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I'm moving to California on Monday, for which I am extremely excited. In the flurry of getting ready for the move and saying goodbye to all of the friends I have here, I haven't been doing much shooting. I probably won't be doing much more until I get out there.
My boy KP done went and made himself famous! He was interviewed by the Washington Post for an article about weather bloggers and, while I disagree with his choice of music for the weekend, I think it's pretty cool that he's taken this whole Gothamist Weather thing and run with it. Actually, since Charley turned out to be an overrated dud for us (no disrespect to its victims in Florida), maybe it's not such a bad musical choice after all.
Since the actual article requires registering, I'll link to the Gothamist Weather summary instead.
The US basketball team was soundly beaten by Puerto Rico today. Good. I relish seeing arrogant, spoiled "professionals" get their commupance. I think the whole "Dream Team" thing is pretty embarassing. Maybe now the American NBA players will stop being such cocky dillweeds and check their egos a little.
Thanks to Hurricane Charley, we're currently under a tropical storm warning. This is not a normal occurence for the New York. I'm amused at the idea of New Yorkers suddenly in a panic and checking for their closest Hurricane Evacuation Route.
The last tropical storm I remember being a big deal in New York was Hurricane Floyd. In the end, I was let down as Floyd ended up petering out just before coming to New York. Was there anything more recent?
Update: So in the end, it must be said that Charley was a bit of a dud. We got some rain, but there was never any wind to speak of and it was just a whole lot of sound and fury signifying not that much to us. Florida did get pretty punished, of course.
I love weather. These fine mammatus clouds rolled past my office just before a massive rain dump.
Sometimes I wish I could spend more time at the beach.
I note with sadness the passing of Fay Wray and can't get songs from the Rocky Horror Picture Show out of my head.
I first saw King Kong at my grandmother's apartment when I was about six or seven. I was simultaneously petrified and enthralled. It's entirely possible that King Kong had as much to do with my current geekdom as Star Wars did.
I will be moving to Berkeley in a few weeks to start a new job. Since the love of my life, Athena, is already out there, I've had the good fortune to be able to head west every few weeks this summer, but last weekend's trip was the first time it really started to feel like home. The highlight of the weekend probably had to be watching the condor, complete with five foot wing span, circling us as we walked through the fog in the hills above Muir Beach.
I'm going out to California this weekend, so this will be the last update for a few days. See you Monday.
It saddens me to see states adding hateful, discriminatory measures to their constitution [reuters.com]. With all of the positive civil rights progress the United States has made in the last fifty years, we as a nation really ought to know better.
What really boils my bottom, though, is that I see this as a cynical ploy by ultra-conservatives to galvanize the right. Every voter who is worried about "homahsekshuhls" destroying their marriage (how someone else's marriage is a threat to yours I'll never know) isn't worried about how mismanaged the war on terror or the (apparent) war on our country's fiscal health has become. The "institution of marriage" is under a far greater threat by Britney Spears getting married as a lark or this country's cultural pressure to get married because it's the right thing to do.
The divorce rate in this country isn't pushing 50% because a few same sex couples got married in Massachusetts.
Gothamist (via the Daily News) writes about a helper monkey biting a young boy in a supermarket. As with all these disputes, the truth probably lies somewhere in the middle, but I fear that this will end badly for the monkey.
I so want a helper monkey.
My roomate Todd and I were ordering some takeout tonight and we realized that neither of us could remember our home phone number. This led to a conversation about the negative impact of mobile phones and other technology on our data retreival memory. These days, if I need to call someone, I scroll through my phonebook until I find their name. I only know the phone numbers of friends and family who have had the same phone number since before I got my mobile. Kind of sad, really.
Oh, we eventually figured it out without needing to look it up.
On my way to work this morning, I saw two police officers giving a photojournalist a hard time for taking pictures of the trains. Since my weekday shooting locations are almost exclusively in and around public transportation, I figured everyone was a little too jittery for me to be shooting without credentials.
More from yesterday's excursion on the Lower East Side
My firewall software, Zone Alarm, upgraded itself today (with my blessing, natch) and since then I haven't been able to do any work through the Movable Type interface. Even after setting this site up as a trusted site and creating all of these custom rules, there was no joy in the blogosphere for rotomonkey. I finally had to completely disable the cookie blocking portions of Zone Alarm (which is an excellent piece of software, btw) to get this to work.
Stupid POS operating system needing third party software to do its security work for it.... This is my first foray into the evil empire and it will be my last.
I have a difficult time shooting strangers, so today I walked around Chinatown and the Lower East Side trying to force myself to get people into the frame. This man road the bus back to Brooklyn with me.
So it looks like the terror alert level is going up again.
How conveniently close on the heels of the Democratic convention.
[update] So I'm sitting here watching Tom Ridge's press conference. As he lists all of the wonderful things the goobermint has done for local law enforcement, I can't help but feel like this is just a campaign speech. He's using flowery language and talking generally about the war on terror leaving all sorts of sound bites. "A weapon infinitely stronger than the kinds used by those who mean to do us harm?" What is that? Well, at least he's taking questions.....
My roomate and I watched two documentaries tonight. The first, Dark Days, is a very interesting look at some of the people who built homes in Amtrak's train tunnel system on Manhattan's West Side. Dark Days is a non-judgmental depiction of some interesting lives that depicts some of the ravages of crack addiction without being condescending.
The second documentary, Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer, is a documentary about the appeal process of Aileen Wuomos, the woman on whom Monster is based. Most of the documentary is not particularly insightful -- a fair portion of it centers around the testimony of the director, Nick Broomfield. It does get interesting towards the end as it focuses on the question of whether or not Aileen Wuomos was mentally competent. As she is screaming about the police knowing that she was killing men and not acting so that they could sell the movie rights for more money, I started to wonder about it myself.
I think the death penalty is one of the great tragedies of a free society. There is no evidence that it acts as a deterrent and, it seems to me, all too often people with political ambitions put or keep people on death row so that they can look "tough" on crime. The recent spate of acquittals and clemency grants based on DNA evidence only further strengthens my opposition to it.
Amnesty International's library of reports on the death penalty. All you need to do is look at the list of countries that performed or sentenced the death penalty in 2003.