Ploafmaster General

Today Valerie and I participated in the Monument Avenue 10k Run/Walk. Those familiar with my portly physique can probably guess that I walked. Val walked with me and that made all the difference, I believe. I managed to finish the whole thing in less than two hours, averaging just over 3 mph, and now I think I'll relax for the remainder of the weekend :-)

Pints at Penny Lane this evening sound about right!

Okay - so there's this new company, Boxed Water Is Better LLC, and their product is...Boxed Water. Coming in a pleasantly designed milk-carton-style container, it sounds nice enough on the surface: Flat packed empty packaging is easier to transport, made of 90% renewable and recyclable materials, and the whole operation is focused on sustainability. I could see how it would be perceived as a better choice than plastic bottles...

But they're still selling packaged water.

Once the containers are filled they still have to be transported, and with every 1,000 gallons weighing over 4 tons (when you include the weight of packaging) that's a lot of fuel to burn. And recyclable or not, all those containers must be manufactured. The only major advantage I see here, in fact, is that Boxed Water may break down more easily in a landfill when non-recycling types just toss them in the trash - except they're probably coated in wax since they have to hold liquid, so scratch that idea.

I'm not an advocate for bottling companies but I think there are advantages to bottles over boxes, the first of which is strength. I can't see a paper-based container holding up to the rigors of a mostly-filled backpack, for example. Based on the pictures of Boxed Water, I also don't see a cap (which makes sense if they cartons start out flat-packed) which means once it's open, it's open until it's done. Make sure you keep it upright!

Look, just buy a few good reusable bottles, and a filter pitcher or something. Boxed Water sounds like mild greenwashing to me.

BBC News is carrying a flabbergasting story about Tsutomu Yamaguchi, a 93-year-old Japanese man who survived both the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombs at the end of World War II.

Photographer Marc Silber got a hold of some rare footage of Ansel Adams describing what he meant by the "visualization" of photographs. This clip was a real thrill for me, seeing and hearing the great Adams speak about one of his fundamental concepts.
(via kottke)

Rosecrans Baldwin made me crack up with his survey of accents around the English-speaking world and how to impersonate them in a jam. I think this was my clear favorite:

Accent: Irish

Scenario: After a short Dublin breakfast, it’s time for a drink. You find a pub suitably Irish without an obvious thing for tourists. Local contractors on their coffee break watch your entrance. The bartender nods and asks what you’d like.

Tips & Tricks: The Irish accent is one of the world’s most beautiful, and nobody knows it better than the Irish. Frankly, you don’t stand a chance of sliding by. Your best bet is to impersonate Colin Farrell on a bender and punch out the whole crowd.

Response: Don’t even try it. They will kill you.

I decided today that I'm going to embark on a photo project moderately larger than previously attempted. This project will be a bit academic in nature as well, uniting photography with historical and cultural research to provide more than just a visual picture.

I plan to catalog the various geographical regions of my fair city, Richmond, VA.

Periodically (I have no set interval starting out. Weekly? Monthly?) I'll post an entry about a specific part of Richmond city that includes some geography, background, landmarks, and whatever other relevant and interesting tidbits I can uncover. All of this will be accompanied by photographs I take while visiting these neighborhoods/districts, and its my hope that these pictures will reflect well the character of each locale.

I'm not sure where I'll start yet, but it certainly won't be one of the major sections like The Fan or Shockoe Bottom. I'll hit those, too, but they'll take more time to plan, because I have to find a happy medium between educating the uninitiated and shying away from too-heavily-tread ground.

Keep an eye out!

UPDATE: I believe I'm going to start with Union Hill.

Maybe this is totally old news, but I just discovered that you can embed photo slide shows from Flickr on any web page. When you're viewing a slide show on the Flickr website, there's a "Share" link in the top right corner (if you only see the picture, move the mouse a touch, and you'll see the controls). After clicking "Share" you can either directly copy the link or embed code, or you can choose to customize the HTML which essentially allows you to customize the slide show size, like this:

http://www.flickr.com/apps/slideshow/show.swf?v=67348

And there you have a quick and easy Flash-based photo slide show with a fairly clean and useful interface. I know it's not quite the customized solution that some professional photographers want for their own sites, but Flickr's tool is free and looks pretty nice, too. Great for starting out, or at the least for most other circumstances where a Flash-based slide show is desired. And because you can create a slide show from nearly any collection of photos on Flickr (search results, sets, pools, etc.), I think it's pretty flexible.

I finally got an opportunity to take some nice shots with the D90 today. Check 'em out if you get a chance.

This week's AVQ&A over at A.V. Club was all about music rendered unlistenable by emotionally tragic times in our lives - times ranging from the death of loved ones to heartbreak.

If I had to think of a song that even approaches having such an effect on me it would be "That Song" by the now disbanded Big Wreck (I've posted this video before, but it's relevant again):

http://media.mtvnservices.com/mgid:uma:video:mtvmusic.com:46306

For me this song came to describe, line by line, a seriously screwy relationship I had with a girl during high school. We never dated or anything - she was already involved with the man she'd eventually marry - but there was a great deal of emotional intimacy developed during my last two years at home. These first three stanzas aptly sum up the mental flotsam that lingered for, quite seriously, years after I moved away:

So I always get nostalgic with that song.
But in my room it's forced. It has to be in some car across the street.

And I always catch the back of your head in a crowd.
Just don't turn around. It's never you and you'll ruin those memories.

And those photos are great if I catch em with the side of my eye.
But if I stare, it just turns into you and me. We're just standing there

You know what, though? It's now nearly ten years since I left Lunenburg County, and in those years I've never stopped loving this song. The baggage is gone and I experienced closure ages ago, but I enjoyed this track even in media res. The same goes for a number of other songs associated with my sadder memories, from the Allman Brothers' "Melissa" to "The Low Spark of High Heeled Boys" by Traffic.

I acknowledge that individual personalities and experiences are likely influencers here. Maybe I haven't yet experienced something heart-rending enough to spoil some previously beloved music. For my part, however, I prefer to revel in the songs themselves than pretend they didn't exist just because they might be connected to some sour recollections.

So you crank that song, and it might sound doomed.
So just leave the room while I sit'n stare, 'cause yeah that's rare.
I really love that tune.
Man I love that song...
I love that song...
I love that song...

Tonight I'm watching my VCU Rams take on the UCLA Bruins in round 1 of the NCAA tournament. We're seeded 11 to UCLA's 6, but a good variety of fans and commentators (not to mention the POTUS) have picked VCU for an upset in this round.

Tip-off is tonight at 9:50 on CBS.

Few things drive me crazier than companies making up their own stupid buzzwords. Are they trying to come with catchy terms that they hope will provide free advertising as they theoretically worm their way into colloquial language? Regardless of intent, here is a short list of made-up words/phrases born out of ill-conceived advertising programs:

Fourth Meal
Threeconomics
Nougatocity (or any of Snickers' terrible terms)
Comcastic
People Ready

You get the point. If you have any others you've seen/heard in any form of advertising, put it in the comments.

Nate tries to avoid photographs as much as possible, but I think I caught his good side here.

So I returned from the Outer Banks this evening, and while it rained almost the entire time (as was expected) it was fantastic to be away with good friends. We had plenty of laughs, craziness, and tom-foolery to carry my spirits for a while, and I think this will sufficiently tide me over until my vacation in May.

I'm heading down to Corolla, NC, in the Outer Banks for the weekend with Valerie. We're staying with some friends in some glorious rental house, and while it's expected to be cold and rainy the entire time, I'm not terribly worried. We'll be out of town and near the ocean, so it's bound to be an awesome time.

Oh yeah, and I'll have the camera and laptop with me, so there may be some pictures along the way.

Today I received a glorious new toy.



Valerie and I now own a Nikon D90 and a Nikkor 50mm f/1.4G lens to go with it. It's safe to say that my picture-taking/posting is going to accelerate a little, especially since I can use that lens on Valerie's more modern N65 film SLR.

Mercy me, but Patton Oswalt's review of the KFC Famous Bowl is funny enough to bust guts.

I can't decide whether FAIL stickers are totally awesome or an example of how this meme is way overripe.
(via uncrate)

I feel giddy. Oh so giddy. There are parcels making their respective ways to my office this week. They're coming from different locations but depend on one another. I bet regulars could guess pretty easily what I'm talking about, but either way, I'll be posting all about it when the time comes.

Until then, I just had to type away some of the excitement :-)

Tonight I watched the film adaptation of Alan Moore's Watchmen. Having read the graphic novel twice I have to say that the film sticks fairly close to the source material. Where it deviates I don't feel that the intent and main plot points were sacrificed. I was quite happy with the acting for the most part, and the visuals captured graphic novel's imagery well. Some musical transitions and editing were clumsy, but not so much to foul the entire experience.

I'm still digesting the whole thing, but I think I can comfortably give this 4/5.

It turns out Flickr has a group devoted to Scanning Electron Microscopy, and it's completely captivating - even if some of the images are freaky and surreal.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AzZi-btc8AA&color1=0xb1b1b1&color2=0xcfcfcf&feature=player_embedded&fs=1&w=580&h=470]

File this under the "too amazing not to post even though everybody else is doing it" department, but Kutiman's project, ThruYou, is one of the most incredible media experiments I've yet seen.

This audio/video cut-and-paste represents, to me, the very best of the Internet's potential. YouTube became a gigantic repository of largely user-generated material which has become reasonably easy to mine. An enterprising (and brilliant according to my ears) musician needed only to piece together samples from a seemingly endless pool of candidates. I'm sure Kutiman may not have been the first, but he sure is good. I'd like to see more of this - there's so much material available, and plenty of talented mixers out there.

And, more broadly, I'd love to see what else clever artists can assemble from the mass of content at their collective disposal.

A smart, talented, accomplished writer-actor like Myers spending years meticulously creating, rehearsing, and refining an obnoxious one-note cartoon like Guru Pitka is a like a group of brilliant scientists working around the clock for a decade to build a malfunctioning fart machine...

Nathan Rabin in his dissection of The Love Guru

My ten year high school reunion is approaching this year, and I was trying to remember what songs were popular around my final days at Central High in Lunenburg County, VA. Naturally, all the music of my younger days has started blending together, so I turned to Wikipedia for help.

Now I'm counting music over a rough one year period that starts right after my junior year (when I became a rising senior) and ends around the time I graduated (when I was no longer a high school senior). I think music from that last summer before college is associated with its own set of memories and transitional nostalgia.

So, for better or for worse, here's everything that hit number 1 at least once on Billboard's Modern Rock and Pop Charts between the second half of June, 1998, and the first half of June, 1999. I've linked, where possible, to YouTube videos of the songs, so there's always the risk that some might disappear over time.

Modern Rock:
Semisonic - "Closing Time"
Goo Goo Dolls - "Iris"
Eve 6 - "Inside Out"
Barenaked Ladies - "One Week"
Hole - "Celebrity Skin"
Goo Goo Dolls - "Slide"
Lenny Kravitz - "Fly Away"
Cake - "Never There"
Everlast - "What It's Like"
Sugar Ray - "Every Morning"
Lit - "My Own Worst Enemy"

Hot 100 (for all intents and purposes, this was the Pop chart until February 2005):
Brandy and Monica - "The Boy Is Mine"
Aerosmith - "I Don't Want to Miss a Thing"
Monica - "The First Night"
Barenaked Ladies - "One Week" (yeah, this was on both charts)
Lauryn Hill - "Doo Wop (That Thing)"
Divine - "Lately"
R. Kelly and Céline Dion - "I'm Your Angel"
Brandy - "Have You Ever?"
Britney Spears - "...Baby One More Time"
Monica - "Angel of Mine"
Cher - "Believe"
TLC - "No Scrubs"
Ricky Martin - "Livin' la Vida Loca"
Jennifer Lopez - "If You Had My Love"

It appears that the pop charts had a lot more variety, but consider that they covered pretty much every genre at the time (hence Barenaked Ladies appearance on both the Modern Rock and Hot 100 lists above).