1.E7 Celsius per gallon!? What’s the exchange rate on this planet?

(Alternate caption: Finally, gas pumps display a global warming index cost per gallon instead of dollars.)

I’m discovering that I really, really like iView Media Pro. Anyone want to donate $199 so I can register it when the demo runs out in 18 days?

In a semi-related topic: What’s up with Xanga’s image server?

More photo stuff: A nifty thing I found, Expo Disc, a light diffuser you attach to the front of your lens. It takes in all light, diffuses it to an even gray, and attenuates it to 18% (give or take 1/12 of a stop). Meaning: Put it on your lens, calibrate the white balance and optionally lock in TTL exposure, and you’re good to go. This page even suggests using it for multiple exposures, to pre-expose the shadow areas of an outdoor scene.

This is a kitten that would show up at my parents’ house, while I was there over the Xmas holidays. She was completely trying to get by on being cute, and it was actually working. It turned out that she wasn’t a stray, belonged to some neighbors, and was just expanding her realm.

Weird, who lives with my parents, was less than enthusiastic about this scenario.

But eventually, a momentary truce was reached.

Yet Another Picture Of The Space Needle At Night.

Update: Femme asks for a link to my gallery, and it’s here. I haven’t updated it for a while, but I might just get to that task very soon.

TXDot has a new project: Covering his cruiser bike with squished pennies from tourist traps.

I mentioned that I have some he might like, and he emailed me that I should send ‘em right over. Which means I have to find them.

However… I began to think that there must be a web site listing all the places you can get smashed pennies, and lo and behold there is! So now I’m thinking it might be fun to go to some the places near here and get smashed pennies to send.

To mark the anniversary of the Holocaust, I’m going to link to a book. It’s called ‘They Thought They Were Free,’ by Milton Mayer.

Mayer was an American Jew who went to Germany in 1952, during the tail-end of reconstruction there, to interview everyday Germans and find out how the hell something like the Holocaust could happen. He ends up befriending his interview subjects.

There’s one story, in particular, told by a German man who worked at a chemical plant. The SS came and told him to approve an order for some chemicals that he knew could be used for chemical warfare, and perhaps to kill Jews. He signed the order. He knew that if he didn’t, he’d be fired, and someone else would sign the order anyway. He says it wasn’t as much a personal failing on his part, as it was that his was the failure of his nation.

It’s a really fascinating read, and explores the roots of anti-Semitism not only in Germany but the whole of western Europe. But hell if it’s not a complete downer.

Update:

Some comments here are trying to draw parallels between the current Republican party and the Nazi party of the past. I have two things to say about this:

1) Very little useful political traction is generated by making such a comparison (regardless of how valid it might or might not be).

2) One of the things I learned from ‘They Thought They Were Free’ is the precondition of the German state prior to the rise of Nazism. See, before WWI, Germany was a few dozen tiny independent states, and then they were united under a Kaiser. This brought a growing national identity, which was subsequently smashed to pieces during WWI. The new nation was humiliated and distraught. During this time (into the late 20s and 30s), the ruling class and elites were threatened by two main radical movements: Communism and Nazism. Communism had spread across eastern and into western Europe as a new economic way, but when it came time to sell this ideology to the German people, there was a problem. German society was (and still is, to a lesser degree) highly stratified and role-oriented, and desired firm leadership. Communism promised government by committee and consensus, where no one person was really in charge. Germany might have become a communist state except for this one fact. And of course the Nazis had a new nationalism for the humiliated populace, and a charismatic yet stern demigod of a leader. Germans could feel safe in knowing that there was someone in charge, and that there was an order to things. The other main factor was that while Nazi leadership talked about the rights of the worker, they were also talking to business leaders about how that was all bullshit.

And that’s how the Nazis got their power. They offered Germans a role in society, even if it was subservient. They made promises and kept them. In fact, they did a pretty good job of managing the country. Minus the anti-Semitism and other assorted insanities, Nazism might have worked.

The point here is that the fascism of Nazi Germany won’t be replicated here. Our society is not as structured or humiliated as the Germany of the time. In fact, drawing the comparison is dangerous, not because of political reprisal for having made the comparison, but because you’ll miss the *real* opportunity when it shows itself. That is, if you lightly say that a given political figure or movement is fascist, then you lose the ability to make that accusation when it really matters.

Comparing Republicans to Nazis doesn’t work, on any level. Learning from history, however, shows you that things in our country could very soon be as screwed up as they were in Nazi Germany. This is an important distinction.

I was talking with a friend of mine a while back, mentioning that I found a VHS copy of ‘Theatre Of Blood’ at Half Price Books for something like $3.

‘Theatre Of Blood’ is an ultra-campy Hammer-ish Vincent Price flick. Price plays a hammy scenery-chewing actor who is denied a coveted critic’s choice award, and subsequently goes on a Shakespeare-themed serial murder spree, killing each critic who voted against him on the award and eluding the bumbling police, all played for creepy laughs. Worth $3, but not as much fun as the two Dr. Phibes movies, ‘The Abominable Dr. Phibes’ and ‘Dr. Phibes Rides Again,’ where Price plays a mad genius who takes themed serial murder revenge on the doctors whom he blames for his wife’s death, all the while eluding the bumbling police, all played for creepy laughs.

Anyway. I was talking about this with my friend, who asked me if I had seen it before I bought it, and yes, I had. I had seen it when I was a teenager. Once upon a time, they showed b-movies on TV in the middle of the night, instead of infomercials, and I had seen it there. And his response was something along the lines that my younger, more impressionable mind had been shaped by this movie, to the point that I’d buy a video tape of it decades later. And he was right.

I used to watch sci-fi and horror movies all the time. I don’t have the patience for the crap I used to watch… And the new crop of horror movies are all so nondescript and stupid looking anyway. But the point here is that I’m wondering what I might be like if I had never seen three movies where Vincent Price is a serial killer, or any of the other strange and weird things I saw on TV.

The only one that ever really disturbed me when I was young was ‘Willard.’ Not the Crispin Glover remake, but the original one. There’s a scene where a rat gets killed horribly, and I happened to be watching. And my mom was, too, and she even called the TV station. I couldn’t have been more than 8 or 9, and that movie shouldn’t have been on in daytime. Roger Corman’s beautifully sublimated Freudian sexuality in Edgar Allen Poe re-hashes I could deal with, but not Ernest Borgnine putting out a cigarette on a rat.

And really, that’s the problem with so many horror movies today. It seems that as a culture, when it comes to horror, we’ve turned up the contrast and lost the details that were in the shadows. And when it comes to dealing with horror, we’re the same way. The tsunami stories have stopped; footage of people rebuilding isn’t as dramatic as footage of people being swept away.

During the 90s (or so) I was on a hunt for religion. Like the man said, there’s a seeker born every minute, and I was one of them. I poked around in some nice rhetoric and ended up with one or two genuine insights, but ultimately I decided that Buddhism had the most to say to me. And when I started reading about the Tibetan traditions, merged as they were with the local shamanism, I knew I was sold. And what sold me was this: There are specific meditations which monks are told to go through, in order to remove themselves from importance in their own minds. A number of these have to do with, for instance, imagining yourself to be dead and decaying, and rotting, and turning to goo, and having worms crawl inside you, and so on. Another involves having a certain deity come and lop off your body parts and eat them in front of you.

Dunno where else to go with this, so I’ll stop. I was trying to hook it up to the idea of horror movies as psychological purge, along with some weird notion that watching horror movies leads to a similar self-detachment as those meditations. But I’m really only writing because I want to get one more load of laundry in before bed, and I needed to fill the time.

A while back I mentioned that the Pentax image file management software sucks. Well, here’s a semi-detailed list of my gripes with it; non-photo-geeks please skip.

1) So far it has taken PENTAX PHOTO Laboratory 2.0 2-1/2 hours to process 20 RAW files into high quality JPEGs. I haven’t run a time comparison against dcraw, there’s just no excuse. It’s like they didn’t even test this software. No one ever ran it on a computer before shipping. Maybe my iBook is old, but I know for a fact that the camera can process this information quicker than 2-1/2 hours, and I doubt that my computer is slower than the camera. I’d use dcraw, but initial experiments have shown that there’s much tweaking to learn before I’m happy with the results. And I’d experiment with the tweaking except:

2) PENTAX PHOTO Laboratory 2.0 eats up your system. It does this in a couple of ways: 1) The software itself is unresponsive to the system. You can’t just switch to it and watch it update the progress bar. It’s so deep in thought it has no time for you. The only way to see what it’s doing is to hide all the other applications. 2) It slows the computer down to grindingly slow. I can barely type what I’m typing now.

3) PENTAX PHOTO Browser 2.0 is the image browser that ships with the camera, and it sucks twice as much as Laboratory. It takes ten years to do anything. It crashes. It misrepresents which files are where within the file system. And it’s the ONLY WAY TO BATCH FILES FOR LABORATORY. That is, if you want to look at previews of RAW files and send them to Laboratory for processing as a batch, then you have to use Browser, because no other software can do this. And here’s what happens once you send the batch for processing: Laboratory lets you tell where to save the processed files, and then it runs along on its merry (and painfully slow) way. Then, when any file within the batch is finished, Laboratory sends Browser to the front. The Browser window becomes the frontmost window, and you have to send it to the back in order to continue doing what you were doing. If Browser isn’t running because you quit it because it’s causing your computer to slow down to the point that you can’t read your Xanga site, LABORATORY WILL LAUNCH IT AGAIN, just to annoy you.

4) Laboratory also does this: The batch of files you send it will have at least one duplicate image, because Laboratory and Browser are buggy as shit. So when the whole batch is done, there will be a dialog which says, “The file foof.jpg%s already exists. Do you wish to overwrite? [cancel] [OK]” Now, first of all, any dipshit user interface author knows you don’t ask a yes/no question, and then not give the user two answers: Yes and No. But that’s not the real problem. The real problem is that you can’t do anything at all in Laboratory until you click either of these buttons, and, like I said, Laboratory doesn’t know how to come to the foreground. There is no way to select the dialog window and click on it. It is perpetually greyed-out, and the only way to fix the problem is to force quit Laboratory.

I really want to shoot (gun, not camera) whoever ‘authored’ this suckware. I’m also terribly disappointed in Pentax for shipping this crud.

madeyouthink.org

Expose to the right.

Twelve essential photographic rules of thumb.

Gotta be intrigued by this domain name: Photoethnography.com. Karen Nakamura is an anthropologist who’s also a photographer and gear-head. I’ve probably found her site and linked to it before, but who cares?