All posts by Steve Stern

I’m thrilled that nothing goes away on the web

Photography, Psychological Musings,

The San Francisco Police Department wants to us a couple of my photographs in their annual report and I am shocked. Not shocked that they want to use the photographs – well, actually, shocked about that too – even though I do think that it is a pretty good photo of the police at the 2011 LGBT parade – as they call it – but shocked that they found it. I put the pictures in my blog last June where they – apparently – lurked until the Office of the Chief of Police of the San Francisco Police Department found them. That is pretty extraordinary. Well, I guess, today, not extraordinary: just ordinary.

Still for me, shocking. A couple of weeks ago, I did a post on going to Sequoia Hospital for a daily infusion of the antibiotic daptomycin and two days later, the head nurse said that I should be careful not to show anybody’s name in my pictures. It turns out that Sequoia does regular searches to see what people are saying about them on the webs and then referred it to the nurse in the photograph. I know that whatever I put here is available to anybody, but it was still a surprise. And I had a moment of feeling slightly queasy, like seeing a cop car’s redlight going off in my rearview mirror.

As I finish this, the shock has dissipated but the thrill remains. And here is the other picture.

 

 

 

 

I do think Eisenhower was right

Americana, War

I am not sure what to say about this crazy You Tube video except to say that the armored personal carriers do not seem to be bound for Afghanistan (because of the non-USA military paint job). My cynicism wants to say that they are probably headed to some country that needs more material to keep their citizens in check. What ever the destination, I find this pretty dis-heartening.

Red Tails and the suspension of disbelief

Film, War

I saw Red Tails the other night and was particularly disappointed. I went expecting it to be not especially good but, like Peter Kuhlman, I love airplanes and once had a World War II airplane jones and I expected the air combat scenes to be at least as good as Star Wars I. They weren’t and I am not sure why.  I think that part of it, but only part of it, was that a huge percentage of the movie was CG and – like the picture above – just did not seem real. CG is great when the subject is not real, but when the subject can be real, like a real P51 airplane, CG seems to breakdown.

Even the airport sets that probably were real just seemed too precious to be a real place . They came across as the kind of dioramas that they have at the National Air and Space Museum. They are interesting but they just don’t look lived in. They have all the right parts – exactly the right parts – but they just don’t transcend the collection of parts. I felt the same way about the Imperial Star Dreadnoughts in Star Wars, they just didn’t feel real like the Nostromo in Alien.

Probably what bothered me the most was the hyping of the plot.  In the movie, the first time the Tuskegee Airmen go into aerial combat, we are to believe that they kick ass against a experienced German fighter group including blowing up their airfield. In their first dogfight!  The story of the Tuskegee Airmen is heroic and hyping the story somehow makes it seem less heroic, not more. From everything that I have read, this movie is a labor of love so I am sure George Lucas did not want to diminish the story, but he did.

 

Racism and unsprung weight

Americana

Just like every car has mass or weight, everybody – to some degree – is a racist . With a car, no matter how much it weighs – but the less weight the better which is why race cars are much lighter than street cars – the trick is to control as much of the weight as possible by putting put it on the control side of the springs or suspension. The weight on the uncontrolled side of the suspension, the unsprung weight, is the weight that causes the most trouble. I think the same is true with our racism, the more we can see it – the more that we can see how the filter of racism colors our perceptions – the better we are able to control the damage done by our racism.

That may be the reason that the people who are the most noticeably racist do not think they are racist and are the most offended by the accusation that they are. They don’t see the filter, they only see the filtered perceptions of their racism. So when Newt Gingrish makes ridiculous, dickish, racist, remarks – like Obama is the food-stamp president because more people are on food-stamps than ever before – I suspect that he doesn’t see them as racist. (He might not even see them as being simplistic to the point of being stupid.)