Coloured Glass

Bush: texas (st)ranger

This has got to be the funniest story of the day. MSNBC is reporting from George W's summer vacation ranch that he has been reading Camus' The Stranger.
Somebody get the guy some pr advice, fast. What staff member thought a novel about the remorseless killing of an Arab (shot 5 times, no less) was the best way to show off the ol' cognitive powers?

Might have been 'White House Spokesman" Tony Snow, who said Bush "found it a quick read" - it is - and added: "I don't want to go too deep into it, but we discussed the origins of existentialism."
Really? what, Kierkegaard? Blaise Pascal?

UPDATE: aug 14 comes a Slate article on the subject, with John Dickerson offering this comment on the above quote: "Oh please, Tony, go into it. This is no time to be vague". Heh.

photo shop chop job

It's been a handful of days now since the Reuters photo-altering story broke over @ Little Green Footballs, and even Danish newspapers are beginnning to pick it up. Since there's no such thing as having too much of a good Photoshop hack-job, here's a nice clean cut of Hajj's F16-shot:

If only people abusing the clone tool would clone different parts of the picture for once. Same thing with the Beirut cityscape-shot. This one just jumps right at you. You could be standing on the ground watching this F16 miles away and still say "hey, that's 3 identical flares, isn't it?" Except, if you saw it, there would only be one, I guess.

So, the reason I'm bringing this trite story up again is to point to a really interesting read over @ Slate, Jim Lewis' thoughtprovoking rundown of the problems of establishing a code of ethics for news photography and post-processing. When is a photo 'real'? When it shows what was on the film? When it shows what the photographer saw? Or what he thinks he saw?

It brings some much needed perspective to what looked for a while like a conspiracy-theory witchhunt on bad photoshoppers everywhere, regardless of intent. Like Associated Press' blunder with the "cloned-hands-man", hilariously dubbed George Cloney by a commenter over @ Gawker. Also, home of the priceless comment from reader 'flashman': "it looks like something his child might have done [with the clone tool] while he was on the can". That would've been something.