BOOKS
Nick Hornby
The Polysyllabic Spree
If you love to read, or like to read, or you're in that vast category of those wishing for more time to read, here is a book that will have you saying "yes" and "so true," or just have you smiling in knowing amusement at most pages. "The Polysyllabic Spree," (yes, it's a takeoff on "The Polyphonic Spree") is a collection of English writer Nick Hornby's recent "Stuff I've Been Reading" monthly columns for The Believer magazine, whose stated mission is to be an "amiable yet rigorous forum for writing about books."
Fans of Hornby know him for books such as "About a Boy" and "High Fidelity" (and movies of the same names). Fans also know that being persistently amiable is not his style. Which, of course, makes his writing very entertaining. This is not a collection of book reviews, but a reading diary of sharp and thoughtful musings on literature that ultimately asks: Why do we read, anyway?
Like many of us, Hornby buys a lot more books than he reads. The reasons are not mysterious. He's got a job, three kids, and a love of (English) football. He watches TV to unwind. In his first essay, he sets an unapologetic tone by dismissing any potential complaints that he spends too much on books. "I know that already," he says. "I certainly 'intend' to read all of them, more or less. My 'intentions' are good. Anyway, it's my money. And I'll bet you do it, too." Er, how did you know?
But buying books is half the fun. For anyone who's ever browsed around a bookstore, reading Hornby's accounts of how one book led him to another, or how he discovered a new author nearly by accident, is like reconnecting with an erudite friend. Each essay is bannered by two lists: "Books Bought" and "Books Read." This gives the ensuing essay a personality before you start it. The "Books Read" list also includes notations of which ones are unfinished and which ones have been abandoned.
One book Hornby couldn't make himself finish was Bob Woodward's "Bush at War." Hornby only read about a third of it before grumbling that "Woodward's tone was too matey and sympathetic for me." One passage did surprise him. He's amazed that the Secret Service needed to wake up President Bush at 11:08 on the night of Sept. 11, 2001.
"Woken up! He didn't work late that night? And he wasn't too buzzy to get off to sleep?"
Hornby reads all kinds of books -- from Robert Lowell's poems to Dennis Lehane's novels to helpful books on quitting smoking (which he's read again and again). Of Lehane's multilayered novels, Hornby admiringly writes "everything seems organic . . . almost nothing . . . seems contrived." These are the kinds of books that Hornby searches for, those that will make you "walk into a lamp-post" while reading them. But reading widely doesn't mean you've read everything. Hornby takes to task those literary critics who give away plots of classics in their essays, under the assumption that everyone has already read them ("I know the only thing brainy people do with their lives is reread great works of fiction, but surely even . . . Harold Bloom read before [he] reread.") Hornby has other frustrations, all voiced with droll acuity, all stemming from the love of the well-written word. He can dispatch a scholarly trend with a few short strokes. Take the current "obsession with austerity" in universities and writing workshops, designed to pare all writing down to bare bone. "Why not just jot the plot and a couple of themes down on the back of an envelope and leave it at that? The truth is, there's nothing very utilitarian about fiction or its creation, and I suspect that people are desperate to make it sound like manly, back-breaking labor because it's such a [cushy] thing to do in the first place."
Not one to diagnose without offering a cure, Hornby has a useful antidote for another bookish dilemma: all the Really Big Biographies that frequently burden the bestseller lists. Under Hornby's rules, before writing a biography, you would apply to the "National Biography Office" for a permit that spells out "the number of pages you get." A biography would only edge toward a thousand pages for someone of Dickens's stature. In this framework, most current biographies would be about 200-300 pages shorter than the length at which they're published. This would also spare many of us the guilt of avoiding books we can't pick up with one hand. Chekhov's "A Life in Letters" is excerpted at the end of the book. The letters resonate as strongly today as they did when the great man wrote them. As Hornby says, "useful advice -- and tough love." Some of the same could be said for Hornby's writing and his love of books.
“We fought, Wilkie Collins and I. We fought bitterly and with all our might, to a standstill, over a period of about three weeks, on trains and airplanes and by hotel swimming pools. Sometimes-usually late at night, in bed-he could put me out cold with a single paragraph; every time I got through twenty or thirty pages, it felt to me as though I’d socked him good, but it took a lot out of me, and I had to retire to my corner to wipe the blood and sweat off my reading glasses.”
New Ways to Manage Your Photos
New York Times
IF you're not already aware that 2004 was the Year of the Digital Camera, here are a few clues. It was the year that Kodak stopped making film cameras, the year that digicams were even more popular holiday gifts than DVD players, and the year that three professional photographers I know each decided, with much grumbling, to buy a digital camera - just to see what all the fuss is about.
And if this month is any indication, 2005 will be the Year of the Software to Organize the Pictures You Took With Your Digital Camera. This week alone, two companies are releasing versions of popular photo-organizing programs: from Apple comes iPhoto 5 for the Macintosh. From Google (yes, Google) comes Picasa 2, for Windows 98 and later. These two programs are very similar in design, features, visual effects and a bend-over-backward effort to keep things simple. IPhoto is part of Apple's new iLife '05 suite, which also includes iMovie (for video editing), GarageBand (recording studio in a box), iDVD (designing DVD menu screens and burning discs) and iTunes (a music jukebox, which is still a free download). The whole package costs $80 (even if, alas, you bought the previous version). ILife also comes free with every new Mac.
Picasa 2, on the other hand, is completely free. Not free as in "time-limited tryout," not free as in "ads in the margins," not free as in "you will be assimilated into our mailing list," but really, truly, no-strings-attached free. You can download it right now from www.picasa.com. (So how does Google plan to make money from Picasa, whose pre-Google version cost $30? The company says that will come later. Google does promise, however, not to get everybody hooked on Picasa and then turn around and start charging or taking away features.) If you've never used iPhoto or Picasa, you're in for a treat. These are elegant, visual, nearly effortless programs. Your photos appear like slides on a giant scrolling light table, at any size you like. Both programs handle every conceivable photo file format, including the RAW files preferred by hard-core shutterbugs, and even digital movies.
You double-click on a photo to edit it, and to find out where the programmers have been putting much of their effort. IPhoto has always offered quick-fix buttons like Rotate, Crop and Brightness. But now you can summon a floating palette filled with sliders for geekier things like color temperature, exposure and saturation. You see the changes in the photo itself - still visible behind the see-through adjustment panel - in real time. (Advanced shutterbugs should note that iPhoto and Picasa 2 now have a live color histogram - a graph of the photo's three underlying color layers. It's so similarly designed that you have to wonder if Apple and Google sent spies to each other's labs.) This is all welcome stuff. But the editing tools in Picasa 2 are much more powerful, not to mention easy to use, deliciously visual and even witty. For example, nestled among the usual quick-fix buttons (Auto Contrast, Auto Color and so on) is a button called "I'm Feeling Lucky." The wording comes, of course, from a similar button on the Google search page, and in this context, its meaning is clear: "I don't care which parameters you tweak, just make this picture look better." As with iPhoto's Enhance button, the resulting improvements are often astonishing. (Picasa makes the changes look even more magical because it animates the edit, making your photo cross-dissolve from Before to After.)
Both programs are now capable of straightening a photo, too - for example, where the horizon line isn't quite parallel to the edge of the picture. Just rotating the photo isn't good enough; that would make the image sit askew in its rectangle, introducing skinny blank triangles at the corners. So both programs subtly enlarge the photo as you turn it, just enough to eliminate the gaps. (IPhoto and Picasa always apply your editing to a copy of the original photo. Months or years later, you can rewind the photo until it looks exactly the way it came from the camera. That's a safety net worth its weight in gold, but it's also a hard-disk glutton; over time, you generate hundreds of duplicates - edited and original.) Now, one huge advantage of digital photos is that you can do so many things with them: turn them into slide shows or desktop pictures, export them as Web-page galleries, send them (in scaled-down form) by e-mail, order prints by mail, and so on. Both programs excel in this department. Picasa's sharing tools go the extra mile by providing tight integration with Google's other recent software acquisitions, like Blogger (a Web-log kit) and Hello (instant photo sharing). And Picasa lets you order your prints from a choice of companies (Kodak, Wal-Mart and so on).
IPhoto 5, on the other hand, expands what was already a blockbuster feature: the ability to design and order a gorgeous, hardbound coffee-table gift book with just a couple of clicks ($30 for 20 pages). You can now specify double-sided pages, softcover books and a choice of three booklet sizes. For example, the little wallet-size booklets (3.5 by 2.6 inches; $12 for a matching set of three) are fun to carry around, hand out as party favors or drop in the mail. (Picasa offers no such built-in feature. It does, however, let you upload your photos to Shutterfly, a Web site that offers similar, though more limited, book options.) Picasa and iPhoto can each create a double-clickable file that fills the lucky recipient's computer screen with a musical slide show - a terrific distribution method. IPhoto 5 even gives you control over the timing and transitions of individual slides - and, in conjunction with iDVD, can save the result as a spectacular DVD that your admirers can play on their TV sets.
Picasa's standout features are its simplicity, smoothness and speed. Whereas iPhoto 5 can accommodate about 20,000 photos per library before it starts bogging down - for the true digicam fanatic, that's about one afternoon's shooting at Disney World - Picasa handily juggles 250,000 photos without breaking a sweat. Unfortunately, Picasa tracks your picture files right where they are, in their existing folders on your hard drive (rather than storing them in its own database, as iPhoto does). That approach makes sense until you want to organize these photos into thematic groupings - virtual folders, in other words. In iPhoto, you click a + button to create a virtual folder, then drag pictures into it. (You can even create folders within these folders.) But Picasa's virtual folders appear in the same panel as the list of folders on your hard drive, and creating a new one involves using a pop-up menu elsewhere on the screen. Picasa is one of the world's least confusing pieces of software, but this aspect of it is a humdinger. Now, Picasa 2 and iPhoto 5 don't really compete with each other, since each requires a different operating system. No, the company that should really be sweating right about now is Adobe, whose Photoshop Elements 3.0 (for Mac and Windows) is only a few months old. It, too, is a terrific piece of software, but it's much bigger, more powerful and more complex; in addition to all the iPhoto-Picasa-type features, it can do things like keep track of offline photos (those on your CD's, not on the computer), superimpose text on your photos, stitch together pictures into a panorama, and so on. But Elements costs $85 online, which is quite a bit more than free.
In a world of software that's so bloated it actually intimidates you, the polish and grace of programs like Picasa and iPhoto are a breath of fresh air. Here's hoping that 2006 will be the Year of More Programs Just Like These Two.
MOVIES
The Oscar nominations are coming out tomorrow. If I was choosing the nominees:
BEST FILM
Sideways
Million Dollar Baby
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
The Aviator
Finding Neverland
BEST ACTOR IN A LEADING ROLE
Don Cheadle - Hotel Rwanda
Paul Giamatti - Sideways
Jamie Foxx - Ray
Javier Bardem - The Sea Inside
Jim Carrey - Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
BEST ACTRESS IN A LEADING ROLE
Imelda Staunton - Vera Drake
Hilary Swank - Million Dollar Baby
Kate Winslet - Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Julie Delpy - Before Sunset
Uma Thurman - Kill Bill, Vol. 2
BEST ACTOR IN A SUPPORTING ROLE
Thomas Haden Church - Sideways
Clive Owen - Closer
Jamie Foxx - Collateral
Richard Graham - Vera Drake
Morgan Freeman - Million Dollar Baby
BEST ACTRESS IN A SUPPORTING ROLE
Natalie Portman - Closer
Laura Dern - We Don't Live Here Anymore
Cate Blanchett - The Aviator
Sophie Okonedo - Hotel Rwanda
Virginia Madsen - Sideways
BEST DIRECTOR
Clint Eastwood - Million Dollar Baby
Mike Nichols - Closer
Terry George - Hotel Rwanda
Martin Scorcese - The Aviator
Mike Leigh - Vera Drake
Closer
New York Times
I had recently moved to northern Idaho to write, and everything I wrote was dull, forced, unnatural. One day I saw a cougar. He was easily eight feet, from his tawny head to the tip of his long tail lazily rising and falling, about the same size as the trophy cougar I once saw displayed in a glass box at a gas station down in Kamiah. He lay stretched out on pine needles on a slope 40 yards away. I felt lucky to have seen him. I was also glad to be inside my house; we had come close enough.
The house I bought sits amid thousands of acres of timber in the Clearwater Mountains, high above the South Fork of the Clearwater River. The day after seeing the cougar, I decided to take down a hog-wire fence from a wooded area where the previous owners kept small livestock. I had no interest in raising anything there; I wanted what came forth on its own urges -- deer, blackberries, turkeys, dogtooth violets -- to have free play. Working around a thicket of wild roses to loosen the fence, I saw the bright carcass of a six-point buck. Something had been eating it. From the fresh scratch marks on a fallen larch holding up the buck's rack, I knew it was the cougar. I once asked a forest ranger what I should do if I was ever surprised by one in the woods. ''Likely the lion would see you first,'' he said. ''And if he really wanted to jump you and break your neck, you'd probably never even feel it. Or,'' he added, ''not long enough to worry about.''
Charley Dreadfulwater, who has worked in these mountains for 30 years, helps me with chores I don't dare try on my own, like dropping big trees dangerously close to my barn. I told him about the kill. You don't know what to think about lions anymore, he said. ''Used to be, you'd never see them, just their markings,'' he said. ''Now their fear seems to be gone. Last month, out after firewood, I had three of them not 60 feet away looking me over. Calm as anything. I eased back into my truck and waited for them to go away. I like lions. They were here first.'' He shook his head. ''But there's only so much land.''
A week later, I went to check on the kill. Only a rag of its fur, its bones and hooves remained. Charley told me that since I wasn't a hunter, which deer figure out pretty quickly, I'd always have plenty close by. And something to eat them. For several days, I avoided walking in the woods near dusk, when the cougar could see better than I could. But I kept staying out later and later, my neck aching from looking into low branches perfect for leaping from. Was I going crazy? Did I want to see a lion perched in a tree, waiting for me? Why didn't I at least buy a pistol?
One afternoon about a month later, I was in the corral, on my knees, pulling up thistles. The cold air was misty wet from a low cloud. I was trying to work off the bad feeling of having made mediocre sentences all morning. It seemed I was becoming an expert. I thought how my dad, a carpenter, could caress the grain in wood and just about make the wood sing. What would he think of his son's courting self-pity? As the mist shifted, the Gospel Hump Mountains came into view. I loved how the clouds seemed to rub their pearly gray peaks into another season. What happened next is hard to explain exactly. I looked up and saw the cougar. He stood in the mist curled around us, close enough to touch, not moving. We looked at each other. Over his shoulder, I could see Gospel Peak covered with snow. Part of me wanted nothing more than to lie in the snow on the peak, slowly move my arms and make a great angel. I also wanted my father to be alive again and see this magnificence with me -- we wouldn't have to say anything. I just wanted to hold his hand.
I was quite afraid -- even to blink -- but also calm. I wanted to see my father shake his head in wonder, the way he did after finishing a tough job, when he had to admit he was happy. Because if I moved, surely my heart would escape and fly off. How long the cougar stayed I don't know. I remember how clear everything was -- the pointy buds on my plum trees, his eyes, the dark whorls the knots made in the boards of my fence. And that perfect, priceless silence in his wake when he turned and went back, as smoothly it seemed as a trout in water.
Years have passed. I have not seen him -- or any kills -- so close again. Charley smiled when I told him about our meeting. ''Maybe he figured this is your hunting ground.'' Once upon a time, a big lion suddenly showed up and might have hurt me, or worse, but instead left me with a sharpened way of looking. I can see great distances -- rain falling in fat columns miles away while the sun warms my bare shoulders. I can hear great distances too. A pine cone dropping branch by branch -- pwak! pwak! Or the sudden flutter of a chukar's wings. When the two senses come together, it's often stunning. Moonlit nights, standing at my window, I can see a passage of the South Fork's curled brilliance that sounds like a woman removing and collecting in her hand a long string of favored pearls.
iPods
Newsweek
Last spring it dawned on Apple CEO Steve Jobs that the heart of his hit iPod digital music player was the "shuffle." This feature allows users to mix up their entire song collections-thousands of tunes-and play them back in a jumbled order, like a private radio station. Jobs not only moved the popular shuffle option to an exalted place on the top menu of the iPod, he also used the idea as the design principle of the new low-cost iPod Shuffle. Its ad slogan celebrates the serendipity music lovers embrace when their songs are reordered by chance-"Life is random."
But just about everyone who has an iPod has wondered how random the iPod shuffle function really is. From the day I loaded up my first Pod, it was as if the little devil liked to play favorites. It had a particular fondness for Steely Dan, whose songs always seemed to pop up two or three times in the first hour of play. Other songs seemed to be exiled to a forgotten corner of the disk drive. Months after I bought "Wild Thing" from the iTunes store, I'm still waiting for my iPod to cue it up. More than a year ago, I outlined these concerns to Jobs; he dialed up an engineer who insisted that shuffle played no favorites. Since then, however, millions of new Podders have started shuffling, and the question has been discussed in newspapers, blogs and countless conversations. It's taking on Oliver Stone-like conspiracy buzz.
Apple execs profess amusement. "It's part of the magic of shuffle," says Greg Joswiak, the VP for iPod products. Still, I asked him last week to double-check with the engineers. They flatly assured him that "Random is random," and the algorithm that does the shuffling has been tested and reverified. More specifically, when an iPod does a shuffle, it reorders the songs much the way a Vegas dealer shuffles a deck of cards, then plays them back in the new order. So if you keep listening for the week or so it takes to complete the list, you will hear everything, just once. But people generally listen only to the first few dozen songs. In theory, that sample should be evenly distributed among all the artists and albums in their collections. So why do you typically get three Wilco songs in an hour while Aretha Franklin waits in the wings forever?
The question will be even more important to owners of the new tiny iPod Shuffles. These use a new feature called autofill to load the one-ounce players with a supposedly random selection of 120 or so songs from much larger collections. The first few times I tried this, I found some disturbing clusters in the songs chosen. More than once the "random" playlist included three tracks from the same album! Since there are more than 3,000 tunes in my library, this seemed to defy the odds. Or did it? I explained this phenomenon to Temple University prof John Allen Paulos, an expert in applying mathematical theory to everyday life. His conclusion: it's entirely possible that nothing at all is amiss with the shuffle function. It's quite common for random processes (like coin tosses) to get unlikely results here and there, like runs of six heads in a row. Over a very long time, it evens out, but it's hard for us to envision that. "We often interpret and impose patterns on random processes," he says, adding that this might be expected in the case of music, which evokes strong emotions. Paul Kocher, president of Cryptography Research, puts it another way: "Our brains aren't wired to understand randomness."
Life may indeed be random, and the iPod probably is, too. But we humans will always provide our own narratives and patterns to bring chaos under control. The fault, if there is any, lies not in shuffle but in ourselves. On the other hand, I'm still waiting for "Wild Thing."
Nick Hornby
The Polysyllabic Spree
If you love to read, or like to read, or you're in that vast category of those wishing for more time to read, here is a book that will have you saying "yes" and "so true," or just have you smiling in knowing amusement at most pages. "The Polysyllabic Spree," (yes, it's a takeoff on "The Polyphonic Spree") is a collection of English writer Nick Hornby's recent "Stuff I've Been Reading" monthly columns for The Believer magazine, whose stated mission is to be an "amiable yet rigorous forum for writing about books."
Fans of Hornby know him for books such as "About a Boy" and "High Fidelity" (and movies of the same names). Fans also know that being persistently amiable is not his style. Which, of course, makes his writing very entertaining. This is not a collection of book reviews, but a reading diary of sharp and thoughtful musings on literature that ultimately asks: Why do we read, anyway?
Like many of us, Hornby buys a lot more books than he reads. The reasons are not mysterious. He's got a job, three kids, and a love of (English) football. He watches TV to unwind. In his first essay, he sets an unapologetic tone by dismissing any potential complaints that he spends too much on books. "I know that already," he says. "I certainly 'intend' to read all of them, more or less. My 'intentions' are good. Anyway, it's my money. And I'll bet you do it, too." Er, how did you know?
But buying books is half the fun. For anyone who's ever browsed around a bookstore, reading Hornby's accounts of how one book led him to another, or how he discovered a new author nearly by accident, is like reconnecting with an erudite friend. Each essay is bannered by two lists: "Books Bought" and "Books Read." This gives the ensuing essay a personality before you start it. The "Books Read" list also includes notations of which ones are unfinished and which ones have been abandoned.
One book Hornby couldn't make himself finish was Bob Woodward's "Bush at War." Hornby only read about a third of it before grumbling that "Woodward's tone was too matey and sympathetic for me." One passage did surprise him. He's amazed that the Secret Service needed to wake up President Bush at 11:08 on the night of Sept. 11, 2001.
"Woken up! He didn't work late that night? And he wasn't too buzzy to get off to sleep?"
Hornby reads all kinds of books -- from Robert Lowell's poems to Dennis Lehane's novels to helpful books on quitting smoking (which he's read again and again). Of Lehane's multilayered novels, Hornby admiringly writes "everything seems organic . . . almost nothing . . . seems contrived." These are the kinds of books that Hornby searches for, those that will make you "walk into a lamp-post" while reading them. But reading widely doesn't mean you've read everything. Hornby takes to task those literary critics who give away plots of classics in their essays, under the assumption that everyone has already read them ("I know the only thing brainy people do with their lives is reread great works of fiction, but surely even . . . Harold Bloom read before [he] reread.") Hornby has other frustrations, all voiced with droll acuity, all stemming from the love of the well-written word. He can dispatch a scholarly trend with a few short strokes. Take the current "obsession with austerity" in universities and writing workshops, designed to pare all writing down to bare bone. "Why not just jot the plot and a couple of themes down on the back of an envelope and leave it at that? The truth is, there's nothing very utilitarian about fiction or its creation, and I suspect that people are desperate to make it sound like manly, back-breaking labor because it's such a [cushy] thing to do in the first place."
Not one to diagnose without offering a cure, Hornby has a useful antidote for another bookish dilemma: all the Really Big Biographies that frequently burden the bestseller lists. Under Hornby's rules, before writing a biography, you would apply to the "National Biography Office" for a permit that spells out "the number of pages you get." A biography would only edge toward a thousand pages for someone of Dickens's stature. In this framework, most current biographies would be about 200-300 pages shorter than the length at which they're published. This would also spare many of us the guilt of avoiding books we can't pick up with one hand. Chekhov's "A Life in Letters" is excerpted at the end of the book. The letters resonate as strongly today as they did when the great man wrote them. As Hornby says, "useful advice -- and tough love." Some of the same could be said for Hornby's writing and his love of books.
“We fought, Wilkie Collins and I. We fought bitterly and with all our might, to a standstill, over a period of about three weeks, on trains and airplanes and by hotel swimming pools. Sometimes-usually late at night, in bed-he could put me out cold with a single paragraph; every time I got through twenty or thirty pages, it felt to me as though I’d socked him good, but it took a lot out of me, and I had to retire to my corner to wipe the blood and sweat off my reading glasses.”
New Ways to Manage Your Photos
New York Times
IF you're not already aware that 2004 was the Year of the Digital Camera, here are a few clues. It was the year that Kodak stopped making film cameras, the year that digicams were even more popular holiday gifts than DVD players, and the year that three professional photographers I know each decided, with much grumbling, to buy a digital camera - just to see what all the fuss is about.
And if this month is any indication, 2005 will be the Year of the Software to Organize the Pictures You Took With Your Digital Camera. This week alone, two companies are releasing versions of popular photo-organizing programs: from Apple comes iPhoto 5 for the Macintosh. From Google (yes, Google) comes Picasa 2, for Windows 98 and later. These two programs are very similar in design, features, visual effects and a bend-over-backward effort to keep things simple. IPhoto is part of Apple's new iLife '05 suite, which also includes iMovie (for video editing), GarageBand (recording studio in a box), iDVD (designing DVD menu screens and burning discs) and iTunes (a music jukebox, which is still a free download). The whole package costs $80 (even if, alas, you bought the previous version). ILife also comes free with every new Mac.
Picasa 2, on the other hand, is completely free. Not free as in "time-limited tryout," not free as in "ads in the margins," not free as in "you will be assimilated into our mailing list," but really, truly, no-strings-attached free. You can download it right now from www.picasa.com. (So how does Google plan to make money from Picasa, whose pre-Google version cost $30? The company says that will come later. Google does promise, however, not to get everybody hooked on Picasa and then turn around and start charging or taking away features.) If you've never used iPhoto or Picasa, you're in for a treat. These are elegant, visual, nearly effortless programs. Your photos appear like slides on a giant scrolling light table, at any size you like. Both programs handle every conceivable photo file format, including the RAW files preferred by hard-core shutterbugs, and even digital movies.
You double-click on a photo to edit it, and to find out where the programmers have been putting much of their effort. IPhoto has always offered quick-fix buttons like Rotate, Crop and Brightness. But now you can summon a floating palette filled with sliders for geekier things like color temperature, exposure and saturation. You see the changes in the photo itself - still visible behind the see-through adjustment panel - in real time. (Advanced shutterbugs should note that iPhoto and Picasa 2 now have a live color histogram - a graph of the photo's three underlying color layers. It's so similarly designed that you have to wonder if Apple and Google sent spies to each other's labs.) This is all welcome stuff. But the editing tools in Picasa 2 are much more powerful, not to mention easy to use, deliciously visual and even witty. For example, nestled among the usual quick-fix buttons (Auto Contrast, Auto Color and so on) is a button called "I'm Feeling Lucky." The wording comes, of course, from a similar button on the Google search page, and in this context, its meaning is clear: "I don't care which parameters you tweak, just make this picture look better." As with iPhoto's Enhance button, the resulting improvements are often astonishing. (Picasa makes the changes look even more magical because it animates the edit, making your photo cross-dissolve from Before to After.)
Both programs are now capable of straightening a photo, too - for example, where the horizon line isn't quite parallel to the edge of the picture. Just rotating the photo isn't good enough; that would make the image sit askew in its rectangle, introducing skinny blank triangles at the corners. So both programs subtly enlarge the photo as you turn it, just enough to eliminate the gaps. (IPhoto and Picasa always apply your editing to a copy of the original photo. Months or years later, you can rewind the photo until it looks exactly the way it came from the camera. That's a safety net worth its weight in gold, but it's also a hard-disk glutton; over time, you generate hundreds of duplicates - edited and original.) Now, one huge advantage of digital photos is that you can do so many things with them: turn them into slide shows or desktop pictures, export them as Web-page galleries, send them (in scaled-down form) by e-mail, order prints by mail, and so on. Both programs excel in this department. Picasa's sharing tools go the extra mile by providing tight integration with Google's other recent software acquisitions, like Blogger (a Web-log kit) and Hello (instant photo sharing). And Picasa lets you order your prints from a choice of companies (Kodak, Wal-Mart and so on).
IPhoto 5, on the other hand, expands what was already a blockbuster feature: the ability to design and order a gorgeous, hardbound coffee-table gift book with just a couple of clicks ($30 for 20 pages). You can now specify double-sided pages, softcover books and a choice of three booklet sizes. For example, the little wallet-size booklets (3.5 by 2.6 inches; $12 for a matching set of three) are fun to carry around, hand out as party favors or drop in the mail. (Picasa offers no such built-in feature. It does, however, let you upload your photos to Shutterfly, a Web site that offers similar, though more limited, book options.) Picasa and iPhoto can each create a double-clickable file that fills the lucky recipient's computer screen with a musical slide show - a terrific distribution method. IPhoto 5 even gives you control over the timing and transitions of individual slides - and, in conjunction with iDVD, can save the result as a spectacular DVD that your admirers can play on their TV sets.
Picasa's standout features are its simplicity, smoothness and speed. Whereas iPhoto 5 can accommodate about 20,000 photos per library before it starts bogging down - for the true digicam fanatic, that's about one afternoon's shooting at Disney World - Picasa handily juggles 250,000 photos without breaking a sweat. Unfortunately, Picasa tracks your picture files right where they are, in their existing folders on your hard drive (rather than storing them in its own database, as iPhoto does). That approach makes sense until you want to organize these photos into thematic groupings - virtual folders, in other words. In iPhoto, you click a + button to create a virtual folder, then drag pictures into it. (You can even create folders within these folders.) But Picasa's virtual folders appear in the same panel as the list of folders on your hard drive, and creating a new one involves using a pop-up menu elsewhere on the screen. Picasa is one of the world's least confusing pieces of software, but this aspect of it is a humdinger. Now, Picasa 2 and iPhoto 5 don't really compete with each other, since each requires a different operating system. No, the company that should really be sweating right about now is Adobe, whose Photoshop Elements 3.0 (for Mac and Windows) is only a few months old. It, too, is a terrific piece of software, but it's much bigger, more powerful and more complex; in addition to all the iPhoto-Picasa-type features, it can do things like keep track of offline photos (those on your CD's, not on the computer), superimpose text on your photos, stitch together pictures into a panorama, and so on. But Elements costs $85 online, which is quite a bit more than free.
In a world of software that's so bloated it actually intimidates you, the polish and grace of programs like Picasa and iPhoto are a breath of fresh air. Here's hoping that 2006 will be the Year of More Programs Just Like These Two.
MOVIES
The Oscar nominations are coming out tomorrow. If I was choosing the nominees:
BEST FILM
Sideways
Million Dollar Baby
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
The Aviator
Finding Neverland
BEST ACTOR IN A LEADING ROLE
Don Cheadle - Hotel Rwanda
Paul Giamatti - Sideways
Jamie Foxx - Ray
Javier Bardem - The Sea Inside
Jim Carrey - Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
BEST ACTRESS IN A LEADING ROLE
Imelda Staunton - Vera Drake
Hilary Swank - Million Dollar Baby
Kate Winslet - Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Julie Delpy - Before Sunset
Uma Thurman - Kill Bill, Vol. 2
BEST ACTOR IN A SUPPORTING ROLE
Thomas Haden Church - Sideways
Clive Owen - Closer
Jamie Foxx - Collateral
Richard Graham - Vera Drake
Morgan Freeman - Million Dollar Baby
BEST ACTRESS IN A SUPPORTING ROLE
Natalie Portman - Closer
Laura Dern - We Don't Live Here Anymore
Cate Blanchett - The Aviator
Sophie Okonedo - Hotel Rwanda
Virginia Madsen - Sideways
BEST DIRECTOR
Clint Eastwood - Million Dollar Baby
Mike Nichols - Closer
Terry George - Hotel Rwanda
Martin Scorcese - The Aviator
Mike Leigh - Vera Drake
Closer
New York Times
I had recently moved to northern Idaho to write, and everything I wrote was dull, forced, unnatural. One day I saw a cougar. He was easily eight feet, from his tawny head to the tip of his long tail lazily rising and falling, about the same size as the trophy cougar I once saw displayed in a glass box at a gas station down in Kamiah. He lay stretched out on pine needles on a slope 40 yards away. I felt lucky to have seen him. I was also glad to be inside my house; we had come close enough.
The house I bought sits amid thousands of acres of timber in the Clearwater Mountains, high above the South Fork of the Clearwater River. The day after seeing the cougar, I decided to take down a hog-wire fence from a wooded area where the previous owners kept small livestock. I had no interest in raising anything there; I wanted what came forth on its own urges -- deer, blackberries, turkeys, dogtooth violets -- to have free play. Working around a thicket of wild roses to loosen the fence, I saw the bright carcass of a six-point buck. Something had been eating it. From the fresh scratch marks on a fallen larch holding up the buck's rack, I knew it was the cougar. I once asked a forest ranger what I should do if I was ever surprised by one in the woods. ''Likely the lion would see you first,'' he said. ''And if he really wanted to jump you and break your neck, you'd probably never even feel it. Or,'' he added, ''not long enough to worry about.''
Charley Dreadfulwater, who has worked in these mountains for 30 years, helps me with chores I don't dare try on my own, like dropping big trees dangerously close to my barn. I told him about the kill. You don't know what to think about lions anymore, he said. ''Used to be, you'd never see them, just their markings,'' he said. ''Now their fear seems to be gone. Last month, out after firewood, I had three of them not 60 feet away looking me over. Calm as anything. I eased back into my truck and waited for them to go away. I like lions. They were here first.'' He shook his head. ''But there's only so much land.''
A week later, I went to check on the kill. Only a rag of its fur, its bones and hooves remained. Charley told me that since I wasn't a hunter, which deer figure out pretty quickly, I'd always have plenty close by. And something to eat them. For several days, I avoided walking in the woods near dusk, when the cougar could see better than I could. But I kept staying out later and later, my neck aching from looking into low branches perfect for leaping from. Was I going crazy? Did I want to see a lion perched in a tree, waiting for me? Why didn't I at least buy a pistol?
One afternoon about a month later, I was in the corral, on my knees, pulling up thistles. The cold air was misty wet from a low cloud. I was trying to work off the bad feeling of having made mediocre sentences all morning. It seemed I was becoming an expert. I thought how my dad, a carpenter, could caress the grain in wood and just about make the wood sing. What would he think of his son's courting self-pity? As the mist shifted, the Gospel Hump Mountains came into view. I loved how the clouds seemed to rub their pearly gray peaks into another season. What happened next is hard to explain exactly. I looked up and saw the cougar. He stood in the mist curled around us, close enough to touch, not moving. We looked at each other. Over his shoulder, I could see Gospel Peak covered with snow. Part of me wanted nothing more than to lie in the snow on the peak, slowly move my arms and make a great angel. I also wanted my father to be alive again and see this magnificence with me -- we wouldn't have to say anything. I just wanted to hold his hand.
I was quite afraid -- even to blink -- but also calm. I wanted to see my father shake his head in wonder, the way he did after finishing a tough job, when he had to admit he was happy. Because if I moved, surely my heart would escape and fly off. How long the cougar stayed I don't know. I remember how clear everything was -- the pointy buds on my plum trees, his eyes, the dark whorls the knots made in the boards of my fence. And that perfect, priceless silence in his wake when he turned and went back, as smoothly it seemed as a trout in water.
Years have passed. I have not seen him -- or any kills -- so close again. Charley smiled when I told him about our meeting. ''Maybe he figured this is your hunting ground.'' Once upon a time, a big lion suddenly showed up and might have hurt me, or worse, but instead left me with a sharpened way of looking. I can see great distances -- rain falling in fat columns miles away while the sun warms my bare shoulders. I can hear great distances too. A pine cone dropping branch by branch -- pwak! pwak! Or the sudden flutter of a chukar's wings. When the two senses come together, it's often stunning. Moonlit nights, standing at my window, I can see a passage of the South Fork's curled brilliance that sounds like a woman removing and collecting in her hand a long string of favored pearls.
iPods
Newsweek
Last spring it dawned on Apple CEO Steve Jobs that the heart of his hit iPod digital music player was the "shuffle." This feature allows users to mix up their entire song collections-thousands of tunes-and play them back in a jumbled order, like a private radio station. Jobs not only moved the popular shuffle option to an exalted place on the top menu of the iPod, he also used the idea as the design principle of the new low-cost iPod Shuffle. Its ad slogan celebrates the serendipity music lovers embrace when their songs are reordered by chance-"Life is random."
But just about everyone who has an iPod has wondered how random the iPod shuffle function really is. From the day I loaded up my first Pod, it was as if the little devil liked to play favorites. It had a particular fondness for Steely Dan, whose songs always seemed to pop up two or three times in the first hour of play. Other songs seemed to be exiled to a forgotten corner of the disk drive. Months after I bought "Wild Thing" from the iTunes store, I'm still waiting for my iPod to cue it up. More than a year ago, I outlined these concerns to Jobs; he dialed up an engineer who insisted that shuffle played no favorites. Since then, however, millions of new Podders have started shuffling, and the question has been discussed in newspapers, blogs and countless conversations. It's taking on Oliver Stone-like conspiracy buzz.
Apple execs profess amusement. "It's part of the magic of shuffle," says Greg Joswiak, the VP for iPod products. Still, I asked him last week to double-check with the engineers. They flatly assured him that "Random is random," and the algorithm that does the shuffling has been tested and reverified. More specifically, when an iPod does a shuffle, it reorders the songs much the way a Vegas dealer shuffles a deck of cards, then plays them back in the new order. So if you keep listening for the week or so it takes to complete the list, you will hear everything, just once. But people generally listen only to the first few dozen songs. In theory, that sample should be evenly distributed among all the artists and albums in their collections. So why do you typically get three Wilco songs in an hour while Aretha Franklin waits in the wings forever?
The question will be even more important to owners of the new tiny iPod Shuffles. These use a new feature called autofill to load the one-ounce players with a supposedly random selection of 120 or so songs from much larger collections. The first few times I tried this, I found some disturbing clusters in the songs chosen. More than once the "random" playlist included three tracks from the same album! Since there are more than 3,000 tunes in my library, this seemed to defy the odds. Or did it? I explained this phenomenon to Temple University prof John Allen Paulos, an expert in applying mathematical theory to everyday life. His conclusion: it's entirely possible that nothing at all is amiss with the shuffle function. It's quite common for random processes (like coin tosses) to get unlikely results here and there, like runs of six heads in a row. Over a very long time, it evens out, but it's hard for us to envision that. "We often interpret and impose patterns on random processes," he says, adding that this might be expected in the case of music, which evokes strong emotions. Paul Kocher, president of Cryptography Research, puts it another way: "Our brains aren't wired to understand randomness."
Life may indeed be random, and the iPod probably is, too. But we humans will always provide our own narratives and patterns to bring chaos under control. The fault, if there is any, lies not in shuffle but in ourselves. On the other hand, I'm still waiting for "Wild Thing."
posted by D @ 5:40 AM
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