#teapix Blogged

#teapix Blogged

A bit of fun news.

The Twitter #teapix event triggered by Neil Gaiman was blogged at geeksaresexy.net and my Four Teapots of the Apocalypse was used as an example.

I'm still having fun surfing the other entries and seeing what other folks have been submitting. Much creativity to be found among Gaiman fans. Surprised? Not hardly.

Take that, Monday!

(Typed while humming the tune to the song All My Internet Friends by Amanda French.)



edit: Ok... fangirl time... more fun than being blogged,
Neil Gaiman left his Twitter Mark on my image post on Twitpic.

flickr in the real world

Wall-e's Instant Fave!
Originally uploaded by meddygarnet

Yesterday I posted an entry on my blog musing about what the office would be like if it was like flickr... today I found a flickr group called Flickr In The Real World - Instant Fave! They print up little cards that look like the "favorite" icon in flickr, and take photos of things they like with them.

I had to join, of course. Now to get me some of those little cards.

In the meantime, here's one of my favorites from the FITRW pool, Wall-e's Instant Fave! by http://www.flickr.com/photos/meddygarnet/.

If the office was like flickr

If the office was like flickr, when you walked past that really pretty calendar in your co-worker's cube, you would stick a post-it note near it with a comment saying "Wow! Beautiful image!"

Your co-worker with the photo of his kittens on his desktop would have notes left on his desk letting him know just how cute those kitties really are. Some commenters would leave little photos of their own kittens along with their comments, hoping to draw people to their own cubes.

People would get flurries of praise on colorful little notes for having the most robust potted plants, or geeky compliments for having a bright red swingline stapler.

And people who got the most comments on their cubicle walls from passers-by would be so very proud.

architectural memento mori

forsaken in plymouth 2
Originally uploaded by tearapen

One of the things that fascinates me about certain regions of the US is how many falling down houses there are out there being reclaimed by nature, an inch or two at a time.

You rarely see something like this where I come from in San Diego, CA. Land is usually just too valuable to let something fall down without quickly replacing it with something new and sell-able. And here in less densely populated Minnesota, such sights are still few and far between.

With this photo, flickr user tearapen has brilliantly captured my fascination for these abandoned homes. I adore the contrast between the domestic decay and the bright, sunny blue sky. It was taken in Plymouth, North Carolina. You can almost hear the spirit of the house sighing about it's loneliness, and the aches of age and disrepair. The vines give it a slightly sinister look, as though it's in the embrace of a creeping, irresistible power that will eventually pull it in into the soil; gone with only a few rusted nails and shards of glass for future archaeologists to find in the traces of its foundation.

Tearapen's got a great eye for composition. I highly recommend surfing over to his flickr stream and giving the rest of his work a browse.

Look into my eyes

Phidippus audax at ~7:1-8:1 Full Frame
Originally uploaded by Opo Terser

Beauty in the unexpected. Beauty in the bizarre. Beauty can be found in the bits of nature most people overlook, or intentionally look away from.

As an example, Opo Terser's flickr photostream is chock full of some of the most truly awesome macros I've seen in ages. They're not safe viewing for true arachnophobes. Though, if you were going to face your fear of spiders, these images could be the place to start.

I especially love all of the stories Opo Terser includes with his photos; describing his interactions with his tiny living models.

Dose of cute

Lilys Yawn
Originally uploaded by bivoir

Getting ready to head out for work... I needed a dose of cute, so I popped over to the photo pool of one of my flickr contacts, bivoir.

Need cute? Bivoir's got cute. Bivoir's got eleventymillion mind bogglingly cute photos.

Yawning guinea piggies. Kissing piggies. Smiling, eating, posing, and even reading piggies. Not to mention funny piggies, safety piggies, baby piggies, mixed species cuteness, frogs, kittens, birds, and doggies.

rain garden

raingarden
Originally uploaded by Andrew Ciscel

We're still waiting to hear whether we've got the house. I understand the paperwork is running through the process as normal on a short sale, and that so far things look promising. Fingers and toes are crossed.

In the mean time, I've been considering what it will mean to have a house with a real yard for the first time. Mowing. Raking leaves. Pulling weeds. The Mister and I are discussing composting grass clippings/leaves wherever we end up living. He'd like to do a square foot garden for beets and such.

And there's something I'm totally taken with now that I'd never heard of when I lived in semi-arid Southern California.

Rain gardens.

Gardens designed to help control runoff from your property when it rains, encouraging more of that water to soak into the soil and get filtered by plants instead of ending up in storm drains. I am all excited about this concept. Partly because they can be pretty, and can be good for local wildlife if you use native plants. And partly because they keep the crud that ends up on your roof from air pollution - and other crud picked up by runoff as it heads to the street and storm drains - out of lakes and streams.

Here are a couple of the websites I've been snooping around on while reading up on the subject:

Rain Garden Network

Gardens for a Rainy Day (MN DNR)

China says "don't interfere"

Free Tibet Flag
Originally uploaded to flickr by Gromit Lad

I just "love" China's government telling Bush that one country shouldn't be meddling in the internal affairs of another country.

"The Chinese government puts people first, and is dedicated to maintaining and promoting its citizens' basic rights and freedom"

"We firmly oppose any words or acts that interfere in other countries' internal affairs, using human rights and religion and other issues."

--Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang, Bush chides Beijing over rights: BBC News

I'm sorry... did I read that right?

Tibet was a country in its own right long before China decided to rewrite history and claim otherwise. Is there a greater form of "interfering" than forced occupation and ethnic cleansing?

The Chinese government claims that the regions they occupy really want to be assimilated, and that anyone who claims otherwise is a splittist or a terrorist. Why do people buy into this when it is a country with known serious human rights "issues" and no true freedom of speech or the press is saying it? If a husband said this of the wife he had been seen beating; a wife who finally struck him back and then been publically beaten again for daring to so, we would be ashamed of ourselves if we blamed the real victim for her plight. Especially if we knew that the battered wife had been forced into her marriage in the first place.

H.H. the 14th Dalai Lama has long since stopped asking for complete indepencence, and asks now only for the Autonomous Region of Tibet to be allowed self-government as pertains to domestic matters, and a guarantee that they would be allowed to mantain their culture and control their natural resources in peace. These are all things they were promised they would be allowed decades ago when the Chinese occupation began. After all they've been subjected to, H.H. offers to stay "married" to China as long as the beatings, exploitation and oppression stop. For this he is called a subversive.

China "is dedicated to maintaining and promoting its citizens' basic rights and freedom"?

How are we supposed to reconcile that with their oppression by the PRC in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region and the Tibetan Autonomous Region? How many people in these so-called "autonomous" regions have been killed or displaced from their homes, or been tortured and/or imprisoned for their cultural expressions and spiritual practices?

The irony is flabbergasting. I only wish it were surprising.

I hope either Stewart or Colbert will pick up on the irony of all this because no one else in the media seems to have noticed.

best. costumes. ever.

best. costumes. ever.
Originally uploaded by sohmer999

Photo taken by sohmer999 at the San Diego Comic Con. He titled the photo "best. costumes. ever."

Don't know about best ever. But they're right up there.

If they don't look familiar to you, you're obviously not following the webcomic Looking For Group.

flower favorites and flickr recommendation

Originally uploaded by peggy.

There's a new flower in my list of all time favorites. The one in the photo taken by peggy. on flickr, is a butterfly pea (Clitoria ternatea). So simple, so lovely, so beautifully formed. According to Wikipedia it's also a nitrogen fixer and can be used as a natural food coloring.

Too bad I: a) have the world's least green thumb and b) live in totally the wrong zone for growing my favorite flowers. My mister would pity even a weed if I were trying to grow it.

By the way, peggy. has a lot of lovely photos (including a gorgeous macro of one of my other favorite flowers, bougainvillea) so I highly recommend popping by her photostream and surfing around a bit. If you're in need of a virtual vacation, don't miss her Grand Cayman, April 2008 set.

We do what we must because we can

thailand
Originally uploaded by jslander

Edit 20080501: According to Jess, the photographer, the plastic cups of water in question in this post were provided for the comfort of the Buddha statues (see her comment). I'm leaving the original post as-is, but wanted to clarify this point up front. I misunderstood the photo as thoroughly as Click Cluck did. Which doesn't change my opinion about his asking her to edit it.

Original Post:

I was eating my sourdough pancakes this morning and browsing flickr when I ran across this photo by one of my contacts, jslander. It shows that some passer-by has left an empty beverage container in the hand of a seated Buddha statue.

What inspired me to blog it isn't the juxtaposition of someone's discarded plastic cup with the timeless serenity of the statue, or the quality of the photo itself.

What made this worth blogging about is that another flickr member (Click Cluck) stuck a note on this photo (view it on the original page by clicking the photo) instructing jslander to remove the cup using photoshop because it isn't respectful. And not just in a comment below the pic, but a note stuck smack dab in the middle of the photo itself.

Huh?

Saying that because it is now fairly easy to remove elements from photos, the photographer should feel obligated to do so if an element is politically incorrect made me boggle. And when I shared it with my Mister, he shared my embogglement.

My guess is that the story of some modern tourist type leaving a cup on the palm of the Buddha statue is exactly what jslander was shooting in the first place. Jslander has a good eye for composition and a well developed sense of irony. If she'd intended to take the photo of just the statue, I'm sure she'd've removed the cup in person. But as it is, it's funny in a tacky-irony kind of way, and it is a commentary on the person who left their trash there in the first place, and on the times we live in.

That said, the irony that Click Cluck was at the same time leaving his own mark on someone else's creation as he passed by seems somehow apt.

If humor is an important part of a delicious weekend breakfast, my recommended daily allowance has been met.

* * *

Aperture Science
We do what we must because we can
For the good of all of us
Except the ones who are dead

~Jonathan Coulton, Still Alive

boggled my little brain

Hot enough to fry an egg
Originally uploaded by Pockafwye

I'm taking a break from work for a few minutes. I'm working from home, and there are flopped cats sleeping all over the living room.

The photo of the egg in this post is my consistently most viewed, most favorited photo on flickr.

I don't know where I've been lately, but I just realized that flickr added a "my stats" page that tells me where my traffic is coming from, how many views I've had all together, and what's going on with each photo. Probably been there for ages, but I just found it. And when I did find it, my brain boggled!

How many views to my photos?!?

[edit: my screenshot seems to have been swallowed by the interwebs. It was a bunch, anyway. It's a bunch more now. ]

If you're one of the folks who's visited my photo stream and clicked through some of my pictures, I just want to say, "Thanks for stopping by!"

Ok, back to work. That monster project isn't going to finish itself.