Whose Faulty Vision

Arrrrrr!

Ahoy, mateys! Today be national talk like a pirate day! Now go out there and keelhaul some scurvy dogs.

V-Day

Happy verdammte Valentine’s Day.

I loved her with all my heart. I know I shouldn’t have, but I did.

Quote of the New Year

Quote of the New Year:

“May your coming year be filled with magic and dreams and good madness. I hope you read some fine books and kiss someone who thinks you’re wonderful, and don’t forget to make some art — write or draw or build or sing or live as only you can. And I hope, somewhere in the next year, you surprise yourself.”

-Neil Gaiman

Happy New Year, everyone.

Back from Thanksgiving

I’m back from Ithaca! Hope everyone had a happy Thanksgiving.

You Can Discover This Post

Another Columbus Day, another meaningless debate in the media over whether Columbus “discovered America”. The position of the anti-Columbus contingent, as far as I can tell, seems to be that the word “discover” means that no human being was aware of the thing before it was discovered, and there were plenty of people living in America before Columbus landed, so he didn’t discover anything.

But that’s stupid. The word “discover”, in common usage, also means something like “I didn’t know about it, and my social circle didn’t know about it”. If I tell you that I just discovered a charming little Italian restaurant in the Village, does that mean that I was the first human being ever to set foot in that charming little Italian restaurant? Of course not. It means that I didn’t know about it, and you probably didn’t know about it, and maybe my circle of friends didn’t know about it.

So yes, Columbus discovered America. He didn’t know about it, and Europeans of that era didn’t know about it until he came back. He discovered it in the same way that I can discover a charming little Italian restaurant, except that he couldn’t just hop on the N train to get there.

Christmas Calendars

Oh, and speaking of Christmas presents, I decided this year to use iPhoto’s calendar-making feature and make calendars from my best photos as gifts for my family. I picked out some of the best pictures I took in 2006, laid them out, and had Apple print them–it was all incredibly easy, and they came out looking very nice. Everyone seemed to appreciate them.

One nice feature of iPhoto is that, while you have the option (which I chose) to print calendars and other photo products using Apple’s service, you don’t have to–you can lay them out in iPhoto, save them as a PDF, and print them anywhere you like. I made a PDF of the 2007 calendar, and I’m considering posting it here or on the photoblog–would my devoted readers be interested in having their own Whose Faulty Vision calendars?

Bastille Day

Aux armes, citoyens!
Formez vos bataillons,
Marchons, marchons,
Q’un sang impur
Abreuve nos sillons.

(Translation: Citizens, take up your weapons and form batallions! Let us march, so that impure blood may water our fields.)

Man, the French national anthem is rather more violent than the American one. We may have bombs bursting in air, but we don’t have blood watering our fields. I guess that’s kind of fitting, considering all of the guillotining they did during their revolution.

Anyway, happy Bastille Day! The storming of the Bastille kicked off a process that eventually led to a functional republic in France, even if there were a few starts and stops along the way.