Not work safe

New free gallery at DOMAI. Warning, don't go if you dislike nudity.

Elton and photography

Redeeming himself, Elton John appreciates photography.
I also saw him in a documentary about Björk, praising her music highly. Kudos to him for that, how often do you see big stars go out of their way to praise smaller stars?

Instant diet

This is so much faster than changing your lifestyle.

Before:


After:

Thanks to Mike.

All Flash and No Thunder

Here's another Flash site. Lord, how slow it is.

But it gives a fun insight into how your favorite celebrities look before their photo is retouched. Click on Portfolio, select pic, and mouse-over.

iMovie '08

Pogue weighs in on iMovie '08. Lots of downsides there I did not know about.

Ne plus ultra

Here is the ne plus ultra of the maxim that the bigger a camera is, the less portable it is. This camera only deals with one subject, unless you move other subjects in front of it. And then it will have to be a patient subject.

Cables for the hoi-polloi

Let the geeks go wild: are expensive cables worth it?

Ricoh

When Fuji came out with their excellent low-noise-even-on-high-sensitivity-settings technology a couple years back (three? four?), I was certain that within a year, the same wonderful thing would have happened to most other compact cameras. Sadly, it is not so. Basically all other compact cameras have really awful noise over 200 ISO, and it's a great shame, especially for otherwise really promising cameras like this Ricoh.

I don't get it. Normally a technical breakthrough like that is reversed-engineered lickity-split by competitors.

Proust

The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes. -- Marcel Proust

---
Laurie sez:

My old Zen Master teacher used to say, "Keep Clear Mind, Only Go Straight. Put down all the thinking. When red comes, red. When blue comes, blue."

He also used to say, "A tree's job is tree; a dog's job, dog. Human being's job, love."

Amazon Vine newsletter

I mentioned Amazon Vine a couple weeks ago. Well, their first newsletter is out. I am curious: can any Amazon customer view it, or only people registered with Vine? (Thanks to Joe and TTL for clearing up it's the latter.)

I was wondering how it works: if the publisher registered with a product sends it to every reviewer who wants it... if there are thousands of reviewers, that could be costly, and result in an avalance of reviews. Well, it turns out that just minutes after I got the newsletter in the email, already two of the items were all gone (a music album, and a book by Michael Chabon), and there was just three left of one I wanted (a book called "Influencer"), so I had to act fast.

Antagonistic nudes

Apropos to the discussion of beauty, here is an artist who clearly does not believe that art has to be pleasant.

Murmurist

This is funny. Puzzling, but funny.

"Such a pointed term." I love it.

Who is he? Who is he writing to? A real person? Where is the supposed previous correspondence?

Will the author explain?

It actually reminds me of ideas I had for web sites when the web was young. There are so many things you can do with it which does not have to follow the logic of the ordinary world.

It also reminded me of an article I read over thirty years ago in Mad Magazine. Called something like "I had to work to reach bottom", it was an unfinished account of somebody's childhood, and somehow seemed like writing which purposefully was devoid of meaning and yet demonstrated that that is impossible. Except if the author is empty, in which case he would never do it on purpose. I found it oddly compelling. At the bottom it said "continued on page 121". The magazine had only sixty pages or so.