DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

This panorama of San Francisco was assembled from 14 photographs, taken from the shore of Treasure Island last weekend. I wanted to capture the entire skyline, from the Bay Bridge to the Golden Gate Bridge.

It was an overcast and somewhat gloomy day; the original pictures turned out dismally flat. I stitched them as-is, then corrected the resulting panorama.

The large number of input images made the assembly difficult. ArcServ’s PanoramaMaker 2000 could not cope with the task. A newer version (PanoramaMaker 3) fared better, but still crashed during output — just after saving the TIFF, fortunately, given that the assembly and tweaking took an hour. The TIFF measured 63 MB.

An aggressive curve correction in Lab mode restored color, removed much of the haze, and corrected the red cast that is annoyingly typical of my CoolPix 995. At this point, the image seems too blue and too dark, but not offensively so.

The biggest problem is that it’s much too wide to be of any use — nearly 9:1. If I were to print it three feet wide, it would be about as tall as a postcard. At a height suitable for mounting, it would span a wall (and cost a fortune).

Stories about people who can sip a glass of wine and tell you the varietal, the country of origin, the region, the year, and sometimes even the vintner:

• Noses Seek Wine Geekdom’s Biggest Prize, a NYT article about students preparing for the “Master of Wine” certification, administered by the Institute of Masters of Wine in London. “There are only 244 Masters of Wine worldwide.”
• A Man with Great Taste, a VIA magazine article about Larry Stone of San Francisco’s Rubicon, one of only 106 “master sommeliers” in the world, according to the London-based Court of Master Sommeliers.

We’ve attended blind wine tastings — even hosted a few. I know from experience that I am generally unable to distinguish flavor components. When I hear someone say “vegetal,” I can taste vegetal, but if nobody would say the word I would be unable to come up with it alone. I’d probably enjoy a component-tasting class if I felt I could free up a months’ worth of evenings to study and drink wine. Hmm, actually that might not be a bad thing.

More stories about Larry Stone:

• It’s 4 a.m. Do You Know Where Your Sommelier Is?… about A-list San Francisco sommeliers getting together to blind-taste wines after work.
• The Day-to-Day Life of a Sommelier… a chat with Larry Stone that has little to do with his day-to-day life, but answers some good questions like “can wine be sent back, and should the customer be charged for it?”

If you know nothing about wine but want to sound like you do, just memorize a few of these aroma words and component flavor words. Flinty or stemmy? Steely or coppery? Maybe just having a vocabulary of possibilities at hand makes it easier to identify the flavors.

The audio commentary track to Something’s Gotta Give, the recent comedy with Jack Nicholson and Diane Keaton, answers a question I’ve wondered about since I was 17 and legally able to watch R-rated movies: how do male actors control their erections during sex scenes?

I mean, maybe I’m abnormal, but if I’m naked under the sheets with an actress, and she’s naked, and we’re “pretending” to fondle each other, I’d be sprouting wood like a bamboo forest.

Are actors picturing something non-stimulating, like their grandmothers or Nicole Kidman? Does the presence of 100 stagehands and extras dull the sensation of hot nekkid flesh? Have they tied themselves down so as not to betray natural impulses?

The answers, according to Jack Nicholson, are no, no, and no. Respectively.

The following exchange concerns the scene pictured above. Nicholson’s character is about to get it on with Amanda Peet’s character. (She’s the one on top.) The commentary track features Nicholson and Nancy Meyers, the writer and director of the film.

Jack: I miss what you edited at the end of this particular scene, here.

Nancy: You mean where you sat up in your underwear?

Jack: Yeah, with a huge, you know…

Nancy: [laughs] That’s why it’s not in the movie, Jack.

I like this one a lot. It seems more intelligent and less cute than most romantic comedies. And the acting, as far as I can tell, is really wonderful.

My younger brother called recently to ask for advice on eradicating a virus from his computer. I couldn’t help him very effectively, because I have not used Windows (except in emergencies) since… let’s see… 1992. I was a power-user of Windows 286, to be sure, but I recovered quickly.

Anyway, on the phone I felt compelled to say, “If you’re tired of screwing around with viruses, you could always ditch Windows and buy a Mac.”

“What do you mean?” he asked. “Can’t Macs get viruses?”

He really didn’t know. He’s a couple paragraphs from finishing his Ph. D… he’s so smart he can find meaning and significance in the least rewarding movie I’ve seen all year. He once wrote a scholarly essay on my band’s debut CD that, even if it didn’t move any inventory, at least sounded like something that might show up in downbeat.

… Among the Babylon of culture there are significant works of art, literature and music. One such is the compact disc WANT, the music of a San Francisco band who seem to be busy at the marginality of super-hype and over-success…

And yet he didn’t know that 99% of all viruses target Microsoft Windows.

I thought everybody knew this — that to use Windows is to accept daily virus attacks in addition to the frequent critical security patches. But I guess it isn’t common knowledge after all.

Macs can, of course, get infected by viruses, but for the most part nobody bothers to write them. Virus authors want to see their work spread quickly. Therefore they’re unlikely to target a platform that is used by ~5% of the population. Windows is simply much more efficient at propagating viruses than any other OS. (They should print that on the side of the box.)

Jon Carroll’s column about the Bush administration’s apparent fantasy of infallibility — that is, Bush & Company’s inability to admit having ever made a mistake — is so right, so lucid, I’d like to quote the whole thing. You can read it in its entirety here: George Bush is never wrong.

(That’s my title, not Mr. Carroll’s; I’m hoping Google will index the link text so that feverish Bush supporters looking for justification will search for “George Bush is never wrong” and find, instead, a strong suggestion that he is.)

Carroll writes:

I have a theory. It dates back to Watergate, the first great 24/7 media scandal. Nixon tried to stonewall, and he could not. Why? Because there were too many staffers whispering to too many reporters.

You could take two lessons from Watergate. You could learn that the cover-up is always worse than the misdeed and that cutting your losses is always a good idea. Or you could learn that you must exert much tighter control over your staffers and your documents.

Which of those two lessons Bush learned is an exercise left to the reader. Just remember, kids: George Bush is never wrong!