So I’m browsing the Google News pages, and I see something about a festival in Kerala in India — where we’re recently visited (here, and here). It’s an interesting article by the BBC about a women’s festival there with 3 million attendees. The paragraph that utterly shocked me was this one:

It is an elaborate logistical feat: almost 3,000 police, 600 of them women, were on duty around the clock. Two hundred priests positioned themselves at different points to sprinkle holy water on the pongala. Fifty portable toilets were also provided.

Now, I don’t know about you … but if I were the Beeb I might be a little surprised that 3 million people had a whole 50 portable toilets to use. I did a little math. That’s one toilet per 60,000 people. That means that if you use the toilet only once per day, you have approximately 1.5 seconds to use it to keep it on schedule. And did they really call 50 toilets “an elaborate logistical feat”? Seriously?!?

I started this blog for my friends and family to look at and now, somehow or another, I get about 14,000 pageviews a month. Thanks for looking.

You’ll notice that I don’t post often — usually only when I have something interesting to say (unlike today). I try and post photos of travel, and these get picked up by google pretty often. For some reason, Gum Wall Seattle is searched all the time, as is The Bachelors Ball (1, 2), and LOTS of hits on how to create the effect from that movie 300 (here, and here). I oddly see quite a few searches for “punk violin” — which seems very random, but comes up almost daily. Other popular searches cover Honduras and El Salvador, the Honey Cone, and the houseboats in India (and here).

Apparently Tripbase liked some of the travel photos, and sent me a pretty graphic for the site. Thanks, Tripbase.

Tripbase Travel Photography Award

The amazing Wednesday spent in India at an Ayurvedic resort was coincidentally one year from the day that April and I first kissed. As I ponder the last year, I can only be astounded at how different my life is in such a short time period: Read the rest of this entry »

The Calendar Factory has expanded to include many things that we’ve been doing for years: magazine design, magazine ads; books; and calendars. We’ve launched The 28 Page Agency’s website recently. It will be updated and changed regularly (we’re already working on a complete redesign) … feel free to stop by!

So, I read in the news today about “Bernard Madoff, who pleaded guilty today to masterminding the largest Ponzi scheme in history…”

I’m confused. Isn’t the biggest Ponzi scheme in history the US Social Security System?

(Ponzi Scheme, from Wikipedia: “pays returns to investors from their own money or money paid by subsequent investors rather than from any actual profit earned. … other English-speaking countries do not distinguish colloquially between this scheme and pyramid schemes…. The perpetuation of the high returns that a Ponzi scheme advertises and pays requires an ever-increasing flow of money from investors in order to keep the scheme going. The system is destined to collapse because the earnings, if any, are less than the payments.”)

Was in Las Vegas a couple of weeks ago, and I had an opportunity to shoot the 1970’s hit band Honey Cone … I had a great location, and so here are a few fun shots from the night.

Intrivolting (Intriguing + Revolting): the only word I could come up with to describe Seattle’s gum wall … a wall with thousands if not millions of pieces of gum stuck upon it.

As you might surmise, I just returned from a trip to Seattle. A very quick weekend up and back on the relatively new airline Virgin America (more to come on that next post), here are a few pictures from the Aquarium:

I love bad grammar.

”… Utah Students From Space.” Classic.

A week or so ago the full moon was the closest to our planet that it’s been in many years — meaning that it looked about 14 percent larger and 30 percent brighter than normal. Sure enough, I walked outside, and — rather than seeing the moon itself, I saw an amazingly bright reflection of it in my neighbors window. It was stunning, and also a different angle on the moon than normal, so I quickly grabbed my tripod to take a few shots. (Probably looked like I was trying to peer in the neighbor’s window.) The windows are double-paned and tinted, so the moon reflected in multitude of different ways, and even moving an inch or two changed the whole look. Here’s how it looked from Orange County, California…

My 20-month old nephew and mom’s new puppy made for fun pictures this Christmas…

Christmas 2008 Picture Gallery

Here are a few of my favorites…