So the Smithsonian Institution is having an in-house photo competition for staff and volunteers.  There are two overarching categories: Smithsonian photos and non-Smithsonian photos.  Each is divided into people, places, and things.  They will award first, second, and third place in each subdivision.  There will also be judging on both professional and amateur levels, since the Smithsonian definitely employs some sick photographers.  The winners will have their work matted, framed, and displayed in an exhibition in DC.

I want to enter.  I can only submit two photos, and only one per subdivision (amateur, obviously, and I have no Smithsonian photos).  I will have a terrible time choosing, so I need your help!  I have created a special Flickr set here populated with photos that represent the cream of my crop, as it is.  There may well be others among the over 2700 photos I have uploaded, but I think these are the best.  I wish I had more photos of people…..I only really started taking those recently.  Take a gander, and comment either here or in Flickr (if you have an account) on the ones you like.  The deadline for entry is September 30th.  Thanks!

I saw this on the AV Club, for both albums and films.  I turned 24 about an hour ago, so I thought I’d regale you with my list, as chosen this evening.

A note on methodology: the films have been chosen primarily on the basis of whether I could remember seeing them when they came out in theaters, or at the very least on VHS or HBO (when we had it) that same year.  They are NOT best-of picks for each year.  That list would take waaaaaaaaaaay longer to compile, and would probably be useless, to be honest.  These are the movies that had the greatest impact on me, year by year, as best as I can guess.  I’m going from memory, and a few chronological lists I found online.  I’m almost certainly missing some big ones, but usually the picks are the ones that really jumped off the page (especially for the early years).  So yeah, there are a lot of blockbusters.  And no, I wasn’t one of those kids who saw The Last Emperor when it premiered in 1987.  Of course I went on to see loads more movies from these years, many of which I enjoyed and/or appreciated more.  Trust me, it killed me not to put Hannah and Her Sisters, Pulp Fiction, Almost Famous, and a bunch of others for the years they were released.  But nostalgia is the mode for this evening.  Who knows what the next quarter century will bring.

1984 – Ghostbusters…….This really is the first movie I can remember seeing, ever.  And supposedly the first movie I saw in a theater, though my memory probably doesn’t spring from that time.  Still one of my all-time favorites.  All of the players were in their prime.

1985 – Back to the Future………..Another very early memory.  Michael J. Fox was the coolest guy on the planet as far as I was concerned.  And to this day, Lea Thompson still messes with me on a seriously Freudian level.

1986 – An American Tail…………..Probably my favorite animated feature not produced by Disney.  And really way heavier than most anything they’ve ever done.  I didn’t fully grasp it at the time, but even at a young age I think I could tell that it was different in some way

1987 – The Monster Squad……….The big lesson I took away from this one was that garlic pizza could in fact be used as a deterrent against vampires.  Still have yet to test that one out.  Didn’t figure out what the word “virgin” meant until years later.

1988 – Who Framed Roger Rabbit……….I desperatly wanted to visit Toon Town, and still do.  Because it was THAT believable.

1989 – Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade………Actually saw this one in theaters.  I’ve always loved Indiana Jones, despite recent disappointment, and he probably set me on the path I’ve been following for the last six or seven years (sad, I know, but at least I’m being straight with yooz).

1990 – Joe Versus the Volcano………..Believe it or not, I remember seeing this on HBO not long after it came out.  Another fairly heavy one, but really light-hearted at times, and so full of hope.  The images of Tom Hanks dancing on his raft made out of luggage in the middle of the ocean (WAY before Cast Away) and his beautiful epiphany at moonrise are ones that I’ll never forget.

1991 – The Rocketeer………….What an adventure!  The Disney Channel used to show this all the time before it became a soulless mill churning out canned laughter and legions of future tabloid headline-grabbers.  The rocketpack was another movie fetish item for me.  And Jeniffer Connelly.  Oh boy.

1992 – Newsies………Still remember singing along to this one.  I love the songs from this movie.  They really don’t do musicals like they used to.  Another staple of early nineties Disney Channel.  And who could’ve guessed that Christian Bale would return in batform?

1993 – Jurassic Park……….As an eight year old boy I was still in the throes of my obligatory dinosaur phase.  This made matters worse.  Much worse.

1994 – The Lion King……….The last great Disney animated feature….maybe the greatest?  Maybe not, but most of the others loomed large in my childhood.  We had a lot of them on VHS.  In those clunky white plastic cases.  Remember those?

1995 – Goldeneye……..Not a great movie by any stretch of the imagination, but still noteworthy as it was the first Bond film I saw in theaters.  And the introduction of a new Bond for my generation.  Daniel Craig really is an improvement.  More importantly, this film spawned the first video game to which I devoted as many (read: more) hours as I did my homework.

1996 – The Rock……..Straight-up awesome action flick.  First time I remember seeing a Hummer anywhere.  It looked ridiculous then, and I never would’ve thought they’d be all over the road within the next five years

1997 – As Good As It Gets……….A racy one.  I got in trouble for using the word “fudgepacker” after I saw this movie.  It was only then that I realized what Jack Nicholson was actually talking about.

1998 – The Truman Show………I was really happy when **SPOILER ALERT** Jim Carrey escaped from that set.  C’mon now, you’ve seen it right?  I didn’t REALLY spoil anything did I?

1999 – The Matrix……….Another blockbuster, I know, boring, but seriously.  If your shit was not fucked up by this movie, raise your hand.  I don’t see any hands.  The sequels, however, will NOT make an appearance on this list.

2000 – High Fidelity……..I was going through my real musical awakening when I saw this movie.  It supplied more fuel for the fire.  Jack Black just as he was turning into a cartoon character.  Also established John Cusack as a Really Cool Guy in my book.

2001 – The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring…………This was another huge franchise for me.  And another phase movie, much like Jurassic Park and Star Wars.  I had read the books (and The Hobbit!  AND The Silmarillion!) about a year or so before, so I definitely felt superior to all of the poseurs who were only into it because of Orlando Bloom.  Yeah, that was lame.

2002 – Adaptation…………I’d probably pin this film as the one that really helped bring my love of movies to another level.  It was one of the first movies I saw after I went away to college.  I had more freedom (or perhaps was more wasteful) with my time and money, so I was at the theater often.  I started doing college-ey things, like reading philosophy and arguing about esoteric crap.  But seriously, this is still one of my favorites and it really surprised me at just about every turn.

2003 – Matchstick Men……….Two in a row for Nick Cage, and the film that made me realize that Ridley Scott just might be my favorite director (think about it).

2004 -The Incredibles…………I think this may have been the first Pixar movie that I saw on the big screen, which is kind of crazy.  If you ever hear anyone talking about the rise of the home entertainment and the death of the cinema, send them to a Pixar movie.  This was a tough year, but the pure in-theater experience of The Incredibles was the dealbreaker.

2005 – The Squid and the Whale……….My buddy Rob took me along to a review screening of this, so I saw it way before most.  It sort of ruined conventional moviegoing for me for a while, and really made me wish that I went to school for film criticism.  Or something else that would land me a job where I got paid to watch movies.

2006 – Dave Chappelle’s Block Party……..Halfway through this movie, my mind wandered back to a rainy September morning in 2004.  I ran into my friend Lawrence that day, and he had a glum look on his face.  I asked him what was wrong, and he told me about an insane hip-hop concert that had taken place the night before, with no notice or publicity.  It was the Block Party.  I was living in Queens at the time, and could’ve easily been there if I had known.  Damn you Dave Chappelle, you bloody genius.

2007 – Black Book……….I saw SO MANY movies that year mostly because I lived three blocks away from the Arts Picturehouse, an amazing theater in Cambridge that showed stuff I probably wouldn’t have even heard of had I been in the States.  Art films, foreign films, shorts, experiments…..a lot of other great films came out last year, but Black Book was really awesome and encapsulates everything I loved about that theater.

2008 – Can’t choose just one for a year that is still incomplete, and still so fresh!  What’s good so far?  Just saw WALL-E, and Pixar has definitely done it again.  Forgetting Sarah Marshall was quite hilarious.  I got hooked up with free passes for the Tribeca Film Festival (my first big festival) and saw the Narrative Film winner, Let the Right One In.  That was pretty dope.  Who knows what the rest of the summer and the awards runnup may hold.

I really don’t like Christopher Hitchens, but I gotta give him props for agreeing to be waterboarded.  That is the real video of him being waterboarded, mind you.

He’s a pretty big Iraq War/War on Terror cheerleader, and supported our country’s interrogation tactics as well, but he put his money (and a wet towel) where his mouth is and subjected himself to it.  And he changed his mind.  He usually doesn’t back down from anything.

This is the second waterboarding video I’ve seen.  The other was a demonstration by a former security expert, I think.  To me, the most shocking thing about it is how little water is actually used.  It really doesn’t take much.  Hitchens described his movement to end the demonstration as entirely involuntary.  He only lasted about 15 seconds before it became unbearable.  That’s how long the first round would last if it had been a real “interrogation.”  And they would increase it to 30 seconds after that, and go for as long as they want.

Now we just need Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity to sign up.

I think there’s beauty in this.

Wow, I knew that Andy Rooney was an old coot but I didn’t realize that he was an awful writer as well:

“I love the books I have in my office. There are about 600 of them and if I knew everything in all of them, I’d be the smartest guy in the world. Well, I don’t know everything in my books. Sometimes when I get up in the morning, I can’t even remember where my socks are. I don’t really like dictionaries but I have several good ones and I’m always looking at those. One of the best reference books ever written, ‘Modern English Usage,’ is written by a man named Fowler. If you do any writing at all, you can’t be without this. We’re lucky to have English as our language because it’s the best language in the world but it’s not easy. One of my favorite books of all time is “A Preface To Morals” by Walter Lippmann. Lippmann was one of the best writers and thinkers there ever was.”

Man. If he came into the writing center when I was on duty I would’ve docked him many a style point indeed.

He’s still the one on national television every week, though.

I’m watching the Scripps National Spelling Bee on television right now.  I LOVE this thing!

A very serious-looking Indian boy was just up.  His word was “numnah.”  The audience chuckled when they heard it, because it sounds like something else.  The boy looked like he was concentrating quite hard.

Then he said “numnut” with the same look on his face.  And everyone laughed even harder.  The official pronouncer corrected him, and the boy said “Oh, NUMnah!  THAT’S a relief!”

That’s going to be on the highlight reel and all over the radio tomorrow, fasho.

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm3010792/

AWESOME

The Internet is so fucking cool.  Today a lady from a publishing company sent me a message on Flickr.  Her company (Arcturus Publishing) is going to be putting out a book on the history of architecture.  She saw one of my photos on Flickr and asked permission to use it in the book.  I’ll get a credit too (no money though, that’s why publishers spend so much time trolling through Flickr and other similar sites).  I took it during my day trip to the Villa d’Este in Tivoli.  Of the many fountains there, this is most certainly the most well-known and the most ostentatious.

The underlying message here is that the photo is pretty boring.  It’s in focus, the subject is in the center of the frame, it was taken on a sunny day with no shadows.  I take a lot of photos like this when I travel (though I also like to think I take lots of interesting ones too).  I did a lot of waiting for people to get out of my frame when I was in Italy.  I wasn’t there during the high tourism season, so it could’ve been worse.  I’ve gotten better about that recently.  I guess I’m not content with the millions of photos I’ve already seen in guidebooks and history books, so I need some of my own.

But I don’t even care if that’s in the subtext.  Now a significant number of people are going to be looking at one of my photos, and perhaps some will be inspired to travel to Tivoli to see that monstrosity.  Obviously the subject does most of the grunt work, but I think that’s pretty neat.  I still captured it.

I was tattooed for the second time today.

I didn’t wake up expecting to have it done. I walked down to Zarha’s a little before noon just to get an estimate on the design, but since it was so small and basically a trace job I was able to get it done then and there.

This one requires some explaining for those who aren’t in the know. I worked in the writing center during my senior year at St. John’s. Shortly after I started, I regretted not having applied there three years earlier. It was an amazing place to work with great people, and I really felt like I was able to help students where others had failed. It also sort of became the center of my social universe that year. There was a fantastic mural all along the wall of our lounge space that the director and his young son had painted some years earlier. It filled the space with more warmth and personality than I’ve seen in most other academic facilities.

The year after I graduated, a new space for the writing center was opened in the library. This has been wonderful for both the staff and the students as it has enabled MANY more sessions to go on at once. More tutors and more clients, with a great new facility. Sadly, however, it meant the end of the mural. Our old space was taken over by a math lab or something. I’m pretty sure that the mural was painted over, but at the very least it is no longer a part of everyday life in the writing center.

So I decided to get an element from that mural tattooed on the back of my right shoulder. He’s* a little character known as “Monstro,” and now he’ll be with me forever. He’s a testament to the wonderful friends and experiences I had there. It sort of represents my gratitude for my entire experience at St. John’s, as I couldn’t really think of any other way to symbolize the other bits (sorry, no St. John’s crest).

That’s my modus operandi with my tattoos at the moment. Movies and cartoons sometimes contain images of huge, sturdy suitcases covered with decals bearing the names of exotic locales to which, presumably, the owner has traveled. I don’t know if anyone does that anymore, but I’ve always loved these images and used to dream about how fun it would be to amass that kind of a portable travelogue. They tell stories about their owners……they’re documentations that everyone can see. I’ve decided to put mine on my body instead of my drab Samsonite.

* I’m not sure if Monstro’s sex was ever established, or indeed if he even has one.  Is this my latent chauvinism breaking through?

O HAI vanhoy!

Now you know how to greet people in Lolspeak!

That was the greeting that the Flickr homepage gave me today. Score one for lolcats.