Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

"Scottish country dancing -- it's really just math [...] The secret to Scottish country dancing is being able to count while being drunk at the same time." -- Craig Ferguson, responding to a guest who asked what kind of dancing he knows how to do, on the CBS television show The Late Late Show With Craig Ferguson, 2007-05-09 [phrasing of second half of quote approximate -- I didn't tape it to be able to go back and check -- DGA]

For a contrasting view regarding the simplicity, or lack thereof, of Scottish country dancing, read about Scottish dancers having to work around the inadvertent presence of a bare knife in a set: "[...] A moment after he picked up his sgian dubh he suddenly realized that this was exactly the wrong time in the dance to have a dagger in his hands. [..]"

Ugh. Felt more tired most of today than I had last night, which was annoying enough but not unexpected after a long day like that, but then I woke up from a nap during which I had a dream that included a shouting match with Pat Robertson over his throwing out a whole lot of my stuff and a lot of other people living in my house whom I hadn't made any agreements to let live here ... and when I woke I had a blinding headache (which I am now trying to knock down to "able to go to rehearsal" levels in case I have a ride to 3LF tonight). Ow. Ow and -argh!-.

Didn't make it to rehearsal -- no ride, which is just as well since this headache hasn't gone away. Tincture of basil helped but not enough and not for long.

I offloaded the pics from the digital camera from yesterday, and every damned frame came out almost entirely black, whether it was shot in shade or sunlight, with or without flash, and regardless of exposure compensation dialed in. WTF? (This camera tends to underexpose night shots, but not this much, and not usually in daylight.) I started tweaking them in GIMP with the levels tool (the histograms were all piled up in the leftmost quarter of the graph in each frame), but then backed out and ran the whole directory through ImageMagick's 'convert' program and told it to equalize every file. The adjusted versions are at least bright enough for the thumbnails to be useful when picking which of the 97 frames to look at more closely; many wound up unuseably grainy after equalization, but some aren't too bad and a few of the grainy ones might be salvageable if I go back to the dark originals and try adjusting them by hand ... or not.

I do not understand what would make the camera screw up like that on every frame. But I'm glad I shot four rolls of film as well as the digital shots. (Er ... that'd be about 110 frames give or take a few, depending on which rolls I got an extra shot on: 24 B&W, 36 Kodachrome, 36 colour print, 16 medium-format slide (I gambled on shooting a roll of Velvia in the Holga).) But I've gotten used to how quickly I have a file to work with from the digicam, so I'm feeling impatient about seeing what's on the film. I don't quite have the energy to go develop the black-and-white tonight, but maybe I should grab a few other rolls and the changing bag and start loading up reels and devloping tanks in case I feel up to pulling out the chemicals tomorrow. The colour pring and slide film will probably have to wait until I have a car again and run up to Charles Village where the lab I go to is.

[Later edit, since if two people in a row misread this entry the same way, maybe I wasn't as clear as I thought I was in the second paragraph: the extremely dark pictures were the 97 from the digital camera. I haven't seen any of the film yet, but I said I was glad I'd shot film as well because I'm counting on that to come back with fewer surprises ... when I finally manage to get it developed. I used four different film cameras, so if one of those glitched as well, I should still have usable pics from the other three.]