"Wilde"

I am watching the excellent film Wilde, about Oscar Wilde.
I am struck once again by how seemingly all strikingly brilliant men seem to also have areas of life where they are profoundly flawed or out of control.
I am sure it is not so because of their brilliance, but despite it. (In other words it is just more noticeable than it is in the ordinary person.) But it is just remarkable to me that there are always such stark contrasts in one person.

Truck And Cloud

(Also a super-long-lens picture, this subject was quite far away.)

Neo-dada poetry

Spammers are apparently using software to make random sentences, or more likely pull them from the web and string them together to make a plausible body of text in a spam email to fool spam filters. This sometimes makes for wonderfull surreal reading. I think the Dadaist poets would have loved these tools. Lo:

She pulled the razor across her left bicep and clicked the stopwatch. That sex automatically means you have STDs. Female characters, however, have one unofficial, arguable benefit: their armor looks like metal lingerie. Oh no, the aliens are too swarthy for that. I jumped into the shower, threw some clothes on, and ran out the door. This is not to say that this real life inequality is represented in the game. At your RTD job, the bus drivers labeled you the "pass around girl," a nickname you have embraced to a degree.
Some professional witnesses, albeit easily debunked ones, report having looked in through portholes and seen the beings working within. I've spent a better part of January nursing a very resilient head cold and cultivating some warm and fuzzy new relationships. In researching you and reading interviews you have given, what struck me most about you was your honesty and lack of illusion.
You know to post on your MySpace profile. When there isn't a scrumptious band playing there's always an in house DJ servicing your every sonic need as you sip moderately priced spirits. A partial answer to this is the idea that UFOs are not from space, but are rather the ships of extra dimensional or time travelers. We were going to hang out longer, but by the time we reached Amy's apartment we were all feeling a bit tired and so my friend and headed back toward my place.
You have participated in more than one polyamorous triad. That's a rough guess.
Who among you will run with the hunt?
This is a better method of getting money than having your workers make crappy knockoffs of consumer products. I know people who have fallen from you good graces frequently ask you what your parents think of your tattoos, but what do they think?
It stays crunchy in milk and can be used as a suppository.

Steel

Fences galore

I quite like this one for some reason. (My tendency would have been to zoom in more.) (Which I also did, but this might be the best one.)

Passion photographer

Here's a fun thing on Laurie's blog.

Related: the original short which was the basis of the great comedy Zoolander.

Doors of Heaven

I had to prove that I am not all talk, so I got the Nikon D40. Wonderful camera. Even with my 18-200mm zoom, it fits in my shoulder bag among the rest of my stuff. And it does not have the plasticky feel and slow reactions one might expect with an entry-level camera.

Ooookay, there is apparently a great appetite for my high-wire analysis of my pictures. So here goes.

This picture is of heaven's gates. The golden colors give promise of great spiritual riches ahead.

The many verticals symbolize the ascension of humanity and of the individual, or "you" if you will.

The shadow of the sign on the right shows the fading of language and symbols as being important in human life, transcending mere mind and entering spiritual realms.

The locks represent the barriers in our minds and our beliefs which each person has the key to if he chooses.

All Saints: Pure Shores

It's a pity that so many outside Europe don't know All Saints.
They have had several hits, I think the biggest one was Never Ever. But they also made the title song for the Leonardo DeVinci movie The Beach. Watch.

Picture from today

It seems from comments there is some trouble grogging this fine piece of art...

Can't you see, it's an artistic comment on the workers of today, who are getting younger, less educated, and more streamlined.
The worker who is eating is several steps in front.
The population in the backgrounds have their blinds closed to the situation. But not fully, because they are voyeurs after all.

The potted plant is the unborn generations.
The mail slot is communications media.
And the brick in the upper left the artist's ego.

"We like the Moon"

I've visited this nutty thing several times over many years, and it never fails to crack me up!
(Warning, loud music.)

Update: apparently not everybody is on the floor. Color me surprised.
Somebody recommended Viking Kittens instead.

Nikon D40

If even the Nikon D80 is too big and too expensive a digital SLR for you, you should take a look at the spanking new Nikon D40. I can't believe it's selling for $600. And it is super-compact, something I always had a weak spot for. (I must have owned like fifteen compact cameras over the years.)
It also reportedly has excellent low-light performance. So if you combine it with for example Nikon's lovely 18-200mm zoom with Vibration Reduction, you will have a camera you can use hand-held in almost any light, even indoors, so combined with the small size this should be a wonderful travel and walk-about camera.
(Take note that not all Nikon lenses will have autofocus on this camera. If you have or buy any lenses for it, they must be "AF-S" or "AF-i" lenses for the autofocus to work. Those have built-in autofocus motor.)

I am so impressed with general developments in digital photography. Just five years ago you had to pay tens of thousands of dollars for performance like this. (And they weighed three times as much.)