Posted 8:57 PM by Angie Schultz

Pluto's Public

As seen in USA Today
Click image for Cafepress site. Not affiliated, etc.

The furor over the status of Pluto rages on. First the IAU "demoted" it to 'dwarf' planet, and now others say that the vote was "hijacked" (though whether anyone's going to do anything about it is unclear). Meanwhile, the general public has been up in arms over the change. Unfair!




I must say, I don't get it.

The most logical explanation for the public's fondness for Pluto is that people grew up knowing that there were nine planets, and they don't want to have to change that tiny, nearly-useless piece of information.

But in my experience, people forget scads of things they learned in science class with nary a tremor. And besides, when I was a kid Jupiter had twelve moons, Saturn nine, Uranus five, and Neptune, two. At one time I could have probably named them all. Now I don't even bother to remember how many moons each has, much less what their names are. I have to consult a moon table.

So why this passion for Pluto? Up at the top I typed, "I don't get it". But I suddenly think I do.

How many people would be protesting at the addition of a planet? What if a tenth planet, say, Neptune-sized, would have been found? Would people be selling T-shirts emblazoned "Nine Is Enough!"? No. So I think what's going on here is that people are a little disappointed in science. Make that Science.

The ancients knew only five planets (out to Saturn, and of course didn't count the Earth as a planet). Uranus was discovered in 1781, Neptune in 1846, and Pluto (the Twentieth Century's -- and America's -- own) in 1930. That's Science, people! That's Progress!

But now Science has taken a planet back! That's not supposed to happen! We're supposed to advance, to get more planets. What gives?

Oh, sure, every once in a while someone trumpets a new planet, but it turns out to be some cosmic pebble, and they give it a name like 2003 EL₆₁, or Quoaoaoaoar.

Illustration credit:
NASA, ESA, and A. Feild (STScI)

People want a real planet, maybe a nice gas giant. Besides, if we don't get a ninth, real planet, a lot of old science fiction shows are going to look awfully foolish, because the humans always showed the aliens (or the psychotic, world-destroying robots) a schematic of a system with nine planets to establish the location of Earth.


Copyright Paramount Pictures

And it's not just in science fiction, either.


Pioneer 10 Plaque


Whether people realize it or not, this little fracas has been educational. It's not often that most people get to see how Science is done. That is to say, sometimes it's not very scientific.

In this case, some astronomers anticipate a number of Pluto-sized objects as larger telescopes allow us to see more objects in the Kuiper Belt, perhaps a very large number. Are these "planets"?

The original draft resolution called for a scientific definition: if the oject is self-gravitating (i.e., large enough so that gravity has formed it into a sphere), and if it orbits the sun (rather than another planet), then it's a planet. The problem with that is that it gives us --

-- 11 current planets (including asteroid Ceres and 2003 UB₃₁₃ aka "Xena") --

Credit: The International Astronomical Union/
Martin Kornmesser

-- and an even dozen "candidate" planets

Credit: The International Astronomical Union/
Martin Kornmesser


-- for a total of twenty-three planets. And that's just for now! No doubt there'll be more Kuiper Belt objects discovered. Do we really want twenty-three+ planets in the solar system?

As far as astronomers are concerned, the answer would probably be: why not? Is there anything fundamentally different about the planets, about they way they were formed? (Actually there is, but we'll get to that in a minute.)

But other people might object. For one thing, do kids want to have to remember the names of more than twenty planets, and their order from the Sun? Does anyone find it odd that this is considered a serious objection? At least by scientists? Does anyone else find it odd that the number and positions of the planets is one of those things you have to know to be considered an educated person? (Don't get me wrong. I want people to know about the planets. But why planets rather than, say, the elements and their position in the periodic table? That's much more useful information.)

(Then again, a smaller number of planets means the National Air and Space Museum's solar system model won't have to swim -- see the bottom of the article.)

I'm here. I'm a sphere. Get used to it.

---Pluto, as quoted in the Baltimore Sun

But if we're going to categorize solar system objects, we have to do it scientifically. That is, if we're scientists. That means not deeming Pluto a planet because you shook Clyde Tombaugh's hand, as astronomer Robin Catchpole is quoted as saying in that link (as I'm sure Catchpole knows quite well). That's a human reaction, to want to be part of history -- just as human as to want to keep the universe you grew up with -- but it's not very scientific.

If you are going to categorize solar system objects scientifically, then you have to think about what the planets have in common. Do planets have a unique composition? Were they formed in a specific way?

You could make a case for excluding objects in the asteroid belt on the grounds that they're not really planets, just dirt that was supposed to form a planet, but never got their act together. (Not strictly a scientific explanation, but close enough.)

That cuts our 23 planets down to 19, but of course that will probably rise as more Kuiper Belt objects are found, so it's only a little help.

Now, if you really wanted to make a sound, scientific classification as to what is a planet, you'd have to look at what kinds of planets there are, where they gather, and whether there are characteristic sizes of planets. That last would be a really useful measure; if planets fell into distinct size regimes, we might be able to say something about how planets -- as opposed to other solar system bodies -- are formed.

First, they came for Pluto, I said nothing for I was not a Plutonian.

---spacemonkey

And, as it turns out, they do fall into distinct size regimes! Not only that, but the members of these distinct regimes also have very distinct compositions, and are found in different parts of the solar system!

So, obviously, the only logical scientific classification scheme is for Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune to be called "planets", and the smaller bodies (such as Pluto) (oh and the Earth) to be referred to as "dwarf planets".

(You saw that coming a mile away, right?)

But, I really don't see that happening. I suggest it merely to highlight my point that science doesn't always get done scientifically.

On a somewhat ironic note, the IAU 2006 news page shows that the chair of the Pluto vote session was Jocelyn Bell Burnell, who knows from dodgy demotions.

Credit: IAU/Lars Holm Nielsen

In 1967, she (she was Jocelyn Bell then) and her thesis advisor, Anthony Hewish, discovered pulsars. In 1974, this discovery netted a Nobel Prize in physics -- for Hewish. Bell was not included. She has been publically graceful about this decision. Her career in astronomy since getting her PhD has not been (ahem) stellar. Whether this is cause or effect I cannot begin to speculate.


Vanderbilt University astronomer David Weintraub has a opinion piece on the subject here. I must confess I don't quite see what he's trying to say, except that I agree with his statement:

Children don't need to memorize the names of planets. They need to learn about the universe and how we and the Earth fit into the universe.

Although I don't see how it'll do them any harm to memorize the planets. (Can you imagine Earth kids on a school outing with kids from another solar system, one that has, say, 50 planets? "Our system has eight planets. How many does yours have?" "Ummm..." "Unthahorsten can't count that high! He doesn't have that many prehensile digits!")

But Weintraub once said something nice to me (which people are rarely inspired to do), so I'll point out his article. Also, if you're really fascinated by the topic, you could buy his book.

More fun Pluto facts here.

Pluto was named by an 11-year-old girl, Venetia Burney, whose grandfather was Librarian at the Bodleian Library at Oxford. She was still alive as of a few months ago. Interestingly, her great-uncle had named Mars's moons, Phobos and Deimos.

In January, NASA launched the "New Horizons" mission, which will get to Pluto in 2015. Some of Clyde Tombaugh's ashes are on board.

Posted 3:03 PM by Angie Schultz

Foto Friday: Phoning It In

Well, it's Foto Friday, but I don't feel like writing a lot about a picture. So here's one that speaks for itself.


Silhouettes: Haleakala, Maui, Sep. 2003

Not that it has much to say.

I went up to Haleakala three or four days in a row, and it was always cloudy. As we were taxiing down the runway on our flight home, we looked up and saw that the summit was finally clear.

By the way, this was taken on the 11th of September. There'll be another photo from this set in a couple weeks.

Labels: Foto Friday, Hawaii

Posted 9:50 PM by Angie Schultz

BREAKING NEWS: World Fails to End

Women, Minorities Hardest Hit

Disregard.

Posted 1:06 PM by Angie Schultz

The Last Night of the World

If you're paying any sort of attention to world events, Iran's creepy president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has you on edge. Even if he weren't playing footsie with the UN over his country's nuke program, his predictions of Israeli destruction and his nutty religious rhetoric ought to be enough to give you the shivers.

Unless, of course, you're a member of the media, in which case George Bush's occasional utterances of "God Bless America" are a sign of terrifying God-addled dementia, but Ahmadinejad's references to serene green light and the Twelfth Imam are just so much standard boilerplate rhetoric for domestic consumption.

Well, tomorrow's the day Iran has promised to respond to Yet Another attempt to get them to give up their nuke program. So far all their responses have been, "No." So why take well over a month to say No one more time?

Some say that Aug. 22 corresponds to the date in Islamic mythology when Mohammed was taken on the back of a flying horse, first to "the farthest mosque", and then to heaven and back. Ahmadinejad may well believe this is an especially auspicious -- in the original sense of the word -- day for some sort of mischief.

But that's crazy, right? No one would believe that.

Right?

Just in case, here's a little photo to contemplate. It's last Friday's photo with the color levels jiggered. I was fooling around with the pictures one day and created this by accident. I liked it so much I decided to keep it.

I call it, "The Last Night of the World".





By the way -- in Iran, it's already tomorrow.

Sweet dreams!

UPDATE: Allah says cut it out already.

Meantime, the Flea has found a true sign of the Apocalypse:

Iä! The Gods Are Crazy! Iä! The Stars Are Blind!
Iä! Iä! Hilton!

Posted 1:59 PM by Angie Schultz

Foto Friday: The Twelve Apostles

No, not a Biblical reference, but a rock formation off the coast of Victoria, Australia.


The Twelve Apostles, Victoria, Australia, Dec. 2000

In December 2000 we flew to Coober Pedy (an opal-mining town in South Australia, famous for underground houses with jewel-studded walls), then visited Kangaroo Island, near Adelaide, and afterward drove on along the coast to Melbourne. We went past Mt. Gambier (home of the World-Famous Blue Lake, which I'd never heard of, before or since), the Big Lobster, and other delights I'll get around to posting one of these days.

Near Melbourne there's a section known as the Great Ocean Road, with many very beautiful rock formations, fantastic vistas, and about ten billion flies. I think the Twelve Apostles (most of them are behind me, in this photo) are the last major formation as you go east.

We had perfect timing that day. We got there just before sunset on a beautiful cloudless day, with a strong south wind whipping up spray into a golden glow.

After taking these pictures we drove back up the coast and took pictures of other formations we'd driven past to get to the Apostles before sunset, and the next day we did it again, getting shots in full sun. As we were leaving the area I went to pay for gas and found I did not have my debit card. This was just before Christmas, and we still had to fly back to Sydney (where I was living) and get Christmas dinner. We went to lunch (Niles paid) and I went through my wallet again and -- ta da! -- there it was, put in the wrong pocket.

I tell you this trivia because you should know that there is no feeling like the one you get when you find you are not flat broke in a foreign country, two days before Christmas.

We never did get to Melbourne. We didn't have time. But we waved as we drove past it to the airport.

Labels: Foto Friday, Greece

Posted 1:31 PM by Angie Schultz

Down with the Great Spelling Satan!

You may have heard about the Iranian newspaper which has decided to lash out at the mockers of Mohammed by lampooning the Holocaust. They announced a Holocaust cartoon contest, and now the results are in!

Turns out that the holders of the big! international! prestigious! cartoon contest can't spell "Holocaust":




Admittedly that's not in their native language, but if you're going to make a big fat hairy deal out of something like this, if you're going to give the English star billing over the Persian, the least you could do is run your poster past an English-speaking editor.

And, no, I didn't whip up a fauxto: the same poster shows up in this collection of gallery photos.

(I googled around to see if somehow "Holocust" was the correct spelling in some other language, but to hell with it: "International Cartoon Contest" is in English.)

The cartoons, however, are making themselves scarce. There's a list of participants here, but no links to the cartoons. There's a photo gallery of the judging here, but the cartoons have been blurred or defaced for some unknown reason. (It's possible the judging isn't finalized, or they're waiting to notify the winners.)

This cartoon is featured prominently on the IranCartoon front page, and another is here (spot the Holocaust relevance), but that's all I've been able to find.

Via Ghost of a Flea, who has an extensive post on the subject.

Posted 10:53 AM by Angie Schultz

Holding the Mayo

Hot Air gives us the latest scoop on the passenger whose antics caused a London-to-DC flight to divert to Boston yesterday. Even her lawyer says "She's got some very serious mental health problems."

And not of recent vintage, either. The ABC article quotes a Pakistan Daily Times article (URL found by Allah, only he mistakenly refers to it as Dawn, a different Pakistani paper), in which she writes:

The folksongs of the 1960s will never be written again because of President George Bush. He has hampered the liberties of my country in the name of September 11. Songs now can only talk of patriotism they cannot mention peace.

That's the pull quote at the top of the page. The article itself is a mess, rambling on about the Cuban missile crisis and the Civil War, and Mayo practically breaks her arm patting her generation on the back for its "brave" anti-war stance. She also says that her favorite US president is Abraham Lincoln, who made the difficult decision to go to war for a moral principle. Obviously she doesn't know her history, or she'd know that Lincoln drastically curtailed civil liberties in pursuit of that moral principle.

In a May 13 column, she wrote:

It is hard to explain to the rest of the world what is happening in the American mind right now because the people in the US are being ruled by their mental health system. Their consciences do not operate according to moral standards, or religious beliefs. They do things because of the diagnoses they have received from their psychiatrists.

She goes on with a very eccentric tour of the history of psychiatry. Americans, you know, constantly assess their own minds to make sure they're not having any unusual thoughts. If they do, they immediately run to a psychiatrist to drug them into conformity. Apparently the psychiatrist does not bother to explain the concept of projection. This column you really must read.

Best of the Web (second item) has found several other Daily Times columns. Here are some more (all from 2003):

In Pindi on March 1 March 11
After Doomsday May 6
Dear Senator Byrd May 27
A New Kind of Arrogance June 10
New Face of Justice June 17
The View from Mt. Abraham June 30
To the Guantanamo Bay Inmates July 15 ("If you were to read the US Constitution now, it would read like a fairytale. None of it can be found in actual practice in the country.")
A Ray of Hope July 29

You may be asked to register, but BugMeNot has a registration you can use.

The columns I read were uniformly simple-minded and self-absorbed, continually assuring her audience that Americans "know" various facts which exist mainly inside her head ("Americans understand, deep down, that they have lost their freedom.") Many (if not all) of her columns contain references to rock music of the '60s (ABC reports she was wearing a Rolling Stones T-shirt to her arraignment). I guess if you just try hard enough you can wish yourself back to those golden days, when you could flatter yourself that you were brave and relevant.

I hate to think of Pakistanis frowning or nodding over these columns, and thinking, "So that's what Americans really think. Huh." I guess I should be used to that sort of thing by now. If only Mayo could replace her hippy dopeyness with an acid contempt, she'd fit right in at the Sydney Morning Herald.

I wonder if someone at the Daily Times was thinking of Katherine Mayo, author of Mother India, a 1927 book arguing against Indian self-rule. One (rather crazed) site I saw said that Katherine Mayo had a "hatred of Hindus", but given her emphasis on women's rights in India, I doubt she'd think much better of Indian Muslims.

(Pre-posting update: Commenter "john" at Rantburg (see comment #10) has found the story of the Pakistani pen pal. It's a romance, and Mayo wrote about it here.)

Posted 7:07 PM by Angie Schultz

New Toy

Hey, look what I got! A cell phone! And it takes pictures!



Well, OK, it's not my cell phone, it belongs to Niles. But he already has a phone, so this is "mine".

As you can see, it takes really crummy pictures.

As near as I can figure it out, he had a phone once upon a time, and wanted to upgrade but keep his own number. No can do, said the phone company, so he got a new phone and number, but kept the old one as well. That was a couple years ago, and now the old phone is so out of date that they're going to start charging people extra to use the old technology.

So he went to get a new phone for the old number. No can do, they told him. But this time he knew they were lying, so he went to a different phone store (same company) and they set him right up.

But this is "my" phone, which I'm to keep here at home and grab to take with me in case of emergency. Such an emergency is bound to come along every century or so, in which event I'll probably panic and forget to take the phone.

Anyway, I've finally joined the 21st century. And with the addition of an inexpensive kit, now I, too, can look like a crazy woman.

Just a few minutes ago, as we were leaving the grocery store, some woman with an explosion of hair started yakking to Niles:

Did you hear about the...pretending to be lawyers...money...thieves...you didn't hear about that?

That's all I heard of her conversation, and that's pretty much all Niles absorbed, too. He just said "uh," and "huh," and "no," and not at all "get the hell away from me," since he is a gentleman (haven't been able to break him of that yet). He finally joined up with me again and she headed toward her car. She was still talking as she walked away.

"You thought all the crazy people were on the internet," Niles said. "Now you know that there are still old-fashioned fresh-air crazies running around."

"Was she on the phone?" I asked Niles.

"I didnt' think of that. I thought she was talking to me!" Her hair made it impossible to tell whether she had those little earphones on.

I told him this was a good excuse to ignore weirdos. "Oh, I'm sorry! I assumed you were on the phone. Freak."

Posted 7:00 PM by Angie Schultz

News You Can Use

"'14 October 2005' Who knew Velveeta even had an expiration date?"

Bastard better not die. He's under-insured.

Posted 2:19 PM by Angie Schultz

Foto Friday: Amateur Fauxtography

Yesterday I was talking about the need for color adjustment. There's also a need for a nice, relaxing image. Fortunately, I have both.

Niles had a business trip to Maui in 2003, and I tagged along. I blogged about it here (keep scrolling up) (if you know what's good for you).

On that trip I shot three rolls of slides, which is about 110 slides. I love the colors you get with Kodachrome. Usually I get two or three pictures per roll that are worth looking at, but with slides that goes up to four or five. I'd shoot only slides, except that then you have to go to an extra expense to get them made into prints.

Recently I had thirty of the slides made into prints and scanned onto a CD. I was excited when the day came to pick them up, because many of them were terrific, and I was anxious to see them full size. But when the prints came back, most of them looked kinda like this:


Pu'u Kukui from Kihei, Maui, Sep. 2003
(Original)

What the hell is that? Why's it all blue? The slide didn't look like that; it was more colorful. It wasn't the printing process; that's the digital scan. This is a good camera store we went to, one that still understands film, and they've always delivered good prints before, though I think that this is the first time I've had them print slides.

Fortunately, though, I have those digital scans, so I was able to turn the dull blue scan into this:


Pu'u Kukui from Kihei, Maui, Sep. 2003
(New and Improved)

Now that's more like it! Perhaps not the greatest picture ever taken, but still pretty, in my biased opinion. And much more like the original slide. I asked myself, is this cheating? And the answer was: it looks so darned good, I don't care.

Of course, my print still looks dull. I can take the fiddled image in and get it printed, but it'll cost me more dough.

(That was the view from our crummy hotel room in Kihei, by the way, after Niles's conference was over. The conference was in Wailea, and that hotel and view were gorgeous.)

I would like to get a dedicated film scanner like this one, but they run $500 for the basic model. Flatbed scanners with slide and negative capability are much cheaper, but I doubt they'll do as good a job as a dedicated film scanner. On the other hand, I do have old prints to scan, and our current scanner doesn't do a very good job on them

Mono Lake and Mt. St. Helens were both scanned from prints and don't look too bad, but I have many lovely photos that I can't show here, because the prints just suck. I found later that we had professional scans of Mt. St. Helens done at processing time; if I run out of photos (unlikely) I might show a comparison between those and the scanned print in that first Foto Friday.

In any case, enjoy the only-slightly-faux tropical breezes!

Labels: Foto Friday, Hawaii

Posted 9:21 PM by Angie Schultz

Full Disclosure: Foto Fakery

What with all the fauxtography (love that word) in the news, I figured I'd best come clean about the amount of manipulation I do to my Friday photos: a lot.

For example, take the photo of the Swift launch I posted a couple weeks ago. Here's a close-up comparing the original image with the image that actually got posted:


Swift photo, before and after manipulation

The image on the left is the original, and shows a bright reflection of the flare to the left of the rocket, and a fainter, upside-down reflection to the right. When I started to post this, I wondered whether I should leave it in, to be "truthful" about the picture, or take it out. I found the reflections very distracting, and decided that since they really didn't add information, they could go.

You can see that the colors are slightly different, too. I fiddled with the levels a bit to brighten up the photo. If you do it right, you can magically perk up a dull photo. Then again, if you don't do it right you can saturate the white or black areas (like I almost did with the right side of the plume there).

I don't do digital photography, so I'm not sure where the line lies in color adjustment. For example, right now I'm looking at two computer screens: a Samsung flat screen, and the display on my laptop. The Samsung has much warmer and richer colors than the laptop. If I adjust the colors so that it looks "right" on the laptop, is that too much manipulation?

The Charlotte Observer fired an award-winning photographer for adjusting the color levels on an image. You can see the published image here, but I don't know if the original is on-line.

It seems a bit harsh to me to fire a guy for adjusting the colors a little in what's meant to be an arty, not a news, photograph. But it turns out he'd done it before, and was suspended. In fact, he had won three awards for altered photographs in that instance, which were afterwards rescinded. So basically he was fired for doing something he'd been told not to do. You can see the three photos, both the original and the award-winning, published versions, here (requires Flash, for no good reason). The second and third pictures seem unobjectionable to me, but the first is really beyond the pale.

Anyway, sometimes the transfer from film to digital (or from film to print) doesn't go quite right, and then some digital fiddling is required. I'll show you that on Friday.

Posted 10:03 AM by Angie Schultz

Signs and Portents

Have you ever noticed that smoke sometimes almost seems to form patterns? It's kinda like clouds, where you can see bunnies, or turkeys, or faces.

Just like this:



How spooky is that?

(This joke was a scream when I thought of it. An hour of photo manipulation later, and it's boring. But that's all I got. Originally Fidel was involved. That was a lot funnier, but it made no sense. I did think of a much better joke, but Publius beat me to it.)

Why did Adnan Hajj go to the trouble of faking this photo, and then do such a crappy job on it? The official Reuters explanation is that their dog ate it. No, wait, I mean, that Hajj was just cleaning up a little dust, and he goofed because he couldn't see the screen.

Can't see the computer screen in the dark? Sure, I buy it. Ric Locke suggests that his laptop batteries drained, and he had to do his Photoshopping by candlelight.

Nick and Nora proffer the novel idea that the photographer was sending a literal and metaphorical smoke signal, a sign that he was working under duress. I think the dog theory is more plausible.

My current theory is that all the local stringers had a bet on to see whose editors were the most gullible and clueless. First one to be fired wins. They were probably inspired by this quote:

"It's hard to imagine how someone sitting in an air-conditioned office or broadcast studio many thousands of miles from the scene can decide what occurred on the ground with any degree of accuracy," said Kathleen Carroll, AP's senior vice president and executive editor.

Photo editor: "Look, Jews do not have horns, cloven hooves, and tails. Choirs of young-eyed cherubim do not follow Nasrallah around, singing his praises."

Local stringer: "Oh, excuse me, Mr. Cool-and-Comfy, I'm only out here eating dust and dodging Zionist ordnance. What do I know?


Hajj apparently won the bet, big time, because not only has Reuters fired him, they've "pulled" all 920 of his photos, where "pulled" just means they won't sell them anymore. I googled him earlier this morning, and found mostly soccer pictures.

[Copyright of the original of the above photo belongs to Reuters, and they're welcome to it. Used without permission.]

Posted 11:50 AM by Angie Schultz

Foto Friday: Kitsch Catch

In honor of kitsch and crazies, today's photo is the magnificent Humping Fish in beautiful downtown Issaquah!


Humping Fish, Issaquah, Washington, Sep. 2005

That's humping as hunched and jumping, pervs, and not at all because it seems to love the building very very much.

Issaquah is where we ended up after fleeing Hurricane Rita. Niles and I loved the Humping Fish. Unfortunately, getting a picture involved either crossing a scary intersection, or trying to shoot it as we drove through. We chose the latter, and it turned out pretty well, but you can see the motion blur in the nearer trees.

If this photo ends up in some future Charles Phoenix's collection, people will look at it and say, "Man, things were weird back then. Did giant inflatable fish really sell cars? And if it's Evergreen Ford, wouldn't an evergreen have been more appropriate?" Know, then, that Niles and I asked ourselves these very questions. Of course, there's not much scope for expression with an evergreen. You're pretty much confined to green with those babies. I guess you could give it eyes or something. That would be even more disturbing.

Also you can be sure that twenty or thirty or fifty years hence, people will be saying two things:

1. Look at those great old cars! Ha ha! Can you believe that? My dad had one of those! (Unlikely in the case of the white stretch Hummer on the right there, but still...)
   
2. Twenty-one thousand for a whole car?? I paid that for tires!
   

That is, if they don't print and frame it to remind themselves what fish, trees, and cars look like as they stumble through the lifeless radioactive ash. Of course, we're unlikely to have the internet still, in that case.

(I bring you this grim scenario because when I was a teenager we were all forced to join the Grim Scenario-Bringer's Union, Local 2525, which ensures that all descriptions of the future feature at least three of: pain, death, radiation, pollution, loss, despair, starvation, disease, and misery. So it's just a contractual obligation. That's how the whole global warming industry came about. Bet you didn't know that.)

Labels: Foto Friday, Washington

Posted 1:21 PM by Angie Schultz

Kitsch as Kitsch Can

I was going to craft a serious post about world events today, but to hell with it. Let's PAR-TAY!

Check out the bling on the woman in the little black dress. Look at those earrings! And the bracelet! And the hair! To top it all off, there's a beaded curtain and a lava lamp and a fondue pot. I was a little kid back then, but I missed out on that kind of thing, because my parents held no fondue parties (though I think we went to some Tupperware parties). My sister did have a beaded curtain in her doorway, but there wasn't room for a cool rec room with pool table in the mobile home.

(Also note that commenter "Miss Sharon" has posted a regrettable recipe to go with it. Oh, "psychedelic"! That's the effect they were going for! Not "nauseating", after all.)

That's the "Slide of the Week" from Charles Phoenix. He's been buying up other people's slides at thrift stores, estate sales, etc, and combing them for neat-o examples of mid-century American culture. Then he writes books about them. His latest book is Americana the Beautiful. I send you to the publisher's website because they have a giant version (1.3M) of the book's cover. Check out the picture of the little boy in the top center picture. He's got airplane wallpaper. Man, I woulda killed for airplane wallpaper.(And here's the Amazon link.)

Before that, Phoenix wrote Southern Californialand, which was more narrowly focused. That picture's so beautiful it hurts my eyes (Amazon link).
Now, I used to look at old pictures from the '50s, say, and experience a warm glow of nostalgia for things I never knew. There was a quality about those times, I decided, a freshness and an innocence that's been lost from the modern world.

And then I came across a an old album of photos that I took myself, with the camera I got for Christmas in 1971, and I realized that that quality is not in the times, but in the photos. It's there in the event, frozen in time. It's the once-in-a-lifetime trip, it's the family reunion, it's the Christmas you got your first camera.

Or the time you went to Opryland:

Opryland, Summer, 1972

According to Wikipedia, that was the summer the park opened. I didn't realize it had closed! (In 1997.) My stepdad was (is) a huge country music fan, so I guess he thought we had to be first in line. I remember almost nothing about the park, except that they had ice cream bars in the shape of guitars, and we went to some sort of horse show when it was almost too dark to see.

That's a terrible picture, I know: too far away and out of focus, and the film was probably accidentally exposed before processing (the little strip of light at the top). That was a little 126 camera that had no focus controls or exposure settings. What you saw in the viewfinder was not what you saw on film, and frequently that meant you had your thumb over the lens.

Worse, though, I managed to catch no one wearing silly Seventies fashions. The best I can do is the man on the left, who's pushing one of the tiny cruel metal strollers of the era, basically half a bucket on wheels. We didn't have them fancy-schmancy padded Humvee strollers back in my day, I tell ya.

In other nostalgia news, Will Collier says that Lileks's head will explode when he sees this site.

Let's hope not. It is cool, what with all the flashy flash animations and whatnot. But, c'mon, the guy's practically a baby. He was in junior high, he says, in 1985. That was the year I entered grad school. Consider this:

What to do if you're in elementary school and you find a vintage gum wrapper in a library book:

1. Place in Trapper Keeper.
   
2. When school year is over, empty Trapper Keeper into a box.
   
3. Place box in storage for decades.
   
4. Wait for internet to be invented.
   
5. Scan wrapper and share it with the world.
   

It's a wrapper for Fruit Stripe gum (MST flashback: "You are chewing the Fruit Stripe Gum of Stability. Those who enjoy it will get a civil service job with good benefits."). See, now, Lileks would've had a wrapper from gum he had personally chewed back in the Devonian.

(I sent this link to my whippersnapper brother, who loved it. He's on the high side of 30 and, like Kirk D., is too old to be collecting toys.)

I particularly commend to your attention the FIRST-EVER FULLY AUTHORIZED, FLASH-ANIMATED CHICK TRACT. Yes, boys and girls, it's a flash version of Jack Chick's "This Was Your Life." I thought the animation was clever, considering that it didn't introduce new graphic elements, but only animated the old ones. Watch it dispassionately, appreciating it for its pop cultural significance. And be sure to scream "YAAAAAA!" as you are cast into Hell.

Also good are the Flip flash toons here and here. They take a while to load, but it's OK, since there are little animations to entertain you while they do. For cute!

These wallpapers are just OK. Much better is the intro: "Attention all computer users of Earth!"

There's also a secret fun blog.