Photography

Black and white softens what is harsh, takes the bite out of a day when the windchill scorches your cheeks, cripples your fingers through the thin shell of the gloves you've put on as you grip the shovel.

Wednesday and Thursday were snow days here. Between about 8 pm Tuesday and 10 am Thursday, we were encased, smothered, in a fine, white powder. No fluffy snowflakes. Not a one to be found. Instead, the snow came down as the grains of sand such as you might find on a Caribbean beach, only icy. Wind chills ripped toward -25F, and the gusts of wind picked up entire hillocks of snow and deposited them against buildings and cars and trees and people, if one was stupid or unfortunate enough to be out in it.

My friend, Angela, and I had ventured out Wednesday afternoon to clear a path through what had fallen then. It was arduous work, and later, both of us were sore. But the snow continued to fall, and when I got up on Thursday morning, it was to the certain knowledge that once again, the snow would have to be cleared.

This is a pile of snow that I made by adding to what was there with what was parallel to it on the driveway. I took a certain pleasure in listening to the thunk of each shovel-full of snow hitting the ancient windows on my house.

I couldn't resist writing that title because there is so much left unsaid of the power of social networks.

So Lindsay proudly posted that image, celebrating her sell to Time.com --a photograph they found of Amanda via Flickr. Flickr, by the way, has become a social networking site disguised as photo storage company.

Anyhow, she took that photograph of Amanda while she and I and a whole gaggle of political and entertainment bloggers were in Amsterdam. We were part of the Bloggers in Amsterdam group, paid by Holland.com and sponsored by BlogAds.

Many women in the Feminist Bloggers Network know each other now for more than a couple of years. Women tend to operate social networks and powerlines a bit differently than men, and so our presence in mainstream media has not been as forceful as the handful of male-run blogs the mainstream journos tend to call "The Blogs".

Well, we not be as prominent in the public eye as some of us would like to be, but make no mistake --we're everywhere.

Want proof? MAJeff, the last quote in that Time.com article happens to be a FBN member who's been on a blogging (but not commenting) sabbatical; and used to be a key player in our blog.

Just saying.

Check out my photo of Amanda and me in Amsterdam after the jump ...

I haven't done any business blogging in a long while. Well, I have a reason now : The idiots of Splash News and 6 other agencies are happy slapping themselves on the back for threatening Perez Hilton with a lawsuit for photographs they claim he "stole" from their website.

Perez Hilton is to be hit by a multi-million dollar federal lawsuit from the top seven paparazzi agencies in the US.

Splash News, INF, Ramey, Bauer Griffin, WENN, Most Wanted and Flynet have joined forces to stop Perezhilton.com from using copyrighted images.
"Perez claims he is making a fortune off exploiting pictures taken by photographers. He blatantly violates copyright and makes advertising revenue off other people's works," said Gary Morgan of Splash News.

[...]

The seven agencies have spent the last few weeks conferring over how to stop Hilton. In an unprecedented co-operation between paparazzi and showbusiness agencies, the heads of the agencies agreed to take action.
A letter was sent demanding full payment of all infringed material or face a lawsuit next week.

I honestly do not understand why people in the gossip business hate Perez Hilton (aka Mario Lavandeira) so much. I don't know if it's because he is :

1. A successful blogger
2. A successful gay blogger
3. A successful gay latino blogger

Even if professional gossip bloggers like Mario wanted to register with the Splash News site and check the prices on their photos (which are not posted publicly, by the way), this is what they are hit with:

From a walk I took last week.

[via Puerto Rico | culturekitchen]

Vacations are not a synonym for rest.

When you travel alone with two kids and are with them 24/7, you really don't get the much needed rest you thought you'd get for $165 a night. You're 'on' all of the time. Also, some of you may have noticed my invisible hand during my 'time-out' 'vacationing' in Puerto Rico. I could not leave the blogs 100% alone since I don't have a systems or web administrator. So, it was not so much a vacation as a much needed change in scenery.

I may have not been able to rest my body completely but my eyes and mind were had been scrubbed fresh by my eight year absence from the island. I was able to see Puerto Rico without the baggage I had carried for so many years after my departure. Yes, there was a sense of what brazilians call saudade, a longing for days past. But it was not overwhelming as before. It was small, a passing thing that barely got in the way of my renewed awareness of the island of Boriken.

  

Not exactly a face that would make most women swoon.

When Eva Braun was a teenager, she worked as a salesgirl in the shop of the official Nazi Party Photographer, Heinrich Hoffmann. Eventually, she began working as his photography assistant and it was in his darkroom that she first glimpsed the man whose paranoia, gastrointestinal agonies (do the research), and "Vitamin B" shots caused the death of millions.

She fell in love with a face that only a (blind) mother could love. Yeah, yeah, I know...I have slept with men who are unconventially sexy, but I doubt anyone in their right mind would classify Hitler as such. He suffered from constant bouts of noxious gas, had terrible taste in clothes, and quite frankly, that whole trying to take over the world thing just doesn't work for me.

I imagine Eva standing in a darkroom as she watches the glow of his face form into an image that captures her heart. Now, I have no idea if it happened this way or not, although it is documented that she met Hitler in this shop and because Hoffman was the official Nazi Party Photographer, she did see photos of Hitler before she met him. As a woman, I can almost guarantee she was already drawn to him through the photos.

Hello visitors from The Showbuzz and CBSNews. Thanks for stopping by.

---

To enlarge click here.

A day or two ago I published information given to me by anonymous tipsters about a duo who may have been involved in the stealing of a digital camera memory stick with 450 private photographs from the Jolie-Pitt family's time in Namibia.

Well, there have been rumors of some arrests as reported by both The Daily News' Rush & Molloy and TMZ.com. I have yet to confirm any arrest(s), but it seems like the information we provided on our site led to one of the suspects.

Here's the story so far: The camera which held the memory stick is owned by Angelina Jolie's brother, James Haven. A series of unfortunate events happened to Haven and the camera : The camera broke, he sent it for repairs to the store where he bought it but ... oooooops! Haven forgot to take the memory stick out of the camera. The camera got sent from Malibu to a repair center in Connecticut. That's were the illustrious practitioner of extreme vanning, a Mr. Bill Keyes, pops into our story.