Bill Murray's Blog, page 15

100+ Year Old Color Photos from Georgia

Here is a link to a collection of color photos from (I believe) 1912, taken in the Republic of Georgia. It seems that a photographer named Sergei Prokudin-Gorsky “perfected a complex early method of color photography that required three separate images of each scene to be shot, with color filters placed over the lens. When the three black-and-white photos were sandwiched together and had red, green, and blue light shone through them, a color image could be projected.”

They’re from an article at the RFERL.org website. Here’s one of the photos:

See also a few more up-to-date photos in the Georgia Gallery at EarthPhotos.com, taken on my visit in 2006.

2-1/2 Human Problems

A chilly, gray, overcast Saturday in January in Georgia, USA. We never really descend into the depths of a prolonged, dark winter here in Georgia, and on the morning rounds with our dogs this morning I heard birdsong. It won’t be long here, say, six weeks, until the seasons begin to change.

I remember thinking last spring, as the virus began to close our worlds around us, that the rest of the natural world went on as ever, that the pandemic was a strictly human problem. May we all begin to rejoin the rest of the natural world now, a year on.

And speaking of human problems, while I have you: I’ve encountered some items over morning coffee I really must share. The first two things are about Trump Administration personnel:

Thing #1: Nobody will be more delighted to see Secretary of State Mike Pompeo go than … everybody in the rest of the world. A Google search took half a second to return five million confirmations:

Thing #2: The President’s little trick of using “Acting” cabinet heads to avoid confirmation by the Senate resulted in acting secretaries like Acting Defense Secretary Christopher C. Miller. Here, an excerpt from a press gaggle on 14 January. Ladies and gentlemen, the Trump Department of Defense at work:

Read the whole thing here.

And Thing number 2-1/2, not deserving of a full number of its own, sums up of the general gravitas and august nature of the outgoing regime. It’s a headline in this morning’s Washington Post:

Not for Everyone

Snake safari, anyone?

More Scotland Snow

Further to yesterday’s post, Good Morning Scotland, here’s more Scotland in snow, from Ailish Sinclair’s lovely blog.

Good Morning Scotland

Scotland woke to a lovely morning today, 14 January, 2021. Here, the Campsie Fells, central Scotland, photo by Melanie Scott via The Scotsman.

Self Important Authors II

I’ve written three self-published books (this one and this one and this one), I’m proud of them and I’d love it if you bought them, and I wish all my fellow authors, self-published or published by diminishing-by-the-day publishing houses, all success. I support you.

A cooperative spirit, I think, may be how we get through this up-in-the-air transitional period in publishing. Alas, there is the question of authors whose egos run well out in front of them. There are two or three specifically that I can think of tonight, and why wouldn’t it be fun to go ahead and call them out?

In my yet-to-be-read stack sits The Economists’ Hour by Benyamin Appelbaum. I understand it to be a study by a journalist of the rise of market-favoring economists since the 1970s, their embrace by policy makers, and the resultant mayhem.

Fair enough. A topic that interests me enough to buy it, and we’ll see how it turns out as a read. What grates is a blurb on the back of the book jacket by Tyler Cowen, who is an economics professor at George Mason University, someone who has become well-known over the last decade through hard work, prolific online output and savvy use of new media.

George Mason University is a libertarian bastion and a Koch brothers-funded favorite, which is a required negative mention in all the lefty press. Nevertheless I applaud Mr. Cowen’s accomplishments, hard and sustained work on his online presence, and the interesting stuff he has turned up. 

Just this one thing: There is an unfortunate contagion among people who have an established audience. They seem to want to make it all about them. This is not just a product of the internet.

Mr. Cowen in a moment. First the prime example of all-about-me-ism, the New York Times’s Thomas Friedman, who wrote compelling books early in his career. Alas, for some time now our former hero has been all about himself.

Friedman has been prolific. His early work, in particular From Beirut to Jerusalem, before he went off on his world-is-flat neo-lib jag, compels admiration. He was there. Did that.

But it’s hard to read Friedman’s NYT review of Samantha Power’s The Education of an Idealist: A Memoir without cringing. The first seven paragraphs, before any consideration of the book, before anything else, are steadfastly Friedman about Friedman.

I’ve written about this kind of hubris before as regards another author I otherwise admire, Robert Kaplan, author of a 2005 book that was seminal for me, Balkan Ghosts, in an article I called Big, Important Writers Embarrassing Themselves).

Back to Tyler Cowen. He blurbed Appelbaum’s book this way:

“I very much enjoyed reading The Economist’s Hour, an entertaining and well-written look at how market-oriented ideas rose from the acedemy and transformed nations. I do not agree with each and every perspective but found this a valuable and highly recommendable book, which I devoured in a single sitting.”

Takeaway here: Cowen is such a polymath that he can digest a 332 page book in a single sitting. It’s not so much about the book. It’s about Cowen’s reading prowess.

Ethiopia Photos

I’ve been reading about the two year old Chinese-built Addis-Djibouti train line lately. It’s a train journey we’d hoped to make this past spring before the virus intervened, and I’m hopeful we can come back and fill in that trip later. 

Although northern Ethiopia is going through a terrible period just now[image error], it’s such a photogenic country, I really recommend it to anyone with a camera and a sense of adventure. Warm people, good food, exotic everywhere you look, what’s not to like?

Here’s Addis Ababa a few years ago. More Addis photos in the Ethiopia Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.

Underwhelming Parler

There is a Finnish word, sinisilmäinen, which means blue-eyed, and translates figuratively as “naive.” I think many of us whom “patriots” would deride as cosmopolitan citizens-of-nowhere are probably sinisilmäinen when it comes to the workings of the more radical Trump-supporting fringes of the internet. I know I certainly am. 

So learning of the imminent demise of the social media site Parler over the weekend, I pseudonymously set up an account to take a spin around. What I found was disappointing. 

I don’t quite know what to make of it. It’s not filled with seditious stuff, or if it is I wasn’t looking in the right place. I just ran through a few obvious hash tags like #Trump and #maga. There doesn’t appear to be a ton of original content; many posts seem to be retweeted (they call called a retweet an ‘echo’) a lot. Mostly, parler seems seemed to be populated by a bunch of paranoid nuts. I gotta say, if people believe all the stuff they read there, it’s no wonder they are paranoid, because if your life is was on parler, your world is coming apart. Here are several posts I found for you:

• Obama Detained at Airport Attempting to Leave Country

• FBI Raids Chuck Schumer’s Home, Finds Explicit Epstein Tapes

• Pelosi Kicked Out of D.C Restaurant for ‘Drunken and Disorderly Conduct’

• Cancel your #Amazon account NOW. Tomorrow will be too late. God bless America

• There’s a reason Democrats and Demons start with the same three letters. God almighty is going to fix this country and use Trump as his weapon to do it!

• Three States Pull CNN’s Broadcasting License, ‘They Fail to be Truthful’

• The fact is President Trump did not make any calls for violence.. Subscribe to the Mark Levin podcast and listen here.

• NEW VIDEO: Antifa Hands Out Weapons from Bag During Storming of US Capitol

• This goes past the 6th! Trust in the Lord our God!

• BE PREPARED FOR AN IMMINENT BLACKOUT. President Trump will be using be using emergency broadcast system. We have a man of courage & faith at the helm. He will be at the helm for 4 more years per the RULE OF LAW. Pray for President, our country

• Apple is going to do an update on all phones to shut off the emergency broadcast system. This is Nazi Germany 1938

• DOJ Orders Raid On Obama Compound After Massive Fraud Found In Audit

• Blackout right now at the Vatican in #Rome , #Italy and in all major #Pakistan cities

• Q was right about everything. They are being wiped from the internet now. I wish I had listened more.

And just remember, this is all Michelle Obama’s fault:

See what I mean? Disappointing. And sad.

 

Thoughts to Start the Week

There’s a whole lot going on in the world just now, eh? Here are a few all-over-the-map ideas to start the week. Housekeeping to start: I hope my brand new book, Out There, will go live on all Amazon platforms this week or next. It’s a collection of thirty essays on travel, written from and about disparate locations, Greenland to Vietnam to pandemic-ridden Cincinnati. At 360 pages, your money’s worth.

Elsewhere, one expects a Lukashenka-like, whatever it takes response, but best of luck nevertheless to the people of Uganda and Robert Kyagulanyi Ssentamu, aka Bobbi Wine, in Thursday’s national elections. The pop singer stands against President Yoweri Museveni, who removed Presidential term limits in 2005 and has ruled the country since 1986. Time for a change there.

Kampala, Uganda

Whether the incoming Biden administration can restore a little spit and polish to Donald Trump’s smoldering city on the hill is an open question, but there’s no doubt the transition team has assembled a capable bunch. Today’s announcement of William J. Burns to head CIA is terrific. His memoir, The Back Channel, reads like a template for best diplomatic practices.

Notable that leading foreign policy establishment spokesperson Richard Haas and iconoclast Andrew Bacevich each claim last week’s events definitively bring down the curtain on the post-Cold War era.

Who needs a quick primer on the state of Irish politics?

And finally, I took a spin around the now defunct social media site parler.com over the weekend. I’ll share what I found here shortly. Cheers, don’t get sick, and a good week to you.

Trump Dumped

Others may be off to enjoy their weekend. I believe I’ll stay here and wring hands about whether the Twitter/Trump feud is a free speech issue, about whether companies have too much power and about the relationship between capitalism and democracy.

You enjoy your weekend.