The Adventures of Tobasco da Gama

While everybody else is celebrating some holiday with an imaginary fat guy or whatever, let’s all take a moment to remember the real reason for the season:

And to remember why we celebrate the birth of this great man, here’s a clip of him in his prime:

(Of course, the other reason I chose that clip is that it’s also Lauren Bacall in her prime. Can you blame me?)

So, the Boston Skeptics this month, in lieu of a speaker, took a field trip to Boston’s Museum of Science to check out the Mythical Creatures exhibit. The outing as a whole was a huge success, with everybody seeming to have a lot of fun.

As for the MoS itself, I went there early this year, and I have to say that in the short time since that visit they made a lot of improvements. There are a few new exhibits, not least including Cliff the Triceratops, a nearly-complete Triceratops fossil recently donated to the museum (who has been rightly featured in a lot of their advertising), lots more live shows and lectures than I remember, and other fun stuff. In particular, there was a presentation about optical illusions given by a guy who Rebecca dubbed “Skeptical Grandpa” that everybody got a real kick out of. And of course the Theater of Electricity is always awesome.

The thing that impressed me most, however, was the theme of skepticism that ran through all the exhibits and presentations. The Mythical Creatures exhibit, of course, examined the origins of myths like sea serpents mermaids, and giant apes, as well as discussing how mythical creatures can cross-pollinate between cultures and become fixed when a certain definitive account gains prominence. But it went beyond that exhibit to the Theater of Electricity presenter (I want his job so badly) telling us how important it is to test ideas we have, not to mention the entirety Mind Games! presentation that Skeptical Grandpa gave. It warms the cockles of a skeptical heart, it does, to see a museum actually doing its job like that.

Anyway, I put up a bunch of photos on Flickr. Go check ‘em out.

While I typically have much better literary taste, everyone loves at least one bit of trashy fiction. In my case, given that my favourite novel is Pushkin’s Evgeniy Onegin and that I spent my spare time in college performing Shakespeare, I’ve got to compensate by going for the most ridiculously dorky and trashy thing possible. Meaning, of course, licensed Warhammer 40,000 novels, specifically the Ciaphas Cain series. (Because I refuse to take the 40k universe seriously, even as a guilty pleasure, and apparently so does the author of the Cain books.)

This is all by way of explaining the reference I made in the title of this post. As everyone knows (I mean, duh), the chapters of the Adeptus Astartes space marines are filled by clones of the nine primarchs who remained loyal to humanity’s God-Emperor during the Horus Heresy. Said space marines take great pains to recover the genetic material of their fallen comrades to use in raising the next generation of warriors to fill the chapters’ ranks.

So, for better or for (probably) worse, they’re the first thing that comes to mind when I see this:

As promised, I’ve uploaded the black & white shots I took at Boston’s Anti-Prop 8 Rally to Flickr. I left in a couple of duplicates that I probably should have left out, but eh. It’s journalistic photography, right? Recording what happened, with all the blemishes. Or something like that.

Anyway, I’m really pleased with the results. The black & white worked out, as did the fact that the film is really noisy from lying around unused for a couple of years. The new shots are in the same set, but they start here.

There’s a lot of good stuff in there, but I think my favourite bit has to be the Wellesley group. I don’t know why, I just like the shot that resulted:

I also really enjoy the All Your Need Is Love sign, so much that I got it both in color and black & white:

Love & Peace, y’all.

Is fucking awesome. FYI.

He has a song that I hadn’t heard before tonight, at his Boston concert. It’s about Laika. I cried.

Last post, I mentioned the gay marriage rally I went to on Saturday. I did bring my camera. However, I made the amateur mistake of not bringing enough film: i.e., any film at all. I figured I would buy some from CVS on the way, but they only had 400 ISO film, and I didn’t think it would be enough for the overcast weather… But anyway, in the event, I ended up going to a CVS in Government Center and picking up some of their 400 ISO film, hoping again to notice a Ritz or Hunt’s or something. I didn’t have a chance to poke around, though, so I was stuck with what I had… which turned out to be a 12-exposure roll.

Shit.

However, there’s a reason I called this post “Part One”. I’ve been carrying around a roll of Ilford 400 B&W film, waiting for an appropriate subject for some black and white photography. Instead, I wound up using it at the protest. You know what? I actually think it’s going to turn out pretty awesome. But the first photo place I went to couldn’t do B&W processing, so they pointed me at another place that does.

Moral of the story is I need to buy a frickin’ DSLR already.

Anyway, here’s the album with the colour photos I had developed today. The B&Ws will go into the same set when I eventually get them done. And here’s a sample:

One of my favourite hobbies is photography. I’ve sadly had only an off-and-on relationship with it, though.

I took a class in high school and fell in love with the smell of dark room chemicals, but since I had no space for a dark room of my own, I didn’t see the point in buying a camera. Eventually, I went off to college and bought a respectable (for the time) digital compact and had a lot of fun with that. This lead to my buying a film SLR in the awkward period when film was clearly on its way out as the definitive photography medium but digital cameras hadn’t quite established themselves fully. My subscription to Pop Photo let me keep abreast of all the latest developments that I couldn’t possibly afford as the pro photography industry went from “nobody serious shoots digital” to “film is a niche medium for art shooters”.

But I had fun with camera for a while anyway, accumulating a nice little pile of 3×5 prints that I never look at. When my favourite camera shop closed, though, I stopped shooting. They were the only folks I knew who printed with matte finishes, and glossies just look so goddamned cheap. That’s also when I realised that film just doesn’t work for hobbyists any more. If you can’t process your own film, it’s just prohibitively expensive, and the cost only gets worse if you actually want to, god forbid, share your work online. (Never mind the cost of sharing enlargements.)

All this is by way of explaining that I went out and shot my first few rolls of film in a long time recently, and despite the expense I went ahead and had them printed to CD. I’ve got a Flickr account, so I figure I’ll actually start using the silly thing to post photos. I think I’ll buy a cheap DSLR at some point, in which case my use of said Flickr account is going to explode dramatically, but for now I have a couple of random photos of your typical autumn-in-New-England crap up. I also brought my camera to the pro-gay marriage rally in Government Center this past Saturday, so those will be posted as soon as I get them developed. Enjoy.

Via Philosoraptor comes news that Obama is already drawing up plans to close Guantanamo and try the majority of cases in US criminal courts. (What to do with cases involving sensitive information where a traditional criminal trial might, for instance, blow the cover of intelligence operatives, hasn’t been decided conclusively — but they’re working on a solution.)

I knew there was a reason we elected that guy.

I haven’t been obsessively following election returns like a lot of folk, but I have been checking in with Is Obama President? and Electoral Vote occasionally, in between doing laundry and watching DEVO videos on YouTube.

The former has flipped from “Almost” to “Yes” and the latter says that Virginia is being called for Obama and that the race is mathematically over now.

I’m too tired and sick (lousy winter sore throat…) to be appropriately excited, but I imagine I’m gonna have a bloody big smile tomorrow morning. “President Obama” has a bloody nice ring to it.

I just saw these two ads that the McCain-Palin campaign put out in the final week of the election. I’m not sure what they’re really supposed to win over, though:

Happy voting, my friends!