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Category: PWP-3
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Archive for ◊ July, 2008 ◊
30
Jul
2008
Rained In
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Category: Aviation
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I love this shot. It’s one of my favourites from last weekend, for the subject matter. (Although the execution could use a lot of work: I should’ve used a faster shutter speed, but I had to shoot quickly before the hangar door shut and the kid was moving his little plane around. The downpour just began and people were taking shelter inside. I’ll get quicker at this; it just takes practice. You can tell I did some tweaking in Photoshop using the red channel, because the maple leaf on the plane is white.)
Canadian Warplane Heritage Museum
Mount Hope, Ontario
(Hamilton International Airport)
30
Jul
2008
Don’t Fence Me In
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Category: Critters + Creatures, Xena & Beano, cameraphone
| 4 Comments
I should’ve known the baby gates were no match for a persistent kitty. Not this one, anyway. You can practically see the calculations and computations going on in his head: “Hmmm… will it hold me if I jump from here?”
Xena would’ve figured it out eventually, given time. She’s pretty clever: she’ll just kick back and leave the plotting and scheming to Beano and copy whatever solution he’s found. Why reinvent the wheel?
It was pathetic the way they’d stick their paws through the fence gaps, like I’d shoved them into a carrier and took them to the vet. It was also getting a little absurd: I had to line the top of the landing with tall objects to stop them from jumping up to a launching point for the stairs, but one time when I was taking out the rubbish I heard a thump and knew Beano had jumped up and knocked something over to get down.
‘So much for that,’ I thought to myself.
It wasn’t until very recently that Beano got bold enough to test out the sturdiness of the gates, which is something I’m sure he’d done with the drying racks, only to arrive at the conclusion that they were wobbly and as stable as a pile of wire hangers.
But Beano somehow managed to find the time in his busy schedule of catnapping and litterbox excavations to conduct a weight-and-balance test on the second gate:
29
Jul
2008
Luba: Let It Go (1984)
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Category: Music, Videoclips, Wacky WWW
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Let it go, Luba, let go of the gratuitous use of the blue screen.
I don’t remember this video being quite so… BIZARRE. I watch it now and I have no idea what some of the people are actually doing. Was it choreographed, or did the director say: “Pretend you’re demented! A deliriously happy sort of demented!” I was 12 years old in 1984, I guess I didn’t question anything.
I showed this to Nadja on Sunday night while we were waiting for her friend’s flight to arrive at Pearson, and I said ‘I betcha it was made around Toronto…’ (considering Canadian video production values, that would be a sound stage, a Commodore 64, and a schoolyard during a fire drill!)
Anyone know?
28
Jul
2008
6-Year Blogiversary
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Category: gailatlarge.com
| 8 Comments
Today I officially reached another milestone: the six-year mark for online publishing. I’ve only celebrated the blogiversary once before, last year, but it’s really only been in the last few years that the posts evolved into full-length chronicles and the photography resembled more than just snapshots.
Current tally of posts is 2,552 including this one!
28
Jul
2008
Some Weekend Faves
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Category: Out + About
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My new Sigma 24-60mm f/2.8 lens got a real workout over the weekend, especially on Sunday! I’ll leave the writeups until I get more time. For now, just a few of my favourite photos from Pedestrian Sunday at Kensington Market and a couple of experiments taken at the Beaches.
Kensington Market:
27
Jul
2008
Platinum Blonde: The Great Canadian Hairspray Band
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Category: Music, Videoclips
| One Comment
I was listening to CBC’s Simply Seán (wryly funny, if you like that sort of humour) on the way to Hamilton Airport, and suddenly the distinctly 80’s sounds of synthesizers and guitars wailed over the speakers like a siren call from the distant past…
Bloody hell! It was Platinum Blonde’s “Crying Over You” (Alien Shores, 1985). If you’re a Canadian who grew up in the ’80s you will understand what a “!!” moment this was, to hear it on the radio in 2008 like I was 13 years old again. Except I was driving a car.
I would’ve pulled over just to sit quietly in my stunned disbelief through the rest of the song, except I was on Highway 403 and would’ve been late for my flight.
For the rest of you, either non-Canadians, or Generation Y or younger Canadians, or Canadians with too much self-respect to admit to recognising these poncy people prancing about in their blue square-shouldered suits, behold the HAIR — the impossibly BIG, BIG HAIR that occupies 80% of the screen when heads are shown in this video. Behold the cheeseball flashes of fake opulence like vintage cars, jets, boats, and the flaunting of politically incorrect figures such as black porters and bodyguards ogling white girlfriends of poncy bandmembers. Behold the 80ishness of it all, in all its shoulder-padded, chemically treated and coiffed glory!
But you know, even though the video makes me cringe in a I-can’t-believe-this-was-de-rigueur kind of way, I still find the song pretty catchy… check out Platinum Blonde’s other less-cheesy videos on YouTube, like It Doesn’t Really Matter and Situation Critical from their album “Standing in the Dark” (1983).
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