Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

"[...] All societies have a dream and a nightmare. And our nightmare has been, I think, our racism. We practically comitted genocide on the people who were here -- the Native Americans. We enslaved another race of people, the Africans. And then we dropped the atom bomb on Asians. We would never have dropped that bomb in Europe, in my view. And I think that's what proves the racism of it.

"That's the nightmare of America. The dream of America is enunciated in the great speech by Martin Luther King -- 'I Have A Dream'. The dream is that there is no country on Earth that has tried to actually embrace all the people that we have tried to embrace. All you have to do is walk through New York City to see that -- or any of our cities. And not a few of our countrysides at this point. We could be called the most racist, or we could be called the least. We are both. And it always remains a tension and a question, as to which side of us -- the good side or the bad side -- will win out in the end. I think that's true for every society."

-- Thomas Cahill, on the the PBS television program Bill Moyers Journal, aired 2007-11-09 (in response to the question, "What would be, as of now, the defining characteristic of the American society you would write about in the 20th and 21st Centuries?")

"[...] All societies have a dream and a nightmare. And our nightmare has been, I think, our racism. We practically comitted genocide on the people who were here -- the Native Americans. We enslaved another race of people, the Africans. And then we dropped the atom bomb on Asians. We would never have dropped that bomb in Europe, in my view. And I think that's what proves the racism of it.

"That's the nightmare of America. The dream of America is enunciated in the great speech by Martin Luther King -- 'I Have A Dream'. The dream is that there is no country on Earth that has tried to actually embrace all the people that we have tried to embrace. All you have to do is walk through New York City to see that -- or any of our cities. And not a few of our countrysides at this point. We could be called the most racist, or we could be called the least. We are both. And it always remains a tension and a question, as to which side of us -- the good side or the bad side -- will win out in the end. I think that's true for every society."

-- Thomas Cahill, on the the PBS television program Bill Moyers Journal, aired 2007-11-09 (in response to the question, "What would be, as of now, the defining characteristic of the American society you would write about in the 20th and 21st Centuries?")

Two oft-heard bits of composition advice are, "get closer!" and "follow the rule-of-thirds."

For how many photos/subjects do you guess/know-from-careful-recordkeeping/feel-from-undocumented-experience/predict these two suggestions agree, and for how many do they indicate different, even opposing, courses of action?

If/when the two rules conflict, do you feel one usually/always takes precedence over the other? If not, how often do you find yourself following each over the other?

Yah, this should be a poll, but I really don't want to take the trouble to do the post-differently-to-different-journalling-sites thing and then nag all the LJ users (the vast majority of my readers) to register at GJ or IJ or CJ to fill out the poll, just yet. (AFAICT, polls are one of the things where OpenID doesn't just make things work automagically.)

And for folks who aren't photographers and/or serious art students or ex-students, did you have to Google "rule of thirds", or is that reasonably generally-known? Also, does it show up in UI design and publishing page-layout design too, or is it "an art thing"? (Okay, now I should be asking Google ...)

Two oft-heard bits of composition advice are, "get closer!" and "follow the rule-of-thirds."

For how many photos/subjects do you guess/know-from-careful-recordkeeping/feel-from-undocumented-experience/predict these two suggestions agree, and for how many do they indicate different, even opposing, courses of action?

If/when the two rules conflict, do you feel one usually/always takes precedence over the other? If not, how often do you find yourself following each over the other?

Yah, this should be a poll, but I really don't want to take the trouble to do the post-differently-to-different-journalling-sites thing and then nag all the LJ users (the vast majority of my readers) to register at GJ or IJ or CJ to fill out the poll, just yet. (AFAICT, polls are one of the things where OpenID doesn't just make things work automagically.)

And for folks who aren't photographers and/or serious art students or ex-students, did you have to Google "rule of thirds", or is that reasonably generally-known? Also, does it show up in UI design and publishing page-layout design too, or is it "an art thing"? (Okay, now I should be asking Google ...)

So ... Perrine does seem to like it when, on relatively rare occasions, I give her moist food from a can or a pouch instead of her usual dry food. She likes the gravy. She licks up the juices quite thoroughly, spending longer at her dish than she usually does at a time ... and maybe takes a bite or two of the solids if it's from a can, and carefully leaves behind every morsel of then-dry solid food if it's from a pouch. Likes her gravy, she does.

A couple of times I've offered her a taste of the liquid from a can of seitan, and she's responded as though I'd given her kitty-crack. Is it the spices, the salt, the mouth-feel? I don't know, but there's certainly nothing especially carnivore-friendly in there aside from the salt. That liquid makes a better bribe than any commercially packaged kitty-treats.

As long as I'm babbling about my darling cat ... she sometimes complains about stuff -- sometimes I can tell what she's complaining about and other times I can't; there's a particular squeak and body language that I suspect means she just woke up from a bad dream -- but it seems that regardless of its relevance to whatever was bothering her, a really enthusiastic scritching or a session with the slicker brush answers pretty much any complaint.

So ... Perrine does seem to like it when, on relatively rare occasions, I give her moist food from a can or a pouch instead of her usual dry food. She likes the gravy. She licks up the juices quite thoroughly, spending longer at her dish than she usually does at a time ... and maybe takes a bite or two of the solids if it's from a can, and carefully leaves behind every morsel of then-dry solid food if it's from a pouch. Likes her gravy, she does.

A couple of times I've offered her a taste of the liquid from a can of seitan, and she's responded as though I'd given her kitty-crack. Is it the spices, the salt, the mouth-feel? I don't know, but there's certainly nothing especially carnivore-friendly in there aside from the salt. That liquid makes a better bribe than any commercially packaged kitty-treats.

As long as I'm babbling about my darling cat ... she sometimes complains about stuff -- sometimes I can tell what she's complaining about and other times I can't; there's a particular squeak and body language that I suspect means she just woke up from a bad dream -- but it seems that regardless of its relevance to whatever was bothering her, a really enthusiastic scritching or a session with the slicker brush answers pretty much any complaint.