Issues dude. Issues.
So the Nice Dog Lady finally stuck her finger in my ring.
It was a joyous occasion, witnessed and overseen by an eccentric Dutch couple who insisted on taking photographs. How we laughed so.
I’m not sure I can top that opening so I’ll think I’ll leave this post riiiight round about there.
36, I’m told, is an All-Gold birthday.
Yes indeedy folks, the answer lies in the packaging. They 36 cram delicious mature adult tomatoes into one bottle of All-Gold. The analogy carries itself from there quite fine with one minor exception…
It is my birthday and I won’t have anyone cramming any amount of tomatoes in me. No matter how hard I beg.
I can’t remember when last I typed a blog post. Fortunately, the site does and has responded with a resounding November 7. In blue.
The truth is that I have been typing furiously over the past few months, only most of the content is of a slightly more esoteric nature and bound to drive me knee first into a legal quagmire with nothing to pull me out except a chain of carefully tied gym socks should I publish it.
The only notes of a personal nature are these days reserved to the likes of:
Which leaves me with the question of “what to write about”?
What I need is a global event. A cataclysmic Act of God, the likes of which has not been seen for a hundred years. Something so huge, powerful and devastating that it would be impossible to miss and illegal to ignore.
But what?
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Life is full of ambiguities.
There are some that say that life itself is ambiguous. Although this may sound deep and ponderous I can say with some certainty that I have no idea what it might mean. Such ramblings are the domain of a tired mind, possibly even the product of the public schooling system. Nobody is at fault here.
A conversation over the phone got me thinking, a pastime I do not relish much these days. I prefer to spend my idle time engaged in menial and purposeful tasks such as whittling the legs of furniture into famous naval scenes. Yet it got me thinking about lights, trains, tunnels and rainbows. These are clearly not my favourite collection of topics as they leave me in deep rhetorical waters and my Wellies only cover my calves up to my knees.
The term “there is light at the end of the tunnel” was bandied about in a loose and irresponsible fashion. I guess it is sometimes comforting to know that hope is on the way, that an end to your strife and troubles are near or that your vision is returning after falling of the roof while leafing through the gutters. However, we are oft warned to “stay away from the light”, though usually in a rather more expressive fashion: “stay awaaaay from the liiiiight”. Perhaps that light does belong to Thomas and his anthropomorphic Friends after all. Perhaps it means that you are nigh on approaching a white-washed room containing a small table and a cameo performance by an aging but presentable actor [1]. You can see why this would be confusing to children.
There is a little understood component in working with digital images that involves blending between layers.
Blending dictates, essentially, how one layer interacts with or affects another layer (below it). Photoshop and its many little ugly cousins provide us with a miriad of possibilities from blending brightness to contrast to colours to plain weirdness. You probably won’t ever need more than about 5 of the basic blending modes but the one that I find the most useful is the “Luminosity” blending mode.
When increasing contrast in an image, whether you use Levels, Curves or any other contrast enhancing tool, it is important to note that it affects contrast across all of your colour channels. This can be easily remedied by simply changing your contrast enhancing layer or adjustment layer [1] to use a Luminosity blending mode.
I don’t own a TV.
This is partly because I secretly enjoy telling people that I don’t pay my TV license because it’s the right thing to do. It’s also partly because the internet is jammed pack full of awesomeness that I can rely on it for all my amusements, abusements and bemusements.
It’s been a long and eventful journey since my first taste of the world-wide-wait. Now I crave it from my parched intellect to my my starving need to be entertained. Herewith follows an (almost) chronological account of all the poignant moments in my web-surfing career, the highlights, the old faithfuls and once-a-day fixes.
If you are not familiar with these gems already, it will only serve to highlight your diminuative age or your complete and utter failure of ever having grasped what the internet was created for in the first place. Don’t be embarrassed, like athlete’s foot, it can be cured slowly.
I’m teaching myself to multitask.
I fear I have much to learn. Amelia managed to send 30 emails, edit a spreadsheet, apply makeup, find all the crap on my iPod, make 3 phone calls and drink a Savannah in the time it took to drive from Somerset West to Blouberg. If she hadn’t pre-prepared the salad I can only assume that she would have chopped and tossed that en-route. I may have set my sights a bit high.
It makes me think though, and I don’t like to think much most mornings. It puts unnecessary strain on a well groomed hangover.
JJB reckons that woman can’t actually do two things at once, but rather can do two things half as well at the same time. The two parts simply add up to a single whole. Although the notion has merit, I find it unlikely that I would be able to apply that theory in a rational debate with a woman. Nor would I want to. They are capable of burning holes through your spine with their eyes, slapping you in the face with a wet fish and driving a high-heeled shoe through your temple all at the same time.
I don’t care which one is done half well.
All this is moot though. Amelia is capable of bathing a dog, building a 1500 piece puzzle, deciding who will win Survivor and deboning a chicken all on the way to work. All I’m capable of doing in the same time is driving over a nail, whacking my wing-mirror on the garage door, scaring a small child, jumping a red light and running out of petrol under the boom at the entrance to my office park.
Multi-tasking is, in fact, for the birds.
Halloween, contrary to some belief, is not a Yanky festival.
It actually has it’s origins in Celtic tradition. That’s right, it was the Irish who taught us to let our children dress up as freaks and knock on strangers’ doors asking for sweeties (I live opposite a primary school, it’s normally the other way round).
I’m tasked this year with constructing a Halloween playlist and it’s turning out to be quite an intellectual mind-bender. Here’s the shortlist so far. Starting with the obvious choices:
…and it looks like a chicken? Well, that’s settled then.
I may have mentioned chicken somewhere before. I forget why exactly but when I considered that I’d mentioned vegetarianism before too, it all started falling into place [1].
Can one, indeed, dress Mutton as Lamb?
I cannot begin to think why not. The one is none other than an ovine O.A.P. [2] that’s trying to stay hip (or at least with a hip-replacement). It is a tactic adopted by most cougars on the hunt for nubile, blind young men who are impervious to the smell of moth-balls. These are, for obvious reasons, in short supply, hence the need to dress down so to speak.
Dressing Lamb as Mutton, on the other hand, would be like photographing your child with a slicked down comb-over, a little tie and a blazer that’s been pulled taught behind his back with safety pins to make it fit. My parents have many of these pearls. I know yours do to. Don’t make me prove it.
Somerset West is on fire.
Literally, that is. This is not a town ablaze with cosmopolitan delights; burning with brazen, youthful zeal; or even conflagrant with exotic and filthy Eastern temptations. Mind you, the Ladies of the Elsies Riviera are known to impart certain kinds of tantalising treats that should leave something burning for a few weeks at least.
