Stephen Dutch Photography

Stephen Dutch Photography.
Stephen lives quite close to me here in the English North-West, which is how I found him, I met him and his camera (Pentax DSLR) a couple years ago, and as my sister says, like dog connoisseurs do, I sometimes strike up conversations with people with cameras. (Considering that photography is a pretty popular hobby, you really don't see many of them!) And I like his work.

Arnold Stang, voice of Top Cat, dead at 91

[Thanks to Joe]

Arnold Stang, voice of Top Cat, dead at 91, article.

It seems Top Cat is called "T.C." by friends. I did not know that when I encouraged our commenter TC (later updated to TC[Girl]) to use Top Cat as a moniker. Heck, at that point I did not even remember that there was a cartoon character called that. I trust she will not be speechless despite this new development of her voice passing on.

The article has a full Top Cat cartoon embedded. Just after the titles, we find the reference to Powerpuff Girls' and Sheep In The Big City's use of the dramatic narration entry: "This is the big city!"...

Arnold Stang was also in one of my favorite movies, It's A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World.

Lightning

Here's advice: in thunder, you should unplug your electronic gadgets, computer, network routers, modems. Don't just turn them off, unplug them. A lightning strike can easily jump the gap of a switch that's turned off.
I've been doing this since I many years ago heard a tech supporter talk about how, after a thunder storm they always had many more calls the day after from people who'd had their routers fry.

I'm reminded of this because you may have noticed Pascal has been absent from commenting a while. It turns out two close lightning strikes near his home fried both the local electricity network and the power brick for his broadband modem. The latter despite the fact that he has surge protectors and a lightning rod.

Things that go bump in the night

Does anybody have an idea what this could be? In this apartment complex in recent months, I sometimes hear an odd noise in the silence of the wee hours: like an electric motor going up the RPM scale, and down. And then a thumping, like something being moved on a floor. These two things always go together, but there are variations in them. I've asked most of my neighbors, but nobody has even heard it.

And while I'm fishing for knowledge: once again while watching Friends, I notice how some of the wardrobe people for TV (Cheers too, markedly) find the most awesome clothes for their actors. Like shirts and sweaters with big, bright, colorful designs. I really want stuff like that, and I can pay, but it is notably absent in this English town. I fear I have to go to London to find some, or maybe even design it myself and have a tailor make it. But perhaps somebody knows a good place for it in, say, Manchester?

Nine Inch Nails & Pink Floyd & David Bowie - comfortably numb (live)

This is an awesome performance. Particularly the last half, instrumental. Some of the best guitar work I've heard. (I wonder which part Bowie plays? I'm not sure if it's him singing.)




I admire David Bowie not just for his unique talent, but also for his relative ego-less-ness. He not only accepts, but encourages, people to rearrange his music and use it, and he always collaborates with other artist, and often complete on their terms. Very unusual for such a talent.

Melly xmas

I wish you all a very merry Christmas or whatever!

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A friend just wrote to me:
"Just reading on Slate about the Swedish (evidently it's a Danish thing too?) custom of watching a 1958 Disney cartoon special for Christmas."

Yes! We watched that every year. (There's a great spillover inside Scandinavia in culture and traditions.)
It's pretty amazing that Disney got away with that, since seeing it with adult eyes, it's blatant promotional material for the films... and I'll bet the TV stations even pay to show it! Good gig if you can get it! (One of my girl friends wanted to get a big carboard Marlboro Man she saw in a clothing store. They told her no, since they had paid good money to get it. Good grief!)

But it's no wonder that the audience loves it, because it really has many of the greatest cartoon scenes of the twentieth century, including such stuff as the famous music/dance scene from Snow White. Wonderful stuff.

Free bulbs

My power supplier (Npower) just sent me four free energy-efficient light bulbs. And it seems to all their other customers as well.
Wow, there's a fresh business approach. What's next, restaurants giving away free appetite-suppressing pills? :-)

My own time

"... He's not recognized in his own time... Oh! I would love to not be recognized in my own time!" - Phoebe on Friends

Snowman

So this evening it was snowing very prettily, and I joined my neighbors Shelley (blonde) and Jen in the backyard to admire it. Jen commented that it was good snowman snow, and of course there was no way out, we had to make one. For me it was the first time I've made one in over 30 years, I think. Good fun.

Once we'd established that the girls meant the two lower balls to be his legs, Shelley and I independently came up with the big feet.
I'm not proud to say I'm the one who gave him a dong.
I am proud of the face I gave him, inspired by the Easter Island figures. Sadly in the time I took to fetch the camera, Shelley was inspired by the Rocky movies, and his pretty face was gone. :-(

They don't teach impulse control in the schools these days? :-)





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Panasonic G1, kit zoom, build-in flash. Slight levels and color correction in Photoshop, and shadows-correction, all the white in the middle had made the girls and background very dark.

... Funny phenom, by the way, that the hollows, like his mouth, which normally would be darker, are the lightest areas in the photos, because the areas act like a parabolic reflector to the direct flash.

Here's something I don't understand about modern automatic cameras, especially those who measure off the main sensor: while they usually do a very good job, sometimes, like here, you see pictures were the shadows are under-exposed, and yet there's plenty of room above the highlights (there was until I levels-corrected these). Why the heck does the camera not simply expose so the whole picture fits in the histogram? It has all the data to do that.

Sheep on the road

[Thanks to Greg]

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The one below just reminds me how very boring most towns on the earth look.

Poor Tiger

... I am this close to just filtering my email to remove all references to Tiger Woods.

You know, I used to blame the press for the delight in "propping them up and then shooting them down"... But now I suspect that it's really something deep in all of us who loves to see somebody take a hard fall.

Superhuman tape measure skills

[Thanks to Tommy]