Fazal Majid's low-intensity blog

Prints are still the most common way of viewing and sharing photos. Framing is certainly an option, but there is only so much wall space. Photo albums and portfolios are the most practical way to display prints to their best advantage.

Avoid the cheesy slip-in white plastic sleeve kind sold in supermarkets, get albums with thick paper pages where you can stick your prints with photo tape and optionally photo corners (available at most art supply stores). The better albums also have thin translucent buffer sheets to protect the prints. Make sure all the supplies you use (including the photo tape and corners) are archival (at the very least, acid and lignin-free, using archival polypropylene or polyethylene, not PVC or polymers with excess plasticizers from their manufacture, which can attack the prints).

Here are some good suppliers of presentation albums:

• Pina Zangaro, a San Francisco-based company, makes elegant designer portfolios and display cases, with a predilection for brushed aluminum.

• Kozo Arts, also based in San Francisco, makes exquisite hand-bound photo albums with silk covers, very popular for wedding albums.

• Kolo makes expandable archival photo albums in handsome linen and leather covers, and are widely available in arts supply stores. Kozo Arts albums are not much more expensive, however and preferable in my opinion.

• Prat and Panodia are two French brands of photo presentation and archival supplies, commonly used by professionals for their “books”.

Update (2003-01-27):

Unfortunately, I can’t recommend Pina Zangaro’s “BEX” line of slipcovered presentation portfolios. I had two, and they came apart unglued in my admittedly very humid apartment. What’s worse, one was placed in a bookshelf and acted as a kind of fungus magnet. Apparently, the cloth used for the binding is very hygroscopic (absorbs and retains humidity), and something in the glue is very nourishing for molds and fungus.

Hypothetically, what would you say if you learned Bavaria proudly flew the nazi swastika over its capitol? And if they asserted the nazis were misunderstood, that World War II was fought for European unification, not racial supremacy and genocide?

Your reaction would be outrage, obviously.

Nazi flags do not fly over Munich because, after the war, Germans had to confront the sheer horror of what they had done and atone for it (unlike many Austrians who eluded this soul-searching with the convenient fiction that nazism was imposed militarily by Germany onto Austria). And the Germans do not fly nazi flags in their World War II military cemetaries either.

To this day the state flags of Mississippi and Georgia contain the “southern cross”, the battle flag of the Confederacy. And that flag still flies in a place of honor in the South Carolina capitol. Southern revisionists try and claim the Confederacy was about states’ rights, and that the Union was less than pure in its motives.

While it is certain the Union was less than ideal (the abolition of slavery was belated, and driven more by foreign policy than moral considerations), it is also equally clear the Confederacy’s motives were unambiguously evil. Unfortunately, the short-lived Reconstruction never forced the southerners to confront the true nature of slavery, which is why neo-confederates can deny slavery had anything to do with their cherished Confederacy, the same way too many Austrians unapologetically vote for Jörg Haider.

I upgraded my iMac G4 (flat panel, with SuperDrive) today. I prefer doing a full reinstall of any major OS upgrade rather than an upgrade install (because I am afraid there might be leftovers of the old OS that can trip me up later), and I did so.

The install procedure worked smoothly, but it did not install iDVD. An upgrader for iDVD is available for download from Apple’s website, but it requires the presence of iDVD 2.0, which can only be ordered from Apple for $19.95, not downloaded. And of course the iDVD 2.0 disc is not included in the disc set provided by Apple with the iMac G4 (at least, the one I got; I ordered my iMac the very day it was announced, perhaps people who got it with Mac OS X 10.1 were more lucky). Grrr…

I found a workaround, which is as follows: copy the disk image files iMac HD Disc 1.dmg, iMac HD Disc 2.dmgpart through iMac HD Disc 6.dmgpart onto your hard drive from the system restore CDs. then double-click on the first one, which will be mounted. You can then drill down to the Applications folder then drag-and-drop the iDVD folder into the Applications folder on your startup disk. After that, apply the iDVD 2.1 updater you downloaded from Apple’s website.

I haven’t tried burning a DVD yet, but the program seems to work.

Recently, campaign billboards have been flowering here about the issue of homelessness. A look at the website www.wewantchange.com shows it is run by a Hotel industry group, and leans heavily towards harsh Giuliani-style enforcement. One statistic is arresting, however: 100 homeless people died in San Francisco last year, compared to 6 in Chicago. San Francisco’s weather is mild all year round, quite unlike Chicago’s freezing winters and stifling summers, and you would expect the opposite.

San Francisco has famously dysfunctional local politics. Thirteen years after the Loma Prieta earthquake, politicians were still squabbling about how to ensure the seismic safety of the Bay Bridge.

In this case, the posturing and special-interest pandering of the Mayor and Supervisors is leading to avoidable loss of life.

National Geographic aired a special today on Fox, mixing interesting prerecorded footage on how the logistics of building the pyramids were handled (by skilled workers augmented by seasonal labor, well fed and treated, not slaves). What mars this show are the two “live” publicity stunts, opening a 4500-year sarcophagus and drilling a hole through an obstruction in a narrow shaft leading from the Queen’s Chamber.

I had a feeling of déjà vu: I remember seeing a documentary on TV about a German engineer who designed a robot, “Upuaut” to explore that same shaft. I only caught the National Geographic special halfway through, but there did not seem to be any credit given to the truly original work done by the Upuaut project. There are other unpleasant aspects to this show, such as the frequent name-dropping with the two featured archeologists, and the on-screen histrionics of one of them, an Egyptian who is also his government’s chief official archeologist (not to mention the conflicts of interest between his official position and the one he holds with National Geographic).

Even the presenter’s pompous final words rankle: “We still stand on sacred ground, home to the world’s first great civilization”, as if that distinction did not in fact belong to Uruk and Susa, in ancient Sumer and Elam in Mesopotamia (modern-day Irak and Iran).

A quick search on Google found an interesting page on this subject. All in all, this is a rather unpleasant spectacle of self-aggrandizement and boosterism, and I am rather disappointed by National Geographic’s unseemly behavior.

I do not agree with most of the latter website’s flights of fancy. Napoléon Bonaparte started Egyptomania with his 1798 expedition to Egypt, and ever since, all sorts of pseudo-mystical fantasies have grown around the supposed cosmic significance of the pyramids. Indeed, one can read Martin Gardner’s excellent book Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science to see how Jehovah’s Witnesses were originally an apocalyptic sect who thought the shape of the great pyramid’s main shaft predicted history and the coming end of the world. When the apocalypse failed to occur, twice, they moved on to slightly more mainstream beliefs…

On a lighter tone:

• A hilarious cartoon on User-Friendly.
• Terry Pratchett’s Pyramids, set in the Discworld but with thinly veiled references to Egypt.
• P.J. O’Rourke’s great article on Egypt in The Atlantic