Engrish signs

It's been long since I've visited Engrish, it's still fun.

Pascal said:
"Me, fail Engrish? That's unpossible!"
"Engrish" comes from Japanese pronunciation, since in that ranguage L and R are exactry the same retter. But the phenomenon extends to a far wider part of the Far East, as illustrated by the notoriously "creative" translations of instruction manuals, usually in China. I had begun blogging precisely about this, but then as usual I got carried away in some utterly pointless chatter. So just cast a glance at the cool asian image (I am have doned it by my own self), and skip the boring text altogether.

You know, Eo? I think you like Engrish for the same reason you like some spam e-mails with random text. Because for some freaky reason, it becomes eerily fascinating

That's surely part of it. Like Dadaist poetry, or Lewis Carrol. I'm just reading his work, in full for the first time, he was a genius.
It's surprisingly hard to be creatively illogical.




The ones below just say it all.

Eurotoon

I found this cartoon from the beginning of the Iraq war.

Leopard dock tip

I am sick of the dock on Mac OS X Leopard not being able to make folders open with a simple click, like sanity demands and like it used to be. It's just embarrassingly poor usability to change very useful and logical behavior and not even leave the old behavior as an option.

A bit of research found no solutions short of messing with code, which I don't like to do.

I found out that command-click opens the folder which contains the folder in the dock. I wonder who asked for that?

But I asked myself: how about if I placed a file from the folder in the dock and command-click that?
Voila! That actually opens the folder the item is in.

Update: I got irritated about this after a folder got so large that even in List view it does not fit on my monitor, so the "open in finder" command normally seen at the bottom is not visible until I have scrolled all the way down...
In the Fan view, the command is at the top, so I have to move the cursor all the way up...
In the Grid view it's close by the cursor, but it's so graphical that it not instant, even on a Mac Pro.

Blood on the market floor

Today the US stock market set a new record for one day fall, in points (not in percentage, I'd think). Here's a comment from Farmann. (And a video article.) (Hans also points to this site, mises.org, which seems interesting.)

I never understood economic crashes. We still have the same people, knowledge, machinery, houses, and factories we did a year ago, so how can the economy suddenly be a lot worse?

I guess the crux is credit. But it still does not make sense to me.

I also guess that if economic crashes don't make sense, then economic booms don't make sense either. Like I wrote in the updated money article, in the wider picture you can't expect any growth larger than 5%. And it'd be less if not for inflation. And in the smaller picture you can get higher growth, but it depends upon luck.
And it's simply because you can only build factories and educate people so fast. Faster growth is based on credit and optimism, and those always crash sooner or later when they have stretched too far from reality, like right now.

Here's an interesting article.
"For many years, the money supply in the form of banknotes and deposits (M3) has grown at an average rate of over ten percent per year (which means that every six or seven years the total volume of money circulating in the world has doubled)."

Wow!!! This explains a lot to me! Anybody with common sense can see that this is just like having water gun fights with gasoline and then having a nice relaxed cigarette after. And then the government is blaming the crisis on "the greed of investors"...

"Economic theory teaches us that, unfortunately, artificial credit expansion and the (fiduciary) inflation of media of exchange offer no shortcut to stable and sustained economic development, no way of avoiding the necessary sacrifice and discipline behind all voluntary saving. (In fact, particularly in the United States, voluntary saving has not only failed to increase, but in some years has even fallen to a negative rate.)"

On The West Wing there was an astute observation: the president's aide asked the president: "but don't you want people to save up?" The president said: "Yes, but we want them to do it while the other guy is president."
Because spending booms the economy in the short term, and saving helps it in the long term. And how can we get re-elected if we think in the long term?

"Indeed, the artificial expansion of credit and money is never more than a short-term solution, and often not even that."

In the SF novel Battlefield Earth (which was a hundred times better than the movie based on it, trust me) near the end they have to save the economy of the entire universe (!). The way they do it is to extend new credit to everybody, secured by new planets being discovered. And it is projected that it will become a big problem when they run out of new planets far in the future. ... And yet it's not even speculated that you could have a healthy economy which is not based on credit! That's insane, it's like saying you can't have a good personal economy if you don't have any debt! (And some people even do say that, I remember my former brother-in-law who is a high-ranking insurance executive say to my mother that it was nuts having so little debt in her house.)

TidBITS e-book sale

TidBITS is having a 50% sale on their excellent tech e-books.

Alyson on Ferguson

She is just too cute.

Adam Stayed Out Late

It was late one night in the Garden of Eden and Adam and Eve were having an argument. Adam had stayed out late for several nights in a row and Eve was not happy.

"You're running around with other women!" she exclaimed. "I just know it!"

"Come on, be reasonable!" Adam countered. "How could I be? You're the only woman on earth!"

Eve did not have a reply to that.

A short time later, Adam went to sleep.

He was awakened in the middle of the night by Eve poking him in the side.

"What are you doing?" Adam asked.

Eve replied, "I'm counting your ribs!"

"Teen Horniness is Not a Crime"

Abbey McBride and Sarah Michelle Gellar - Teen Horniness is Not a Crime.

I was looking for more with Abbey, since she is pretty and funny. (According to IMDb, it's "Abbey", not "Abby".)

She's quite underused (just like Sarah is these days). Apropos, here is Sarah at five.

Sailor - Panama

Back in 1977 as a young lad I'd bought my first serious camera (a Konica TC), and I went nuts photographing that summer, and a record which is associated with that time for me is Sailor's LP "Trouble".

The video is a bit gay and they don't even show any cameras, but I still like the songs from that record, Panama (below), Girls-girls-girls, Glass of Champagne, The Old Nickelodeon Sound, it's good pop and they take me back to one of the most creatively expansive periods in my life.

Red One in use

Article about using the Red One video cinema camera (for stills too). Very positive, with a few caveats.
McLain and Thelia were also surprised at how much bigger and heavier the Red One was than they had imagined. Thelia estimated that with a battery and lens attached along with other assorted hardware such as a viewfinder, the camera weighs about 25 pounds. "It's pretty damn big and pretty damn heavy," McLain says. "You're not a fly on the wall with that camera."

"One of the limiting factors is motion," he notes. "Anything you can't freeze is going to come out as blur when it's extracted as a still."

Hmmm... can't you adjust the shutter speed on an upmarket video camera?

Toshiba DVD Player

I heard about the new "Toshiba DVD Player with XDE500 Advanced Upscaling Technology". This is apparently the name of the model in Europe! (I think it's the one called "Toshiba XD E500" in the US.)

It's supposed to upscale DVDs to HD screens much better than other players. I was sceptical, but saw some great user reviews somewhere, so I bough it. I just posted this review on Amazon:

--
I haven't made comparisons of the image quality yet, but this machine has several issues which makes it disappointing to me:

1: It does not remember how far it has played a disc. Since I never watch all of a DVD in one go, it means I have to leave the machine on 24/7.

2: The remote control is the cheapest, most plasticky thing I've ever seen. And the buttons are so unresponsive that I have to press them on average three times to get the machine to react. It's highly annoying. Toshiba should be *embarrassed* by selling something of such poor quality.

3: The picture is stretched to wide screen (and thus distorted) no matter what picture setting I use.

--
It's amazing you can buy such a poor product these days. I mean, DVD players are not news anymore. And this one cost twice as much as the average player, even those which also have upscaling technology.

I've been using my Blu-ray player to play DVDs, but it's sloooow.

Short films

Short videos about photography. (The second one is interesting for those who can't get their camera big enough.)

The first one gave me an idea: mix photos with paintings and drawings in a book, magazine, exhibition or web site, and it's suddenly easier to see the photos as art rather than records.

Dang, I'm realizing I'm actually missing the Polaroid SX-70 camera. The wonderful simplicity and directness of the thing. Once you clicked the button it was done. You could really focus on just the picture.
It also had an interesting softness to the pictures, a particular quality of non-sharpness and colors like you'd used a soft-filter almost.
And man, how brilliant was the reflex-viewfinder system!

Cool houses

I am watching Grand Designs season 3. It has some outstanding episodes in it. For example one of the coolest houses I've ever heard of, the Woodman's Cottage. It's hand-built in the middle of the woods for under 30,000 pounds sterling, virtually all out of natural materials, and it's virtually self-sufficient with energy and food, and yet it's beautiful, modern, warm and comfortable. Awesome.

One of the remarkable things about this cottage is that the wood was not cut to squares, the whole frame is made from whole tree trunks, which even can be seen in the final house from the outside. And the house does not have any straight lines or square corners, it's so organic in shape. 

Another outstanding project is the Water Works house, a huge old industrial building in the utmost state of disrepair, which a young couple restored from the ground up on a shoe-string budget, with their own labor, over ten months after hours. An astounding effort. And the result is just breathtaking.

The text and tiny web pictures don't do these projects and houses justice, I warmly recommend getting your hands on the DVDs. (It doesn't seem they are for sale in the US. If you have a region-free DVD player, get them from Amazon UK. Or maybe they can be found for download somewhere.)

One of my friends in Canada also built his own house, from scrap wood. Cost him next to nothing, only had to buy the electricals and such.
I'm full of admiration and a bit of envy over people who are that practical. I am not, if I try to vacuum my floor myself, I get a nervous breakdown. I'm proud of my mind, but if anybody were to depend on my practical abilities, they better cut their wrists. (OK, I can if I have to. In my youth I was a sandblaster, and a very successful one.) It must be really wonderful to build your house with your hands.

Rivers and Tides

Rivers and Tides, the nature art of Andy Goldsworth.
[Thanks to Eric]



The above is part II. Part I is here.

Preflight check?

A man should not leave this earth with unfinished business. He should live each day as if it was a pre-flight check. He should ask each morning, am I prepared to lift-off?
-- Diane Frolov and Andrew Schneider, Northern Exposure, All is Vanity, 1991

That's just BS. This would mean that you could never start any project which would take longer than 24 hours.

Perhaps what they mean is that one should always strive to finish everything one begins, if at all possible. This I agree heartily with. Unfinished projects, cycles, and communications are a great drain upon energy and attention. If something is dragging out long, then take a decision to finish it or not. If you decide you probably won't ever, then throw out the remnants of it and forget about it.

Abuse and Power

I got sent this, it's a true story, I'm told.
-Eolake

=============
Abuse and Power
by Robb Blodgett

The electrical power serving our condo complex was suddenly interrupted while I was working on a project in my shop. No warning, no apparent cause. It was 4:30 PM and the February daylight was beginning to fade.

It had now been an hour and a half without electricity. I tried reading by candlelight; romantic in theory, but NOT in substance. Put factually, a great waste of time!

Several "powerless" neighborhood residents gathered outside in the cold. I donned my winter coat. I stepped outside to collect whatever info I could on the outage.

As I suspected, no one knew spit! Other than unsubstantiated neighborhood gossip, my fellow condo owners seldom, if ever, possess information I don't already have, speculation not withstanding. I shuffled back inside to consider my options.

Doing nearly anything would be far more productive than sitting in the dark. The microwave oven and television were idle and useless. There was no power to run my shop tools or light to assure that my fingers stayed connected to my hands. I picked option four; I would leave my condo and run errands.

To do errands, I needed wheels. To have wheels, the garage door needed to be opened. But alas, there was a quandary.

No garage door opener will work without electricity. . . . a fact that any pre-school child would know. Therefore, someone had to open the garage door manually. Who would that be you ask? Me, who else? I'm not married anymore!

The "Emergency Door Release" was attached to the opener's chain mechanism by the original cotton rope. The rope's frayed, dark-stained appearance spoke of its many years just standing by, waiting to be of service. A dusty, red-plastic handle at the end of the rope hung within easy reach. There was just barely enough light to see the handle. I found it, gripped it firmly and gave it a mighty yank.

I should have known. The old, bedraggled rope snapped immediately leaving the red plastic handle in my hand. The dilapidated rope lay at my feet in two pieces. Aw GEEEEZE!

My son had borrowed both of my ladders. I'm 6'1" tall, yet even so, I required more height to see the mechanism, not just feel it. I needed something to stand on. Thinking for a moment, I went inside. I retrieved an old, grey and green Steelcase chair from the basement. The chair was positioned directly under the area where the rope was attached. With an assortment of tools in my front and rear pockets and a flashlight held in my mouth, I stood nervously on the chair wrestling with the grimy door release.

Meanwhile, inside the house, my cute little Shih Tzu puppy named "Boo Boo Bear" was awakened by increasingly hard hammer blows, now being liberally applied by yrs trly to a stubborn safety catch. Bear stood upright in his crate dancing, barking like crazy and practicing his "Daddy, I'm lonely" routine.

For clarity, let me stop and explain something. When "The Bear" barks, I get RREALLY irritated. I hate the sound of a barking dog. But worse, when it's MY dog that's barking. I always think the neighbors can hear him through the common walls that separate our living spaces. And THAT really bugs me.

I can just see my neighbor's cold, red faces! Jaws working, mumbling something naughty about my mother. . . .them getting more and more aggravated the longer the barking and banging continues. Where is the anger directed? At me, of course! And why? For my lack of "doggie discipline."

Of course, cute little "Boo Boo Bear" ALWAYS gets out "Scott-free" . . . he's just too darned cute to get angry with! I, however, provide a broad target for venting frustration. What else can I say? It's a proven fact!

So here I am standing timidly on this old, rickety chair. My jaw muscles are beginning to cramp with the weight of a "D" cell flashlight in my mouth. My pants pockets are laden with all variety of heavy tools. And now, with both arms in the air, I feel my pants ever … so …slowly …slipping …south.

It was then that I heard a polite knock on the front door. Naturally, this drove the Bear's barking into overdrive.

I'm generally a sane, calm, patient person. I can handle even the toughest, most challenging predicaments with the grace of The Pope himself. This was different however. I solemnly confess that what I experienced next was an "out of body" moment of total and utter insanity.

As my pants slid slowly to my knees, a "king-sized" pair of vice-grips fell from my bulging pockets directly onto the second toe of my bare right foot. I opened my mouth to express my unhappiness with the intense pain. As I did, the flashlight became airborne, bounced twice on the trunk of my formerly flawless BMW Z3, and smashed headlong onto the floor, shattering the lens into millions of pieces. Immediately, all visible light was extinguished. It was dark as new asphalt on an overcast night. Now what?

Dear friends, this IS, by definition a hazardous environment. Not moving an inch in the black abyss, I began to form an action plan to get my elephantine keester down and off my wobbly perch. I was reviewing my limited options when a much more insistent beating was administered to my front door with a closed fist. The noise whipped the Bear's yelping into ultra-super-overdrive.

Here I was . . . in total darkness balanced on this treacherous, old chair. I had bare feet. There was broken glass on the floor directly in front of me. I had no light to see how much glass I was dealing with or where the pieces were scattered. My toe felt like it was on fire. My pants were now at my ankles. "The Bear" was inside, barking his fool head off. Now comes some jackass who has chosen this very inopportune moment to assault my front door.

That was enough! My face seared with anger. My heart bounded in my chest. A colossal, mind-numbing headache was beginning to make its acquaintance with the inside my cranium.

Instinctively, without thought or concern, using my highest decibel voice, and, in the meanest, roughest, toughest tone I could muster, I screamed: "Quit beating on the G#$d@*&£!*&%! door and get the HELL out of here!"

So, just as instructed, my little 10 year old paper-girl beat a hasty retreat from the front porch as she began to cry.
---
Robb Blodgett
Grand Rapids, Michigan

Brokeback Mountain II

[Thanks to Mark.]

The sequel all men are waiting for.


I'd pay good money to see that.
(Unlike the first one, which I've been no more tempted to see than Titranny, Dances With Wolverines, Bridget of Madison Country, or In And Out Of Africa.)

Train Drives Through A Bangkok Market

Train Drives Through A Bangkok Market. Dead funny. Shows how humans can adapt.

Drink and manhood

There are two things that will be believed of any man whatsoever, and one of them is that he has taken to drink.
-- Booth Tarkington

(Are we supposed to figure out what the other thing is?)
---

I'm glad I didn't have to fight in any war. I'm glad I didn't have to pick up a gun. I'm glad I didn't get killed or kill somebody. I hope my kids enjoy the same lack of manhood.
-- Tom Hanks

Well said, Tom. This idea that being a Real Man is being a good killer is insane.

I saw an actor, maybe it was Johnny Depp, on The Actor's Studio, . He said something like: "sure, war movies show the horror and so on, but still, they all have the underlying message of: this is were I became a man".

Book trailers and Foss

Trailers for books, a 21st Century concept if any.
Alex points to the Cosmic Motors book trailer.
And an old favorite of mine: Robota.

I'm reminded of Chris Foss, from way back when, I think the seventies.
I don't get why Foss was so overlooked. He was commissioned for designs on big movies like Alien, Dune, and Superman, but hardly anything of his was used. I'd love to see his colorful machines, space craft, and buildings in movies. I don't see why SF should always be so colorless.



Here's something funny: in the link above I've linked to Google's frame for the page, because I can't link to the original Russian page! Strangely, though my Mac can display the Russian characters, it seems it can't copy/paste them.
Also I've never before seen a URL with non-english characters, I did not think it was possible.
(The reason for linking to the Russian version is because it has lots of images.) (I'm guessing the Russians, like the Chinese, don't have a lot of sympathy for the copyright concerns of rich and decadent Westerners...)


ChrisFoss.net, est. 2005.

Huf Haus

Believe it or not, Huf houses are sort of prefab. On the highest order, though.
I think you can only get them in Europe yet.
I might get one, one day. I'd want to do something about the starkness, though, put in some color. (I'm surprised that I've yet to see a picture of one which is not either black or white.)
See this article and don't miss the videos.

Apparently Huf put up eighty houses between 2004 and 2006... and that's just UK, they supply the whole of Europe!

Letterman

David Letterman takes a shift at Taco Bell. Surprisingly funny.

First private space craft

First private space craft Falcon 1 launched successfully.
Information Week article about the Falcon 1 launch.
Video following the launch.
Wired article about the company SpaceX and the future.

D90 and video

Mike Reichman reviews the Nikon D90 and its video capabilities. Like I had more than suspected, he concludes that it's no substitute for a good video camera, but it's an excellent mid level camera with video as a great little extra for some uses.
"... But, put it on a tripod, do all manual settings, add a terrific Nikon lens between fish eye and super telephoto, and you may have a useful add-on tool to the Indy and creative film maker / videographer. At under a thousand dollars it's a virtual steal for this type of use, costing far less than devices such as the Letus 35mm lens adapter, being also much smaller and more mobile, and of course providing a high quality DSLR as well at no extra cost.
Stills photographers who want to explore and become familiar with shooting video and exploring the world of convergence can now do so at under $1K. For someone that already owns a Nikon system and lenses this is a no-brainer, because the D90 is a very fine, small, and full featured DSLR regardless of its video capabilities. You get video for free to play with and learn about. What's not to like?
The third and final market that's going to be all over the Nikon D90 like a dirty shirt are newspapers..."

Also CameraLabs is an early bird with a full D90 review. (His video part of it will come tomorrow.)

My D90 is a bit delayed, but it seems I'll get it next week.

Creator breakdown and writing deep meaning

Sometimes it shocks me just how much information is available on the web. For example I was doing a tiny amount of research about Dave Sim and way his comic Cerebus changed markedly over its 300-issue run (so much that I'd claim it's a stretch to say it's actually the same story or even the same type of story). And I came across this page on TV Trope about creator breakdown. If you read all that and follow all the links you have months of reading on your hands, I'll bet.

Related (because Dave Sim did this to an astonishing degree in later issues) is Author Tract. It's when an author starts preaching instead of entertaining. At the Writers Of The Future workshop, Tim Powers recommended us to not aim to put out beliefs on the page. Instead just write a story, and our beliefs if any will show through "like a body under a blanket". Good advice, partly because preaching bores or irritates the audience like nothing else, so it does not work and will turn away readers. And partly because even the deepest held beliefs can change over time, I know many of mine have!

In a similar vein, Algis Budrys adviced us that long discussions of a philosophical nature does not belong in fiction. He said that there were non-fiction books for that kind of thing, and avid readers of them, so why not write such a one?

Oooh, oooh, oooh, here's another good one (see what I mean about the depth?).
"In the minds of Really Clever Literary Critics, the true worth of a book, movie, or TV series is not in telling an engrossing story with interesting characters, but in allowing people to write long, complex, deep essays on the true meaning of the subject matter, whatever they think that may be. Once the critics have done this sort of analysis, they can objectively declare these works as True Art: it doesn't matter how much you personally like or dislike these works so long as you understand the deeper meaning behind them. Only ignorant fools don't understand."

Indeed.

Plastic Lens

Plastic Lens photoblog. There are some wonderful pictures, see a couple samples below.

There are quite a few people who have forsaken the quest for higher image fidelity, and gone the other direction to Toy Cameras like the Holga or Diana.

I often like those pictures. And I'd like to try to make some. But I'm held back by two things: I don't know of any which are digital, and I'd be frigged before I'll process and scan film. And also I'm emotionally leery of giving up the potential of high image quality if a picture turns out to be really good.

So maybe I could find a way to process high quality images to look like these pictures. Shouldn't be tough, if somebody has made a filter for it, surely a one-click process.
But here's the interesting thing: I suspect this wouldn't feel "genuine" to me. Why the heck not?

Connie Talbot, six

I hope all the adulation doesn't mess her up. But I'm hopeful, since at that contest show she didn't seem too affected.

Visiting elephants

A regular occurrence at the Mfuwe Lodge in the South Luangwa National Park in Zambia where the lodge was unwittingly built on the Elephant's traditional path through to some wild mango trees on the property. The herd of a dozen or so elephants walk through the lodge's reception area at least twice a day for about 4 weeks and then sporadically for about another 3 weeks to feed on the trees.




Tim said:
this would be a unique vacation maybe a trifle risky. the idea reminds me of a hotel in Atlanta, Georgia back in the 60's where at certain times of the day one could find ducks waddling through the lobby to the hotel fountain.

eolake said...
Yeah, I lived in a hotel in the early eighties in San Francisco, where on most days, just after lunch, you could see hippies drift through. You had to sit still though, they were skittish. If you were lucky, you could smell their pot and hear snippets of hummed Bob Dylan tunes.

Rock balancing

It seems a few people can do this. I guess they are people who have an unusually high perception for the surfaces and masses of the rocks.

Diane Varner art

NeutralDay points to Diane Varner art. From the comments each picture gets, it's clear it's a very popular site. (Astounding how much traffic some photo blogs get. (The picture-a-day kind).)

Hers are very, very pretty images. And I envy her technical skill and patience.
But ultimately I feel that for art, they are over-processed. They tend towards the look of advertising or posters. They’ve acquired so much glossy surface that the deeper qualities are getting a bit drowned out.

That said, I also think there are some great compositions, for instance the picture below.


------
Below is a photo of my own which I've post-processed in these manner, just a brief experiment. I must admit it's addictive, but I'm still not sure what I think of it artistically.

Original:

OK, I'll confess I think it improved the picture.
Maybe it just has to be used with a light hand.

I don't know, though, I kind of get the feeling when looking at heavily processed photos, that it's... dishonest somehow. It looks like reality, but it isn't. Because it looks so real and so powerful, the viewer can't help but believe in it, but you're cheating him. Like putting up a hologram of a table of food in front of a hungry man.

The viewer can't help but feel that if he was walking where the photographer had been walking, he would see the things he see on the photo, looking like they do on the photo. And he would feel the beauty. But he wouldn't, because that photo is fiction, brought forth in a computer.

I could be wrong, it's just a feeling I get, very visceral (a gut feeling, both figuratively and literally).
Like the feeling I got as a kid if I'd been swimming for hours at the beach. A sort of empty feeling of unreality. Odd.

Most paintings don't give me a feeling like that, surely because it's "not-real" in an obvious way.

Jim said:
I have to confess I'm also ambivalent about it, although I don't consider what comes out of the camera to be sacrosanct because the camera-processed image is seldom true to the original as experienced. Lately I've experimented with adding contrast and color saturation, which is sometimes truer to the moment. Obviously altered images are interesting as a novelty I guess, but it seems more like a dexterity than art...sort of like a Thomas Kinkade painting. It's always a thrill to get a remarkable image straight from the camera that needs no "makeup".

Funny I was just thinking about Kinkade. I'm not sure if it's the same issue, maybe it is.

Maybe the issue I'm feeling for here is when the superficial qualities of a work of art get dialed up to a point where they get out of balance with the deeper qualities.
(I should note that Kinkade is an extreme in this regard. Ms. Varner's art has lots of deeper qualities, it's just that she is so skilled with the more immediate qualities that I feel that they threaten to dominate.)

Doodle 4 Google

Doodle 4 Google.
I like this drawing. Lively, and very skillful for a 15-year-old.
The hard thing in the arts is not making nice details, it's is getting the whole to fit together nicely.

James Vornov art

James Vornov. More photos. Profile.