Drag and Drop Post

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UPDATE!!!

PELICAN

Luxor

Here are some kids doing what kids do best: burning stuff in the street. They were out front of my hotel in Luxor all the time (The Happyland Hotel sign is visible down the street a little) looking for stuff to burn and achieving quite a bit of success. Here they've found some plastic pipe, which both burns AND MELTS. Tough to beat. Nobody really minded because most buildings are made of hideous non-burning mud-brick, and kids tend to do what they like anyway. Four-year-olds go shopping and so on. The banners across the buildings are for Ramadan. There's a cheapo plastic lamp up there too, sort of a christmas-light equivalent. Many of those beep out awful tunes: anti-Israeli marching anthems, and, strangely enough, christmas carols.

The view from the bar at The Venus Hotel, which has some issues involving ants, roaches, bedbugs, and other insects. I figure it was a plague sent from the Lord, that being the area for it. The Venus Hotel was on the market street. Canny sellers would move their carts into the middle of the street to obstruct traffic and extort their way to profits. The little van down there goes from town to town. Cheap transport if you know how to negotiate.

This is easily the most impressive piece of technology on display in the streets of Egypt. Pour some goop into the hopper and it streams out of a series of little holes onto a rotating grill, then it gets scoured off by a blade. The result tastes like shredded wheat.

Coming over another hill to Deir El Medina, the ruins of a Christian monastery that surround an Egyptian temple. This is in the area near the Valley of the Kings, another good area for hiking that nobody takes advantage of. Up the mountain to the right is the aforementioned Valley. Sissies take donkeys, and I don't even want to discuss the rubes in the buses.

Hatshepsut's mortuary temple. A wide-angle lens makes this way smaller than it looks...the scale is insane, and a lot of it is carved right out of the mountainside. Also near the Valley of the Kings; just a hop over that mountain there.

Down there is the Valley of the Kings.

Down there to the left is the Valley of the Artisans. That white path is concrete stairs, a fairly punishing climb. Farmland in the distance.

Karnak is a huge temple that was once at the end of a three km road of sphinxes that connected it to the temple in Luxor. The scale is ridiculous. Those high pillars just visible at the vanishing point of the photo originally held up piers for a second floor.

The lotus was the symbol of Egypt; the stem is the Nile, the flower is the Delta. They're washed out in this photo, but the tops of these lotus pillars are painted red and blue.

More bits and pieces of Karnak.

Karnak doesn't end.

Luxor Temple. The locals were so bored with the ruins in the sand that they built a mosque on top of 'em. Now the mosque's too important to be moved. Christians and Moslems both spent a lot of time vandalizing the most amazing things.

Mark Noonan

Still have the wonky graphics cards so I can't actually figure out details in my photoshoppery. Oh well.

Next project: eyebrows orbit head. Getting somewhat distracted...

UPDATE: Thanks to a javascript freebie you can drag Noonan down to the post below and sit him on that hideous mink woman. Also give him eight more sets of eyebrows.

Where would we be without the internet?

Disgust

Susan Phalen is senior adviser for Iraq Communications at the U.S. Department of State. She has been deployed to Iraq nine times and once to Afghanistan, and is currently writing a book of her experiences. Phalen is wearing a three-quarter length black sheared mink coat with silver fox trim from Miller's Furs.
(Courtesy 2008 Clare Boothe Luce Policy Institute/Photography by KochFoto)

More Names

Now that the Joe the Plumber fad is hopefully dispensed with, why not add animals to the stupid names? A sample random 20:

Nonprogrammable Yoos
Sayj Mefhidplozoysh
State Senator Leann-Marc Unknowingly-Role
Utopianize Shattering-Involved the Tasty Ray
Wichalica Onita
Juserokejplaqu Sparsely
Duke Neon
Seaman Jeffrey the Peachy Dingo
Shachutsheequyeewo Breakthrough the Electrical Engineer
Mister Lanora
Al Aftereffect-Tins the Controller
Poe Charmers the Smoky Hair Stylist
Haleyjom Tyrants the Velvet Catfish
WoyxEloise Regression-Devises the Cab Driver
Affirmations Nancie the Fading Diplomat
Choopromoters Kliquzagmopo
Vice Admiral Kacy Rogers-Wordsworth the Milkman
Muxlemxayyya Davis the Mushy Pricklefish
Nubterrifies Impersonating the Velvet-Belly Shark
Alvaro Eliana the Poor Astronaut
Allie Vincenzo

Eerie Parallels

Via Curly Howard yet another crazy person:

The Left sees in Palin eerie parallels to Ronald Reagan. A common-sense, plain talking former sportscaster who is shattering the near Biblical certainty that their time had come to control America. A woman whose very stage presence is more powerful than a speeding bullet and has given Americans the chance to jump over the Left’s control of the media and communicate their approval with wild applause and chanting, which no manner of media tricks can edit away.

North Side Represent

Aswan

This isn't really in Aswan, but the only way for tourists to get to it is a little flight from Aswan's airport. This is the temple at Abu Simbel, a monument to Ramses, who was something of an egomaniac. Those are four of him in front, and most of the temple's reliefs are devoted to him slaughtering and enslaving all comers, Nubians especially. The mountain is artificial and hollow...the whole temple would have been underwater if it hadn't been moved. That guy in the black shirt between the rightmost two Ramseses is a tour guide, and his T-shirt says "Abdul" on the front and "Follow Abdul Please" on the back.


The temple of Hathor at Abu Simbel. It's supposed to be dedicated to Hathor and Ramses's wife, but, surprise, it's all about Ramses slaughtering and enslaving.

This is a large chunk of Aswan as seen from the roof of my hotel, the Nubian Oasis. Elephantine Island is in the middle of the Nile, a lush place with a Nubian village that's fun to walk through: the village is small enough to have no need for vehicles, so the streets are wide enough for a couple of Egyptians to pass down, which translates into about one and a half of us titanic North Americans. The houses also have a more celebratory form of decoration, but once again I missed taking decent pictures. Aswan was warm, relaxed and the people were kind. I spent way too much time there, from the perspective of someone who wanted to see lotsa sights; aside from Philae and Abu Simbel, there's nothing eye-popping around. Just a good place to relax. I ate an orange up on the roof and in a little while the peel crunched under my foot: no humidity at all. That little peak on the hill is a mausoleum, which is a nice starting point for a walk across the dunes to the decaying monastery of St Simeon. Dig under the rocks there and you can steal a certain camel driver's drug stash, which I think is adequate recompense for his being rather forward with me. The rule appears to be that all foreigners are whores.

After a few days in my hotel room in Aswan, Ramadan struck, which meant no meals, liquids, medicine, or smokes during the day for the devout, but an orgy of gorging before dawn and after dusk. That made dusk a nice time for a nap, because the streets would empty out while everyone ran home and stuffed themselves. Soon enough though, they'd come back out. The guys extending the hovels into this dumping ground outside my window were no fools: they only worked at night, so they could eat, drink, and smoke while doing it. Bastards, hammering away at all hours, taking valuable nesting space away from the flea-bitten felines and garbage-eating chickens...hey, I guess those chickens are free-range, huh?

Most of the sand in Egypt is actually a deathly gray, but it's heavier than the yellow sand which blows around and hides it. This is the monastery of St. Simeon, and the walk to it is a good one for Indiana Jones fantasies. Not many tourists seem to walk in the desert...can't think why. It's silent and desolate in a really inspiring way. Deserts in Arizona seem like fertile pastures in comparison.

Philae's another temple that would have been lost under the waters of Lake Nasser, the lake formed by the High Dam at Aswan, had it not been moved from one island to another with the help of huge infusions of foreign cash. So you get to it via little motorboats. It's a spectacle. Not to be missed.

Philae. Roman addition in the background.

More Philae.

Heck, I think it's more Philae, this time with people for scale, although I recall trying my damndest to eliminate them. [Editor's note - Although "elimination" brings colourful images to mind, rest assured that our naive traveler was simply wishing people were not in the picture he was taking because he hates people with a passion.]

This is probably a temple at Kalabsha, another island temple rescued from hydroelectric might. My memory's fuzzy on this one, but when I look at it I hear a security guard bragging about just having acquired his second wife and fantasizing about a further two. Yup, gotta be Kalabsha. Then the guy wanted baksheesh (palm-greasing money) for having subjected me to his company. Through all the temples, tombs, and whatnot, guys were hanging around trying to point something out to you so they'd have an excuse to ask you for baksheesh. Sadness, pity, annoyance...you could feel all these plus a triumphant cruelty when you thought of slick ways to brush them off or put columns between them and yourself. A lot of the time they have little to offer but things like "Ramses. Snake. Sun." Thanks professor.

Stupid Fun

It turns out that renaming files with a tool that fires out random names helps make your animated GIFs zippier and funnier: you wind up dumping files into your GIF building thingie in random order. Those interested in such a dangerous file-renamer (it does other less damaging but remarkably confusing things to text and audio and video) and possessed of a Mac should check out Argeïphontes Lyre.

Anyway this took a stupid amount of work for a first try, no thanks to Blogspot which doesn't want to host these.

Mean Google Search of the Day

Skateholder.

Spellcheck is not God.

Sarah Palin: Not Quite That Stupid?

Only time will tell.

Fish War Poetry

BASS! Bass! Quick, boys!– An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy fish tanks just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And sautéing like a perch in salt or lime.
_____________

“Forward, the Whitefish Brigade!”
Was there a fish dismay’d?
Not tho’ the soldier knew
Some one had blunder’d:
Theirs not to make reply,
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do and fry:
Out of the valley of Depth
Rode the six haddock.
______________

The zaniness began here.

Dialogue with Children

Kid: WAIT WAIT! You forgot dessert.
Dad: What are you talking about? There's no dessert after breakfast.
Kid: But in SPACE there is.