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So long to slide night

Kodachrome pose; photo by flickr.com user Nesster, CC-licensed

Kodachrome pose; photo by flickr.com user Nesster, CC-licensed

Kodachrome
They give us those nice bright colors
They give us the greens of summers
Makes you think all the world’s a sunny day, Oh yeah

– Paul Simon

Kodak announced last year that it would retire Kodachrome, the color reversal (slide) film it had manufactured since 1935.

Steve McCurry, well-known for his 1984 photograph of Sharbat Gula, or the “Afghan Girl,” published on the cover of National Geographic magazine, asked the company to let him shoot the last roll of 36 frames it manufactured.

He spent two months shooting images in New York, Bombay and Rajasthan in India, then back in New York. There were some scenic shots, portraits of several film-making personalities, photos of a near-extinct tribe in India, and serendipitous moments on the streets of New York.

The last three frames were shot in Parsons, Kansas — believed to be the location of the last Kodachrome processing laboratory in the world.

It’s definitely the end of an era,” McCurry said of Kodachrome. “It has such a wonderful color palette … a poetic look, not particularly garish or cartoonish, but wonderful, true colors that were vibrant, but true to what you were shooting.”

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Egyptian deity found in British Roman city

“A battered and corroded thumb-sized piece of bronze has turned out to be a unique find, the earliest representation of an Egyptian deity from any site in Britain – and appropriately, after almost 2,000 years hidden in the ground, it is Harpocrates, the god of secrecy and silence,” reports the BBC.
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The statuette was found at Silchester. The University of Reading runs regular archaeological digs at Silchester.

Statuette en argent représentant Harpocrate, époque Greco-romaine, Dynastie Ptolemaïque, 350-30 av JC. Photographiée à la fondation Calouste Gulbenkian à Lisbonne, Portugal. Photo by Patrick Clenet, CC-licensed and published on WikiCommons.

Ptolemaic bronze Harpocrates as the child Horus (Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon), Greco-Roman epoch, 350-30 BCE. Photo by Patrick Clenet, CC-licensed and published on WikiCommons. (This is not the statuette found at Silchester).

Writing in The Australian about an exhibition at the Ian Potter Museum of Art, Bronwyn Watson noted:

Harpocrates was the Greek and Roman god of silence and secrecy but he originated with the Egyptians. After the Greeks conquered Egypt under Alexander the Great, the Greeks merged the Egyptian sun god Horus into their own god, who became known as Harpocrates.

“Statuettes of Harpocrates were in demand throughout the Roman Empire when mystery cults and oriental religions became increasingly popular. Because of this popularity, images of Harpocrates were manufactured and mass produced. They were made either from inexpensive mould-made terracotta, suitable for house shrines, or from bronze, becoming in-demand cabinet pieces for wealthy connoisseurs.”

In Egyptian mythology Horus was the son of Isis. He was the god of the Sun who conquered the darkness each morning. A representation of the child Horus personified the newborn sun each day and was associated with early vegetation. Egyptian statues represented the child Horus as a naked boy with his finger on his mouth — a version of the hieroglyph for “child” and nothing to do with the Greco-Roman gesture for silence. A Greek poet misunderstood the symbology and the initial misconception became accepted fact: with his Europeanised name, young Harpocrates became the god of secrecy and silence in Greco-Roman mythology.

Ruins of the temple at Medamud. Photo from www.touregypt.net

Ruins of the temple at Medamud. Photo from www.touregypt.net

Ruins of a temple for Montu, Rattawy and Harpocrates are visible at Medamud, about 8 km north of Luxor.

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Appreciating Ze Frank

Photo of Ze Frank from ted.com

Photo of Ze Frank from ted.com

M’colleagues and I became addicted to Ze Frank’s daily video, “The Show,” in 2006.

We admired Ze’s humor, his creativity, his ability to think of wacky projects for his fans to attempt, his engaging openness. The awareness that this was a strictly limited, once in a lifetime, 365-days-only experiment in online media arts just made The Show more precious to us.

Blogger Ethan Zuckerman has written an appreciation of Ze Frank, summarising and linking to some of Ze’s other online projects.

Recently news slipped out that Ze had secured US$500,000 for a startup company developing a ‘social media game’. It will be worth watching to see what he does next.

Meanwhile, kudos to Ethan Zukerman for writing about someone cool who’s still alive. Far too often I see blog posts and newspaper articles about people who died. It seems a bit pointless to eulogise our heroes. How much better to publicly celebrate those people’s lives while they can still hear how much we appreciate them.

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Motown becomes Growtown

Photo by James Griffioen, a vacant lot in Detroit

Photo by James Griffioen, a vacant lot in Detroit

Once a symbol of 2oth century manufacturing success, the city of Detroit has been hit hard by financial issues and a rapidly-changing marketplace. City authorities have tried several times in the last few decades to revive Detroit’s fortunes.

Today 33,000 empty lots and vacant houses litter the city. The once-wealthy magnet for immigrants and big business is now facing an unemployment rate of nearly 50 per cent.

In a nation where unemployment benefits and public health care are virtually non-existent, people must find other ways to survive.

“Across Detroit, land is being turned over to agriculture. Furrows are being tilled, soil fertilised and crops planted and harvested. Like in no other city in the world, urban farming has taken root in Detroit, not just as a hobby or a sideline but as part of a model for a wholesale revitalisation of a major city. Some farms are the product of hardy individualists or non-profit community groups. Others, like Hantz Farms, are backed by millions of dollars and aim to build the world’s biggest urban farm right in the middle of the city…

“As with many community or charity-run farms, the food is simply available free to residents. When it is ready they can come and harvest it straight from the ground themselves. Such a scheme might seem a recipe for chaos, but vandalism on the city’s urban farms is almost unknown. They are unfenced, open to all, and run by volunteers or charity workers.”

Motown is turning into Growtown.

The city council is broke, manufacturing industries are failing, tourism is almost non-existent, many home owners lost their over-mortgaged properties in the global financial crisis, and the city’s population has shrunk significantly. There are no major supermarkets in the city, no WalMart or CostCo.

“Right now, Detroit is as close as any city in America to becoming a food desert… where the distance to a bag of potato chips is half the distance to a head of lettuce… About 80 percent of the residents of Detroit buy their food at the one thousand convenience stores, party stores, liquor stores, and gas stations in the city. There is such a dire shortage of protein in the city that Glemie Dean Beasley, a seventy-year-old retired truck driver, is able to augment his Social Security by selling raccoon carcasses (twelve dollars a piece, serves a family of four) from animals he has treed and shot at undisclosed hunting grounds around the city. Pelts are ten dollars each. Pheasants are also abundant in the city and are occasionally harvested for dinner.

“Detroiters who live close enough to suburban borders to find nearby groceries carrying fresh fruit, meat, and vegetables are a small minority of the population. The health consequences of food deserts are obvious and dire. Diabetes, heart failure, hypertension, and obesity are chronic in Detroit, and life expectancy is measurably lower than in any American city.”

The Spectre web site has collected several fascinating articles about the issues Detroit faces and various attempts to deal with them.

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Inflationary language

The Federal election campaign was littered with hyperbolic language, starting with accusations of political assassination (despite the lack of dead bodies) and gigantic public debt (actually the smallest in the developed world), and degenerating rapidly from there.

Via Bobulate, here’s an antidote to such toxic nonsense: a six-minute video of the wonderfully witty Victor Borge demonstrating his theory of inflationary language.

If you have trouble following the subtitles, here’s a transcript in English.

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