‘Corpse Flower’ Blooms, Ends Smelly Peak
That was CBS' lead for the story on an exotic plant that bloomed this week at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. Its Latin name is Amorphophallus titanum, which translates roughly to ‘giant waxy penis.’

The plant rarely blooms, this being the first specimen to bloom in New York in 67 years. The flowers are huge, well, phallus-shaped affairs with a very strong and distinctive odor — designed to attract carrion beetles, which are one of the insects that pollinate the plant in the wild.

In captivity, the various organizations that grow these plants scoop up the pollen (the plant version of semen) and store it until another one blooms in another city. [Can you say ‘sperm bank?’] The plants' handlers artificially apply pollen to the female part of the plant (in-vivo fertilization) when it blooms, in the hope of spawning a next generation of giant stinky plants.

I wonder if there's a stud fee for the pollen. Considering the fun The Daily Show had with the Taepodong missile, imagine what they could do with this...

I've got to see This Film is not Yet Rated when it opens in September. What a fascinating premise for a movie. Here we are in 2006, with TV news dominated by the Right wing, and film (or at least ‘independent’ film) dominated by the Left.

Unfortunately, that means that we generally have to pay something to get the other side of the story, but at least we get more than thirty second sound-bites, and the message isn't jumbled up with commercials and fluff.

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There are some features of iView that are better than Adobe Bridge, and that's why I continue to use it even though I've finally upgraded to CS2. I was a bit dismayed to find out about a month ago, that iView had been sold to Microsoft, who really don't seem to get visual software.

Now, a blurb in MacWorld gives me further pause. It says the company will offer upgrades to future products based on iView. That suggests that iView may get rolled into some typically bloated MSmonolith.

We'll see whether iVeiw and the feature set I've grown to like so much remain visible in its new incarnation, but I'm starting to think I should plan my workflow around Bridge, or look into some of the other asset management tools, and forget iView.

Or, maybe Microsoft will get it right... but I'm not holding my breath. This isn't a coder's tool.

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Scotty, it's not Dead Yet
Seems trekkies can't accept the idea that the Star Trek franchise has given up the ghost, beamed up for the last time, been blasted by disruptors... you get the idea.

No matter that Paramount may not have any plans to launch another series based on Gene Roddenberry's epic idea. That didn't stop some intrepid fans from creating Star Trek: Intrepid — Heavy Lies the Crown. Could this little fan film get the legs of Blair Witch? We'll see. In the mean time, you can check out the trailer at starshipintrepid.net.

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Susan Sontag
argued that photography is not an art form, but a medium through which art can be produced. She went on to say that it is the medium which will ultimately render art obsolete. I'm not sure about the obsolescence part, but it's clear that photography has dramatically altered our relationship to, and experience of, art.

Reading On Photography has me looking more closely at the nature of ateurship in the photographic medium. It has me thinking a lot more about the importance of the body of work as the context for making photographic art. It also clarifies how some images and many photographers can pass so fluidly between the worlds of art and commercial work.

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Rip_Mix_Sell(popcorn)
Most are likely to attribute the famous photo at the left to Dali, but Dali & Halsman collaborated on this image, with Halsman as the photographer. Strange that the work would be lifted, and the bodies clad to promote the popcorn flick ‘The Descent.’ Doubly-funny, that they would bill this as the best horror-thriller since Alien. I wonder if there's anything remotely original about this movie.

And you wonder why Dali has that look on his face.