Opportunity from crisis, lemonade from lemons, art from a burgled computer

Good spot by James Pomerantz in the New Yorker, all very WeiJi:

When life give you lemons, make lemonade. When someone breaks into your home and steals your computer, make a collaborative photo project. That’s what Melanie Willhide did.

Willhide dedicates “To Adrian Rodriguez, with Love” to the individual who broke into her home and stole various things. Her computer was recovered by the police, but the hard drive had been wiped clean. Willhide attempted to recover the erased data but found her digital photographs corrupted. Lemons! Rather than delete the images, Willhide considered these corrupted files a collaboration with her machine. She refined them and made additional ones inspired by the mess. Lemonade!

The series opened on 23 Feb at Von Lintel Gallery, in New York. Go and see it if you can (sneak preview below - click an image to activate the slideshow).

 

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Read this if you want to write - A Tribute to Marie Colvin

John Cassidy wrote this in The New Yorker. It's a tribute to Marie Colvin, war reporter for The Sunday Times, who died in Syria last week.

In May, 2003, I travelled around Iraq reporting on its oil industry. Before reaching Baghdad, I got in touch with Marie Colvin, who was there covering the war and its aftermath for the Sunday Times, where I worked from 1986 to 1993. She wrote back to say that she was staying at a hunt club in the neighborhood of Mansour: the temporary headquarters of Ahmad Chalabi, the controversial Iraqi exile, darling of the neocons.

I didn’t know where Mansour was, and the idea of a hunt club in the middle of Baghdad struck me as a bit bizarre. But the news that Marie was staying there didn’t shock me. If she’d said she was hiding out with Saddam Hussein and his son Uday, I wouldn’t have been overly surprised.

It turned out that the hunt club was pretty well known. Before the war, which had only been finished a few weeks, Uday, or one of his brothers, had had some sort of connection with it. When I arrived, there was nobody about except a few of Chalabi’s heavily armed guards. I told one of them that I had come to see Marie. He said she was in the garden and led me through the building and into a nicely maintained half acre, with flower beds, a patio, and a huge stone head of Saddam, which had been removed from a statue. We walked down a path to a small brick building, which looked a bit like an oversized garden shed, and knocked on the door. Marie opened it.

As I recall, it was one room with a cot in one corner and a sink in another. Along a wall, next to the window, there was a chair, a table, a laptop computer, and a bottle of Scotch. There might have been a small stove; I can’t remember. Marie said cheerfully that until she moved in, Chalabi’s guards had been using the space to interrogate former members of Saddam’s regime about the whereabouts of W.M.D. and other matters. I said I hoped they’d finished, and she said they had; nobody bothered her here.

It was like a scene from a Graham Greene novel. Marie, except for the fact she was female, was very much a Greene character: wry, nicotine stained, almost ludicrously brave. By her standards this was a cushy assignment. Since before the war had started, she’d been travelling with Chalabi’s party. The exact details escape my mind. I think they’d been in Kurdistan for a time, and then, once Saddam fell, they came down to Baghdad. How long was she staying? She said she didn’t know. She never did. But it was sure to be a while.

As were many other reporters, Marie was on the trail of the W.M.D., which never turned up, and of Saddam, who did. By staying close to Chalabi, she was hoping to get a tipoff. She was also doing other stuff. The next day she was driving out to look at a mass grave, where some of Saddam’s victims were said to be buried. She asked if I wanted to go with her. I said I had urgent business—at the oil ministry.

After a while, Chalabi returned, and we had drinks in the garden with a couple of other reporters who’d shown up. It was a bizarrely sedate scene. Apart from Chalabi’s guards patrolling the garden perimeter with their AK-47s primed, and the calls to prayer from a nearby super-mosque that Saddam had built to appease his populace, we could have been virtually anywhere.

Marie was clearly on good terms with Chalabi and his honchos. She was never a press-office reporter. In the places she operated in—the Middle East, mainly—the only way to find out what was going on was to get to know the major players and win their confidence. Some whispered that she got too close to her sources. That was just jealous gossip. Working for nearly thirty years on a weekly paper that prides itself on making news, she was a one-woman scoop machine. And many of her biggest stories had nothing to do with playing the access game. From the besieged Burj el-Barajneh refugee camp in Lebanon during the late nineteen-eighties to the embattled streets of Homs, she somehow slipped into hellholes other journalists couldn’t or wouldn’t reach and told the world what was happening there.

She had scores of stories. Not that she volunteered them unless asked. This is one she told me. Years back in Tripoli, she got exclusive access to Qaddafi, who was then in his pomp. The night before the interview, some of the Libyan leader’s security personnel awoke her in her hotel room. They ushered in some nurses, who said they wanted to examine her, presumably for signs of infectious diseases. She shooed them away. The next day she did the interview, which overran its allotted time in the usual Middle East fashion. That night, or maybe it was the next night, the security men and nurses returned. This time they wanted to take blood. Marie decided it was time to return to London.

Then there were the times she was running through fields in Chechnya being strafed by Russian warplanes, and, in Sri Lanka, getting caught up in firefights with Tamil Tigers. It was there that she lost her eye. She didn’t talk about it much, but she hadn’t really wanted to go. It wasn’t her part of the world: she didn’t know the topography, the history, or the local characters. But when the foreign editor asked her to fill in and cover the story, she went.

The last time I saw her, she was swinging through New York to see her folks out in Oyster Bay and pick up a journalism award. She won lots of them, and, even after all her years in London, she remained enough of an American to take them reasonably seriously. Despite her tough-cookie exterior, she had never succumbed to the Fleet Street disease: cynicism. As the editor of the Sunday Times, John Witherow, said in a statement yesterday, she was “driven by a passion to cover wars in the belief that what she did mattered. She believed profoundly that reporting could curtail the excesses of brutal regimes and make the international community take notice. Above all, as we saw in her powerful report last weekend, her thoughts were with the victims of violence.”

Only Tuesday, in an interview with the BBC from Homs, she described the death of a young child from shrapnel wounds. I didn’t hear the report; I had no idea she was there. But when I saw the tragic news yesterday morning, I can’t honestly say I was surprised. Part of me believed Marie had nine lives and would die in her bed of old age. But that’s just something you tell yourself about friends who repeatedly put themselves in peril. On any objective scale, Marie was living dangerously. Of course she was in Homs. Where else would she have been?

As I drove to the ice rink with my wife and kids up here in Vermont, where we are spending a few days’ vacation, I thought about the choices we all make. Marie made hers many years ago, devoting her life to being a war correspondent. Everything else—her health, her family, her personal life—came second. Naturally, she sometimes thought of doing something else, something less crazy. At our last lunch, she spoke in her throaty-voiced way about the possibility of writing a book and dialing it back—maybe getting a gig at a think tank or a journalism school. I think we both knew she’d never do it. Many moons ago, she quit reporting for a while and spent a couple of years on the Sunday Times foreign desk, rewriting copy and managing other reporters. She nearly died of boredom.

Before very long, she was back on another plane, heading into another danger zone. “In an age of 24/7 rolling news, blogs and twitters, we are on constant call wherever we are,” she said in a 2010 speech. “But war reporting is still essentially the same—someone has to go there and see what is happening. You can’t get that information without going to places where people are being shot at, and others are shooting at you.”

We all have to die sometime. Marie died doing what she loved, what made her feel most alive, what turns journalism from a job into something bigger and more noble: a mission. It’s perhaps not much of a consolation to her many friends and her family, but it’s what happened.

He-gassen - antique Japanese farting competition scroll

You've got your thick-rimmed glasses, your manga books, your expensive jeans and a couple of t-shirts made of really really nice cotton, but do you have a farting scroll?

The database for Japanese and Chinese classics at Waseda University Library has digitised a rare scroll showing a he-gassen (屁合戦), or 'farting competition' (see it here in full).

Apparently, similar drawings were used to ridicule westerners towards the end of the Edo period, with images depicting the westerners blown away by Japanese farts.

Personally, I happen to know first hand that English ones are bad enough, so I'm not sure the Japanese guffs would have worked. My friend Max's divine wind would have made short work of them.

I also once read a book about a dude who travelled the world learning weird local martial arts (pressure points, wrestling, iron jacket, all that stuff), and the weirdest of all was a guy who had deliberately developed halitosis so bad he could knock you out by burping in your face.

Nice Bon Iver live session - 25 mins worth

Continuing the slightly angsty live music theme...(really lovely stuff this) [youtube=http://youtu.be/A9Tp5fl18Ho&w=700]

4AD and Jagjaguwar have collaborated on a live session that captures a truly unique Bon Iver performance, featuring Justin Vernon and Sean Carey. On recent tours fans will have become accustomed to seeing Vernon flanked by an eleven-piece band, with the swell in numbers lending a grandiose element to even his most delicate songs. Sidestepping expectations, the idea Vernon presented for this session was to provide a wildly different experience.

Recorded in AIR Studio's Lyndurst Hall - a building that was originally a church and missionary school designed in 1880 by the great Victorian architect Alfred Waterhouse (designer of the Natural History Museum) - Vernon was joined only by Carey, with the pair positioning themselves opposite one another at two grand pianos. Although neither Justin nor Sean's first instrument is piano, they were able to remodel the songs in a way that showcases their complimentary vocals and, perhaps more strikingly, a seemingly effortless ability to experiment with form and structure.

As such, fans are treated to jaw-dropping interpretations of several songs from both the new album and the 'Blood Bank' EP, as well as a cover of Bonnie Raitt's "I Can't Make You Love Me". And interpretation is an apt word, as these songs are artfully abstracted from their original incarnations. Rather than layer the sound as on 'Bon Iver, Bon Iver', the focus is on paring back, in part evoking the minimalist approach of contemporary classical music, while remaining true enough to the source material to retain those elements characteristic of Bon Iver.

As on "Babys" and "Hinnom, TX", Vernon's trademark falsetto is positioned centre stage, framed by subtle and unexpected instrumental flourishes that render the performance simultaneously weighty and airless. It's quite an achievement that songs so widely-known and loved in their recorded form are able gain in emotional impact, and stands as testament to Bon Iver's singular talent.

1. Hinnom, TX 2. Wash. 3. I Can't Make You Love Me 4. Babys 5. Beth/Rest

Director: Iain Forsyth & Jane Pollard Recording & Mixing: Jake Jackson with Brian Joseph Recorded in London at AIR Studios, October 16, 2011

"Hinnom, TX", "Wash.", "Beth/Rest" (c) 2011 April Base Publishing (ASCAP) "Babys" (c) 2009 April Base Publishing (ASCAP) "I Cant' Make You Love Me" (c) 1991 BMG Songs, Almo Music Corp., Bird Blues Music, Hayes Street Music (ASCAP)

Attention please! ATTENTION PLEASE!

'Attention please! Attention please! Don't dare to talk! Don't dare to sneeze! Don't doze or daydream! Stay awake! Your health, your very life's at stake! Ho-ho, you say, they can't mean me. Ha-ha, we answer, wait and see.

Did any of you ever meet A child called Goldie Pinklesweet? Who on her seventh birthday went To stay with Granny down in Kent. At lunchtime on the second day Of dearest little Goldie's stay, Granny announced, 'I'm going down To do some shopping in the town.' (D'you know why Granny didn't tell The child to come along as well? She's going to the nearest inn To buy herself a double gin.)

So out she creeps. She shuts the door. And Goldie, after making sure That she is really by herself, Goes quickly to the medicine shelf, And there, her little greedy eyes See pills of every shape and size, Such fascinating colours too -- Some green, some pink, some brown, some blue. 'All right,' she says, 'let's try the brown,' She takes one pill and gulps it down. 'Yum-yum!' she cries. 'Hooray! What fun! They're chocolate-coated, every one!' She gobbles five, she gobbles ten, She stops her gobbling only when The last pill's gone. There are no more. Slowly she rises from the floor. She stops. She hiccups. Dear, oh dear, She starts to feel a trifle queer.

You see, how could young Goldie know, For nobody had told her so, That Grandmama, her old relation Suffered from frightful constipation. This meant that every night she'd give Herself a powerful laxative, And all the medicines that she'd bought Were naturally of this sort. The pink and red and blue and green Were all extremely strong and mean. But far more fierce and meaner still, Was Granny's little chocolate pill. Its blast effect was quite uncanny. It used to shake up even Granny. In point of fact she did not dare To use them more than twice a year. So can you wonder little Goldie Began to feel a wee bit moldy?

Inside her tummy, something stirred. A funny gurgling sound was heard, And then, oh dear, from deep within, The ghastly rumbling sounds begin! They rumbilate and roar and boom! They bounce and echo round the room! The floorboards shake and from the wall Some bits of paint and plaster fall. Explosions, whistles, awful bangs Were followed by the loudest clangs. (A man next door was heard to say, 'A thunderstorm is on the way.') But on and on the rumbling goes. A window cracks, a lamp-bulb blows. Young Goldie clutched herself and cried, 'There's something wrong with my inside!' This was, we very greatly fear, The understatement of the year. For wouldn't any child feel crummy, With loud explosions in her tummy?

Granny, at half past two, came in, Weaving a little from the gin, But even so she quickly saw The empty bottle on the floor. 'My precious laxatives!' she cried. 'I don't feel well,' the girl replied. Angrily Grandma shook her head. 'I'm really not surprised,' she said. 'Why can't you leave my pills alone?' With that, she grabbed the telephone And shouted, 'Listen, send us quick An ambulance! A child is sick! It's number fifty, Fontwell Road! Come fast! I think she might explode!'

We're sure you do not wish to hear About the hospital and where They did a lot of horrid things With stomach-pumps and rubber rings. Let's answer what you want to know; Did Goldie live or did she go? The doctors gathered round her bed, 'There's really not much hope,' they said. 'She's going, going, gone!' they cried. 'She's had her chips! She's dead! She's died!' 'I'm not so sure,' the child replied. And all at once she opened wide Her great big bluish eyes and sighed, And gave the anxious docs a wink, And said, 'I'll be okay, I think.'

So Goldie lived and back she went At first to Granny's place in Kent. Her father came the second day And fetched her in a Chevrolet, And drove her to their home in Dover. But Goldie's troubles were not over. You see, if someone takes enough Of any highly dangerous stuff, One will invariably find Some traces of it left behind. It pains us greatly to relate That Goldie suffered from this fate. She'd taken such a massive fill Of this unpleasant kind of pill, It got into her blood and bones, It messed up all her chromosomes, It made her constantly upset, And she could never really get The beastly stuff to go away. And so the girl was forced to stay For seven hours every day Within the everlasting gloom Of what we call The Ladies Room. And after all, the W.C. Is not the gayest place to be. So now, before it is too late. Take heed of Goldie's dreadful fate. And seriously, all jokes apart, Do promise us across your heart That you will never help yourself To medicine from the medicine shelf.'

Roald Dahl

Starvation, cannibalism and madness - The Raft of the Medusa

(best viewed large)

The Raft of the Medusa (Le Radeau de la Méduse) is an early 19th century oil by French Romantic painter Théodore Géricault (1791–1824), and an icon of French Romanticism. At a whopping 5 x 7 metres, it shows the horrifying aftermath of the wreck of the French naval frigate Méduse, which ran aground off the coast of Mauritania on July 5, 1816.

At least 147 people were set adrift on a hurriedly constructed raft; all but 15 died in the 13 days before their rescue, and those who survived endured starvation, dehydration, cannibalism and madness. The event became an international scandal, in part because its cause was widely attributed to the incompetence of the French captain perceived to be acting under the authority of the recently restored French monarchy.

In choosing the tragedy as subject matter for his first major work, Géricault consciously selected a well-known incident that would generate great public interest and help launch his career (something modern artists aren't exactly strangers to - a bit like painting the Twin Towers today). The event fascinated the young artist, and before he began work on the final painting, he undertook extensive research and produced many preparatory sketches. He interviewed two of the survivors, and constructed a detailed scale model of the raft.

His efforts took him to morgues and hospitals where he could view, first-hand, the colour and texture of the flesh of the dying and dead. As the artist had anticipated, the painting proved highly controversial at its first appearance in the 1819 Paris Salon, attracting passionate praise and condemnation in equal measure. However, it established his international reputation, and today is widely seen as seminal in the early history of the Romantic movement in French painting.

The noon posting - Gabriel Fauré, Requiem

Rack up the quality setting, crank the volume and lie on the sofa. 

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSPfp4VMkpY&w=700]

  "It has been said that my Requiem does not express the fear of death and someone has called it a lullaby of death. But it is thus that I see death: as a happy deliverance, an aspiration towards happiness above, rather than as a painful experience. The music of Gounod has been criticized for its overinclination towards human tenderness. But his nature predisposed him to feel this way: religious emotion took this form inside him. Is it not necessary to accept the artist's nature? As to my Requiem, perhaps I have also instinctively sought to escape from what is thought right and proper, after all the years of accompanying burial services on the organ! I know it all by heart. I wanted to write something different."   Notes edited from here: Fauré began sketches for the Requiem in 1887. Unlike many composers, he was not drawn to compose a Requiem because of the death of a loved one. Rather than offer visions of the terrors to come, Fauré said that he saw death "as a happy deliverance, an aspiration towards the happiness of the hereafter, rather than as a painful passing away." For this reason, Fauré's setting is remarkably subdued, omits entirely the Sequenz segment, with its visions of wrath and hellfire, and adds the Pie Jesu and In Paradisum texts, which are not part of the Requiem proper but emphasise the granting of eternal rest.

By the time of the first performance, on January 16 1888, there were five movements: an Introit and Kyrie, the Sanctus, Pie Jesu, Agnus Dei, and In Paradisum. To perform the work, Fauré called for a mixed choir with divided tenors and basses, a soprano soloist, an orchestra of low strings (violas, cellos, and double basses), harp, timpani, and organ, with a violin solo in the Sanctus. He added an Offertoire in 1889, and added a setting of the Libera Me that he had written for baritone and organ some twelve years earlier. He added horns, trumpets, and trombones to the orchestra, and a baritone soloist, and this version was first performed at the Madeleine in January of 1893.

Fauré's publisher wanted a larger-scale work, though, leading to a final revision premiered in July 1900 at the Trocadéro in Paris.

As a choirmaster and organist, Fauré constantly sought to create a new kind of church music. He wanted something different than the operatic bel canto style which was popular in Paris at the time, and different than the outsized, large-scale Germanic Romantic style which dominated the rest of Europe. Along the way, he helped to establish a distinctive French style which set the stage for the development of the Impressionist style of Debussy and Ravel.

For example, the composers of the day tended to write for progressively bigger and bigger orchestras, with thicker, more complicated textures, and phrases which stuck slavishly to the divisions of the bar line. Fauré, on the other hand, opted for smaller ensembles and spare orchestrations, omitting violins and winds in the Requiem, for instance, when he felt they were unnecessary.

Fauré also thought on a smaller, more intimate scale than many of his contemporaries. There are none of the larger-than-life, outsized statements of a Wagner or a Berlioz here; the entire Requiem has some 30 bars of fortissimo singing, and most of it doesn't rise above mezzoforte. Instead, Fauré uses subtle gradations in dynamic, color, and harmony to achieve the effects that he wants. And in the Requiem, these gradations often follow the central points of emphasis in the text.

In some ways, though, Fauré's style involves some paradox. One example is the curious relationship between freedom and control. In his piano music, his chamber compositions, his songs, and his vocal works, phrases emerge that are freed from the tyranny of the strong-weak-strong-weak four-beat bar line. For the Requiem, he draws melodic inspiration from the tunes and rhythms of Gregorian chant, which thought in similarly long phrases. But Fauré was quite explicit about how to go about achieving this freedom. He knew exactly what he wanted, and is scrupulously precise in his directions on rhythm, dynamics, and phrase length. As a result, even more than in other composers, it is essential in singing Fauré to pay strict attention to every marking in the text. Often, Fauré's effects depend on very subtle shifts in dynamics or harmony, shifts that require meticulous attention to bring off successfully.

Advice we should all heed, from Harper Lee

This, via the wonderful Letters of Note:A young fan of 'To Kill a Mockingbird' named Jeremy wrote to Harper Lee in 2006, and asked for a signed photo. He didn't get one, but instead received this lovely piece of advice from the author that is far more precious.

Transcript follows. Image courtesy of Nate D. Sanders.

Transcript

06/07/06

Dear Jeremy

I don't have a picture of myself, so please accept these few lines:

As you grow up, always tell the truth, do no harm to others, and don't think you are the most important being on earth. Rich or poor, you then can look anyone in the eye and say, "I'm probably no better than you, but I'm certainly your equal."

(Signed, 'Harper Lee')

A fascinating obit: John Fairfax, the most interesting man in the world

He crossed the Atlantic because it was there, and the Pacific because it was also there.

He made both crossings in a rowboat because it, too, was there, and because the lure of sea, spray and sinew, and the history-making chance to traverse two oceans without steam or sail, proved irresistible.

In 1969, after six months alone on the Atlantic battling storms, sharks and encroaching madness, John Fairfax, who died this month at 74, became the first lone oarsman in recorded history to traverse any ocean.

In 1972, he and his girlfriend, Sylvia Cook, sharing a boat, became the first people to row across the Pacific, a yearlong ordeal during which their craft was thought lost. (The couple survived the voyage, and so, for quite some time, did their romance.)

Both journeys were the subject of fevered coverage by the news media. They inspired two memoirs by Mr. Fairfax, “Britannia: Rowing Alone Across the Atlantic” and, with Ms. Cook, “Oars Across the Pacific,” both published in the early 1970s.

Mr. Fairfax died on Feb. 8 at his home in Henderson, Nev., near Las Vegas. The apparent cause was a heart attack, said his wife, Tiffany. A professional astrologer, she is his only immediate survivor. Ms. Cook, who became an upholsterer and spent the rest of her life quietly on dry land (though she remained a close friend of Mr. Fairfax), lives outside London.

[slideshow]

For all its bravura, Mr. Fairfax’s seafaring almost pales beside his earlier ventures. Footloose and handsome, he was a flesh-and-blood character out of Graham Greene, with more than a dash of Hemingway and Ian Fleming shaken in.

At 9, he settled a dispute with a pistol. At 13, he lit out for the Amazon jungle.

At 20, he attempted suicide-by-jaguar. Afterward he was apprenticed to a pirate. To please his mother, who did not take kindly to his being a pirate, he briefly managed a mink farm, one of the few truly dull entries on his otherwise crackling résumé, which lately included a career as a professional gambler.

Mr. Fairfax was among the last avatars of a centuries-old figure: the lone-wolf explorer, whose exploits are conceived to satisfy few but himself. His was a solitary, contemplative art that has been all but lost amid the contrived derring-do of adventure-based reality television.

The only child of an English father and a Bulgarian mother, John Fairfax was born on May 21, 1937, in Rome, where his mother had family; he scarcely knew his father, who worked in London for the BBC.

Seeking to give her son structure, his mother enrolled him at 6 in the Italian Boy Scouts. It was there, Mr. Fairfax said, that he acquired his love of nature — and his determination to bend it to his will.

On a camping trip when he was 9, John concluded a fight with another boy by filching the scoutmaster’s pistol and shooting up the campsite. No one was injured, but his scouting career was over.

His parents’ marriage dissolved soon afterward, and he moved with his mother to Buenos Aires. A bright, impassioned dreamer, he devoured tales of adventure, including an account of the voyage of Frank Samuelsen and George Harbo, Norwegians who in 1896 were the first to row across the Atlantic. John vowed that he would one day make the crossing alone.

At 13, in thrall to Tarzan, he ran away from home to live in the jungle. He survived there as a trapper with the aid of local peasants, returning to town periodically to sell the jaguar and ocelot skins he had collected.

He later studied literature and philosophy at a university in Buenos Aires and at 20, despondent over a failed love affair, resolved to kill himself by letting a jaguar attack him. When the planned confrontation ensued, however, reason prevailed — as did the gun he had with him.

In Panama, he met a pirate, applied for a job as a pirate’s apprentice and was taken on. He spent three years smuggling guns, liquor and cigarettes around the world, becoming captain of one of his boss’s boats, work that gave him superb navigational skills.

When piracy lost its luster, he gave his boss the slip and fetched up in 1960s London, at loose ends. He revived his boyhood dream of crossing the ocean and, since his pirate duties had entailed no rowing, he began to train.

He rowed daily on the Serpentine, the lake in Hyde Park. Barely more than half a mile long, it was about one eight-thousandth the width of the Atlantic, but it would do.

On Jan. 20, 1969, Mr. Fairfax pushed off from the Canary Islands, bound for Florida. His 22-foot craft, the Britannia, was the Rolls-Royce of rowboats: made of mahogany, it had been created for the voyage by the eminent English boat designer Uffa Fox. It was self-righting, self-bailing and partly covered.

Aboard were provisions (Spam, oatmeal, brandy); water; and a temperamental radio. There was no support boat and no chase plane — only Mr. Fairfax and the sea. He caught fish and sometimes boarded passing ships to cadge food, water and showers.

The long, empty days spawned a temporary madness. Desperate for female company, he talked ardently to the planet Venus.

On July 19, 1969 — Day 180 — Mr. Fairfax, tanned, tired and about 20 pounds lighter, made landfall at Hollywood, Fla. “This is bloody stupid,” he said as he came ashore. Two years later, he was at it again.

This time Ms. Cook, a secretary and competitive rower he had met in London, was aboard. Their new boat, the Britannia II, also a Fox design, was about 36 feet long, large enough for two though still little more than a toy on the Pacific.

“He’s always been a gambler,” Ms. Cook, 73, recalled by telephone on Wednesday. “He was going to the casino every night when I met him — it was craps in those days. And at the end of the day, adventures are a kind of gamble, aren’t they?”

Their crossing, from San Francisco to Hayman Island, Australia, took 361 days — from April 26, 1971, to April 22, 1972 — and was an 8,000-mile cornucopia of disaster.

“It was very, very rough, and our rudder got snapped clean off,” Ms. Cook said. “We were frequently swamped, and at night you didn’t know if the boat was the right way up or the wrong way up.”

Mr. Fairfax was bitten on the arm by a shark, and he and Ms. Cook became trapped in a cyclone, lashing themselves to the boat until it subsided. Unreachable by radio for a time, they were presumed lost.

For all that, Ms. Cook said, there were abundant pleasures. “The nights not too hot, sunny days when you could just row,” she recalled. “You just hear the clunking of the rowlocks, and you stop rowing and hear little splashings of the sea.”

Mr. Fairfax was often asked why he chose a rowboat to beard two roiling oceans. “Almost anybody with a little bit of know-how can sail,” he said in a profile on the Web site of the Ocean Rowing Society International, which adjudicates ocean rowing records. “I’m after a battle with nature, primitive and raw.”

Such battles are a young man’s game. With Ms. Cook, Mr. Fairfax went back to the Pacific in the mid-’70s to try to salvage a cache of lead ingots from a downed ship they had spied on their crossing. But the plan proved unworkable, and he never returned to sea.

In recent years, Mr. Fairfax made his living playing baccarat, the card game also favored by James Bond.

Baccarat is equal parts skill and chance. It lets the player wield consummate mastery while consigning him simultaneously to the caprices of fate.

=

By MARGALIT FOX NY Times, Published: February 18, 2012 (Well spotted Harro, tip of the hat to ye)

Astonishing colourisation brings black and white images to life. Uncanny.

A seriously impressive piece of colourisation, showing just how amazing Photoshop can be. The people behind this gallery and, I think, this site normally restore old wedding pics and so on, but here they turn their eye to iconic figures and images. It's amazing how it brings them to life. The one of the self-immolating Vietnamese monk is harrowing enough - it was already a Pullitzer prize-winning image, but the others have just as much impact in their own way. Anne Frank, for example, seems to gain personality, Abe Lincoln looks - less anachronistic. Anyway, see for yourself: Charles Darwin -

Abraham Lincoln -

Anne Frank -

Mark Twain -

Fridtjof Nansen (Norwegian explorer and total badass) -

Thich Quang Duc, protesting at Catholic repression of Buddhists.

More images can be found here.