A Picture Is Worth 1000 Words: Hunger

A Picture Is Worth 1000 Words: Hunger

I ran across this picture recently and even though I just did one picture worth blah blah words, I figured that this was depressing enough that it needed to be shared.



I know what you're thinking. 6 seconds to read that first sentence? Holy crap, are people actually that slow readers? But no, the real threat here is the fact that Pizza Hut would give two shits about hunger in the world. You know, they could very well just donate that $1 million a day themselves from the amount they make from selling their shitty pizza, but hey, they want to use your money instead and take the credit and get the good PR.

How about if you're going to donate or give to a good cause, you just give directly to the best charity who doesn't have very little to no middle man in the process who get a percentage of the whole deal. Then again, your average pizza hut consumer won't really care what others are eating, or in this case not eating. Given they're choosing Pizza Hut pizza.

Just some food for thought.

A Picture Is Worth A Thousand Words: Fuck This Gay Planet

A Picture Is Worth A Thousand Words: Fuck This Gay Planet



These photographs of albatross chicks were made just a few weeks ago on Midway Atoll, a tiny stretch of sand and coral near the middle of the North Pacific. The nesting babies are fed bellies-full of plastic by their parents, who soar out over the vast polluted ocean collecting what looks to them like food to bring back to their young. On this diet of human trash, every year tens of thousands of albatross chicks die on Midway from starvation, toxicity, and choking.

To document this phenomenon as faithfully as possible, not a single piece of plastic in any of these photographs was moved, placed, manipulated, arranged, or altered in any way. These images depict the actual stomach contents of baby birds in one of the world's most remote marine sanctuaries, more than 2000 miles from the nearest continent.

Simple solution: Kill all humans. The giant garbage patch floating around in the pacific gyre is getting to be a problem. As the saltware and the UV are breaking down the plastics, the whole thing is turning into a sort of plastic soup/suspension and it's beginning to fuck with micro organisms.

In short, we're pretty much fucked if we continue on our ways of messing with mother nature. Eventually we'll be feeding plastic soup to our children with every beach trip. Just something to think about the next time you think of putting that recyclable in the regular trash can.

A Picture Is Worth A Thousand Words

A Picture Is Worth A Thousand Words

I used to do a little segment piece here that would be just me mindlessly ranting on about a picture for a thousand words. In reality it was often more than a thousand words because, as you know, I can ramble on for days. So much like something retro, I'm bringing it back. Especially since it's this picture ripped from the headlines!



'What the hell?', you say? I'll tell you what. It's the family of the Spanish Prime Minister. Yes, my glorious home of origin's prime minister and his daughters. Perhaps Zapatero should tell his daughters to stop following fashion trends from the early 90s. They look like they sleep in caskets.

At first I thought that it was the half-dozen goth march onto Washington. Though I remembered that the only marches that were scheduled were the ten million patriot march and the fifty thousand Muslim march. No goths are scheduled to appear at any of those.

There's an interesting back story to Zapatero's Prime Ministership. In that there is a Spanish law that protects the right of the child to have their own image due to the good work of all the gossip magazines. When Zapatero was trying to be the Prime Minister he asked the Spanish media not to show images of his daughters. So when this photo came out all the Spanish media has been going crazy with the conservative media mocking the two teenagers.

I sort of admire the braveness of the Spanish president taking his half-goth daughters with him to meet Obama. You don't have to dress like Jackie O in a pink dress just because you're a politican's spawn. But it does sort of make the picture look very much fake.

I sort of half expect Obama to make a joke about it.

Obama: - nudge - "Your daughter wears combat boots"

PM: "Que?"

Obama: "It's a riff off an old saying here - your mother wears combat boots."

PM: "Mi Madre non esta violencia - mi Madre es muerte, es con dios."

Obama: "No, no, it's a joke, hey Michelle, help me out here..."

Michelle: - Snort - ...not on your life...

PM: "Que es "riff", que es "joke"?

Obama:...forget it....

But by now it seems that Obama is just going through the motions with his photo oppurtunities. Don't believe me? Take a look at this

Barack Obama's amazingly consistent smile from Eric Spiegelman on Vimeo.

A Picture That Needs 1000 Words: X

A Picture That Needs 1000 Words: XI?


I'm not sure a thousand words is needed for this one. I mean, what's there to say that hasn't been written on the damn t-shirt already. Clearly Obama spends and Jesus saves. What does he save? Souls, I guess. But in this terrible economy, there's not much you can do with souls. I hear that with inflation the way it is, even the devil isn't giving you much for them.

So why did I pick this image for one of my series of pictures that needs blah blah blah words for? Well, I guess I just found it stupid. Very very stupid. I mean, shouldn't both people in that shirt be black? Just sayin', cause history has shown me that the white washed Jesus is as accurate as the Wiz to the source material. Then again, The wizard of oz wasn't all that accurate to the source material either. But you get the idea.

Though I guess it's only fitting that stupid hick sayings go on stupid hick products. So I shouldn't be to surprised when this slogan is put on a product for children.



babby's first horrible opinion shirt, nice

Would you look at that, Babby's first horrible opinion shirt, how nice. It's funny to see that Obama, that rascally negro, contrasted with our lord and savior, Gnome Jesus. Look at him about to smoke that fat grass! What's jesus doing anyway? Waving? Sheesh, no way Jesus would do something like that.

A Picture That Needs 1000 Words: VII

A Picture That Needs 1000 Words: VII

You know the drill. Pictures with words with them because even though a picture can say a thousand words, I like typing them for some reason. Add in that I have been blogging daily now for a while and you can assume this is just some fill in blog that, while entertaining and insightful to the mind I carry in my head, is just filler for those bigger post. So I present you with this picture and the tons of words to follow it.



A picture released Friday from New South Wales, Australia, police shows an X-ray of Chen Liu’s skull. Children playing in marshland found the 27-year-old immigrant’s body last November. He was shot 34 times in the head and neck with a high-powered nail gun.

Humanity is fucking doomed. Nail guns represent the worse of America. The longing to rebuild shit and do it yourself and the need to shoot things. Don't get me wrong, I like doing stuff myself. I've been working on my place for a long time now. What did I learn? That not only will it not go faster if I shot things at the wall, but doing it yourself takes fuckin' forever!

Don't get me started on the children. Who the fuck sees a dead body and thinks to themselves that they should shoot shit into the skull and see if anything happens? When I was little I hit a tree when I was bored and feeling like I needed to take out my anger on something. Years later I saw the markings on that tree (what can I say, my sisters pissed me off) and I felt bad. Not cause I'm some tree hugger. Mainly because I felt like shit, if that tree felt that, I feel like shit.

That was a tree. Not a dead person. Hell, there I go even giving these kids the benefit of the doubt that they FOUND the body and not created it. When I watched that scene in The Wire that had Snoop shopping for a nailgun, that picture is how I figured we'd find the bodies in the vacants. I was later proved wrong, but that doesn't change the fact that I could think that shooting a nail into someone's head would be a fucked up way to go.

So there you go. The kids aren't alright. Someone is giving them nail guns and we have to find out who and stop them. Kids shouldn't have nail guns. Nuff said.

A Picture That Needs 1000 Words: VI

A Picture That Needs 1000 Words: VI


You know this whole series of photos that continues to grow and grow. The whole "picture worth a thousand words" blah blah blah stuff. Well, this is a series to say those words. Often a lot can be lost in a picture. This little task helps us read into it.

With it being two weeks after Earth day, let's get a check up on how we're doing...



Ooouch. Yeah, that's not good there. This picture is all sorts of confusion. It's an enigma wrapped in a paradox of stupid. They say you shouldn't judge a man by what he drives. I say, why the hell not. I have a Tom Leykis bumper sticker on my car. Many assume it's because I have to be some sort of misogynistic bastard that plays the field.

When in reality the sex/relationship aspects of his broadcast were my least favorite of his drive time radio show. It's his take on current events and finacial matters where he was one hell of a broadcaster. Tellin' it like it is was just a side bonus. But I'll take the lumping together of what people think of me because of my car. Much the same as this douche sending a loud message with it. Let's get started.

First off you have a Republican gone libertarian with a NASA sticker. That in itself should explode your mind. I guess spending is only wasteful if it's on things I don't personally care about, right guy.

Most Randroids idolize Reagan, who spent more, and expanded the federal government more, than any other president ever, but because it was on pewpew space lazers (that never worked) apparently that's fine. At least it wasn't wasted on them brown people, am I rite?

Add to that, this randian übermensch drives an old-ass civic. Way to leave your foot print into a foreign made car. Fuck that good ol' American auto industry, right. That may be a big heart for a mighty small carbon footprint with your Ultra low emission vehicle. So unless they were just saying they love the fact that they're creating a small footprint, that's a different story.

I highly doubt it's there to be ironic. Keying this car would be a morally neutral action.

A Picture That Needs 1000 Words: V Tea Baggers

A Picture That Needs 1000 Words: V - Tea Baggers

We're about two weeks after taxes were due. I hope that you're not still in line at the post office or even worse, taking off your shoes to count how much you owe the state. Believe you me, they're going to try to get it. As for giving the returns back... Yeah, the check's in the mail, so to speak. But for all you folks who went teabagging, here's a single picture speaking a 1000 words.



Oh wait, the only thing that picture is putting in your face is that people don't like taxes. In fact, some even want zero taxes. I guess that's pretty normal. Who likes paying for services that you may not partake in. But, much like an onion, this has layers and layers in it. The simple picture is worth 1000 words simply because it tells you a lot about it. This picture needs 1000 words that aren't written on poster board size paper.

Let's see where your taxes actually go to and how ironic this picture is to be protesting them in this context.



All those things around them are bought and paid for by the tax dollars you put in. It's sort of ironic, much like wearing a Che t-shirt to protest capitalism. That is unless you got the shirt for free or something.

I have a libertarian friend that will complain about taxes in the same sentence as complaining about how the roads need to be fixed. Maybe someone just handed them those signs as well but they all appear to be literate. A big thank you to the government for the publicly funded school systems.

Another one the picture fails to get across is that there is no poisonous food pointing in everyone's stomach. Thanks to the tax paid health inspectors and food standard boards. Nor any mention of the Medicare/Medicaid that has invariably kept everyone in that picture alive and healthy to some degree.

To add to another level of irony in all this, I can tell from the street sign of "no right on red" and the type of stoplight in traffic lights that this picture was taken on a NY state maintained road. Even funnier when you consider that NYC basically pays the bills for upstate NY as far as taxes-to-spending goes.

A Picture That Needs 1000 Words: III

A Picture That Needs 1000 Words: III

They say a picture is worth a 1000 words. In this case, I want a picture to not speak for itself. I plan on giving you the words of what makes it so special. In this series of images I'll continue to show a single image and give you some back story to bring out a new meaning to the image.

This is a photo of Mohammed Alim Khan, the Emir of Bukhara.



It was taken in 1911.


I guess if that's not clear enough let me repeat that. It was taken in 1911. The significance of the photo, to me, is how brilliant the colors are, given that black and white photography would be the norm for decades after, one would imagine that early color photographs would be blurry and indistinct, but here is a picture taken at the turn of the 20th century which shows a man in shining colors in incredible sharpness.

three black-and-white images taken with red, green and blue filters respectively. The three B&W images are then developed onto glass slides and projected through a three-stage stack of colored filters so that the filtered-out colors now reappear in the correct part of the picture.
It is not 'color photography' in the modern sense. What you see there is the digitized copy of the projected final image.

The tricky part is getting the three original plates to line up so you don't get accidental overlaps and bleeding of colors. Amazing work for something over 100 years old.

A Picture That Needs 1000 Words: II

A Picture That Needs 1000 Words: II

They say a picture is worth a 1000 words. It basically runs down to meaning that the picture speaks for itself. What is often overlooked is the fact that pictures aren't always as clear as they present themselves. Sometimes they need a voice to add a story to it. In this series of images I'll continue to show a single image and give you some back story to bring out a new meaning to the image.




This is just a happy dude taking a picture in front of an old bus. What you dont know is that he died in that bus a few weeks later of starvation after the river he crossed to get there filled and he couldn't get back the way he came. To add to the irony, it turns out that there was a ferry crossing just a few miles upriver that would have saved his life, but Chris McCandless did not believe in maps. The photo was found undeveloped in his camera along with his body. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_McCandless

You may remember him by book and movie called Into the wild. While he died on his ventures it didn't change the fact that he actually went out there to discover life. Lived it to the best that he could, the way that he could. Most of all, the way that he wanted to. Not many of us can say that we are living to our fullest right now.

On my death bed, have it be on a magic bus or in a home up in Santa Barbara, I want to say that I lived a life that's full. To a simple image. One that can't say a lot, but it can tell a story if you look deep enough.

A Picture That Needs 1000 Words

A Picture That Needs 1000 Words

They say a picture is worth a 1000 words. It basically runs down to meaning that the picture speaks for itself. What is often overlooked is the fact that pictures aren't always as clear as they present themselves. Sometimes they need a voice to add a story to it. In this series of images I'll continue to show an image and give you some back story to bring out a new meaning to what your eyes are seeing.



Normal empty road, right? Well, compare it to this picture of the same exact place in Northern PA.



One in 1986, another in 2008. In the 1960s the population of the town was around 2000 and in 2007, the population had dwindled 7. What happened to this town?

Centralia, PA. The story began sometime in 1962 along the outskirts of town when trash was burned in the pit of an abandoned strip mine, which connected to a coal vein running near the surface. The burning trash caught the exposed vein of coal on fire. The fire was thought to be extinguished but it apparently wasn't when it erupted in the pit a few days later. Again the fire was doused with water for hours and thought to be out. But it wasn't. The coal then began to burn underground. That was in 1962. For the next two decades, workers battled the fire, flushing the mines with water and fly ash, excavated the burning material and dug trenches, backfilled, drilling again and again in an attempt to find the boundaries of the fire and plan to put the fire out or at least contain it. All efforts failed to do either as government officials delayed to take any real action to save the village. By the early 1980s the fire had affected approximately 200 acres and homes had to be abandoned as carbon monoxide levels reached life threatening levels. An engineering study concluded in 1983 that the fire could burn for another century or even more and "could conceivably spread over an area of approximately 3,700 acres."

This town was the bases for the video games Silent Hill. So yeah, creepy shit.