KIDS, PISS OFF AUTHORITY: DRINK COKE OR PEPSI AT SCHOOL!
Well, what's currently a bit more annoying to me besides the increasing drumbeat we're getting in the media over just how unhealthy the soft drinks we drink (and the junk food we eat) are (leading to the question of such nanny-state nincompoopery as imposing a
"fat tax" on junk foods)?
Why, that would be the number of mainstream newspaper articles using the word "pop" for carbonated soft drinks in regards to the
Canadian soft drink industry's voluntary withdrawal of Coca-Cola, Pepsi, and other carbonated soft drinks from vending machines at elementary schools. (Examples:
here and
here and
here.) Gah! I can't stand the word "pop", at least used in a soft drink context. I prefer just saying "cola" or "soft drinks" (yes, I know technically, "soft drinks" include everything from milk to orange juice, but, in common usage, it just applies to carbonated ones) and I'll take "fizz" and I'll take "soda", but I've always hated hearing people say "pop", and serious news stories that use the word "pop" read like they were written by professional journalists whom, for no particular reason (maybe a post-hypnotic suggestion from a stage hypnotist gone horribly wrong?), revert to a trailer park trash vocabulary whenever they need a word to express "soft drinks".
Anyhow, kids, if you've tried smoking and, for whatever reason, the cigarette smoke disagreed with you, the way you can almost be as cool as the smokers is to smuggle in soft drinks from home. I was sorta lucky as a kid in that, when I was at Edgewater elementary school, I was close enough to home to walk home for lunch (well, actually, it was a bit over a kilometre, so my parents drove me) except when I had activities, but, at Macdonald high school, since it was in Sainte Anne de Bellevue, around 3 kilometres away from my house in Pincourt, I had to brown bag it, or, rather, yellow bag it, since I had one of those insulated bag thingies to keep my New Coke nice and cool, though I always ate outside, even on the most cool of days. Or at the arcade. Anyhow, one advantage of banning the sale of carbonated soft drinks at school is that it forces you to bring them in from home, and, if you get your parents to buy you soft drinks in packs of 12 or 24, it's much, much cheaper than buying from a machine. Or, you could always hop over to the nearest convenience store, or, as we call them in Quebec English,
d�panneur, where they seem to be selling the plastic bottles that have almost twice the volume of cans more and more these days. Or, if you're craving cola and you have one nearby, you could go to McDonald's or one of the other fast food places and have a full lunch with a drink that's something like 800 ml.
But, kids, you have to remember one important thing about soft drinks: despite the compelling case the Vanilla Pepsi commercial with the tricked-out Pepsi truck makes, Vanilla Coke still tastes better.
(Actually, come to think of it, my elementary school didn't have any soft drink vending machines at all, and I think Mac's only vending machine was juice and milk. Damn, kids today were lucky until the soft drink vendors just now pulled out of the schools, though I think they still have the sweet, sweet nectar until the end of the year.)
COMIT� D'ACTION ANTI-GENTRIFICATION: CLUELESS
In the Montreal area, over the past couple of nights,
various non-explosive packages which sorta vaguely resemble bombs in that the packages contain wires and clocks, have been left at condominium construction sites and letters have been sent to the media claiming responsibility, with the "group" (probably just one or two people) calling themselves the "Comit� d'Action Anti-Gentrification" ("Anti-Gentrification Action Committee", though some of the local English-language media are just calling him/them the "Anti-Gentrification Committee").
For those of you whom don't read college or university newspapers on a regular basis, "gentrification" is the the term currently
en vogue with Marxist-types for, essentially, any profit-oriented non-governmental investment in the nasty areas of any given city, raising property values. Yes, this does create some legitimate concerns about those people whom can't afford their new rents which, yes, should be addressed, but I can not see investment in the poorest areas of a city as being a "bad" thing overall. Isn't that the sort of thing that should be encouranged? I do not see there being, in any given city, fewer slums and ghettoes which are absolute "no go" zones for the productive self-sufficient members of a society as being a "bad" thing. I do not see stores opening where once there were empty storefronts as being a "bad" thing. I do not see increased police patrols in the newly "gentrified" areas of a city as those affluent people with more property they want protected encourage the police to patrol their neighbourhoods as being a "bad" thing. The members of the Comit� d'Action Anti-Gentrification can decry the "yuppies" moving into an area, bringing "trendy caf�s" along with them, but complaining about "yuppies" doesn't bring in the money (well, unless you're a liberal columnist like Mike Boone).
Hey, here's an idea! Rather than decrying the opening of a hip caf� in your neighbourhood, you take the safety pins out of your eyebrows, you re-dye your hair a more natural colour, and you put on a pair of pants that isn't a worn-out pair of jeans with anarchy symbols and "Fuck Capitalism" written on it with a Sharpie and apply for a job there. Yes, providing people with services they want is so much better than coercing money from them through aggressive begging or squeegee-ing. Oh, wait, I forgot, you'd decry getting a job at places "yuppies" want to shop at because it's "capitalist exploitation". (Well, of course it's "exploitation", "exploitation" in the dictionary sense meaning just utilizing something or someone for your advantage, which isn't inherently wrong in and of itself, as long as the person your using gets some benefit out of it.)
Yeah, I listened to a bit of
Kevin Holden and Trudie Mason on CJAD today and they were talking about the Comit� d'Action Anti-Gentrification and, for the most part, I agreed with what Kevin was saying, that the guy or guys doing this are almost certainly hardline Marxists whom expect the government (re: the taxpayers) to provide everything for them, including free housing, or, at least, pay their rents for them for perpetuity with no strings attached, housing being a "right". To those people, "compassion" is creating a sub-sector of society fully dependent on government handouts, some of them even mocking self-sufficient people as being tools of the "system". Holden also compared them to the "squatters" we had in Montreal a couple of years back, publically taking over abandoned buildings in events orchestrated to make them look sympathetic to the media, though I seem to recall, in practice, the squatters made the abandoned buildings look even worse, spray-painting anti-capitalist slogans all over the walls (because, if you don't own where you live, there's no pride in upkeeping your property). And Holden decried the "us vs. them" mentality that the Comit� d'Action Anti-Gentrification is provoking, as though the rich are people separate from the rest of society, people to be villified. However, Holden called them "terrorists" of the sort they had in America in the 1970s in the form of groups like the . Yes, what this guy is or these guys are doing is a form of really low-grade terrorism, but, in this case I think calling them "terrorists" gives them exactly the sort of notoreity they want, so, instead, I think "Comit� d'Action Anti-Gentrification = ne'er-do-well", or, since they probably wouldn't understand "ne'er-do-well", maybe just a simple "Comit� d'Action Anti-Gentrification = LOSER". (I'm even tempted to say "Comit� d'Action Anti-Gentrification = DUMB-DUMB-DUMB-DUMB-DUMB", but I don't want to drive the
South Park "All About Mormons" gag too much into the ground, so I'll save that just for the Quebec public sector unions.)
For their actions, once they catch the guy or guys whom are doing this, I hope they are humiliated in a most public of way... maybe a public flogging on television just before
Star Acad�mie or whatever show is currently the most popular with the French-Canadian population. Then put them in stocks in Berri Square and have a stand selling rotten fruits nearby. That would kick ass. (That reminds me, also, when they're in the stocks, have a backwards-facing sign above them saying "Please kick our asses. Place foot here." Well, saying that in French, with it written in English in half-sized lettering.)
Also, don't some leftists, mainly of the David Suzuki variety, WANT people to move back to cities because they hate excessive use of automobiles and/or suburban sprawl? (Not that I'm implying Suzuki has "anti-gentrification" views... I really don't know one way or the other his opinions on that issue, if he has any. He's just anti-suburbs and anti-car.) So the affluent people should move back to the cities from the suburbs but shouldn't have nice places to live and shouldn't have stores they want to shop at in these neighbourhoods? I certainly can't say I agree with Suzuki's reasoning, but I don't see some affluent people moving back to the cities they had once abandoned as being a "bad" thing. The experiment of Chicago's
North Town Village is something which should be looked at closely to see if it's a viable model to use. If the anti-gentrification activists had their way and property values never rised, the sum results would be closer to the inner cities that are black holes like Detroit as seen in
8 Mile.
"MISERABLE FAILURE" UPDATE
Hmm, another counter-googlebomb to the attempt to tarnish the
great president George W. Bush (well, he's the "I'm Feeling Lucky" hit for "
great president" currently) as a
miserable failure is working. The last time I checked, the number 2 "
miserable failure" was Michael Moore, but, now the second place "
miserable failure" is Jimmy Carter, though with the grain of salt that the page conservative bloggers are linking to for Carter is the page for him on the official White House site, which also has the page the Bush-bashers link to for "
miserable failure", so Michael Moore might still have more "
miserable failure" votes than Jimmy Carter has, but Carter gets a "
miserable failure" position one notch higher because Google puts pages on the same site together.
The anti-Hillary Clinton blog
Miserable Failure ranks higher than any attempts to link "
miserable failure" to Hillary's senate site, though that may be because the title of their site is "
Miserable Failure" and Google takes titles into account in their rankings.
Meanwhile, attempts to link Howard Dean to "
miserable failure" haven't been as successful, with more people trying to link him with "
unelectable" or "
[the] new McGovern" (or "
[the] new George McGovern").
Has anyone tried starting one linking Al Franken to "
lying liar"?
SUPER GALS! REVIEW
Ah, now it's official, the anime site to which I submitted my
Super GALS! (a.k.a.
Super GALS! Ran Kotobuki, the anime based on the shoujo manga
GALS! by Mihona Fuuji) review won't post it. I won't mention which site it was since there is absolutely no sour grapes involved here. They thought the review was a bit too long and sarcastic... I thought it was affectionate sarcasm, very much like the reviews Matt Caracappa writes for
X-Entertainment, being such a huge fan of his writing style, and I can't be breathlessly enthusiastic, even for things I like, but it wasn't the style (or length) of review they wanted, and that's fine. I just won't submit reviews like the one I wrote to them again, though I'm intending to write a review of a certain famous anime movie I've been meaning to write a review of for a while**, and I'll submit it to them since I know it's a film I can review without being sarcastic.
Still, I think it was miles better than most of the old reviews I wrote for
Anime on DVD, which I stuffed to the brim with irrelevent in-jokes and even a couple of Harry Knowles-ish personal anecdotes no one wanted to read, since I didn't have a blog back then (well, from the perspective of about five years later, I can say that there wasn't really much you can say about each individual volume of
Tenchi in Tokyo***, each volume being more-or-less identical in quality only with different episodes).
So, since now I can do with the review what I want, I've
posted it over in my Rotten Tomatoes Journal instead of posting it here so that those of you whom don't care about Japanese anime, especially cartoons meant for junior high school aged girls (and younger), don't have to scroll down through a dozen paragraphs or so of irrelevant bullshit you're not interested in.
**Hint: I submitted a much shorter review of this very same anime film to
The Concordian in the autumn of 1998, just after this film was released in North America on VHS, but they didn't print it, the entertainment editor at the time being someone whom would print little else from reviews of local bands.
***As for
Tenchi in Tokyo, no, it wasn't nearly as good as either the original two
Tenchi Muyo OVA series, or the
Tenchi Universe TV series (which I like best, but I like Kiyone), but it was an interesting alternate-alternate-continuity failure, with the addition of Tenchi's seemingly normal love interest Sakuya (whom, since, of course, it's impossible for normal Earth girls to fall in love with Tenchi, turned out to be just one facet of the seemingly malevolent alien Yugi's personality, the good side... hey, the ending's been out on video in North America for over four years, so it's well past the "spoiler warning sell-by date") and a plot structure for most episodes which was ironically much closer to that used in actual episodes of
Sailor Moon, down to Yugi's stylish henchmen creating monsters-of-the-week out of ordinary objects and subplots about crystals, than the plot structure of a typical episode of the
Tenchi Muyo spin-off series
Pretty Sammy/Magical Project S, which was meant to be a spoof of "magical girl" shows like
Sailor Moon.
WE'VE GOT THE COLGATE PUMP!
For those of you that don't know me that well, I think the best damn commercial in the history of the world (well, at least out of the sort of commercials that they'd show during
Transformers and
G.I. Joe and Jem and the Holograms on WVNY-22, the ABC affiliate out of Burlington VT, during the mid-80s) is the Colgate Pump commercial, for Colgate gel toothpaste in the faddish pump containers that were popular during the mid-80s, before they introduced the plastic toothpaste tubes that were much easier to squeeze than the old aluminium (or were they tin?) tubes. (I have previously talked about the commercial
here and
here.) It featured kids whom might have been the Mini-Pops skulking around in stereotypical spy trenchcoats, hats and dark glasses and one girl dressed as Uncle Sam (for no apparent readon) singing a song about the Colgate Pump to the tune of Maddness's "Baggy Trousers".
To see it, go to
this page, and it's the third commercial down, or the second commercial below the giant ad (well, a differeny type of ad).
To refresh your memory, here are the lyrics you hear in the version of the commercial which I saw and which is featured on the UGO site.
Wake up all you sleepyheads,
Colgate gets you out of bed!
Now there's the Colgate Pump!
We've got the Colgate Pump!
It's a neat new trick, you know.
Pump it on your brush and GO!
They've got the Colgate Pump!
She's got the Colgate Pump!
Even mums and dads agree,
what makes it good is M.F.P.! (Maximum Fluoride Protection)
Just a squirt (?) of minty gel,
protects your teeth...
(American girl) "...as you can tell!"
We've got the Colgate Pump!
We love the Colgate Pump! X2
Hmm... so, anyhow, the reason I bring it up today is that I noticed on my Sitemeter that someone had come here looking for the "Baggy Trousers" Colgate Pump commercial, and, just for fun, I clicked on the referrer link to see what else Google can find about that now, and I found
this message from November 1999 on something called the Press Gang mailing list, and it has the lyrics to the "Baggy Trousers" Colgate Pump commercial, except, and this is the weird part, they're completely different to the lyrics I know and love.
Morning Time and we're awake
Brush our teeth with new Colgate
Colgate blue minty gel
Colgate blue minty gel
It's a brilliant new toothpaste
Like the colour - Love the taste
I've got blue minty gel
Mum and Dad use it as well
Oh what fun we have
[frustratingly I can't remember this line]
Brushing twice a day
is good for teeth as we all know
Oh what fun we have
It's all colgate we can tell
Who'd believe such fun
Was doing lots of good as-well
Actually, that's a lot closer to the
actual lyrics of "Baggy Trousers". Even without knowing any of the specifics, I'm willing to bet that those are the lyrics from the British version of the commercial, and the American version re-jigged the lyrics to include the phrase "MFP", for "Maximum Fluoride Protection", which is, or at least was when I was a kid, Colgate toothpaste's motto on American commercials.
So, now I have a new mission in life... to track down a video file of the Colgate Pump commercial with the alternate lyrics (or, probably, the original lyrics with the version I know being the alternate version).
WEIRD SEARCH REQUESTS
"cinema mumia wallpaper"
What? I know a couple of documentaries were made about the "radical chic"'s favourite guilty cop-killer,
Mumia Abu-Jamal, but, while I remember something about a re-enactment with actual actors being shot ("being shot" in the film sense, I mean) at the corner of 13th and Locust in Philadelphia mentioned on Maureen Faulkner's site a couple of years back (before the
Arnold Beverly hoax, I think), no actual film seems to have come out of that, unless it was only released outside of North America (probably in France, because, just like Germans love David Hasselhoff, the French love Mumia).
So, anyhow, I followed the link to a Brazilian search page, and, as it turns out, what the guy was probably looking for was just "wallpaper", in the
Windows sense, of
The Mummy, the 1999 remake directed by Steven Sommers starring Brendan Fraser and Arnold Vosloo, which is known as "A M�mia" in Portuguese, apparently. While there's plenty wrong with lionizing Mumia, there ain't nothing wrong with liking
The Mummy and
The Mummy Returns, both of which I have on DVD. (Yeah, I know I'm one of the minority of people that liked the sequel, even if you know Ebert's problem with the errors in London geography with the Houses of Parliament and Tower Bridge and Saint Paul's Cathedral being visible in the same shot, not to mention his problem with the error of the shadows. I liked the car chase with the double decker bus with early HMV ads visible inside the bus.)
"THE 95 THESES AGAINST FANDUMB" (and a few "Theses" of my own)
Hmm... I've gotten a inordinate amount of hits from various LiveJournal.com pages over the past hour, so I was worried that someone at LJ was falsely listing this blog as a personal homepage, but, it turns out, nope, someone named
Amanda "Incisivis" Wells just linked to me in a short post entitled
Funny Rants Aganst the Pretensious[ness] of Anime because of the
rant I wrote the other week against all of the gross overgeneralizations about and cheap shots against western cartoons in AnimeNation's
"Parents' Guide to Anime". She also links to the now defunct
Team Sexy Madam[e]'s "95 Theses Against Anime Fandumb" but she says my rant's better. Thanks, but I disagree, it was the sort of thing I write at 2 a.m. and is far from the closest thing to the definitive reference for the ways sensible anime fans should behave themselves without looking foolish.
I don't have any major issues with any of the
"95 Theses Against Fandumb", except for, maybe,
"85. Don't give away spoiler details of shows unless you've made sure the person to whom you are speaking doesn't mind.". For recent anime, yes, but, once something has been out a while and 99% of the people whom care would already know and a spoiler becomes "public knowledge", especially with the most popular series, I wouldn't lose any sleep over mentioning in a sentence that Sailor Moon is the Moon Princess Serenity or that Tenchi is the Crown Prince of Jurai or even the ending of
Cowboy Bebop. Also, I think that, if the list is just limited to 95 items, far too much space is given to convention-related items of little interest to those of us whom aren't too interested in going to anime conventions. But, even without the con-related theses, it's several dozen sound theses. The only major problem is that the page isn't still around and we all have to link to a cached page on
The Internet Archive Wayback Machine. I wish we could submit more. Here are a few I'd add.
-Taking note of a similarity between something in an anime and something similar in a Hollywood production is fine. However, there is a huge difference between merely noting a similarity and claiming that the Hollywood production is a rip-off. Unless you have airtight evidence and a good command of the important preceding works, anime or not, in any given genre, sci-fi, fantasy, or whatever, or important historical events, figures, legends, customs, religious mythology, or scientific theories, which may have influenced both productions, your rip-off claims will usually make you look stupid. Even when you can spot irrefutable anime influences, like the watermelon shot in Ghost in the Shell which inspired a similar shot in The Matrix, these are usually intended as homages or in-jokes.
-And never jump to conclusions on influences based on merely seeing a trailer. Wait until the movie is released or the TV show has aired a few episodes before going public with your outlandish rip-off conspiracy theory. For example, yes, Melfina in Outlaw Star and River in Firefly both emerged from metal containers (one a suitcase, the other a stasis pod) naked and in a fetal position. However, it's a sci-fi clich� that one strips down before entering stasis, and, sometimes, people lie flat in stasis pods but, other times, people lie in fetal positions. Outlaw Star didn't invent that. And Melfina, the emotional android whom acts like a naive young girl, and River, the emotionally disturbed, near-mute psychic girl, are two entirely different characters, so, even if the one Firefly shot was meant as a nod to Outlaw Star and wasn't just coincidental, the two shows aren't at all similar besides both having been influenced by 50s "pulp" science fiction from authors like E.E. "Doc" Smith.
-Generally, the more obscure the anime is, the more likely that any similarities you find between that and an American production are just coincidental, or based on the writers of both productions being influenced by the same things. This is why it is far, far more probable that the similar shots to Studio Ghibli/Hayao Miyazaki's Laputa and Princess Mononoke found in Disney's Atlantis: the Lost Empire were indeed homages than it is that Studio Gainax/Hideaki Anno's Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water, which was available pretty much import-only in 1997, when Atlantis was written and is still not nearly as well-known as the same studio's Neon Genesis Evangelion, was an influence in any way on Atlantis. And don't get me started on the ridiculoud one about Time Bokan, a really obscure 1970s series.
-If Ghibli wasn't satisfied with the job Disney was doing releasing its films, they would have pulled out of the agreement a long time ago.
-Anime on American TV, especially on children's TV, is usually more edited than in most other countries simply because the media watchdog groups, religious or secular, that organize boycotts of advertisers are more active in America than in most other countries, and the children's television syndicators like 4Kids and DiC and FUNimation and Nelvana and Cloverway have full a priori knowledge as to what sort of thing ticks these groups off and they edit their shows accordingly. You don't have to like their objections, but, in the real world, you'll never get them to change their opinions and they're a much bigger group than the anime purist niche, so you have to learn to live and let live sooner or later.
-Also, some Japanese cartoons, like Sailor Moon, are just as edited for content in countries like France as they are in North America.
-For kiddy merchandising spin-off franchise anime like Yu-Gi-Oh, the Japanese licensors care a lot more about getting access to the wider American children's television market, the most lucrative children's television market on Earth, than they do keeping the show "intact" for the tiny anime purist niche in North America, so editing for content is a fact of life, and, often, the licensors are proactive with the editing, like Toei withdrawing certain episodes and one entire season in the case of Sailor Moon in order to protect Sailor Moon's "family-friendly" image in North America. At best, you can agitate for alternate, subtitled, uncut releases of your favourite kiddy anime, but, there often isn't enough demand for one to justify the cost of putting one out, and, if a series is still at the height of its popularity on North American television, they might not want to put one out lest some concerned parent find out things about the intact Japanese version.
-No one elected you to be the self-appointed guardians of "teh artistic integrity". The Japanese licensors themselves don't usually care about the artistic integrity of their products, at least not the people whom make the important decisions, and, if they disapproved of what 4Kids or the others were doing, they wouldn't do business with 4Kids.
-And, sorry, Pok�mon and Yu-Gi-Oh do NOT have the same degree of artistic integrity as, say, Millenium Actress does, and it's normal that the pragmatic anime fans whom know not to pick battles they can't possibly win not to be at all concerned with the fate of those shows on the North American airwaves. Being opposed to any and all cuts on "principle", even for the most blatantly commercial of kiddy anime, sounds like a nice idea on paper but won't get you anywhere in the real world.
ODDS N' ENDS
-Yeah, I was intending to post regulary during the holidays, but, you know, "stuff"... oh well. I hope everyone had a merry Christmas, Hanukkhah and/or miscelaneous winter solstice-related holiday and a Happy New Year, but, to be honest, I feel insincere expressing such things to people at random, so that's why I never wished that before. I'll get back to posting regularly this coming week.
-I got several DVDs including
Finding Nemo,
Pirates of the Caribbean, the second
Magical Project S two-disk set, Daft Punk and Leiji Matsumoto's animated musical
Interstella 5555 and the second season box set of
King of the Hill. Also Nick got me the anime
Read or Die based on my Amazon.com Wish List, which was thoughtful but I had it already, so he had to take it back. Damn, I should update my Amazon Wish List more frequently. I also got a clock-radio/CD player, a few books, some winter clothing and pajamas, a gift certificate to L'Equipeur (Mark's Work Wearhouse in the province of Quebec) and a subscription to
National Geographic. Not bad...
-Look, it's fine if you're a teenager or older and like it (I like
Sailor Moon after all, and I'm 29), but, sorry,
Yu-Gi-Oh is a kid's show, pure and simple, perhaps with a few elements *not* considered inappropriate for children's television in Japan which would be taboo for kiddy TV on North American shows, but, still, as it's aired in Japan on a children's television timeslot, it's a children's show. Check this
"Ask John" column for the straight scoop from John Oppliger himself. Now, please stop spamming the
Anime News Network forum.
-Remeber
the kitten we found in October? Nick took her back to Toronto with him in October, and left her in the care of his roomate when he came back for Christmas. On Friday, he went back to Toronto, and was rather astonished to find about something that happened to the cat. Her testicles dropped. It was a "he" all along. And I was the first one to say he was a female... well, look, I couldn't see a penis, so it was difficult to tell.
-Yeah, Friday, January 2nd, was officially, keeping in mind that my birthday was October 2nd, 1974, the day it became clear to me that I wouldn't be a father until my thirties. Damn, that's depressing. Damn, the fact that my 30th birthday is less than 9 months away is also depressing. Not that I'm remotely ready to be a father, but, still.
-Yeah, I did get a cheap, dorky thrill out of recognizing Berri-UQAM M�tro (subway) station in Friday's installment of
SomethingAwful.com's "Photoshop Phriday" about "Amusement Park Madness", with a roller coaster pulling in. I deserve a medal for recognizing a station hundreds of thousands of people pass through a day. Where's my medal!?
-Finally, the pro-Bush, counter Google bomb for
"Great President" which was circulated around various blogs was hardly a
"miserable failure". Go to Google, put
"great president" into the search bar and press "I'm feeling lucky!" Funny on how the media hasn't reported on this Google bomb nearly as much.
TESTING...
Ahh... don't you just love photobooth pictures? Well, really, I just wanted to test out my new
Photobucket account, for when I want to add graphics directly to this blog. I'll mainly use it for non-personal stuff and I'll keep the Fotopages blog for my own photos.
