Hitting Snooze

On the weekend I had a four hour nap. This came about because it was terribly hot outside, (and warm inside too), and I’d been getting less than ideal levels of sleep attending concerts and a family reunion.

-River south of Moose Jaw, SK

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The American government is getting ready to let BP hit the snooze alarm on the people living in the Gulf region.

For Acy Cooper, a shrimper from Venice, La., weekly checks from BP had replaced income lost when large sections of the gulf were closed. But then his 25-boat task force shrunk to 21, to 12, to nine. And he wasn’t one of the nine.

Cooper says that leaves him in a hole; shrimp-trawling season won’t start for one week. And even then, he worries that the remaining oil could turn up in somebody’s net and ruin his business all over again.

“If we get these shrimp and they get one person sick, you know how long it will take us to come back?” Cooper said at the meeting with Mabus. To prove his point that oil was still out there, he held up a Gatorade bottle filled with oil taken from a nearby marsh. “We ain’t through the cleanup. We can’t go into recovery. It is not recovery. Somebody’s lying.”

Washington’s solution to their problem is to say that if the oil is out of sight, it’s not their problem.

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Also on the weekend I had a very interesting discussion with my uncle. He’s a respected journalist for a large newspaper, and I always learn lots from him and his stories. One quibble I’ve not been able to get out of my head though, is his idea of “sustainability”. He’s in favour of nuclear energy for this province, in part because it’s “sustainable” (even though uranium is clearly a non-renewable mineral). He’s not convinced that what happened at Chernobyl could happen here (because we have different politics over here). I think the BP oil spill and Chernobyl meltdown are perfect examples that even though safety systems can be in place to prevent or limit catastrophes on a global magnitude, they will be turned off. Just hit snooze, it’s what humans do to alerts they don’t want to hear.

A Look Back in Time with Pictures

Here’s a photoshop technique that I’m a fan of. I love little projects like this one that lets someone see the past in a modern context.

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Here’s a recent fireball over New Mexico, caught on a parabolic mirror camera.

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You may look like one of these people when you wake up.

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I wish Wascana Centre Authority would spend more time planting native fruits and plants at the UofR, and less time watering the boulevard’s streets at night. Fortunately there is some corn and Swiss char planted near the new residence buildings, in place of a flower garden. There is no wheat on the boulevard on the way to SIAST this year though.

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Hat tip to Robert P.

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A friend of mine remarked the other day that people were looking at pictures of her from the past. She obviously meant the distant past, but every single photo of you or I is from the past. I’d like to see pictures from the future, that would be something very special.

Photos Without a Lens

It is ideas like this laptopogram that makes Photojojo an excellent newsletter, even if some of their newsletters are little more than ads for photography gear.

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Some random soldiers against the War in Iraq.

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I had one of these things as a child. It did not work very well, at least that’s what I remember about it.

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The Ford Pinto was known for a gas tank problem that killed many people.
Mitch9521 writes: “i saw a pinto parked in wendys with his liscence plate saying KABOOM lol i almost died laughing”

Saskatchewan Weather

The weather this Summer has been a little violent around Saskatchewan this year. I hear it’s melting people in the east, and here on our semi-arid desert, we’re getting drenched to the point of flooding and crops can’t even be planted. Fortunately my garden is growing a healthy crop of weeds and some food. The city of Yorkton ran into some trouble on Canada Day, however. They got so much water downtown and all over the city, in such a short time, that the library, McDonalds, and many homes were semi-ruined.

- This tiny tornado didn’t cause any damage, and was a long way from Highway 6 about an hour south of Regina.

Lose Your Head in Vegas

Las Vegas is a rather dirty town.

In more ways than just grime.

And the McDonalds is recalling their recent Shrek Trash Glasses, and replacing them with somewhat (less?) toxic Shrek wristbands.

It’s all a great place to photograph though!

… so long as they don’t mind you have a camera. I never ran into a problem, but I didn’t whip it out in a casino either.

Random Stats and Photography Links

It’s strange, the other day I noticed that my Akismet spam blocker had blocked exactly 3333 spams, and for a period over a week, I’d had several days with almost exactly the same number of visitors — 150.

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Niépce isn’t a name you’re familiar with, but he’s one of the first people in the world to invent a photographic process.

Here’s another process used more than 110 years ago. Mercury vapours made the first process more than a little dangerous for the photographer. You also had to work quickly, since the pictures only worked while the plate was wet. People had to think of everything we take for granted, including backgrounds. It wasn’t easy to photograph people, they move too quickly.

There’s so much to look at on WikiMedia commons, that has to do with photography. There are fantastic photographs older than you may have imagined, like this one from San Francisco. Andrew Jackson even had photographs taken of him. There were many pioneering photographers. Their photos captured the root of some of our modern words, like Siamese twins (I only made the connection between Siam {restaurant in Regina} and the name of conjoined twins probably located in old Thailand, a few weeks prior to reading about Chang and Eng). {You can see the twin’s liver.}

Snapshots caught on at the turn of the 20th century, but their precursors were traded like sports cards were a century later.

I started reading more about photography after looking at the Wikipedia page for the Oklahoma City bombing, where a prize winning photograph was taken. You can find a list of the winning photographs over the years.

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Local foods aren’t easy to find. Hellmans shows how it’s getting harder to find too.