Sand animation is the art of storytelling through continuously created and recreated images in sand, and there may be no one better at it than Kseniya Simonova. In the video above, she steals the show on Ukraine’s equivalent of the America’s Got Talent TV show, and has the judges and audience in tears as she tells the story of a peaceful pre-WWII Ukraine, Germany’s ensuing occupation, and the restoration of independence. The medium, sand on a backlit tabletop, is just gorgeous — and made all the more dramatic as she builds into a frenzy of sand and emotion and long black whirling hair. You’ve really got to see it.

Though you wouldn’t know it, Simonova is new to the art, having decided to become an artist after the credit crisis sent her business belly-up. Since her TV victory though, the art world has started to take her seriously, and YouTube’s lower-brow art-lover community has noticed too, as the Guardian reports:

Her war story has over 400,000 views on YouTube [actually more like four million now] and is provoking an interesting debate in the comments section. Jgoo24 notes that “sand is her bitch” and few would argue with this. “Maybe the most magnificent master piece of art of all time” says DevinsDad90, not a man prone to hyperbole. And also “i just jizzed in my pants” (thank you, deaddevil6).

You can watch the full-screen version of her WWII recreation here, or check out some of her other work.

BTW, somebody help me with this — she looks exactly like a celebrity whose name I can’t remember for the life of me. Who’s her famous twin?

Thanks Gen and Craig!

After an impromptu beatboxing lesson from a pro, Paul MacInnes, the Guardian’s slightly disheveled entertainment editor, takes the stage and delivers a valiant if somewhat silly-looking live performance. I gotta say: it’s good to see a reporter who doesn’t take himself too seriously.

“They’ve got a special bit for me in the second half,” he says in the video. “It’s going to involve all my noises.”

Thankfully, it doesn’t.

His tutor, incidentally, is Kevin Fox, the Toronto-born baritone and member of the storied Swingle Singers a cappella octet. Oddly enough, the band was founded way back in 1962 by a hip cat named Ward Swingle, who had to be the only Alabaman in Paris at the time. Swingle and his crew made a name for themselves — and scored five Grammies — doing strangely awesome things like scatting the works of J.S. Bach.

Today’s Swingle Singers make a living selling their sound to big-name TV shows like Sex and the City, The West Wing and Glee. They also put out a CD every year or so, but really — and I’m not trying to be mean here — would you pay £10 or $17 for a cappella versions of Christmas carols and Air on a G String? Maybe I’m just uncultured.

In case you didn’t catch this back in December, an apparently homeless man named “Mustard” recorded a pretty damn fantastic cover of Radiohead’s “Creep” on the sometimes controversial Opie and Anthony show, broadcast on XM Radio and Sirius Satellite.

Little-known fact: “Creep,” now one of Radiohead’s biggest hits, sold just 6,000 copies as a single in the U.K., as local media thought the song was too depressing to broadcast. The band was moving on to other projects when Israeli Army Radio became the first station to give it significant radio play. It took off from there, and Radiohead built a tour around the song, with Tel Aviv the first city they played outside of the U.K.

This has been one of my favourite YouTube videos for ages now — six drummers wait until an elderly couple leaves their apartment to walk the dog, then breaks in and proceeds to turn each of their rooms into a distinct and remarkable musical instrument. Truly odd and wonderful, and I never did figure out what country it was from.

Some other neat videos of people hitting things in a musically pleasing fashion…

• Seven young’uns with a bunch of mikes, a sound board and a Jeep Cherokee that they slap, whack, click and slam to make music: link (Thanks Fatts!)
• Brazilian band with a dedicated rubber-duckie player: link
• Best drummer under ten years old you’ll ever see: link

Before I read this, I didn’t know that octopuses could navigate mazes, solve problems, and even work the lid off a screw-top jar in search of food.

Wikipedia says:

An octopus has a highly complex nervous system, only part of which is localized in its brain. Two-thirds of an octopus’s neurons are found in the nerve cords of its arms, which have a remarkable amount of autonomy. […] Some octopuses, such as the Mimic Octopus, will move their arms in ways that emulate the movements of other sea creatures.

In laboratory experiments, octopuses can be readily trained to distinguish between different shapes and patterns. They have been reported to practice observational learning, although the validity of these findings is widely contested on a number of grounds. Octopuses have also been observed in what some have described as play: repeatedly releasing bottles or toys into a circular current in their aquariums and then catching them. Octopuses often break out of their aquariums and sometimes into others in search of food. They have even boarded fishing boats and opened holds to eat crabs

The U.K. has even decided that although they lack a spine, octopuses’ extreme cleverness makes them “honorary vertebrates,” which means researchers and pet-owners must follow the same animal cruelty laws for them as they would for mammals and other intelligent backboned critters.

So, with octopuses as bright as they are, it should be no surprise that a British octopus named Louis has grown extremely attached to his Mr. Potato Head toy — so attached that he gets violent when his handlers tried to take it away. Louis has even figured out how to get hidden food out of the toy’s spare parts compartment.

Over the course of my extensive scholarly research for this post, I came across this and asked myself the age-old question: “Is it possible to stumble upon a Wikipedia article on ‘Octopus Wrestling’ without stopping to read it?” Answer: No. Apparently, wrestling matches between divers and octopuses attracted up to 5,000 spectators in the 1960s. Now they watch NASCAR.

Incidentally, and because I know you were all wondering, Wikipedia also says the acceptable plural forms of “octopus” are “‘octopuses,’ ‘octopi,’ or ‘octopodes,’” and that “[c]urrently, ‘octopuses’ is the most common form in the US as well as the UK; ‘octopodes’ is rare, and ‘octopi’ is often objectionable.” It doesn’t say what’s so objectionable about “octopi.”

Thanks, B!
Top image via Apex/Metro
Side image via Wikipedia.

Why does it always have to be “Death to so-and-so”? Is there no middle ground between “Long live Imam Khomeini” and “Death to the dictator”? Why not something a little more constructive, like “Stop beating and killing unarmed protestors for no damn reason”?

With temperatures dipping to a nippy 3°C on National Students’ Day, tens of thousands of Iranians showed that they haven’t forgotten about the June election stolen by incumbent president Mahmoud Ahmedinejad — even if the world has.

The Times of London reports:

They waved Iranian flags shorn of the Islamic Republic’s emblem, burnt posters of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader, and chanted “Khamenei is a murderer; his rule is illegitimate” — unthinkable before the Ayatollah backed President Ahmadinejad’s dubious election victory in June.

They demanded the release of detained students and taunted members of the Basij volunteer militia who are supposed to monitor their activities. They waved banknotes at them and chanted: “Mercenary agents, get lost!”

Elsewhere in Tehran security forces used teargas, plastic bullets and baton charges to disperse demonstrators and prevent them from reaching the University of Tehran, the epicentre of the unrest. They fired warnings shots in the air, beat anyone caught filming with mobile phones and made numerous arrests. The film clips showed demonstrators clad in facemasks throwing stones, setting fire to rubbish skips and shouting: “Death to the dictator,” and “Don’t be scared, we’re all together.” Some were bloody from beatings.

After six months of brutal repression by soldiers and pro-government gangs, the confiscation of a human rights activist’s Nobel Prize, and likely far more arrests than the Iranian government is admitting to, the protest against the June election results is still going strong.

But the unrest has become about much more than a stolen election, and protestors are now attacking the Ayatollah, Iranian theocracy, and the country’s whole system of government. And there’s more than the future of Iran at stake: if the pro-democracy momentum dies down and Iranians become unwilling to endanger their families and careers by fighting an unjust regime, repressed peoples around the world will get the same strong and dangerous message: that citizens’ movements, no matter how strongly supported by the masses, simply can’t topple well-armed governments that are willing to beat, torture and kill to keep power. For that reason, despots the world over are rooting for the Ayatollah and his allies, and hoping that a crushed rebellion in Iran will make it that much easier to steal an election in Zimbabwe, or keep a Burmese human rights activist under house arrest for another 14 years.

But if Iran’s “Green Revolution” succeeds, and if a dictatorship finally manages to depose its dictators through demonstrations, protests and generally peaceful means, the shock wave will be felt throughout the region and far beyond. Already there have been anti-Ayatollah demonstrations in the authoritarian United Arab Emirates and tightly controlled Malaysia — countries that don’t generally tolerate public protests. If the Ayatollah actually falls, who knows who’ll be next…

Burning corpses generates a lot of heat, and a crematorium in East Sussex plans to convert that energy into usable electricity to reduce its own power costs — essentially turning dead bodies into a renewable energy source.

“A crematorium uses vast amounts of energy,” says Hastings Borough Council amenities manager Peter Mead. “We buy about £25,000 worth of gas a year. Clearly we want to be as energy efficient as we can be.”

That sounds reasonable, and there’s something to be said for efficiency, but I’m not sure how I’d feel about my charred remains powering a desk lamp in a funeral director’s office — though I guess it’s not any worse than being worm food.

Some other novel renewable energy ideas that you may be hearing more about soon:

• A “wind dam” (artists’ conception above) may one day sail over Lake Ladoga in northern Russia. The architect, Laurie Chetwood, says it ” looks like a bird dipping its beak into the water.” I happen to think it looks like a sail on a evil ghostly pirate ship. Chetwood also says the dam is “highly effective at capturing the wind because it replicates the work of a dam and doesn’t let the wind escape in the way it does using traditional propellers.”
• The Netherlands will churn out 36.5 megawatts by burning chicken poo.
• The U.S. Air Force purchased “600,000 gallons of renewable jet fuel made from weeds, algae or rendered fat from animal corpses” in October.
• Researchers in Idaho have created inexpensive photovoltaic plastic sheets with nanoantennas that collect waste energy from factories and power plants as well as the sun. They store energy 24 hours a day — whether the sun is shining or not.
• The sidewalks of tomorrow just might be able to convert the energy from your footsteps into usable electricity to power traffic lights, street lamps, electronic parking meters and more.
• Pacific Gas & Electric, a major player in California’s energy industry, is backing a Canadian-made power plant prototype that will harness the power of the waves to generate enough electricity for 640 homes — apparently a world first. If all goes well, the project will go 50 times bigger.
• A new data farm in a cave beneath a Finnish cathedral will funnel the heat generated by its servers into a network that heats 500 homes.
• A prototype lamppost/compost bin encourages pedestrians dump their half-eaten burgers, banana peels and other food waste into a bin at its base. The lamp is powered by methane produced by the food’s decomposition.

In awesomely unrelated news, a 59-year-old woman named Jesus Christ was summoned for jury duty in Alabama, only to be released for “being disruptive.”

Best line from that story: “Efforts to reach Christ were unsuccessful.”

Story via Xenophilia.
Image via Inhabitat.

A Scottish study is shedding light on ways to safely manipulate hormone levels in men to decrease — or increase — sperm production. The result could finally lead to a long-elusive birth control pill for men, as well as new fertility-enhancing techniques for men with low sperm counts.

From the Times of India:

To make this discovery, Welsh and colleagues performed studies in two groups of mice.

The first group of mice was normal, but the second group of mice was missing a gene from the peritubular myoid cells in the testis. This gene that was missing codes for the androgen hormone receptor, and when missing, sperm production was significantly decreased when compared to the normal group. The result was infertility.

[…] Although the research was conducted in mice, a similar effect is likely to obtain in other mammals, such as humans.

This summer, the Iranian government brutally suppressed citizen unrest following an election that incumbent president Mahmoud Ahmedinejad won in a landslide. The consensus — on the left, on the right, and everywhere in between — is that the election was rigged.

Five months later, the anti-Ahmedinejad protests have become more muted — probably due in part to the hundreds or thousands of protesters who have been killed or arrested. But Iranians are still seething about the stolen election, and the government seems to be worrying about its weakening grip on the Iranian people. Dissidents and reformers are still being arrested and sentenced to death, and last week Iran took the unprecedented step of seizing a Nobel Peace Prize awarded to one of its most famous dissidents: Shirin Ebadi. They also froze her bank account, claiming that she owes some $400,000 in taxes on her Nobel prize money, and according to the Norwegian officials who award the Nobels, have arrested her husband and beaten him badly. Her human rights group says Iran has no tax on awards, and that in any case, Ebadi has already used the prize money to support Iran’s many political prisoners and their families.

Last year, I wrote that my favourite books are usually the ones that make me angry, and that Shirin Ebadi’s Iran Awakening is one of those books. Since losing her job as a judge — women were no longer allowed to fill important posts after the Revolution — Ebadi has fought hard to secure divorce and inheritance rights for Iranian women and children, freedom for political prisoners, and tolerance for religious minorities like Iran’s much-persecuted Baha’i community. In spite of jail time, death threats, constant surveillance and intimidation from the authorities, she has been a vocal and visible champion of basic human rights in a country where those rights are trampled on a daily basis. She’s no fan of the West either, and I can’t say I agree with her defence of Iran’s nuclear program. But for some 20 years she has been a brave, lonely champion of citizens’ rights, pointing out the many flaws of a country that could and should be a model for human rights in a region that sorely needs an example to follow.

Before the Revolution, Iran showed the world that deep-seated faith can co-exist with night clubs, miniskirts and a healthy respect for personal freedom, and if it ever does again, it will be due in large part to Ebadi’s decades-long struggle. But by confiscating the most visible symbol of her work, Iran only shows us that there’s a long way to go yet.

Story via the Daily Beast.
Image via Payvand’s Iran News.

When I started this little site back in February 2008, I swore I’d never write a post like this one — all apologies for an extended lack of new posts, and all promises for more consistent posting in the future. I told myself I was serious about this blogging business, and that no matter how busy I got, I’d never let life get me sidetracked enough that this blog fell by the wayside.

After a year and a half of posting at least a few times a week, life happened anyway, and for the last couple of months I’ve been preoccupied with an unexpectedly busy time at work, wedding plans that have been more complicated than I expected (who knew weddings were complicated?) and a really brutal, possibly swiney cold, to the point where I’ve been exhausted pretty much since September. I’m feeling a little better now, the most pressing wedding planning is done, and while my communications work still shows no signs of slowing down, I think I’m out out of the woods.

I really do love this little piece of Webdom, and it’s always been a great outlet for me, letting me do a kind of writing that my regular job doesn’t have a lot of use for. So here it is then, a promise that I’ll make a real effort to do a more consistent job of this. If you’re still around, I’m glad to have you.

Cheers,
-mark

At least in South Africa.

Frustrated with Telkom, South Africa’s biggest ISP, the cheeky staff at a South African IT company devised a race to see what would be faster: e-mailing a large file from their Pietermaritzburg offices to the city of Durban, 77 km away, or strapping a data stick to a pigeon’s leg and tossing it in the right direction.

The best part, from Reuters:

Including downloading, the transfer took two hours, six minutes and 57 seconds — the time it took for only four percent of the data to be transferred using a Telkom line.

So not only was the pigeon faster — it was 25 times faster. And assuming that the IT company was using

So if you live in South Africa and want to sign up for Telkom’s fastest DSL plan, you should know that your high-speed communications will run you paying 413 rand per month, or about $55 — not including pigeon feed.

Image via Wikipedia.
Story via Asher Vijay.

Check out this simple and fascinating primer on how to visualize ten dimensions by Rob Bryanton, author of Imagining the Tenth Dimension. Every so often — and it doesn’t happen often — I’m just really glad we have physicists.

(Apologies if this video loads slowly — Bryanton’s site got Boing-Boinged and doesn’t seem to be handling the traffic well.)

Story via Boing Boing.

PHOENIX, Arizona (CNN) — A man toting an assault rifle was among a dozen protesters carrying weapons while demonstrating outside President Obama’s speech to veterans on Monday, but no laws were broken.

I’m not sure what’s more ridiculous about that sentence — the fact that a guy thought it was okay to bring an assault rifle to an Obama speech, or that the law thought so too. According to the article, people in Arizona need a permit to conceal a firearm, but can walk around with it strapped to their back so long as it’s out in the open — even if it fires 600 rounds per minute.

We’ve delved into the gun debate here before, but this is a whole new kind of worrisome. Never mind that the guy could have easily shot a bunch of people. Never mind that, if I were silly enough to protest against improved health care for millions of Americans, I wouldn’t have wanted to stand beside this guy to do it. What’s scary is that he seems to genuinely believe that his assault rifle is making America safer.

We already know that around the world, gun ownership is directly correlated to gun crime. Even with the usual caveats about correlation not equaling causation, I don’t think it’s a huge stretch to say that people with guns are far more likely to shoot each other than people without guns. The USA has the highest rate of gun ownership in the world, with 90 guns per 100 citizens. Americans also have the worst homicide rate in the industrialized world. And 70 percent of those homicides were committed with guns.

Funny then, that all those guns don’t seem to be keeping people safe.

Phoenix, with its liberal state gun laws, does better than some U.S. cities in terms of violent crime, but to be honest, that’s not saying a whole lot. It registered 167 murders among its 1.5 million people last year, while here in the larger, less gun-happy city of Montreal, we had just 29.

Next door, New Mexico has both lax gun laws and one of the highest murder rates in the Union — only D.C., Maryland and Louisiana had more homicides per capita.

Head one more state over, and in Texas, contrary to gun enthusiasts’ claims, widespread gun ownership hasn’t done much to decrease violent crime — Dallas had 170 murders last year, and Houston had another 292. The death penalty, incidentally, hasn’t helped much either. Texas, with its 1,415 murders in 2007, still has a higher per capita murder rate than the U.S. average. It isn’t even in the same league as Canada, which had 821 fewer murders despite having 6 million more residents, and you’re three times more likely to be murdered on a Texan street than on a Canadian one.

There may be legitimate reasons for a private citizen to own a gun, but nobody really needs an assault rifle unless they’re planning to shoot a lot of people very quickly. If you’re concerned about home security, it seems to me that a regular shotgun ought to do just fine. And as for hunting, I wouldn’t think there’d be much left of that rabbit after you blast it in half with an AK47.

When I was a kid, comic books always had those little ads for mail-order venus flytraps, with promises that they’d keep your home bug-free by crushing the life out of unsuspecting houseflies with their razor-sharp fangs and super-corrosive digestive juices. When my mom finally got me one, I was a little disappointed — no ninja-style hunting prowess, no cat-like reflexes, just a tiny little plant that more or less sat there. Not once did it make a diving leap across the room to pounce on an unsuspecting mosquito. The plant’s kung fu, you might say, was highly overrated.

But a newly found species of plant is apparently so ninja-like that it actually lures rats and other small animals into its huge leafy “pitchers,” which are filled with acidic fluids that slowly digest anything unlucky enough to fall inside, bones and all. Carnivorous plants are nothing new, but Nepenthes attenboroughii is positively huge compared to most of its gnat-nibbling cousins.

The BBC says it was originally discovered in 2000 by mountain-climbing missionaries who were hopefully better missionaries than they were mountain climbers — after nearly two weeks of wandering around lost, they were finally rescued and regaled their rescuers with tales of huge rat-eating plants high in the mountains.

Story via Boing Boing.
Main image via It’s a Thrall world.
Side image via Wikipedia.

The top-notch Web design team at the New York Times has put together a very neat interactive graph highlighting the ways different groups of Americans spend their day. Here are some interesting facts, with the usual caveat about correlation not equaling causation and all that:

• People with two children are more likely to be actively looking for work than those with no kids — and more likely to be working.
• People with higher education levels watch less TV.
• More people are eating at 12:10 p.m. than at any other time during the day.
• 76 per cent of Americans with no jobs are awake by 9:00 a.m. anyway.
• Unemployed people are as likely to be sleeping at 3:00 p.m. as those with jobs.
• White people have the most regimented meal times.

Story via Flowing Data

I spent a bit of time in South Korea last year, and if you could sum the place up in one word — which you can’t — it would be “busy.” South Koreans work an average of 2,390 hours a year, compared to 1,777 in the U.S.A., 1,717 in Canada and 1,652 in the U.K. Koreans work almost twice as much as the Dutch, who somehow punch in for just 1,309 hours a year, or about 25 hours per week, and still have the 9th highest per capita income in the world.

Anyway, South Koreans are so busy — and recently, so wealthy — that a little cottage industry has sprung up around “instead-men” (and women) who, for a price, do unpleasant tasks so you don’t have to. No time for shopping? Toss him your car keys. Too tired for school? He’ll take notes. Don’t feel like roach-hunting around your apartment? Pass him the Raid.

GlobalPost reports:

Inching toward his mid-30s and with an ill father, Mr. Kim had a problem. He had no girlfriend and no intention of getting married, but his parents insisted he find someone and settle down. As his father’s condition became worse, so did the pressure from his parents about marriage, until one day Mr. Kim found himself letting a little lie pop out: He told his parents he was seeing someone.

But the harmless lie, which was supposed to give Kim temporary freedom, suddenly turned against him. He somehow ended up promising his parents he would visit them with his fiancee. […] So as most South Koreans do when in need, he turned to the internet, and it did not fail him.

Kim, who declined to give his full name for fear of his parents finding out, found a company that offered to do anything for him. With the help of that company, Kim will soon head down to the countryside with a “nice woman” in her early or mid-30s posing as his potential bride.

No word on whether she’ll fake the wedding too — or the honeymoon…

Image via Crowdhacking.

How brilliant is this interactive little site?

Well, it can tell you that Washington, D.C.’s lone legislator used a meager 35,679 words in 2008 — enough for a long-ish novella. In comparison, California’s 57 representatives spoke exactly 1,346,968 words — equivalent to 33 regular full-length novels, or about two and a half times the length of Leo Tolstoy’s 1,400-page War and Peace.

It can also tell you that surprisingly, the most-used word by Utah’s representatives was “oil.” Perhaps less surprisingly, the Congress’s Texans most favoured the word “Texas,” using it a whopping 6,482 times. That’s an average of 55 “Texases” each day Congress was in session last year.

Incidentally, the longest speech in U.S. Congressional history was a pretty inglorious one by South Carolina’s Strom Thurmond, who argued against the Civil Rights act for 24 hours and 18 minutes. Wikipedia says “[c]ots were brought in from a nearby hotel for the legislators to sleep on while Thurmond rambled on about random things, including his grandmother’s biscuit recipe.” It was an ultimately unsuccessful stall tactic designed to buy time so his buddies could convince legislators to vote down African Americans’ rights, and even decades later refused to rescind his views on segregation. Proving that karma doesn’t always work, Thurmond died in 2003 at the ripe old age of 100.

Probably not. But tell that to this guy.

Jay Weidner at Reality Sandwich compares the cinematic style of Stanley Kubrick’s work to the famous moon landing footage, and says he’s convinced beyond any doubt that Kubrick was enlisted to show up the Russians, NASA stole flying saucer technology from the Nazis, and JFK was assassinated to cover up the whole thing.

The extensive article is interesting, if a little fantastical. And a touch crazy. Does it meet your sniff test?

Here’s an excerpt:

In early 1964 Stanley Kubrick had just finished his black satire Dr. Strangelove and was looking to do a science fiction film. While directing Dr. Strangelove, Kubrick had asked the US Air Force for permission to film one of their B-52 bombers for the movie. The Pentagon turned him down. The movie, Dr. Strangelove, was about a flight squadron that had been ordered to fly to Russia and drop nuclear bombs on that country. The Pentagon read Kubrick’s script and rejected his request to actually film the inside, and outside, of a B-52. The reason for this rejection was that Kubrick’s film was clearly a satire on the military and US nuclear policy. The Pentagon did not want to assist Kubrick in this satirical undertaking.

Undaunted by the rejection, Kubrick used various special effects to create the B-52 in flight. When viewing Dr. Strangelove today, these special effects look quaint and old fashioned, but in 1963 they looked very good. It is possible that someone in NASA saw what Kubrick had done in Dr. Strangelove and, admiring his artfulness, designated Kubrick as the person best qualified to direct the Apollo Moon landing. If he could do that well on a limited budget – what could he do on an unlimited budget?

No one knows how the powers-that-be convinced Kubrick to direct the Apollo landings. Maybe they had compromised Kubrick in some way. The fact that his brother, Raul Kubrick, was the head of the American Communist Party may have been one of the avenues pursued by the government to get Stanley to cooperate. […] In the end, it looks like Stanley Kubrick faked the moon landings in return for two things. The first was a virtually unlimited budget to make his ultimate science fiction film: 2001: A Space Odyssey; and the second was that he would be able to make any film he wanted, with no oversight from anyone, for the rest of his life.

Image via Science Blogs.

So I got back to Montreal last Sunday and I’ve been a little delinquent in the posting department — both re: the posts from Lebanon that you’ve come to expect when I’m travelling, and re: the regular neat-o news and whatnot that you’ve come to expect when I’m home. I expect that next week I’ll muster the time and dedication to get back into the swing of things, but in the meantime, the photos from both Tunisia and Lebanon are up.

And by the way, I used to think the biggest sky country in the world was in Saskatchewan, Canada, but now I know it’s in the middle of the Sahara Desert, two hundred miles from nowhere. I’ve always suspected that the places on this Earth with the least stuff in them are still somehow the most full. Now I know.

Thanks for reading what little I’ve managed to post between my long-haul flights and my desert wanderings over the last month or so, and enjoy!

• Tunisia
  26 images, more to come
• Lebanon
  57 images

Incidentally, I’ve also posted photos from India, Korea, Bermuda and elsewhere, but if you’re looking for real photography by real photographers, check out the work of these folks, some friends of mine with more photographic talent in their left pinkie fingers than I have in my whole body.