Haircut
New haircut. I was debating between going for something either like Gregory Peck or like the style sported by Cillian Murphy in Batman Begins. In the barbershop, it rather thought that I ended up with something more like Johnny Depp, but seem to have also ended up with Satan Wisps! Added Bonus!
Telegram from Dynamite Dan
Found in the Detroit Free Press:
For Auction: Collection of 24 Telegrams Twenty-two telegrams sent from Howard Hughes to Katharine Hepburn between 1937 and 1939 and including two 1939 handwritten drafts in Miss Hepburn’s hand of telegrams to Hughes.
One of the great Hollywood romances of the 1930s started innocently enough. In June 1935, while filming “Sylvia Scarlet”, Cary Grant invited Howard Hughes to lunch in Malibu. Hughes made a spectacular entrance by landing his Sikorsky Amphibian on the golf course where director George Cukor and co-star Katharine Hepburn were playing. Miss Hepburn mentioned it in her autobiography Me, thinking it “rather nervy and romantic, in a bravado sort of way.” Obviously, something about Hughes impressed her as, a year later, they began an affair that lasted more than two years and garnered much media attention.
The first of the telegrams from Hughes to Miss Hepburn is dated January 19, 1937 and addressed to the Ambassador Hotel in Chicago where she was starring in a theater production of Jane Eyre, in part: “…supposed to arrive six something in the afternoon probably not in time to see you before the theatre so will try to contain myself until eleven thirty, love Dan.” Dan was short for Dynamite, one of their nicknames for each other. That very day, Hughes had flown from Burbank to Newark breaking his own transcontinental speed record. Hughes spent a few days in Chicago on this trip, leading to speculation that he and Miss Hepburn were married. Most of the telegrams to Miss Hepburn were sent to Emily Perkins, Miss Hepburn’s assistant, to avoid unwanted attention.
One message from Hughes reads (in part): “Conkshell, you are terrific, but you might say something nice amid cleverness and reminders which make me lonesome…” One of the two handwritten drafts from Miss Hepburn appears to be from this same period and reads: “Arrived one item, missing one boss, lonely one mouse, empty one conkshell.”
Hughes, of course, purchased the film rights to The Philadelphia Story and gave them to Ms. Hepburn as a gift. Despite the consistently positive notice of her widely-touring performance of the stage version, Ms. Hepburn would probably not have been allowed to star in the feature adaptation as the studios considered her to be unhireable. Hughes’ gift therefore gave her the ability to leverage herself into the film version. It was clearly a gift for which we should all be thankful.
Three Dimensions
Well, that only took seven hours.
In the same vein as my previous post about Clutter, I was about to embark upon a massive project to catalogue all of my CDs, DVDs, and books. I had previously catalogued all of my DVDs using DVD Profiler, but as it is an IBM-only program, I am no longer able to maintain a current and accurate collect profile. Then Dan Evans introduced me to Delicious Library, a program that works with Amazon to translate bardcode numbers into a virtual bookshelf. It’s not the most useful thing in the world, except perhaps for fire insurance purposes, but it’s lovely to look at and a fun way to while away the idle computer hours.
However, I can’t afford to buy a software license at the moment, as I am only one-fifth of the way through The New Poverty, which is how I’m referring to my current financial affairs, affairs I expect to last until the end of October. So my original plans of happily puttering about the apartment, typing in barcode numbers by the convenient armload, are temporarily on hold.
Due to the oncoming incidence of a 3-D film festival at the Coolidge Cinema in Boston, my interest in View-Masters, the Loreo-3D camera, and all things stereographic has recently resurfaced, so I decided a good alternate computer activity would be to learn the process of making a flat image into a 3-D anaglyph.
1) I began with the traditional Ben and Pete RAWK! photo, the trademark image of The Brothel. I altered it slightly so that Ben and Pete were both wearing Red/Blue 3-D glasses, specifically the glasses provided to patrons of the recent Spy Kids: 3-D film.
2) Using the instructions provided by Jim Long, I worked on separating the original image into layers of depth. Mr. Long recommends editing the image and closing the gaps layer by layer, but after some experimentation, I found that it was easier to do all the editing in one go. So the image on the left is the shifted image with all the gaps. 3) The image on the right is the image with the shifts filled in. It’s a little difficult at the reduced size to see exactly what the changes have wrought, but compare Image #1 and Image #3; if you look at the position of the RAWK! hands and the faces, it’s as if the camera has taken two steps to the left.
On my first attempt, I continued shifting the image to the right by one pixel, layer by layer, until I had pushed the foreground image completely off the screen. This seemed like a bad idea somehow, as I didn’t think that my outstretched RAWK! hand would look very 3-D if its cyan shadow wasn’t even in the frame. So instead of a full thirty-layer shift, Image #3 is only half of the process, and is just the shifting of Pete and Ben in the foreground. 4) I then proceded to shift the background to the left, having masked off the foreground figures and copied them to a separate layer. This, then, is the shifted background with the landscape interpolated and filled in. 5) is the masked right-shifted figures pasted back onto the left-shifted background. Image #5 was then combined with Image #1 using a freeware piece of Mac software called Anaglyph Maker, producing the following image:
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