We got a keyboard this week (just to learn some Scissor Sisters) so despite my efforts to diversify the playlist, the play count still leans towards one band . . .

1. Laura Scissor Sisters Scissor Sisters (can almost play this one now)

2. I Can’t Decide Scissor Sisters Ta-Da

3. Take Your Mama Scissor Sisters Ta-Da (can play the guitar but no keys yet

4. She’s My Man Scissor Sisters Ta-Dah

5. Lights Scissor Sisters Ta-Dah

Pillows and Don Juan Dracula are poised to break into the top five!

1 Kiss You Off Scissor Sisters Ta-Dah

2 Laura Scissor Sisters Ta-Dah

3 More Human Than Human White Zombie Astro Creep 2000

4 Electric Head White Zombie Astro Creep 2000

5 The Sanity Assassin Bauhaus Crackle

Yesterday’s post looked at the link between food and cancer through a fairly small window. I don’t really have an opposite view to expound upon, but rather another side of the issue (through another small window). It has long been thought that higher consumption of red meat increases the risk of colo-rectal cancer. Turns out that food cooked the way I like it increases the risk of cancer simply because of the way I like to cook it.

I always cook at high heat. Especially meat. Stir frying is a forgiving art that allows the cook to get away with almost any pick of ingredients. Cut it all up small, put the big stuff in first (go by water content), and cook it as hot as you can. It always comes out good. Same thing for the grill, cook steaks and chicken on high heat and let the center come up to temperature off the grill. The crispy texture is great, and the quickly sealed outer layer keeps in moisture (in beef). The great taste comes from the fond that forms at high heat.

Now studies are concluding that this charred meat, the fond of which we are all so enamored (thought I was gonna say fond?), contains several carcinogenic chemicals. The tumor promoting kind, as the poor lab rats found out. Maybe they were eating grilled red meat up until the tumors. Probably direct injection of the chemicals in question instead, controlled experiments never seem to be in the rats favor.

Having evolved to eat meat, I don’t plan to lay off the stuff or even slow down. I’ve kept meat to less than a fifth of my diet for a couple of years, mostly due to an addiction to various green vegetables if they are prepared right. Wok fried string beans with some XO sauce is probably the best among them. Next time the grill comes out for dinner, throw something new on there. Potatos, eggplant, squash (3 kinds atleast), asparagus, corn and bell peppers all grill up great. So do over a hundred other vegetables. Just put the corn (soaked) and potatoes on early.

The glaringly obvious is never as obvious as it would seem. Never the less, how often have you seen something so stupid that it boggles your mind? Your common sense is the uncommon assessment for others and I guess that is why Mr. Rogers told us we’re all special. What is the elephant in the room (for me) this time?

People eat shit. I don’t want to be disgusting, and hence the paraphrase. The things people actually are eating turn my stomach more than shit (any kind really). I know those first three words weren’t fun to read, but I’m not writing a rogerian appeal anxious for agreement. Products that are edible are treated as food and have been long enough that most of us aren’t aware there is a difference between the two. You will find food defined as anything that can be metabolized and used to build tissue. Edible substances can fit that interpretation, but you will also find food defined as something not made of synthesized substances.

Why is this worth consideration? Obesity and the related health issues that come with it. Since the CDC started tracking the rate of obesity in 1960 the figures have been on a steady upward trend. That means that each year has a higher occurrence of obesity that the year before, quite literally exponential growth. Cancer rates have risen in the same period of time with a nice reduction in the 90’s as medical technology improved (treating cancer became a profitable industry). Now I know it is false logic to positively correlate two variables just because they have a consistent reaction to each other. Correlation does not imply causation, it merely suggests the link between two variables.

That said, look up the ingredients in a twinkie. Polysorbate 60? Grew that in the garden did you? If you dig a little, you find that the polysorbate 60 is an emulsion that can contain ethelyn oxide, a tumor promoting carcinogen. Don’t trust me though, I’m kind of biased. Don’t trust .com and .org sources either, they’re probably leaning one way or the other pretty strongly. If you like being taken seriously, you need data and logic before you present your hypothesis. Turns out science is your friend. When in doubt check out the NIH’s website for some good data.

My daughter (9 months old) is demanding I turn over the laptop, and I think I had better. Read all the ingredients of the next meal you sit down to eat, then decide what you really want going in your body.

1 Laura Scissor Sisters Ta-Dah

2 Take Your Mama Scissor Sisters Scissor Sisters

3 Return To Oz Scissor Sisters Scissor Scisters

4 Yoo Hoo Imperial Teen Jawbreaker Soundtrack

5 Jesus Christ Superstar Laibach Jesus Christ Superstar

This week is proof I need to listen to so something other than Scissor Sister for at least a month.

1. I Can’t Decide Scissor Sisters Ta-Da

2. Laura Scissor Sisters Scissor Sisters

3. She’s My Man Scissor Sisters Ta-Dah

4. Lights Scissor Sisters Ta-Dah

5. Take Your Mama Scissor Sisters Ta-Da

When you screw up at work, is it in isolated incidents that can be blamed on that idiot Tibor, or do you just throw a whole day in the trash? I make my share of mistakes, usually ones that I can cover up or fix before I look stupid. Not this time.

Despite the stress and responsibility, shooting weddings is easy if you have been doing it long enough. You bring the same gear, prepared the same way, to take the same pictures. How do you screw that up? Well …

Strike one: Camera batteries, charge ‘em. I have three batteries for my Mark II, or two and a half if you take into account the quality of the after market battery. Forgot to charge all three of them. The camera didn’t die on me, but I didn’t shoot as much as normal, and I had to carry a backup camera on me all day (on top of regular gear which gets heavy!)

Strike two: If you have gear that belongs to the office, bring it back. We wanted to use the portable softbox setup we rigged for Vegas. It was super windy and real lights would have been insane. So after I got the call from work reminding me to grab the gear, I promptly packed it all in a box neatly, and left it sitting in my home office. The day is looking good. . .

Strike three: If your going to wear contacts, bring extras. This is so obvious I that I always pack 3 or so extra pairs. I bought some new camera bags for Vegas, even put contacts it each bag, but lost them somewhere in the shuffle repacking gear for this job. The left contact came out first but I put it back in. When the right one came out (who knows? allergies?) I dropped it on a filthy carpet and stepped on it looking for it. Luckily my contact RX is the same in both eyes, so my left contact went to the right, and the half blurry vision gave me a hell of a headache. Didn’t miss a shot though, just couldn’t tell when some of them were in focus.

The closer: Woke up this morning with some evil kind of pulled muscle. In the wrong spot. It’s quite disconcerting to wake up to a pulled groin when you don’t remember pulling the thing. Did I have fun last night I don’t know about? Two hours in my back was aching from picking up the slack, and the right side of my right thigh went numb from the knee to the hip for most of the night. That was preferable to a sharp pang happening with every step. Not as preferable as sitting down . . .

Oh well, it’s not all bad. It was an 8 hour day. Some last 10, some last 12. Vegas was even more (over two days though). This was the last wedding for 5 weeks, so I have plenty of time to get my shit together. Time to put some more ice on, uhh, nevermind . . .

The advent of digital changed nearly every aspect of the photography workflow. Shooters and programmers tried to wrap their heads around the new technology while keeping the process as close to the old days as possible. Your computer wouldn’t ask you what to do with pictures when you plugged a card in, and it took some old-school pc skills to process, archive, and display images. Before the days of picasa, f-spot, iphoto and the like you had to mine the internet to find the little gems like Photo Mechanix and iView multimedia.
Photo Mechanix was a lightweight image viewer that had great batch renaming, but problems with the rest of the features. iView Pro was great from the start. Cataloging, sorting, editing and batch processing all in one. Of course iView tried to improve their product through two new versions. The first update to 2.5 pro was great, more undo’s, some better web gallery templates, etc. The upgrade to 3 was pure evil however. Plenty of crashes, bugs, and the complete lack of an undo function when deleting images from a catalog.

When iView decided to put out a progressively shittier product they piqued the interest of Microsoft. Microsoft made a bid for the company, which resulted in the company shutting down all development and customer support while they waited for their fat buy out checks. The product disappeared for three years, and now a bastardized version called Microsoft Expression Media is out. The trial version crashes, stops responding, and is general piece of shit. Like Vista SP1, the fun now sets you back $300. Like we needed anymore reasons to get behind Adobe’s Lightoom, but now we have another.

With no support for newer camera raw files, my old copy of iView is now retired. Between Bridge and Lightroom I have a new workflow that is actually better than the iView approach, but I still miss being able to dump files in a catolog, sort em, export and delete the catalog. With thousands of photographers on the market (and more of you who think you need pro tools) I can’t understand why something has not been released to replace iView. Aperture is usable, but slow and counter-intuitive. iPhoto is just plain horrible, forcing you to surrender control over your files. Picasa was never meant for more than organization of images and posting online, so like gThumb and f-spot there is just not enough power in the program (the price is right though).

So rest in peace iView, and may your ashes be cloned by some FOSS developer and released for debian linux.

Yahtzee never gets old. Prepare to laugh your ass off.

Since launching systematic disorder I have been attention whoring through digg.com to draw some traffic to the site. I have never had a very successful digg submission (15 or so diggs on Amazon Recommends Killing Yourself is the best), seeing how sepultura and the like get thousands of diggs on some of theirs.

None of my submissions from this site have gotten any diggs, but neither do most of my other submissions. I added the digg button script to the pages, so it’s easier to digg a post here. I doubt anything will get dugg, but who knows? 3 diggs would be a new record.