Two Point Nine Four Cheers for Juno! Hip, Hip...

Ultrasound imaging scene from Juno.

Do you remember the scene in that Die Hard film where Bruce Willis' John McClane is dodging a hail of bullets? ... you know, that scene in the film where a crack team of highly trained assassins, expert marksmen to a man, somehow cannot kill him despite ninety minutes of constant effort? Or to put it another way, have you ever seen any of the Die Hard films? If you have, do you remember thinking that in real life McClane would have been, like, totally dead two reels back but you don't care because it's an action film... and it's more fun that way? Well Juno is just like that... only, of course, totally different.

Juno is the story of an attractive but socially awkward sixteen year old girl who makes an ill-advised decision and winds up pregnant. She initially considers getting an abortion but decides to have the baby and put it up for adoption. Her parents and her quirky friends rally round to support her, albeit in odd idiosyncratic ways, and the prospective adoptive parents that she finds via an add in the Penny Pincher seem to be perfect. Each of these links in her chain of support is tested but in the end they hold and she comes through fine. I don't think I have said anything here that can't be derived from any of the trailers I've seen so I don't think I have spoiled anything.

The film follows the formula for almost all teenage comedies: the protagonist is not particularly popular in school because of the too-cool-for-school problem. [... Oh, did I say almost all teenage comedies? Sorry, my mistake. I exaggerated. I should have said all teenage comedies.] When a big part of your target audience consists of high schoolers, all of whom are all socially insecure -- even the popular ones -- the best, the easiest, and almost the only, way to get them to identify with your hero is to make that hero a misunderstood outsider with a few quirky high-quality friends.

Anyway, Juno, our hero [I'll get back to that word later] finds her school social life very little changed because of her pregnancy. There are a pair of very funny point-of-view sequences in the film showing her making her way through the crowded halls of the school. In the first sequence, early in the film, most of the other students seem bigger than she is and she must shove her way through an indifferent mass of book-bags and elbows to get to class. In the second scene the mass of students in the hall parts before her pregnant belly like the waters of the Red Sea parting for Moses. But those two scenes notwithstanding, before she gets pregnant she is an outsider with a small cadre of very-loyal friends, and after she gets pregnant, exactly the same.

In describing Juno as the "hero" of the film, not just the protagonist, or even just the main character, I am being quite specific. Juno is the hero of the film in exactly the same way the John McClane is the hero of the Die Hard films. She is brave, sensible, honorable, wise beyond her years and, except for one or two small mistakes she does everything right. She gets all the big stuff right. No one dies. And, like Johm McClane she dodges a lot of bullets along the way -- things that might not work out so well for real-life girls in similar situations. In addition to all of her undeniable virtues, Juno is lucky as hell. This isn't a complaint, exactly. All the Die Hard films are great and Juno is a fine little movie. It's just something to bear in mind.

It's been fun to watch the contortions of the actors, the film makers and the production company -- all trying to deny that Juno is a pro-life film, which would be anathema to the very-liberal Hollywood film industry. I must admit that their arguments elude me a bit -- something about Juno being the story of one individual who chose not to terminate her pregnancy, as if Silence of the Lambs were not a monster movie because Hanibal Lecter is only one individual who chose to kill and eat people he didn't like... but whatever. In the end they were allowed to get away with it because Juno was a small-budget independent film and their screen-writer was a retired exotic dancer and not likely to be some sort of repressed religious zealot. I hope I can be forgiven for suspecting that the "our screenwriter is a stripper" defense wouldn't have saved them if the film had been made by, say, Sony Pictures.

March 14, 33 seconds before 2 pm.

It's 3/14 1:59.26!

Time for a slice of π !

Like Father, Like Daughter, Tonsorially Speaking.

On the left is a recent photo of the Teleodaughter shown with two cousins and quite a bit of hair. There was a time when she had neither cousins nor hair. On a family trip when she was only a few months old we stopped at a fast food restaurant for a bathroom break and a snack. I was spooning some sort of messy goo into her mouth while the wife took her older brother, a toddler, to the bathroom. A gentleman walked by and saw me feeding the baby. He noticed that neither of us had much hair and he wanted to make smalltalk.

"That boy sure looks like you" he said, guessing the wrong gender for the infant in the unisex baby garb. I thought for a minute and nodded. "Maybe so," I said " but it is a resemblance we hope she will come to outgrow."

There will be an opportunity next week to see if I was right, without the confounding factor of her having more hair now and me scarcely any. The Teleodaughter will be having her head shaved to raise funds for the St Baldrick's Foundation, an organization that funds research and fellowships for children's cancer. If you follow the link it will take you to her page on the St. Baldrick's Foundation web site where she put this dedication:

One individual who had a great impact on my life was a child with cancer, my cousin Walker. Walker was diagnosed with a cancerous brain tumor as an infant, when I was myself just 7 or 8 years old. He far outlived expectations but did eventually succumb to the cancer. One would expect that his brief life was not a happy one. But that's not what I remember about Walker. What I remember is a little boy with an infectious smile who delighted in "scaring" his older relatives with a toy bug. Walker taught me to appreciate life. If he could get so much pleasure out of his short life, I think the rest of us have the responsibility to get at least as much out of ours. And we have the responsibility to help children like Walker have the opportunity to keep enjoying life.

She has set her goal as raising $1000 and still has a few hundred to go. If you would like to make a donation you can do so at her St. Baldrick's page and help her reach her goal. And for those of you who are local to the area and would like to come by for the event and make a donation in person, it will be Saturday, March 8th at the Hibernian Pub in Cary, North Carolina.

Review: The Transformations: a Tale of Modern Sin

Your book review will start in a few paragraphs. While you are waiting, please enjoy the following puzzling non sequitur.

I grew up in the Episcopal Church and, although my religious education clearly did not cover in one coat, there are a few things that remain to me from it. One is the definition of a the word sacrament as "the outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace." I am not particularly religious, and not that into the sacraments, but after forty years I still find the words of the definition endlessly useful for analogy. For instance, consider facial piercings which are "outward and visible signs of inward and metaphorical holes in the head."

If you take the definition and negate one word you get "the outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual disgrace." Doesn't that sound strangely familiar? It's odd that you can take the definition of a rather technical bit of Christian doctrine, make a piddlin' change and suddenly discover that it has turned into a pretty good description of the television gossip show that you try not to watch.

Thank you for your patience. The review of The Transformations: a Tale of Modern Sin starts now.

Dex Quire's new novel, The Transformations: a Tale of Modern Sin, takes its name, its format, some plot elements, and its sense of the divine glimpsed in the ridiculous from Lucius Apuleius' picaresque novel, Metamorphoses, more commonly known as The Golden Ass. The Golden Ass is the only Roman era novel to still survive in its entirety and is still, after 18 centuries, a good read. Quire has set himself the task of re-imagining it for modern audiences. As in Apuleius' original, Quire's story concerns itself with the misadventures of a man who accidentally turns himself into a donkey. Apuleius' hero steals an ointment from a witch believing it will turn him into a bird but Quire's hero orders his from the back of a "men's" magazine:

Increase Your Penis Size!
Onan's Enlarging Ointment:
Increase Your Penis Size!
*Apply twice a day
HARMFUL IF SWALLOWED.
*DO NOT OVERAPPLY

It came wrapped like a pipe bomb, no external markings except for a New Jersey postmark. The morning it arrived I ran to the bathroom rubbed it on and damn if my c**k didn't instantly start to fill out and enlarge, to feed out like a trombone. I was so happy I grinned into the mirror and my smile pulled right off my face. In fact it pulled and pulled back and back until it grew into a snout and my ears widened and shaped into long goofy triangles. At the same time the little bit of hair I had on the back of my head sprouted and ran, coating my entire body. My belly bulged and seemed to grow as big as a cement mixer. I was winded and dropped to the floor. But somehow I was still standing. I was on all fours. All fours? So far off the floor. Hind legs? All fours!

Huh?

I was still clutching the tube of Onan's and the writing on the back label jumped out at me:

In case of over application—

Damn! My feet and now my hands were bunching into hooves and I dropped the tube into the toilet. What the hell? I looked into the mirror. I shouted and heard myself:

Braaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaayyyyyyii!!

God help me! I had turned into a f***ing donkey!

[Excerpt from Chapter One which is available as a sample on the publisher's web site.]

You may have noticed from the w**ds that I asterisked out for my review that the language gets a bit frisky at times. Neither Apuleius' nor Quire's book is suitable for the prudish, the prim or the overly sensitive. If you can't handle "adult language" or "sexual situations" -- as they say on MPAA rating cards -- you should give both books a pass. One of the main frustrations of Quire's protagonist is finding himself in a near-encyclopedic assortment of sexual situations with scarcely any actual sex. Let me be clear: it's a kinky little book, but one that is well worth reading and, ultimately, oddly inspiring.

After turning himself into a donkey our hero is shuttled all over the hemisphere, befriends a sad alcoholic elephant, grinds flour for a Jesus-freak commune bakery, is teased by an eco-terrorist, finds the world's best food on a tramp freighter, hears a story of a giant bested by an androgynous prince, meets a jungle hero who would have been more like Tarzan except for his mom, invents new strategies for donkey basketball, finds out that a really smart pig makes fairly ordinary bacon, and gradually comes to realize that there are a lot of wonderful things in the world that you will never see if you spend your life contemplating your navel -- and a few nearby anatomical features.

In the Golden Ass there are a number of other magical transformations leading up to our protagonist's but in Quire's book there is only the one literal transformation (or two if you count the change from donkey back to human.) Apuleius has a character turned into a beaver by a witch who felt she had been romantically misused. The choice of a beaver is symbolic since in ancient times the beaver was reputed to bite off his own testicles when pursued so that the hunter would stop for them and the beaver could escape. (The word "castrate" comes from the Greek "castor" meaning beaver.)

In The Transformations there is only one literal, magical "transformation" but a number of other characters do not turn out to be what we expect, or what they initially appear to be. There is a constant interplay between the inner and outer natures of things. Sometimes this interplay is playfully symbolic -- our alcoholic elephant drinks to forget -- and other times it runs deeper -- as with our hero who physically turns himself into a donkey after years spent making a jackass of himself. On the external, literal level our hero needs to learn how to magically turn himself back into a human (which he would have known if he had read his Apuleius) and on the internal, symbolic level he needs to learn about being a man -- his path to self-knowledge having started with one of the sacraments offered in the back pages of a men's magazine.

The transformations is available in Trade Paperback. and Electronic (Kindle) formats. These links, and the image at the top, lead to the Amazon.com product pages. If you follow my link to buy it I get a piece of the action from Amazon. I think it's four percent. If you all buy two copies I could buy a cup of coffee... if I kick in a buck or two.

Georgia Aquarium Photoblog

The teleospouse and I had an opportunity to visit the Georgia Aquarium in Atlanta just before the new year. The Georgia Aquarium is a huge facility (the biggest aquariumn in the world is the claim) that is right in downtown Atlanta. It makes an interesting contrast to the North Carolina Aquarium which is less of an engineering marvel but it does benefit from its NC beach location which allows a lovely mix of indoor and outdoor exhibits and activities. Both are definitely worth seeing if you get a chance. My posting on the NC Aquarium is here.

We went to the aquarium the Sunday before New Years and it was slammed. Most of the photos are of the huge tanks because the smaller exhibits were generally obscured by kids standing with their backs to the camera with noses and fingers pressed to the glass. Occasionally through the mass of kids and the smeary glass you would catch a glimpse of a fin.



Case in point, I took several photos from this location and this is the only one that came out well enough that I can even describe what I was trying to do. I wanted the kids on the rail in the background reacting to an otter in the middle ground with people in the foreground to establish my location on the other side of the tank. This is a bit of a dark corner of the aquarium, especially on a rainy day, and my choice of subject -- kids and otters -- won't hold still for a long exposure.



But, fortunately, the aquarium offers huge tanks and overhead exhibits and there is plenty to look at no matter how crowded it gets. I only mention the crowding so I can point out that the photos here are not representative of the overall exhibit. There are lots of smaller tanks and criters but they are difficult to photograph in a crowded room where you can't use your flash.



This guy is fairly easy to photograph because he sleeps most of the time. He likes to lay in out of the way, hard to see corners of the tank and snooze. He wakes up every few minutes to swim to the surface for a breath of air and then he finds another corner to hide in for a few more Z's. The result is that the hundreds of kids look in the tank, see a few fish, get bored and move along to the next tank leaving the view more or less unobstructed when the turtle makes on of his regularly scheduled appearances.



The Teleospouse snapped this shot of me in the tunnel that runs along the bottom of the tank with the whale sharks in it. I love the science fictional look that the tunnel's joint ring gives to this image.



These jelly fish are sufficiently slow-moving that you can get a decent shot of them even in the dim light...



... and I wasn't the only one taking pictures of them.



Several of the photos in this set remind me of Kelly Freas book covers for Laser Books. Here is an example. The Laser cover specification called for a full-face portrait of the main character in the lower right side of the cover. Several of the photos my wife took of me at the aquarium follow that format exactly.

This is a low-resolution copy of a copyrighted Kelly Freas book cover (Laser Books #34 - SEAS OF ERNATHE). I added the name of my blog and copied it to my flickr account so I could comment on it. You can contact www.northernstarart.com for more information about the painting. I boosted this image from their site.



Here is an example. There are several more in my Ga Aquarium set in Flickr.



Here's a nice shot of the Teleospouse with the whale sharks. We took rather too many photos of each other but one wants to have a person in the photos to show the (generally colossal) scale of the place... and she was handy.

I cannot resist mentioning that, although she sometimes complains that I am inattentive, most of the photos she took of me show both eyes and a nose while in my photos of her I was lucky to get an ear.



I like this one too.



The banquet hall has windows giving views of the Beluga whales and the tank with the whale sharks. These offer some of the best views of those exhibits. This photo was taken from the banquet hall. If you go to the aquarium be sure to check out the view from the banquet hall if it is open when you are there.



This is the main viewing window of the Beluga whale exhibit. I like this photo because of the Sponge Bob Squarepants jacket in the foreground. It works better in bigger sizes.



If this guy had just held his head still this woulda been a great picture.

These are just a few of the photos we took at the aquarium. If you want to see the rest this link should bring up a slide show and, if that doesn't work for you, this one should take you to my flicker set for the aquarium.

Christmas 2007

My favorite honeysuckle vine grows by my nightly dog-walking route. It has a complex scent—jasmine with a hint of camphor-wood and musk. I stop every night to smell it. It amuses me to make the dogs wait while I stop to smell something. Generally, it blooms from June through September but this year it is still blooming in December -odd weather this year.

Some may suspect that, since I opened with the weather, this will be a no-big-news year for the North Carolina Haslups Christmas news letter. I suppose… but the weather has been big news this year. You see, we are having a drought here in the Carolinas. Last spring they declared a minor drought and since then they changed that to a moderate drought, then major, severe, extreme and finally exceptional. Efforts were made to conserve water but it was only after it was too late that they realized that they should have been conserving adjectives as well. “Exceptional” is the last one – the highest level. Now they’re out.

Lee is still working for Keane, Inc., on a computer system to track environmental mitigation projects that offset impacts of DOT construction projects in NC. What is new is that this year the time he steals from his honey-do list is spent on photography. This mild obsession was made worse when Irene gave him permission to buy a new camera for his birthday and Christmas. She thought that, since digital cameras don’t use film, they make photography an inexpensive hobby. What she failed to take into account is that the camera he wanted takes interchangeable lenses. Having a Nikon D40 around is a bit like having an unspayed female cat. So far the litter includes two zoom lenses, an attachment for copying 35mm slides, a telescopic converter, several close-up lenses and a Ukrainian-made Russian SKF-1 stereo attachment for taking 3D photographs. Fortunately, the D40 is almost content—lacking only a faster prime lens, a flash and a much bigger camera bag to be totally happy…for the moment.

My Halloween costume was a member of the 3d Paparazzi. To view this 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.

Less satisfactory are Lee’s new glasses. Most people start to need glasses when they are Lee’s age, officially 39, and Lee thought it might be time for him. The progressive bifocals are Lee’s first glasses that he is supposed to wear all the time. Trying to look on the positive side, Lee has compiled a Pollyannaish list of things his new glasses do well. The new glasses, he decided, are great for looking at his watch, good for reading the odometer in his car and perfect for futzing with his cell phone. Sadly, they are irritating for almost everything else. The are unsatisfactory for reading, driving and, oh yes, they give him a bit of a headache in his recliner with his laptop while writing a Christmas letter.

Irene still sells cheese for Harris Teeter. They are renovating the store where she works. It is to be a “Super Flagship”, one of only five Harris Teeters so designated in the country. For the cheese department this means a much bigger facility with fancy new cases—needed, presumably, to keep the cheese from flying about when the Super Flagship is maneuvering at high speed.

She took another trip on the corporate jet to Wisconsin, this time for a course on cheese making. On last year’s trip the Wisconsin Cheese Producer’s Association plied Harris Teeter with food, wine, entertainment, dinner cruises on the lake, etc. This year’s trip was a four-day intensive course on cheese making—up early, in class all day at UW, bag lunches, dinner in the hotel--quite a different scene. Irene thinks that several people on this year’s trip were managers who, hearing how much fun last year’s trip had been, suddenly developed an interest in cheese when another trip was being planned. That newfound interest in cheese was severely tested and, in some cases, came up short when the class ran far into the evening, leaving time only for hotel food before bed with class starting early the next morning. Irene had a swell time but some of her classmates got a bit cranky.


The Harris Teeter Cheese Whizzes.

Speaking of being cranky, Irene struggled with frequent migraines most of the year. She went to her doctors saying she had headaches. They did CAT scans of her head and MRI images of her arteries, they measured, they consulted, they evaluated, they employed the full arsenal of diagnostic technology, and in the end they had good news: she just had a headache. The process cost our insurance company some money but, on the positive side, after being married to me for almost thirty years she has finally had her head examined.

It turns out that the expensive drugs do work better for migraines than the cheap ones. As the holidays approach Irene is now more often cranky about the cost of her medicine than about the pain in her head. This is a big improvement.

Christopher is a Senior at the Ringling Art School in Sarasota, Florida. Since he works hard and keeps his nose reasonably clean there just isn’t that much to write about for him. He gets good grades, his teachers and his boss at Big E’s coffee shop think well of him, and neither he nor his girlfriend ever seem to need bailing out of jail. Next year there should be more to report—there will be graduation, for one thing (in May), and maybe a new job and/or a change of locale, and who knows what else. But, for this year…

He was given an assignment in his Documentary Photo class: to document his Thanksgiving dinner. His teacher, doubtless, was hoping for Norman Rockwell shots of a golden-brown bird surrounded by a quintessentially American family. What Chris had to photograph was his girlfriend’s pleasant, but not particularly photogenic parents and grandfather eating in a restaurant where Chris would have felt awkward turning supper into a photo-shoot. After taking a desultory shot or two he decided to hope that his good performance on other assignments would make up for one dud.

Amber still works at the Carolina Living and Learning Center, a home for adults with Autism in Pittsboro, NC. She is still applying to medical schools where she hopes to specialize in psychiatry. Her grades and scores were good and she volunteering in the ER at the local hospital to jazz her resume and improve her chances. She lives in Chapel Hill with her two ferrets and a cat. Her latest boyfriend, Jake, is a graduate student in Modern Languages at UNC and teaches undergraduate classes in Italian.


Amber reviews some photos of her cousins in South Hill.

Her best friend from High School, Liz/Anna, got married this year and Amber was Maid of Honor. Anna decided to go by her middle name (Liz) when she left for college. At the wedding you could tell who were family and who were her college friends by what they called her: Anna for family and Liz for friends.

Amber was Maid of Honor.

It is wonderful having Amber live close enough to do things with us. We seldom go to a film without calling her first to see if she has seen it, and on Tuesday there is the “pub quiz” at the Hibernian Pub in Cary. The prize for the team with the most correct answers to a list of (occasionally idiotic) questions is a $100 gift card. When Amber is there (every other week) I play on her team, The Boondocks Saints. We win often enough to make the pub quiz thing about 75% self-financing. If Amber gets into a far-away medical school those state capitol and European geography questions will be trouble.

Lee’s father is doing well. He had his cataract fixed and no longer walks into walls in dimly lit environments. This year’s “beach week” will be Hilton Head again so we’ll see if his improved vision helps with his bicycling abilities. To be fair, the problem was not so much his vision as the coaster brakes on the tourist bikes we rented. If you stop on a hill you have to decide between falling over with your feet on the brake or putting a foot down and rolling down the hill towards the muddy, alligator-infested canal. Dad tried both options and found neither altogether satisfactory. This year, we’ll get him a hand brake. (More about Beach Week).

No brakes needed on the beach. The sand slows you down.

We had a very enjoyable visit with him for the Thanksgiving holiday and also had Lee’s college roommate, Bill Ritch visiting from Atlanta. Bill’s girlfriend, Caran, was able to come, too, and we had a wonderfully full house for the holiday.
We also got to spend some time with Bill and Caran at two Science Fiction conventions we attended this year: the Robert A Heinlein Centennial celebration in Kansas City (see my blog postinghere), and DragonCon in Atlanta (see my blog posting ).

Both Lee and Irene lost cousins this year. Lee’s cousin, Tod Mears, was struck by a truck on a highway in West Virginia. Tod and Lee have a great-grandfather in common, Eli Motts, and many of the same people who were at last year’s Fehl-Motts 100th reunion were at this year’s funeral. Funerals are not as good as reunions but it was good to see everyone again. Hopefully, next year we can manage a happier occasion.

On Irene’s side of the family, she lost a cousin-by-marriage to illness in November. His wife, Krystal., was Irene’s cousin Wayne’s step-daughter. Irene never met him but her parents, who met him at Croft family reunions, spoke well of him. Irene’s cousin, once removed, several times hospitalized and occasionally jailed, born Robert Knievel but better known as Evel, R.I.P..

Wishing you a merry Christmas, the happiest of New Years and all the joys of the holiday season.


– The NC Haslups, Christmas 2007

As I type this Jaxon has just sent his Holiday greetings… if I understand him right. He may just have been barking at this critter who sneaks into the back yard sometimes at night to scavenge for uneaten dog food.

The Cheap Critic: Underdog -- A Labor of Love

I hadn't expected to like Underdog. The trailers I had seen for it didn't show any tie-in to the original series. I was expecting it to be a pleasant but insubstantial film about a boy and his talking super-dog that took its name from the 1960s cartoon show -- and nothing else but its name. I was pleasantly surprised to find that the writers had gone to considerable lengths to stick to the original material with the main concession to the difficulties of a more-realistic style being that the two lead characters -- Underdog and Polly -- were each split into two individuals (a human and a dog) to avoid the surreality of people ignoring the fact that underdog's alter-ego, Shoeshine Boy, is a talking dog.


And some Disney references, too, here's A Lady and the Tramp riff.

All this effort to tie the film back to the original marks it as clearly a labor of love because it wasn't easy and... nobody will care. The Underdog cartoon show ran from 1964 until 1973. The new movie is a kids film about a forty-year-old cartoon show that hasn't seen many reruns in the last twenty years. Not only will today's kids not remember the show, their parents won't remember it either. It's before their time. All that work to tie a new kids movie to a cartoon show their grandparents used to watch. From a business point of view, what's that all about? It wasn't a business decision: it was just something the people who made the film needed to do -- a labor of love.


Simon Bar Sinister then and now.

Don't get me wrong here, Underdog won't change your life. It is insubstantial but it's fun. It's good family fun with enough references to other things -- not just the cartoon show, but to the Superman films and other Disney properties -- to make it enjoyable for grown-ups too.

It would make a fine DVD rental to watch with your young grandchildren.

SKF-1

Several of my readers have noticed that blogging has been light lately and have worried that I might have developed a life. Nothing could be further from the truth as I will now demonstrate.

Here is a device that has consumed some of the time I might otherwise have spent blogging:



Here is a photo I narfed off of eBay. It shows a Russian SKF-1 stereo adapter mounted on an old nikon (using a Russian Helios 58mm lens.) I don't suspect that MoscowStore will mind my using their photo since I bought the product from them that it portrays.

I went through several plans on how I was going to use this adapter. Initially I was going to mount it on my Kodak p712 using the accessory mounting tube. But the mechanics didn't work out. The Kodak accessory tube mounts the accessory a fixed distance from the front of the camera. This works fine for filters, etc. but doesn't work with the SKF-1 since by the time the lens has zoomed out to the 30mm length required for a stereo photo it has pulled too far back into the tube and the corners are cut off.

My next theory was to use the 18-55mm lens that came with my new Nikon D40 but the filter ring on the lens turns as the lens focuses. This could be made to work -- sort of -- by focusing manually and repositioning the adapter every time you move the focus ring. Not very satisfactory, to say the least.

So I went to my local used camera dealer and bought an old non-AI 30mm lens. I can only use it in Manual mode and the meter doesn't work so I have to guess the exposure, look at the histogram on the camera, adjust and try again until I get it right. My current rig for the SKF-1 uses that 30mm lens.


The eBay auction

BTW: if you are thinking about getting an SKF-1 for your Nikon digital don't be tempted by the Russian 58mm lens. The right focal length on a D40 is 30mm because of the smaller sensor size.

The SKF-1 is set up to be slightly crosseyed so that a subject four meters from the lens can be centered in both of the left and right images. My dog Jaxon is very friendly and it is difficult to get him to stay 12 feet away so you can take his photo. In this series I tied him to his run and stood ten feet beyond the reach of his cable. Technically, this worked fine, but he did bark at the camera without stopping until I was done. People tend to look retarded if you take their picture while they are talking. Barking dogs are also not a their best, as these pictures demonstrate.



To view these photos relax your eyes letting the image go slightly out of focus. Cross your eyes slightly so you see three copies of the image and then concentrate on the one in the middle.







For a few more photos taken with the SKF-1 plus some more-technical discussion of depth-of-field and vignetting, see my Flickr set here

The Cheap Critic: Enchanted

Ok, even a dedicated cheapskate spends a buck every now and then. We have out-of-town guests staying with us for Thanksgiving and we all decided to go see Disney's Enchanted at a first-run theater. The late show at the Southpoint Theater in Durham, NC. If you were there too I was the guy in the fourth row who muttered about "ten bucks to see an f'in' movie" though the opening credits.

I don't have time for a lengthy review. Did I mention out-of-town guests? Well, they are starting to wake up and my hermit-in-the-office time is limited, plus there's that big raw bird in the refrigerator to deal with...

Without giving away anything that isn't obvious from the trailer, Enchanted is the story of a Disney princess from an animated world -- small animals that talk and sing, birds that can tie ribbons into bows, that sort of stuff. She has a run-in with an evil queen and winds up magiced into gritty, live-action New York. While she is waiting for her handsome prince to come rescue her she is taken in by a world-weary divorce lawyer (divorced himself) who lives alone with his young daughter.

Enchanted is a lovely film and succeeds wonderfully at what it tries to do. It is an excellent example of a rare form: the affectionate parody -- parody without snarkiness. In Enchanted Disney spends the entire film making fun of Disney films, with specific references to all of their animated films and deft send-ups of the patented Disney Schmaltz. In the animated portions there are just a few too many cute talking animals helping our heroine, a few too many hearts and flowers and the songs are just a bit over the top. But it's wonderfully subtle, you can get the joke without stepping out of the experience. In the live actions sequences the cartoon romanticism collides with gritty, New York realism and comes off better than you might expect -- not because the characters are surrounded by some sort of Glenda-the-good-witch bubble, but because princesses turn out to be more resilient than you might expect. There is not one shred of alienation in the whole film.

One gets the sense that the entire rather-large cast of Enchanted consists of insider cameos. In recent years Disney has had a series of mega-hits on Broadway which has given them a New York Theater vibe to offset their Los Angeles Movie biz connections. With Enchanted Disney is flexing their New Yorker muscles: Enchanted is very much a New York City movie -- several plot elements revolve around addresses (New Yorkers love the yeah, I've been there thing) and there are fantasy elements designed just for residents of the Big Apple; talking chipmunks and giant dragons may be fantasy elements for the rest of us but that rent-controlled apartment with a view is the stuff of dreams for New Yorkers.

Bottom line: If you take a very jaded view of things Disney you might miss the cynicism of other parodies that target Disney films (see The Cheap Critic: Shrek Third) but if you are looking for an almost perfect family film you might drop a couple of bucks on Enchanted. I spent ten to see it and I am only mildly cranky about it: the movie is that good.

Belated Veterans Day Posting.

I meant to post this photo on veterans day but life got complicated and it didn't happen. This is a small image of a copyrighted AP photograph that was taken on the Kuwaiti side of the Kuwait/Iraq border the night before the initial assault started. These soldiers got up at 3:00 am to listen to the President's speech on the radio. Chris is second to the left, holding the radio.

Photos from Todd's funeral.

The disconcerting thing about funerals is how enjoyable they can be. It is pleasant to get a chance to catch up with family members you don't get to see as often as you would like, but you feel guilty about it. You might see a favorite aunt and say "It is so good to see you... but I wish it was for a better occasion." For the extended family it is a reunion with one chair sadly empty and for the immediate family it keeps them busy -- with planning, notifications, arrangements, giving directions, meeting people at airports, making sure everyone is fed and housed, and with all the business of hosting such a large event, until the pain had ebbed just enough to get on with their lives.

This past weekend I attended a family funeral in the small town of Nitro, West Virginia, with the burial in nearby Huntington. I took along my camera to snap a few shots of relatives and this posting is mostly intended to provide the extended family with this link (click here) to the photos that I took.


This is probably the best photo of the lot. It shows three generations of the family of the deceased.


While the adults know, intellectually, that life will go on, it is always the kids that make the concept concrete.


As I was waiting near the end of the procession to park in the cemetery this old truck caught my eye. I went back the next morning to snap this shot of it.

Wedding Photoblog.

Over the weekend I attended the wedding of one of my daughters best friends (since high school). It gave me a chance to try out some of my new photo gear. It was a learning opportunity, as usual. I learned, for instance, that one's external flash, despite being fully automatic, does not turn itself on. Putting it on top of your camera isn't enough. You have to turn it on too.

Panoramic view of the wedding.

Here is a link for a Flickr slide show with the best of the shots from the wedding and the reception. The Teleodaughter was the Maid of Honor.