A Haunting Photo of the Day....

I thought this was a cool one and worth sharing for the Holiday Season. Okay, it's not THE Holiday Season, but Halloween is pretty up there in my family. This is from Smithsonian Magazine's Photo Contest and this is the Photo of the Day for October 21st. It's called Some Kind of Alice by Stefan Andronache and was photographed in Romania.

Benjamin Bratt = Yumminess!

One of the perks of working at a notable place is that you occassionally have moments where you meet really famous people. Today wasn't my day, but my friends Anya and Charlie met Benjamin Bratt at the National Museum of the American Indian. Benjamin is part Quechua and he and his mother were also active in the protests at the 1969 occupation of Alcatraz with the American Indian Movement. As part of NMAI's mission to bring Native film to the forefront, they are showing La Mission at the museum as well as a discussion with Peter Bratt (Director) and Benjamin.

Now that all of the technical stuff is out of the way. Let's just focus on Benjamin Bratt's general yumminess. (My friend Charlie is on the far right with some of the other employees at NMAI. But really, we are all looking at Ben.)

How Matt did it....

Remember Where the Hell is Matt?

I sent it to my Dad, who loved it and he said, "HOW did he do that?" Here's how...

When I have down days, I watch his video of him dancing around the world and it always makes me feel better.



Here is the end result (and as of today there have been over 24 million views):

Anthropology at it's best!

When I was a college student studying anthropology in the mid-1990's, there was a new view of Anthropology. Basically, it was to listen to the cultures and learn from them, rather than telling them whether or not they are civilized. Since the announcement of the 2016 Olympics will be in Rio de Janeiro, there have been a lot of people concerned about what will happen to the Indigenous communities in Brazil. This issues there are heated, and many tribes are facing extinction.

But let's, for a moment, consider how anthropology is approached today. Embedding yourself into the culture you are studying is still believed to be much better than "armchair anthropology"- where college professors don't go anywhere, but ponitificate about the civilized and uncivilized peoples of planet Earth. Here, National Geographic created a show to be broadcasted in the U.K. based on Cultural Anthropology with people from the South Pacific ~ with a twist. Now... this is my kind of reality show.

I haven't posted lately about Harry Potter...

... but this is cool. This was the concept art for the death of Dumbledore by Adam Brockbank, but it never made it into the film. I always wondered how the film would visualize such a scene.

But... they never did. This is one beautiful image though...


You can see more images created by Adam here.

That's one big tree. Is it a truffala tree?

Nope... not a truffala tree. It's a Redwood.

According to National Geographic, this is the Biggest, Tallest Tree Photo ever.

I gotta say, it's pretty tall. At over 1,500 years old this Redwood has grown to over 300 feet. Somehow it survived weather, loggers, and a mulitude of other variables to survive this long. Clearly they had to piece several photos together just to get the full magnitude of this giant.

It involved three cameras, a team of scientists, a robotic dolly, a gyroscope, an 83-photo composite and a whole lotta of patience. Here's the video of how they did it: