Robert Kennedy, Jr.

I would vote for this man. He understands what is wrong with both major parties, and recognizes the reasoning behind the White House's tactics for what it is: fascism.

The box said daylight

Because I'm cheap and lazy, I try to come up with alternative, $2 solutions to $500 problems commonly experienced in photography. Oddly enough, they don't usually work.

For example, there often just isn't enough natural light to create the effect that I want. If I use my on-camera flash, I end up with a completely different effect, a flat and harsh snapshot instead of a photo with subtle lighting and depth. If I turn on an artificial light, it affects the colour in the picture (yellow with incandescent, green with fluorescent). The accepted solution would be to use photography-specific lighting, such as a separate flash and/or freestanding lights and reflectors, but that would cost money and sounds very awkward.

So I was shopping in Superstore the other day, and I came across these incandescent bulbs with a blue coating. The box claimed that the colour of light they gave off was in the daylight range. Ah hah, I said. I can put these bulbs in a lamp to give myself spot or supplemental fill lighting, and everything will be good. I can take pictures of my cats at night to my heart's content.

Well, I'm here to tell you that even though the naked eye is fooled, film is not. The pictures came out still noticeably yellow, if less so than before. But I'm an optimist. I'm thinking about trying out an aquarium grow light next.

Gear

Yesterday, because I completely can't afford it, I bought a new lens for my camera, and I am so excited! The lens is a Pentax-FA SMC 28-200 3.8-5.6 AL(IF) with hood, which is not the fastest, but it's ok. My camera is a Pentax SF-1. I've really been wanting to get a telephoto lens because I'm starting another photography class tonight. Not that I'll necessarily take any better pictures than I did before, but at least I won't be able to blame it on the gear anymore.

If I take any good pictures, I'll try to post them here, but I'm warning you, they'll probably be cat portraits.

Heisenberg's cat

My cat, Otto, likes to play in the tub behind the closed shower curtain. I can hear him in there, making a lot of noise, thwap-a-wap-a-wap-a-thwap, pause, thwap-a-thwap-a-wap-a-thwap, pause, pause, thwap...

If I open the curtain to see exactly what the hell he's doing, all I see is him crouched down, staring at me with dilated pupils.

The nerve

So I went to the optometrist yesterday, and everything was going smashingly, right up until the end, when she pointed out that she measured my left optic nerve at .25 (mm?) and my right one at .15. This wouldn't be a problem in and of itself, except that at my last appointment, they were both .15.

She says that this may be a very early sign of glaucoma, or it may be a difference in the way she and the last optometrist measured the nerve. I get to go back in six months for a follow-up, and if it has continued to grow, then I might be in trouble. Well, trouble thirty years from now, but still, I don't ever want to go blind. In the meantime, "eat right, keep fit," the usual blah blah blah.

Also, for some reason, she was insistent that I was going to get laser eye surgery. The last time I went, 2 1/2 years ago, I did want them to check to see if I was a candidate, but I got glasses then and haven't been back since, so obviously it wasn't a big priority for me. But yesterday, she was all talking about how the glaucoma issue might delay it and she doesn't know how big a rush I am in about it and she can send me over to Horizon and let me put these drops in your eyes that'll dilate your pupils for the next eight hours, and I'm like, I didn't ask for laser eye surgery, and she just keeps going. Either she gets a kickback, or everybody she sees wants the surgery, because holy goddamn crap! Seriously, lady, you just told me I might have glaucoma. I don't want to talk about re-shaping contacts.

My computer just froze - literally

Do you know how cold it is in Regina today? -47 Celsius, with the wind chill. For you Americans unfamiliar with metric, who are probably thinking that's about -10 Fahrenheit, no. Not even close.

That would be -54 Fahrenheit. That's right. -54. Like 86 degrees below freezing.

It's been like this for a couple of days, and will be for at least one more. In fact, tomorrow's supposed to be even colder.

I park about 2 blocks from my office, and with the snow on the ground, it takes me at least five minutes to walk the distance. Today, I kept feeling my eyeballs start to freeze as I walked directly into the wind. I'd have to look away and blink hard to get the moisture moving again. Then I'd feel the skin around my eyes and nostrils getting hard, just exactly as skin is not supposed to do.

Everybody keeps saying that at least we don't have earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes, volcanos, poisonous snakes or insects, or dangerous animals, and how they're happy to stay here and deal with the cold and the snow. And yet, with all our advantages, the northern prairies are some of the least populated areas in the world. Odd, isn't it?

Burnout

It's not that I'm losing interest, per se, but I just can't keep up the rate of moral outrage I had going in the first weeks after the election. I don't want to read the political websites anymore. I don't want to post and post and post here, not accomplishing anything, just screaming my frustration incoherently.

At the same time, I don't want to stop writing here, so this blog may take a bit of a turn, and become more personal. Hope nobody (heh) minds.

Things that went wrong today, before 10 am:

• one pair of glasses, snapped in half at the bridge for no apparent reason
• one meeting with a client, forgotten and missed completely
• one cup of coffee, spilled all over a coworker and her desk

I also learned that runny yolks and egg sandwiches and clean arms/shirts/desks/cats do not go together, but that was later in the day.

Things that went right:

• one boss, taking the meeting for me and not killing me later
• one blizzard warning, lifted
• one afternoon, full of intensely satisfying spreadsheet diddling (wow, that ended up sounding a lot dirtier than I expected)
• one cat, purring in my arms
  

And Iraqis are better off, and the world's a safer place

How can they carry on with the farce of calling them democratic elections, when they have decided it is too dangerous for the candidates if their names are made public?

Yay Boxer, boo Bush!

This time, finally, a senator agreed to back the House's objection to the Ohio vote count. Hee! I can hear Bush's tantrum from here.

Mad cow

December 29/04 - US re-opens border to live Canadian beef
January 2/05 - Second case of Mad Cow found in Alberta

Sigh. The ranchers seriously can't win. Of course, proving that the decision was always motivated by politics rather than health, apparently the US will not revoke its decision to re-open the border.

What really pisses me off about this is that there is a very simple way to prevent Mad Cow - don't feed cows to cows. They're not even carnivores, let alone cannibals. But that might cost a little bit more, so it's out of the question. Instead, we'll just continue to produce diseased animals. After all, what's a little brain-wasting between friends?

Religion of fear

For some thousand years in Western society, people were controlled by their fear of hell. Their actions, loyalties, choices, and even their thoughts were governed by the ruling priests, who held ultimate power over their immortal souls. In the last hundred and fifty years, though, this power has been waning, as religion has less and less influence on people's lives. So what's a ruling class to do?

Well, if you're a neocon, the answer is easy: substitute a more earthly fear for the spiritual one that no longer resonates. If people have become materialistic, threaten their prosperity. Threaten their security and their peace and their way of life. Make sure that the people know you are the only one standing between them and disaster, so you are indispensable.

I'm curious why this phenomenon is so prevalent in the US, while Canada seems relatively untouched by it. I also wonder what we can do to prevent its spread here.

Long-term goals

According to this article, Rumsfeld and Cheney have been at it for decades.

Rumsfeld and Cheney began a concerted effort - first secretly and then openly - to undermine Nixon's treaty for peace and to rebuild the state of fear and, thus, reinstate the Cold War.

And these two men - 1974 Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Ford Chief of Staff Dick Cheney - did this by claiming that the Soviets had secret weapons of mass destruction that the president didn't know about, that the CIA didn't know about, that nobody but them knew about. And, they said, because of those weapons, the US must redirect billions of dollars away from domestic programs and instead give the money to defense contractors for whom these two men would one day work.

Do you know your state flower? How about your state religion?

According to this article in the New York Times, Clarence Thomas believes that the constitutional separation of church and state applies to the federal government but not to state governments, meaning that individual states could adopt an official religion and use tax money to proselytize for it.

I think the writer of this article is being optimistic if he/she thinks that's all that could happen. In England 350 years ago, people who did not conform to the state religion were prohibited from many jobs including holding public office, persecuted, and even killed. The same happened in Spain during the Inquisition. I've read opinions by fanatic Christian politicians in the States in the last year or so that because the US is a "Christian nation", only Christians should be allowed to hold political office. Do not make the mistake of believing it couldn't happen.

This site will tell you the "Ten Things President Bush Doesn't Want You To Know About Scalia And Thomas."

Lifetime imprisonment without trial

The US is now considering ways in which they can keep suspected terrorists, whom they can't try due to lack of evidence, in prison for the rest of their lives. Unbelievable. Someone could more or less be snatched up by the American military for any reason, and never, ever be released, with no recourse and no chance to argue his or her innocence. I mean, I guess I understand that it's all in the name of freedom and democracy that the US has decided to become a totalitarian regime...

They have to be stopped. How? And who?