Journal of No. 118

Smithsonian magazine's Indelible Images feature always has a nifty photograph to discuss. This month, it's like a blast from my past... a towheaded kid in plaid pants on a Big Wheel in a housing tract in the Bay Area in the early 70's. I'd like to think my face looked less murderous than this kid's, but that's really what makes this photo. It's like the ghost of the Wild West. Beautiful.
( photo by Bill Owens )

So... today's Draw Muhammad Day.

From one side, I hear that it will be striking a great blow for freedom and justice if I scrawl an image of Muhammad biting the testicles off a whippet.
From another side, I hear that one of my unexamined privileges as a white dude is ready access to pencils, and the use of perspective in a depiction of Muhammad would be an act of European imperialism.
From Pakistan, they've blocked Facebook and YouTube, which makes the country sound something like paradise.

I can't draw anyway, so...
( here's a hotlinked image )

iPhoto has face recognition software. You put a name to a face on a photo, and then it hunts through your library for matching faces. I named myself and let it go, and it works freakishly well. It identified me as Indiana Jones. It identified me with the Doctor Orpheus beard. Mouth open, mouth closed, blurry... it made no difference to Skynet.

But it's not perfect... It also guessed that I was ian_tiberius (twice), popepat, vadenalim, and, ahem, casketgirl, as well as PalaeoMorgan dressed as the Monarch.

Must be the eyebrows.

My attempt at a postcard, with a fair amount of shopping of the original image. Click through for a couple more, one with no manipulation, but still very very pretty. Not as eye-popping clear as yesterday morning, but Becca and I had a good time scouting through the hills for some shots this morning. We were joking that Jim Cameron is shooting a Himalayan epic and has erected some sets. "Well, we have 28000 cubic feet of Wintrex, which is a new white foam rubber which actually on screen looks more like snow than snow."

LIFE photos of the women of WWII.

When You Marry, a 1962 guide for teens. It's really long, so if you want, you can just skip to this excellent introductory lesson in genetics.

Had a good visit with mom for our shared birthday. Chit chat and a lunch outing to El Torito Grill. Their cats find presents wrapped with bows even more inviting than I do.

I came away with some albums and a scrapbook for more scanning. There is a lot of weird stuff in the scrapbook. Apart from my previous entry, there were a couple other things worth scanning:

If you enjoyed the Big Book of British Smiles, then you'll love my before and after orthodontia photos.

Me in marching band.

An unpublished poem from my ALL CAPS period.

My first publication as a journalist.

Blonde mini-me.

For my next trick, I will maybe transcribe some of the other things for posterity.

#1: Chicks are pretty good at math.

#2: Why are blueprints blue? Why did I never wonder why blueprints were blue and not some other color? Now that computer-aided design is all the rage, this is almost like asking why buggy whips were made from whalebone. Crap, why were buggy whips made from whalebone?

Anyway, to answer the question, John Herschel (son of William Herschel, who discovered Uranus) among his many scientific pursuits was involved in early photography (indeed, he coined the term 'photography'). One of his early inventions was the cyanotype. Although the process is pretty simple (coat paper or linen with a solution, expose, and wash with water), it wasn't a super success as a photographic method (though the first book ever published with photographic illustrations was Anna Atkins' book of cyanotypes of seaweeds). However, in the absence of photocopying machines, this simple process became the standard reproduction method for line-drawings, forming the negative image blueprints we know today. Or used to, now that they're dead as the dodo.

#3: The vibrator was "the fifth electric appliance to arrive in the home -- after the sewing machine, the fan, the teakettle and the toaster." Originally designed for use by doctors, the vibrator helped to liberate doctors from the time-consuming chore of having to manually stimulate women to orgasm in order to combat hysteria.
For more info, you can Read the Book or Watch the Movie bow-chika-bow-bow.

I now have a flickr tag for the bestofcruise2009, with a mere 61 photos.