Posted 2:03 PM by Angie Schultz

Revenge of the Petits Fours: The Petits Fours Turn Petty

The petits fours react to my Scrooginess of the other day. Sorry, sweetcakes; I'm fresh out of that, too.

Labels: Too Much Time on My Hands

Posted 7:44 PM by Angie Schultz

Revenge of the Petits Fours: Christmas Carols for Our Times

God rest ye smarmy gentlemen
Let nothing you dismay
If your summer home is worthless
You can sell it on eBay

And that's as far as I got. Niles suggested I should squeeze "Bernanke" in there somehow, but that was too much for my artistic sensibilities.

Feel free to create your own. It's fun!

(Well, not really, but I gotta say it.)

Labels: Too Much Time on My Hands

Posted 5:50 PM by Angie Schultz

Revenge of the Petits Fours: The Petits Fours Speak Sooth

It sure as hell does. I paid my Visa bill this morning. My checkbook is still whimpering.

Christmas. Bah, humbug!

This was also the theme of about half a dozen of this morning's comic strips. Oh, how original.

Labels: Too Much Time on My Hands

Posted 10:45 AM by Angie Schultz

Revenge of the Petits Fours: Adventures in Oxymoronitude

'Cause miry marshes tend not to have crests, you see.

Else they wouldn't be marshes.

Because the water...aww, skip it.

Labels: Too Much Time on My Hands

Posted 9:52 AM by Angie Schultz

Revenge of the Petits Fours: The Treat of THE FUTURE!

Today, frosty delicious Cherry Mars Mist, in honor of the very, very bad movie we watched last night, in which astronauts travel to, er, Venus.

Labels: Too Much Time on My Hands

Posted 10:48 PM by Angie Schultz

Foto Friday: How Green Was My Valley

How green was it?? This green:

Iao Valley State Park, Maui
November 2008

The Iao Needle, which you've seen before, is off to the upper right of this photo.

This turned out to be a strange series of pictures. I came home one morning to find the West Maui Mountains to be free of cloud, which is fairly unusual. So I decided I'd go down to the Iao Valley to get some good pictures of the Needle, since my previous photos were all thick with cloud.

I keep my camera with me at all times for just such an emergency, so -- despite having worked a 15 hour shift -- I headed over there. The sky was beautiful, the air was cool, and the tourists were minimal. I got to the park about 7:30am and climbed up hill and down dale until about 9.[*]

And when I got the prints back...they sucked. The actual photos of the Needle were a bizarre shade of green; rather bright but washed-out. Working with the scans today, I realized that those images had little contrast. I fiddled with the colors but was never quite happy with the results (I'll post 'em eventually, though).

Was it the lighting, the film, the temperature of the film (COLD), the processing? Don't know. The later photos in the sequence, like this one, were a rich, almost embarrassing green. I did minimal fiddling with the colors of this one, and found I had to desaturate the color before I felt I could post it. That doesn't happen very often, I can tell you.

Anyway, as I said the Needle off the frame to the upper right. You can see the little brown viewing shelter on the near hill. The tin-roofed building on the lower level houses the restrooms.

This is the view from the upper half of the parking lot; I was just about to leave when I realized this might make a pretty good picture. So I climbed over the parking lot railing and wandered onto the grass to get an unobstructed view. By this time the tourists were beginning to roll up and they were following me like goslings. "What's she taking a picture of? What can you see?"

[*]Stayed up that day until 11am, which meant I'd been awake for 23 hours -- not unheard-of, but unusual -- woke up again at 1pm and couldn't get back to sleep, though I was exhausted. Thought I was going to die. So you can imagine my emotion when I saw the thoroughly unimpressive prints.

Labels: Foto Friday, Hawaii

Posted 4:56 PM by Angie Schultz

Revenge of the Petits Fours: What a Sap!

And there's just a soupçon of frankincense, too. Faaabulous, dahling!

Labels: Too Much Time on My Hands

Posted 7:48 PM by Angie Schultz

Revenge of the Petits Fours: The Beginning

Remember this series? (See the months of December 2006 and January 2007.)

Theeeey're baaaaack


To be continued. WHETHER YOU LIKE IT OR NOT! Muahahaha!

Labels: Too Much Time on My Hands

Posted 8:21 AM by Angie Schultz

Foto Friday: Prepare for Purple

Got a fresh hot package of photos back from the lab, and there's a big smokin' stack of these:

Sunset, November 2008, Maui

That's Mai Poina Oe Iau Beach again.

That's...colorful, isn't it? Sometimes I see postcards that look like this, and I always think, "Aww, they cheat -- they've used some kind of filter." But no filter here; I have a sky 1B and a polarizer on my lenses, but when it gets this dark I have to take them off. So that's what it really looked like.

That is, that's what the film thinks it looked like. I don't remember it quite so purple. This is 100 ASA Velvia, which apparently does purple really well.

I blew about a third of a roll on this one sunset, so you may see others in the series again. I had six or seven rolls developed, and a good percentage of the shots are like this. Gets a bit tedious after a while. "Ho hum, beautiful sunset. What else is there?"

Labels: Foto Friday, Hawaii

Posted 2:49 PM by Angie Schultz

Aged Cheese

A couple weeks ago, Volokh blogger Orin Kerr -- that's Professer Kerr to you -- was goofing off instead of working, looking for the cheesiest Lawrence Welk clip he could find. His is OK -- it certainly demonstrates the sartorial horror that was the '70s -- but commenter SKardner tops it with this beauty:


For those of you reluctant to click, that's the "modern spiritual" "One Toke Over the Line" performed on the Lawrence Flipping Welk Show.

As someone in the Youtube comments says, a stage full of musicians and no one knew what that song was about? Riiiiight.

Nice color in that clip, by the way.

Been meaning to post this for a while, but didn't get to it. But I'm on vacation now, and I can post every day if I want to, and you can't stop me! Muahahaha!

Labels: Music for the Apocalypse

Posted 9:52 PM by Angie Schultz

Foto Friday: Skyscape

Sunset Skyscape, Maui
Summer 2008

I love this picture, and saved it until I could jigger with the colors on a nice bright screen (rather than my laptop screen). Note that the rainbow appears broken -- I didn't notice it at the time, and can't explain it. I took several pictures, and it looks similar in all of them.

This was taken in July or August (I got very bad about logging my photos) in Kihei on the beach behind the Kauhale Makai condominiums, which you see there. The lights in the windows are reflections of the sunset behind me. I didn't notice those at the time, either. Some of the other photos show more detail in the clouds, but no reflections. I like the look it gives the photo -- like a dark, brooding Scottish castle, only in sunny Hawaii.

This was taken less than half a mile northward of last week's picture, still on the same nasty beach. But the nasty beach has much better views inland than the better beach, to the north.

Of course, when you're walking on the beach at sunset, you don't generally look inland. I vaguely remember snapping several shots of the ho-hum sunset and then turning around and holy cow!

Labels: Foto Friday, Hawaii

Posted 9:49 PM by Angie Schultz

Foto Friday: Ripple

Sunset, Waipuilani Beach, Maui
September 2008

Waipuilani Beach Park is a tiny little park on a crummy, rocky, seaweedy, smelly beach. There is what looks like a fish pond there, though I couldn't google up any mention of it, and at high tide the water just covers the rocky walls, creating tiny ripples from both left and right, making a V pattern on top of the wall.

That's what you're supposed to be seeing there, but the ripples refused to be synchronized with the shutter, so you don't see those on the left very well. Stupid waves.

The land on the right is Pu'u Kukui, on Maui; on the left is the island of Lanai. Off to the far right is a windsurfer. In the middle is the sun.

Labels: Foto Friday, Hawaii