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lunes, 29 de diciembre de 2008

Singapore Zoo



Cangoo Caves - South Africa



Mt. Kilimanjaro



Palestinean loss of land 1946-2000



Inside a typical Oktoberfest tent [pic]



Shutter

Here’s an idea. Take a great product with one glaringly flawed feature, put together an application that exploits the awfulness of that feature in a few brilliantly simple ways, and then sell it for a few bucks.

Something like a month ago, a $5 app called CameraBag hit the iPhone app store. I read the description, took the risk and bought it. I turns out it’s no more complicated than a few pre-built filters that will take a typically crappy photo with the iPhone’s camera (or let you choose one from your library) and make it look as if it were taken from one of a variety of classic low-quality cameras. You’ve got your Lomo, Holga, 1970’s faded and yellowing print, high-contrast B&W, infrared, and a few more (though you’ll find the first two as “Lolo” and “Helga” in the menu, for trademarks reasons naturally).

It’s basic, it’s slow (the filters take a while to render), the already-low iPhone image quality doesn’t hold up at large sizes after the filter, and it’s nothing I couldn’t do on my own in Photoshop. But I love it for being so simple, and doing such a good job at making lemonade out of the iPhone’s lemon. It turns one of the phone’s most obvious flaws into a desirable feature. Almost.

I put CameraBag to the test on my way out for lunch in Vancouver’s Chinatown last week. Here are some selected photos from the full set on Flickr.

Hassan Nasrallah: The the Head of Hezbollah

While Israeli forces continued to strike in Gaza, the man leading Hezbollah continued to back Hamas in Lebanon. Could this guy decide the fate of peace in the Middle East? Revisit this profile from Esquire's 75th anniversary issue to find out.

Most terrorist movements go one of two ways: They either fall apart after the top leaders are captured or killed, or they are successfully drawn into the political process and ultimately assimilated by the ruling political forces. Hezbollah's rise within Lebanon increasingly looks like the latter, except it is Lebanon's splintered political system that is being assimilated into Hezbollah's radical Islamic agenda rather than the other way around. Now in control of close to a dozen ministries and capable of forcing the installation of its preferred president (a feat Hezbollah pulled off this summer), this Shiite militia--backed extensively by Iran--has become Lebanon's de facto ruling party.

Forty-eight-year-old Hassan Nasrallah, Hezbollah's charismatic secretary-general since 1992, is part Yasir Arafat (he earned his stripes as a guerrilla commander fighting Israel's occupation in the 1980s) and part Ayatollah Khomeini (then spent years abroad burnishing his meager religious street cred and honing his skill for mob-igniting fiery sermons). And, oh, part Huey Long, because he has proved that he can deliver services to a desperate people that the government couldn't or wouldn't. Israel long ago decided that it can't live with him (attempting to assassinate him just like his predecessor) but eventually may come to the conclusion--along with Washington--that it can't live without him.

Nasrallah, who currently holds no public office, wants to rule Lebanon openly, but with Shiites constituting roughly a third of the population, his only route to Supreme Leadership replicates Iran's long-standing strategy of emphasizing a staunchly anti--Israeli/U. S. front. In this quest, Nasrallah has succeeded brilliantly, presiding over both Israel's embarrassing withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000 and its failed military effort to reduce Hezbollah's southern state-within-a-state in the summer of 2006, yielding a 34-day war that shell-shocked Beirut's fragile ruling coalition, not to mention the world.

With Israel staring at two unthinkable long-term scenarios (South African--style apartheid rule over a soon-to-be majority Muslim population in Palestine and a nuclear Iran), the diplomatic race may soon be on to capture Nasrallah's support for the mythical two-state solution in exchange for Western acceptance of Hezbollah's achievement of clear rule in Lebanon. In effect, banking on the notion that Nasrallah is more a power-hungry nationalist than he is Tehran's ideological puppet.

The United States helped turbocharge the Middle East's ongoing Shiite revival by clumsily creating the first modern Arab Shiite-dominated state in post-Saddam Iraq. In a "one man, one vote" world, that means learning to live with the likes--and dislikes--of Hassan Nasrallah.



SOURCE

sábado, 20 de diciembre de 2008

sábado, 6 de diciembre de 2008