Unicyclists, nuclear. Hee.

I do agree--at least for 19th century portraiture and photography. With a few exceptions (Abraham Lincoln and Robert E. Lee both among them, as it happens), I rarely get a strong sense of personality off a 19th century photograph, while in a good portrait you can get it in spades.

I'm being pretty literal with my notion of representative. Personality, for me, doesn't even begin to get captured until photography allows for candids. The artist's impression of a person's personality doesn't feel like anything more than that to me, so what I'm looking for isn't personality, but a real sense of what Historic Person X looked like. Using Ada as my example, even the best portraits of her don't give me as much of a sense of what she looked like as the two photographs I've seen, one taken in her youth, and one closer to the end of her life, after illness and addiction had taken their toll.

He wants to fight the water there, so we don't have to fight it here.

Damn it! I miss cable tonight!

No b-ts up, either.

I can save it for you, so that it's here when you come visit me, Plei.

(what? it could work)

On that TDS clip of Bush telling Brown he was doing a fiine job, is it just me, or was Bush was the only one on camera, including Brown, who came close to looking like they believed what Bush was saying?

From DailyKos:

This is a clear signal of the depravity of this administration, w[h]ere everything is political and nothing can be real. Nothing can be done simply because it's the right thing to do, or it's the best thing for America. There is a "real" America, and then there's Rove's America, where firemen serve the Republican Party and their leader, not people in distress. The Republican banner flies over the Stars and Stripes.

When does this end? Will we be free of this horrific administration when Bush leaves office, or is this going to go on and on? Is this America now?

9:28 P.M. - WASHINGTON (AP): The government's disaster chief waited until hours after Hurricane Katrina had already struck the Gulf Coast before asking his boss to dispatch 1,000 Homeland Security employees to the region – and gave them two days to arrive, according to internal documents.

Michael Brown, director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, sought the approval from Homeland Security Secretary Mike Chertoff roughly five hours after Katrina made landfall on Aug. 29. Brown said that among duties of these employees was to "convey a positive image" about the government's response for victims.

Before then, FEMA had positioned smaller rescue and communications teams across the Gulf Coast. But officials acknowledged Tuesday the first department-wide appeal for help came only as the storm raged.

Brown's memo to Chertoff described Katrina as "this near catastrophic event" but otherwise lacked any urgent language. The memo politely ended, "Thank you for your consideration in helping us to meet our responsibilities."

I was just reading about the new Hong Kong Disneyland, and this struck me as cool:

Don Robinson, who started as a dishwasher in 1972 at Magic Kingdom in Orlando, Fla., and now runs Hong Kong Disneyland