Posted 7:27 AM by Angie Schultz

The Return of the Natalie

Look who's back, without so much as a "sorry to have kept you waiting". She must have been through strange and transformative adventures in the belly of the Earth, for now she is claiming superpowers. Clairvoyance, here, and, well, something about a plibble way of knowing. (I was going to accuse her of claiming the knowledge of the angels, as opposed to the inferior knowledge of man, except I couldn't remember the proper Greek terms or the C.S. Lewis book I'd read them in. Stupid memory.)

I suppose she'll be wanting us to call her Natalie the White now.

Posted 10:07 AM by Angie Schultz

Foto Friday: Lookout!

Thanks to the new scanner, I can post photos that just didn't scan well from prints, like this one:


Kalalau Lookout, Kauai, Sep. 1995

This of course is the beautiful Kalalalalalau Lookout on the Na Pali coast of Kauai. We had to drive up there twice to get that picture. On our first try it looked a lot like this:



"Um, gosh, breathtaking," we said. We hung around for a while, hoping for the fog to clear, but it just swirled around, taunting us. I think I heard it laughing. But then the next day we went again and got an entire roll of beautiful pictures.

Which led, eleven years later, to me spending the entire flipping afternoon scanning in the damn thing, and only getting 3/4ths of the roll done! I've decided to scan only the best pictures at 4800dpi, but since nearly every shot in this roll was gorgeous, I had to scan most of them in at high resolution, which takes six minutes each. The most frustrating and time-wasting thing, though, was the failure of the scanner to detect all of the frames.

The film holder has space for twelve 35mm frames. My negatives are cut into four-frame strips, so I can only scan eight frames at a time. The scanner is supposed to detect how many frames you have in there, but often it will only find five or six of the eight frames. Then you have to fiddle with it, and move the negatives around in the holder, and curse a lot. I've read reviews for many scanners where that was a problem, so I don't think it's unique to mine. Still, grr. I found myself wondering whether it wouldn't have been better just to have the camera store do it.

I can't afford that, though, and more importantly I can't control the finished product. That certainly turned out great in this case. The print scan had little horizontal lines in the mountainside and ocean over on the left. This one does too, if you look close, but those are actually intrinsic to the mountain, and not artifacts. The greens in the print scan were also richer and darker, which gave a sort of distance to the image. It was a beautiful photo, but it was clear that it was a photo. I'm using this image as wallpaper, and now when I look at it I feel slightly dizzy. I might fall in!

(One day the wallpaper will be animated, so that the clouds move and the trees shiver in the wind. And one day that will be on your actual wall.)

Labels: Foto Friday, Hawaii

Posted 6:36 PM by Angie Schultz

Hogpile!

You've probably heard about the little ruckus regarding Arizona's new 9/11 memorial.

But what you probably didn't know is that Arizona also has a new World War II memorial, and my operatives deep within the Scorchy State have returned with photos:


Acknowledging the root causes
See also here.




Coincidence? Read the link.
A familiar name appears.




Disproportionate response



Distractions from the real war

Wonder if they have a memorial for the Mexican-American War?


Other memorial versions:
Six Meat Buffet
Sean Gleeson
Macker's World
Iowahawk

UPDATE: By the way, one of the panels in the real Arizona 9/11 memorial notes that Avtar Singh Cheira, a Sikh, was shot in Phoenix on 5/19/03. You can read a little about that here. Cheira has recovered, but his assailants were never found. It certainly does sound like a crime motivated by bigotry. But I must point out that, sadly, bigotry existed in the world before 9/11, and will no doubt be with us for some time to come. I couldn't find anything which indicated that this shooting had anything to do with 9/11, nearly two years earlier.

ALSO: It should be noted that the backgrounds to images in this post came from the photos by "AZ Patriot" in the Hot Air link, above.

Posted 9:46 AM by Angie Schultz

Foto Friday: Scanners Do Not Live in Vain

Two weeks ago I mentioned wanting to get a scanner to digitize my large photo collection. Last Saturday I finally found one, and so I'm able to bring you one of my favorite pictures.


Lanai, Hawaii, Sep. 03

This is the road to the Garden of the Gods on the Hawaiian Island of Lanai. The actual Garden -- an area of colorful rocks -- is a not as impressive as its Colorado namesake, but it does have its charms. I'll be posting some pictures of the rocks eventually.

This is a very simple picture, of pretty much nothing, and I'm not quite sure why I'm so fond of it. I think it's the colors, and the soft banks of cloud.

This was taken at sunset, which is the best time to see the Garden. It's on the way out, back to Lanai City. It's easy to get out of the Garden, because if you just head toward the mountains you'll get back to town eventually. There's nowhere else to go. Getting there is harder. "Go north out of town. Turn onto the third dirt road on your left. Where you see the fence knocked down, turn right. Drive until you get to the Garden." The directions were something like that, and it's quite a ways from the knocked-down fence, and all the while you're wondering whether you're on the right dirt track.

As I said in that previous post, I really wanted a dedicated film scanner, but they're very expensive. This one -- a CanoScan 8600F -- was less than $200, and so far seems to do a good job. It was easy to get set up, too, somewhat to my surprise. (When you're used to Linux/Unix, installing software without some sort of crash or complaint is virtually a miracle. And damned suspicious.)

Here's a comparison between a scan made at the camera store, and the one made by the new scanner. (For reference, this is the blue cooler seen at the right hand side of the bridge in last week's photo.)




I've fiddled with the color saturation and contrast in order to facilitate a comparison (though I didn't work very hard at it). There are certainly more pixels, which gives a much smoother appearance. A crude calculation shows that the store scan has a resolution of about 2200, whereas the CanoScan scan has about 4800. But there's not anything like twice as much detail, which suggests that we're coming up on the limitation of the photo itself (which was, after all, a quick hand-held snapshot). I think I read that the most resolution you're going to squeeze out of a piece of 35mm film is something like 3000 dpi, using a tripod in good light with perfect focus.

I got the scanner in order 1) to archive all my old photos, in case of fire or something, 2) so that I could shoot more slides, which have much richer color than prints, and 3) so that I could digitize them and post them here.

The CanoScan takes six minutes to scan a frame like the ones above, that's at 4800 dpi with the dust removal set on high. I have thousands of photos, so scanning them all in at that resolution is not going to be practical.

On the other hand, I don't really have to. A 4x6 print doesn't need anything like 4800dpi and, if the negatives should be destroyed, I wouldn't want to re-print all the pictures anyway. So only the best ones really need the full resolution.

Anyhow: Fun! More pretty pictures! Teh Yay!

UPDATE: To wax tedious on the subject, I tried scanning the print with the all-in-one HP scanner, but the contrast was too much for it, or something. The dark area on the side didn't come out black, but a mottled dark purple. I spent hours and hours trying to get rid of it, to no avail. The same thing happened on a number of photos.

Labels: Foto Friday, Hawaii

Posted 5:22 PM by Angie Schultz

Speechifyin'

Avast, ye scurvy pups! It be Talk Like a Pirate Day. Coincidentally, the Presydent gave those lubbers at the UN a talkin' to. Did he give it in pirate speech? Arrr, he did NOT. Did he threaten 'em with keel haulings and plank walkings? NO. He didn't even order that cur Ahmadinejad to the gratings.

Arr, well that settles it. I'll not be voting for Mr. Bush in the next election. That'll learn him. Arr.

I had me a thoughtful post on the 9/11 movie that had the rabble all up in arms t'other day, but I decided to post this instead. Yer right welcome.

Arr.

Posted 4:36 PM by Angie Schultz

Foto Friday: Unnatural Bridge

Well, again I don't have a lot of time to write, so, since David Fleck (scroll around for more) is offering only hard, brown, jaggedy things, I thought I'd give you something in a nice, soft green:


Liliuokalani Gardens, Hilo, Hawaii, Dec. 2004

Ahhhh....

The person on the right side of the bridge was fishing for some little critters in the water---tadpoles, maybe. Don't know why, maybe they were bait, maybe some Japanese delicacy.

Labels: Foto Friday, Hawaii

Posted 11:06 AM by Angie Schultz

It Begins

Listen! What's that sound, that distant rumble? Could that be, finally, the turning of the worm?

That's Martin Amis's long and digressive Observer essay, "The Age of Horrorism". Touching on a variety of seemingly-unrelated topics (his daughter, an abandoned novella, the liquor laws of Greeley, Colorado in 1949), it has the feel of a long walk in a meadow with a vicar who reveals, in between pointing out the interesting flora and fauna, that he has become a Moonie. (Or a Muslim, Mormon, atheist, Zoroastrian, neo-pagan...whatever you find most shocking. Or a Christian, for the truly jaded.)

Perhaps that's the reason for the nature walk, to reassure you that he hasn't gone off his rocker, that he's still the same thoughtful, tolerant, gently-contemptuous, fashionably-ironic fellow we've always known. It's just that these chaps want to kill us all, you see. And for the most illiberal of reasons! True, the Americans are ghastly, but these Muslim chappies are even more ghastly, if you can credit such a thing.

On his rambles, Amis touches on something we of a more direct (and ghastly) nature have realized (and said) for years: that terrorism is less a product of American foreign policy than of the pathologies of the Islamic world.

We should understand that the Islamists' hatred of America is as much abstract as historical, and irrationally abstract, too; none of the usual things can be expected to appease it. The hatred contains much historical emotion, but it is their history, and not ours, that haunts them.

And:

The main distinction is that the paradise which the Nazis (pagan) and the Bolsheviks (atheist) sought to bring about was an earthly one, raised from the mulch of millions of corpses. For them, death was creative, right enough, but death was still death. For the Islamists, death is a consummation and a sacrament; death is a beginning.

And:

That's what all this was supposed to be: not a clash of civilisations or anything like that, but a civil war within Islam. Well, the civil war appears to be over. And Islamism won it. The loser, moderate Islam, is always deceptively well-represented on the level of the op-ed page and the public debate; elsewhere, it is supine and inaudible.

And:

The most extreme Islamists want to kill everyone on earth except the most extreme Islamists; but every jihadi sees the need for eliminating all non-Muslims, either by conversion or by execution.

(Note the distinction between "Islamists" and "jihadis", suggesting that the latter are more numerous than the former.)

And (regarding suicide bombings during the "Second Intifada"):

The parallel process was the intensive demonisation of Israel (academic ostracism, and so on); every act of suicide-mass murder 'testified' to the extremity of the oppression, so that 'Palestinian terror, in this view, was the measure of Israeli guilt'.

(Amis's quotes are from Paul Berman's Terror and Liberalism.)

These are ideas that his Guardian audience would reject, coming from neocon warmongers like Bush. Will they take them any better from kindly padre Amis?

Perhaps they will, since he washes these bitter truths down with a few teaspoonfuls of sugar in the form of obligatory genuflection to the Other...

Let us make the position clear. We can begin by saying, not only that we respect Muhammad, but that no serious person could fail to respect Muhammad - a unique and luminous historical being.

...swipes at the vulgar cowboys we are saddled with...

The fatal turn [in the Iraq war] was the American President's all too palpable submission to the intoxicant of power. His walk, his voice, his idiom, right up to his mortifying appearance in the flight suit on the aircraft-carrier, USS Abraham Lincoln ('Mission Accomplished') - every dash and comma in his body language betrayed the unscrupulous confidence of the power surge.

...and ritual self-flagellation:

Since [9/11/01] the world has undergone a moral crash - the spiritual equivalent, in its global depth and reach, of the Great Depression of the Thirties. On our side, extraordinary rendition, coercive psychological procedures, enhanced interrogation techniques, Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, Haditha, Mahmudiya, two wars, and tens of thousands of dead bodies.

These reminders may comfort those who would flee from sharing any cause with the "mortifying" Bush.

However, this essay will likely give his reluctant audience the wrong ideas. His recounting of Sayyid Qutb's exile to the bubbling fleshpot of Greeley, Colorado is fascinating, for those who don't know the story. (Short version: Qutb decided America was Satan at a dance in a church basement in Greeley in 1949, which was at that time a dry town.) While Amis is no doubt correct that the horror of the female is one of the major psychoses of the Muslim (more likely, the Arab) world, his history will probably give unneeded support to those who believe that Bush's nasty bellicosity results from his unsatisfactory sex life. (And, yes, I have read lefty blogs where this was seriously suggested.)

He also blames religion, all religion, not just Islam or its extreme forms. I might be on board with that, if not for the previous example of fascism and Communism.

Anyway, it's possible this is the first step to at least some of those who claim to cherish liberty to wake the hell up and start defending it, if only with words.

The other day, Scrappleface had a post on ABC's special on the fiftieth anniversary of 9/11. At the risk of spoiling the joke:

But then the tide turns in favor of the budding Islamic caliphate (Allah be praised!). As memories of the 2001 attacks fade, world opinion turns against the Great Satan. Then the Great Satan turns on itself, consumed from within by a toxic combination of political ambition and cowardice masquerading as tolerance.

But that's not how it's going to go.

No, in 2051 9/11 will be remembered as a heroic time when the entire country woke up to the peril, thanks to the pleading of liberal intellectuals who alone recognized the barbaric, implacable nature of Islamofascism. The country rallied behind the President, the news media supported his policies, and patriotic celebrities cheered up the troops and the public. And so America united to whip yet another totalitarian ideology, and gained the eternal gratitude of the world.

(Speaking of implausible alternate histories, see here.)

Posted 9:53 PM by Angie Schultz

A Thousand Words

Haleakala National Park H.Q., Maui
Sep. 11, 2003

Posted 9:54 PM by Angie Schultz

Self-explanatory

Manhattan from Liberty Island, Summer 1975

Posted 11:20 AM by Angie Schultz

Foto Friday: Digital Ice

I'm trying to avoid posting photos scanned from prints, because I'm hoping to get a film scanner any day now. Canon is supposed to be releasing a new version of a scanner that's gotten very good reviews, but no one has it yet. You can't even buy it from Canon's site.

(I'd rather have a dedicated film scanner, but they're too much money right now.)

When I get it, if I ever do, I'll be able to post much nicer images than the print scans. So I'm trying to post only those photos for which I have digital copies. Like this one:


Mr. Rainier, WA, Sep. 2005
I like the way the road seems to run right up into the curving ridges of the mountain.

I took that almost a year ago, when we were fleeing Hurricane Rita. The really busy hurricane season we were promised seems to be getting off to a slow start, so there probably won't be any fleeing to be done this year.

I figured I'd still have plenty of time to post this deliciously cool image before fall arrived (which comes here just a little too late for Christmas), but it's not been all that warm lately. Why, it's not been above 95 all week!

Labels: Foto Friday, Washington

Posted 8:01 PM by Angie Schultz

Give 'Em Hell, Harry!

See update at the bottom. I've also added a link directly to the DNC's web page on the series, and a quote from the Senators' letter to Disney.

Ya know, I never intended to watch this thing. What? A broadcast network "docudrama" about 9/11? Gee, I'd love to, but I have an appointment to have a root canal done without anaesthetic while listening to Noam Chomsky lectures.

But now I hear that Bill Clinton didn't like it and Madeleine Albright didn't like it and the Democratic National Committee wants the series not just edited but pulled.

From the official DNC website:

A Despicable, Irresponsible Fraud

Does a major national broadcast network want to stain itself by presenting an irresponsible, slanderous, fraudulent, "docu-drama" to the American public? "The Path to 9/11" mocks the truth and dishonors the memory of 9/11 victims to serve a cheap, callous political agenda. Help keep this propaganda off the air.

That's currently the front page. The main page for The Path to 9/11 is here.

When I first saw that at LGF I thought that it came from one of those semi-nutty pseudo-sites, with names like democrats-r-us.com, which try to lure the unwary into thinking they're the Democratic Party. But, no, this is the Real McCoy.

Well, but Clinton, Albright, and Berger are all retired or whatever, and political parties will be partisan (although if I were ABC/Disney I might be chatting with my lawyers about the laws regarding defamation -- can you even defame a TV show?), so big deal.

Ah, but now honest-to-God US Senators are writing thinly-veiled threats against ABC's broadcast license:

The Communications Act of 1934 provides your network with a free broadcast license predicated on the fundamental understanding of your principle obligation to act as a trustee of the public airwaves in serving the public interest. Nowhere is this public interest obligation more apparent than in the duty of broadcasters to serve the civic needs of a democracy by promoting an open and accurate discussion of political ideas and events.

As Allah says, was that letter typed, or written with letters cut from magazines?

(And, as someone I've forgotten said earlier today, first they came for Pluto, and I said nothing, and now they've come for Mickey.)

So now I'm wondering just what it is that Bill and Maddy and Sandy and Harry don't want me to see. Now I think I'll record the show and take a squint at it. So good job with the suppression, Democrats. Well done.

Apparently the sticking point is a bit of overheated "drama" involving men on the ground in Afghanistan waiting to capture Bin Laden, and being held up at the last minute by someone high up in the Administration.

It does sound as if the documen -- excuse me -- docudrama has condensed months of planning and dithering and scads and scads of nuance into a simplistic tale of gutless government officials reining in the guys there on the ground, but that's the "drama" part of the "docudrama".

Which is the reason I can't stand the stuff. I hate re-enactments, especially when the characters talk. Look, show documents, do voiceovers, interview the principals, but don't try to show me the expression on Oswald's face as he pulled the trigger, because you weren't there and you don't know. If you're going to do that, call it fiction and have done with it.

(I go a little easier on people who are doing documentaries about, say, the Punic Wars, since Scipio Africanus is notoriously difficult to interview.)

Having said that, though, the incident described does seem to be more or less true. But I thought we'd all known about that forever: CIA agents had a chance to zap Bin Laden but were prevented by their superiors, quite high up in the government. Those superiors seem to be worried that Bin Laden would be killed in a firefight, which might look like an assassination to some people, leading to snippy remarks by our European betters and frosty moments at UN mixers.

Dorkafork[*], writing that INDC Journal post, says that "in retrospect" the reasons for calling off the operation seem "inadequate". Things are usually easier to see in retrospect. It's a shame we can't see them in retrospect ahead of time; it would save so much trouble. Whoever it was who called off the operation -- that person is being very modest about his role now -- may well have been right about the frosty moments. After all, many serious thinkers[**] advised restraint about going into Afghanistan even after 9/11, on the grounds that we couldn't prove that Bin Laden did it and if he did he probably had a good reason and if we were just nice to the Taliban they would have a talk with him and get him to come forward and apologize and promise never ever to do it again and then we'd have a big group hug.

But I'd just like to see the collective colon spasm that would result if the current Administration or the RNC pulled some kind of baloney like this. The Canadian border crossings would be backed up for twenty miles.

Speaking of which, suspected Canadian Damian Penny reminds us that Republicans did pull a somewhat similar stunt when CBS was preparing to air a miniseries on the Reagans. In that instance, RNC chairman Ed Gillespie asked CBS President Les Moonves to let historians and friends of the Reagans vet the show. (Of particular concern was a remark made by the dramatized Reagan, to the effect that AIDS sufferers deserved to die for their sins. According to the CNN article, writer Elizabeth Egloff admitted to pulling the words straight from her hindquarters.)

If the RNC's "request" wasn't met, Gillespie was prepared to get tough, just like Harry Reid:

Gillespie said that if CBS rejects both requests, the RNC would to sell tapes and DVDs on its Web site that would present "the real Reagan record."

OH MY GOD, SELL DVDS! Those capitalist pigs!

CBS responded, in the end, by defiantly curling up into a little ball and whimpering, and moving the series to Showtime. Let's hope the Mouse shows more guts.

Now I'm ticked at Reid for making me care about this nonsense.

[*]The problem with blogs, and the Internet in general, is that you find yourself arguing or agreeing with intelligent, thoughtful people who call themselves things like "Dorkafork". One day someone will want to read something scintillating and insightful into the Congressional Record and they'll have to page through a dozen blogs to get to someone who doesn't call themselves Dorkafork or Wind Rider or Allahpundit. That's where I win. Ha ha.

[**]By which I mean, ninnies.

UPDATE 9/8: Ahhh--HA! I knew it was something like this. Maybe the whole kerfuffle was ginned up by ABC's publicity department, to get us all watching it. And I fell for it like a rube! But who could imagine? I mean, surely only the Dark Lord Rove could hatch a plan so diabolical, right? And he's not working for ABC.

(I did wonder about these "edits". How long would it take to edit a show like that, anyway? Surely you couldn't get it done between yesterday and Sunday.)

Posted 11:49 AM by Angie Schultz

Moonbat Patrol!

This William Safire column explores the etymology of "moonbat". He correctly ascribes it to Perry de Havilland of Samizdata (see here), but I believe that he errs in writing:

"The prevailing put-down of right-wing bloggers is wingnuts; this has recently been countered by the vilification of left-wing partisans who use the Web as moonbats..."

I thought it was the other way around, that "wingnut" began to be used in response to "moonbat".

I'm afraid that as a put-down, "wingnut" simply doesn't have the cachet that "moonbat" has. Wingnuts have always been with us. A wingnut might be anybody -- a genuine loon, or just someone with whom you stupidly disagree. But being a "moonbat" means a special quality of lunacy, above and beyond the call of the wild.

By the way, Perry insists that he did not mean for "moonbat" to be applied solely to lefties, but does name Noam Chomsky as the ur-moonbat.

After getting that sorted out, Safire slogs on, determined to discover the source of the River Moonbat -- that is to say, the first use of the word itself. He finds it (provisionally) in the Robert Heinlein story "Space Jockey" (Saturday Evening Post, April 26, 1947), where it was a rocket stage. BUT, Heinlein also used the word a year later in "The Black Pits of Luna" (Saturday Evening Post, Jan. 10, 1948; both were subsequently collected in The Green Hills of Earth), where the "Moonbat Patrol" was apparently a scout troop.

"Moonbat Patrol" would be a killer name for a blog. Exploring the Black Pits of Lunacy! I'd do it, but I've got my hands full, what with my constant posting on this one. Anyone who wants to take it, be my guest.

Anyhow, congratulations to Perry on his etymmortality.

Bonus linky: The Heinlein Society.

Posted 9:01 PM by Angie Schultz

Pardon Our Dust!

Please bear with us as we update our blog to serve you better!

Er, well, no. To hell with you. I've been fiddling with the template so it's not quite so ugly. That is, those who choose the dark text on light background will find it's not quite so ugly. The rest of you are doomed to looking at the same old crap. Serves you right, is my view.

But it's late, and I don't have time for further tweaking, so this half-assed effort is all you're getting for now. Deal.

(I can afford to be rude to my readers when there aren't any. That's where I have it all over those more "popular" bloggers. Bwahahahaha!)

UPDATE: OK, think we're done for now. Let me take you on a quick tour of our new features.

First, the banner is now 15% more garish. An increase in garishness was requested by nine out of ten voices in my head.

Second, the side bar has been changed just a little, with new and exciting colors added, and some words removed. I think I added a site to the blog roll too. Remember, if your site isn't there, it's probably because you're not paid up. So get those checks out today!

But the biggest change is over on the day side. Click that link in the upper left to change to dark text on light background. Note that the stupid little black-and-green post titles are now gone. I changed all the titles on the posts now showing, but older posts will still have them (and even older posts will have just lime-on-cream, which is hard to read and will eventually curdle, I suppose).

Now most of the extraneous text on the page is rendered in a dizzying rainbow of brown, befitting the crap it is. I was going for a sort of autumn-y theme, but all the orange and gold was too light to read against the cream background.

Even ignoring the garish banner, I'm not real happy with the light side. What looks sleek and minimalist on the dark side just looks bare in light colors. I might change it again in another couple years.

In the meantime, enjoy changing the colors. I gnashed an millimeter off my back molars getting it right -- well, getting it to how it is now, anyway. So flip those colors! Come on, flip me off! You know you want to.

By the way, if you want to change your personal colors, I recommend Dave Raggett's site. He has a nice table showing the various browser-safe colors.

Annabella has a wonderful HTML help site. Unfortunately it covers what is now very basic, probably deprecated, code, but I still get a lot of use out of it. I think the colors in her browser safe color palette aren't as easy to see as those in Raggett's, but if you click on one of her colors, you'll get some examples of how that color looks as a background to several other colors, and how it looks like as font color on several backgrounds. That helps a great deal in decided whether a color is too light or dark to go on a given background, and I'm sure it was a lot of trouble for her to set up. So onya, Annabella.

UPDATE II: Also now we have special blockquotes. From now on all blockquotes must be boxed for shipping. (Actually, I'm not sure this isn't a tweak too far.)

It's a little difficult to judge what colors are good, especially if you stick to the browser-safe colors. Through some deviltry, the colors that look a bit silly and cartoonish on the big monitor look sleek and modern on the laptop screen. The solution, then, is to look at the blog only with the laptop.

Posted 2:19 PM by Angie Schultz

Foto Friday: Automandias

I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said:--Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
A Budget Rent-A-Car counter...

Temple of Olympian Zeus, Athens, June 1990

I was going to work up a full-length poem, in correct rhyme and meter, which would reference conveniently-placed Jamba Juices for the fasting activist on the move. But it got to be too much work. Poetry is hard.

This picture seems to tilt, I know. By putting these pictures on line I have discovered, to my chagrin, that I don't always hold the camera exactly straight. Who knew? Fortunately the "rotate" task fixes this. But this picture defied correct rotation -- no rotation seemed to fit all the elements. So I'm just going to blame it on the Greeks' skill with "optical refinements".

That's the Acropolis over there on the right, by the way.

This was my first trip out of the US, and I was constantly embarrassed and frightened -- by which I mean, frightened of being embarrassed. There were other, personal things going on in my life at that moment, likewise frightening and embarrassing, with the result that I cannot remember this trip with much pleasure. At the time, though, I thought this would be a once-in-a-lifetime chance to visit Greece.

(It occurs to me that I have very seldom been frightened, except that I was frightened of being embarrassed. Of that, though, I am terrified, constantly. I envy people who have no shame.)

Anyhow: Greece. I spent two weeks on Crete, on business, and a weekend in Athens, sightseeing. These scans were made from prints. I'm hoping to get a slide scanner soon, and then I'll scan in some slides I took on the trip.

Labels: Foto Friday, Greece