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Saturday November 12 2005
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give us this day our daily image
Last Sunday Zoe, Gerry, and I went of to Kim and Doug's to celebrate Kim's birthday.
Zoe and Kim
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gordy's image archive index
I'm actually in the picture. It's a 20 minute exposure and I sat with Zoe for about half the time. You can see her hand around me on the left. The bright spots that are in the same location of Zoe's head are the flash on her camera going off. I'm actually in the image twice. The left side of the door in the mirror has a faint ghost image of me.
Gerry and Doug
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gordy's image archive index
Kim's place was pretty dark. I'm still getting the hang of exposure for the pinhole and I need to be a bit more fearless about giving more exposure. You can just make out Doug's feet to the right of Gerry's foot.
Kim's presents
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gordy's image archive index
I could have used more exposure here. Reading a long exposure pinhole is a little different than reading a lensed photograph. A lensed image (usually) is an instant moment. Reality (a loose term) is frozen. A long exposure pinhole is not the recording of an instant but a recording of much longer period of time. Sort of a smear of instants. Halfway through this exposure Kim put the lit cup/candle in front of the between the camera and the other gifts she had opened.
plamegate
For those that weren't there, John Dean was Nixon's lawyer during Watergate.
A Cheney-Libby Conspiracy, Or Worse? Reading Between the Lines of the Libby Indictment
by John Dean
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In my last column, I tried to deflate expectations a bit about the likely consequences of the work of Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald; to bring them down to the realistic level at which he was likely to proceed. I warned, for instance, that there might not be any indictments, and Fitzgerald might close up shop as the last days of the grand jury's term elapsed. And I was certain he would only indict if he had a patently clear case.
Now, however, one indictment has been issued -- naming Vice President Cheney's Chief of Staff Lewis "Scooter" Libby as the defendant, and charging false statements, perjury and obstruction of justice. If the indictment is to be believed, the case against Libby is, indeed, a clear one.
Having read the indictment against Libby, I am inclined to believe more will be issued. In fact, I will be stunned if no one else is indicted.
Indeed, when one studies the indictment, and carefully reads the transcript of the press conference, it appears Libby's saga may be only Act Two in a three-act play. And in my view, the person who should be tossing and turning at night, in anticipation of the last act, is the Vice President of the United States, Richard B. Cheney.
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thanks to Huffington Post
frappr
You may have noticed to link to Frappr! at the top of the page. It's a way for the my readers to let me know where they are. It's been interesting. First there are family members: Zoe (my LOML), my sister Madelane Coale, my son Robby Coale, and my son-in-law William Valdez. There is one old friend from the real world: Eric Blume, and a new friend that I met on the internet and had the oportunity to meet in the real world: Ken Smith. there are two that I only know from the internet: reagan who know owns one of my camera straps and sent me a wonderful Brownie Bulls-Eye that I really, really intend to used when I get my darkroom going, and Scott Vanthoff who sends me encouraging emails. All the others: Joe Leahy, Kahaa, daniel philip, sonny, Darr Boharsik, Richard Goodman, Alain, Lisa, Rick, and Brian are new to me. I lay awake nights wondering who they are and how they found me. There are others that I know come by here that haven't signed up (it only takes a name and zip number.) What's keeping you? Thanks to everyone who put their names on my map! It's nice to know that there is someone out there.
iraq
Movies and Dreams...
by Riverbend
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Americans constantly tell me, “What do you think will happen if we pull out of Iraq- those same radicals you fear will take over.” The reality is that most Iraqis don’t like fundamentalists and only want stability- most Iraqis wouldn’t stand for an Iran-influenced Iraq. The American military presence is working hand in hand with Badir, etc. because only together with Iran can they suppress anti-occupation Iraqis all over the country. If and when the Americans leave, their Puppets and militias will have to pack up and return to wherever they came from because without American protection and guidance they don’t stand a chance.
We literally laugh when we hear the much subdued threats American politicians make towards Iran. The US can no longer afford to threaten Iran because they know that should the followers of Sadr, Iranian cleric Sistani and Badir’s Brigade people rise up against the Americans, they’d have to be out of Iraq within a month. Iran can do what it wants- enrich uranium? Of course! If Tehran declared tomorrow that it was currently in negotiations for a nuclear bomb, Bush would have to don his fake pilot suit again, gush enthusiastically about the War on Terror and then threaten Syria some more.
Congratulations Americans- not only are the hardliner Iranian clerics running the show in Iran- they are also running the show in Iraq. This shift of power should have been obvious to the world when My-Loyalty-to-the-Highest-Bidder-Chalabi sold his allegiance to Iran last year. American and British sons and daughters and husbands and wives are dying so that this coming December, Iraqis can go out and vote for Iran influenced clerics to knock us back a good four hundred years.
What happened to the dream of a democratic Iraq?
Iraq has been the land of dreams for everyone except Iraqis- the Persian dream of a Shia controlled Islamic state modeled upon Iran and inclusive of the holy shrines in Najaf, the pan-Arab nationalist dream of a united Arab region with Iraq acting as its protective eastern border, the American dream of controlling the region by installing permanent bases and a Puppet government in one of its wealthiest countries, the Kurdish dream of an independent Kurdish state financed by the oil wealth in Kirkuk…
The Puppets the Americans empowered are advocates of every dream except the Iraqi one: The dream of Iraqi Muslims, Christians, Arabs, Kurds and Turkmen… the dream of a united, stable, prosperous Iraq which has, over the last two years, gone up in the smoke of car bombs, military raids and a foreign occupation.
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The White Death
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Using filmed and photographic evidence, eyewitness accounts and the direct testimony of U.S. soldiers who took part in the attacks, the documentary -- "Fallujah: The Hidden Massacre" -- catalogs the American use of white phosphorus shells and a new, "improved" form of napalm that turned human beings into "caramelized" fossils, with their skin dissolved and turned to leather on their bones. The film was produced by RAI, the Italian state network run by a government that backed the war.
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Britain's "Lawrence Wilkerson": Sir Christopher Meyer Critiques U.S.-U.K. Orchestration of Iraq War
BREAKING RANKS
What turned Brent Scowcroft against the Bush Administration?
medal art
Anti-War Medals
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thanks to Eric Blume
oil
A couple more cheerfull installments from the ever so reality based Jim Kuntsler.
They Lied To Us
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You want truth, Progressive America? Here's the truth: the War to Save Suburbia entailed an unavoidable strategic military enterprise. Saving Suburbia required that the Middle East be pacified or at least stabilized, because two-thirds of the world's remaining oil is there (and in case you haven't figured this out by now, Suburbia runs on oil, and the oil has to be cheap or we couldn't afford to run it). The three main oil-producing countries in the Middle East, going from west-to-east are Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Iran. We had serious relationship problems with all of them at various times, and they with each other, leading at frequent intervals to a lot of instability in that region, and consequently trouble for us trying to run Suburbia on cheap oil (which they sold us in large quantities).
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Attention Deficit Nation
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The American public's failure to pay attention reached supernatural levels this week as our mass media gloated over falling gasoline prices -- down 24 cents, average, to pre-hurricane levels. The news media took this to mean that all the end-of-the-summer trouble is over with and things can now get back to normal, including especially an economy based on trade in suburban houses.
What they failed to notice is this: since the hurricanes shredded our Gulf of Mexico oil and gas capacity, Europe has been sending us 2 million barrels of crude oil and "refined product" a day from its collective strategic petroleum reserve. The "refined product" includes 800,000 barrels of gasoline, plus diesel, aviation, and heating fuel. Meanwhile, US domestic production has fallen to around 4 million barrels of conventional crude a day. America uses close to 22 million barrels of oil a day. Bottom line: post-hurricane, total imports have accounted for 80 percent of America's oil consumption.
Now, the important part of all this is that last week the International Energy Agency (IEA), Europe's energy security watchdog, declared that it would now end the 2 million barrel a day shipments to the US. Not because they are hateful meanies, but because, after all, it is Europe's strategic reserve and they can't sell it all to us because, well, some strategic emergency might come up for them, too.
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holy shit!
I saw this 9 minute adrenalin rush about 10 years ago. It's good to see it on the internet.
Rendezvous
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On an August morning in 1978, French filmmaker Claude Lelouch mounted a gyro-stabilized camera to the bumper of a Ferrari 275 GTB and had a friend, a professional Formula 1 racer, drive at breakneck speed through the heart of Paris. The film was limited for technical reasons to 10 minutes; the course was from Porte Dauphine, through the Louvre, to the Basilica of Sacre Coeur.
No streets were closed, for Lelouch was unable to obtain a permit.
The driver completed the course in about 9 minutes, reaching nearly 140 MPH in some stretches. The footage reveals him running real red lights, nearly hitting real pedestrians, and driving the wrong way up real one-way streets.
Upon showing the film in public for the first time, Lelouch was arrested. He has never revealed the identity of the driver, and the film went underground until a DVD release a few years ago.
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More on the film and info on buying the DVD:
C'était un Rendezvous - The Legend
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middle east
Jordan and regional geopolitics
by Helena Cobban
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Jordan-- like much of the rest of the region-- feels to me like an explosion waiting to happen. So far, the King has acted with agility. Getting his supporters very visibly out on the streets of Amman yesterday, before the pro-Islamist people could get their people there, was a smart move. Zarqawi hurt himself badly-- and quite possibly also damaged the anti-US cause more broadly-- by the wanton and inhumane nature of Wednesday's violence. (The counter-productive effect of the purveyors of terror on the building of genuine, mass-based social movements was ever thus.) So maybe the explosion has been staved off from Jordan for a little while?
Still, the whole region of the Middle East is now bubbling with different kinds of political energy. It hasn't looked this volatile and unpredictable since 1970. That was the year when these things happened:
(1) The Palestinian militants of George Habash's PFLP tried and failed to topple the monarchy in Jordan. But they threw the whole country into chaos as they did so.
(2) Gamal Abdel-Nasser died of a heart attack-- in the midst of trying to negotiate an end to the Palestinian-Jordanian battles in Jordan.
(3) Hafez al-Asad, then the commander of the Syrian Air Force and a relative moderate in the Syrian Baath Party, made the crucial decision not to use air power to support Syrian tanks going to aid the Palestinians in Jordan... That decision persuaded the Syrian tank commanders to turn back home; and shortly afterward Asad made the coup that brought his much less adventurous branch of the Baath to power in Damascus.
In 1969, Qadhafi had seized power in Libya and Saddam Hussein did the same in Iraq... So 1969 and 1970 were really transformative years for the politics of the whole region. Jordan was a crucial locus and engine of much of that change.
Since 1970, as I've written before, the political systems of nearly all these polities became quite ossified. Thirty months ago, Washington took a sledgehammer to the Iraqi part of the region's bone-set, and now, much of the ossification seems to be shattering. The whole Middle East will most likely see a lot of deep, rapid, and hard-to-predict change in the two years ahead. This much is easy to predict though: these changes will look nothing like the rosy scripts of spread of US-style democratization and US influence touted by the war-planners before March 2003 and since.
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photography
Check out New Set - Intersectionary Tales #3 (Japan).
CrowMountain.net
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torture r us
Talking Points Memo
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Scandals..on the torture scandal part of the ongoing psychodrama called America, the political theme is that the Republican Leadership continues to trip all over itself, contradicting each other, insulting each other, and generally looking like incompetent fools. This is almost too much for the Democrats, who can hardly believe what they see unfolding, and who thus, so far, remain in something of a comic stupor, pending an organized, coherent attack.
But things are happening, and Senate Dems are coalescing around efforts to force real hearings on the misuse of Iraq war intel, and the torture scandal...even as the Republicans flounder between trying to deny everything, while simultaneously excusing or explaining it away. Latest example...former Republican Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, whom, you will recall, was forced to resign for insensitive racial remarks, is clearly revenging himself with comments that it was a fellow Republican who leaked the “CIA torture” story to the Washington Post last week.
On the larger topic, law and morality...the ethic of being an American leader, and its betrayal by the Bush Administration...the NY Times today details last year’s CIA Inspector General’s classified report that Bush Administration torture directives carried out by the Agency “might violate some provisions of the International Convention Against Torture...”and remember we warned last night that the CIA pros have it out for the White House, and will not rest until responsibility for torture, as Iraq WMD, is laid at the foot of the political bosses responsible, consequences come what may.
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U.S. running secret prison in East Europe
by Helena Cobban
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Today's WaPo has a very disturbing story by Dana Priest in which she reveals new details about the globe-circling gulag that the CIA has run since September 2001.
[...]
Look at that second paragraph there. Some CIA officers argue that the secrecy surrounding the program "is not sustainable." What are their precise fears? That if the truth came out, the program would have to be ended? Or, that anyone who had been involved in administering it might be liable to prosecution under the laws of the countries they've been working in?
... At a broad level, though, you really have to wonder at the twisted logic of all the people involved in designing and running such programs. In the name of "democracy" you subvert the rule of law in other countries? In the name of "freedom" you deny even the most basic habeas corpus protections to detainees-- quite possibly, for the entire rest of their lives?
Of course, it is not the "democrats" inside Hungary or any other non-American place who need to take the lead in ending this system. It should be all adherents of (small-d) democracy right here in the belly of the beast, here in the USA.
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As Long as We're Looking Into Things...
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Here's a clue for all those "patriots" who are frothing at the mouth saying you can't coddle terrorists and that "liburals" want to give them therapy and lawyers: John McCain knows a hell of a lot more about torture than most people. And he's as disgusted by this crap as I am.
Wake the hell up -- we either stand for our principles, even in the days when it is dark and difficult -- especially then -- or we might as well just give up because the terrorists will have won. Governmentally implemented programs of systemic torture. It's no wonder we are keeping some of these prisoners in former Soviet facilities. Stalin would have been envious of what we've achieved here.
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The Cheney Administration
by Billmon
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Vice President Dick Cheney's office was responsible for directives that led to U.S. soldiers' abusing prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan, a former top State Department official said Thursday.
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music
Break from tradition sounds even sweeter
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Luis Leguia is polite and unassuming, with the manners of an old-school gentleman. He insists that a visitor have coffee before conversation, wrestles down his feisty, friendly dog Teddy and restrains him, and modestly leaves out the details of the poverty-stricken childhood that he rose above to become a musician with the Boston Symphony Orchestra -- until his wife, Stephanie, prods him or fills in the gaps herself.
But when it comes to his cello, there is nothing quiet about the Milton musician. He wants to be heard. He wants to stand out in a crowd. For years, he had searched for a cello that would be powerful enough to distinguish itself amid the sea of sounds in an orchestra and still maintain its subtle sweetness.
He never found it. So he invented one himself using an unlikely material -- carbon fiber. And now he designs, manufactures, and sells carbon fiber cellos, violins, and violas through Luis and Clark Carbon Fiber Instruments, a company that he started five years ago and runs out of his home. Carbon fiber, strong but flexible, is strands of carbon tightly woven and set in resin. He has sold 100 cellos, 12 violins, and 20 violas. He designs the instruments, and they are fabricated by a Rhode Island boat maker, Matt Dunham.
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thanks to DANGEROUSMETA!
Luis and Clark
carbon fiber instruments
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Thursday November 10 2005
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the evil one
Deconstructing Cheney
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THE INDICTMENT of the vice president's chief of staff for perjury and obstruction of justice is an occasion to consider just how damaging the long public career of Richard Cheney has been to the United States. He began as a political scientist devoted to caring for the elbow of Donald Rumsfeld. As a congressman, Rumsfeld had reliably voted against programs to help the nation's poor, so (as I recalled in reading James Mann's ''Rise of the Vulcans") it was with more than usual cynicism that Richard Nixon appointed him head of the Office of Economic Opportunity, the antipoverty agency. Rumsfeld named Cheney as his deputy, and the two set out to gut the program-- the beginning of the Republican rollback of the Great Society, what we saw in New Orleans this fall.
When Rumsfeld became Gerald Ford's White House chief of staff, he again tapped Cheney as his deputy. Now they set out to destroy detente, the fragile new relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union. Dismissing detente as moral relativism, Cheney so believed in Cold War bipolarity that when it began to melt in the late 1980s, he tried to refreeze it. As George H.W. Bush's secretary of defense, Cheney was key to America's refusal to accommodate the hopeful new spirit of the age. Violence was in retreat, with peace breaking out across the globe, from the Philippines to South Africa, Ireland, the Middle East, and Central America. When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, Cheney forged America's response -- which was, little over a month later, to wage an illegal war against Panama.
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thanks to Bad Attitudes
photography
Amy Burchenal Photography
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When I was 18, I was given my grandfather's 1950's Contax IIIa camera. This gift initiated my life-long passion for black and white photography. I began shooting with it, and felt that by using his camera I could channel a connection to a man I'd never known. This bond has generated a passion for traditional photography. There is something different about the quality of a photograph that is created with a camera from a different time. Auto-focus, zoom and flash are not part of my repertoire. I like knowing that every photograph I print is a direct result of my personal decisions and actions, instead of the latest technology. I love the challenge of working with available light and the spontaneity of shooting people on the street. I particularly enjoy walking the streets and capturing the excitement of the now as it unfolds before me. As the images slowly emerge in my darkroom, I am always amazed by how these photographs reveal all that can be experienced in one simple day, hour or minute. Suddenly the ordinary becomes extraordinary! In life's short journey, photography helps me to step back and marvel at the significance of every day.
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thanks to RangefinderForum.com
Amy has some very nice images. This is another case that shows that old cameras are still good cameras.
This is a Contax IIIa. It was a worthy, some would say more than worthy, competitor to the Leica. Nikon made their name on a rangefinder camera based on this design. I had the opportunity to use one back in the 1970s — a Nikon SP. Loverly. Nikon modified their rangefinder and made it the Nikon F. But that's another story. Here is a page on the Contax:
Contax II and III
Zeiss' Successful Leica Competitor
I've always been a Leica kind of guy (my grandfather's fault) but these are beautiful cameras and lenses. There is a Russian copy called the Kiev which is also very nice. Just to say that if a camera took beautiful pictures 50 years ago it can take beautiful pictures today.
france
Some different perspectives on what is happening in France. Some from people that actually are in France or have been in France.
Riots in France persisting
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The anger-fueled rioting in the banlieues (suburbs) around Paris and some other big cities in France has gone on every evening for the past ten days now. It seems very diffuse and ill organized and looks really tragic. Who knows at this point if it will harden into some recognizable and lasting social movement supported by the marginalized, mainly immigrant-origin families stuffed into the banlieues?
One of the friends who came to our place for dinner last night commented that while the US news broadcasts he'd seen all tended to focus on the fact that most of those rioters have been Muslim, the BBC had given a lot more stress to the fact that the anger came out of the "housing estates"-- that is, to give a socioeconomic interpretation to what was happening.
Here on JWN commenter David made some reference to "the Paris intifada". That launched an interesting discussion, which didn't really belong on that post and should anyway have its own post, so I'll reproduce it at the end of this post.
I'll just note here that the anger of this generation of mainly French-born young adults from immigrant-origin families seems largely parallel to the anger of their counterparts in the immigrant-origin communities in Britain-- though in France, the anger has not yet spawned a violent, Qaeda-linked underground like the one that killed 55 people in the London Underground in July.
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The Problem with Frenchness
by Juan Cole
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Readers have asked me for comment about the riots in France that have now provoked emergency laws and a curfew. What I would rather comment on, however, is the myths that have governed many rightwing American comments on the tragic events. Actually, I can only think that the disturbances must produce a huge ice cream headache for the dittoheads. French of European heritage pitted against French of African and North African heritage? How could they ever pick a side?
I should begin by saying how much these events sadden me and fill me with anguish. I grew up in part in France (7 years of my childhood in two different periods) and have long been in love with the place, and the people. We visited this past June for a magical week. And, of course, I've been to Morocco and Tunisia and Senegal, and so have a sense of the other side in all this; I rather like all those places, too. How sad, to see all this violence and rancor. I hope Paris and France more generally can get through these tough times and begin working on the underlying problems soon. At this time of a crisis in globalization in the wake of the Cold War, we need Paris to be a dynamic exemplar of problem-solving on this front.
The French have determinedly avoided multiculturalism or affirmative action. They have insisted that everyone is French together and on a "color-blind" set of policies. "Color-blind" policies based on "merit" always seem to benefit some groups more than others, despite a rhetoric of equality and achievement. In order to resolve the problems they face, the French will have to come to terms with the multi-cultural character of contemporary society. And they will have to find ways of actively sharing jobs with minority populations, who often suffer from an unemployment rate as high as 40 percent (i.e. Iraq).
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WHY IS FRANCE BURNING? The rebellion of a lost generation
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As someone who lived in France for nearly a decade, and who has visited those suburban ghettos, where the violence started, on reporting trips any number of times,
I have not been surprised by this tsunami of inchoate youth rebellion that is engulfing France. It is the result of thirty years of government neglect: of the failure of the French political classes -- of both right and left -- to make any serious effort to integrate its Muslim and black populations into the larger French economy and culture; and of the deep-seated, searing, soul-destroying racism that the unemployed and profoundly alienated young of the ghettos face every day of their lives, both from the police, and when trying to find a job or decent housing.
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thanks to Politics in the Zeros
zen photography
UNphotographable
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This is a picture I did not take of an orange persimmon, loose from an asian grocery stand in the middle of Chinatown, rolling down a freshly paved section of Pacific early on a Saturday morning as if it had a new idea about how it wanted to spend its day, bright orange rolling on black, right between two dashes of the new yellow lane dividers, rolling beneath (and between) the two wheels of my red scooter, to the delight and amazement of three women waiting for the bus with their groceries as I slowly rolled uphill.
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thanks to streetphoto
china
The Chinese Shadow
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The "rise" of China has suddenly become the all-absorbing topic for those professionally concerned with the future of the planet. Will the twenty-first century be the Chinese century, and, if so, in what sense? Will China's rise be peaceful or violent? And how will this affect the United States, the current "hyperpower"? In fact, China has been "rising" for some time (after several hundred years of "fall"), but for many years its claim to notice was obscured by more exciting events. Attention in the 1990s concentrated on the fall of Soviet communism, "globalization," the spread of democracy, and the high-tech revolution. These developments, which left America as the world's sole economic and political superpower, seemed to belie Paul Kennedy's prediction in 1987 of relative US decline and "more of a multipolar system."[1]
The attack on the World Trade Center in 2001, together with the concurrent collapse of the high-tech bubble, exposed America's fragility, but this was masked by the hyperactivity of the Bush administration. The "war on terror" planted American armies in Afghanistan and Iraq; the Clinton surpluses were succeeded by the Bush deficits to shore up the economy and finance the military operations. However, as the Iraq escapade foundered and the deficits ballooned, the sense of relative decline reasserted itself. Unlike in 1987, there was now a clear candidate for the succession: China. This was especially so as the US economy became dependent on China's bankrolling its huge trade deficit. The dream of an "American century" receded, to be replaced by the nightmare of a "Chinese century."
Focus on China is overdue. For the last quarter of a century its economy has been growing by over 9 percent a year, increasing eightfold. However, it is not just this long-sustained hyper-growth rate that amazes and alarms the observer. It is the size of the economy which is growing. China's population is officially estimated at 1.3 billion, but is probably larger—one fifth of all the people in the world. This makes its rise much more important than that, say, of Japan in the 1960s. From the economic point of view its cheap labor is much more abundant, so its cost advantage will not quickly be eliminated. The size of an economy obviously matters, too, in measuring power. The Chinese economy, in terms of the purchasing power of the Chinese people, is about two thirds the size of the US economy.[2] If it continues to grow at 9 percent a year, it will overtake the US by 2041. Lee Kwan Yu of Singapore believes that the rise of China will shift the balance of power back to the East for the first time since Portuguese caravels arrived there in the sixteenth century.
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pinhole literature
Every once in a while you take a turn on the internet and discover a treasure trove. This is a great resource on old pinhole literature and a great new online book on pinhole photography.The site is:
Nick Dvoracek Pinhole Photography
The above page has a link to a .pdf file of:
The Pinhole of Nature
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Hosta after rain
I specifically seek things of a temporal nature, things that don't last very long. I suppose in some climates water drops on plants are constant, but it only happens every couple of days around here, and of course the plants change, and of course the lighting changes, and it looks different if you look at it from a different point of view. This of course is a characteristic of all photography. Not so visually apparent is that nothing has moved during the five or so minutes it took for enough light to fall through the little tiny hole to create a response in the light sensitive surface, a somewhat rare circumstance. This is not typical of the pinhole photography experience. Most stuff moves and the sun actually zips along the sky pretty quickly, smearing sunbeams across a scene. Part of the appeal is kind of a macho competition just to see if you can pull off getting an image at all with a pinhole camera.
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It is a must read. Nick's Pinhole Page also has a link to a page of old pinhole tracts:
Historical articles on pinhole photography
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I was a History major as an undergraduate, and I've always found it interesting to look at primary sources of materials. Here are some historical references and some articles on pinhole photography from the late 19th and early 20th century. In chronological order except where I've grouped a couple by the same author together.
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He has some real treasures here. I have a copy of Advanced Pinhole Photography by H. D'Arcy Power (1905) but his copy has better reproductions of the pictures. This is a treasure of information on pinholes.
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Wednesday November 9 2005
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economy
Wow
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President George W. Bush and the current Administration have now borrowed more money from foreign governments and banks than the previous 42 U.S. presidents combined.
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The worst President. Ever.
zen for the day
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7. Announcement
Tanzan wrote sixty postal cards on the last day of his life, and asked an attendant to mail them. Then he passed away.
The cards read:
I am departing from this world.
This is my last announcement.
Tanzan.
July 27, 1892.
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from Zen Flesh, Zen Bones
endgame
end·game also end game
n.
1. Games. The final stage of a chess game after most of the pieces have been removed from the board.
2. The final stage of an extended process or course of events: the diplomatic endgame that led to the treaty.
It's been a trying week. My brother Terry has been taking care of my mom, Doris. He called to let me know that he had found a family care facility that would take her. She has been living by herself in an apartment but she is no longer capable of doing that even with having a care provider that comes in during the day. She is 85 and not in the best of health but moving her into a family care facility only brings home the fact that we won't her around for a lot longer. That's a fact that I have admitted with my head, now I am admitting it with my heart.
And Zoe's mom, Gerry, is doing worse. She trys to help but really can't. She likes to put the dishes away from the dishwasher. As time as gone on she has had more and more trouble knowing where stuff goes. Last week she emptied the dishwasher out onto the island in the kitchen. She didn't know where anything went. She is also getting more and more fearful after dark. Zoe is putting things into place to get her on Medicaid and into a family care facility. It's not been easy watching someone leave in slow motion.
I've also been busy with paying work. I hope to be back to regular programming soon. I should be picking up another roll of pinholes this afternoon.
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