Malletrivia

Slightly incongruous dialogue

Christina and I watched "Apocalypto" last night. I thought it was very well done overall, but there's one bit that just doesn't sit right with me. The actors in the movie speak Mayan all the way through, so everything is subtitled, and most of the dialogue is rather ... stilted, along the lines of "Our lands were ravaged. We seek a new beginning.", "People of the banner of the sun ... Kukulkan has drunk his fill", "Travel well" etc. So it was a bit jarring to suddenly have one of the lines read "He's f!cked" after one of the characters is bitten by a snake. I half expected the follow-on line to be "Dude, that totally sucks !", but they went right back to expressing sentiments like "I am Jaguar Paw. This is my forest. I have hunted it with my father, and my sons will hunt it with their sons when I am gone."

Weird. 

Christina is shooting meth ... addicts

Continuing our personal "War On Drugs", Christina was recently selected to be the photographer for the Seattle leg of a White House-sponsored anti-meth campaign running in Washington and 7 other states. She spent two days taking pictures of several recovered meth addicts and her pictures are being used for the campaign print ads. She was also asked to cover the press conference associated with the launch of the campaign, which was attended by John Walters, the national drug czar, and various other political luminaries. The posters in the background here are all her shots. [Christina, as usual, was not impressed -- her first comment about the press conference was "My new word for the day is 'blowhard', because there were lots of them"].

This is cool on several levels:
- She was selected from the oodles of photographers in Seattle
- Her pictures will be on display nationwide
- She's now been in the newspaper for 2 totally different careers; the first time was when she was a teacher and got her students to ask the Mars Corporation some pointed questions about Fair Trade
- The financial renumeration was ... generous, given the amount of work she had to do

This is all the more impressive given that she only started her photography business this year. At this rate, I expect to be able to become a trophy husband in about 2-3 years [not that I'm much of a trophy ...] and spend my time entirely on such gentlemanly pursuits as polo, yachting, and collecting 200-year old wines. 

"Bro" as an almost universally applicable prefix

... as demonstrated here.

My favorite coinage: "You are Broseidon, lord of the brocean".