May 13, 2009

• Playing Possum

  I received two emails from overseas this week telling me that my site takes too long to load because of all the photos I post, so I’ll give you a bandwidth break today.  Coincidentally, I backed up all of my personal photos to my external hard drive last night.  How many digital photographs do you think I have on my computer?  How many do you have?  Take a guess…the answer is at the end of this entry. 

  Last year the following sign was posted all around Hollywood.  The guy who posted it, said he was doing it as an art project.  He set up an answering machine to record all of the messages that people left about the “cat”, and then posted them on YouTube.  Some of them are pretty funny!

   

  This reminded me of a poem about, of all things, possums in Los Angeles by Larry Levis:

  The Oldest Living Thing in L.A.
  

  At Wilshire & Santa Monica I saw an opossum
  Trying to cross the street. It was late, the street
  Was brightly lit, the opossum would take
  A few steps forward, then back away from the breath
  Of moving traffic. People coming out of the bars
  Would approach, as if to help it somehow.
  It would lift its black lips & show them
  The reddened gums, the long rows of incisors,
  Teeth that went all the way back beyond
  The flames of Troy & Carthage, beyond sheep
  Grazing rock-strewn hills, fragments of ruins
  In the grass at San Vitale. It would back away
  Delicately & smoothly, stepping carefully
  As it always had. It could mangle someone’s hand
  In twenty seconds. Mangle it for good. It could
  Sever it completely from the wrist in forty.
  There was nothing to be done for it. Someone
  Or other probably called the LAPD, who then
  Called Animal Control, who woke a driver, who
  Then dressed in mailed gloves, the kind of thing
  Small knights once wore into battle, who gathered
  Together his pole with a noose on the end,
  A light steel net to snare it with, someone who hoped
  The thing would have vanished by the time he got there.

  “The Oldest Living Thing in L.A.” by Larry Levis, from The Selected Levis. © University of Pittsburgh Press, 2003. (Buy now)

  Remember that creepy possum blocking my driveway last year?

  

  So what did you guess how many digital photos I’ve taken??

  
  How close were you?

  
  My first digital photo ever was taken with a camera I bought in Times Square, New York City.  It was taken on May 9, 1998 and it was of Claudio in the camera store:  http://x92.xanga.com/483f3a5261c33242927453/w192423714.jpg.  That was 10 years and 4 days ago.  Which means, in 10 years, I’ve taken nearly 28,000 pictures.  That’s 2800 a year, 233 a month, 58 a week, 8 a day!

  Claudio’s Response:

  
  

  From: Claudio	Wed, May 13, 2009 at 8:52 AM
  To: Carey Anthony
  Great example of how averages can be deceiving (will use it in my math class). Nowadays you take 2800 a week (a nightmare). And either the cameras got a lot better or I continue to get younger and more photogenic as I approach 30!  :)

  • 1:55 am
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