smonster. I love the bag. You should get it!

I guess if you want to work for the government, you need to know fifteen people who can answer "No" to that question.

And those people have to come up with a couple new and different people each.

And gods help you if you give an apartment number, because that's how you get your mail, and the inspector finds out you don't live in an apartment building, but in a "converted house."

Oh, and my favorite, as a college student renting a room in Eagle Rock, Los Angeles: "I checked with your neighbors, and they don't know you."

One of my cow-irkers has this "cute" habit of making up nicknames for people and then calling them by that instead of their real name (these are ones that, sometimes, play off their real names but sometimes she just makes them up). Most of the time, people are OK with it, but I heard one person repeatedly ask her not to use the made-up name ... and have it used repeatedly. She left and I'm wondering if that was at least part of the reason ....

It was a joke but we still want to hear the cool explanation.

Yay!

So. In a nutshell. Our understanding of photography lies on several axises. The big ones are art, science, mechanics and education. It goes without saying that this is an analytical observation, and that most photography uses, even without knowing, those axis. Example for pictures that were taken with only scientific purposes is mostly medical photography. Tons of the first photographs were nature photographs, for purely scientific purpose. I don't think you'll find anyone who thinks they hold artistic value: they were experiments.

Art/Science are the big axises to understand how we understand photography directly, but not the only ones. The non-direct ways are important too. Mechanics is the "child" of the science axis, but its focus is on the camera, not the subject of the photograph. Using photography for educational purposes requires a lot, mostly trust that the machine and the artist/mechanist knows how to use one and their goals are "pure". It lays against all of those axises.

Now, let's say there's one truth everyone is after, like Victorian science thought (just a reminder: that's before theory of relativity). There are still few ways to look at it, and this is the value aspect. Science axis lays on the notion that there is One True Truth. Art, the same, but the tactic is using the artist's values to get to that truth. In some discourses, what I'm referring to as value is the representation.

So unless wanting a very specific medical photography, we expect a lot from it: showing reality (truth) in a pretty way (value). This really isn't the case, and you can rarely wrap all of your expectations to one single photograph.

That's it, basically. But one of the cool parts of my paper will be about ghosts: x-rays were discovered with the progression of photography, and for about 40 years, people were trying to photograph ghosts. Photography had to find a way to distinguish between ghosts and mortals, this world and the next and answering some epistemological questions about the nature of proof, identity and knowledge during this time.

I'm very tired; I hope that was coherent enough.

The President has yet again shut down the Westside. I am trapped in my building for the indefinite future.

Really? He's on the westside right now? Hmmm. I was going to go home, too.

My cousin's baby has arrived! No details yet.

Man, real FBI badges are so much more boring than the ones you see on TV.

My main disappointment was that real FBI agents aren't as hot as they are on TV.

That too.

Yay sj!

Congratulations, Aunt sj!