is of Bristol's "choice" and the fact that if Palin were Queen, Bristol and the millions like her every year would not HAVE that choice. It's one thing for Bristol, whose parents are kind, supporting, and financially secure, to go into such a situation, and quite another for a poor girl from the projects with no support network and no resources to face it. But Palin wants to treat them just alike.
The whole thing irritates me so that if it were not for the fact that states are all-or-nothing and there is no way on Eris's sweet Earth that Obama will not win Illinois, I might reconsider my policy of not voting for anything but rejection of tax referenda.
M
PS: Several researchers have pointed out that it is almost statistically certain that Palin and her husband were having unprotected premarital sex based on the date of her marriage and the birth of her first son, but while I find that very Amusing it only shows that Palin herself was not properly educated and made foolish choices when young, which should NOT be held against her in any way. More after the jump - click here!
Here's the logic underlying my conclusion:
Sarah Palin has stated unconditionally that abstinence-only programs are the only acceptable sex-education for American children in public school, despite the clear statistical evidence that they don't work and safer-sex education programs do. The only two reasons one could advocate such a proven failure are that one is stupid, or that one believes that sex-education is the responsibility of the parents.
Sarah Palin went to college, has been the governor of a state, and has many other accomplishments (did you know she's a pilot?) I don't think she's stupid. So let's give her the benefit of the doubt and say she honestly believes sex-education is the responsibility of the parents.
Well, Palin, as I said, isn't stupid. She's had several kids. She knows what causes them. But apparently she utterly failed in her duty to her daughter Bristol, who got so little sex-education that she finds herself pregnant at 17. Either Bristol's too dumb to be allowed to run around where there are boys - in which case Palin failed her by deciding to pursue her political career instead of caring for her and, by the way, Palin's own four-month-old child who has Down's Syndrome - or Palin couldn't be bothered to teach her daughter not to let boys put their thingies in hers. Either way, especially for a true-blue social and religious conservative, EPIC FAIL.
And still, confronted with seventeen-and-knocked-up PROOF that such policies DO NOT WORK, Palin is presumably still all about family responsibility and abstinence-only educational policies. Unless she admits either her failure or her idiocy, she's not only either a failure or an idiot, she's also a hypocrite. And ALL of those are very relevant to somebody who is asking to be put a faltering heartbeat away from the Presidency. Bristol's not running for Vice-President, and she should be strictly left alone by the media and the public. What's important is not the choices Bristol Palin made, but what Bristol Palin's choices tell us about Sarah Palin.
And as many others have pointed out, Palin sees no contradiction between pointing out how proud she is of Bristol's "choice" and the fact that if Palin were Queen, Bristol and the millions like her every year would not HAVE that choice. It's one thing for Bristol, whose parents are kind, supporting, and financially secure, to go into such a situation, and quite another for a poor girl from the projects with no support network and no resources to face it. But Palin wants to treat them just alike.
The whole thing irritates me so that if it were not for the fact that states are all-or-nothing and there is no way on Eris's sweet Earth that Obama will not win Illinois, I might reconsider my policy of not voting for anything but rejection of tax referenda.
M
PS: Several researchers have pointed out that it is almost statistically certain that Palin and her husband were having unprotected premarital sex based on the date of her marriage and the birth of her first son, but while I find that very Amusing it only shows that Palin herself was not properly educated and made foolish choices when young, which should NOT be held against her in any way. More after the jump - click here!
Against the Assault of Laughter...
nothing can stand.
So we went to my parents' house for the holiday weekend. On the way home we stopped at McDonald's...
... and ahead of me was this raggedy-looking fellow who, upon receiving his order, immediately said, "I wanted this to go." It was like three Happy Meals (which come in bags no matter what) and a Big Mac deal, which was on the tray loose. Okay, fine. The counter person had the sandwich and fries in a bag in the blink of an eye. But then...
"Since my order's jacked up, I want to be compensated. I want a free cheeseburger or something."
The girl taking orders said, "Are you kidding me?" I don't blame her - she didn't say it in an obnoxious way, but the guy's demeanor was so manic that she very probably thought it was a joke.
He replied, "No, unfortunately I am not. I want two free pies. Give 'em to me now or your manager will do it." He repeated this four or five times in slightly different ways, getting more and more upset by the second.
The guy next to me and I were literally laughing out loud at this guy and making no attempt to hide it. I have not been so well-entertained by incidental street theater in I don't know how long.
Eventually the manager came out and, upon hearing the situation, said calmly, "Sir, the mistake was an accident and took ten seconds to fix. I apologize for the small delay but I am not giving you anything for free. If your order is complete, please move so we can serve other customers."
Rag-boy flounced off in a huff, obliterating any shreds of dignity he may have retained. I mean, really, he said, "Fine, I'm never coming back here again!" How cliché is that? I swear to Bog, his affect during the entire affair was that of a spoiled six-year-old girl.
My order came up just after and the manager counted off the items: he said, "Three-piece Chicken Selects" when I had ordered a five-piece. I immediately said, "That's wrong! I ordered a five-piece! I want the whole thing for free! And I want the keys to your car! Right now!"
He looked in the bag and said, "I was wrong. It is a five-piece. And I don't own a car. Sorry."
I snapped my fingers and stage-yelled, "Darn!" I then laughed and thanked him. He thought it was funny and hopefully it broke up the tension a bit.
M More after the jump - click here!
So we went to my parents' house for the holiday weekend. On the way home we stopped at McDonald's...
... and ahead of me was this raggedy-looking fellow who, upon receiving his order, immediately said, "I wanted this to go." It was like three Happy Meals (which come in bags no matter what) and a Big Mac deal, which was on the tray loose. Okay, fine. The counter person had the sandwich and fries in a bag in the blink of an eye. But then...
"Since my order's jacked up, I want to be compensated. I want a free cheeseburger or something."
The girl taking orders said, "Are you kidding me?" I don't blame her - she didn't say it in an obnoxious way, but the guy's demeanor was so manic that she very probably thought it was a joke.
He replied, "No, unfortunately I am not. I want two free pies. Give 'em to me now or your manager will do it." He repeated this four or five times in slightly different ways, getting more and more upset by the second.
The guy next to me and I were literally laughing out loud at this guy and making no attempt to hide it. I have not been so well-entertained by incidental street theater in I don't know how long.
Eventually the manager came out and, upon hearing the situation, said calmly, "Sir, the mistake was an accident and took ten seconds to fix. I apologize for the small delay but I am not giving you anything for free. If your order is complete, please move so we can serve other customers."
Rag-boy flounced off in a huff, obliterating any shreds of dignity he may have retained. I mean, really, he said, "Fine, I'm never coming back here again!" How cliché is that? I swear to Bog, his affect during the entire affair was that of a spoiled six-year-old girl.
My order came up just after and the manager counted off the items: he said, "Three-piece Chicken Selects" when I had ordered a five-piece. I immediately said, "That's wrong! I ordered a five-piece! I want the whole thing for free! And I want the keys to your car! Right now!"
He looked in the bag and said, "I was wrong. It is a five-piece. And I don't own a car. Sorry."
I snapped my fingers and stage-yelled, "Darn!" I then laughed and thanked him. He thought it was funny and hopefully it broke up the tension a bit.
M More after the jump - click here!
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