Disorderly Content

Savannah is famous for its squares, one of which used to have the park bench where Forrest Gump regaled people with the story of his life. (That bench is now at the Visitor Center.) The original city plan had twenty-four squares. Now there are twenty-one: one was turned into a parking garage, a second became the site of the cultural center, and this is the third. It used to be called Liberty Square; now it's the county courthouse and the jail. Which are, of course, places where one's liberty may be at risk.

But even better is the sign on the jail. Chatham County, it reads. It used to say Chatham County Jail; you can still see the shadows of the missing letters. I guess even jails aren't safe from pilferage.

No, I truly don't. But I am.

Took all day, thanks to a flaky autopilot on the second leg of my journey, but I am now blogging from Savannah, Georgia. Which looks a lot more like suburban anywhere than I remember from all those car trips from my long ago childhood. But tomorrow morning I'll head downtown and explore those Forest Gump-y squares. And thanks to the magic of hotel wireless access, you'll get some of the gory details of my time with my southren relations in something resembling real time.

I'm frightened...

I just got back from seeing Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. I'm a huge fan of the original movie. And I've read and enjoyed both of Roald Dahl's Wonka books, although I was surprised to discover that much of what I loved about the film isn't in the source material. Gene Wilder's Wonka has heart and wit; Dahl's version is just demented. So when I read that Dahl's family wasn't happy with the film and wanted to do a proper version of the books, I wondered what the heck they were talking about. Still, I was determined not to prejudge. There've been good remakes, after all.

Things started auspiciously enough with the trailers. First the trailer for Dukes of Hazzard started up, mercifully without sound. (The audience sat quietly, perhaps wondering whether complaining was in our best interest.) The problem was fixed in time for the second trailer, for Tim Burton's Corpse Bride, followed by Ice Age 2 and the Wallace and Gromit movie. And then it was time for the main attraction.

I really, really tried to like it. But as others have said, Johnny Depp's performance is exceedingly creepy, and not in a good way. The children are appropriately annoying, Charlie's living situation excellently dire. But as Willy Wonka's backstory unfolded I kept asking myself why I should care. I want my chocolate makers to be magical, not emotionally crippled. Not that I begrudge Christopher Lee the work.

Final analysis: all the CGI money in the world can't make up for a soupçon of heart. I'm glad I saw it. But I don't think I'll bother with the DVD.

...and against an even littler gal too!

I refer to Mattel's lawsuit against photographer Tom Forsythe, whose Food Chain Barbie photo series so offended the toymaker that they used their considerable legal might to shut him down. As Mr. Forsythe himself writes, Mattel lost. Big. To the tune of more than $2 million in legal fees for their "unreasonable and frivolous" lawsuit, in the words of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.

Clearly, Mattel never expected the case to go to trial; they couldn't imagine Mr. Forsythe doing anything but roll over and play dead. And even if he felt he had nothing to lose, finding attorneys to take on a multimillion dollar expense with little hope of return should have doomed him from the start. But he fought. And he won. And so do we.

I remember an interview with Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork in which he declared that the First Amendment applied only to political speech; nothing else was intended to be protected, nor should it be. I'm glad Mr. Bork never became one of the Supremes; if he had, the Web might have been stillborn. But others argue that only the government can censor, that free speech rules don't apply in the larger world. And maybe that's true as a matter of law; maybe corporations don't have the kind of absolute censorship power the government has, and uses. But that won't stop them from trying, using their enormous financial resources and connections. Is Mattel's attempt to cut off images that bother them all that different from Disney's efforts to legislate their right to own their characters and images for a thousand lifetimes? Maybe the big difference is that Disney uses lobbyists too.

The Register has a story that takes the Microsoft/Apple rivalry to an extreme. It seems that Virtual Earth, MSN's photomapping site, denies the existence of Apple's Cupertino, California campus. Compare this picture of an empty lot with the Google Maps version of the same location.

The article goes on to point out that Virtual Earth hasn't heard about 9/11; it thinks the twin towers are still there. So it may just be that Microsoft is too cheap to buy current satellite images. But personally I prefer the conspiracy theory...

Amazing how quickly we get spoiled. I left Reno behind Wednesday morning, only to lose easy access to WiFi at the same time. So I have some catchup to do...

I had a sort of plan. Well, more accurately I had a series of destinations in mind, with a lot of miles in between. Instead of heading home, I drove south: through Carson City and a couple of towns along US 395, then back into California, up into the mountains and down the other side to Lee Vining, next to Mono Lake and the eastern entrance to Yosemite. I decided to spend some of my casino winnings on a ridiculously quick visit to the park. And discovered something I'd forgotten from my previous visit: that some of the most spectacular views are outside the gates.

After my flying visit to the park and stops in Lee Vining for lunch and gas (two separate stops, I'll have you know), I continued south along US 395. I planned to reenter Nevada on US 6, the road that got me back to California during the December blizzard conditions. Then I found what my maps claimed was a scenic route that would connect with US 95 further south. They have a different definition of scenic than I; aside from an almost complete lack of other cars, it was neither more nor less interesting than the (slightly) better traveled road. That other road did have one interesting surprise: the remains of a mining town called Palmetto after the Joshua Trees, which the miners mistakenly thought were some kind of palm.

There's not a lot of civilization through that part of Nevada. Arriving on the northern outskirts of Vegas around 8PM, I found a place to stay and lost another few dollars of my Reno winnings. Next morning I raced through town to Hoover Dam, took the tour (which owing to post-9/11 security concerns is a lot less comprehensive than it used to be; besides, it was insanely hot!) and then went across the dam into Arizona. I had a new plan: take the chunk of old Route 66 east of Kingman, Arizona, eventually get to Williams where I'd find a place to stay and see about taking the train up to the Grand Canyon the next day. I stopped at the Hackberry General Store for something to drink and a few photos (it's a wonderfully tacky place) and then found lunch a little further down the track at the Hualapai Lodge in Peach Springs.

I haven't mentioned the weather, have I? Aside from the heat, that is. Back at Lee Vining I'd noticed that the clear sky was starting to show some rather dramatic clouds. Things got steadily more overcast as I went along. And then gray. And by the time I reached Williams, there was lightning and thunder and rain. And then clear. And then more of the bright and the loud and the wet. But I have to say, it did a nice job of getting the muck off my car.

Friday morning I was at the depot, ready to take the Grand Canyon Railroad to the South Rim. It takes a little over two hours by train, probably half that by car. Then again, I'd done plenty of driving the past few days, and I still had the trip home ahead of me. Besides, I like trains.

If you've been to the Grand Canyon, you don't need me to tell you how spectacular it is. And if you haven't, pictures are a poor substitute. (At least mine are.) I wandered along the rim, taking pictures of the canyon and the condors and the hawks. When it started to rain a little I went into the El Tovar Hotel for lunch. And by the time it was done the rain had turned serious. So I followed that wise old saying: "When the going gets wet, the wet go shopping." Eventually it was time to head back to the depot for the run back to Williams. The train people had laid on some entertainment: a train robbery! Unfortunately, the bad weather kept them from arriving on horseback. And train robbers in an SUV just don't have the same panache, you know?

Back in Williams I got my car and took the Interstate back to Kingman. I'd stay the night there and make the rest of the way home on Saturday. Which I did, through the kind of heat that really makes you question government denials about Global Warming. Have I mentioned the heat? Yeah, I guess I did.

It's a sad life when you get your best advice from street signs. But, tomorrow night's Blogger Meetup, the insane three digit temperatures around here and my tendency to get trapped by road construction and accidents wherever I go notwithstanding, I think I'll hang around the Sierras a little while longer. Silicon Valley may be cooler, but it's not necessarily cooler. If you know what I mean, and I think you do.

I'm blogging from Reno, where I'm enjoying a change of scene. But not a change of weather; it's even hotter here than in Silicon Valley! Especially on the way in, as a lane closure on Interstate 80 slowed us to something like 3 MPH for a mile or so. Which, I'll admit, is still an improvement over my last trip here. Dead of summer is still preferable to dead of winter.

There have been some small changes. Like WiFi in the hotel. Free, even! But it's still a mixed bag, like the fact that I can only have two of the three things I need for happy computing: table & chair; convenient outlet; wireless signal. So instead I'm blogging from the bed, where the signal is good and the nearest outlet almost reaches.

Oh, and yes, I've been playing the slots. But this time they aren't playing me: at the moment I'm $50 ahead. And unlike last trip, I won't be spending my entire visit indoors at the machines. Tomorrow I'm heading to the Railroad Museum and then to wander around Virginia City. And if I'm very lucky, I'll even get a few new pictures for my Flickr page. You never know...

As I've mentioned before, I'm spending a lot of time taking pictures and uploading them to stock photography websites in hopes of making huge piles of cash. Over time I've been getting a better idea of what might sell, like these huge satellite dishes we have scattered among the government contractors here in Silicon Valley. Problem is that most of the dishes I've found are in hard to photograph locations, what with freeway overpasses, roads without shoulders, chain link fences and the like keeping me from getting a clear shot. It's kind of amazing how little on-street parking there is around here, especially when it comes to office parks.

Anyway, I'd left my car in a hotel parking lot and wandered down the street for a closer look at one reasonably accessible dish. Crossing the street for a better look, I found the only way to shoot it without having lightrail power lines in the way was to wander into a facility parking lot. It was a quiet Saturday morning, so I didn't expect to be bothered. But as I was emerging from the lot after taking a couple of photos, I saw a Sunnyvale police cruiser on the other side of the street. And as I waited to cross, he made a U-turn almost in front of me. I wondered how much grief I was in for, what with having been on private government-contractor property and looking vaguely suspicious. But he had no interest in me at all; he finished his turn and went on his way.

Okay, not much of a story. The buildup was okay, but the punchline needs work.

Slashdot has a pointer to How It Should Have Ended, which provides an alternate ending to the original Star Wars that presumes not everybody in the Empire is an incredible moron.

You'll need a Bittorrent application; I like Bits on Wheels for the Mac. And once you have it you'll need Windows Media Player; you're on your own for that one. But it'll be worth it.

A couple of weeks ago I got a notice that my driver's license is up for renewal. And this time I don't get to send them a check; I actually had to go down to DMV my ownself to fill out the paperwork. Never a pleasant prospect, what with lines that rival Disneyland and not nearly as many distractions while you wait your turn. Fortunately, California has bits of its act together. Like an online appointment system to save some of that standing in line.

Anyway, my appointment was for 9:45 this morning. I arrived 20 minues early, found the line for people with appointments, was told they'd put me in the queue immediately and given a number like they use at the deli counter. Ten minutes later my number was called. And ten minutes after that I was out the door. Assuming my new license shows up in less than the seven weeks until my birthday, it'll have been an effortless process. And how often can you say that about anything involving the government?

About a week ago I saw a notice in the paper about a promotion Six Flags is doing with Pentax. Just show up at one of their parks on a Thursday between July 7th and August 4th with a Pentax camera and you get in for free! And seeing as how I'm not working at the moment, and seeing how I blew a few bucks on a teeny little Pentax in preparation for my Oz trip in April, I decided a visit to Marine World was in order.

As the name suggests, Marine World started out as a nature park along the lines of Sea World in San Diego, although it transmogrified itself into a more typical theme park just a few years ago. But as I wandered the park today, I realized I was far more interested in the animal life than I was in the coasters. Granted, some of that is due to the sometimes questionable condition of my neck; it doesn't take to bouncing around the way it used to. And granted, when it's a hundred degrees outside, being in the shade with the critters is more appealing than standing on line in the sun. (At those temperatures, even getting soaked on the rapids ride didn't do much to cool me off.)

So maybe it isn't my advanced age. Maybe I just like feeding lorikeets and giraffes and watching butterflies go flitting by. Or maybe it's both. I guess I can live with that.

Who watches the watchers? Who writes about the writers? Salon has an article about a cover story in W Magazine about the cult programming of Katie Holmes. Both pieces make her sound even more frightening than Tom Cruise himself; phrases like fembot and Stepford wife are used with no irony at all. But I can't decide which is more frightening: The turning of a supposedly intelligent and competent young woman into something more pudding-like? Or the fact that I had to stare momentarily at an ad for right wing wingnut Tucker Carlson before Salon would let me read their take on weird celebrity behavior? Followed by yet another picture of the creepily weird Carlson on each page of the article itself. In a celebrity strange grudge match between Holmes/Cruise and Carlson, I don't know whom to root for. Or maybe they could devour each other like the gingham dog and the calico cat. Yeah, I'd love to see that on PPV...

"I'll have Moronic Lawsuits for $500, Alex." From Groklaw we have quite possibly the most audacious legal action of the modern age. And it's not from one of our fifty litigious States. No, believe it or not, the award goes to a French firm called Transports Schiocchet Excursions, which, according to the Guardian in the UK, has sued ten cleaning women for driving to work instead of using their service. It seems they were given a monopoly on the route in question. And to these guys, and to their attorneys, a monopoly is a monopoly.

(An extra tip of the hat to the Guardian for, at least in my browser, inserting an ad with the on-topic heading, "Are You Paying Too Much For Auto Insurance?")

With all the macro pictures I've been taking of flowers and other plantlike substances, it finally dawned on me that there might be some small value in actually knowing what the heck is in those pictures. Despite my parents' best efforts, not to mention those of my Scoutmaster, I have virtually no knowledge where flora are concerned.

So, not much wiser after a couple of visits to local nurseries, I decided to head to my local Borders for a good book, one with lots and lots of pictures. And among the books on houseplants and wildflowers, I found a surprising number of volumes on the cultivation of another kind of plant, one that might falls somewhere between hobby gardening and a cash crop. I refer of course to cannabis, that horror of right-thinking Americans everywhere. Except maybe in California, where it falls under the heading of compassionate medical analgesic. Or maybe Free Enterprise. Or both.

You have to feel sorry for newsmen... oops, sorry, make that newspeople... when there's a breaking story that just refuses to provide any news right at the moment. But it might, y'know? Any second something might happen. Just not right now.

Anyway, here's one blogger's version of the endless reportage when there's nothing to report. Good stuff.

Oh, and as long as I brought up the PC thing regarding newsperson vs. newsman, I was listening to a podcast of On The Media where they interviewed rightwing nutjob Nancy Grace (who I assume is on CNN because Fox can't have all the rightwing nutjobs). And when the interviewer referred to a jury foreman, Ms. Grace immediately corrected him with foreperson. And yet there's an anti-liberal bias in the assumption that all PC crap comes from liberals. As a liberal myself, at least some of the time, I refuse to consider Nancy Grace one of us...

Unless the only mail you get is delivered by somebody in a postal uniform, you probably get at least a couple of phishing emails a week. You know what I mean; they claim to come from eBay or PayPal and tell you your account is about to be closed unless you log in and update everything. I got one of these PayPal scam attempts just moments ago. Which is hardly news, right? Except that the heading on the message got my attention. "You're Billing Information!", it screams. Well, the hell I am. I'm not billing Information or anyone else. Unless of course that's an example of the grammatic incompetence of the would-be scammer, who doesn't know the difference between you're and your. If I wasn't already wary, the illiteracy of the message would be a dead giveaway.

It's the little things, you know?

Update 07/09: This guy makes a similar point, aside from being more inclusive and considerably more amusing.

I've been doing a bunch of shooting lately with my Nikon D70. And yesterday I noticed something upsetting: a little blemish in the upper left corner of all my pictures. At first I thought it was on the lens, until I tried a couple of shots with my other lens and discovered the same little blot in the same spot.

Distressing to say the least. Fixing the pictures was no problem; Photoshop Elements has a healing brush that zapped the blot in no time. I wasn't looking forward to sending the camera to Nikon for a professional cleaning. But after trying the blower bulb that worked a couple of weeks ago with no success, I prepared myself to be SLR-less for a few weeks.

Today I stopped at Keeble & Shuchat, the Palo Alto camera store where the Nikon and I first became acquainted. I wanted to know how to send the camera back. They, however, had a better solution. A Canadian company had just come out with a brush for cleaning sensors. A dry brush; you just blast the brush with compressed air and then brush away the dust. The brush is expensive, a little more than the cost of a professional cleaning. (Which is about what my dentist charges for a cleaning, so you know what I'm talking about.) But it's easy and safe. And best of all, it works! I'm now splotch-free.

The company is called Visible Dust; the product is Sensor Brush^TM. If you have a digital SLR you'll need one sooner or later.

I've spent enough time in London over the years to feel a kinship with the locals. And if I don't feel quite the same shock as when my home town was violated back in September of 2001, that's more from having my "it can't happen here" confidence ripped away than from any sense that what Londoners are going through now is of lesser import than New Yorkers four years ago. I hate the people who would perpetrate such an outrage with every fiber of my being. And I hope you can get back to a sense of normalcy and order and life as it ought to be lived. To do otherwise is to let the terrorists win.

Update 07/08: Two items that highlight the two sides of human reaction to such a horror. Boing Boing points to a sign at a Covent Garden cafe offering people a place to rest and restore, gratis. And The Huffington Post quotes Fox News's Brit Hume on his reaction to the news:

"I mean, my first thought when I heard -- just on a personal basis, when I heard there had been this attack and I saw the futures this morning, which were really in the tank, I thought, 'Hmmm, time to buy.'"

Way to put events in perspective, Brit.

Despite my disappointing time at the zoo, the day wasn't a total loss. Last night was one of our twice-monthly blogger Meetups, which was more mellow than the last one but still a whole lot of fun. Got to try out Courtney's new Nikon D50, a smaller and lighter version of the D70 I've been using. Debated a name for Elke's new plastic duck; D. Arthur was suggested and approved by acclimation. (The D may stand for Disco; that point is still subject to further discussion.) We even got into a discussion about blogging, something that happens surprisingly rarely for a blogger Meetup. In particular, for whom do we write? Rich says he writes primarily for his blogger friends. Me, I write for people who don't know me; there's always a chance I can impress them. Okay, a small chance. A very small chance.

Oh, and we had some new participants. I'll rely on Elke to provide their particulars. But welcome, guys; you got into the spirit of the thing with no prompting at all!

Update 07/06: I said we could count on Elke. And we all know, I'm never wrong.

I was up in Marin and Napa on Sunday; Marin for a barbecue in honor of a Scaper friend who's in transit from Alaska to San Diego (talk about your change of scene!) and Napa because I had a little time and couldn't resist stopping at Domaine Carneros for some champagne. It was about as perfect a day as I can remember; on the drive back through San Francisco that evening I saw plenty of spots I'll want to revisit and photograph. That got me thinking, always a dangerous proposition. Since I'm looking for photo ops, what about the zoo? I've never been to the San Francisco Zoo, so why not now? And so I set off yesterday morning.

According to the weather doohickey (that's the technical term) on my menu bar, San Francisco was chilly but sunny when I left a little after nine. Lesson #1: the weather doohickey lies like a politician. In fact, SF was anything but sunny. There was even the lightest mist during the day. And to make matters even less interesting, a shocking number of the zoo's enclosures are closed for maintenance. Between the renovations and the cool weather, my photo expedition was less than successful. But at least the penguins were out and about. And a few other animals were awake and cooperative. Guess I'll have to come back when things are livelier.

A couple of weeks ago I blogged about my visit to eBay Live! I mentioned that I saw a few products for photographing small objects. And I was pretty excited about the possibilities. In fact, I ordered one such package the moment I got home that evening. Said package arrived a few days later. And I have to say I'm disappointed.

The product in question is called Photo Studio In A Box and is available for $100 from Ritz Camera. It consists of a light box with translucent fabric walls, a reversible backdrop, a pair of spotlights and a camera stand. In theory, you can position the object to be protographed, the camera and the lights exactly where you want them and take precise, well lit images for eBay listings or whatever.

So much for the theory. The reality has been a lot of frustration and results that are mediocre at best. For one thing, the lights are okay for augmenting the light you need on your subject; but they're wholly inadequate as primary light sources. For another, the camera stand is a pain to adjust precisely; I was always aiming either too high or too low.

And then there's the backdrop, which offers a choice of dark blue on one side and medium gray on the other; what I really want is a white backdrop I can eliminate from the final shot. And the weave of the fabric shows up in macro images, making editing it out even more challenging.

I should have known. It's like getting stuff from Bazooka bubble gum or the back of comics when I was a kid; nothing's ever as good as the description. The one consolation is that I now know what it'll take to produce proper results. Now all I have to do is pay for it.

One of my hobbies is helping actress and entrepreneur Virginia Hey with webmastering duties for her sites. That includes checking and cleaning out spam, of both the comment and trackback variety. Today I got a bit of a surprise, one I had to validate. But yes it's true; some trackback spammer has actually registered the domain www.unitedinchristchurch.org as a link to one of those poker sites. I'm not even a Christian and I'm offended by this one.

MacSlash has a posting this morning pointing to the Flickr gallery for someone with talent, perseverance and way too much time on his hands. It's an iPod with its case replaced by one made entirely of wood. Wonder how much mass that adds. And I wonder how well the wood scroll wheel works in practice, not that it would stop me from buying one if it were available. Gee, d'you think that natural case provides extra resonance for the sounds within? Is a Stradivarius model next?

Let's go out and wave a flag or something.

Today's been a random kind of day. I decided to drive down to Gilroy to visit Bonfante Gardens, a low key theme park whose flowers had given me some good macro photography practice last year. On the way down I listened to a couple of podcasts on my iPod: Coverville, which features interesting (in both the positive and negative sense) song covers; and Lascivious Biddies, the adventures of four musicians from Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Both will stay on my subscription list for at least another week.

Arriving in Gilroy, my senses were assaulted by the unmistakable aroma of garlic. Gilroy, you may not know, is the garlic capital of the world, a place Will Rogers once said is "the only town in America where you can marinate a steak by hanging it on the clothesline." Today's just the kind of day he had in mind. The annual Garlic Festival's the last weekend in July. I'll have to miss it this year, owing to my uncle's unfortunate decision to turn 90 around the same time. A pity; I like the garlic festival. Although I won't miss having it oozing out of every pore for two days afterward.

Anyway, on to the Gardens. Parking wasn't a problem at all, a bad sign for a theme park the Friday before a long weekend. But not surprising, given the nature of the place. Bonfante Gardens can't seem to decide what to be. The rides are designed for small children and adults with heart conditions; this place makes Disneyland seem like the height of excitement. The gardens are beautiful and pleasant to wander through. Or at least they would be, if the piped music weren't so intrusive. And the price weren't so high. Almost $40 to visit gardens? Even I'm not that crazy; at least not more than once twice.

As a Marketing person, or at least someone who's had that title, I wonder what they think of as their demographic. Most everyone I saw was either under ten, over sixty, or somebody responsible for someone under ten or over sixty. Doesn't sound like a recipe for success to me.

So let's all go out and show a beaver we care (totally safe for work).