In light of yesterday’s re-affirmation that the California proposition system is a dumb one, y’all need to take advantage of your enfranchised status and vote! Or just peruse the samples, and if you’re feeling photo-critique-y, then contribute your expert opinion.
When the blocks of granite in Franconia Notch that formed the Old Man in the Mountain’s face (finally) broke off the cliff face in the spring of 2003 (how’s that for a run-on sentence?), there was a lot of discussion about what to do.
One idea was to re-build the face, but instead of using concrete or granite, architect Francis Treves suggested using glass: “the grand metaphor with this piece of glass on the mountain is it’s not really a piece of glass, it’s a piece of ice,” Treves said. The Old Man, he added, “was sculpted by the glaciers; the ice gave it birth.”
When first proposed, Treves’ idea was met with considerable criticism – perhaps the “loss” was too recent to have any satisfactory solution? Anyway, I was intrigued by the sheer scale of Treves’ solution, if skeptical of the actual implemented result.
Personally, I miss the Old Man, but I am doubtful that any attempt to actually rebuild/replace the original formation would be satisfactory. My understanding is that they will/did install some carved rock blocks down in the parking lot, has anybody been to the Notch since ‘07?
As public service I thought it important to post this little doozy: 10 minutes of daily boob observing prolongs male’s life expectancy by 5 years. So this means that characters on the O.C. will live way longer than shlubs from Minnetonka, or do they have to be real? Tough questions demand tough answers.
Are you bad at remembering birthdays? Wish that you knew the address/contact info of your friends? Well, especially if you have a lot of friends on Facebook, then you may find this little program useful.
The un-hyperbolically named AddressBookSync will download Facebook profile pictures and birthdays to Address Book cards on your Mac (OSX 10.4 or higher), probably most useful for people who sync their iPhones (or other fancy phones) with their OS X Address Book contact information.
One nice little feature is the automatic matching of many common short/alternate first names between Facebook and your Mac (i.e. Mike for Michael, Jess for Jessica).
I will start by admitting that I didn’t actually take this photo, but it is an impressive (depressing) example of light pollution:
On the left we have a “dark sky” photograph – a ‘naked-eye’ photo from the ground under good observing circumstances … while on the right is the same region of the sky, taken in “the teeming metropolis of Orem, UT at the heart of the Utah County megalopolis comprising about half a million people.” I’m not quite sure where JP Stanley is from* to call Orem, Utah a “teeming metropolis” but no matter – the comparison is striking.
* oops, turns out he is from Orem. hmm.
P.S. This isn’t really Brian, but it fits the category.
I only shot a handful of pictures in the hospital when Sarah was being born and I shot them all on film. Then, with the busy times, it took me a while to get things developed. End of story, one roll came back in the mail today.
Lately, I’ve only been getting negatives processed and then scanning them, so I was holding the strip of negatives up to the light. My thoughts were something like, “Waiting room, waiting room, hospital room, oh yeah, I remember taking a picture of that.” Then a few frames later, “Who the hell is that? What is going on in this picture? I don’t remember taking that!”
It turns out that, when we went into the OR, I handed my camera to one of the nurses and she photographed the entire c-section. In graphic detail. I’m actually kind of happy about it because now there’s a very interesting record of what happened. I’m very happy too that it was b&w film.
