77percent™

well a bunch of my enormous-format prints arrived today and they are supreme, i am very very happy with white house custom color and would recommend them to anyone for any digital [photographic] printing needs. they’re a small team and each print is accompanied by a card indicating which of them mounted or packaged it, speaking of which their mounting was flawless and the prints came out excellently despite my fears of lacking resolution , they do look wonderful and no flaws can be seen with the human eye at close distance let alone at distance .. their fuji PRO papers are very nice and are very comparable to mpix’s kodak e-surface [despite my natural biases favoring kodak and against fuji] nothing like the flimsy crystal archive crap that all the consumer printers use . all my nonmetallic prints were lustre sprayed and it’s very worth while, comparing with my test 8×10 prints none of which were lustre sprayed . although it’s not cheap ,especially on larger prints, i would recommend it on any print [ besides metallic of course , i doubt they would even offer it on metallic ]

in other news picked up a copy of kevin smith’s collected essays also named ’silent bob speaks’ .. now normally i’m not too keen on these sort of someone’s collected writings books , even douglas adams’s salmon of doubt [which i really wanted to enjoy and was quite looking forward to] was rather disappointing ; i’d say it wasn’t really interesting enough .. i mean naturally these kinds of things won’t be overwhelmingly exciting but sometimes they make up for it in philosophical insight /etc .
kevin smith did well in terms of interest , the many collected essays firstly tell an interesting story and some get into very interesting thoughts , through storytelling .. i’m really digging it and i’d definitely recommend you get a copy
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.. didn’t manage to finish it but i already read the end [while at kramer’s] where i think some of the more interesting bits are .. surely the book has its more dreary parts but overall i thought it well balanced and a worthwhile read
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, got it at kramer’s [on 19th at dupont circle] , i always tend to find something interesting there .. and they’re great for dinner and/or drinks .. i certainly don’t go there nearly enough .. while i was there i also noticed a great photo book on the Sahel by Sebastiao Salgado unfortunately kramer’s only had one copy and it was a little beat up but i’ve now got one in the mail from amazon [for half the price (i’m starting to feel the immediate side of a walmart effect brewing but that is for another time] one-day shipping for $4, can’t beat that [loving amazon prime] .. it’s got some really strong hitting photographs from the sub-saharan during the mid eighties over fifteen months

another thing , today at the [world] bank (my internship) i was in a meeting on reconstruction in iraq and a [very clever friend of mine] made some interesting comparisons with egypt .. also demonstrated how the iraqis were [this is post gulf war mid nineties] zealously following the strong example of ireland [a commonly used success story for ingenious economic change overnight] .. he was at the world bank compound in iraq when it was attacked [first and only direct violent attack on world bank staff] , yea it was interesting stuff ; apparently all their pilots are either russian or south african , have you ever been in an aircraft doing a spiral take off .. it’s some scary stuff when they do that , i haven’t a clue where but i seem to remember having been in one as a child (perhaps in a dream, altho it’s more than believable) .. basically the plane just keeps on going in larger circles faster until it has sufficient velocity for take off and straightens out .. it’s a maneuver that requires great skill i’d imagine and is very risky i’m sure .. in a lot of areas in conflict planes have to land and take off in a very small place and from/to great alititude , they can’t descend from safe cruising altitude until they’re well over friendly territory [the airport] and only then can they begin their landing ,, the takeoff works similarly in that as soon as they’re airborne they have to climb as fast as possible without stalling …. all this can be quite traumatic