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There comes a time in a young man's life when Halloween, like Gregor Samsa, goes through a metamorphosis from something familiar to something vaguely unsettling. One year Halloween means providing for the Dentist's retirement, and suddenly, the next year, it is a venue for impersonating Bela Lugosi. While trick or treating was fun when you are a little kid, and visiting the local Haunted House was okay when you were only a kid, things change so that actually MAKING a haunted house, or as close as you can get to it, becomes a really cool thing.

I remember a Halloween in the early 1960's when I went through this change. Since I was the studious sort, not the juvenile delinquent type, my Haunted House was well... a little weird. After all, one must admit that a Volcanic Pumpkin is a far cry from a Haunted House. I don't remember where I got the idea, but I think it must have been from Mr. Wizard.

"There, I guess King George will be able to read that!" —John Hancock, upon signing the Declaration of Independence

Observant readers will have noticed that Sweet and Sour Spectator has been upgraded from Movable Type version 3.2 to version 4.2. The upgrade includes a complete face lift, support for tags, and much better navigation and search capabilities. I think it is a big improvement, but there are two changes that readers might want to take note of.

1. The Category archives now contain only the fifteen most "recent" entries. They used to contain all posts in the category. I may change this later, but for now, you can work around this limitation by using tag search. I've tagged all posts with their category, so a tag search will return all posts for that tag/category.
2. This version of the blog software no longer supports rdf syndication, only atom syndication. I've linked index.rdf to atom.xml & hopefully that will provide a seamless transistion for those using the rdf method. If that doesn't work, you may need to switch to atom syndication.

If anyone finds anything that is broken or has any questions, please contact me using the email link under the "Author!" block in the right margin.

Photography has always had a tenuous relationship with the real word, but as we get further into the digital age, the links between photographs and reality are disappearing.

We entered the age of photography with an industrial attack on the landscape and portrait artist. Before the daguerreotype only artists could document the world for posterity. After, anyone could do so, and thus we have an extensive record of the world from about 1850 forward.  For scores of years, photography provided indisputable evidence of reality. However, today the digital manipulation of photographs can lie and cheat, or create an alternate reality.

And if that wasn't enough, now we have a post-modern take on photography where the intent is to fool us into thinking that a picture of something real is a picture of something fake. This started when Olivo Barbieri started taking photographs using a special tilt-shift lens that manipulated depth of field to fool us into thinking we were looking at a model. (Follow the Barieri link for some examples of his work). Ironically, this illusion relies on a limitation of photography--close-up lenses have poor depth of field--plus assuming that everyone is familiar with this artifact.  And, just as the digital domain makes it easier to fake reality, it also makes it easier to fake fakery.

Here is a recent on-line magazine article that is a must see: 50 Beautiful Examples of Tilt-Shift Photography.  For do-it-yourself buffs here is a Tilt-Shift Photoshop Tutorial, there is a tilt-shift Flickr tag and it brings up these examples, and for the obsessive, a comprehensive Tilt-Shift Link Collection.  If you want to do this in the analog domain, here is a nice $2k Nikkor special lens to get the effect. Finally, there is my attempt above, taken along Cienega Road in Hollister, California, which will pop up a larger version if you click on it.

There comes a time in a young man's life when Halloween, like Gregor Samsa, goes through a metamorphosis from something familiar to something vaguely unsettling. One year Halloween means providing for the Dentist's retirement, and suddenly, the next year, it is a venue for impersonating Bela Lugosi. While trick or treating was fun when you are a "little kid", and visiting the local Haunted House was okay when you were only a kid, things change so that actually MAKING a haunted house, or as close as you can get to it, becomes a really cool thing.

I remember a Halloween in the early 1960's when I went through this change. Since I was the studious sort, not the juvenile delinquent type, my Haunted House was well... a little weird. After all, one must admit that a Volcanic Pumpkin is a far cry from a Haunted House. I don't remember where I got the idea, but I think it must have been from Mr. Wizard.

A recent blog post by Mark Bittman reminded me of one of my favorite quotations:

Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away. Antoine de Saint-Exupery

This isn't about wine or food or San Francisco or music, but these pictures are so incredible and eye-popping that I am compelled to blog about them. It's almost like a time machine, transporting you back to Czarist Russia before Lennin's Revolution. My grandfather on my father's side was Russian (or Polish, depending on how you want to look at it) and I'm certain that he grew up looking at scenes exactly like those depicted in these incredible photos.

Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii (1863-1944), was photographer to the Czar and spent 10 years between 1905 and 1915 traveling around the Russian empire documenting what he saw. Amazingly, Gorskii took his pictures in color using an ingenious camera that took three exposures through red, blue, and green filters. High resolution digital scanners and Adobe Photoshop didn't exist 100 years ago, Gorskii had to make do with a lantern projector with three colored filters focused on one image. Today, we can use the aforementioned digital media tools to create the most amazing pictures which you can see here, at Alex Gridenko's website.

For more digital realizations of this amazing trove of material, look at the Prokudin-Gorskii exhibit of the Library of Congress. And for details on how these images were created, look at this page.

It is enough to think you are exercising. You don't actually have to do it. Click below to read about a remarkable study that claims the placebo effect works for exercise.

Exercise Sizzle Works Sans Steak.

Although it goes against the grain of my overly-logical bent, there really does appear to be good evidence that health is driven by your state of mind.

This is the best list I've seen today: 33 Names of Things You Never Knew had Names. I knew five of them. My favorite is #28.

(Thanks to TT @ About Last Night).

There comes a time in a young man's life when Halloween, like Gregor Samsa, goes through a metamorphosis from something familiar to something vaguely unsettling. One year Halloween means providing for the Dentist's retirement, and suddenly, the next year, it is a venue for impersonating Bela Lugosi. While trick or treating was fun when you are a "little kid", and visiting the local Haunted House was okay when you were only a kid, things change so that actually MAKING a haunted house, or as close as you can get to it, becomes a really cool thing.

I remember a Halloween in the early 1960's when I went through this change. Since I was the studious sort, not the juvenile delinquent type, my Haunted House was well... a little weird. After all, one must admit that a Volcanic Pumpkin is a far cry from a Haunted House. I don't remember where I got the idea, but I think it must have been from Mr. Wizard.

I've never been much concerned about clothes, but I have two thoughts about this picture: 1) it seems incredible that this might be thought of as high fashion and worth a premium, and 2) we seem to have "graduated" to a post-egalitarian age where it is not even the common which is exalted it is the pathetic.

Barbara Schwartz, delegate to the 2005 Democratic National Convention. (click the picture for original site)

Now there is proof that it exists.

Four jobs you've had in your life: paint salesman, cost accountant, CEO, consulting practice director.

Four movies you could watch over and over: Ran, Melvin and Howard, Adventures of Baron Munchausen, On the Waterfront

Four places you've lived: Cedar Mills, OR; Los Angeles, CA; Charlotte, NC; San Francisco, CA

Four TV shows you love to watch: News Hour with Jim Leher, Nova, The Ernie Kovacs Show, Twilight Zone.

Four places you've been on vacation: Kenya, Oxford, British Virgin Islands, Japan.

Four websites you visit daily: Instapundit, American Spectator, New York Times, California Insider

Four of your favorite foods: smoked salmon, stilton cheese, mushrooms, wine.

Four places you'd rather be: The French Laundry, The Ojai Valley Inn and Spa, the Village Vanguard, the summit of the Matterhorn.

Well, here I am in Bangkok, Thailand working on a business analysis for a local polymers company. At Siam Polyolefins, Ltd. (the company we are working with), the standard business dress for men is dark trousers, white shirt and a tie. There is an official company neck-tie, so everyone wears the same tie each day. (My jet-lag was so bad, that I didn't notice this until the third day!) On Friday, they have casual dress day, just like the U.S. Well, not exactly like the U.S... Here it means you can wear a colored shirt, it doesn't have to be white! Tie still required.