I have no idea when I took this picture, though I assume it was taken on our front window screen.
Just organizing my digital photos so that I can (hopefully) archive a bunch of them to CD or DVD, and came across this test photograph. It's a copy of one of the stained glass windows in Notre Dame that we keep hanging in our dining room window, and is a frequent subject when I'm trying to work out some function or other in my camera.
From David Brooks, the following (emphasis added):
I understand the complaints, but I thought the questions were excellent. The journalist’s job is to make politicians uncomfortable, to explore evasions, contradictions and vulnerabilities. Almost every question tonight did that. The candidates each looked foolish at times, but that’s their own fault.
Uh...no. The job of a journalist is to get to the truth, and then share it with the world. Journalists shouldn't care one way or the other how comfortable politicians are. If discomfort was the end goal of journalism, then Sasha Baron Cohen and Stephen Colbert would win Pulitzers annually.
Of course, the irony in this is that even if political discomfort were the goal of journalism, American journalists would fail on that account just as miserably as they do their more important task.
On Temple of the Seven Golden Camels today, I found the following, expressing concern about the new Indiana Jones movie:
The part of the trailer that sets off alarm bells in my head is the moment when Ray Winstone says "This isn't going to be easy" and Harrison Ford answers "Not as easy as it used to be" (If you haven't seen the trailer, it can be found here or here.The reason I think this line is troublesome is that it's basically a wink to the audience that refers to the first movie and the fact that the first movie was made over twenty years ago. It's a line that would be meaningless if those first films had never been made and if we weren't all aware of them.
I have a hard time believing that anybody would ever really say that line in that situation. I know people who have aged and have made remarks about their diminished faculties but never at all the way Indy does here, and it's hard to imagine that being the first thing on your mind in the situation that Indiana Jones seems to be in here.
That line in the trailer bothered me as well, but for slightly different reasons. I don't have a problem with the occasionally improbable aside, but this one strikes me as being horribly out of character. A more appropriate response would have been for Indy to say, "It never is." After all, it's not like he handily sailed through the first three films, and unless those were exceptions to his career or he spent the time between "The Last Crusade" and the new film sitting quietly on dissertation committees, we have to assume that he has these kinds of adventures on a regular basis.
The following is a shot of some stuff that's just been sitting on our dining room table, put into a quickie scene. Mostly I'm testing an image uploading applescript, but this is also a photo that I think is fun.
For bonus points, what other goofball items can you see here?
