Bakerstreet

And already scared a child to tears! HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

David Copperfield has been accused of raping a 21 year old woman, the thing is that once again, I’m skeptical of the claim. It’s not that I don’t think he is capable of it, I don’t know him so I won’t hazard to guess if he is. There isn’t much information on the matter so it makes it hard to know what happened, but the things that have come out are strange. The media has said that he would tell his staff what girls he liked and they would try to get them into the act and then back to his dressing room. So what! I imagine that is what all stars that are on stage do, do you think that Elvis didn’t have a few chicks taken to his dressing room? How about the Stones or Zepplin or any number of other acts? The media plays it as if it was illegal or something. Heck, you can see similar interaction at any bar as men(and women) get their buddies to introduce them to women (or men). Another thing that’s strange is that the police are searching his computers and digital cameras, is this standard in a rape case? I imagine if she said he photographed her, but wouldn’t he keep that on his island? Would they be doing this if he was a regular guy?

Now I come to the biggest problem I have with the whole mess. This woman claims she went to an island in the Bahamas alone with someone she barely knew! Are women really that stupid*? Get a clue! I’ll give you a word of advice girls, If Mike Tyson invites you to his hotel room at 3 in the morning, it not to converse about politics or world events, if David Cooperfield invites you to his private island, he’s probably going to want you to assist him with his trick of pulling a penis out of his pants. This really goes for any guy you barely know that invites you up at 3am or to an island! Even if she was actually that stupid, I would hope someone she knew would tell her that she was probably going to be using her vagina and other orifices extensively on the trip. She says he told her she wouldn’t be the only one there, but if she didn’t want to be alone with him, why not bring a friend?

Did he rape her? Who knows, it could just be that after the pony ride, she found out he couldn’t or wouldn’t help her modeling career. Maybe after modeling his penis in her mouth and vagina she realized she could make some cash from a lawsuit.

(*Men are more stupid when it comes to women, they would be packing their bags if a good looking girl wanted them to go to an island with them, but that they would want to be raped is the difference!)

So I finally broke down and got a digital camera, I still plan on keeping and using my film camera though. I got a Nikon D40x SLR body, I already have lenses for it, though they don’t auto focus.

There are several reasons I have waited to go digital, I have a great film camera and getting a digital would be expensive to get a comparable one. I love film, it seems more artistic I guess you could say, having to develop the film (I shoot mostly B/W & IR) is great fun, seeing the photos appear before your eyes, it feels more like creation then just taking the photo, I’m sure most people don’t understand as they just want their pictures and don’t care about the process.

One thing about film is that you have to think about your shot, you only have 36 frames per roll max so to get the best shots you want to make sure it’s right, if you shoot B/W or infrared like me, it’s even more important to get things right as B/W & IR are not forgiving like color film is. You can totally screw up the settings on color and still be able to salvage the picture, With B/W and IR, you shot crap and that’s what you get, crap. Your best bet is to bracket your exposure which means that roll of 36 is more like 12 shoots or less. I’ve read somewhere that a good photographer can get 1 great shot from every hundred or so photos if he’s lucky, that means he goes through 9-10 rolls of 36, and that is with thinking things through.

Yesterday I was checking out the new camera, I decided to take photos of the fish in the aquarium. I took 63 photos in a few minutes and got maybe 2 that are worth keeping. In my defense, the fish didn’t want to cooperate and stand still! What I am most afraid of with the new digital camera is that I won’t think about the photo I am taking like I do now. I have a 4 gig card in the camera and can now take almost 400 photos before filling it. I can also erase any that I don’t like to make more room. Will it be easier to just keep pressing the button as many times as possible and get a good picture then to plan out the shot to get a great photo?

Since I’m known to be found crawling on my hands and knees and through mud, or wading out into a pond or doing something crazy to get the shot, I would hope that I will be able to go for the great shot rather then a good one. This camera is also more for an experiment and I plan to get another digital camera within 6 months or so, I am hoping to get the Nikon D300 or the Nikon D3 which come out in November. The d40x is going to become a frankencamera of sorts as it will be taken apart, modified and put back together sans warranty. I plan on doing that as soon as possible.

Early into our relationship, me and wRitErsbLock took a road trip to New Orleans. We had a great time walking around the city and exploring all around. We saw the aquarium and Bourbon street and the cemeteries all over the city, and of course we hit the bars and partied out on Bourbon street. We didn’t go during Marti Gras but it was still pretty much of a party there.

We hit several of the restaurants in the city for some cajun cooking, we ate us some mudbugs and oysters and cajun gumbo and crawfish etouffee. We’re big fans of good authentic cajun cooking and it doesn’t get more authentic then in New Orleans. We also went several times to Pat O’Brians and drank lots of hurricanes and other tasty beverages

I’m glad that we were able to get to New Orleans before Katrina hit it and devastated the city, I’m also glad that the are managing to rebuild it, hopefully better then it ever was. I look forward to going there again, maybe this time during Marti Gras so we can really party, but we’ve slowed down since we last went there so Marti Gras might be to much. Maybe taking advantage of New Orleans Tours might be fun. We would probably want to do the Ghost Tour. I see they also have Boston Tours, another city I would love to visit again someday.

I added my latest attempt at art on the paint splatters page. It might be considered NSFW in some workplaces, but only slightly.

I had to fix the link to the paint splatters page. one of them was a broken link. If you had trouble with the link check it again. Some of the other links under Bakerstreet are not working right now, i’ll try to get those working again soon.

We need to get a new faucet for the kithen, the one we have right now is on it’s last legs. Some times when you turn it on it is really hard to turn it back off, the handle sticks and you have to yank it down to get it to shut off. I am afraid that one of these times it will break off in someones hands and water will gush up and flood the house. Since my mom will probably not be able to shut the water off, I fear it will happen while I’m at work and can get there fast to turn the water off because that is our luck. wRitErsbLock tends to flood homes!

We’ve looked around when we are at a home improvement store to see if we can find one we like, but since we want to remodel the kitchen, we don’t want to spend too much on a faucet we may change soon. I think our current faucet is a Moen. but we’ve looked at Kohler and others. Hopefully we change the faucet before it blows, that would suck!

I have read several articles about how male teachers are disappearing and why, there was also an article I saw on big brothers/big sisters having trouble finding big brothers. I used to work as a teacher, then later on as a child photographer these are my thoughts.

I worked as a teacher in the summertime at a daycare center. Working as a teacher, the only problem I had once was when a 10 year old attacked me, He was the bad kid in school and we got along pretty good, in fact, better then he got along with the other teachers which was the reason they put him with me. I don’t remember what happened that day but I managed to hold him while the principal was called. Luckily the other students told him that I had been attacked and all I had done was hold him so he wouldn’t hurt me or himself. The fact that he was the bad kid and had attacked others before helped too. He was expelled. I’m not so sure that would happen that way today.

When I got my first job as a portrait photographer, they told me that a lot of the subjects would be children. One of the rules they had was that we couldn’t touch the children, the parents were to do that. This rule was mostly a CYA rule for the company, none of the photographers followed it, it would be impossible to work if you tried. Some of the parents themselves would just hand their baby over to someone that they had probably just met without a second thought.

Just last night I saw part of a report on NBC about the decline of male teachers, I missed most of it but I did see that they were saying that money was a factor in the decline, a male teacher could make much more doing some other job. While that might be true and it is a factor, I don’t know if they mentioned fear as a factor. It is a scary time to be a male in an occupation that involves children. All that someone has to do is accuse you of molesting them or their child and that is it. whether you did it or not, the stain is on you, the scarlet letter hangs around you. Even if you are found not guilty or not enough evidence, people will still wonder. If you get convicted or plea bargain, your name goes on the sexual predator list and on the internet. Don’t think that it doesn’t happen.

As a photographer, I got complaints lodged against me from customers, luckily none were about harming the children or anything. I’m sure all of them were false, all the photographers got them. Why? Most people only call when they have a complaint, that’s true in anything, but the complaints I got were from customers who knew how to work the system, the portrait companies I worked for would usually pay off the customers by giving them free photos when they called and complained, the more they complained about the photographer the more portraits they got. This may seem great to the customer, but the photographers got paid a percentage of what they sold, the more sold the higher a percentage, the ‘freebies’ came right off of your percentage, so they were taking money out of my pocket, and I was a great photographer. The complainers knew the drill, one time, a women just flat out told me she was going to complain to get her free photos, and once, two women started arguing about it when they came to look at their portraits, The one woman was furious because the other woman called to complain to get her free portraits, she called the store manager and the customer service line to tell them the complaint was bogus, it did no good, they still gave the other woman the photos and even offered her the photos for free, she told them she was going to buy all her photos and she did. what does this have to do with the fact of fewer men in occupation with children? Well imagine what a customer would get if they just throw out an accusation? They had no problem lying about how they were treated just to get photos and cared less what happened to the photographer. I loved photographing children, the parents I liked not so much, but I don’t think that I would go back to being a photographer or teacher because of what I might be accused of.

I have a crown that keeps coming loose, it sucks because I’ll be eating and then I feel it pop off and roll around in my mouth. I’m always afraid that I’m going to swallow it so I have to stop and pull it out in front of everyone else that’s eating, it’s disgusting and embarrassing. Of course I have to run around with a missing tooth looking like Cletus from the Simpsons while I wait to get an appointment to the dentist. You also have to watch out when you’re eating not to damage the tooth and to avoid any pain.

I have wished that there was an easy way for me to put the crown back in while I waited for the dentist appointment that was several days away. I’ve looked before to see if there was and hadn’t found one. The only thing I could find on the internet was actual dental cement that was both expensive and you had to mix chemicals together just right and it was messy and inconvenient. Well I was surfing around today and I just came across Dentemp OS. This seems like it would be for prefect when a crown or filling comes off. It’s a clinically proven 60 minute solution that requires no mixing, relieves pain and you can eat on it! It repairs both loose caps and fillings. So for temporary dental repair it seems to be the way to go.

So last night I got most of the computers up and online. Locutus, Davinci, and Beaker are all up, Davinci (the webserver) was down yesterday, hence the missing header graphic here. Beaker and Locutus have been down for a few weeks. Now the only computer not up is Montana which is RTY’s new computer and is only up when she is there to use it. The two laptops (Ghostwriter and Cerebro) are on and off when we are there.

‘Never in the total span of time and space has ice damaged steel…GOOGLE IT, where’s my hoagie?’ – Dosie McRonnell