1000 Demons

Keep an eye out.

If you are looking for a way to help with relief efforts in Haiti, I suggest considering Partners in Health. They have a long and established history of providing aid in Haiti.

You may donate to their cause HERE

Or you may send your donations directly to:

Partners in Health
P.O. Box 845578
Boston, MA 02284-5578

It’s January two. Has this demon reached you yet?

Permanent, bad art on your body.

This sums up my problem with tattoos. They are ugly. They are permanent. The permanence muliplies the aesthetic offenses. More often than not the art of the tattoo resembles the restless doodles of a sullen but talented junior high school boy. What is impressive in an 8 graders notebook is not so impressive when engraved in the skin.

They are bought on a whim and they remain forever.

In most cases they become objects of regret. I knew this when I was twenty and I warned my friends against them. I am even more sure of it now having watched an entire generation get “inked.”

I have never understood the appeal.

A few friends have tattoos I do understand. They have them as talismans or reminders, and their meaning and permanence intertwine. But these are the rare cases.

Most tattoos are picked from a book or a Google search and inscribed by artists whose best qualities are their ability to copy a picture onto a fleshy hide and to not judge your decision to put something like this on your body forever:

But maybe the problem is me. Perhaps I lack a commitment to that kind of art.

Nothing good ever happens in Broad Daylight. No one every tells you about the lovely picnic they had in Broad Daylight. (Unless brazen youths stole the food). There are no tales of parades in broad daylight, unless they are full of Nazis. (Nazis, marching down our little street, in Broad Daylight!)

The things that happen in broad daylight are street attacks, rapes, abductions and murders.

Look at this list of 10 things that happened recently in Broad Daylight:

• Shooting near a kids’ dance studio in Vancouver
• Brazen sex trade in Detroit
  
• Jogger attacked in Scotland
  
• Police shootout in the Philippines
  
• Magritte painting stolen in Brussels
• Woman mugged in Duluth
• Armed robbery and shootout in Manila
• Men in Mexico kidnapped from their homes
• Two police officers shot down in Rio de Janeiro
  
• Attempted robbery just outside Boston

ALL in Broad Daylight!!

Obviously the problem is international. Broad Daylight emboldens criminals. There is something dangerous about this peculiar kind of sunny. The weather service really needs to get on this. If there is even a 10% chance of Broad Daylight in my area, I would like to be warned.

Looking for information on Canon’s new 7D camera this morning I stumbled across an early review and I was so amazed, I had to write my own review of that review here.

The first thing that struck me is that the reviewer is a young, chicken-legged model from Hong Kong. I know this because, while there is no byline for the article, she is clearly shown throughout the review holding the 7D just like a PRO!

For example, here (at right) she is almost holding the camera up to her eye. Being a professional, she does not want to mess up her lashes or eyeliner. Look at those long, white, manicured nails – the mark of a great photographer!

And here (at left) she is leaning back on a glossy white floor in a natural and casual manner, elegantly holding the camera across her tube top without even looking in the viewfinder. I frequently find myself using this technique at weddings and Bar Mitzvahs. (Yes, this technique will only work with a tube-top.)

After demonstrating the proper way to hold this new camera, the reviewer goes on to show us how useful and versatile the camera is in a variety of situations. In order to be as helpful as possible, she poses for all the photos herself!

Here she is on her hands and knees atop some sort of construction platform in what appears to be a incomplete bathroom, probably to demonstrate how one may use this camera to photograph a pet or weakened loved-one.

In the next sample, she is with Mike, the janitor, in the boiler room to give us an idea of how suited this camera is to engagement photography:

You can really feel the connection between these two!

And finally, here she is towards the end of the review, where she has nearly passed out from hunger in a dirty stairwell.

In the high resolution image (which the site offers for download here) you can see the sheen of sweat from what I can only presume is a combination of exhaustion and lack of nutrition. Poor hard-working girl!

But boy, hunger or no, she loves this camera! She gives it a fantastic review! A more jaded person might be concerned about the fact that the digitalrev website isn’t a review site at all, but an online retailer based in Hong Kong. One might think that they are totally biased and just want to sell cameras. One might think this girl didn’t write the review, but that she is only used to create a sleazy sex-appeal for what is really nothing more than a big product ad. But I don’t believe it. I believe this girl loves cameras and mini-skirts almost as much as she hates calories!

Thanks unnamed skinny reviewer girl!

Roman, a cursory glance at the events of your life tell us it has been a cruel and ugly world for you. The horrors that seem to have surrounded your life would devastate any of us. But that you have suffered does not mean you are not and would not always have been a wretch.

The terrible death of your wife at the hands of the Mason lunatics pushed you, somehow, into the company and younger and younger women and girls. That you have admitted you were unfaithful to Sharon Tate does little to shed a flattering light on you, but rather makes her life and death all the more awful and tragic. I am unable to comprehend how her death lead you down the road of pedophilia, unless your understandable nihilism led you to feel you should do whatever you wished, regardless of right or wrong. But this could have led you down any road. The trouble is in what desires you found at your own core.

You may want to pretend that fleeing for 30 years entitles you to some sort of victory over consequences for the things that you have done, but it does not. You may want to cloak yourself in the story of your life – that fleeing makes you feel safe, but your behavior remains deplorable and your unwillingness to face the music looks like nothing but cowardice to me.

More than anything, I think you want to refuse to speak of what you have done, because you are smart and clever enough to know you may then have to face yourself. Your lawyer hopes you will soon “obtain your freedom,” but that does not mean it is deserved.

Thanks swine flu. Swell of you to stop by the states. So glad to have you.

Thanks for teaching me to wash my hands like I’m scrubbing in for surgery.

Also nice of you to correct the image of pigs as filthy, disease festering animals who wallow in their own filth.

And let me congratulate you on requiring a double vaccination! Outstanding! Measles, mumps and rubella have nothing on you.