Comments have turned out well, and I thank you – this is just what I’d hoped. Almost to 4K in the blog’s brief run. That doesn’t count some of the. . . intently focused spam I’ve had recently. My spam, let me share it with you:
made some good points. I did a search on laxative use and found most people agree with your blog.
I don’t doubt it one bit. The next one:
There is obviously a lot to know about laxative list. I think you made some good points in
Laxative List? Is that when you’ve consumed so much laxative you lean to one side? I don’t recall making any good points in, but I never read what I type. Says another costive patron, pant-button about to pop from the accumulation of unevaluated by-products:
There is obviously a lot to know about colonic wash. I think you made some good points in
Wasn’t Coloniquash the movie about a world out of balance? Or a mass-produced Soviet rifle? Once again, it seems I made some good points in, and another comment agrees:
After tihs post I think different!
Well, I am using a Mac. Later, an interesting note from someone who was browsing internet searching:
Hi, I was browsing Internet searching for short hair cuts for black women and your blog regarding came my way. Very interesting! You really do know your thing! I\’m gonna bookmark you and come back in a few to see your new posting! Looking forward to! Cheers!
Frankly, I’m a little insulted that he had to browsing internet searching to find me; I’ve long regarded this site as the authority on short hair cuts for black women, and it’s not for nothing I have to get awards for blog regarding.
This fellow seems shy about his spam subject, but unloads at the end – and I don’t mean in the Coloniquashi sense:
Hi. I think you could also make more of it through a bigger exposure about \”\”. Perhaps you can have some who invented cocoa puffs.
It reminds me of an old thesaurus entry for Stupid. It was a public-domain version someone had thrown together and sold for a buck, and had no references past 1945. It didn’t have “he’s not rocket scientist.” It did have “He who did not invent gunpowder.” I loved that. You could see someone sitting around in Deadwood in the 1880s, looking at a dimwitted rube who’d rolled into town. Well, there’s one who didn’t invent gunpowder. I’d like to think they said “It doesn’t take a gunpowder inventor to know that,” but probably not.
So who did invent cocoa puffs? The spammer left a web address, but I’m sure it injects your computer with an overdose of Reanimator chemicals and turns it evil. So never mind. Be secure! I’ll be here, standing guard on the ramparts, ever vigilant. Sleep well in your beds knowing that rough sysadmins are willing to bulk delete enticements for amorous zoo follies.
A few weeks ago I found some slides of a 1950s Mexican vacation at the antique store. I sorted through the batch until I lost interest – why do people shoot the sea and the sky? we always think the pictures will bring the vacation back to life, but they never do. I bought a half-dozen.
Later I discovered my fancy new $100 scanner doesn’t do slides. Well. The old scanner did. So I dug it out . . .and discovered I’d tossed the drivers. Downloaded the drivers, put them on the laptop, because I intended to take the scanner to the office. I can either sit around with my thumbs a-twiddle waiting for a scanner, or I can proceed with Operation Oh To Hell With It and set up my own workstation. Otherwise I’d have to wait for the Mac I was promised long ago, and then I’d have to petition for admin access. The idea of not having admin access to my own machine is like being married to someone who wears a chastity belt and gave the key to someone else. In HR.
So I set up my own shop. I should note that I have finally, finally after all these years, been attached to a Team at the paper. I’ve been hanging out there, a lone molecule orbiting nothing, as long as I’ve been there. Now? Digital. Blogging, video production, music, and the SuperSecret project. I love it. Some days it means mornings that begin much earlier than I’m used to, and I find myself at 9 AM coveting a second breakfast – something that’s hard to resist when you know you can get scrambled eggs, toast and bacon upstairs for two-and-a-quarter. Those are practically Valli prices from 1981. They have hashed browns, too. The temptation of working one floor below the certainty of hashed browns is sometimes too much to bear.
Anyway. I hooked up the scanner, and discovered the tantalizing lie of slides: they look so wonderfully sharp when you hold them up to the light, and blur out when you scan them. I’ve tweaked everything, but you can’t get around the limitations of the source material. That said, I present details from the slides of Mexico, some time in the 50s. I’ve scanned them at the largest possible resolution, zoomed in, and picked out images which could be the bones of a dozen stories.
This one was almost beyond saving, but turned out mysterious. I’m pretty sure he was a hired killer, or a retired hired killer.
A town, somewhere, after the rain. Reform and Pepsi:
The pole in the middle is the most significant change in the last 100 years, probably:
She swore she had seen him before, but he was gone before she knew for sure:
Finally: a Family Man.
Lots more to come, here and at buzz.mn. See you there now, and here later.
It’s long been rumored that a lifetime battle with irritable bowel syndrome fueled the tormented music of Franz “Laxative” Liszt.
Sadly, the all-knowing and never-inaccurate Wikipedia has nothing to say about the corporeal inventor of Cocoa Puffs aside from the fact that the cereal was introduced by General Mills in 1958. Oh, and a Google search for “who invented cocoa puffs” returns this blog as its third result.
I’ve been getting a log of spam messages that say “I think you are thinking like sukrat, but I think you should cover the other side of the topic in the post too…”. Who is this mystic Sukrat of whom you speak? I wonder…
Thank goodness for Akismet.
My parents took tons of slides. Unfortunately, they took so many that they often went through and tossed some of them because they didn’t have enough space for all those round slide trays.
One time when looking through them, I noticed a bit of rot or mold growing in the corners of a couple of them. So I bought a slide scanner and my just-retired father scanned in all 3000 or so of them.
Like yours, they are resolution limited, however, the biggest disappointment was the dust which I found nearly impossible to remove. I think the slide projector with its blast of heat sort of welded some of the dust to the slide material itself.
My parents were big fans of the World Fairs and went to a few of them, and they got the pix to prove it. Pretty cool space-age stuff.
You can only get resolution as good as the camera/lens that made them. There’s a lot of us who shoot slide film, and I could show you some scans that are sharp enough to slice bread with.
_@_v – enny pix of the oklahoma pavilion at the 64/5 ny worlds fair? any pix in general of the 64/5 ny worlds fair?
_@_v – oh and it’s amazing how deep spammers will sink to promote their krep. they’ll even raid guestbooks on little geocities sites. because apparently there’s legions of people who’ll click on a link buried in a guestbook. eventually had to resort to moderating the one attached to one of my pages.
“…I found some slides of a 1950s Mexican vacation at the antique store.”
You mean somebody went all the way to Mexico, and then spent the whole time inside an antique store? Much as I love antique stores, that sounds kind of boring…
You need a better scanner. Flatbeds are not the hardware of choice to scan negatives or slides. Unfortunately, that means something by the likes of Nikon that costs more than $1,000 new. Film/slide scanners come with software that will remove the scratches and dust from the digital image too.
Or click on that ad at Shorpy and ship the slides to India.
James, my husband drives a handicap bus for the city. He’s having lunch at 9am. If he gets to stop here for a break, he gets bacon & eggs. Supper at 2, bedtime is 5:30 or 6. So your second breakfast sounds perfectly reasonable in this household.
Picture with pole in middle? Try 300 years . . . cool stuff, thanks for putting in the effort. The images will swim around in my brain for the day if that helps rationalize the time you put into the project!
Coloniquash… he was in ‘Last of the Mohicans’, wasn’t he. Something about ‘warrior who never shows up on time, and is always off in the bushes somewhere’.
Not having admin access on your own workstation is not unlike being a Moonie or Davidian cultist, in that on random days the weird kid with the strange hair comes by, pops out his ear buds, and says today you get to talk to you wife. But that’s all.
Spammers are craftier now than they were 10 years ago. I also run a WordPress blog (not as active as yours, sadly) and I’ve been hit with many a spam.
One of the most craftiest ways I’ve seen was through Instant Messenger. I remember one day sitting in the living room, dozing off, when I heard the familiar *ring* my Instant Messenger gave off whenever someone wanted to chat with me. I went into the computer room, thinking it was a friend wanting to go out somewhere, but imagine my shock when the first line read “Congratulations.” The spammer/phisher went on to say I was a benefactor, and that I was going to receive so many millions of dollars. Basically it was a Nigerian 419. I reported them to my Instant Messenger provider, blocked them, the whole nine yards.
As for slides, I remember in 6th grade my teacher showing us slides from her trip to Australia and New Zealand.
If you can clean those slides up, that would be a great new page for the site. Maybe a satirical look at traveling to Mehico, with your own personal touch. Probably do some research on some of the locations depicted on the slides. I’m sure some of those slides are labelled as to what they are, possibly with whoever’s in the shot as well, like Uncle Jeff in front of some temple or Memaw and Pepop in front of El Rey de Hamburguesa. I don’t think anyone would mind, since the slides ended up in an antique store anyway.
This morning’s gem:
“The idea of not having admin access to my own machine is like being married to someone who wears a chastity belt and gave the key to someone else. In HR. ”
I gotta remember to say that when the jack-booted I.T. thugs come and take away admin rights on my machine. Not that it will make any difference, I just will have something pithy to say to the Man, man. (Of course, I’ll credit you, James.)
I like the spam that tries to sound normal and suck up to me:
“Good points but do not you think you are forgetting about thing of dsfkjhdsakfj? Nonetheless good of write!!!”
Because that’s so flattering to me as a blogger, I probably won’t notice that your Christian name is Throbbing-Satisfaction-Guaranteed.com.
People seem to be avoiding this photographer–walking or looking away. There is a paranoiac feel to the photos, as if something is about to happen.
The biggest problems with slides is for whatever reason they faded quite quickly.
My Dad has a large number of family vacation slides taken in the mid 1970s that are just about completely gone. They could probably be brought back with an hour of Photoshop time each, but those photos of 1975 Lincoln, Nebraska just aren’t worth the effort.
Now, if I could ever get around to scanning the hundreds of color negatives from that same era that seem to be hanging in there, that would be different…
I bought a little slide scanner for hundred bucks. It only does three at a time but it’s much better than fooling with a flatbed. Those slides were deteriorating and my folks are gone now so I felt that I needed to save the memories. Gave a CDR copy to each of my three brothers so maybe one will survive.
“This one was almost beyond saving, but turned out mysterious. I’m pretty sure he was a hired killer, or a retired hired killer. ”
Look, it’s William S. Burroughs!
slides are intrinsically good material to work with. I processed a bargeload of ‘em myself, printed some on both Ciba and Kodak paper. 60s Ektachromes were a little pointillistic, but E6 really sharpened the film up in the 70s.
I periodically toy with the idea of scanning mine and the folks’ output, time’s a-wasting. I’m thinking I will have a little fun with tax refund time this year. the 16mm in the basement has survived excellently, so the slides should be in great shape as well.
I have taken the first run at using the flatbed, the software does not have its collective act together. so it’s going to be a minolta or nikon scanner I’ll be looking for.
I was broosing the Internets and came acrost your most pleasurable and agreesome blog posting comments. I quite agree with your thoughtfull points about TARGETMATCHBOOKMOTEL and wish to cher wit you news of an amazing and gauranteed new way to get Obama Stimulus Moneys for your blogsite. Please visit my blogging web at http://www.VeryImportantInfos.cn for soon informations.
Laxative List? Is that when you’ve consumed so much laxative you lean to one side?
Counter flooding will correct that list. You may be a bit down at the keel, but, you know, ya gotta do what ya gotta do.
Pretty much everyone over the age of 20 in those slides is now dead.
Apropos of nothing, I live in Rahm Emanuel’s district, meaning my phone rings every two minutes with a robo-call for one of our 78 possible next Congressdroids, and now whenever someone starts to tell me about Sara Feigenholtz or John Fritchey I answer them with an accented voice and political opinions of the 1910s:
“Sara Feigenholtz will cure cancer–”
“No Feigenholtz! Is tool of Eastern speculators and revanchists!”
“John Fritchey is endorsed by Jesus–”
“What about the gold standard! Where does he stand on crucifying our farmers on a cross of silver?”
I like to think that they’re testing both of those with focus groups right now for a last minute ad blitz.
I’m surprised how good a job you do keeping the comments cleaned up. What’s going to happen to all the old posts you no longer check? I suspect from my own experience that those will unfortunately get flooded with junk. Can you get some kind of image verification system or something for this WordPress thing? Or perhaps just require registration?
Alex et al…
recaptcha might be a good one to use. Helps fix OCR’d books and stops spambots. Two birds with one stone as it were…
http://recaptcha.net/
I make once-a-week contributions to a group blog on automobiles that runs on TypePad, and I have to say that their built-in comment spam filter is pretty good at cutting the bad guys off at the pass. The only things that seem to regularly leak through are the ones who put their name and/or product description as the commenter name and put in a URL. There’s a trucking firm called “National Transport” and an auto parts seller called “Drivewire” that seem to be the worst offenders–but I have to give the folks selling “Wedding Dresses for Men” points for creativity.
Wow, Jim Treacher is lurking
Spent a week last winter scanning slides that my wife’s late father took in the 50s and 60s. I was pleased that I got anything.
Cute pics of my wife when she was a kid that I had never seen. Also, her dad was an engineer so, there are pics of many things under construction at the time that seem old today.
I always wondered why people would sell old family photos in antique shops. Couldn’t figure out, for the life of me, why anyone would want a picture of someone unknown to them.
However, I got quite a laugh out of a film I once saw (can’t remember the name), wherein the family had a collection of old framed photos on a hallway wall. Sure enough, they didn’t know the subjects in the pictures – they used it as a conversation piece
“So who did invent cocoa puffs?”
Well……, I don’t know. But, I do know and am friends with the man who invented “Captain Crunch”. So, do you want to know who that is?
The ‘reform pepsi’ slide has a proto-mime in it.
If they knew then what we know now…
In Re: slides. A good camera store can do wonders. I took in some old, big, early 20th century family studio pics in to be reproduced. They did – beautifully. On one, the chemicals were coming apart, ’silvering’ and they were able to make clear, good copies of it, of both. And they remounted the originals back into their frames,
BTW – If you don’t have this site donated to the Smithsonian in your will, you should. A chest in the Nation’s attic, as it were.
Susan – A lesson to write down the day/date/month/year on the back of family group photos, and who everyone is.
And to have someone write down a history of everyone.
Concerning the “hired killer” slide: I think William S. Burroughs was still down in Mexico at that time.
Those are pretty bad scans. I see a lot of horizontal artifacting – not sure where that’s coming from. If you look beyond the artifacts, the source material seems like it might be really good; you should check with one of the photogs at the Trib.
By the way, the problem with the first slide (hired killer) might be that you had the shiny emulsion side facing the wrong way (i.e., away from the sensor assembly). That being said, I don’t remember the correct orientation.
Eric in Seattle
Love the Mexican slides – the colors, the architecture, the mood of them. My parents were ardent slide takers and travellers during the mid century years. Maybe because they lived all their days on flat land in a cold country, they were fascinated with mountains and tropical foliage – and felt compelled to gather hundreds of slides of these subjects. The slides were passed down to me, and after culling out all the scenery-only shots, scanned hundreds of them into Picasa from Google. The cool thing was that I could lighten up the dark pictures and see details that had been lurking in the shadows for 50 or 60 years!
found a really good flickr page of family photos with the stories behind them called ‘mom’s world’ at this url
http://www.flickr.com/photos/joeyharrison/sets/1071542/
watch this entry doesn’t post for a week when everyone’s moved on something else
All my clever commentary here, and all you can find quote-worthy is spam.
P.S. “Reforma” refers to the 1855-1876 upheaval whereby the Mexican people threw off the chains of one dictatorship and embraced a suffocating, European-style socialist state instead.
Of course, that wasn’t their intent. Now they’re simply voting with their feet, as it were.
Nonetheless, “Reforma” was once an exalted concept in Mexico. Now it’s just a slogan that rings about like “Great Society” does here. Except it’s still plastered all over everything.
Hey shesnailie, thanks for the link to “moms world”. Old b&w’s like these are magical!
Go ahead, ask me who invented both Cocoa Puffs and sarcasm…
_I_ did.