Kung Fu and Cheech Wizard.

The other night at dinner I was talking with the Teleodaughter about Kung Fu actor, David Carradine, and the rumors surrounding his recent death. I mentioned another celebrity who was reputed to have met the same fate and the Teleodaughter admitted that she had no idea who cartoonist Vaughn Bodé was, nor did she know his character, Cheech Wizard (examples). This fascinates me since Bodé, at the time of his death in 1975, was immensely popular and he remains one of the three or four most influential comic artists of the last fifty years. Ask any artist to draw something in the style of the 1970s -- or ask a graffiti artist simply to draw anything -- and they will immediately channel Bodé although many of them might not know who he was. In death, Bodé achieved an odd sort of identity-free immortality. He dissolved into his decade and has become its graphic arts avatar. It's not altogether unlike the Buddhist concept of Nirvana. Bodé, who was interested in alternate spirituality, might have liked the idea, although it would not have entirely made up for finding himself so suddenly and embarrassingly dead.

David Carradine's signature TV show, Kung Fu, was ending its very successful four-year run at the time of Bodé's death. Carradine also made a contribution to the zeitgeist of the decade but, unlike Bodé, he stayed around to give an identity to the phenomenon. He had a presentable career since then -- he wasn't one of those actors who makes a career of signing photos taken forty years ago at media conventions -- but his early 1970s TV work defined him. His hardcore fans may prefer to remember his character, Frankenstein, from Death Race 2000 (also 1975) but for most people he was always "that guy who starred in Kung Fu in the '70s, only now he is doing ads for Yellowbook".

Star Trek Reboot -- Escape from the Swamps of Canon

It is probably a "spoiler" to tell you that the new Star Trek movie takes place in a different universe that runs parallel to the familiar Trek universe of the TV show and most of the other movies. But I don't care. The film does an adequate job of documenting the critical events that caused the time-lines to diverge but some people seem to miss it -- which irks me. So, if I can save one moviegoer from having to sit next to a trekker with a booklight clipped to his dogeared copy of the Star Trek Encyclopedia flipping pages and muttering to himself during the movie, this small spoiler seems worthwhile. The Kirk, Spock, Bones, Scotty, etc. in the film aren't supposed to be the same Kirk, Spock etc. as the ones you have seen before. It's not a mistake if there are differences.

I've heard the alternate-universe plot described as a writers crutch. I guess it is... or, actually, more of a writer's prosthesis -- a marvelous device that lets a lame series with its legs crushed under tons of accumulated detail get up and dance a jig. The Star Trek franchise has been hoisted out of the Swamps of Canon and made fresh and new.

Not of course that the film is perfect. There is, for instance, a scene on an ice planet where our hero is pursued by a series of increasingly large critters and every time the monster at his heels is replaced by one bigger and scarier he screams like a girl and runs faster, his only plan apparently being to keep running until he is saved by the inevitable Deus ex Machina. I didn't like that part very much but it was short. And I wasn't satisfied with the makeup on the obligatory green Orion woman with whom Kirk makes out -- her lip color didn't suit me. But, except for those small flaws I liked the film a lot. I remember thinking during the end credits that I would have liked rent out my house for the summer and move into the theater where I would live on stale popcorn and Star Trek until it was time to move across the hall for Harry Potter.

Last Unicorn Architectural Salvage in 3D

I recently took my Stereo Photo Rig to a local architectural salvage yard. Here are a few of the photos. These "crosseye" 3D photos were taken on the grounds of an architectural salvage company near Chapel Hill, NC. For directions, hours, etc., see their website -- www.thelastunicorn.com/ .

To view these photo you need to cross your eyes slightly so you see three vague images and then concentrate on the image in the middle which will be in 3D. It takes some practice but most people with good vision in both eyes can learn.












More photos are in my Flickr.com photo set.

Tea Party Stereo Photographs

Here are some stereo photographs from yesterday's Tea Party rally on the grounds of the State Capitol in Raleigh, NC. To view these 3D images you cross your eyes slightly so you see three images side by side and then concentrate on the image in the middle. Most people who have good vision in both eyes can learn to do it.

Click on any of the images below to see it bigger or view the entire set in Flickr here.

Building a Stereo Camera Rig (on the Cheap)

I'm going to be writing about the stereo (3D) camera I made with a total expenditure of about 70 bucks but, before I start I want to teach you a trick for cheating on the "Find the Ten Differences in these Pictures" feature in the Sunday Comics page of your newspaper. I want to do this first because the way the newspaper business is going the Sunday Comics may be gone before you can read this posting to the end.

The trick is this: you hold the paper so the two versions of the picture are side by side and cross your eyes so you are looking at one version of the picture with your left eye and the other version with your right eye. Just relax your eyes and let them cross so you see three copies of the picture and concentrate on the one in the middle. If the pictures are over/under you will need to turn the newspaper sideways. Assuming you have adequate vision in both eyes you can almost always do this with a bit of practice. Your brain will fuse the two pictures into one image that appears to float a few inches in front of your nose. The parts of the pictures that are the same will look normal but the parts the are different will appear to shimmer or flicker. That missing button on the clown or the dog's tongue out vs. in will be dead easy to spot.

I don't have any of those find-the-differences pictures laying around for you to try out (they are copyrighted and I am too lazy to draw one) but here is something I whipped up in PowerPoint. Look at it and relax your eyes. Let them cross slightly so you see three boxes, not two, and then concentrate on the box in the middle. The parts that are different will appear to shimmer or flicker. Try it and you'll see what I mean. Let your mouse cursor hover over the image for the answers.



Here's a slightly harder one, again a PowerPoint image. This time the only difference is the spacing between the letters. Some of the text is slightly to the left or right depending on the image you are looking at. What you should see is some of the letters appearing closer to you than the rest. Your eyes have to cross just a bit more to see those letters and your brain will interpret that as their being closer.



By a happy coincidence the technique for looking at crosseye-format stereo images is the same as we've been doing here. Here are two images I took at the NC Botanical Gardens in Chapel Hill last weekend. The photos were taken at the same time by cameras about four inches apart. Again your brain will interpret parts of the picture that are farther apart (so you cross your eyes more to look at them) as being closer. In these photos the bottle trees are farther apart (and thus appear closer) than the bench.


Click on the image to see it larger. It might help to slide your chair back and view it from a bit farther away.

In my description of the photo above I mentioned that the photos were taken at the same time. That's the hard part. If you are going to take 3D photos of anything that moves (ie. people) you need both images to be taken at the same time. One way to do this is to use a single camera with a beam splitter -- a collection of prisms and mirrors you put in front of your lens to split the image -- which gives you perfect synchronization but so-so images (because of all those mirrors and prisms and such.) See my posting on my Russian made SKF-1 beam splitter for more info. The other way is the use two cameras and try to figure out a way to make them do the same thing at the same time. That's what I have been trying to do lately.

I should probably mention at this point that I have not been altogether successful in that regard. I am still struggling with a few technical bits and if you are looking for complete instructions for making a reliably-synchronized stereo rig you can stop reading now, and if you are an optimist you can check back in a few weeks to see if I have the problem solved.

Here is a photo that shows the problems you run into if your stereo images are not properly synchronized. In this photo the two cameras went off a fraction of a second apart-- just enough time for a few things to have moved. The image on our right was taken first then the one on the left. When you view this as a 3D crosseye image the things that have moved will shimmer and flicker like the differences when we were cheating on the find-the-differences puzzle.


Click on the image to see it larger. It might help to slide your chair back and view it from a bit farther away.

So what has moved? The most obvious thing is the legs of the girl in the blue dress. She is walking across the frame right to left and, for the most part the displacement simply makes her look a bit closer than she actually is, but her moving leg and her swinging arm are too different and our brains can't fuse them into a consistent image -- so they shimmer. The young lady in the green dress was turning and the hem of her dress looks a bit odd. The lady in the background (white shirt) was putting her foot down and her left leg shimmers. And finally, the lady in the foreground -- the one who looks a bit like the Queen dressed up as Paddington Bear, and who says she was not dressed for a photo shoot and has expressly forbidden me to post any pictures of her in that outfit -- has moved her toes.

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Here is a photo of the stereo rig I built.



Lots of people have built stereo rigs, most of them better built than mine, but I don't remember seeing one before that converts from horizontal to vertical format.





It is constructed from two Kodak C530 digital cameras that I have modified to accept an external shutter button.



I chose the C530 for a number of reasons: First, it can be had cheaply -- a used one in good shape can be had for twenty bucks on eBay; Second, it is fixed-focus which should make the shutter delay more predictable; Third, it is small enough to sit side-by-side without making the lenses too far apart; Forth, it is large enough for a clumsy tinkerer to solder bits of wire into its innards and still put the case back together; and Fifth, it can be had cheaply.

Because the C530 is fixed focus there is no fancy three-way button that you push half-way to lock the focus. My plan was to make the additional connections to two C530s to allow them to be hooked up to external shutter connections. I had hoped to hook both cameras in parallel to a single switch. I haven't got that part to work yet but more on that later.

To open the C530 you take out six small screws -- two on each end and two on the bottom, make sure the selector wheel is set to the "OFF" position, open the battery compartment and pry the case apart at the midline.



This photo shows the shutter button circuit board, the control wheel and illustrates why the case won't open if the wheel is not in the OFF position.



Here is a detail of the shutter button circuit board.



The circuit board sits on top of the battery compartment and appears to provide power to the camera through jumpers J7 (battery common) and J5 ( +3 vdc ). It also provides +3v to JS (shutter?) when the button is pushed. Here's my guess for a schematic.



Since the shutter switch is between J5 and JS that is where my external switch connections ought to go too, so I soldered on a couple of bits of wire, routing them beneath the other connections and towards the end of the camera.


No, I'm not proud of those solder joints but there are good connections with no shorts.

It's a bit hard to see here but I have enlarged the screw hole enough for the wires to pass through it and used a pair of diagonal cutters to clip off the tab that the screw previously connected to. This allows me to close the case and route the wires out the old screw hole.

Once I had the wires connected to the shutter switches on both camera I closed the cases, put in some batteries and made sure I could fire the shutters by shorting the wires. So far, so good.

In theory I thought I could just hook both cameras together in parallel J5 to J5 and JS to JS and fire both cameras together with a switch between the J5 and JS connectors. The schematic would look something like this.



But that doesn't work. For some reason the cameras don't like to be hooked together. Once they are connected J5 to J5 and JS to JS and turned on they take turns going off a random until they are turned off, disconnected or run out of memory.

My new plan was to use a double-pole single throw momentary contact pushbutton switch -- one that is really two switches (for two separate circuits) that are both activated by the same button. The schematic for that would look like this:



But the problem is... DPST pushbutton switches are hard to find. Radio Shack failed me so I turned to the Internet. Not much help there either, as it turns out. I'll find one eventually. But for now, I have installed two buttons side-by-side -- close enough to press both of them with one finger.





My first session with the new rig was both encouraging and a failure at the same time. It was encouraging in that I got some very nice stereo images and the synchronization was occasionally fine -- indicating that the two cameras do have a very similar shutter-lag -- but discouraging in that I had trouble pushing both buttons at the same time and got quite a few photos like the one above with the little girl in the blue dress.

So, I have redoubled my efforts to find that DPST pushbutton and have ordered this button...



... which claims to have the electricla properties I am after and offers the additional advantage of being very, very big, red and silly-looking. I'll post the results of the installation of the Big Red Emergency button when it comes.

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Since I wrote the above I have taken the rig on another outing -- the Tea Party demonstration at the NC State Capitol and I continue to struggle with synchronization. In fact, it is difficult to get one of the cameras to fire at all sometimes. I think one of the buttons may be defective or have a loose connection. You have to push it just right to fire the camera. Maddeningly, it seems to fail most often when you are holding the rig overhead for a crowd shot like this one:



But it does work -- more or less -- and when it does work you can capture quite a nice image with it.

Who Will Watch the Watchmen?

Watchmen Trailer - Warner Bros

Who will watch (the) Watchmen? Well, I did, for one -- last night at the midnight show. I don't have time for a full review but a few random observations:

My daughter has been looking to borrow a copy of Alan Moore's graphic novel so she can read it before she sees the movie. Sadly, I can't find my copy, and her brother has been too buried under his backlog at work to look for his copy... and she is running out of time. I have some good news for her: the new film is incredibly faithful to the graphic novel -- it is exactly the same, almost frame-for-frame, and there is no burning need to read the graphic novel first. It's the same thing. Zack Snyder, the director, did an amazing job of sticking to the graphic novel. (He did leave out the comic-book-within-a-comic-book subplot about the Black Freighter but it came out cleanly.) If you see the movie first then skim the comic book, reading only the parts about pirates, you will have gotten the whole experience.

Snyder did allow himself one small indulgence, almost a signature. In the first sequence, an aging superhero called The Commedian is attacked in his apartment by an assassin. As his attacker bursts through the door The Comedian throws ... something (a whisky bottle would be in character) ... at the assassin but misses. He hits the door instead, knocking off one of the digits in the apartment number, changing it from "3001" to "300" -- a reference to the Snyder's previous comics-related movie: "300."

The Watchmen is arguably the best comic book mini-series ever made. And the movie version is, as I have said, incredibly faithful to the comics version. The interesting question is this: does that make The Watchmen a great movie? Not necessarily. That's not to say that it isn't a great movie -- haven't made up my mind -- just that it is an interesting question.

I've heard reviewers criticize Snyder for sticking too close to the original -- not giving the movie room to breathe -- and they suggest that it might have been better if he had updated the original a bit. I can see the point. The Teleospouse and I were the only members of the audience last night who are old enough to really remember President Nixon -- who features prominently in the graphic novel and the film -- and Moore and Snyder use images of Nixon as shorthand for big chunks of the zeitgeist of the 1970s and early 80s in a way that must have puzzled many of the twenty-something members of the midnight audience. But Snyder was right to leave the story in its original, alternate-history of another generation setting. Watchmen is a creature of its times and would not survive an update.

I takes nothing away from Snyder or his movie to suspect that the prominence of the Nixon character is one of the reasons that the movie was funded just now. The aging leftists who run much of the Hollywood film industry are looking at retirement (those who are in still good health) and Nixon is the demon figure of their youth. They can't resist an opportunity to revisit their salad days by taking one more whack at the Tricky Dick Piñata. Like Frost/Nixon, Watchmen cashes in on the favorite animus of the generation in the 'arts' that is just entering its decline. For those of you too young to remember the Tricky Dick meme, Tricky Dick is to Chimpy McBu$hitler as Heroin is to light beer. Bush derangement syndrome has been the Methadone which with the Hollywood left has tried to get by -- but now that Bush is gone they have gone back to the real deal.

Obama's Brilliant Plan to Finance the Stimulus

The conservative critique of President Obama's "stimulus" package, when talking to other conservatives, tends to be that the provisions of the plan are bad things in themselves -- spending on pet liberal projects which cost a lot, do little to actually stimulate the economy, and which tend to reinforce the expectation in the populace that any problems they might have are best solved by sitting on their thumbs and waiting for the government to bail them out. These are the arguments against the proposed stimulus plan that resonate with the right.

But this line of argument is less compelling for Joe Sixpack. To explain their opposition to the plan to the working guy conservatives boil down their argument to one simple rhetorical question: "Where in the world is all that money going to come from?" The question is pithy, easy to understand and, they thought, unanswerable. This is where they underestimated President Obama. He seems to have a plan.

In road-runner physics a character who has walked off a cliff will not fall until his unsupported state is brought to his attention. Apparently tax accounting rules for liberal politicians are similar; they don't need to pay their taxes until the unpaid taxes come to the attention of the press. Mr. Obama apparently knows this and is using his cabinet appointments to produce extra tax revenue.

President Obama's pick for Treasury -- Timothy Geithner -- had to pony up about $30k in back taxes to buy into the Obama honeymoon tax amnesty plan offered by the liberal press. And he's a piker compared to Tom Daschle (Health and Human Services nominee) who coughed up more than $100k. Mr. Obama plans to grow the size of the staff of the Administrative branch considerably, and he will be replacing most of those currently working there. Add to that the judges, ambassadors, and all the bureaucrats who are appointed by the president and you get a lot of political appointments. If they all pay off as well as the Geithner and Daschle picks he will have gone a long way toward paying for the stimulus package.

Update: I had barely finished this when I turned on the TV to find that Daschle had stepped aside to let someone else take their turn at the wringer. We may find that trillion bucks for the "stimulus" plan yet!

How to Take a Really Memorable Photo.

Bill Owens (Dolly Parton's Uncle) at the American Chestnut Foundation's 25th Anniversary Celebration in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

Bill Owens is Dolly Parton's uncle. He is a songwriter who performs in the shows at Dollywood*. He is a supporter of the American Chestnut Foundation and provided the entertainment at the ACF's 25th anniversary celebration.

I bought my Sigma f/1.4 30mm lens for my Nikon D40 with events like this in mind. The ballroom in the Reed House Hotel in downtown Chattanooga seemed well enough lighted to my eyes but the light was quite dim for most cameras. Hotels are a horror show for existing light photographers. Lights are dim and oddly-colored and reflective surfaces are everywhere.



The Sigma was doing more or less what I had bought it for. I was shooting full auto and the D40 was doing 1/25 of a second at about f/2.8 -- an acceptable compromise for depth of field, hand-holdability and subject motion blur.



Mr. Owens was moving around a bit and the camera really liked that couple on the right side as the subject. I had a bit of a struggle getting it to ignore them and focus on Bill.



Add to that the facts that he had set up on the far side of the stage, I wasn't sitting that close to the stage and a 30mm lens is pretty wide at that distance and I was starting to get a bit frustrated. It didn't help that Mr. Owens was interacting with his slide show which kept his back mostly to me.



This shot above is probably the best I was going to do with the normal lens. I had convinced the camera to focus on the subject and I got a nice profile shot. But I wasn't completely satisfied. So, as he finished his last song I put on my longer but slower zoom lens and changed the setting that was keeping the camera from using the flash. I don't usually like photos taken with an on camera flash but they do generally have the advantage of being sharp and well exposed.

When Mr. Owens stood up after his set I also stood up and snapped the photo below.

It costs me a bit to admit that this is the most memorable photo of the group. The teleospouse still remembers the cost of the Sigma lens and my argument that it was my patriotic duty to go out and spend that economic stimulus check tends to fall on deaf ears. But she does react well to existing light photos. Unfortunately, this time it was the flash photo that grabbed her attention.

Looking at the shot on the LCD screen on the camera she told me that I really ought to show it to Mr Owens who was packing up his equipment.

I should have shown it to him. I'm sure he would have enjoyed it.

The problem is that I am a bit shy.

And I was already feeling a bit embarrassed by the Teleospose's howl when I showed her the photo. People were looking at us wondering what was going on.

Here's what she was looking at.


detail



Entire Image

*I know what you're thinking. Dollywood, huh... But you're wrong. Dollywood is a class act. It's one of the nicest non-Disney theme parks with a wonderful mix of terrifying rides for teenagers, decent shows and traditional mountain craft exhibits. I recommend it.

The Elephant

In the aftermath of the election, and Barack Obama's solid victory, there is a great deal of speculation about the future of the G.O.P. There is a widespread consensus that the Republicans lost the presidency, and lost seats in congress, because they deserved to lose. This comes not just from the places you'd expect -- the Democrats, the Libertarians, the Greens, the, um, whatever Naderites call themselves these days -- but also from a large number of Republicans -- perhaps a majority. So many people are saying it, indeed, that it has become quite the cliche and it is with some reluctance that I admit that I am one of them.

Conservative pundits have looked at the demographics of the recent vote and are feeling quite glum. This is not so much because they lost -- the Republicans were sailing into a sizable headwind this election and nobody was offering even money that they could win it -- but because they lost votes in all the demographic segments where they usually do well. It wasn't just the Democrats get-out-the-vote program that whelmed them, they were leaking votes in the demographic compartments that were supposed to keep them afloat.

The popular meme in the mainstream media is that there may have been a sea-change in the country, precipitated by war-weariness and the bad economy, and that the US is now a center-left country instead of a center-right one. This meme is on all the networks, presented rather gloomily on Fox News, cheerfully on CNN and CBS, and gleefully on the Beeb. There is, to be sure, some debate about it -- the talking heads on one side of the screen will point out the shift in voting patterns and assure us that the world has changed, while the heads on the other side of the screen will point to several ballot initiatives that suggest otherwise and say not so much, but the notion is never dismissed and the change in the vote is never explained away.

This leftward lurch meme is bunk, of course, and the reason is is never explained away is that the obvious explanation is something that the talking heads can't say -- a taboo subject. It is the elephant in the room that nobody is talking about.

For me, as a libertarian-leaning conservative, there is a bitter-sweet aspect to Obama winning the presidency. It is an historic event, an overdue milestone in our history, and a real accomplishment for our society. The slight bitterness arises from the fact that I had hoped -- and expected -- that the first black president would be a Republican. As an individualist, I try to resist identity politics -- to vote for the man and his policies, not for his ethnic identity -- but in resisting I can't deny that there is something to resist. History was there to be made on Tuesday and I could feel its pull. I didn't vote for Obama. I am enough of the Buckleyite to have stood athwart history on Tuesday, not so much yelling "STOP", as saying sadly "Not this time." But, since I am channeling William F. Buckley, I can't really criticize those, such as Buckley's son, Christopher, who were carried away by the flow.

My point is that having elected the first black president we all feel a sense of accomplishment -- even those of us who voted against him and fear that his policies will be a disaster -- it is a pleasing sense of something overdue which can be checked off of our lists. Vice-President elect, Joe Biden -- whose mouth is only loosely coupled to his brain -- inadvertently captured this sense during the Democratic primaries when he said "I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy... I mean, that's a storybook, man."

I contend that the factor that cost McCain those missing votes in the safe parts of his base is that some people saw the election not so much as a contest between Democrats and Republicans -- or a contest between Barack Obama and John McCain -- as a referendum on the question "Is America ready for its first black president?"

The elephant in the room, which everyone is studiously ignoring, is that people voted for Barack Obama because he was black. Or more precisely, people felt ready to vote for a black president and there was Obama -- "articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy" the first presentable major-party black candidate for president. Biden was exactly right, it was a storybook moment.

The good news for the G.O.P. is that it is a one-off deal. In four years this historic moment will be merely history. The short attention-span media will have lost some of its infatuation, and Obama and the Democrats will need to run on their accomplishments. During their well-deserved time in the time-out corner, the strategists for the Republicans should ignore the illusory leftward movement of the voting public and focus instead on the basics -- having a message that makes sense, having candidates who can present the message, and generally generally acting like they have part of a clue about running a political campaign.

Photo Credit: The photo of an elephant in the rear view mirror is a creative-commons licensed photo by a flickr user named exfordy. The original photo is here: flickr.com/photos/exfordy/123900378/

Belated Halloween

Didn't have any time to decorate for Halloween this year. I've been busy at work and the wife has a cold. The cold may be the same one that caused the host of our pumpkin-carving party to have to cancel his party last week. The pumpkins never got carved and, when I got home from work on Halloween night there was no time.

So... Since I wanted to do something, I grabbed a desk lamp and hid it behind a potted plant to illuminate the pumpkins and then decorated them with bits of black duct tape cut out with scissors.

The nice thing about using black tape is that it leaves the pumpkins intact so you can remove the tape and use them for your non-spooky autumnal decorations and, possibly, make a pie out of them later.

pat-a-cake

Update:Like many nursery rhymes this one turns out to be a fantasy although details of what actually did happen remain sketchy...

Pat-a-cake, pat-a-cake, mugger man

Give my your dough as fast as you can

I'll bat you, and roll you, and mark you with "B"

And put you in the hospital for Barack and me.

While it is unfair to blame to Obama campaign for this I would like a brief hiatus in the reporting of the hateful things that McCain supporters may (or may not) have shouted at a McCain rally.

A 20-year-old woman who was robbed at an ATM in Bloomfield was also maimed by her attacker, police said.
Pittsburgh police spokeswoman Diane Richard tells Channel 4 Action News that the victim was robbed at knifepoint on Wednesday night outside of a Citizens Bank near Liberty Avenue and Pearl Street just before 9 p.m.
Richard said the robber took $60 from the woman, then became angry when he saw a McCain bumper sticker on the victim's car. The attacker then punched and kicked the victim, before using the knife to scratch the letter "B" into her face, Richard said.