giant toad

... or maybe he just looks big in the pictures. They say the camera adds 10 pounds, you know.

One of many wild residents of my back yard.

These pictures are in cross-eye 3D. Cross your eyes to merge the two views.







I love the grim expression.

Scoundrels!

I'm sure you've had the experience of getting caught with an embarassing pose or facial expression in a snapshot, but can you imagine sitting days or even weeks for a painting and coming out like this?



You may not recognize this man but you've heard of him. This is the famous Dr. Samuel Johnson, the wit credited with saying "Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel."

Here's another one. Some people just don't take good oil paintings.



These were both painted by Johnson's close friend Sir Joshua Reynolds so I suspect these were not without some intended humor. Sir Joshua was entirely capable of painting a flattering portrait... when he was painting himself:

a hard-luck story

I answered my front door this afternoon and there was a younger 20 or 30-ish woman there. She was dressed in too-tight short shorts, sandals and a tank top and was holding an uninterruptible power supply and a large wire brush.

She asked if I knew what they were and if I might want to buy them from from her. She went on to explain that she needed the money because her boyfriend who had brought her here from St. Louis a few weeks ago had taken her to a liquor store, sent her in to buy something and then drove off.

I felt like an extra in one of those post-war Italian neo-realist films. That could be the plot for one. They basically go like this: something bad happens to someone, he spends the rest of the film trying to solve the problem, but doesn't.

Fattening Gandhi

You may have noticed that opera singers tend not to be tiny creatures. Posing behind a staircase bannister only helps a little.



It's an alternate universe in which a 300-pound man can play a teen-age boy and a 250-pound woman can be a "nymph".

None-the-less, imagine trying to cast the lead in "Satyagraha", an opera by Philip Glass (Philip Glass Philip Glass Philip Glass Philip Glass Philip Glass... that guy) about the famously thin Mohandas Gandhi. You can read about the new Metropolitan Opera production in a New York Times article Opera About a Giant’s Life, Complete With Giant Puppets in which they duly note that singer Richard Croft lost "10 pounds" for the role.



This seems to have gotten him down to somewhere between Jesse Ventura and Mussolini, I'd say. If only Ghandi had been known for wearing more slimming colors.

The NY Times also has a nice video piece about the staging and large scale puppetry in the production.

Murder, she campaigned

My 104 year-old aunt doesn't understand why Angela Lansbury is running for President and thinks she should go back to making those nice detective shows.

The whitest Indian in America

Charleton Heston just died and I realize I've mostly only seen his well-known blockbusters like Ten Commandments, Ben-Hur (he looks marvelous) and Planet of the Apes. So I went to Netflix to check up on some others.

Here's a little-known outing...Far Horizons, as described by Netflix:

At the request of President Thomas Jefferson, in 1803, explorers Meriwether Lewis (Fred MacMurray) and William Clark (Charlton Heston) set out to explore the untamed, trackless Western lands recently purchased from France (in the Louisiana Purchase).

That sounds like good casting... I'm interested... then we have this info:

Donna Reed portrays Indian maiden Sacajawea, who helps the explorers.

Now, that is Hollywood being Hollywood as only Hollywood can.

delusions of relevance

Michael Stipe, the 48 year-old leader of a band I never followed anyway announces he's gay "to help some kid somewhere."

Yes, that must clarify things immensely for confused teens everywhere when a bald, middle-aged man who writes music they wouldn't listen to even if they could download it for free comes out of the closet.

a lesson to be learned

For all aspiring politicians:

If you're going to be linked with a prostitute make sure it's one of those trendy male prostitutes, so you can use your wife as a fitting backdrop during an "I am NOT GAY" press conference. Your plausible deniability is much more limited if you've been caught consorting with old-fashioned female hookers. It's very 20th century.

According to the transcripts Gov. Spitzer "would ask you to do things that, like, you might not think were safe."

I guess that means he wanted to use a chandelier that wasn't over the bed?

All that said, however, I hope there is more to all this than what we see. I'd think the FBI must have better things to spend its time on than a simple prostitution ring when the director admits he's had to cut back on regular law-and-order policework due to the priority of the war on terror.

David Caruso is... the new Jack Lord

In most media the red-haired characters are typecast as unconfident, ineffective, not-too-with-it sorts. Think Ritchie Cunningham on Happy Days needing Fonzie to explain things to him. There are no red-haired leading men, no red-haired action figures, no red-haired male models, no red-haired superheroes... I don't think there are even any red-haired porn stars.

So imagine the pride of red-headed people everywhere at this development:

David Caruso is (meaningful pause, don sunglasses) the new Jack Lord.



For those who don't recall:



Hawaii Five-O was a one-hour detective drama that had about 15 minutes of script padded out with long scenes of cars coming up driveways, pans across island scenery and beauty shots of Jack Lord's hair as he stalked about the crime scenes.

the nowhere woman

At [company that dare not speak it's name] we had this thing called a "Chyron" in our video studio. It was an absurdly expensive and primitive digital box for overlaying text and graphics onto video. All keyboard commands, almost no GUI. About $30,000 I think.

They hired a woman to run it. (I think it was a woman. She really looked more like the "Nowhere Man" in the Beatles' Yellow Submarine). She was a Chryron specialist. At every opportunity she would moan about how our Chyron wasn't as good as the Chyrons she was used to using on "the network" jobs she did. I guess we were supposed to be impressed at her career of superimposing people's names on the bottom third of the screen during golf tournaments.

Anyway, since it didn't create graphics on its own, she tasked one of our print artists to create some bugs and bars to lay text on. When they imported them to the Chyron they all had a halo around them and they called me in to look at them.

I said they'd need to have a proper alpha channel to look right and proposed the workflow that she could do to get that. But there was no explaining it to her. She knew nothing about CG, nothing about channels, nothing about file formats, nothing about R, G or even B, and she didn't want to know. So it was hopeless. I could have been explaining it to a hamster.

She ended the conversation with "well, I'm going to call my friend who works at the CBS affiliate in Phoenix. He can solve this. He's a real professional."

Other co-workers who had contact with her had similar experiences. She wouldn't know what to do and insisted that it was someone else's lack of knowledge that was the problem.

So no one missed her when she got laid off after about a year.

Hot PM

Comes with her own halo.

Beyond Thunderdome

The Chicago Cubs new player says his first goal in America is to learn english. No rush, guy.

And of course his new manager, Jim Hedry, had to say "He really fills a big hole for us."

Collective Cluelessness

Behold, a living, breathing definition of "cluelessness":



If you weren't on board yet, I'll just note that "One Toke Over the Line" was a substantial hit in 1970 for the original performers, Brewer & Shipley.

I recall about the same time, there was a "current issues" TV program for kids on Saturday mornings called "Take a Giant Step", with two teenage hosts. One week they had the artists on and earnestly asked them if it was true that this song was about smoking marijuana cigarettes.

"Oh no, not at all" the singers insisted. "One toke over the line" could refer to anything done to excess, such as "eating one too many cheeseburgers."

The man with the baton at the end of the clip is, of course, Lawrence Welk. Don Jackson, my college jazz band director told us this story:

The Lawrence Welk Orchestra was out on tour and five minutes before a performance was supposed to start he looked down and saw one of his saxophone players was missing.

"Where's Sam?" he asks.

"He went to the bathroom, he'll be back in a minute." someone replies.

"He just thought of going to the bathroom now?!? This concert was booked two months ago!!"

Blight of the Union

Has any US President so consistently rushed when he should have waited, waited when he should have acted, squandered when he should have saved, hoarded when he should have spent, lied when he should have told the truth, told the truth when it was too late, and overall, zigged when he should have zagged?

It's true there hasn't been another terrorist attack in the US since 9/11 but it's impossible now to believe that is because of the competence and leadership of our President.

While it's tempting to think an Al Gore presidency would have been better, the Republicans would have been working from day zero to derail him.

When Al Gore didn't invade Iraq (or North Korea, or Iran), they would have shouted "coward" and "traitor". They would have kept beating the WMD drums and it would have worked because running in fear is America's favorite exercise. Possibly, Al Gore would have been impeached over something like that iffy Bhuddist monastary campaign contribution in the 90's. Remember, they impeached Clinton over such a trifle. At the very least Gore would have been damaged enough to lose re-election in 2004.

Only through the lens of the utter failure of George Bush has the country begun to see the foolishness of this act-first-think-later policy. Two-thirds of the country, anyway.

The clarity won't last long. There will always be new things to scare people with, and there will always be people who say they have super secret information that makes it all true.

And realistically, George Bush has left this country so damaged that I doubt any amount of good government can set it right again.

There's no such thing as bad publicity

as long as they spell your name ri... oh... never mind...