Doug's Photography
This is a Flickr badge showing public photos from DougHumphries. Make your own badge here.
Google
Web Eight Hour Lunch


Eight Hours of Recommended Reading

(But only if you're really slow.)

Eight Hours Worth
of other Blogs

I've been to too many blogs to list them all in this column, but you can see the list here.

At Least Eight Hours Worth of Podcasts I'm Not Supposed to Like:

September 2006


IX Things I’ve Learned in Rome

Saturday, September 30, 2006
10:44PM

1. Flush the toilet with the button on the wall. You’ll find it at eye level behind the towels after swearing for about ten minutes. You’ll figure out how to make it work ten minutes after that.

2. Don’t wash your hands in that little sink next to the toilet.

3. I never knew crossing the street could be so exhilarating. Basically it works like this. No one will ever stop their car, bus, motorcycle, etc. for you. So you jump out in front of them. No, really. Wheee!!! Try it with children!

4. God hates tripods. Got one? Don’t bring it to the Vatican. I’ve run in to the same problem at Temple Square in Salt Lake City. Posers. Their reasoning is that they don’t want professional photographers in without permission.

Well, oooooookay, we’ll just ignore the fact that professional photographers have cameras with lenses so fast, they don’t need tripods. For that matter, we’ll just ignore the fact that I’m working in Italy right now as a PROFESSIONAL PHOTOGRAPHER and I’m getting pretty damn good pictures inside the Vaticanwithout my tripod, thank you very much.

5. Rum and chocolate gelato…mmm.

6. Rigatoni al la Arabianna…mmm…with the house red…mmm…finished off with a cappuccino. MMMM!!! Sweet Jeebus, I’ve never tasted red sauce like that before!

L'Archetto di Cabour. A great place for lunch, worth the walk.

By the way, I’d agree with anyone who says you need to get away from the tourist attractions to find good food and fair prices. Oh, and on the off chance you speak Italian, please forgive my spelling.

7. Furthermore, if you don’t speak Italian, the GO TO HELL you FUCKING YANKEE PIG!!! No, no, actually it’s ok. There are tons of English-speakers here, and for the most part everyone has been very kind. Where English hasn’t worked, my Spanish has come in quite handy. For example, I didn’t know the word for “check” as in “check, please.” As it turns out, “Señor, deme la cuenta, por favor,” works just fine.

On top of that, I actually had someone ask me for directions to the coliseum in Spanish yesterday. It was cool to actually understand and be able to help. I’m a little confused why they thought this cracker looked like he’d be the one to ask in Spanish, though.

8. Near the end of a long walk away from the center of town, I met a man named Manuel Alberto Roldán Roboz. He’s an attorney from Costa Rica. He thought I was a journalist because of my camera. That, and the marching communists (more on that later). We had a pretty decent chat about our trips, and he had some good advice for me:

  • “Don’t ever travel alone.” Sadly, I didn’t have the presence of mind to ask him why he was traveling alone.
  • “Be careful with your bag. And that camera. That’s a very nice camera. Are you a journalist?”
  • “Watch out for the cops here. One of them hit me on the back of the head with a nightstick. Knocked me right out.” Sounds to me like he should have looked out for the nightstick.

9. Speaking of cops, there sure were a lot of them around. Maybe this is why:

Whatever. Hammer and sickle is sooo late 1800s.
They should change it to the keyboard and mouse.

You know those wascawy communists. Try as they might, history just hasn’t shown peaceful protest to be one of their strong points. They seemed pretty upset about Iraq and Palestine. Because I’m part stupid, I just had to get a few pictures.

I think one of these guys didn't want his picture taken.

Then I got my American ass back into the center of town, where an hour later, the “parade” slowly made its way down the hill behind dozens of cops towards the coliseum. I caught the subway (that’s the ninth thing I learned)

Rome's underground. No tripods allowed here, either.
That or I was standing too close to the edge.

and rode the five miles back out of the city center to where our hotel shuttle dropped everyone off earlier. You see, knowing about the protests, he wouldn’t drop us off downtown. Being crazed for entertainment, we went anyway.

Call me crazy, but I think there are maybe one hundred Americans that will ever even know about the protest. Thirty of them read this blog. Nice work, guys. I know how it feels to go unnoticed. At least you deserve it.

See the pictures from Friday and Saturday.

Top

Excuse number When in Rome…

Thursday, September 28, 2006
5:04PM

OK, I didn't actually see any Romans taking pictures, but it's my first night here, and I couldn't help myself.

See the rest of today's pictures here.

Top

Fishing for an Answer

Sunday, September 24, 2006
6:25AM

I’m driving home from work again in heavy rush hour traffic. I’m forty-five minutes into a commute that should take ten minutes on the open road. I stop for the third time at the same light and wonder if I’ll ever get through.

This time, I notice that the car in front of me is sporting the crude, shiny outline of a fish. It’s exactly like all the others I’ve seen at least a million times before. For a moment I smile as I muse over the irony of evolution playing out on the backs of cars. It’s getting late and my thoughts turn to dinner.

My menu starts out simply enough with a Jesus fish. Now, I like seafood as much as the next guy, but you’ve got to admit—there’s something really fishy about all this trout worship. There isn’t much time to think about it, though. Faster than I can work out whether a fumé blanc or chardonnay goes better with tilapia, my would-be dinner has sprouted legs and is jumping off my plate.

Not to be outdone, a bigger, angrier Jesus fish breaks into the room. It violently attacks and begins to devour my former and short-lived pet, Darwin. I’ll miss him, but not for long. You see, nature sometimes has amusing ways of working these things out.

Before he can finish, an even bigger, hornier Darwin fish races onto the scene and mounts the Jesus fish from behind. He vigorously pumps his new “friend” with all the gleeful enthusiasm and passion of a hyperactive Chihuahua on Spanish fly. All you need is love, baby. Love is all you need. Or is it?

About this time, a huge mass of spaghetti and meatballs with eyes floats gracefully into the room and descends upon them all. He stops in front of me, extends his noodly appendage and gently touches my forehead. I’d like to think that this settles it, but I’ve been around long enough to have my doubts. In fact, I’d like to do my part to perpetuate the problem:

How long now until the zealots trash my car?

Now, I’m not much for tall tales or trusting unverified rumors, but some people believe in this guy named Moses who apparently led his enslaved people out of Egypt a few thousand years ago. He started by asking nicely for his freedom, but eventually his arguments grew to a violent onslaught of umm…(cough)…biblical proportions.

In spite of all the flash and wow of plagues and fire from the sky, it’s the opening act that intrigues me. You see, early one evening at the local pub, Moses and a buddy of his were commiserating with each other about their lousy jobs at the brick factory. After a couple (ok, several) beers the mood started to lighten somewhat. Aaron borrowed Moses’ staff to show him a magic trick he’d been practicing at home in his spare time.

You probably know the trick already. After Aaron threw the staff to the ground, Moses’ tired eyes lit up. “Dude! I think we could totally use this to get out of work tomorrow!” They laughed and slapped each other on the back as they finished another round. Next stop: Pharaoh’s house.

“Let my…(hic)…people go!” On cue, Aaron threw down Moses’ staff. Ok, actually having just come from the pub he dropped it, but he still had enough of his wits about him to sneak in his trick. After a bright flash and smoke, the staff was gone and a large snake appeared in its place.

Pharaoh let out a long sigh. The court magician groaned and rolled his eyes. In an incredible show of patience for those days, neither of them was killed on the spot. Instead, the magician, (I think his name was Penn), threw his staff to the ground to show Moses and Aaron that he too knew the oldest, lamest magic trick in Egypt. Now, what most of you don’t know is that the story actually ends here.

Or at least it should have. The Bible says that Aaron’s snake went cannibal and devoured the magician’s two snakes. What the??? Look, I’m no biblical scholar, but that last part just smacks of historical tomfoolery. I can totally see a priest in the early Catholic Church telling his kind but illiterate congregation the story right up to Aaron’s first trick. “God is magic!” he proclaims to his awestruck audience. “And you will learn to obey him unless you want him turning your stuff into snakes. AMEN.”

The priest couldn’t be happier with himself. His story is entertaining and effective. The locals are just eating it up. Attendance is up, and most importantly, so are donations. That is until some smart ass shows up and makes his own live snake from a stick in front of the entire congregation and says, “big deal.”

Seeing his livelihood threatened, the priest thinks, “Well, I have the Bible and you morons can’t read it. I’ll fix this!”

“My dear brethren and sisters, I’d like you all to know that I’ve been holding out on you. There’s more to the story (because I’m about to add it) that I have saved until a time when I thought you’d need it.”

“First, it is true that magicians can make snakes appear from sticks. After all, Pharaoh had a magician, and that’s exactly what he did! But as we read further in this chapter, we find that God’s snake ate the Pharaoh’s up.”

“Oooooooh…”

“And he gave them umm…lice! Yes, that’s it. Lice!”

“Huh?”

“And a plague of grasshoppers and frogs!”

“Well that doesn’t sound so bad…I like frogs.”

“And nasty boils and gnats and flies and hail!”

“But weren’t all of those things happening already?”

“THAT’S IT!!! Do you know what happened next? He killed all the cattle and then he made it real dark so he could sneak into the houses and kill each and every firstborn Egyptian male as they slept! That’s right—every one of them. And if you don’t shut the FUCK up, that’s exactly what’s going to happen to you!”

Only it didn’t.

The story of Moses seems such a blatant allegory of religion’s institutionalized contempt for science that I’m surprised I didn’t recognize it earlier. Looking back on history, I have yet to find a single instance in which science has lost an argument to religion. But we have plenty of examples of it happening the other way around.

For ages, different faiths have sold their mystical view of the world around us, how they thought it worked and what their god wanted us to believe about it. When they were wrong, they were very, very wrong; but when they were right, it was science. If you didn’t get executed for being right, well, that was just plain lucky.

Nowadays you don’t see a lot of people trying to turn staffs into snakes, but I’ll be damned if we haven’t done our best to recreate the plagues. Our worst plague by far is self-imposed ignorance. I’m afraid for what will happen to the world if we don’t find a way to get it in check. There are no guarantees, but I hope that history will someday show us that the person with better ideas is always the biggest fish.

Top

Shut Up and Smell the Roses

Sunday, September 17, 2006
10:30PM

Headphones at work, car stereo, people, my kid, my wife, music at home, background music at the restaurant and in the grocery store. Hell, I’m even listening to my favorite blues podcast as I write this. The noise is so constant and unrelenting, there doesn’t seem to be anywhere to hide. Am I trying to drown something out, or is this seemingly inescapable cacophony of attention-grabbers just an unintended consequence of something else?

Sometimes when I’m driving to work, I turn on the radio so habitually it’s almost like an addiction. When I turn it off, the silence builds with a pressure that feels like it might crush me. At first I struggle successfully against the urge to turn it back on. Twenty seconds later, I’m back at it again; switching madly through the commercials and lame music as if it were my last true shot at happiness in life. Am I really that afraid to be alone with my thoughts for even just thirty seconds? I turn the radio off.

It’s back on again, and this time I don’t even remember doing it. Annoyed, I hit the switch. This time I’ll force myself to leave the damn thing off until I get to work—just to see if I still can. There’s nothing I want to listen to anyhow. At first it’s uncomfortable, but I stick with it. After a while, something starts to happen.

It starts as a trickle, and then little by little the flow of my own ideas grows to a torrent. New ways of looking at things and ideas for my writing seem to be as easy to grab as food from the fridge. I need paper—a recorder, anything. I’ve got to get these ideas down before I forget!

As the cool air from the vents in my car blasts me in the face, I realize the air, like my ideas, has become stale. I can breathe, but it’s canned. There’s nothing invigorating about it. I roll down the windows and open the sunroof. It’s a little uncomfortable at first, but then the sounds and smells from outside flood the car. This is life! I think…

If it is life, I’ve been living it out in a series of moving and stationary holding cells. I’ve been serving out a voluntary sentence for no crime at all. As I move from house to car to office, it’s as though I’ve gone out of my way to avoid any direct contact with the outside world.

As I step out of the car in front of the building where I work, the full fragrant air from the flowers in the fields around me fills my lungs, and I feel, if only for a moment, like a blind person who has been given thirty seconds to experience sight. I suck in as much as I can, and pass yet again through the double doors into a world of flavorless, bland, air-conditioned comfort.

Top

So Happy Together

Saturday, September 16, 2006
12:50PM

Heidi and I have a screwy system of checks and balances. I write the checks, and she balances. Right. I know I’m not fooling anyone. She writes the checks, too.

Once in a while, my beloved Minister of Finance cedes her mighty power to me and the results are…well…predictable. To make it short, I’m happy to announce that the purple goddess of love and blues doesn’t have to play alone anymore.

Now you know why the salespeople at
Guitar Center smile when they see me.

Top

Opening a Can of Smart-Ass

Friday, September 8, 2006
10:05PM

I love mixing words. Add a letter here, a letter there…change the order around and I guarantee you, the new sentence is almost always more interesting than what you started out with. I think it might be a disorder—sort of an elective dyslexia.

You’ll see what I mean if you ever get to know me. It doesn’t matter what we’re talking about. As quickly as you can speak, my devious little mind will be looking for clever or sick (preferably sick) ways to twist your words for my own personal amusement.

My sister-in-law has discussed this with my wife on more than a single occasion. She says I’m funny, but I’m not sure she means that in any positive way. I’ll grant her that—but I’m not going to quit. It’s just too much fun.

Case in point: Just a few days ago, Heidi called to me from across the house to help her with something.

“Honey-poo?”

“Poo-honey???”

“Eeeew! Doug, that’s disgusting! GOD! Why do I keep falling for that?”

You see? Beautiful! It’s simple, easy to do and you don’t even need a picture. Hell, whatever your mind conjures up after hearing “poo-honey” has got to be worse than any image I could show you. You really should try it out.

Just be careful. Less intelligent people might not get it. In fact, they might even take it personally. Ages ago, I worked a very short stint as a car salesman in Salt Lake City. One night, I was playing around with the words of one of the other salesmen on my shift. He’d been a backhoe operator in his previous job, which meant that he wasn’t necessarily smarter than dirt; he just got to push it around all day. He was the dirt’s manager.

Up to my usual antics, he said something and I made some lame attempt at a joke in response. Before I even knew what was happening, this asshole told me that I’d better knock it off or he’d beat the living shit out of me. I thought he was kidding. So I told him that it wouldn’t be necessary, as none of my shit was alive so far as I knew. Funny how that didn’t really calm him down…

He was about forty years old and easily twice my size. From the sound of things he was more than a few sales short upstairs of his full quota. He sat up in his chair with murder in his eyes and said, “I’m serious. You wanna take this outside?”

Now, some say the pen is mightier than the sword, but have you ever tried to block a punch with a Bic Cristal? Not me. I backed down and Mr. Cro-Magnon (Dickus-Headum Asshaticus) let me keep my teeth. Somehow, I’m okay with that. It seemed like a fair trade for my pride.

Top

Reason Excuse 424 Why I Haven't Been Posting Much

Saturday, September 2, 2006
3:00PM

I’ll bet some of you are wondering why I haven’t been posting. I think this photo will help clear things up:

Ok, ok. I'll pose with the models. If I have to.

That’s right. I’ve been working.

Actually, it’s true. I spent the last week at the Ritz-Carlton on Amelia Island, Florida. I was there as the photographer for a big tech conference. It was all sixteen to eighteen hour days and a lot of hard work, but I got a lot of great shots and truly enjoyed myself.

The Ritz-Carlton at Amelia Island, Florida. Photo by me.
Some of us were just born to suffer. ;)

As far as my work on the site goes, don't despair! I've been working on chapter two of my book, and have several posts queued up. Now that I'm back home, I hope I'll be able to get them up soon.

Doug

Top

« Previous | Next »

Copyright © 2007 Doug Humphries. All Rights Reserved.