Posted 9:16 AM by robert d

Feigenbaum's Constant - 4.6692016090

I am beginning to read A Most Wanted Man by John le Carre.


Unhand Me, Grey-Beard Loon

The character in the snap above is the ubiquitous Robert d Snaps hanging with his posse after an evening of innocuous distractions.

The “d” could stand for dangerous but actually it stands for digital.

I finished Most Wanted last night. le Carre is approaching 80 years old and he still has it. A trick that le Carre has used before is to take a word that the reader is probably not familiar with and making it a focal point of the novel. In Most Wanted the word is Lipizzaner. If you have read Most Wanted you will grok. If the novel still awaits your touch you will think born black then turns white. Think Crimson Tide.



© 2009 big box industries

Posted 11:49 AM by robert d

AIG - Project Mayhem – Hank Paulson

"Steph: But in Project Mayhem, we have no names.
Narrator: No, listen to me. This is a man and he has a name, and it's Robert Paulson, okay?
Mechanic: Robert Paulson.
Narrator: He is dead now, because of us, all right? You understand that?
[Everyone stares at Narrator]
Mechanic: I understand. In death, a member of Project Mayhem has a name. His name is Robert Paulson.
Steph: His name is Robert Paulson.”

Fight Club (1999) almost got it right, but not quite. The source of all the current AIG problems is not Robert but Hank.

If you can remember back a few months ago, there was a bald headed guy all over TV telling everyone that the sky was falling in. Everyone’s house and car and anything else that we held dear would poof, disappear, if the US government did not immediately, like yesterday, bail out AIG. That bald headed guy, who is keeping a very low profile now, was former Secretary of the Treasury – Henry Merritt “Hank” Paulson Jr.


Your Parents Must Be Very Proud (Pretty Woman)

If you look like a crook and act like a crook and have worked with and assisted crooks, then you probably are a crook.

“Paulson was Staff Assistant to the Assistant Secretary of Defense at The Pentagon from 1970 to 1972.[7] He then worked for the administration of U.S. President Richard Nixon, serving as assistant to John Ehrlichman from 1972 to 1973, during the events of the Watergate scandal for which Ehrlichman was convicted, and sentenced to prison.”

“In 2004, at the request of the major Wall Street investment houses, including Goldman Sachs, then headed by Paulson, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission agreed unanimously to release the major investment houses from the net capital rule, the requirement that their brokerages hold reserve capital that limited their leverage and risk exposure.”

If anyone in government knew what was going on at AIG, all the ins and outs as only a Master of the game would know, it would have been Hank Paulson.

Where is Henry now?

© 2009 big box industries

Posted 2:10 PM by robert d

The Rime of the Ancyent Mariner



Little Girl in Pink Dress


One of the few poems from college or maybe it was high school or perhaps both to have any lasting impression on me is The Rime of the Ancient Mariner – Samuel Taylor Coleridge – 1798. I use the term impression loosely because besides a vague recollection of the story line, the only actual text I remember is -

“It is an ancient Mariner,
And he stoppeth one of three.”

and

“unhand me, grey-beard loon!”

With these lines being in the very beginning of a poem that is rather long in length.

As meager as it might be though there would be few today who would associate “stoppeth one of three” or “grey-beard loon” with Coleridge.

Even more trenchant is the discovery that there is a passage from The Rime that most would know but very few could acknowledge comes from The Ancient Mariner –

“Water, water, every where,
And all the boards did shrink ;
Water, water, every where,
Nor any drop to drink.”



Banishing the Illusions

© 2009 big box industries

Posted 4:21 PM by robert d

Get Yer Ya-Ya’s Out

I have been working on a blog that references Neanderthal Man, 46 chromosomes in Homo Sapien but 48 chromosomes in chimpanzees, and how Darwinian Evolution is pretty good at explaining the “recent” past but is lacking with respect to the earliest emergence of life. Unfortunately I got waylaid by a graphic that was to accompany the blog that I thought I had seen on the internet but had trouble finding again. From there things went downhill.

In the interim I have been doing (n+1) things, were n = lots and lots of stuff.

I just got finished working on a snap from the Retouching Forum on dpreview.


Before

I gave the snap a ya-ya, as in Get Yer Ya-Ya's Out. It's a retro Euro look that has recently been used by Greg Bear in his Fresh Fish Montage.


After

© 2009 big box industries