Jon Stewart on Apple going where no man has gone before. Richard, this is for you.
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We are on our way to Death Valley for the weekend
We are on our way to Death Valley even though the weather is supposed to be pretty bad. Windy, which means even windier at higher elevations and dusty. We'll see.
Seeing “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” and thinking about New Stories
A couple of nights ago, we saw "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" with Laura Atkins and Neil. It is a Swedish movie with lots of subtitles. It is a hack story with lots of gore, a horrific rape scene – two rape scenes, I guess, depending on how you count them – and shot in Rembrandt lighting minus two f stops. I heartily recommend it.
It got me thinking. Why is this a hack story? because I have seen it before? Several times? This is a story of Buffy Summers and River Tam, it is the story of any woman in any Luc Besson film. Or, as far as that goes, like the Marine Lioness Program . Then I started thinking What if it isn't a hack story, but a new female archetype?
It is an archetype of a young woman as the most powerful person in the
Universe of the story.
Buffy Summers is all that is between Sunnydale and the hoard of
Vampires that will destroy the world. There are men who, maybe, can help her – often
not very well, atleast, compared to her – but she is the only one that can save the world. The men are there to hold the structure, but Buffy holds the power.
Part of the Buffy story is that she is both damaged and vulnerable and River Tam even more so. Mathilda, in Luc Besson's The Professional is incredibly vulnerable and damaged but, in the end, she is more powerful than Leon, her protector.
I think that this is a new myth. A New Story. Granted, my education in myths is preeeety shaky, but I can't think of a Grimm's Tale or a Greek Myth where the female is young, vulnerable, and straight up, kickass, powerful.
And, like any archetype, it is coming out in stories because it exists in the real world. One place, for sure, the archetype is starting to manifest itself is the Marines Lioness Program. The Marines are now training women to go on patrols because they can interact with the local women in Afghanistan and Iraq. In other words, they can go where the men can't. They have power the men don't.
An email from a neighbor
We got this email from a neighbor – a neighbor that lives at least a mile away, though – yesterday and I am both horrified and thrilled.
We had a mountain lion kill a deer on our back porch, and it almost broke our sliding glass window.
(See the photograph below.)
It was very early in the morning, around 4-5am. The deer appears (footprints) to have gone to the watering hole. The mountain lion appears to have been in stalking mode on the stairs. It attacked the deer as it was moving along the back porch to the hillside.
The lion slammed the deer against the back slidingdoor, almost breaking it, then started eating a few feet away.It feasted in one abdominal, and butt area, without biting the neck or adding other wounds; it discarded the stomach and some green organs. My turning on the lights and shouting at it frightened it away. I dragged the carcass;300 feet to the eucalyptus tree line.
Upon returning 30 minutes later, I discovered something had been eating the bowels that fell out of the carcass, including the liver and possibly the heart. It could have been a cat, but also the mountain lion since Animal Control advised that it may still be in the vicinity. It may be feasting on the carcass right now.
Blue jays are squawking because lots of red-tailed hawks are swooping in for a feast on the kill. We can expect a lot of carnivore predators out tonight; bobcat, coyotes, mountain lion, etc.… I’ve called the neighbors to advise keeping their dogs indoors tonight.
I’d seen a mountain lion once at or near the house, and it was not very afraid of me when I cornered it next to a big bush/rock. It moved away, but not really fast, when I jumped and yelled. I have many photographs of bobcats which did not do this sort of damage. Also photos of coyotes which hunt in packs and bite the neck of the prey, dragging it down.Animal Control may put out an alert for Portola Valley, suggested I keep a shotgun in the house, in case they break through the window the next time. We have a lot of windows around the porch, from which I have photographed a lot of bobcats, boars, and deer, but never a kill.
Portola Valley awaits you… with a carnivorous hummmmm……
Horrified because the whole thing seems much more violent that I thought it would be – not that I had thought about it very much – and I can now easily imagine a writhing deer/mountain lion combination breaking through our back door and rolling around the livingroom. All I have is a 16" ruler to fend them off. Thrilled because the email came through the PV Garden Club which now seems much cooler; the writer seems so nonchalant, and thrilled because we live in a town where they aren't scrambling helicopters and SWAT teams over this.
Why there is an App in your future: with real numbers
A couple of weeks ago, I went to a meeting of the Northern California Chapter of the American Society of Media Photographers – asmp NorCal, to you. In one of the handouts, was an article on Photo Apps by Lee Foster.
Using a book he wrote on where and how – presumably, I haven't seen the book – to photograph in San Francisco, Foster goes through the numbers on the book and an app.
The book retails for $14.95, but typically sells through Amazon at a hefty 55% discount. So, his publisher gets $6.73 of which he gets 15% – that is $1.01. He is now converting the book to an app which will sell for $1.99. In the app world, the author typically gets 30%, the developer gets 30%, and – in the case of the iPhone – Apple gets 30%. The remaining 10% is for overhead and – I guess – gets beamed up to some unknown place. So, for the sale of two apps at $1.99, Foster gets $1.19.
He thinks that there is a better chance of two people paying $1.99 for an app than one person popping for $14.95 for the book. I think he is right. Even a casual visitor to San Francisco would probably be willing to pay $1.99 but, paying $14.95 for the book that you would then have to pack and carry to be of any use, is much more problematic.
And the app could be much better. In Foster's case, the book has about 70 photos, but the app has 100 photos. And he expects the next app to have 500 photos. It could also have interactive maps and videos.