Thank you Easter Bunny. Thank you!

Imagine my surprise when I opened my basket this year...

Someone with too much time on their hands

Clyde turned me on to this incredible video. Just when you think you've seen something wild, the next one blows it away. Something tells me knowing what the text says would only diminish the experience.

Timelessness

Lesson learned: if you stay at home on a cloudy day listening to ambient music, you lose all sense of time.

Not necessarily a bad thing.

Spam

Spam seems to come in waves. Sometimes stuff appears to be from one country or another. A couple months ago I noticed a lot of stuff seemed to have no date and Outlook put it at the bottom of my mail list. The latest twist is spam with my real name in the subject line.

Odd cuz almost no one calls me "Elmer".

Big Love

I admit, I'm hooked on Big Love, HBO's new Sunday night polygamy hour. I have HBO on Demand so I've caught all three episodes in real time and invited Michelle and Drew over to watch the first two which they'd missed.

I see I'm not the only one weighing in on this either.

I don't watch TV (my big screen is for movies) but Big Love has me hooked. Why? Most TV shows are one of a handful of basic plots (cops, funny families, doctors'n'nurses, etc.). This one is different. Way different.

How different? It hits up against taboos. Strong taboos. Non-traditional family structures, non-mainstream faith, cults, pedophiles, to name a few. Several people I've talked with find Big Love genuinely disturbing. And for that alone, it qualifies as non-trivial TV.

I gotta say I'm having the time of my life shooting photos for the Google Pack Screensaver. Great little screensaver that rotates between the photographs in a designated folder. What's great about the Google screensaver is that it "tosses" the photos down at random locations and angles, just like you're tossing real photographs on the table.

So far I've done photo collections of Alcatraz, poker, and neon signs among others. I'm having fun planning these collections than anything I could be printing. And that's what digital photography means to me: digital (as in non-print) output.

Works for me.

My current Marfas (79843)

Big Love on HBO. As if handling one woman is do-able. Three? Puh-leeze. Not that I'm not hooked...

The Bay as second city. And I always thought it would be Vancouver or Boston.

Now my oldest wants me to do acupuncture on him, not Miki. Silly me, I thought he didn't want it at all. Guess that answers the question about me wanting to treat my own kids. Guess I don't have a choice after all.

Psychoacoustics, binaural beats, and the Schumann Resonance. As MP3 now, podcast later.

And flower essences. Bach Flowers of course but others too. Botanicals, always back to botanicals.

As much as I love movies, I haven't been in a theater for 4 or 5 months. Long live Netflix.

It looks like I'm gonna have to learn QuickBooks. Great. In my spare time.

Herbal liquors. Way beyond Jagermeister. I'm collecting nips, mostly from Ledger Liquor in Berkeley.

And lastly, I spoke with Les Blank on the phone last week. Big cultural hero.

Make sure you know what you're looking for so you'll recognize it when you see it. This implies keeping your eyes open as a way of life.

I'm sitting once or twice a day. Time to clear up my karma. Good for the kids. Mom wants to come for a month.

[sigh]

Back home again

I'd like to think that Oprah has had a positive effect on book consumption and literacy in general. Don't know; don't watch her. But when I stumbled across this in the Austin airport I had a hard time believing that it's progress. Towards what? Further growth of the Oprah Empire? And why won't she marry the man??

Is there a pricetag on happiness? How valuable is pursuing one's passion? Will I recognize a genuine rite of passage when it drops in my lap? Is it time to step back and do something else? Is a business meeting on your Mom's birthday significant? 1:30 tomorrow will tell.

And it has nothing to do with Oprah.

Austin rocks!

Finally, finally I have something good to say about Texas. Austin Rocks!

I'm here for work. I dreaded coming and put off registering for this conference until the last minute. My previous TX experiences have left me runnin' for the border. But everyone sez Austin is the jewel of tex-ass.

I'm hooked. Why? The downtown architecture rocks. People look you in the eye and talk to you. To a person: old, young, women, men. With sincerity. Once, twice maybe. But it's prevalent all over town.

It's the only place this northern urban black boy feels comfortable around people wearin' cowboy boots, driving pickup trucks, and drinking like, well, cowboys. Only it ain't a cowtown like Fort Worth.

I told Lisa I'm bringing her here. Austin rocks!

Dad

I'm such a dad. Everywhere I go, I still grab napkins and stuff them in my pockets, backpack, bike bag, etc. It's a habit leftover from when my kids were young.

I can't help myself.

The kindness of strangers

The boys and I are in SF for mid-winter break. We're having dinner in a small Japanese restaurant (Grandeho's Kamekyo if you insist) sitting at the table by the door. A gentleman leaves, pauses, and says to the boys "Listen to your Dad. He's a good man."

And yes, that's The Rock behind the segaKidz.

Hacking Digital Cameras

One might forget that JetCityOrange purports to be a photography blog. Sometimes other things get in the way or I lose my way or whatever.

Let's reaffirm what we all know to be true: yes, this is a photo site. With that firmly in mind, may I direct your attention to a site aptly named Camera Hacker. And with this link may I re-establish once and for all, JCO's primary identity.

Speaking of weird fotographee I had my implant work wrapped up today. Long story, big bill. The oral surgeon has this really kewl office complete with a panoramic digital xray setup. Stand on these footprints on the floor, bite down on this thingie, and this widget rotates around your mouth in an arc. No darkroom, no chemistry, and the xray shows up on a screen in your treatment room. Big shoutout to Dr. Chin in Bellevue. (yes, it's a classic aptronym.)

We now resume our regular programming...

Valentine's Day

I'm no V Day believer myself but I just posted this page on dating for those of you who do. Or for anyone interested in The D Word (dating, not divorce, though we all know that there's a connection).

Hunting anyone?

If you go ahuntin', don't go with Cheney. Dead eye Dick hunts for Quayle.

Funny how the story was suppressed Sat nite so it didn't make the headlines Sun morning. Ahhh, the power of spin.

Random rants'n'raves

Valentine's Day, amnesty for those who aren't romantic the other 364 days of the year.

Your kids spend all day every day figuring out how to get you. It's their job.

Snapshots vs. photographs. Do you know the difference?

Guantanamo Bay

Camp xray is a national embarassment. These are POWs our draft dodger chickenshit of a president won't cop to. The courts are abandoning these poor bastards in the name of "national security". I don't know about you, but I feel less and less secure every day.

Let's see, there never were any weapons of mass destruction & the White House boldfaced lied about it, Al Qaeda wasn't in Iraq before but they sure are now, Islamics hate us the world over, Hamas won in a landslide yet we won't reach out to them, Isreal continues to paint itself in a corner and drag us alongside, the NSA has been wiretapping us illegally and the NY Times kept their mouth shut about it for a year, and Bush is still an asshole.

Yeah. I feel more secure.

Magic

I saw Crash again tonight. I cried more the second time than I did the first time.

Crash should be a double feature with Grand Canyon.

It's amazing that such films come out of Hollywood. All the shit they pump out and two gems like these sneak out.

Further poof that there is a God.

Photography in a police state

This sad news from down under is similar to the NY ban on taking photographs of bridges. Any half-assed terrorist isn't going to whip out a tripod and take pictures in broad daylight. Misguided totalianarism.

As misguided as the Capitol police arresting Cindy Sheehan for daring to wear an anti-war t-shirt to Bush' state of the union speech.

Now this is something The Man don't want us to know about. Talk about fotographee...

Tim Eyman

Tim Eyman, your 15 minutes are up. It's time for you to die now. No, really.