This is so amazingly wonderful. From the Google Blog:
We're excited to announce the availability of never-before-seen images from the LIFE photo archive. This effort to bring offline images online was inspired by our mission to organize all the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. This collection of newly-digitized images includes photos and etchings produced and owned by LIFE dating all the way back to the 1750s
Via Waxy.org
I could go all defensive about this piece on Valleywag about our extravagant Disneyland trip, but I won't. Instead, I'll be gracious and help Owen during these troubled times for Valleywag. Here's a couple of story ideas based on a few photos from our weekend. Enjoy!
Today is the last day of the DonorsChoose.org Blogger Challenge. While I missed a couple days of posting daily, I think I did a pretty good job to sticking to my promise.
Three items (and a photo) that may be of interest to those who might still need to be persuaded to vote for Obama. [1]
While we've endorsed hundreds of congressional candidates for election, both Democrats and Republicans, we've never before endorsed a presidential candidate. We have members on the left, in the center, and on the right, and we knew it could be controversial to choose either party's candidate for the top office in the nation. But in an era of sweeping presidential power, we must weigh in on this most important political race in the country. Standing on the sidelines is no longer an option for us.
Up until last Sunday morning, I had only been pulled over by a cop once in my life: I was sixteen years-old and had forgotten to turn on my lights on my way home from my pizza-parlor job. My reaction to being pulled over (pure panic) prompted the officer to ask me if I had been drinking. Of course I was incredibly naive at the time and said: "I'm sixteen -- it's not even legal for me to drink!" And I meant it, too.
Today was Penelope's first trip to a beach, courtesy of a warm October day in San Francisco.
She's a very generous little person and will pick up things and bring them over to people. Then, she makes a little sound that sort of means "here." She started doing that with grains of sand. She'd pick up a pinch of sand and then bring it to me. What totally delights me is how she would take time to pick just the right grains out of the billions out there.
I'm sure that there is some lesson to be learned from this baby's action and that it would make some great sort of Zen parable.
It's amazing what a little color can do. Take these vivid color photographs from the 1930s-1940s available from the Library of Congress collection. Or these photos from turn-of-the-century Russia. It's the presence of color that make these folks look like they aren't that far removed from modern times. (Actually, he's not like anyone I've met lately.)
The process used a screen of tiny potato starch grains dyed orange-red, green and violet. Dusted onto a glass plate, the dyed grains were covered with a layer of sensitive panchromatic silver bromide emulsion. As light entered the camera, it was filtered by the dyed grains before it reached the emulsion. While the exposure time was very long, the plate could be processed easily by a photographer familiar with standard darkroom procedures. The result was a unique, realistic, positive color image on glass that required no further printing.
Perhaps most men won't agree, but the state of women's Halloween costumes has probably hit an all-time skanky low. Since when did every costume out there have to be sexy? Strike that. Sexy would be fine -- I'm talking straight-out slutty. And it's not just the expected sort of costume: nurse, French maid, Playboy Bunny. I'm talking about utterly absurd costumes to be sluttified.
Want to see the saddest and/or greatest Halloween costume ever? Penelope models it over at my other blog, Nested.
