Elf, Mary Steenburgen

Just watching "Elf". If you can stand a Christmas movie, it's a fun one.

In it I was stunned to see Mary Steenburgen looking as beautiful as ever, at over fifty. Her smile is awesome.

It's by Jon Favreau. I was pleased to see that in designing Santa's home and workshop, which could easily have been an unbearable orgy of green and red, they chose to go with light grey tones for everything, walls and furniture, very nice.

Boat and Water

This is from the mid-nineties, when I was photographing again after a break of many years. I'd made and framed a nice print of this and hung it on my wall. One morning I woke up very early, and the sun was just rising. It was sending a beam of light through my windows, and my curtains and objects outside was shaping the beam into a square which (despite a pretty acute angle) was exactly framing this photo on my wall!* I felt like god was shining a light and saying "see what you can do?" Kewl.



* Not only is the chances against that astronomical, but it would also only last for a minute or two, literally, because a sun beam moves very quickly across a wall when it's at an angle.

Small sites and catcam and the Net

A Simpsons episode from 1996 has a web address for a school on a sign. I looked it up at Wikipedia.
"The sign at the elementary school displays "www.studynet.edu". Weinstein said that this was one of the most dated jokes in the history of the show because it centered on the idea that it would be outlandish for a school to have its own website."

Hell, even in 1996 that was outdated! If he'dda asd me, I coudda tole him. The very existence of a .edu domain says that educational institutions has lots of use for a web site. (Update: I checked with the commentary now, and actually it does not say "outlandish", but "advanced", which makes more sense. I've updated the wiki page.)

Anything and anybody should have a site. If I had a cat, it would have one.

I don't get when people don't see the scope and power of the Internet. People sometimes talk about the Net as if it were a building outside town. No man, it's the world outside town and includes the town too.

White cat

This was one of our cats, at a young age. It was a beautiful cat.
The trees/fog picture was taken from the terrace you see on this picture. You can see the hawthorns reflected in the windows.


And apropos pussycats:

Mom

I didn't post this one for many years, since I think it shows the miserable condition she was in.


Early 1980s.

The Colour of Magic

I posted this review on AmazonUK, of The Colour Of Magic, a 3-hour TV movie based on Terry Pratchett's first two discworld books.

Rincewind the wizard was never my favorite Terry Pratchett character, but I have to say they did a fine job turning this book into a three-hour film. (Or two TV episodes, whatever.) It had a good cast, including Jeremy Irons and the toothsome newcomer Laura Haddock, who did a fine job in the role as octogenarian Cohen The Barbarian's fair maiden.

Most of all, the dragons, buildings, and space turtles were detailed and beautiful to behold, created on a budget which would have lasted a Hollywood studio through lunch time. We are clearly out of the age where a TV production would have inferior graphics.

I'm hoping they will continue to make films from Pratchett's books, there's a wealth of humor, great stories and outlandish ideas to explore.

The review is based on the just-released Blue-ray version, which didn't hurt the nice visuals.

If you don't know, Cohen the Barbarian is 87 years old, and the maiden who falls for him is a simply beautiful girl in her twenties. Like the actor said, didn't do his reputation no harm. :-)

I think this is an enjoyable film, but I dont' think it is an important film, because I don't think it was Pratchett's best books. I'm not sure why the first two books, and the cowardly Rincewind character, were such huge hits. Many of his later books were much better written and had more interesting characters. (I tend to like characters with powerful minds, like Granny Weatherwax, or Tiffany Aching, both witches.)

Dancing nerd

If you liked the dancing dog, you'll love the Danish dancing nerd.
(Personally, while I think he's pretty cool, I don't see why the audience and judges go totally bananas over him.)

It is funny how these internationally licensed TV shows duplicate each other exactly.

Hawthorn trees Updated

This is the view with a 100mm lens from my childhood home, taken in my teens.
I grew up with these trees as a fixture. They were not for climbing. As you can see they are very dense, but more importantly, they were hawthorn, so absolutely filled with thorns! If a ball ended up in them, you just had to make your peace with it being gone forever.

On the other side of the trees were a cherry plantation. We ate ourselves silly on those as a kid, even though it technically was "stealing". I really miss those cherries; they were sour cherries for wine and cooking, so they didn't taste like the cherries you buy, they had a sharper but to me much better taste. Gawd I miss them. 


Below is a photo from the same years. It's typical of what I tried to do back then, and maybe still: make photos which were about lines, tones, and textures, and not about the subject. It's a tricky thing to do, you have to disconnect the part of your mind which all the time is evaluating what things around you are for, and what they do and what they mean.
Of course once you've changed your own mind, you still have the audience left. It's frustrating to present a picture which you consider very artistic, and the audience says "yeah, it's a picture of _____, so what?" Very few people have the ability or even the desire or concept of looking at things disconnected from their significance.

Thom on compacts

[Thanks to SeriousCompacts]

Thom writes about three of the current good bets for a serious compact camera.

I think we can get better than that in the future. All three cameras have small sensors, although they make the most of them. I think it should be possible to make a good camera the size of the Canon G10, but with a much larger sensor, thus enhancing low-light image quality. And I'm far from the only one hoping for such a camera, so I'm optimistic.

Canon low light videos

Canon has a new innovative ad campaign in the UK, featuring the capabilities of the new cameras. Here are some making-of videos. Neat ideas for unusual light.

(Odd video player interface, by the way, when it's playing, the button is an arrow, which you click to pause it, and when it's paused, it's two vertical lines, which you click to start it. Opposite what it normally is.)

For unity

I give my congratulations to American president-elect Obama, may god be with him in a very tough job.

My wish for the coming four years, the coming twenty years, the coming one hundred years, is that each American as well as each inhabitant of planet Earth will take the opportunity to strive always to correct his vision towards that of unity rather than that of partisanship.

That's not an easy thing. The devil in this universe is obviously a little man in the heart of each of us, telling us that "evil" is out there. It's in the other person, it's in the other group, it's in the other nation. Lord forbid we should ever look into our own heart for the origin of evil and suffering, for this would be too fearful.

Still it can be done and it is being done, and in unity is salvation.

Portraits

I took these portraits of my friends Martin and Zadis in the mid-nineties.
All three of us went out and wandered the streets of inner Copenhagen for a couple of hours, me carrying my Pentax ME Super on a tripod (with today's cameras I wouldn't have needed the pod). It was a good day out.