Posted 8:39 AM by Angie Schultz

Foto Friday: Sunny Beaches

In 1995 we went to the island of Kauai. On our last day I snapped this photo of the beach behind the hotel:

Kapa'a Beach, Kauai, Sep. 1995

I know it was our last day because there are pictures of the Sierras on the same roll.

I scanned this from the negative yesterday. It came out nice, but not nearly as interesting as the print. I had to fiddle with the colors considerably to recover the golden-green of the print, and didn't quite suceed. The sky is much more turquoise in the print.

Which shows, once again, that colors are kind of subjective.

At the time we were there, this was the Kauai Beachboy Hotel -- a beguiling name, evoking lazy days in the tropical sun. In 1999 it was bought by Shell, who promptly renamed it the Kauai Coast Resort, evoking the fact that it's a resort on a coast. Good marketing there, dudes. (Other pages refer to it as the Kauai Coast Resort at the Beachboy, which is maybe a little better.)

It was a nice hotel. Had thick towels and Comedy Central on the cable, which was my first acquaintance with that MST3K thingy all the kids were talking about. Ahh, happy days.

We sort of felt we were above our element there, and tried not to get the property too grubby.

Here's a postcard of the hotel from the late '60s-early '70s. I haven't had a chance to check out that site yet, but it looks cool.

Posted 3:40 PM by Angie Schultz

Peter Mehlman: At Least Hitler Meant Well

Well, this was inevitable. Peter Mehlman, most famous for being co-executive producer for Seinfeld[*], argues that at least Hitler (and other dictators) meant well, unlike Bush:

You could argue that even the world's worst fascist dictators at least meant well. They honestly thought were doing good things for their countries by suppressing blacks/eliminating Jews/eradicating free enterprise/repressing individual thought/killing off rivals/invading neighbors, etc. Only the Saudi royal family is driven by the same motives as Bush, but they were already entrenched. Bush set a new precedent. He came into office with the attitude of "I'm so tired of the public good. What about my good? What about my rich friends' good?"

How can anyone not see it? It's not that their policies have been misguided or haven't played out right. They. Don't. Even. Mean. Well.

I have long been used to "progressives" saying things like, "At least the Soviets meant well" -- they wanted to create a New World populated with New Men who were above greed and ambition and all those nasty things. Sadly, they had all those pesky "old" Men (i.e., homo sapiens) standing in their way.

But right after September 11, I thought it would be impossible for them to justify Bin Laden; after all, his aim was to force all Muslims (and quite a number of other people) to live under a 7th-century religious code that was notable for being unfriendly to women, gays, and freedom in general. But, no! When it came down to a choice between excusing Bin Laden or supporting George Bush, they found it was no choice at all: Bush unter alles!

Hitler has been the ne plus ultra, the gold standard, of evil. Surely, even those who excuse Bin Laden, who march in the streets carrying signs reading "Bush=Hitler", can't possibly sink any lower? Surely they can't now excuse Hitler?

Thanks, Pete, for demonstrating how low you can go. Got any relatives spinning in their mass graves?

[*]A series which contained only trace amounts of humor. If your doctor prescribes a low-humor diet, ask him if Seinfeld is right for you.

Posted 10:28 AM by Angie Schultz

Foto Friday: Acropolis

A little something from the vault:

The Acropolis, Athens, June 1990

Taken from the roof of my hotel, whose name has been long forgotten. It was just off Syntagma Square, as I recall.
I scanned this from a print; I have no idea where the negatives are. Yes, I'm shocked too. They've got to be somewhere, though, right?

My mother recently gave me a big batch of family photos, and said that they'd just thrown out a bunch of negatives. I mean, what are you going to do with negatives, now, really? I damn near had a heart attack.

Labels: Foto Friday, Greece

Posted 10:44 AM by Angie Schultz

Foto Friday:World's Best View

I believe that this -- in the face of some stiff competition -- is my favorite view in the whole wide world:

Pu'u Kukui from Wailea, Maui
Sep. 2003

Pu'u Kukui is the extinct volcano that makes up the western end of the island of Maui. Some web pages say this means "Hill of Light", which I guess is more romantic-sounding that what I thought it meant, which is "Candle Nut Tree Hill". Although I suppose if you burn candle nuts for light, it's the same thing.

Candle nuts are those big black nuts you sometimes get in leis. They are extremely butch, so a modern manly man can wear them instead of a femmy flower lei. Also, they're cheaper and last longer.

This is a mystery photo. For a long time I've had a picture of Pu'u Kukui, ready to post, and then a while back I scanned in this (in some ways) better one.

The aspect ratio was as you see it there, which would be typical of a panoramic camera. Niles's film camera has a panoramic mode, but my antique scorns such modern frippery. I think there was a scanner glitch, but it made a nice picture. The lesson here is that it is possible to have too much contrast (use those polarizers wisely!).

I was transfixed by this view while I was in Maui. I could barely take my eyes off it, even to blog (start at the bottom, scroll up). When I was a girl we lived in hilly Missouri, and I used to sit out on the back porch and look westward over the hills, wondering what was out there, in my future. I used to imagine myself visiting exotic places and seeing exotic sights.

Now I (occasionally) go to exotic places, and the exotic sights only remind me of Missouri. I actually get nostalgic for the back porch and the hills, and wish that I was back there dreaming of the future, rather than here living it.

Posted 11:28 AM by Angie Schultz

Geezer Squad Update

You might have read this Boston Globe article about the to-do on a Northwest flight on June 2. It reported that a man had become "unruly", and had to be subdued by a couple of old guys: an ex-cop (Bob Hayden) and a retired Marine (name unknown). The article was notable for the remark by Hayden's wife, who calmly read her book during the incident. She was quoted as saying:

"I figured he would go up there and step on somebody's neck, and that would be the end of it. I knew how that situation would end. I didn't know how the book would end."

I got to wondering just what the heck was going on, and what "unruly" meant, and why, if two guys were acting weird and shouting before takeoff, did the plane leave with them still on it. Never got an answer to that last one, but here are a few follow-up items:

Annie Jacobsen, writing at Aviation Nation, interviewed Hayden. (You'll remember that Jacobsen wrote about her experiences on a different Northwest flight, one in which she described a group of [what turned out to be] Syrian musicians acting strangely. This Wikipedia page [WARNING! etc] has links to her original articles for Women's Wall Street, among other things.)

Anyhow, Hayden sounds as if he still thinks it might have been a probe, since then men popped out of their seats the instant the pilot made an announcement. He also likes that quote about his wife in the Globe.

The Aero-News Network describes exactly what the men were doing. Although the Globe article, above, said that one passenger was unruly, and the other was his brother, here Hayden describes both men as acting strangely.

His hometown newspaper has an article in which Hayden describes the two men as "Pilipino". (Ah, that good old fact-checking.) At the end, the article also notes that Hayden was a contestant in a short-lived reality show called Lost, which ran on NBC in late 2001. The idea was to drop two-man teams off in the middle of nowhere, and let them make their way back to New York City within 25 days. (Sounds ripe for lawsuits.) The episodes Hayden appeared in had the teams dropped in Bolivia. Read about the series in general here. (WAR---aww, skip it).

Finally, the Patriot Ledger says that his staff presented him with a cake when he got back to work, with a Superman figurine on it. A white-haired Superman.

Photos of Hayden at those last two links.

Posted 11:08 AM by Angie Schultz

Quilting Bee Hard

[This title was won the coveted award for World's Worst Quilting-Related Title. Thank you!]

Natalie Solent points us to a contest to find the World's Worst Quilt.

Frankly, some of these people are just showing off. This quilt, for example, won a consolation prize on some sort of technicality, although it looks perfectly fine to me. It's as if she's saying, "Look! This is my worst quilt! Ain't it beautiful?"

And, frankly, the Grand Prize Winner is less than impressively awful. After all, she did piece together all those little pinwheels, even if she didn't actually quilt them into the quilt.

Somewhere I have a quilt my mother made that could beat of those -- and many others -- hands-down. She made it, naturally, out of material left over from clothes, and thus it had an electic assortment of fabrics (no fake fur, though -- now that's impressive): there was some yellow satin, and red rayon(?) and some ugly dark purple felt-y stuff, and I think some dark purple rayon. The pieces are enormous and randomly-shaped, and machine-stitched together with more than one color of thread, using a weird stitch that looks like a fish's skeleton. I think the backing was originally a sheet -- striped mostly with different pinks, but also with blue and green and purple. She said the large random pieces were supposed to be reminiscent of stained glass.

And appliquéd on the top is a brown corduroy basket of blue flowers. On top of "stained glass"? Mom only knows. I'd post a picture, but it's packed away somewhere.

It is, in short, one ugly-ass quilt.

But it's heavy and soooo waaaarm! When I lived in Sydney I had no central heat -- Sydney is surprisingly cold in the winter, without central heat -- and I was very glad of that quilt.

And that's the primary point of a quilt, to put on your bed and keep you warm. The secondary point is thrift -- to find a use for leftover scraps of fabric. Because paw cain't hitch up the team and drive the five miles into town to buy that fancy dollar-a-bolt stuff every year missy! Beauty is a tertiary function of the quilt, and one that can be dispensed with if necessary. I don't understand people who make quilts out of new fabric and then hang 'em on the wall. On the wall!

Which I believe my stepmother does. So maybe I better shut up about that.

When I was little my sister and I used to sit in bed with my stepdad's mother and she'd tell us where all the little squares of fabric came from: "This was a dress of Aunt Susan's -- she wore that the day she started school. And that was a shirt of your dad's; he tore it up climbing a tree, and I was so mad, because you know, we didn't have much money then. And this was from one of Grandpa's coats..." We loved that, loved to think of Dad and our aunt and uncles as little kids like us, long ago in the misty past.

Grandma eventually made me a quilt of my own, a pretty one in shades of light blue. Mom also made me a "proper" quilt (though maybe not up to those (sniff) quilters' standards), in purples. The backing is a piece of red-violet fabric with a "peasant" print (popular then, 25 or 30 years ago). I think it's pretty. It contains, among other things, bits of my sister's fuzzy housecoat.

But at least there are no breadwrappers (note, in the close-up, how the quilter has quilted a turkey-shaped line around each of the turkeys in this turkey). No stuffed blue jean butts, either. (Though I admit that was the sort of thing that went into your more "arty" quilts, back in the day.) Surely either of those is actually the World's Worst Quilt.

Posted 4:11 PM by Angie Schultz

Foto Friday: Mauna Kea Sunrise

I had to take a business trip to Hawaii last year, and on my last day there I woke up (too) early to find this:

Sunrise on Mauna Kea, Hawaii, Dec. 2006

It's not the Earth's best picture, admittedly, since I didn't have the right film, or a tripod. I vaguely recall that this shot -- and another roll and a half like it, as the sun rose -- was obtained by balancing my camera on the railing of the lanai and holding vewy, vewy stiww. I remember wrapping the camera strap around my neck securely, because I was seven stories up.

The reddish blobs are the lights of the business district of Hilo, Hawaii, across the bay.

Usually in the morning (and frequently at other times) Mauna Kea is covered by clouds, but that morning the clouds had not yet gathered, and I went out and shot about a third of this roll, an entire roll of slides, and several more frames of a third roll while the sun came up and the light crept down the sides of the mountain and the clouds rose in a ring to obscure the top at last. I'll probably inflict some of those on you later.

Mauna Kea rises to almost 14,000 feet above sea level. But it's nearly 33,000 feet from its base on the ocean floor to the summit, making it the tallest mountain on Earth. Because it's so high, and in the middle of the ocean, the atmosphere at the summit is unusually stable, which means that Mauna Kea has broken out in mushrooms:

Telescope domes at sunrise
Mauna Kea, Hawaii, Dec. 2006

I know, I know...horrible grain. I was working at the limit of the film. That's an enlargment from a different frame from the same roll, where you could see the domes a little better. I didn't bother with the telephoto lens, since there was no way to steady it.

I'm not sure which telescopes those are, but I'm guessing they're the two Gemini telescopes, plus the Canada-France-Hawaii telescope, as seen here.

I went up to the summit on that trip, and got some nice photos of the domes. I'm bore you with those one of these days, too.

Labels: Foto Friday, Hawaii

Posted 9:57 AM by Angie Schultz

OH NOES! I M N UR MSM!

Now Iz ofishally l@m3!

Houston Chronicle tech columnist Dwight Silverman documents the Lolcat craze, as typified (or possibly invented) by the site I Can Has Cheezburger?

Silverman looks (this tiny image is the best I could find) as if he has to have clues surgically implanted -- which is my cruel way of saying he looks too old to be doing the geek beat. "But...but..." Niles sputtered, "...he's a TruGeek! He's been doing this column for ages!" Yes, but he's a Paleogeek, full of WATFIV and WIN.INI. His labored explanation of the basis of the humor in funny cat pics is like William Safire doing an exegesis of a rap song ("The representation of the male member as a snake -- in the line 'my anaconda don't want none 'less you got buns, hon' -- is an ancient one, going all the way back to the Book of Genesis, where...").

Worse, Silverman identifies the grammatical shortcuts common to text-messagers (u no wot i mean unlss u r 2 stupid lol) as "leetspeak", which is totally bogus, man. Leetspeak is intended to make communication harder (in order to fool the Man and the mundanes), not faster. |\|0 +ru3 h@x0r \/\/0u1d u53 0|\|3 |<3y5tr0|<3 \/\/h3n +3|\| \/\/0u1d d0, 1@/\/\3r!!! Y0u h@\/3 b33n pwn3d!

We can only hope that this mainstreaming of Lolcats spells the end of the whole craze, or at least of the lingo. (Actually, a lot of the pictures and captions on the cheezburger site are cute and clever, but then you get stuff like this. Phew! I'm pretty sure that's against international law.)

See also: I Has a Bucket. I think that right-hand picture is from Mucosia: Carnivorous Slugs of Venus!

Labels: Teh Cute Internet

Posted 11:56 AM by Angie Schultz

Logo-rrhea

That oughta be a new word (or, rather, a new definition to an old word): that sick feeling which comes from viewing an unnecessarily-ugly logo. The BBC has asked for alternative logos (see also here.) Well, here's mine. Note the retro look and marketing tie-in possibilities:

If you don't get the joke, well, you're probably young enough to compete in the Olympics. (I knew a girl in high school who had to hide her boyfriend's loaned 2112 album from her parents because of the pentagram. They're evil, you know.)

This would be a lot more appropriate if the Olympics were held in London, Ontario. And they were the NerdOlympics.

As usual, once I'd finished this, I realized it wasn't going to be as funny as I thought. But I WASTED A LOT OF TIME ON THIS, DAMMIT, AND YOU'RE GOING TO LOOK AT IT!

There.

Via Hot Air. Also, Jim Treacher displays a still from a BBC segment on viewer contributed alternate logos so I don't have to. He also has the YouTube link, so I don't have to soil my blog with it. Does that logo look at all familiar? The hands? The circle? Can you spell g-o-a-t-... I knew you could!

Actually, that would not be the first thing that came into my mind when I saw that logo, but having had it drawn to my attention, I can't see any other explanation.

Posted 9:43 PM by Angie Schultz

Spamalot!

Tonight Niles and I went to see the musical Spamalot, which is playing here in town.

The plot, such as it is, deals with King Arthur's quest to find some knights to help him in chivalrous deeds, although he's not clear on what these will be. But then they receive a quest from God: the All-Knowing has apparently misplaced the Holy Grail. After chasing after that for a bit they get separated, and we see them wandering around having adventures and being beset by various annoyances. Finally they are reunited, overcome the Killer Rabbit and learn the location of the Grail. It's under one of the seats in the audience. No, really. Down on the floor, not up in the nosebleeds, where we were. And we end with a big number and a couple of weddings.

During the first half of the first act it seemed as if the show would be entirely made up of musical versions of the best bits from Monty Python and the Holy Grail -- which would be sort of interesting, I guess, but hardly worth the effort. But after the scene with Dennis (of the anarcho-syndicalist commune) it picks up. The Lady of the Lake puts in an appearance, and drags Dennis away to return him as Sir Dennis Galahad. This is a gorgeous little scene, with lovely shiny costumes and a moving boat and cheerleaders wielding electric cattails.

Other good bits are "We're the Knights of the Round Table" (where Camelot is revealed to look suspiciously like the Excalibur Hotel in Las Vegas), "Whatever Happened to My Part?" in which the Lady of the Lake laments the fact that she hasn't been on stage for fifteen minutes or so (done while scenery is being changed behind the curtain), and "His Name Is Lancelot", where Lancelot discovers that he's gay (simply faaaabulous costumes in this number).

But my favorite was "You Won't Succeed On Broadway". You see, the Knights Who Until Recently Said 'Ni', after receiving the tribute shrubbery from Arthur, demand a second sacrifice -- namely, that Arthur produce a Broadway musical. Arthur's game, but has no idea how to go about it. Brave Sir Robin appears and cautions him that it's impossible, because...

In any great adventure,
that you don't want to lose,
victory depends upon
the people who you choose.
So, listen, Arthur darling,
closely to this news:
You won't succeed on Broadway,
If you don't have any Jews.

The audience, who took (or would take, I forget) Lancelot's homosexuality completely in stride, seemed stunned. My God, can they say that?

Niles didn't get it, and had to have it explained to him later. Surely that couldn't have been true of everyone in the audience. (If you don't get it, then recall the question oft asked of Mark Steyn: "You're a huge fan of musicals, and you're not Jewish or gay??")

The Quest for the Grail turns momentarily into the Quest for a Jew, until Patsy, Arthur's faithful servant and coconut man, reveals that he's Jewish on his mother's side.

Arthur: But why didn't you mention that before?
Patsy: Well, it's not the sort of thing you say to a heavily-armed Christian.

That got a huge laugh from the audience, but only a small one from me, for the Ghost of Crises Present hovered over my shoulder and made snarky remarks.

I had heard that Spamalot was a parody, and I wondered how they were going to parody something that was already a parody; but it's a parody of musicals, not of Monty Python and the Holy Grail. You'd think that would have been done by now, but -- being neither Jewish nor gay -- I can't think of any instances offhand (aside from everything by Andrew Lloyd Webber, of course).

Aside from a rather too heavy reliance on lines removed in bulk from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, my one criticism is that sometimes the acoustics weren't very good, and you couldn't hear the lines. Niles and I think that was the reason for the leaden reception of the taunting Frenchman. His accent, bien sûr, was outrraaageous, which meant a lot of people couldn't understand the silly son of unmarried amphibians.

Wikipedia has a Spamalot page which may contain facts. Apparently the tour version changes some lines depending on venue. Our version had Arthur telling the "peasant"[1] under whose seat the grail was found that her name will be revered in Houston along with that of Yao Ming. (The reverent way he said "Yao Ming" did make it funny. Try it yourself, remembering to use a plummy British accent. It's fun!)

Also, the Knights Who Say 'Ni' changed to the Knights Who Say 'Ekke Ekke Ekke Ptang Zoo Ping The Stars At Night Are Big And Bright...' I'm guessing you could tell the native Texans in the audience by the fact that they reflexively performed the ritual four claps required by the song. Or maybe they'd just seen the show before.

[1]Anyone who can afford to drop the kind of change necessary to get a seat in the fourth row is no "peasant", baby.

Posted 6:17 PM by Angie Schultz

Foto Friday: Mt. Whitney

Mt. Whitney, California, Aug. 1995

From the August 1995 trip, which began in Yosemite, stopped off at Mono Lake, and finished at Death Valley (last week's Foto Friday).

Mt. Whitney is the highest peak in the continental U.S. (The highest peak in North America is Mt. McKinley, in Alaska, and the highest in the Western Hemisphere is Aconcagua, in Argentina. Wikipedia has many fascinating tidbits about Mt. Whitney, some of which are probably true. It also has pictures better than mine, damn them.)

This is the way the mountain looks from the town of Lone Pine (which is not to be confused with Big Pine, just up the road a piece) -- or, to be specific, the second floor of our motel in Lone Pine. When I scanned these pictures yesterday, I was disappointed to find faint horizontal lines across the lower part of the picture. Were they some sort of scratches on the negative? Or could they be roads? One of them kind of looks like a road on a distant mountain.

On close examination they revealed themselves to be...power lines. I was too lazy to edit them out.

Mt. Whitney is within Sequoia National Park, but you can't see it from the normal park hangouts or views (like Moro Rock -- although I think there's an arrow up there which points in Mt. Whitney's direction).

Labels: California, Foto Friday