Tried to take some uni project photos this afternoon. Failed. Did this instead.

Will try again tomorrow.

Simon Mayo sat in for Chris Evans on Radio 2’s drivetime show last week. I remember being amazed to discover I liked Chris Evans’ show - the guy has a great way with words, and is seriously sharp - but he is a little credulous on occasion, particularly during the daily interviews with offbeat guests. It’s not designed to be in-depth serious journalism, but nevertheless reaches millions of people and can add to the general impression of reiki, say, not being made-up bollocks. Last Thursday’s guest was the editor of Dictionary of the Unexplained. I haven’t heard Simon Mayo much, but I expected he’d continue the usual interviewing style. I don’t have a transcript, but he began with something very much like:

So this dictionary is full of the paranormal. Tell me why I should believe a word of it.

He rocked! The editor came out with the usual gumph on keeping an open mind and having consulted ‘experts’. SM ignored this and followed up with a question on the most frightening monster in the dictionary. She told of the chupacabara, a reported ‘demonic entity’ which sucks the blood from goats in Puetro Rico, but has also been sighted in the USA. He asked whether there was any actual evidence of its existence, and she replied that there’d been many sightings. He wasn’t impressed, and moved onto the conspiracy theories and hoaxes - did she have a particular favourite hoax? She replied with the Moon Hoax, saying that newspapers in the mid 1800s reported sightings of flying men and bipedal beavers on the moon…

and people actually believed it!

Yeah. That’s bonkers. Anyway, back to the goat-sucking monsters.

At the end of the interview SM asked what she was working on next. She said it was a book on ‘lost crafts’. Good grief, I thought, this woman really is in deep. What’s this - the bermuda triangle? The government hiding evidence of UFO crashes?

Like plucking a chicken, or thatching a roof. That kind of thing.

Ok. My bad.

She didn’t come over as all that mental, in hindsight, and certainly a far cry from some true believers I’ve heard. But Simon Mayo didn’t let her off lightly; I was very impressed. Great to hear some decent skepticism on the radio.

Is someone out there having Charlie Brooker’s babies? If not, we should get right on that. Here he is after watching Newsnight’s report on the Brain Gym, which is…I’ll let him explain:

Brain Gym, y’see, is an “educational kinesiology” programme designed to improve kiddywink performance. It’s essentially a series of simple exercises lumbered with names that make you want to steer a barbed wire bus into its creator’s face. One manoeuvre, in which you massage the muscles round the jaw, is called the “energy yawn”. Another involves activating your “brain buttons” by forming a “C” shape with one hand and pressing it either side of the collarbone while simultaneously touching your stomach with the other hand.

Throughout the report I was grinding my teeth and shaking my head - a movement I call a “dismay churn”. Not because of the sickening cutesy-poo language, nor because I’m opposed to the nation’s kids being forced to exercise (make them box at gunpoint if you want) but because I care about the difference between fantasy and reality, both of which are great in isolation, but, like chalk and cheese or church and state, are best kept separate.

Confuse fantasy with reality and you might find yourself doing crazy things, like trying to wave hello to Ian Beale each time you see him on the telly, or buying homeopathic remedies - both of which are equally boneheaded pursuits. (Incidentally, if anyone disagrees with this assessment and wants to write in defending homeopathy, please address your letters to myself c/o the Kingdom of Narnia.)

Brain Gym is a government-endorsed program. Doesn’t it break your heart?

I am now going to do something very very silly. I have to produce a set of abstract images, on slide film, for a uni project. While researching I came across camera tossing - a technique in which you throw your camera into the air while it’s taking a picture. This can produce utterly lovely results:

And it can also total your camera beyond repair. Various techniques and approaches for avoiding this outcome are detailed here, but it’s always a risk. I’m generally an ok catch - a benefit of learning to juggle - but I hadn’t twigged that I’d have to catch the camera in the dark. I had a brief, terrifying attempt with my digital SLR, and came out with this:

Which convinced me it’s worth trying out on slides. I originally intended to use a Very Old film SLR which could be destroyed without causing upset, but on inspection today it needs old+weird+expensive batteries, so I’m instead going to go with my Old But Still Pretty Good film SLR. I could cope with its devolving into a million pieces, but I’d really rather not.

I’m using old-school Velvia film, which has frankly insane colour saturation (never, ever photograph people with it). Should be fun, although I have visions of my SLR hitting the floor on shot 36 and sending the film spilling out…I’ll report back in a bit, if I’m not sobbing in a corner.

Update: Ok, that’s one roll exposed. Nothing broken, thank goodness. I put a load of pillows on the (wooden) floor, and the camera hit them a few times. I also caught it by the lens once or twice. My camera now hates me. I’ll take the film into Jessops tomorrow, then it’s a quaint 48hr wait for the results.

Weirdest news of the day: Richard Dawkins is apparently guest starring in Doctor Who this series. His wife Lalla Ward is an ex Doctor’s-companion, but Russell T. Davies is an atheist and fan, too. Could be entertaining, one way or another.

Mainly posting this to warn against reading the explanatory Independent article, which is full of spoilers. Bastards. It would have killed them to put a warning at the top?

To whoever got up early on Sunday to make this on Stratford’s recreation ground:

I salute you. Nice work.

Me: Hello, smile, is it possible to convert my regular bank account into a student account?
Smile: No probs. Send us your university acceptance letter and funding form and we’ll get right on it.
Me: Here you go.
Smile: Thanks! Here’s the thing: we can’t convert your account. You’ll need to set up a new one and run it alongside.
Me: Ok. How do I do that?
Smile: Just submit a normal account application, tell us your current account details and we’ll get it all linked up so you can see it in the same interface.
Me: Ok, I’ve submitted my application.
Smile: Thanks! We’ve rejected it. We won’t tell you why. Byeee!

Even if you’re not into superheroes¹, read this for the writing:

This sad outcome even in the wake of thousands of dollars spent and months of hard work given to sewing and to packing foam rubber into helmets has an obvious, an unavoidable, explanation: a superhero’s costume is constructed not of fabric, foam rubber, or adamantium but of halftone dots, Pantone color values, inked containment lines, and all the cartoonist’s sleight of hand. The superhero costume as drawn disdains the customary relationship in the fashion world between sketch and garment. It makes no suggestions. It has no agenda. Above all, it is not waiting to find fulfillment as cloth draped on a body. A constructed superhero costume is a replica with no original, a model built on a scale of x:1. However accurate and detailed, such a work has the tidy airlessness of a model-train layout but none of the gravitas that such little railyards and townscapes derive from making faithful reference to homely things. The graphic purity of the superhero costume means that the more effort and money you lavish on fine textiles, metal grommets, and leather trim the deeper your costume will be sucked into the silliness singularity that swallowed, for example, Joel Schumacher’s Batman and Robin and their four nipples.

Michael Chabon. *makes note to look him up on Amazon*.

1. I feel for you [↩]

Abode released a beta of Lightroom 2.0 this morning, which was quite the surprise. The feature list is impressive, but most interesting are:

• Much better Photoshop integration. Images can now be sent directly into CS3 without requiring an export. It can also send a group of pictures straight through to be merged into a panorama or HDR image. Now they’ve implemented this feature I really don’t see the need for Bridge, Photoshop’s built-in image browser.
• Localised masking. This is the big, attention-grabbing one - Lightroom can now edit specific areas of images. It’s nicely implemented, although since it links so well into Photoshop I might just use that instead. Well, I say that. In practice it might be quicker to do lots in Lightroom - we’ll see.
• Smart collections. These are a bit like iTunes’ Smart Playlists. You can configure a bunch of rules, each with individual AND/OR inclusion settings, that give you a very nice way of focussing on specific images. So you can have a dynamically created set of recently-edited images, or anything with the keyword ‘monkeys’ taken last May, with a wide-angle lens. Etc..
• Dual-monitor support. I’ve got two monitors, so I can have the smaller one displaying an overview of an image as I change particular elements. Or it can show the grid of photos while I edit on the main monitor. My smaller monitor’s colours are a bit dodgy, but it’s still useful as a rough guide.

There’s a fair bit more: export sharpening, better filters, a loupe in the details panel, and the interface has been overhauled and some of the existing features tweaked. A full guide is here.

Scott Kelby etc. have some introductory videos up, and their FAQ has some interesting details. They reckon the full version will be released June-ish, and there won’t be any beta updates between now and then. No word on pricing yet.

I’ve been playing around with it today and they’ve certainly been listening to the feedback. Lots of things work just that bit better, but it’s the Photoshop links that are the most useful for me. There are a couple of bugs, as is to be expected with betas, but nothing show-stopping yet. The program was pretty good already, but v2 adds enough that I can’t see me not buying the upgrade.

Because I own version 1.3 I can invite people to be on the beta program for six months - otherwise you’re limited to a 30-day trial - so let me know if you’d like an invite.

My favourite, in a slightly disturbing way:

Via the increasingly-sucking-up-my-free-time metafilter. I’ve known about that site for years, but I’m only just starting to appreciate it.

I’ve recently been applying for summer internships. I’ll have a few months free after uni finishes in late May, so I thought I’d make the most of it. I’ve had three rejections this week, but today I received a acceptance letter! Woohoo! It’s not finalised, but if I get this right I’ll be a trainee with the photographic staff of the Daily Mail from mid-June to mid-September.  Apparently they have a fair few applicants, and they’ll judge on the basis of a project that I have to complete before the end of next week. I need to supply pictures of ‘people who don’t fit in’ in my local area. I’m not quite sure what this means, but they recommend it be on the basis of accent, or the type of work they do, or something like that. Shouldn’t be too hard. Once this is complete their photoshop experts will get to work, and who knows - I might even make the paper! Most chuffed.