bestof/photography

This is an old attempt to gather the most interesting bits of kirk.is in an easy-to-browse format.

If you like kirk.is mostly for the quotes and links, it might not be the "best of" per se, but overall these pages represent a big part of my creative output so far in the 21st century. The "best of" parts are shown in their natural habitat, often accompanied by the typical quotes and links and asides.

I've divided the work into various categories, and tried to sort each page into roughly descending order of "interestingness". Sometimes there's a particularly chosen closing entry.

I'm 29!

Oy.

BTW--snow? Today?

Yeesh.

Image of the Moment
--The Ghost of a Snowman. Inspired in two ways by Ranjit; it's similar to some photos he took in 2001...and his offer of being a guest poster for the April Fool's edition of his site Moonmilk got me to make some shots I had taken more presentable, so click that link for more and larger images. (A fullsize version of the original snowman shot on my wallpaper page, which was also inspired by a page by Ranjit. He rocks!)

---

Quote of the Moment

I can't read porno by candlelight!! Who am I, Abe Lincoln?!

---

Current Events Link of the Moment
The Iraq-O-Meter, for all your at a glance war stats needs.

---

War Analysis of the Moment
Slate.com has two pieces that, together provide some insight to the thinking behind getting ourselves into this war. The first is What Was Rumsfeld Thinking? and it argues that Rumsfeld tried to lowball the troopcount in order to prove neoconservative thinking about the effectiveness of smaller and lighter forces, as well as demonstrating a more credible simultaneous threat against "the Axis of Evil", Syria, and heck, lets throw Saudi Arabia into the mix too. I guess one sliver of silver lining is that if this is a quagmire, the administration is likely to not be as hawkish as it would be if the "regime crumbling" scenario won. Of course, from the neocon point of view, it makes as look less strong in the world. Think it might bring us to to something closer to a "humble foreign policy"?

The other article gives some of the background to the Iraqi force being "a bit different than the one we war-gamed against." I remember hearing about the armed forces wargames last summer, and how the commander of the "bad guys" quit, because he was overly constrained in the tactics he could use, his strategies overridden by the staff running the game. We're such idiots! We broadcast how we're going to invade, how much it's going to hurt if we don't get our way, and then we're surprised that the Iraqis don't want to follow all the rules we expect them to?

---

War Quote of the Moment

It's my country.

For more pessimism, Bill the Splut linked to this article tal about how numbingly difficult it is to fight in cities. So, yesterday I noticed an attractive beetle crawling on the window ledge at work:


click for full 600x600
I checked, and lo and behond, my Canon SD400 has a nifty "Digital Macro" feature. Once I learned to stop messing it up with additional zoom, I managed to get some decent shots. The focus isn't perfect for all of the image, but with these 2 shots (Both are heavily cropped) I managed to get the important detail.


click for full 1600x1200

The second one is resized to make good wallpaper, and both of these images have been added to my desktop wallpaper page. I think it's worth clicking to see the full version of both.

---

Hedbergism of the Moment

I was in a casino, minding my own business, and this guy came up to me and said, "You're gonna have to move. You're blocking a fire exit." As though if there was a fire, I wasn't gonna run. If you're flammable and have legs, you are never blocking a fire exit. Unless you are a table.

---

Essay and Jokes of the Moment
A longish but worthwhile essay on the jokes people in communist countries told. I remember one that I think Lena told me in college:

Stalin was walking through the park eating caviar on a bulky roll. An old frail hungry woman comes up to him "Please, Mr. Chairman, " she begins, "may I have a bit of your sandwich?" "No, get away from me, you stupid woman!"

The woman returns to her friends and tells them what happened. "Oh, I'm so happy!" she says. "Why?" they ask, "he was totally rude to you!" "But... he could have had me killed!"

For some reason it's the detail of caviar on a bulky roll that makes me remember that one. Ksenia told me another joke:

A woman sees a starving woman and her son near a zoo. She takes pity on them and gives the boy the apple that she had with her. The mother prompts her son, "well, what do you say?" The boy looks down at the apple, looks up, looks down and says "Hello, Apple!"

I posted a version of that joke in the comments to help explain my Hello, Money! greeting of newborn cash from the ATM, but I left out the poverty aspect, which, after reading the article, I realize is what made it a political joke rather than just a bit of absurd humor.

---

News Event of a Past Moment
Color me parochial but I don't think it sunk in that Mumbai is what used to be called Bombay.

Back from NYC. Seeing those two towers reflected in the "Millenium Hilton" when your back is to the WTC site are a little unnerving, at least for a moment. The Guggenheim wasn't quite so blue as the other subjects, but it's always fun to photograph. The eight is there because I admired the craftsmanship, and then I could make it look like eight blue photos is what I was aiming for all along. Other trip highlights were a terrific cheap Russian place in Brooklyn, just outside the Hassidic Jewish neighborhood our hotel was in, a Klee exhibit at "The Neue Galerie", hanging around where the St. Patricks Day parade was coming to a stop (always fun to see bands and groups coming undone, relaxing and grateful to be finished), Times Square, seeing "The Producers", and meeting up with Tony from Tufts.

Three photos from three consecutive Augusts, added to my desktop wallpaper page. The water one is probably the best background... nice how it made kind of a squared off Yin/Yang.

---

Sports Note of the Moment
Not that I have a dog in this fight, but the injustice of a blown call in Game 2 of the World Series rankles me to no end. It just ain't right. The Umpire said it hit the guy, not the bat, every bit of replay showed he was dead wrong, but still, there was no recourse.

I hate trivial injustices almost as much as the big ones.



This is (the back of) Mo standing in front of the fountain at the World Trade Center plaza, taken September 11, 1999, two years (to the day) before the tragedy.

I liked that fountain very much. I once got the chance to look down on it, from about halfway up the tower, three years earlier when I was on assignment for Barron's Online. It was the most interesting thing to look at from that height... water poured from the center circle onto the larger circle. All around the outside border of the inner circle it looked a bit like a boat's wake (you can make out the 'wake' in the picture), giving the illusion that the inner circle's edge was constantly moving inward. But of course it was remaining the same size, thus confounding the eye. It was a great piece of art, now ruined. That pales in comparison to the rest of the tragedy, but that's my attempt to connect to what has happened.

Update 2002.02.25: I moved a thumbnail and link to this page to kisrael.com's front page. The image shows up on the second page of Google image search for "WTC", but the resulting "in context" link is to the site's front page.

---

Image Gallery
The pictures from Tuesday were horrifying, but for some reason these images of the citizens of other countries sharing our grief really moved me. (Update: parts two, three and four)

---

A Lighter Note
Brunching.com has An Open Letter To Dorks and Losers, exploding the myths of bullydom, like "they'll back down if you stand up to them". It's very funny and rings very true. Do you think politicians ever change each other's mind, like with debate on the house floor? Does a convincing argument even matter at determining the outcome of votes, or is the real action in all the party-wrangling and poll analysis and the arguments are just good for sound clips on the evening news?

---

Link of the Moment
Potentially useful link: GetHuman.com... how to talk to a real live person as quickly as possible, for a big array of companies. (via Sarah, who wishes Dylan was on that list.)

---

Vacation Photos of the Moment
So on my first day in Florida, Felisdemens and I went to The Morikami museum and gardens. Quote of the Moment

Photography isn't about the pictures. Pictures never come out right. It's about the adventure.

---

Photo Gallery 1
So I got that new Canon Digital Elph, and I'm loving it. I've actually started carrying with me everywhere, the same way I do my Pilot and cellphone, and started playing at being a photographer. These are some of my favorite post-honeymoon pictures (shrunk down from the originals which were five times times the size seen here):

Flash Toy of the Moment
Yesterday boingboing posted a link to what might be the freakiest flash animation ever...a ragdoll woman manuequin falling through and sliding over an infinite amount of spheres. (You can grab the figure with the mouse and help her if she gets caught in a dead end.) EERIE.

---

Photos of the Moment
A few portraits of sorts taken during a recent trip to Chicago:

At the Häagen-Dazs at Navy Pier:




Afterwards, tired while walking around downtown searching for the Blue Line:(yet another "reflection")


Quote and Ramble of the Moment

Considerable evidence suggests that if we use an increase in our incomes, as many of us do, simply to buy bigger houses and more expensive cars, then we do not end up any happier than before. But if we use an increase in our incomes to buy more of certain inconspicuous goods -- such as freedom from a long commute or a stressful job -- then the evidence paints a very different picture. The less we spend on conspicuous consumption goods, the better we can afford to alleviate congestion; and the more time we can devote to family and friends, to exercise, sleep, travel, and other restorative activities. On the best available evidence, reallocating our time and money in these and similar ways would result in healthier, longer -- and happier -- lives.

Man, what a thought-provoking statement!

I wish I knew how to act on it. Wish I had a better understanding of how my budget worked. It seems like I should be able to live on a lot less and I'm essentially debt-free (and with a comfortable buffer from the house) but my Savings grows very. Very. Slowly. Is it the toys? Media? Rent?

I can't complain about my job: it's not very strenuous, it's not physical labor, it pays well, my team has added some interesting and fun people. I must complain about my job: it's really tough to get motivated about its random projects, it has an awful commute, and I'm not happy with my work there. I guess most of my complaints are about the cosmic injustice that we all have to work except for this exceedingly tiny minority. Is it a life out of balance? Am I missing some fundamental daoist thing in not being able to find a deep satisfaction with my daily efforts?

There was an interesting Ask Slashdot about how to make programming fun again. It sounds like this guy really has it together.

One question: how restorative is travel? It always seems kind of stressful but fun, along with being something people "should" do. Or maybe the problem is that vacations always get lumped into these 1 or 2 week chunks, enough time that you feel compelled to "do something cool", but not enough time to really fit into the new lifestyle?

Sometimes it feels like my life and relationships and nation's politics all need a reboot. Not to wipe everything out, just get rid of the cruft, start with mostly the same installed programs, but free and clean to make a better go of it all.

---

Image of the Moment

--Ksenia (this very nice gal I've been dating as of late) at the top of the stairs. I like the way the lighting came out.

Video of the Moment
Probably the most amazing high school basketball shot in the history of the universe. Hmm...if people could learn to do that consistently, maybe basketball would be a whole new ballgame.

---

Photo of the Moment

--Tonya and Alex at their wedding reception yesterday. If it weren't for the placement of a few of the champagne bottles, this would be about my favorite wedding photo ever. I think overall I do dink around with low light stuff too much, get a lot of blurred photos. I need to figure out how to get my camera to take even darker, quicker pictures when it doesn't have enough light. So...wow, it's cold.

I finally got up some drapes for my bedroom and the tv/video room...tan suede, a little "western" feeling but I like it. It's not utterly "lights out" in the bedroom but it is significantly darker and I think it helps my sleep quite a bit...it's noticeably harder to get up in the morning if I went to bed too late (in the "I think I've been sleeping deeply recently" way, not the "I slept fitfully" way.)

But man is it cold. My thermostat was set to like 68 but the temperature was reading in the lowish 60s. I need to get some more drapes for the other rooms...I think. But I worry, unless I pin up the bottom of the curtains they're going to be covering the radiators, which looks ugly...would that undo the good I'm doing in blocking the chill from the window by also trapping the heat from the heating system? Maybe I should just buck and pin 'em up and see what happens. My place is going to be relatively dark though.

Actually, I got to googling the difference between "curtains" and "drapes" and got admonished by this for Dummies article: it's draperies never drapes. Err, whatever.

---

Flowers of the Moment

--Flower arrangement (for a family friend's grandfather's memorial, alas) by Ksenia. I helped winding the ribbons around the base. I like how this photo came out.

---

News Quote of the Moment

Watch to see what I can still do!

At least she obeyed the Ancient Advice of when attempting a silly stunt, "Never say anything more predictive than 'Watch this!'" Back now. Will try and catch up on comments etc. later...

Heh, actually there's less to catch up than I thought... maybe at some point I'll post screenshots of my editing system but I'm not who besides TSM would find that interesting.

Anyway: the Pats-Colts game. Bleh. Some crazy-weird calls, like taunting on Troy Brown (Referee: "he taunted me by gently tossing me the ball when I wasn't ready and making me look bad!") My co-worker is convinced (and predicted it a few weeks ago) that Belichick would basically throw the game to keep his team angry. Given how it looked they could have just kept it on the ground for the whole game, I almost think he's on to something, but that's a heap of wishful thinking.

---

Quote of the Moment

I am the emperor, and I want dumplings.

According to Bartlett's Anecdotes this is his "one recorded notable saying." It reminds me of Sarah and I riffing on a similar theme many years ago: Her was "I would that the minions bring me my biscuits" and mine was "Summon the waitstaff--I would have a scone." Hers has aged a bit better.

---

Image of the Moment

--A scenic pond my mom and I drove past in New Hampshire. It was chilly up there, I almost had to rethink my current idea of "wear sandals until I have to wear boots."

---

Politics of the Moment
Iraq as the Ultimate Welfare State, and pointing out how Bush is kind of an anti-Reagan in that regard.

---

Link of the Moment
The Wikipedia Knowledge Dump, "Knowldge's Last Chance", picks up the best of what Wikipedia discards. (via BoingBoing)

Puncuation Fun of the Moment
Puncuate the following so that it makes sense...if you give up, hit Ctrl-A or highlight the text (with its ten HADs) and reveal the puncuation:

ANN,  WHILE   BOB   HAD   HAD   "HAD,"  HAD   HAD "HAD   HAD." "HAD   HAD"   HAD   HAD   A   BETTER   EFFECT   ON   THE   TEACHER.

My coworker Tim showed that to me yesterday, I HADn't seen it before.

---

Kittens of the Moment
Ksenia's family is catsitting Mia, a mamacat who just had herself a batch of kittens...last night FoSO, FoSOSO, Ksenia and I headed over for some kitten therapy. I was going to dole the photos out one per day but Ksenia accused me of being too stingy, so here you go all at once...
Quote of the Day

"Evangelists say Halloween is the devil's holiday.
What a lame-ass devil! Sitting down in the depths of hell, going, "I've got control of the major corporations, churning out weapons and toxic waste, but how can I get candy? Let me think--I'll get the children of the world to dress up as hobos and Power Rangers--and then I'll have all the bite-size Three Musketeers I need! I am Satan!"

---

Image of the Moment

--Jack O' Lantern's Eye View of Mo and the kitchen

---

Quote of the Moment

The greatest productive force is human selfishness.

Not one of the usual Heinlein quotes I always see kicking around. I'm not sure I agree with it completely. Compare and contrast to

Rationality tied to moral decency is the most powerful joint instrument for good that our planet has ever known.

---

Link of the Moment
Ranjit pointed me to Googlism, a Google using tool that informed me that "kirk israel is a visionary" and "kirk israel is the blender". It can tell you what nearly anyone is, especially if you only use their first names.

Keep in mind that succesful "hits" on the site get added to a publicly-viewable index.

---

Old School of the Moment
RIP, Jam Master Jay, the DJ for the hiphop pioneer group Run-DMC. Here are some pictures from Ocean Grove and Asbury Park New Jersey. I also put a larger photo gallery online.

The Asbury Park ruins are really amazing, the old casino now a total wasteland. For a while the carousel building had a small indoor skatepark, but I guess that's gone as well...

I found this page with more photos via Google, and this page of how it used to look along with some quotes and lyrics from Bruce Springsteen, who famously cut his teeth at Asbury Park's "Stone Pony".

---

Note of the Moment
The latest loveblender digest is here. In doing some research (well, trying to find out when my I'd resorted to "reviewing a website" for the monthly feature) I found this ramble on the 1-year relationshipaversary for me and Mo. Criminy, I had forgotten that that had set a record for longest continuous romance in my life. I hope that doesn't bode too poorly for the future.

---

Site Feature of the Moment
For some reason when I made up my best of kisrael.com lists, I kept the entries that I strongly considered but then rejected embedded in the list I was making. I decided those entries deserved a "second best" set of links, and so the best of page is updated accordingly, and 2003 "best of" and "2nd best of" have both been finished off, with a sad poem and a reindeer's butt, respectively. Also, I added a note of explanation and apology to the front page, just because I'm not sure that "Kirk's Digital Arts and Crafts", which is what those pages are full of, are really the best of kisrael.com.

Hmm. I have probably just exceeded the "gives a damn" quotient for most of my audience. Excelsior! Quote of the Moment

I have bought this wonderful machine--a computer. Now I am rather an authority on gods, so I identified the machine--it seems to be an Old Testament god with a lot of rules and no mercy.

---

Photo of the Moment

---

Political Link of the Moment
Salon article reinforces an opinion I've been forming... with all the treaty rejecting we've been doing: Kyoto, ABM, Nuclear Test Ban, Small Arms, Land Mine, Biological Weapon Enforcement, from other countries' point of view, we've become the kind of "rogue nation" Bush is trying to use as a bogeyman...the irony is, well, if not "overwhelming", at least kind of funny. I was up at 3:30 this morning, after having gone to bed before 8 last night. Guess I'm still on London time...but that 3am ride to Heathrow combined with "gaining" 5 hours made for a long day.

---

Landmark of the Moment
London Eye was one of the coolest things we saw in England. It's a giant "observation wheel" (like a ferris wheel, but bigger) set right in Westminster, by Big Ben and Westminster Abbey. They built it for the Millennium celebrations, but then British Airways stepped in to run it full time. (Supposedly they might be looking to sell it...I certainly hope it remains a permanent attraction.) It takes about half an hour to go all the way around, and it generally doesn't have to stop to let people on and off. Anyway, it's such a cool thing to have built, I thought it deserved a photospread of its own...

Distance shots from tourbus, from two different days. Big Ben (well, its tower) is visible in the center of the second. I love the asymmetrical architecture of it, how it juts over the Thames, only supported by a few beams on one side.

Artsier shots, including a nearby elephant statue.

Here's an idea of what its capsules were like. Clever design, so views are never blocked by the infrastructure.

And of course there were some great views up there, including Mo in a tanktop. "Those people look like ants!"

---

Link of the Moment
(Trying to get back in the hang of non-vacation-related updates...) WayTooPersonals is a gathering of real personal ads that definately fall into the realm of "Too Much Information" about the people who posted them. Played a little hooky Friday and went with Peterman and Leslee to Six Flags New England (we went despite the commercial with the wacky dancing old guy and the gratingly catchy jingle.)

While the coasters ended up being their usual fun selves, Peterman noticed that my two favorite parts, the ones that I ended up talking about the most, both involved drumsticks.

The first was lunch...I had been jonesing for a giant turkey drumsticks ever since I saw a tv show that showed 'em for sale at this giant Texas fleamarket months ago, and Six Flags had 'em...amazingly, they lived up to my hopes and expectations, just a massive chunk of tasty tasty meat you can rip off with your teeth.

The second was an arcade game they had there...I think it was an MTV Drum Jammer...it's basically drum karaoke, you pick a song and then drum along. (Not like one of those DDR games, it doesn't judge you or anything.) I've been thinking of using a little mad money on a drum pad setup, one of those tabletop models, and this convinced me I really need one.

---

Images of the Moment
So Overheard in New York had this exchange:

Barista: Would you like to try a cappuccino muffin?
Customer: No, thanks. I don't want to start my appetite yet.
--Starbucks, 45th & Broadway

I didn't think that was funny, because I could totally relate... you can get by with just coffee in the morning, and oddly if you eat something you might still be ready for lunch at about the same time, or even earlier.

Anyway.

---

Photo Work of the Moment
So the other day we were walking, and I snapped one of those typical shots of the church and the Hancock at Copley, a little cooler than average because of the reflection of the clouds: I then remembered FoSO borrowing my Kodak DC-20 (arguably the "Brownie" of the Web's toddler years) back in the day and taking a series of photos from her office building, which I then stitched into a collage:
click for fullsize Funny to realize that this image is over ten years old, which means A. I've been doing digital photos for a while now, and B. I've been in Boston for a long time, and so finally may be feeling a bit more rooted. Oh, and, C. DC-20 images really haven't aged so well. It was a nifty minimalist camera back in the day, but...

---

Passage of the Moment

Tim Crane thus describes the basic two requirements for an emergentist position as 'dependence' and 'distinctness': 'mental properties are distinct from physical properties'. That some kind of dependence relationship exists seems hard to deny: destroy enough molecules within a cell and you no longer have a cell; kill enough cells in an organ and the organ ceases to function; watch your discussion partner ingest enough alcohol and his sentences will cease to be coherent.

Admittedly not the funniest... I guess it caught my fancy because of its resemblance to this Monty Python bit, (though less racist and sexually explicit) in a fairly serious and dense tome.

---

Passing of the Moment
Oh, huh... BC-Creator Johnny Hart died. It's weird seeing his early stuff when he was a bit cutting edge, and not just in the weird "Fundamentalist Wacko" way.













Congratulations Lex and Michi!

Really odd detail in a dream, apparently I was given the superpower of performing any normal human skill but only "moderately well". So I could, say, speak a bit of Chinese, but not, say, fly.

It wasn't quite clear if these skills came at the cost of the things I feel I actually do well, if programming "moderately well" would override my hard-won Java mojo.

---

Chicago Photos of the Moment

Today's theme: color.

Open Photo Gallery

Nice advice from a bumper sticker:


One thing it's easy to miss with fireworks
is how they light up the faces of your fellow watchers.




And they were some mighty fireworks!


Am I missing something, or is this like
the world's least ambitious helicopter?


I was impressed that this syrup
(declining to be more labled more specifically than "breakfast")
managed to have not its top but
TOP TWO ingredients be corn syrup.


Jersey shore. It seems you get a lot of sunset shots
facing over the water, but not as many going the other way.


Best shot I took at Six Flags.

Written on the commuter rail last night:

Riding the commuter rail up to Rockport, listening to Paul Simon on my iPhone, my eyes dilated from the eye doctors. The iPhone is pretty good in these situations, its zoom feature means you can make text big to a silly degree.

You know, that's one of the things I miss about my old palm journal, random little "What I'm doing now", slice of life vignettes.

The landscape outside the window looks dark and threatening, storm coming on, but maybe its the sunglasses I'm wearing to protect my poor dilated pupils, or maybe the windows are tinted. Funny not to know.

It feels weirdly adventurous to take the commuter rail, maybe because I've probably ridden more trains in foreign countries...

---

Photography of the Moment