ultrasupergenius’ journal

Canal Street, 8-30-05

Originally uploaded by Lotus Lynn.

Something happened to Flickr this morning. It has changed. Flickr didn’t upend the backend or re-integrate the flux capicitor or anything techie like that… This time it happened on the people level. This is the first major american tragedy that has befallen the United States since Flickr’s rise to the mainstream - and while flickr is certainly an international phenomenon… there are a heck of a lot of flickrites in the U.S. Some residing in the wake of Katrina’s destruction. There will no doubt be a lot more Katrina photos posted in the coming weeks and months… but there are already an awful lot of Katrina photos posted. As a matter of fact - flickr was the second place I went to after I was unable to find the types and quantity of photos that I was looking for on google news. I found what I was looking for in spades. This is the first time that I have ever considered flickr to be anything more than an artistic endeavor… Like I said - Flickr has changed. At least in my mind.

Here is a link to Photos Tagged Katrina, and a few of those photos below:

(My heart goes out to those affected by this tragedy… and I wish you the best in the many difficult weeks and months ahead).

Post No Bills

Originally uploaded by redkoi.

There is a lot of street art that just plain sucks. I would write the whole genre off entirely if I could. The vast majority of what I see every day, the mundane tags and self-absorbed splotches of crapola that serve no purpose but to boost the ego of the scribbler - if it is art, then I would classify it even lower than the works of Thomas Kincaid - the self proclaimed “Painter of Light” who is nothing more than a Bob Ross knock-off who puts a cottage in the center rather than a big hacking tree at the end (Bob Ross, you are the man - and you are sorely missed…). But where was I? Oh yeah - most street art I see sucks balls. A small percentage of the street art I see, however, is not crap at all. Some pieces are amoungst the greatest works of art that I have ever beheld. Certainly more deserving of wider acclaim. This photo of an installation happens to be one of them. This piece was met by the fate of many a great peice of street art - it was painted over. Lost. Gone. I for one, do not lament it’s early demise - becuase I know that it will pop up again sometime really soon. Someplace else - perhaps even installed by someone else. Great street art is infectious. It can tickle the funny bone, prompt deeper thought, or make us all obey.

Here are some links to some other post no bills art out there in the big big world:
http://img10.imageshack.us/img10/9999/post_no_bills_4.jpg

http://www.wibbler.com/files/pictures/post_no_bills.jpg

http://www.web.net/~lukmar/post_no_bills2.jpg

http://www.web.net/~lukmar/Post_no_bills.jpg

A few quotes from Pat Robertson, from his ‘Killing is Bad’ perspective:

God Almighty wants to protect life and have everyone walk the streets without fear of being murdered. — Pat Robertson

Life has become more and more cheap in the society we live in. But God says you shall not murder. — Pat Robertson

The moral foundations that taught us to value life are crumbling under our feet. — Pat Robertson

Some quotes from Pat Robertson from his ‘Killing is Good’ perspective:

You know, I don’t know about this doctrine of assassination, but if he [Hugo Chavez] thinks we’re trying to assassinate him, I think that we really ought to go ahead and do it… It’s a whole lot cheaper than starting a war… — Pat Robertson

We have the ability to take him out, and I think the time has come that we exercise that ability. We don’t need another $200 billion war to get rid of one, you know, strong-arm dictator. It’s a whole lot easier to have some of the covert operatives do the job and then get it over with. — Pat Robertson

Here is some more information from Pat Robertson’s official webiste, a “Teaching” entitled “God’s Word in Action: Thou Shall Not Murder…

This guy is a jackass. Anyone not familiar with Pat, or his influence within the Republican Party and the Religious Right might want to do some googling.

I have spent a decent amount of time in the great outdoors… and in the process I have seen a great number of animals: deer, elk, bison, coyote, and a great number of raptors. One animal that I had never seen in the wild however, was a bear. That changed on Saturday after a hike in Shenandoah National park. Off to the side of the road and down a hill a ways, there was a mother black bear and two cute little cubs. They were quite a distance away (at least a football field or so), but I could still really get a feel for what they were like. The mother bear was a lot longer legged than I would have expected, and while I only saw a few fleeting glimpses of the babies as they headed deeper into the woods - the bouncing and bump-along tromp that they travelled with said a lot about their happy-go-lucky playfull spirit. The momma bear stuck around for quite a while longer, pausing to graze as she slowly made her way out of sight. It was a really cool thing to see.

Lotus Flower

Originally uploaded by ultrasupergenius.

All right - I can deny it no longer. I have some very serious geek tendencies. From time to time I get all kinds of obsessed with internet stuff. My latest obsession has been with the Flickr photo community. For those unfamiliar - the basic jist is this: You put up your photos, and you look at other people’s photos, and you make comments, and arrange photos into little groupings of photos, and then you look and chat about the groupings of photos.
One of the things that you can do while you are looking at other people’s photos is to mark them as one of your favorites. Here is my list of other people’s photos that I have favorited.
One of the groups on flickr limits posting photos to only those which have been marked by 25 or more fellow flickrites as a ‘favorite’. I hit a milestone this morning when I checked my Flickr account, and found that this picture had reached that pivotal number. I got a picture into the topf pool… WooHoo!

I hate to break a non-blogging spell with something so inconsequential, but this I had to share. A paparazzi photographer named Brad Diaz was shot in the leg by a BB gun while staking out Britney Spears Baby Shower. Normally, pellet gun injuries are not such a big deal… just a welt and a red mark. Apparently this photog thought it was serious:

Firefighters were called to the scene and treated the wound; Diaz was transported to a local hospital for further treatment.

So I am figuring that this must have been some kind of crazy super titanium BB that nailed him, encased in plutonium with a uranium core or something… because that is the only way that I can imagine that a BB gun wound would require hospitalization - but then I read that it was plastic. Hmmm… This is seeming strange. How could a plain old plastic BB from a BB gun cause an injury so severe that it required both the fire department to treat it at the scene, at for him to be rushed to the hospital in an ambulance for further treatment? Something isn’t adding up in this story, I was thinking to myself… and then I read this:

“If there’s anything below minor, that’s what the injury was,” Lieutenant Steve Smith of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department said of Diaz’s injury.

Okay. Now that pulls the pieces together.
This jackass must be A) the biggest wussy on the face of the planet; and B) trying in some way to extort some money out of this incident.
My conclusion: Brad Diaz is the biggest wussy on the face of the planet.