I felt a funeral in my brain,
And mourners, to and fro,
Kept treading, treading, till it seemed
That sense was breaking through.

And when they all were seated,
A service like a drum
Kept beating, beating, till I thought
My mind was going numb.

And then I heard them lift a box,
And creak across my soul
With those same boots of lead, again.
Then space began to toll

As all the heavens were a bell,
And Being but an ear,
And I and silence some strange race,
Wrecked, solitary, here.

-Emily Dickinson

This seems like an oddly specific Web banner. Are there a lot of people who read Web comics who happen to run fishing tournaments and who are also looking to start Web sites? The peculiarity is only enhanced by its placement as part of a triptych banner of unrelated ads; the other two were for an HDTV and a once-a-month birth control implant.

Labels: amusement, funny, internet

Sometimes I think scammers would do well to hire a good (albeit ethically loose) proofreader to polish the nonsense they distribute. There seems to be no shortage of people on the Internet offering to clean up resumes, Web sites and other published material, although I do admit that the quality of these services is somewhat suspect until the results are displayed. Hopefully, they would know not to put exclamation points into a missive supposedly originating with a major corporate entity (and could polish out the missing articles, because nothing says "this wasn't penned by a literate English writer" like "If you are not customer").

Perhaps of more importance than appropriate business-style grammar and format, though, is the give-away involved in announcing that, even though the e-mail is going out to all Chase customers, if the recipient isn't a member of Chase Bank he or she can ignore (again with the exclamation point!) the e-mail in its entirety (bolding mine in the picture). Very polite. Not particularly bright.

Seriously, where is the doctoral-candidate-in-English mastermind writing these things on the side for pizza money who actually understands how to write to the audience and make it look realistic?

Labels: amusement, internet, social commentary

I arose early on Saturday to attend the 2008 Omaha Pride parade (and by "early" I mean "9:15," which doesn't seem very early to most people but is quite strenuous for the darkness-dwellers like me). The parade itself was disappointingly short (lasting a total of about 20 minutes), but the fact that Omaha even *has* a parade (and that it has grown each year) is an accomplishment.

The crowd seemed to enjoy the parade, with no discernible protesting or heckling. I did have one awkward encounter before the parade started as I was standing at 10th and Farnam messing with my camera gear. A gentleman who may or may not (based on his sports-themed attire) have been in town for the College World Series approached me to ask why people were lining up along the sidewalk. I told him it was for a parade, to which he responded "Oh, cool! A parade for what?" Internally bracing, I replied "The Omaha Gay Pride parade." "Oh," was his monotone reply, accompanied by the expected quick retreat.

Labels: omaha, photography, social commentary

The following is a frequently encountered question in the wide pantheon of OkCupid questions:

If the price of an apple was raised 50% and then decreased 50%, making it cost $0.75, how much was the original price?

(a) $1.00
(b) $0.75
(c) $1.25
(d) $0.50

What particularly amuses me about this question is that it's not a "how do you feel?" or "what's your opinion on this?" question as every other OkCupid question is; this is a math problem with only one correct answer. For those of you without OkCupid memberships, the problem with this is that the answer is never given and instead your answer (along with "how you want your friends/matches to respond," which works well for questions like politics and music tastes) is just posted for other people to see. And the vast majority of people who have compared their profiles to mine have gotten it wrong. So essentially it's a trick question that makes mathematically inclined people look dumb to the non-inclined, and the non-inclined look dumb to the inclined, because there's no opportunity to explain *why* you answered the way you did. So if you answer the question incorrectly and specify that you only want to match to other people who answered as you did . . .

Labels: amusement, social commentary

- A handful of new photos from the zoo and a disappointing storm-chasing attempt. In general I was unhappy with how both of these sets turned out. I need more practice (just to clarify, the ones I posted are okay; it's the vast majority that I junked that lend themselves handily to my love-hate relationship with my photography skills).

- Overheard in the hallway:

Secretary: "I really apologize for asking you to do this."
Courier: "No problem. I don't mind going down."

Alas, no soap-opera material here; they were taking about the courier delivering papers to a floor she'd already passed in her route.

- Omaha made No. 3 in Kiplinger's "Best Places to Live, Work and Play" survey. I'm guessing it was composed pre-tornado season.

- The Top Chef reunion show was somewhat disappointing, save Richard's starry-eyed appearance via satellite from the hospital where his wife was in labor. The contestants all pretended to be friends and had nice things to say about each other, despite body language indicating continuing resentment and hard feelings. And the contestants eliminated in the first 5 or 6 episodes had somewhere between zero and one line apiece over the course of an hour (which I suppose makes sense, since we, the viewers, know so much more about those who survived into the final 4 or 5 rounds). Sadly, Zoe and Jennifer have apparently broken up since the show (or least uncomfortably refused to talk about rumors to that effect); I wonder if the show played a significant part. Also, head judge Tom Colicchio wore a vest, something I've been told by various people I'm not allowed to do because the style has passed (of course, he was teased about the vest . . .).

- Note to John McCain (as if he hasn't already heard it ad infinitum): Don't schedule fundraisers with supporters who compare rape to the weather ("As long as it's inevitable, you might as well lie back and enjoy it." My god.).

- My next-door neighbors of the last four years (technically my only next-door neighbors, given my corner-lot status) are reluctantly moving in with their children after a stroke incident, something I was very sorry to hear given how friendly and upbeat they've always been. The family has been clearing out the house into moving trucks over the last few days, and an estate sale is scheduled for later this month. Given the dismal housing market, the family has decided to keep the house and rent it out. This means that I will now officially have an entirely different set of neighbors (on all sides) from the those present when I bought my house.

- As an addendum to the above, I learned from the adult children cleaning out the house that apparently either the wireless control for my garage door or the wireless keypad for my security system sets off the side doorbell of their house . . . and has been doing so since I moved in. Every time I come and go. For some odd reason, my elderly neighbors decided not to mention it to me, and instead have been treated to a few bars of a Dixie song of some sort day and night for years. I offered to try to track down the interference, but the adult children laughed and said they're just going to disconnect the doorbell instead.

- As a further addendum, I'm really starting to worry about my memory. My mother is suitably distressed that my neurological dysfunction has obscured or obfuscated a sizable portion of my childhood and my friends are routinely frustrated when I forget not just names and dates but entire conversations. One of the tricks of poor memory retention is not knowing you're forgetting the things you're forgetting, but when the adult children cleaning out the house next door ask what you were taking pictures of in the backyard a few nights ago, and you don't remember even being in the backyard with photographic equipment, you start to be concerned (the alternative is there was someone else in my backyard, which is equally disturbing). I'm hoping he just misinterpreted the cordless drill I was using to fix a bird feeder as a cell phone or camera of some sort.

- Omaha revalued thousands of houses last year (leading to massive criticism in the paper and a new business niche for attorneys offering to challenge valuation increases of up to 50% for some homeowners). Mine jumped about 40%, although I thought it reasonable given that my house had been undervalued given what I paid. Still, a higher value means higher property taxes, which showed up in the form of an increase in my mortgage payment of $130 a month starting this month. Ouch.

- For those of you who haven't seen me online lately: maybe I've been ignoring you, and maybe Adium hasn't wanted to connect to the Yahoo servers for about three days, a problem I originally thought was a server issue that would correct itself and only today discovered is a glitch in Adium itself (corrected with the new version). Whether I've been offline for technical reasons or actually ignoring you is up to your imagination to decide.

Labels: house, miscellany, politics

It was not death, for I stood up,
And all the dead lie down;
It was not night, for all the bells
Put out their tongues, for noon.

It was not frost, for on my flesh
I felt siroccos crawl,
Nor fire, for just my marble feet
Could keep a chancel cool.

And yet it tasted like them all;
The figures I have seen
Set orderly, for burial,
Reminded me of mine,

As if my life were shaven
And fitted to a frame,
And could not breathe without a key;
And 't was like midnight, some,

When everything that ticked has stopped,
And space stares, all around,
Or grisly frosts, first autumn morns,
Repeal the beating ground.

But most like chaos, stopless, cool,
Without a chance or spar,
Or even a report of land
To justify despair.

-Emily Dickinson

Labels: introspection, poetry

A quick photo update from a Saturday trip to Benson Days and then to the Qwest Center, including one new planet. Enjoy.

Labels: photography

Not at the same time, of course. Some things should not be cooled to -320 degrees F, and nipples are probably one of them.

The Top Chef finale was last night. Unfortunately, I can't talk about it yet because Cris's cable was out due to the second round of tornadoes and flash flooding we've had in a week and I don't know if he's seen it yet. I *will*, however, say that my favorite contestant, Richard, once again tickled my molecular gastronomy bone by incorporating liquid nitrogen into his cooking (yay for cool gadgets and high-tech ingredients), in this case to make a flash-frozen ice cream. The idea is pretty simple; assemble your non-frozen ice cream ingredients (in his case bacon-flavored ice cream, which did not particularly impress me; his original idea for tabasco pepper ice cream sounded better), put them in a high-grade mixer (like my KitchenAid), turn the mixer on low and slowly add liquid nitrogen until the concoction is ice cream (observing all due safety precautions, of course). Nitrogen is inert and boils out, leaving only the original, now-frozen ingredients. Lane has encouraged me to try it (with her present, of course), and liquid nitrogen can be had without permits or the like (it's not a regulated gas). The limiting factor is finding a place that will sell it to you in small quantities (most gas supply stores sell in bulk and I don't really need 30 liters of the stuff, since it doesn't store). I haven't found one in Omaha yet. Maybe someday.

On the nudity end of the spectrum (Do spectrums really have nudity ends? Is there a chocolate end?), the Transportation Security Administration rolled out its first full-use backscatter airport security machines this week. I first heard about these years ago in a Discover Magazine article (because they use a unique form of X-ray that measures object density by how much the object "scatters" the radiation rather than how it absorbs and re-releases it), where the focus was on the science rather than the politics. Now that they're in use, expect to hear about them in the news, because they produce near-photo-quality black-and-white images of the subject's nude body, regardless of clothing (clothing scatters almost none of the radiation so it doesn't show up). In an attempt to address privacy concerns, early versions of the machines had software that blurred out private areas, but apparently the TSA has decided that blurring those areas will encourage terrorists to hide items there, because the machines delivered to 10 airports this week "allow the security screeners . . . to clearly see the passenger's sexual organs." The TSA's press release assures people that there is no way for the screener to make a copy of the image, and the software still blurs the subject's face, but they're still getting a "show."

The defense offered to make the machines easier to swallow is phrased in the form of options. You can still request a physical pat-down in place of the machine, and the idea is that the machine is less physically invasive. I can see from my own personal standpoint that I would prefer the machine to having a stranger's hands on me, but then I'm not particularly uptight about images of the nude body (even my own), given my photography portfolio. It remains to be seen how most people, especially women and parents of pre-teen children, react, and how the actual security setup is handled (the procedure would likely be more palatable if the person viewing the images is in a different room and cannot see the subject, making it more impersonal, and the screener and subject are matched up by gender the way physical pat-downs are). I imagine it's only a matter of time before there's a scandal of some sort involving an overzealous screener; stay tuned.

Labels: cooking, politics, science, social commentary, television

Pictures from the trip Meghan and I recently took to Florida are finally up. Included in this package are a trio of new planet photos, a wide assortment of photos taken from the airplane window during the flights to and from, a day of beach photos and a collection of photos of historical St. Augustine (the oldest city in the U.S.). Some of them are standard "trip documentation" photos, but I tried to throw a handful of artistic ones in there, as well. Enjoy, and as always let me know what you think. :)

Labels: photography

Given my photographic proclivities, it's probably not surprising that at the moment I own four complete camera systems (granted one of them has some zooming issues due to an unfortunate fall and hasn't been out of the drawer in a few years, but it still takes perfectly good pictures), all four Canons, the most recent acquisition of which (purchased a scant two weeks ago) put a $1,300 dent on my credit card (but I got a really good deal on it!). Still, one can never have too many cameras, so for those of you who would like to take out a mortgage loan to treat me, this Hasselblad 31-megapixel camera is on sale ($9,000 off!) for a scant $18,000. :)

Labels: amusement, photography

My status for some noticeable amount of time has been "AWOL" (an acronym that leads inexorably into the question of whether one can, in fact, be "AWL," as well). I have been entangled, perhaps even embroiled (if the plot is devious enough), in a variety of sundry events, including an out-of-state trip, a family visit and a tornado scare. Each should receive a post in turn, all of which would have been completed previously but for my inexcusable inability to process photos from said events to my standards in a reasonable amount of time. The joys of being exacting.

In the meantime, the photo to the left shows the current view from my front step (that's not a bush in the center; it's the top of a toppled tree shown more clearly from a different angle here). I have some minor tree damage in my backyard, but nothing matching this.

Labels: house, photography