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Ordering prints
I’m ordering more prints from the Kodak Gallery, who has done good work for me in the past. I took/created the photo above which will pair with the similar photo (with the same text) that I have of Schaef.
To upload the photos (65 megs this go-round) Kodak asks you to install an Active X control, making this the first time I’ve used Internet Explorer in around a month. It seems to work quite well.
In related news, Sam Flax has some extremely good deals on picture frames. While the high end frames are quite pricey, the medium is extremely low in cost.
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Last call for Freedom Parkway
I think this will be my last photo expedition to Freedom Parkway for awhile. I have been photoshopping the photos a bit more.
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The Lonesome Fiddler Series begins
I hereby launch my lonesome fiddler photo series. The goal is to have many different people and places playing fiddle in silhouette. The below is the first draft. Much thanks to Jason for his help.
What I was shooting for is the image below. For this happen with a real person and not my angry nun bottle opener I would need a light bulb 4 feet tall. All thinks in time I suppose.
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Wednesday Rapid Fire
- From Yglesias
…The article claims that “In Israel, American Jewish men are considered nerds,” which seems reasonable. To this Jewish American man, Israelis seem like goyim. The older Ashkenazis, often born abroad, still have some connection to the tradition, but your average Israeli makes a mockery of Jewishness. The idea of a Jewish fireman or a Jewish sailing instructor is ridiculous, and everyone knows it. Of course to many American Jews the very outlandishness of the notion that you could not only have an entire army filled with Jews but that it could actually win wars is much of the appeal of the Zionist enterprise. Still, not the sort of thing real Jews do. One wonders how they find enough non-nearsighted fighter pilots.
- Sand Bullets in Israel – which is conveniently close to many deserts.
- .Net DNS component – and only six months after I wrote my own. This one looks better than mine though.
- Sortable Lists via CSS and Javascript
- This editorial from the Middle East Times discusses the possibility of the West closing the door to immigrants and visitors (which is probably what will happen if current trends continue) and this one from the Belgravia Dispatch deals with similar matters. I think history will eventually judge the current European assimilation problems as a failure of the welfare state. I was going to do a longer post on nationality and self-identified moral class but I think that will have to wait.
- From Yglesias
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Best selling artists
I recently stumbled upon this list of top selling artists of all time. While it was pretty much what I expected there were some notable surprises, most notably, Leonard Cohen is in the top 20! He’s ahead of Mettalica, AC/DC, Bon Jovi, Barbra Streisand and Bruce Springsteen.
I then go to the Leonard Cohen page on Wikipedia, and see this quote:
“I feel that, you know, the enormous luck I’ve had in being able to make a living, and to never have had to have written one word that I didn’t want to write, to be able to have satisfied that dictum I set for myself, which was not to work for pay, but to be paid for my work. Just to be able to satisfy those standards that I set for myself has been an enormous privilege.”
which is as good a theory of working I’ve seen in quite some time.
Now readers, whose presence surprised you the most on the list of best selling artists? Comments are open.
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The Appalachians
I just finished watching The Appalachians on PBS. On the whole, it was good, but had a few glaring flaws namely:
- Why was it funded by the Department of Veteran’s Affairs and NASA?
- The failure to draw the conclusion that successful unionization was the cause of the increased wages for the coal miners, hence the increased mechanization (and safety) of the mines, and also the drop in the people needed to work the mines. The producers treated these as unrelated events.
- No music past the Carter Family, which is quite notable since there is much footage of Clarence Ashley and Doc Watson available.
- No mention of traits that carried over from Scotland and Ireland, namely a desire to be on the far edge of society (and I’m sure many others, such as whiskey making) Instead they concentrated just on the music as the only carryover. While important, it was hardly the whole thing.
- No mention of bluegrass music; they stop at string bands.
- They omit the details of the modification of the banjo over time. Originally it was a four sting instrument made from gourds. It evolved into a 5 string instrument made from cats, and now leather. They present it as coming into existence fully formed as a 5 stringed instrument. It’s an interesting progression and on that stuck out by it’s absense.
- And most importantly, they omit the importance of the cultural factors and the terrain in explaining the hardness of their lives. They wanted their independence at any cost, and living on land inhospitable to mankind was the price they paid.
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Something worth reading
I finally checked out the website of Michael Yon. He’s a photographer and a former special forces officer who’s rambling around Iraq not embedded with any American unit. The commentary is quite different than what one ordinarily sees (it’s more a here’s what I did today in Fallujah) and the quality of the photography is unmatched.