Flickr and Google go toe to toe
In high school, we called them crackers. They functioned as eye magnets and brain-befuddlers, distracting us from the joys of higher learning. A teenage boy cannot not look at a cameltoe.
No, no, not that.
I almost changed my mind about writing this post. Could I stoop this low? But this very afternoon in the grocery store, I heard a muzak version of the Beach Boys’ Kokomo, which everyone under 35 knows as The Camel Toe Song.
Clearly, a Higher Power was speaking to me.
Flickr Follies
Hat tip to Jurassic Pork for pointing me to Tom Hilton’s post on If I Ran the Zoo, Fun & Games, Random Flickr-Blogging.
Here’s the idea: pick an image from Flickr and write about it. Flickr has millions of photos posted, some dull, some intriguing. Pick a photo. Write about it. Here are Tom Hilton’s suggested rules:
Here’s how it works:
- Every week, we all start with the same randomly-generated four-digit number (call it ####).
- Go to Flickr and search for “IMG_####”. There should be anywhere from a few hundred to a couple thousand results.
- Choose an image from among the results, post it to your blog (be sure to include attribution and a link back to the page where the image appears–this is done automatically if you use the ‘blog this’ feature in Flickr).
- The rest is up to you. Write about the place shown in the image. Make up a story about it. Connect it to some issue you care about. Or just post it as an image you really like. Do whatever you want.
As Jurassic points out, this could be a delightful way to break a writer’s block, not to mention an answer to the eternal wail, “What will I blog about nooooow?”
And I already have an idea what to do with it. Forget the random stuff — I’ll do that some other time. This evening, we’ll see how Flickr and Google Images match up on a specific image search. Something special. Something for me.
Tonight: The Great Camel Toe Race of 2006!
D.
Hobbit update
They’re defaming my ancestors.
A recent issue of Science (19 May, Vol. 312, pages 983-984) dishes on the controversy of Indonesia’s Homo floresiensis, the one-meter-tall humans who “made stone tools and hunted dwarf elephants 18,000 years ago.” Anatomist Susan Larson of Stony Brook University reported at a recent meeting that H. floresiensis seems to be descended from Homo erectus, while paleoanthropologist Robert D. Martin of the Field Museum (Chicago) “argue[s] that the single skull is that of a mondern human suffering from microcephaly.”
Microcephaly. Teensy head syndrome. (Next time you want to insult someone with language that escapes them, call them microcephalic.) I’d give you a link, but in my opinion, there’s nothing more disturbing than images of malformed babies.
“More surprises are still to come,” reports Elizabeth Culotta. “[William] Jungers said in his talk that LB1 [the H. floresiensis skeleton] includes an essentially complete foot, something not identified previously, and hinted that the foot is extremely large. Indonesia’s hobbits, like J. R. R. Tolkien’s fictional creatures, may have trekked about on big hairy feet.”
Now that is more like it.
In other science news, Elizabeth Pennisi reports that human and chimp lineages may have split only 6 million years ago. More controversial still is the claim that “early hominids interbred with their chimp cousins.”
Hey, I’ve got news for you. They still do.
Thirteen thirteens
Yes, SORRY, I admit it, I’m a lazy sack of poo, but I’m writing this on Wednesday night and I want to have time to work on my romance.
Current working title: Technical Virgin. Yes, there are similar titles on Amazon, but they look really unpopular.
Anyway, that’s why you’re getting a runty Thursday Thirteen. Without further ado, Thirteen Thirteens.
It snuck up on me
The Book Thief
by
Markus Zusak
The Book Thief makes me think of so many things: of being ten, having to write a book report for English, and thinking of nothing better than, “This book was really good. You should read it”; of being a Jewish kid growing up in the 60s and 70s, getting force-fed the Holocaust to the point that I couldn’t take it any more.
All right, already, I wanted to tell my Hebrew School teachers. I won’t forget.
Why do fools fall in love?
What amazes me the most about Groundhog Day is that I love it as much as I do, even though Andie MacDowell and Bill Murray are light-years away from my ideal vision of romantic leads. Goes to show what a kickass script can do for a film. More on Groundhog Day in a moment.
As you folks know from yesterday’s post, my muse has decided she wants to write a romance. Or a romantica. Or an erotica. The muse doesn’t get out a lot, hasn’t read much from any of those genres, doesn’t care about the distinctions between them. But she has a story to tell and damn it she’s going to tell it. From past experience, I know better than to get in her way, but I also know she needs proper nutrition. Hence this evening’s post.
If it’s romance the muse is writing, my protags ought to fall in love, right? But, but, but . . . why?
Why do people fall in love?
Who wants to read the first 3500 words . . .
of my ‘romantica’ story, Sloppy Firsts?
Already I see a problem. 3500 words, and no one has gotten laid. I’m thinking I don’t understand this genre, which isn’t surprising, since I’ve never read this genre.
This is Miss Kate’s idea, by the way. She’s the one who encouraged this. She and my muse, whom I gave permission to write about anything today, and what does she do? 3500 words. Damn. For me, that’s a pretty fine day’s work.
If you’re at all interested, let me know. Especially if you WRITE this stuff yourself. Email me (azureus at harborside dot com.) If I’m way off base, I’d like to know before I invest much more time in this project.
On the other hand, I haven’t had this much fun with writing in months.
D.
Memorial Day & more
The General says it better than I can. He let his Inner Frenchman write today’s Memorial Day post. Snippet:
I watched the documentary, Control Room, again last night. One of the scenes featured an Al Jazeera reporter, Hassan Ibrahim, discussing the run-up to the war with a number of Iraqi intellectuals. He told them that he did not believe that the American people would allow the war to happen. He said that we were a rational people and a people who revered justice above all else. I once thought that too. With all of our faults, I believed that we were a people who truly believed in reason, justice, and the principles of democracy, and maybe we did, but it is no longer true.
We became vengeful and bloodthirsty, striking out against the innocent and the weak to ease our groundless fears. We are now Fox News. We are a nation of Malkins, Hewitts, and Charles Johnsons, frightened of everything that is different or alien to us and reacting violently.
My America is dead. Or perhaps more accurately, The America I believed in, and the people Ibrahim thought he knew, never existed. As saddened as I am at this realization, I now understand that I must fight even harder to ensure that we do not lose our way again.
***
Elsewhere in the ‘osphere . . .
I’m not quite sure what to make of Huffington Post‘s prominently featured link to a Yahoo News story on William Shatner. The headline reads: “Shatner: ‘Therapeutic [Horseback] Riding’ Can Help Middle East Peace . . .” Seems sarcastic, mocking. Look at what our silly celebs are doing now. But if you read the story, what Shatner is doing isn’t all that unreasonable:
Shatner said that placing injured people on horseback has been shown to improve their conditions. “We know that the use of a horse in their therapy takes them beyond their handicapped body, their injured body, and into another area of health,” he said.
Shatner has long been involved with “Ahead for Horses,” a Los Angeles charity that works with physically and mentally disabled children through horseback riding.
He hopes his new fund, launched with the nonprofit Jewish National Fund, will contribute to Mideast peace. He stressed that every citizen of Israel, as well as Palestinians, Jordanians and Egyptians, will be encouraged to participate.
Does anyone see anything wrong with that? Any reason for mockery? I don’t.
I promised my muse I’d write today . . . about anything she wants. I had better make good on the promise.
D.
Agent behaving badly
Just checked my hit counter and . . . sucky Sunday! I should be whoring my little loins off with a Technorati-laden post, but I don’t have the heart for it today. Instead, I would like to follow Beard’s lead and talk about the latest Barbara Bauer brouhaha.
Eureka!
What I learned in my Ancient Civilizations class at Berkeley: you’re supposed to pronounce it Oy-reka. Cyrus King of Persia should be pronounced Surrus, and Darius, Dar-yoosh.
Oy-reka!
We saw elk on the way down and on the way back. Here are a few females.
We never made it to the kinetic sculpture races. We did, however, make it to CostCo and PetCo. Tells you something about our priorities. Two other things:
- I finished The Book Thief today. I cried all the way through the last 60 pages of this sumbitch. It deserves a much more comprehensive review than that, so I’m going to save it for another day. It’s GOOD, though, REALLY GOOD. Check it out over at Barnes and Noble.
- I had a great conversation with a cobbler this morning. He told me his life story, and it was a corker. The guy used to be a PhD/MPH researcher, but he gave it all up in the 70s to become a cobbler, a trade he had learned from his father and grandfather. I’d say more about him, but I do have a few local readers. I feel a little funny spilling all the stories he told me this morning. (Dummy! I could have asked his permission.) Cool guy. Meeting him was the highlight of my one-day vacation.
Did I mention yet that I passed my treadmill test with flying colors? And did you know that they had to shave off bits of my torso to attach the EKG electrodes? All weekend, I’ve been scratching my chest and belly. The remaining hair tickles the shaved areas. It’s maddening.
So I shaved it all off earlier this evening. I must look awfully weird, with my monkey arms and monkey back and naked chest & belly. Weirdest of all, though, is the fact I don’t recognize myself when I look in the mirror. I’ve never seen this body before. The last time my body was this bare, I weighed 100 pounds.
Strange stuff. Karen, to her credit, did not laugh, but even if she did, it would have been worth it. I’m not itchy any more.
D.