Reading Around on June 15th

Some additional reading June 15th from 18:15 to 19:26:

  • Iran’s Disputed Election – The Big Picture – Boston.com – re Iran’s Presidential Election, Tehran and other cities have seen the largest street protests and rioting since the 1979 Iranian Revolution. Supporters of reform candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi, upset at their announced loss and suspicions of voter fraud, took to the streets both peacefully and, in some cases, violently to vent their frustrations. Iranian security forces and hardline volunteer militia members responded with force and arrests, attempting to stamp out the protests – meanwhile, thousands of Iranians who were happy with the election outcome staged their own victory demonstrations. Mousavi himself has been encouraging peaceful demonstrations, and called for calm at a large demonstration today (held in defiance of an official ban), as Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has just called for an official inquiry into accusations of election irregularities. (Update: several photos of injuries from gunshots at today’s rally added below)
  • The Fiery Judge | Mother Jones – comparing the substance and tone of her questions with those of his male colleagues and his own questions.

    “And I must say I found no difference at all. So I concluded that all that was going on was that there were some male lawyers who couldn’t stand being questioned toughly by a woman,” Calabresi says. “It was sexism in its most obvious form.”

    And what if such criticism came from a woman lawyer? Well, says Calabresi, women can be just as sexist as men in their expectations of how a woman judge should act.

    NPR played a couple of snippets of Sotomayor in its piece so listeners could judge for themselves. Ann did: “Listening to the clips, Sotomayor sounds an awful lot like John Roberts — who did not face any concerns about his ‘fiery temperament’ during his confirmation hearings. Totenberg exposes this talking point for what it is: straight-up sexism, with some racism mixed in for good measure.”

  • Daily Kos: Obama: Iranian people “should be heard and respected” – “What I would say to those people who put so much hope and energy and optimism into the political process, I would say to them that the world is watching and inspired by their participation, regardless of what the ultimate outcome of the election was. And they should know that the world is watching.And particularly to the youth of Iran, I want them to know that we in the United States do not want to make any decisions for the Iranians, but we do believe that the Iranian people and their voices should be heard and respected.”
  • Twitter Blog: Down Time Rescheduled – A critical network upgrade must be performed to ensure continued operation of Twitter. In coordination with Twitter, our network host had planned this upgrade for tonight. However, our network partners at NTT America recognize the role Twitter is currently playing as an important communication tool in Iran
  • Competition For Dummies by digby Just think. This… – “Sadly, this is the result of misguided American exceptionalism (and years of convenient Republican gibberish.) Even people who by all rights should be well informed about the issues of the day just simply can’t wrap their minds around the fact that our health care system is not only bad by our own measurements but that it is far worse than the systems in other industrialized countries. Foreigners cannot possibly have better health care than America. This is the greatest country the world has ever known or ever will know! It’s impossible!

    Except it’s true.”

Flavin triangle

Flavin triangle
Flavin triangle, originally uploaded by swanksalot.

From a 2005 Dan Flavin exhibit en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Flavin at the Museum of Contemporary Art.

Not supposed to take photos (for some blasted reason), but somehow a few dozen photos managed to make it onto my camera.

Steamboat Films, a French documentary film company, is planning to use this image in a documentary they are working on about Dan Flavin. Hope I eventually get to see the film, but international documentaries are sometimes hard to get a copy of. Anyway, more details as I know them (name of the film, release dates, etc.).

Serge Bromberg, C.E.O. of LOBSTER FILMS, a well-known, 22-year-old film restoration and stockshot sales company, created STEAMBOAT FILMS in November 2006.

STEAMBOAT FILMS is an independent film production company, which handles all of Serge Bromberg’s production activity. The company is currently producing documentaries and developing magazines, shorts and feature films.

Serge Bromberg and Marianne Lère oversee operational direction on the company. Claire Gadéa act as production manager on the various on-going productions. Pauline Pasquier and Flavie David joined the team in November 2007 as Production Assistants.

Currently playing in iTunes: Slow And Low by Beastie Boys

Unfiltered Dramatics

Unfiltered Dramatics
Unfiltered Dramatics, originally uploaded by swanksalot.

Chicago River

[view large on black at my photoblog: www.b12partners.net/photoblog/index.php?showimage=219 ]

Image unmodified in Photoshop (other than standard corrections). Sometimes the light is just right, and nothing needs to be done to make an image interesting.

Marina Towers – Polapan

Marina Towers - Polapan
Marina Towers – Polapan, originally uploaded by swanksalot.

Is the Marina Towers Condo Assocation Board still policing the internet trying to claim copyright protection for any photo of the towers? We’ll see.

[view large on black at my photoblog: www.b12partners.net/photoblog/index.php?showimage=218 ]

Sky Ride Tap Redux

Sky Ride Tap Redux
Sky Ride Tap Redux, originally uploaded by swanksalot.

not much better than the first attempt, unfortunately. Hard to get good light as the bar is under the Loop El tracks

centerstage.net/bars/sky-ride-tap.html

Today I received an email that read:


“you have a picture posted of the sky ride bar located on van buren. my husband is in that picture, and wants to be removed”

I responded:
sure, for $50,000 I’ll airbrush him off the public sidewalk.

As far as I know, photographs of people on sidewalks don’t require model releases, especially if there is more than one person in the shot. The email writer didn’t specify which one was her husband – 33.33 percent chance of guessing correctly. Maybe he was supposed to be at work at the time? (If my EXIF data is correct, I took the photo at 2:40 in the afternoon.)

If she pays me $10,000 I’ll put a black line over one of the guy’s face, $25,000 special for all three – and the pigeon included no extra charge.

Got a good laugh at the ridiculousness of it.

Reading Around on June 2nd

Some additional reading June 2nd from 10:55 to 18:58:

  • Craigslist’s Forced Censorship of Erotic Ads Saves Journalism Industry | Threat Level | Wired.com – Craigslist’s new policy barring the publication of erotic ads has not only saved lives and stopped prostitution, it’s also saving the dying newspaper industry.

    After the site announced last month under pressure that it would no longer publish erotic ads, sales of erotic ads in local alternative weekly newspapers have soared, according to the Washington City Paper.

  • Good Luck With That – “There are commercial websites, not even bloggers, necessarily,” Bridis added, “that take some of our best AP stories, and rewrite them with a word or two here, and say ‘the Associated Press has reported, the AP said, the AP said.’ That’s not fair. We pay our reporters. We set up the bureaus that are very expensive to run, and, you know, if they want to report what the AP is reporting they either need to buy the service or they need to staff their own bureaus.”

    Bridis did acknowledge the importance of fair use. “Because we do it too, necessarily,” the AP news editor conceded. “If the New York Times has a story, we may take an element of it and attribute it to the Times and build a story around it.”

  • Marilyn Monroe – MARILYN: Never-Published Photos – LIFE – August 1950: A 24-year-old Marilyn, wearing a simple button-down shirt monogrammed with her initials, leans against a tree in Los Angeles’ Griffith Park for LIFE photographer Ed Clark. The negatives for these photos were recently discovered during our ongoing effort to digitize LIFE’s immense and storied photo archive, including outtakes and entire shoots that never saw the light of day. Click through to see more stunning shots of Marilyn, plus the reason why they may never have been published…

Venice Canal

Venice Canal
Venice Canal, originally uploaded by swanksalot.

Taken somewhere in Venice, right before I dropped my camera lens-cap in the water and refrained from putting my hand in the nasty water to retrieve it.

from my 35mm archive (scanned from a print). Circa 1993.

a comment left on this Flickr photo1

Hello, my name is Rhett Hoffmeister, I own the website www.promaptraveler.com and am in the process of creating a screensaver to give away (free) to the visitors of my website. The screensaver will be composed of various images from around the web taken in Venice.

I like this image that you took in Venice in your Flickr account and see that you use creative commons license. I am writing to tell you that I will be using this image when I create the screensaver. I hope to have the screensaver completed this month, I am in the process of writing to all of the photograph owners to notify them of using their photos or seek permission if they are not creative commons. If you have any questions or comments or concerns please feel free to contact me.

In all instances there will be a reference to you as the photographer and your website where the picture is located. In addition, I will be creating a list of each and every photographer who allows usage of their photos and placing it on my site encouraging those who download the screensaver to visit all of the photographers.

Rhett Hoffmeister
www.promaptraveler.com

Footnotes:
  1. I gave permission, the concept sound interesting, though probably a Windows only application []

Reading Around on May 21st

Some additional reading May 21st from 10:35 to 17:13:

  • David H. Murdock: A Recipe For Longevity: 33 Of The Healthiest Foods On Earth – No pills, not even aspirin, and certainly no supplements ever enter my mouth — everything I need comes from my fish-vegetarian diet, which incorporates 30-40 different kinds of fruit and vegetables every week. Even though I am Chairman and Owner of Dole Food Company, I do most of my own grocery shopping, and even took Oprah on an impromptu trip to Costco, in a day that included bike riding, exercise in the gym, and juicing vegetables in the kitchen. Oprah marveled at how much I eat, and yet never gain a pound. In fact, I expend a lot of energy in my 50-60 minutes of cardio and strength training every day. Plus there’s the fact that fruit and vegetables tend to be lower in calories, but higher in filling fiber and other nutrients that help you feel satisfied.
  • Expert Tips on Photographing Your Pets – Gadgetwise Blog – NYTimes.com – “Back in the day when I was obsessively photographing just my own cats, I’d wait for them to do something interesting or cute before I actually brought the camera up to shoot. Of course by that time, 1 or 2 seconds have elapsed, and they’re doing something less interesting, and I’ve missed the shot.Now, I sort of treat my still camera as a video camera. Even if I’m not actively shooting, and even if the subject is not doing something “capture-worthy,” I continue tracking through the viewfinder and recomposing. Because soon enough they will do something capture-worthy, and I’ll be ready to press the shutter the second it happens.”
  • Data.gov – The purpose of Data.gov is to increase public access to high value, machine readable datasets generated by the Executive Branch of the Federal Government. Although the initial launch of Data.gov provides a limited portion of the rich variety of Federal datasets presently available, we invite you to actively participate in shaping the future of Data.gov by suggesting additional datasets and site enhancements to provide seamless access and use of your Federal data. Visit today with us, but come back often. With your help, Data.gov will continue to grow and change in the weeks, months, and years ahead


Swanksalot’s Geek Chart

Happiness is Next on the Agenda – oil on canvas

abandoned business space, West Loop.

[view large on black at my photoblog: www.b12partners.net/photoblog/index.php?showimage=207 ]

former home of EHDD, an architectural firm, and most recently, Mesirow Stein office for R+D 659. Vacant since 2/2009.

The City I love

The City I love
The City I love, originally uploaded by swanksalot.

If I wasn’t so lazy, I’d get up early and retake this photo, with a tripod.

from a couple of summers ago

I made the image into a photosketch to hide some of the photo’s blemishes, but actually made the blemishes more obvious (to my eye anyway). Sigh.

The City I love -Selenium

Majestic Corn Silo

presumedly corn, though could be some other grain I suppose.

[view large on black: www.b12partners.net/photoblog/index.php?showimage=187 ]

Kodak Ultra Color 100UC (emulation, that is)

Power of Less, The: The Fine Art of Limiting Yourself to the Essential…in Business and in Life