So, let's say that one of your newspaper photogs - probably a freelancer because you're too cheap to send people all over the communities you serve - takes a really cool photo of this weekend's Kite Fest (no, I didn't go - got busy, shut up).
What do you do?
Do you put it up in a slideshow on your website? Sure...
Do you put up an alternate slideshow view but without the ability to let people save the photo? Okay, I can even get down with that.
Do you provide a link so that people can buy a copy of the photo - likely not to pass the cash along to the photographer? Fine, whatever...
But at least provide the option to link directly to that photo of the slideshow so I don't have to tell people that it's slide #6 in the show and ask them to click through five far more pedestrian photos first.
That, my friends, is how to make sure that your website doesn't get any more traffic than the absolute minimum - customer service.
Humans have been changing the climate for eons. There's reason for hope. - This short article posits that we've been changing climate for a lot longer than just since the Industrial Revolution but rather much, much longer - since the development agriculture which lead to the first part of our recent, sharp increase in CO2 levels and then the development of rice paddy farming which lead to another spike, in methane levels. If it's true, it means we've been terraforming far longer than most of us believe we have been. It also means that we might be more likely to undo what we've done.
Futurist Ray Kurzweil Pulls Out All the Stops (and Pills) to Live to Witness the Singularity - This guy's crackers. He's thinking that within his lifetim - and he's doing everything possible to extend that lifetime so he'll be around - computing power will increase enough that he can make himself eternal by dropping his conscious into electronic media. Crackers - and Wired just about says so in the sidebar with the article.
Clive Thompson on Why the Next Civil Rights Battle Will Be Over the Mind - An interesting proposal by Thompson pondering whether the growing ease of use of truth-detecting equipment will someday make us consider whether we have freedom to lie, to think dishonest thoughts. Let's hope that we take some precautions before it becomes an issue.
Test: 1080p Projectors for Less, Pared-Down Multitools, VHS-to-DVD Converters - The Girl and I have talked about out next TV - and we will need to replace things within the next year (or go for a converter box) - and considered replacing our current one with an LCD projector, so we're going to have to do some research in this area. The biggest initial issue (other than the $$ requeired) is trying to get it to receive the signals as most projector's don't have any sort like that - at least we'll need a second bit of equipment stuck up there to the ceiling. Plus it still looks like it's going to be a pricey investment.
Hype Machine: Searching for ZAP's Fleet of No-Show Green Cars - Now there's a charlie foxtrot (look it up, I'm not linking). The electric car has been right around the corner for decades now, and I certainly don't see more of them driving around than I saw when I was young. This company has, however, or at least the couple of folks at the top of the company have made a buttload of money on promising folks electric cars left and right for the past decade. It's a cautionary tale for folks looking to do a little green investing.
I do dig the subscription to Wired as it's the only magazine to which I currently subscribe. It's an interesting read through the world of tech and tech-science each month. Good stuff.
Weirdly, however, Wired.com isn't the magazine. Apparently they're now different business interests, and the magazine is Wired.com/wired. Odd but good to know.ul>
Today's Seeqpod playlist - cover versions...I tried to keep myself to no more than two by any single artist, but I broke that for Johnny Cash (and maybe another somewhere along the way - Seeqpod doesn't sort)...
This is killing me. I've got Seeqpod playlists already stacked up for the next couple of Saturdays, but I'm trying to be good an offer them on my self-imposed Saturday-only schedule.
This one gets set aside for a reason as it's one of the more frightening and thrilling YouTube's I've seen in a while. It's video of a trek across the Caminito del Rey, a walkway perched 700 feet above the falls and on the side of a sheer cliff face. The filmmaker's pace and casualness left me queasy but also unable to look away. This video, however, is even more casual and caused me to turn the thing off halfway through before I got sick. They're both must-sees.
These topics don't merit full posts, but I thought I'd throw them in here...
I'm writing this on Friday night, and I'm pretty sure I'm in love with Stephen Curry. If The Girl were to leave me this weekend, I think I'd send him my proposal. In that vein, there is nothing in all of sports that I love more than a shooting guard with no fear and NBA range.
I don't understand - at all - why so many small municipalities still exist within Hamilton County. The other large cities with which I'm familiar - Indy and Louisville - have both consolidated the city and county governments to be more fiscally efficient. Looks like Hamilton County might finally be considering consolidation.
Cincinnati Locavore seems like a blog that I should be reading more frequently, and I will be since I just found out about it today.
If I haven't mentioned it before, Garden Fresh Gourmet's artichoke garlic salsa is amazing...phernomenal...fresh, bright, brilliant...tasty...and easily my favorite salsa condiment in the world. Sure, it's not made locally, but it's am-frickin-brosia. If you're not eating it, you're a fool.
Something is wrong with the world, and I can't quite put my finger on it.
I Can Has Cheezeburger continues to provide the most consistent laughs of any site on the web.
First, please add this comic to my list of acceptable birthday gifts.
Second, future vacations look to be all sussed up now that blogger will let me set up future posts in advance and have them appear like ninjas in the night.
We now return you to your regularly-scheduled blog reading.
It's spring...sort of...and in the spring, a young chemguy's fancies naturally turn to frisbee golf.
Sure, my back yard - and I'm sure most of the Cincinnati-area courses as well as those in Dayton - is a muckity, muddy mess, but in another month or two, that'll all dry up, and the courses will be ready for a little frolfing.
Um, that's frisbee golfing for those of you not in the know.
(--if you're familiar with disc golf already, skip ahead a bit 'til you see another note like this--)
And it's usually called disc golf because the game usually isn't played with real frisbees, at least not with the ones that I remember from kiddie picnic games, instead the discs used are a little smaller, heavier, and more narrow profiled than the lighter, bigger, rounded-edge Frisbee that most of us remember from childhood.
The game's a pretty simple one played a lot like golf. You throw a disc from a tee pad (ideally a conrete pad about 4'x8' but often just a marked strip of dirt) toward and eventually into a hole which is really a metal basket with chains that drop the disc into the basket. The goal is to hit the eighteen baskets in the fewest number of throws.
Most of the courses are in public parks, and the discs cost from a little under $10 to around $20 for the nicer, more durable ones. The low cost and typically casual attitude around the course makes for a pretty friendly and open atmosphere among the disc golfing crue, so it's a sport (I know, it's dodgily a sport) that just about anybody is welcome to come out and play. If you're a rook, ask somebody who seems to know what they're doing for some tips. Most everybody's been a disc noob at one time or another, and players are generally pretty friendly and willing to offer hints.
(--Non-rooks can come back now--)
The first time I ever tried the disc golf thing was out at Miami Whitewater park, and Luke and I gave it a try with the clunky, flyaway frisbee that I had in the closet. Things weren't all that successful that first try, but I kept at it and have now played just about every one of the twenty-some courses around Cincy. We're like a frickin' hotbed of disc golf, and it's a blast.
So, I'm thinking early May, we hit a few courses. Who's with me?
I've got a birthday (a third of a century if we round) coming up in about four weeks, and in case you were looking for a gift, feel free to consider the following items at various price points (depending on your amount of love for me and the fabulous work that I do here every day - all for you, remember)...
I count stairs when I climb them. I start with the initial landing as #1, and I remember what most of the sets of stairs that I climb regularly have. The steps up from my garage, for example, count nine.
My mantle has stuffed animals on it - like a dozen of them. A couple of times a year, The Girl and I go to Valley Thrift and drop five or ten bucks and get stuffed animals for our elder dog to carry around like his baby, use as a pillow, and eventually eviscerate.
Once every spring break - and summer break, too - I get up obscenely early and head to Little Dutch Bakery (in Mt Healthy) for an apple fritter fresh out of the fryer.
I make my cat dance from time to time - hooking my thumbs under her front armpits and making her move. Her typical move from there is to kick and punch one of our dogs while I make bad kung-fu movie dialogue about them.
I put pretty much everything into spreadsheets and have been for a few years. If somebody asks me to type up a list, it'll be on Excel so I can sort it a hundred different ways. And anytime somebody sends me data on an excel spreadsheet, you can bet that I'm going to resort it and ask questions.
I'm a completist. At one point I owned every cd by Neil Young, Queen, Wilco, Richard Thompson, The Beatles, Ryan Adams, Chris Isaak, and John Mellencamp. As tastes have shifted, I've gotten rid of lots of them. I do the same with songs, too, and the best example of it is when I couldn't find the 80's music collection I wanted (every cd had some crap songs), I hunted down (in pre-iTunes days) about 400 songs of the 80s and made myself an eighteen-disc collection that is perfect 80s to me. And I have every figure (including the alternates) of the Kevin Smith Inaction Figures for the first three series.
I write a blog to which I am (for some reason that exists pretty much only in my head) desperate to post to every day.
I play everything to win. I just borrowed the Wii game Zach and Wiki, and I don't really enjoy it. So I'm playing it semi-obsessively until I win it so I can return it. I play Wii Tennis to win and get little enjoyment just playing around - especially if the other person isn't taking it seriously. If I find an online game that has me frustrated, I either quit or search for a walkthru and finish it so I can move on. I'm not a good person, clearly.
At home in the winter, I spend nearly every weekend day in some variation of jeans, hoody, ballcap, socks (no shoes if I'm just 'round home) and it's about a 50-50 chance that I'm not going to leave the home or even shower on a typical weekend day if I don't have a pre-scheduled social engagement. Sometimes, this level of laziness drives The Girl bonkers.
I spend most nights sleeping five on the bed - the order from left to right if you stood at the foot of the bed and looked at the menagerie is Dog #2 (under covers), The Girl, Dog #1 (on top of covers), and then ChemGuy with the cat on top of one of the aforementioned people. No kids...pets rule.
For those of you who know me, I'm kind of curious to hear what you think I should've included on the list but didn't.
I'm getting tired of my glasses. They always seem to be smudged or scratched. They fog up every time I open the dishwasher or come in from the cold. They're just annoying.
And I tried contacts for a while but started to get eye infections and don't want to deal with that again.
I'd thought about Lasik but didn't want to pay the thousand dollars that it would cost or risk some quack ruining my sight by lasering my eye just wrong.
My first experience with the bagpipes came because a man about a block away from the house I grew up in played the pipes from time to time on his back porch. We had a clear view from our front porch, straight across the street and to his back porch, so when he would head outside and practice, we could see and hear him clearly. I've loved their sound ever since...
"Amazing Grace"
The Tannahill Weavers
"Mull of Kintyre"
Amateurs followed by pros
A truly unique event in the history of the pipes
Or maybe not quite as unique as I would've hoped
"Scotland the Brave"
"Clumsy Love set"
When cultures meet
The bagpipes' appearance on Friends - with outtakes
That just seems like cheating
A medley from Edinburgh
And the last for today, Rare Air perform on a morning show...
Over on imdb.com, an amateur reviewer wrote this about 3:10 to Yuma:
As most westerns ultimately are, this was a movie about the measure of a man.
What we have here is a classic tale of man against man which turns into a tale of two men against themselves, and the two characters are well-enough written and masterfully acted that the tale rises far above and beyond the Western film cliches that have caused many of the original examples of the genre to age poorly.
This is very clearly a Western of the current age, one in which the characters' motivations are every bit as important to the story as the characters' actions. The dual leads are played by Russell Crowe, in the black hat, and Christian Bale, in the metaphorical white hat but a white hat that has a thick layer of dust on it as his living is eaked out of the drought-ridden dust of his poor ranch homestead where the film opens.
Bale in center with Fonda bringing up the rear
The film sees Bale happening upon our roguish black hatter, Crowe's Ben Wade who is clearly the moving force of the film. Wade sets the film in motion by robbing the local stage in spectacular fashion and lingering behind in town, celebrating with the local - and admittedly quite attractive - barmaid, leading to his eventual capture by the marshall and local railroad toughs. It is in the course of this capture that the plot is truly set into motion as Bale's character lucks into a paying job that just might save the farm if he can escort Wade to the titular 3:10 train bound for Yuma prison.
Wade's second in command - Charlie in the film's penultimate scene.
From there the typical things happen - Wade's gang races to rescue their leader, the rougue reveals himself to be both monster and man, and our hero eventually must stand alone. Typical, however, isn't what this film is. The depth of character of our dual leads as well as the acting - including Peter Fonda in a role that shocked me as I saw him interviewed on the DVD extras - is outstanding enough to carry the film even through its surprising and perhaps a bit unlikely ending.
The roguish Wade - killer and charmer in one package.
The film's reviews have suggested that it might be the best Western since Unforgiven, though that might be damning it with faint praise as the genre isn't exactly in its heyday right now. It is an excellent film that easily improves on - or at least strongly updates - the original film for a turn-of-the-century sensibility, and it's a very enjoyable view.
My favorite Westerns, by the way...just to give you some perspective...
Unforgiven
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly / Fistful of Dollars / For a Few Dollars More (the sum of the trilogy)
We need to take a minute to talk about Watchmen...
We're about a year away from the release of the Watchmen film, and I have a feeling that some of you out there aren't down with the story, so I'm here to provide something of a primer.
I'll try to avoid presenting anything in the realm of spoiler, but if I do, know that I have absolutely no inside information regarding the film itself. I've read, coveted, and now owned the collected series on which the film is to be based, and it's on that graphic novel (read: comic book) that I'll be providing commentary - with just a few thoughts on the film at the end of the post.
I've posted regarding my trepedation about the movie adaptation of Watchmen before, and it's my hope that by the end of this post, you understand enough about the original work that you can share in some of my trepedation (and excitement, too, I'll admit it) and you might even have an inkling to head over to la local biblioteca. In both of those endeavours, wish me luck.
First off, Watchmen is an outstanding book.
To call it a comic book or even a graphic novel is to sell it drastically short and to mark it as something that numerous people will dismiss out of hand. Yes, this is a tale of and about people who spend much of the book in various costumes, but it is a tale of people simply trying to make the best out of their dramatically flawed world, one that occupies a mysterious and tenuous position halfway between a Smallville-Metropolis-Gotham world and our very own.
It is a world where the Cold War is still very much in control of international relations, and the United States' position of power is due not to a willingness to outspend out rivals but because one of our scientists had an accident that turned him into the world's first true superhero, Dr. Manhattan, one who could unbuild and rebuild the entire planet with the blink of an eye but who is reluctant to change the path of time as he can see events already taking place in his future.
The world of the Watchmen is one in which the United States left Vietnam a conquering, heroic nation and where Richard Nixon has remained in the White House into the early 1980's by repealing the 22nd ammendment, where the cowboy actor RR mentioned for a possible run at Nixon is Robert Redford, not Ronald Raygun.
Their world first saw "costumed adventurers" appear in the 1940's as non-powered men and women who took up crime fighting nominally because they wanted to make the world a better place - though many of their motives are questioned throughout the course of the tale - as are the motives of the costumes villians that they initially found themselves facing until the heroes were eventually outlawed in 1977.
Theirs is a world on the absolute brink of utter destruction as the Russians have launched a full invasion of Afghanistan, putting the entire world at risk of destruction as Dr. Manhattan, whose position in the United States' strategic defense plan is found suddenly vacant.
It is this world that Moore crafted to allow him to explore such disparate subjects as the motivation of superheroes and villians, the effects of a mututally assured destruction policy to national defense, the reaction of normal people to the sight of masked vigilantes both powered and not in their midsts, the religions built up around a man who can unmake creation with not even the wave of a hand, the value of human life to such a being, the folly of punching out a gangster when the core of society is rotting from the inside, and the actions of a select few who find themselves eventually placed in a position where they must keep quiet in order to maintain the sanctity of peace for the world - as well as the effects of one who chooses truth over peace.
The tale is told in twelve issues, now collected into a single volume. Throughout the issues, Moore and Dave Gibbons - a perfect visual foil to Moore's tale - include numerous pieces that most people wouldn't remotely consider to be comic book in nature: exerpts from the memoirs of one of he retired heroes, business plans for action figures of the masked adventurers, an article abou "The Black Freigher" (a comic within the comic used as a framing device). These pieces round out the world and provide a much richer experience, allowing he characters to speak directly to the readers without breaking he fourth wall.
In addition to the addition of the false documents, Gibbons and Moore tried some pretty radical artistic decisions. In issue five - "FearfulSymmetry", for example, the entire issue focuses on the symmetry between two of the characters and has a recurring motif of symmetric images - skull an crossbones, RR logo, Rorschach images - and is, in fact, an entirely symmetrical issues with the first panel on page one being a mirror image of the last panel on the final page and many of the panels between lining up with each other. It is in visual statements such as this that take Watchmen above and beyond the realm of a novel and make the medium every bit as important as the message. Entire papers could - and have been written on the visual symbolism of Watchmen. This story simply could not be told - and if so, would not be nearly the magnum opus that it is - in any way other than in the comic book format.
And in the end, Watchmen is an exploration of so much more than superheroes. Moore and Gibbons crafted an outstanding exploration of the human condition in all of its subtle nuances, why we choose to step beyond our limitations, what happens when those limitations are brought back upon us, and what possible effect one man - or even a group of men and women - could possibly have on the entire chaotic world.
I have read Watchmen a half dozen times and am constantly amazed at how many nuances, references, and issues I have missed on each of those readings. I will be reading Watchmen dozens of times in the coming years, and I have no doubt that I will find new things on every one of those readings.
This is truly the greatest work of the greatest comic book writer. And even writing that line - with its limitations - sells the work short.
This is a great work. If you're interested, here are some of the sources that I consulted and recommend for further reading about Watchmen:
Watchmen is probably the best American graphic novel ever. Its greatest flaw in the eyes of many is its genre, that of super-heroes, but it radically transcends this genre, offering a tale of astounding structural complexity. Its influence on American graphic storytelling was immense and continues to be felt today.
South Park gets nixed because his part is about a minute long......Tom Wilkinson...
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Batman Begins
Michael Clayton
Full Monty
Shakespeare in Love
...Tilda Swinton...
Orlando
Michael Clayton
Adaptation
Constantine
The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe - okay, I haven't seen it, but Calen swears that I'd enjoy it in spite of my revulsion to seeing it, and I need a fifth for Swinton
...Sydney Pollack...
The Player (actor)
Michael Clayton (actor, producer)
Sliding Doors (producer)
The Firm (producer, director)
Cold Mountain (producer)
...Tony Gilroy...
The Bourne Ultimatum (writer)
Michael Clayton (writer, director)
The Bourne Supremecy (writer)
The Devil's Advocate (writer) - it's trash, but I enjoy the heck out of it
Tie - The Bourne Identity (writer) - and The Cutting Edge (writer)
I've now seen four of the five films nominated for best picture at the 2007 Oscars, and I'm feeling okay about the choice.
Michael Clayton is outstanding, no doubt about it, but I'm going to stick with my choice of No Country for Old Men, though I'd put Clayton as a close second.
Michael Clayton tells - in case you weren't aware by now - the tale of a lawyer at a large law firm, a fixer whose courtroom days are long passed by but whose usefulness to the firm has rarely been higher, particularly when one of the firm's shining stars and senior partners cracks in the midst of a deposition on a half-billion-dollar case. Clayton is dispatched to reign his friend back in and bring him back into the fold, a rather challenging thing to do as Clayton finds that his friend's madness just might be catching and might not be madness at all.
Clayton is an impressive character sketch of a man pulled in a dozen different directions, all of which involve letting one of the others fall by the wayside. He is a divorced father trying to pay attention to a son who grows more and more distant from him by the day, a brother who is trying to help out his kin but finding that increasingly hard to do, a friend who wants to stay true, a cog in a giant money machine needing the machine to keep him on hand while the new owners take over, and a man hoping to make something more permanent of his life than a leased and - at the beginning of the film - destroyed Mercedes.
Focusing almost entirely on Clayton and showing him in utter isolation throughout the film (a wise choice in deleting a scene with a girlfriend - found on the DVD) and never moralizing the choices that he has to make, the filmmakers have crafted an outstanding character sketch and tied Clayton up in so many Gordian knots that his resolution stymied me until it was finally revealed - after a false ending seen when the film comes back to its beginning moments to find Clayton's aforementioned Mercedes in flames. The ending didn't ring false but yet left me with my mouth agape and even more impressed with the film.
Clooney (Oscar nominated), Swinton (Oscar winner), Wilkinson (Oscar nominated), Pollack, and the entire cast, honestly, give a masters class in acting in small ways, allowing their characters' emotions to dribble out in the smallest motions and briefest appearances.
This one should age quite well and certainly deserved its best picture nomination.And now I'm left with just Atonement, which just holds no interest at all for me. I can't possibly imagine the pain of sitting through what looks like an English Patient-rehash with Kiera Knightly in another of her costume pieces.
Good god...
The only years for which I've now seen every nominated film are 2005 (Crash - horrible choice by the Academy) and 1994 (Forest Gump - defensible, but I'd put three of the films above it). Four out of five puts this year up with 2001 (A Beautiful Mind - not my first choice but not a travesty), 2000 (Gladiator - I'd take Traffic or Crouching Tiger easily), 1997 (weak year - haven't seen Titanic), and 1991 (Silence of the Lambs - good choice).
I'm a little disappointed in myself at that smallist list...
