I commented yesterday on how much the photograph of the Administration’s security team released by the White House appeared to me to make the president look like an irrelevant spectator watching from the background.
I was clearly not the only one who noticed, and you can see that the left’s commentariat is on the job spinning this photograph into proof of precisely the opposite.
Why amazing? Because the President seems so small and peripheral to the action. He is hunched down, seated on the margins of the meeting, seemingly trying not to take up space. It appears as if he couldn’t even find a place to put his jacket. By contrast, Tom Donilon, the national security adviser, practically bestrides the room like a Colossus (an affable Colossus, if you know him). I was struck, when I saw this photo, that the Bush White House would have ever released a similar photograph. This is not to cast aspersions on Bush, but could you seriously imagine his public relations releasing an image of him leading from behind, as it were?
I was just talking to David Brooks, and he, too, was struck by this photo. He noted that the President most likely had to move seats to see the screen, but he did not move to a central seat, but to a small chair against the wall. The negative interpretation of this, of course, is that the President wasn’t running the meeting, but both of us found this impossible to believe. The positive interpretation is that the President is so confident in his power that he is comfortable even in a corner. This speaks well of him, to my mind; a president who kills America’s enemies without swagger is better than a swaggerer who doesn’t kill America’s enemies. (Maybe here I’m casting a few aspersions on Bush.)
University of York finds a surprisingly intact brain in Iron Age skull discovered during excavation for campus extension. Its original owner appears to have been sacrificed. Additional linkStill more.
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Nude photo of 24-year-old Elizabeth Taylor, taken by Roddy McDowell, found in private collection.
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Nice wall tentacle, but $1100 is much too high a price.
The Boston Globe has 35 landscape images from the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment camera (HiRISE) on board the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO).
Geekologie got these average facial composites of girls of different ethnicities (and put them in a more convenient format) from Dragon Horse.
I thought the Swiss, French, and Lithuanians seemed to have the best looking girls.
Update: Dragon Horse writes that Geekologie screwed up and mislabeled Argentina as South Africa.
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Discover got composite female actress faces (Today versus Golden Age of Hollywood) from Dienekes actor composites from Dragon Horse.
Razib comments:
There seem to be two correlated trends here: 1) more feminine features for both males and females, and 2) more youthful features for both males and females. Correlated, because neoteny and masculinization seemed to generally push in opposite directions of trait value. Projecting in the future I assume that the Global Human Celebrity will converge upon a 14 year old girl?
Addendum: One difference between the “Golden Age†and modern celebrities is the attention to a rather buff physique. So though the actors of yore had more rugged faces, their physiques were often rather flabby in comparison to today’s leading men. So I might correct and assert that the future global celebrity will be a baby-faced 14 year old girl with abs to die for!
This New York Times feature has a representative slide-show:
Vivian Maier, evidently one of America’s more insightful street photographers, has at last been discovered. The release of every fresh image on the Web causes a sensation among the growing legion of her admirers. … Ms. Maier’s streetscapes manage simultaneously to capture a redolent sense of place and the paradoxical moments that give the city its jazz, while elevating and dignifying the people in her frames — vulnerable, noble, defeated, proud, fragile, tender and often quite funny. …
What is known about Ms. Maier is that she was born in New York in 1926, lived in France (her mother was French) and returned to New York in 1951. Five years later, she moved to Chicago, where she worked for about 40 years as a nanny, principally for families in the North Shore suburbs. On her days off, she wandered the streets of New York and Chicago, most often with a Rolleiflex twin-lens reflex camera. Apparently, she did not share her pictures with others. Many of them, she never saw herself. She left behind hundreds of undeveloped rolls.
How high exactly can a Polar Bear jump? How fast can he move?
The Daily Mail published this image of wildlife filmmaker Tristin Bayer engaged in a staring match with one of the natives of Cape Churchill, Manitoba.
An amateur photographer with a habit of driving around inside Yellowstone National Park in his spare time taking shots of wildlife last month encountered a grizzly bear pursuing with intent an injured bison.
The photographs were taken around 7 AM at the Fountain Flats area, located between the Madison Junction and Old Faithful inside the Park.
The unfortunate bison had blundered into one of Yellowstone Park’s hot springs and was badly injured. As events unfolded, the bison managed to outrun the bear, but it was subsequently concluded to be too badly burned to recover and was put down by Park rangers. It seems a pity that the bear lost the race.
Martyn and Connor look dressed for business as usual, but I have no idea what the lady is dressed to do.
To our great amusement, we yesterday through the hunting grapevine received a link to a fashion spread in a luxe magazine called Weddings Unveiled, in which one of our local friends here in Virginia, Martyn Blackmore, professional huntsman for the Loudoun Hunt West, accompanied by Connor, his Spotted Draft hunter, and foxhound pack, got to serve as part of the background for the modeling shoot.
The setting was Morven Park, once home to Virginia Governor (1918-1922) Westmoreland Davis. Now owned by a foundation, the estate hosts an array of equestrian and country activities, including the annual Virginia Foxhound Show.
The model has cleverly placed her hands in such a way as to reduce the likelihood of pawprints on her lovely white dress.
