A few weeks ago, Hollywood screenwriter Shane Salerno, who is working on a documentary about J.D. Salinger, released a low resolution image of what he called a “never seen before” photograph of the famously reclusive late writer. The fact that the released version was low resolution (the one making the rounds on the web was roughly 580 x 590 pixels) was perfectly understandable. After all, if it’s such a rare image, you don’t necessarily want to release it to the digital wolves. What bugged me is that Salerno released a scan of the crappy, unrestored image.

Naturally, my impulse was to fix it. So I did. I spent a bit of time (not nearly as much as you’d think, given the low resolution) restoring the image. OK, let’s be up-front; I spent about 20 minutes on this restoration. If I had a high-resolution version I would have probably spent a day or two on it, and wouldn’t have done nearly as good a job as a master like Ctein would have done. But that’s not the point. The point is that if you find an old “never seen” photograph of a famously reclusive famous person, the least you could do is clean it up before you show it off. Showing the dirty version is like coming down to dinner in yesterday’s underwear.

So I cleaned it up. I’ll present to you an even lower resolution version below, as proof. I will say here and now that I have no intention of doing anything with this cleaned up picture except maybe looking at it now and then and feeling smug. If you happen to be Shane Salerno, or Shane Salerno’s lawyer, then bugger off, there’s nothing to see here. This tiny image constitutes fair usage, and I have no intention of usurping your right to show us the shitty version, nor of making any money off of my improved one.

Left: shitty. Right: Blorky.

That was last week’s procrastination. Today I made BBQ chicken & ribs with two different sauces, and reduced half a bushel of Roma tomatoes down to a medium-sized pot of pomodoro sauce for tomorrow’s dinner. When I retire, have my stomach removed, and divorce myself from the Internet, then maybe I’ll write that novel.

I hated the original Footloose. OK, let’s be reasonable; I “didn’t like” Footloose. At the time, I thought it was about the dumbest movie I had ever seen. (Red Dawn wouldn’t come out for another six months.)

If you’re lucky enough to be unfamiliar with the movie, here’s a quick rundown: in a random small town in middle America, the local preacher has succeeded in banning dancing. Into town rolls a teenager (Kevin Bacon) with his single mother. Bacon is an urban tough guy who likes to dance. As a result of the ban on dancing, he ends up smoking angrily a lot, does late night acrobatics in the barn, and drives his VW Beetle very fast. He ends up challenging the preacher and his dancing ban, but not before getting hot for… wait for it… the preacher’s daughter! Because he is Kevin Bacon and not a frumpy town preacher, he wins.

I knew from the premise that I’d hate the movie, but everyone around me was chirping about the dancing. “But the dancing! The dancing!” This was a year after Flashdance, so there was a huge buzz around movies with dancing in them. But watch the trailers for Footloose and Flashdance and you can tell that they are very, very different movies. I knew I’d hate Footloose, but I went anyway because everyone – including my then girlfriend – was all hopped up on “the dancing.”

There wasn’t much dancing. After all, this is a movie set in a town that has banned dancing. So how much dancing can there be? And what “dancing” there was, was more like second-rate circus acrobatics made dramatic with lots of backlighting and angry smoking.

Then there was that whole “urban kid comes to a small town and shows them townies how it’s done” thing. As someone from a small town, who at the time was living in a smaller town, I resented that. Most egregious was the idea that there was a tough guy who likes to dance. When I was in high school, there could not have been two things more mutually exclusive than “tough guy” and “likes to dance.”

Let’s imagine for a moment that Footloose was set in my home town, at the high school I went to. It would have gone down something like this:

Tough city guy who likes to dance rolls into town. As soon as he opens his mouth somebody yells “fag!” and a bunch of guys beat him up. High school “dance” carries on as usual, which is to say there is no dancing and it is entirely concerned with drinking, smoking, and trying to make out with girls.

Things are different nowadays. In the era of wall-to-wall So You Think You Can Dance, it’s OK for a fella to like to shimmy about and bust a few moves. Heck, I assert here and now that So You Think You Can Dance is one of my favorite TV shows. It’s a whole new world, where farm-boy yokels like Kent Boyd (from Wapakoneta, Ohio!) can magically develop world class modern dance technique while baling hay and shucking corn. But that begs the question; if the premise of a town banning dancing was absurd in 1984, how is it going to seem in 2010? And will there actually be dancing this time?

(cc) Slack12 on Flickr.

Many people really love these HDR images. Similarly, many people love paintings on black velvet. I know what I’m about to say will insult and enrage many people, but it is my opinion that  HDR photographs are the black velvet paintings of our day.

Unicorn Comb-over, as seen at the Velveteria.

HDR technology – which has become easier to use in the past few years due to Photoshop plug-ins and other inexpensive software – has the potential to be very useful in photography. Experienced photographers understand how hard it can be to work in high contrasty situations, like an afternoon at the beach or mid-day at the medina. You have to choose between showing the sunlit parts and having the shadow areas lost to blackness, or showing the shadowy parts and having everything else lost to whiteness. We are forced into this dichotomy because of the limited dynamic range (the range of light in which we can see details) of film and digital camera sensors, and of the human eye.

Along comes HDR to solve that! Now you can can show that sunny beach and see the beauties hiding in the shadows of their umbrellas. You can show the sunlit streets and colorful awnings of the market and see the grinning vendors holding up their wares. And while you’re at it, why not crank up the tone mapping so it ends up looking like you were on acid and over-dosing on pastel crayons while you’re at it? It sounds wonderful in theory, and in some cases (such as when the tone mapping is skipped) it works in practice. But those cases are rare.

I’m certainly not opposed to photographic manipulation, particularly when it comes to nudging and tweaking exposure and contrast to make the image look its best. But I don’t like it when the effect becomes stronger than the image itself.

Overdoing it much?

To apply HDR processing to a photograph is like putting on makeup. It’s very easy to go too far, to put on too much. If an actor were to step off a Broadway stage and head out into the afternoon light still wearing their stage makeup, they’d look like a freak. That doesn’t stop some regular, non-actor folks from painting it on with a roller and presenting themselves to the world like that. And we all gawk. Aside from Broadway, the purpose of makeup is to enhance and bring out the person’s natural beauty. If you see the makeup, then the person is wearing too much. If you see the HDR effect, then the photographer is Photoshopping too much.

As well as the over-processed look of most HDR images, I’m also annoyed by the fact that so many HDR practitioners hone in on a very narrow and highly clichéd catalog of subjects. Typically, an eye-popping HDR image shows:

• A beach scene with crazy swirling clouds overhead.
• A super wide-angle view of the facade of a building, receding towards the horizon, under crazy swirling clouds.
• A super wide-angle view of a decrepit old car, truck, or bus, often in tall grass, under crazy swirling clouds.
• A super wide-angle close up of a shiny motorcycle (no room for the crazy swirling clouds).
• A cityscape, often at twilight, usually under a dark blue sky marked with garish halos around the tall buildings.

There you have it. The standard HDR repertoire. Not unlike the standard black velvet painting repertoire of Elvis, Jesus, naked ladies, and unicorns.

Then there are the technical problems I see with most HDR images (and by “technical” I mean purely visual elements that have nothing to do with the subject matter). These are:

• The highly exaggerated color saturation effects are phoney-looking, garish, and ugly.
• The light and dark halos that you see around any edge where there was as strong contrast difference in the original scene – such as where a roof meets a sky – make the images look weird, distorted, and phoney. It screams “too much makeup HDR!”
• Tone mapping often makes the image look like a processing error has occurred. Why are you showing me a reject?
• When you look at HDR images up close (for example, if you look at the “original size” version on Flickr) you often see an a lot of blur, weird chromatic aberration effects, and overall technical ugliness.

If you don’t read much on photography, you might not be aware that there’s a bit of a battle going on between those who favor HDR and those who are against it. I hereby plant my standard on that battleground; I am against HDR.

Not against all HDR, but decidedly against the HDR images that suffer from the problems I’ve mentioned. That means about 98% of HDR images.

(cc) Paulo Barcellos. This HDR image is gorgeous (and rare!). Not over-processed, and not tone-mapped to death. Click here to see it larger on Flickr.

I am not against the technology or the technique; they provide a mechanism for coaxing both high- and low-range detail out of a single image, something that’s been very difficult to achieve in the 150 year history of photography. My problem lies in the way that most practitioners of HDR become too enamored with the technology and go too far with it. They apply too much HDR effect to otherwise good images, and they seek out images (oh, those old buses and cars!) where they can crank up the HDR whether they need it or not.

I should end by adding that I’ve actually seen black velvet paintings that I liked. They were good despite being painted on black velvet, not because of it. And I’ve seen some HDR photos that were spectacular. But few. Very, very few.

Further reading:

• (Digital Photo Experience) Getting Ready for International HDR Day.
• (The Design Inspiration) 40 Beautiful HDR Pictures You Would be Amazed (sic). (Ed. note: this is for reference; I think these are all overprocessed.)
• (Toxel.com) Beautiful Examples of HDR Photography. (Ed. note: in their opinion…)
• (Quazen) HDR Photography: Hot or Not?
• (Gregory Taylor) My Anti HDR Images Movement.

That odd sentiment is understandable if the person hold high stakes in the business, or has a clearly defined path up the corporate ladder and is handsomely rewarded in bonuses and company equity for all of their sacrifice. But an alarming number of the vacation-averse people I’ve met are not that way at all. They’re middling white collar workers who seem to be addicted to their jobs. And they are all, to a man, men.

Frankly, if some office dork in his beige dockers wants to be like that, fine. It’s your life, buddy. It becomes a problem, however, when that person is your boss, or your boss’s boss. Then it trickles down. Or more precisely, it is expected to trickle down.

Um. No. I’m very fortunate that I’ve never had this kind of thing thrust upon me directly, but I’ve come close a few times and I’ve seen other people fall victim to it. It enrages me.

It’s not just that as time marches on and the years seem to get shorter that vacation time feels more and more precious. No, I’m enraged at the sheer ignorance of the people who take this kind of work-inspired martyrdom for granted.

I am angry at the drones who fall victim to it, and I am particularly angry at the executives – the stakeholders – who don’t understand that for most of us salarymen these are just jobs. We don’t have the same dedication to the company as they do because we don’t own it. Yes, we want to succeed in our “careers,” and we want to do good work, but we want that for ourselves, for our own self respect. We know that none of us are going to get rich off of these gigs. None of us will be renowned in the company annals. None of us will retire gently into our Spanish villas bought with the generous stocks and bonuses that we’ve earned through our tireless devotion to the success of the company.

No. We work until we retire, and if we retire with money it’s because we saved it ourselves from our salaries and (if we’re lucky) the company’s meager 50% of 5% matching bonus. And that’s assuming we survived the periodic swinging of the layoff scythe that so regularly and indiscriminately reaps its bloody harvest.

So I’m going to take that vacation, and I’m going to take as many days and weeks of it as I can. As much as I might like my job and my career, and as keen as I am to see the company succeed, I also like my friends and family, and I want to see those rolling golden hills of Spain and the deep blue sea of the Mediterranean while I can, before the fixed income and the bad legs set in.

If you want me to sacrifice on the altar of the corporation like you do, then there’s got to be something in it for me. Something big. But I don’t own part of the company, and a cash bonus does me no good if I can’t leave my desk to spend it. About the only thing I have to negotiate is more vacation time. That’s right. I’ll work those long days and ruin the odd weekend for you, but not because I’m addicted to work or enamored with the company logo. I’ll do it for more vacation time.

The issue has popped up again. None other than MacLean’s magazine, so very much a Canadian institution (which is to say, it is 90% from and about Toronto), has issued the results of some surveys and resulting rankings of cultural activities in various Canadian cities. Lo and behold, Montreal ranked quite low, which raised a lot of eyebrows and prompted MacLean’s to toss this nugget up on the web, complete with a photo of rioting Habs fans, as if to underscore just how uncultured we are here in Montreal:

What MacLean’s doesn’t get — which is the same thing that all those barking Ontarians didn’t get in 2001 — is that Montreal culture is not about symphonies, theatres, and musuems. The famous Montreal culture is the stuff that happens every day, with regular people. It’s about the extent to which regular folks here are engaged in cultural activities as a normal part of their lives. How so many people know how to play — and actually do play on a regular basis — musical instruments. The way regular folks go to small-budget movies and neighbourhood theatre productions (regular people, not just faux-ho hipsters). It’s about how regular people think it’s completely normal to read a lot of novels and to be able to talk about writers and literature outside of the Twilight and Harry Potter series. It has to do with the extent to which people are aware of the small acts of music, literature, and theatre that happens every day all around them.

We’re not all like that. There are plenty of tight-assed people in Montreal who can think of nothing more interesting than their jobs and their daily commutes. People who haven’t read a piece of fiction in 20 years and who parade themselves off to a fancy restaurant every Valentine’s day and pay big bucks for good seats at the Basilica Notre-Dame’s performance of The Messiah every Christmas and are glad when it’s over because they’re off the hook for another year.

But many, many people are culturally engaged. I think of the first impressions I had of the people I’ve worked with over the years (I’m an office drone). At first many of them seem pretty dull, but then you get to know them and you discover that this software geek does salsa and tango dancing on weekends. That project manager plays clarinet in a neighbourhood klezmer band. The engineer in the corner has a fine arts degree in ceramics. On and on.

Of course there are people like that in Toronto too. Toronto, which, as urban legend has it, was declared by UNESCO to be the world’s most ethnically diverse city*, is jammed with people just like that; people who cook for passion, who publish small chapbooks of poetry while scraping out a living as a bookkeeper or bank clerk. People who saw on fiddles at night and sing in amateur choirs on weekends.

The difference is this: the predominant attitude about culture in Toronto is still highly influenced by its old, white, Presbyterian “Hogtown” past. That’s a tired hold-over from the days when Toronto had no ethnic diversity to speak of, and was composed primarily of a bunch of working class stiffs and a handful of rich Scots and Englishmen. (By the way, the only difference between Toronto and Montreal back then was that Montreal had more of those wealthy anglos, and its working class was 80% francophone.)

In that way of thinking, “culture” is indeed defined by symphonies, theatres, and museums. And lets not forget opera. In other words, “culture” is something you look at, not something you do. Spectator culture. More specifically, black tie spectator culture. If you don’t have to buy an expensive ticket for it, it isn’t culture.

That attitude prevails in the arguments by those indignant white collar stiffs back in 2001 and in the orientation of the MacLean’s surveys and reports. Well, I hereby declare that culture is alive and well in Montreal, but it is a participatory culture that you don’t need an expensive ticket or a tuxedo to be part of. It happens every day with the choices people make with regard to how they divide their time, how they amuse themselves, and how they pursue their interests.

And it happens in Toronto as well. Toronto, that city of neighbourhoods. That city of ethnic diversity where every street is like a little tower of Babel. But those old Presbyterians up there in their stuffed white-collar shirts, those parliamentarians and editors, are stuck in 1932. As for the rest of us, we can pretty much ignore those fools and get back to our books and guitars.

* UNESCO never said any such thing. From what I can gather, it started with a University of Toronto professor who used UNESCO data to arrive at that conclusion according to his own criteria. This was picked up by the mayor’s office and touted as a UNESCO finding. The press then ran with the story based on the mayor’s declaration. [Source 1: CERIS Policy Matters # 11, Oct. 2004, "The Anatomy of an Urban Legend: Toronto’s Multicultural Reputation(PDF), Source 2: to.ronto.ca/demographics]

Today I’m focusing on that insane little “Paste Options” button you get whenever you paste some text into a Word document. You know the one:

That thing shows up next to your pasted text, usually blocking your view of something on the next line. Its role is to help you decide if you want the pasted text to bring its formatting with it, or to adopt the formatting of the document you’re pasting it in to. You have to expand its menu and choose, or simply type something to make it go away.

Let me say this very clearly: I have been using Microsoft Word almost daily since about 1992. Never in that time have I ever wanted the pasted text to keep its formatting. Not once! I always want it to adopt the formatting of the document I’m pasting into (the “destination” document).

As such, this feature is not only unnecessary, it is useless and annoying. The right thing for Microsoft to have done is make “adopt the formatting of the destination document” the default behaviour. For those few people who want it another way they could have built in a special key combination or put “Paste the retarded way” in the Edit menu.

But no, we’re stuck with it. Or not! I’ll show you how you can get rid of that annoying button in both Word 2003 and Word 2007. If you have a different version of Word, these instructions should still point you more or less in the right direction.

How To Get Rid of Word’s “Paste Options” Button

Word 2003:

1. Go to Tools > Options.
2. In the Options dialog, go to the Edit tab.
3. Uncheck the “Show Paste Options button” box.
4. Click OK. That’s it! You’ll never see that icon again!

Word 2007:

1. Click that retarded nameless ball in the upper left corner (the one that makes it difficult to write instructions for because it has no name or label on it — thanks Microsoft).
2. On the retarded nameless ball menu, choose “Word Options” (at the bottom).
3. Click “Advanced” in the left sidebar.
4. Scroll down to the “Cut, copy, and paste” section.
5. Uncheck the “Show Paste Options button” box.
6. Bonus! In the four “Pasting…” options, select “Match Destination Formatting.” This makes Word behave the way a non-retarded software company would have designed it.
7. Click OK. That’s it! You’ll never see that icon again!

Below are the same instructions in graphical form:

Get this: May 1, 2001 was the warmest May 1 on record in Montreal (about 28 C). Today, May 30, 2001, is the coldest May 30 on record! Specifically, today had the “lowest high on record” (the high was about 10 C). Grrrrrrr!

It ain’t over ’til it’s over. I’m just sayin’.