Swine Flu Bulletin

In conjunction with recent warnings about transmission of swine flu, the following activity should probably be avoided:

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• Track the Swine Flu Outbreak on Google Maps (geeksugar.com)

Babel Tales by Peter Funch

This is pretty cool.   A Danish photographer, Peter Funch, who lives and works in New York City has created a photo series called “Babel Tales” which consists of pictures of people passing New York City street corners.

Every photo is an edit of several photo’s he took at exactly the same spot in a period of two weeks. He then Photoshopped the images he captured to create the Babel Tales series.

The pictures are all pretty cool.  As a former New Yorker, i think these do a great job of catching the energy of the sidewalk.  People doing their own thing and creating a dynamic piece of art every second of the day.

For a view of the whole series check out the Flickr photos

One of the more amazing photos i’ve seen

Check out this image of Obama’s inaugural speech.  It’s a 1400 Megapixel photo.  This allows you to do some ridiculous zooming in.  You can even check out Bush’s sour face.  Pretty cool.   Here’s the article where the photographer explains how it was done.  Click on the photo below to see the sweet details

Muppet Viewing for your Friday

Here it is for your viewing pleasure – some muppets that were on display at the Photoshop contest at worth1000. Check ‘em out:

Happy Valentines Day

(looking for love in all the wrong places?)

Chris Farley’s Child Has Been Discovered

I don’t know what to say, but it’s good to see the soul of the Big Guy live on…

It’s not all technology – the arts matter too (Dana Gioia)

Below is a great speech by the poet Dana Gioia to the Stanford graduating class of 2007….

Stanford Commencement address by Dana Gioia, chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts (June 17, 2007)

Good morning.

It is a great honor to be asked to give the Commencement address at my alma mater. Although I have two degrees from Stanford, I still feel a bit like an interloper on this exquisitely beautiful campus. A person never really escapes his or her childhood.

At heart I’m still a working-class kid—half Italian, half Mexican—from L.A., or more precisely from Hawthorne, a city that most of this audience knows only as the setting of Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction and Jackie Brown—two films that capture the ineffable charm of my hometown.

Today is Father’s Day, so I hope you will indulge me for beginning on a personal note. I am the first person in my family ever to attend college, and I owe my education to my father, who sacrificed nearly everything to give his four children the best education possible.

My dad had a fairly hard life. He never spoke English until he went to school. He barely survived a plane crash in World War II. He worked hard, but never had much success, except with his family.  When I was about 12, my dad told me that he hoped I would go to Stanford, a place I had never heard of. For him, Stanford represented every success he had missed yet wanted for his children. He would be proud of me today—no matter how dull my speech.

On the other hand, I may be fortunate that my mother isn’t here. It isn’t Mother’s Day, so I can be honest. I loved her dearly, but she could be a challenge. For example, when she learned I had been nominated to be chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, she phoned and said, “Don’t think I’m impressed.”

The Biggest and Baddest Pig Ever

I just read this story where  an 11-year-old boy used a pistol to kill a wild hog his father says weighed a staggering 1,051 pounds and measured 9 feet 4, from the tip of its snout to the base of its tail.  He said he shot the huge animal eight times with a .50-caliber revolver and chased it for three hours through hilly woods before finishing it off with a point-blank shot.

The story i wrote about the Biggest and Baddest Bear has gotten a tremendous amount of attention. I’m curious what those readers would think of this.

Nice Playground…for Bears

Some people build swimming pools in their back yards. But outdoor pools in Alaska just won’t work as it’s too cold and dark for 1/2 the year.  There is a particular family that lives on the outskirts of Anchorage. They decided to build a sturdy, colorful playground for their 3 and 4 year old sons, with smooth-stone gravel all around it to avoid knee scrapes and other injuries. They finished building it on Saturday evening, and the following morning, as the mom was about to wake up the boys and have them go out to play in their new play center, this is what she saw from the upstairs window:

2 more photos after the link:

Instead of a Diet, Get a Camera

Americans are obese, but at least we have a slew of technology out there to help us out. In fact, there’s a newHP camera, that actually makes you look slimmer. Check this out:

And the website reads:

They say cameras add ten pounds, but HP digital cameras can help reverse that effect. The slimming feature, available on select HP digital camera models, is a subtle effect that can instantly trim off pounds from the subjects in your photos!

That’s almost eerie – but whatever, pass the turkey