Thomas Locke Hobbs
| Currently: Buenos Aires |
 |
| Luc took this picture of me with his camera as we drove up Highway 46 ascending away from the coast towards Paso Robles. I was a little annoyed at the flash going off while I drove so I had this scowl on my face. Still I liked the flash balanced against the setting sun in the background |
 |
| Luc is visiting from Paris. On Monday we drove down to Big Sur and back.
YouTube: Puppy or Chicken? I can't get enough of cute puppy shit [stuff, not literal shit]. |
 |
| Sparing adolescent male elephant seals on Piedras Blancas beach near San Simeon [see also Feb 24, 2006]
Why South Africa Looks like Northern Virginia, Daniel Gross in Slate, "Throughout the 1990s, businesses pulled up stakes from Johannesburg's old City Center and moved north to spanking-new, low-slung, brick-and-glass office buildings—ringed by high fences and security gates." |
 |
| Bixby Bridge, Big Sur |
 |
| *Julia Pfeiffer Burns State Park |
 |
| The sea at Point Lobos.
Random Link: Why Full-Frame DSLR's suck [they cost too much and you're better off getting an XTi and some nice lenses] |
 |
 |
| Way back in May I went wine tasting up in Napa and, thanks to a friend who works at winery, was able to try some mighty fine wines. A bottle that costs $150 really does taste better. I'm posting these now because I've run out of pictures and I feel like I need to post something and these were lying around.
William Langewiesche on Haditha [Vanity Fair, 12 pages]. Langewiesche, my favorite magazine writer, explores the events that led up to the incident at Haditha in which 24 Iraqi civilians were killed. The piece delves into the soldiers point of view during war with all the boredom and stresses and provides a context for understanding what happened. He goes into some gruesome details but in the service of explaining the incident. It's a long read but fantastic. Accompanying the article is this amazing series of portraits of Kilo Company, the group of marines involved in the incident. They were taken by photojournalist Lucian Read two months before the incident. Read was embedded with the unit as part of his project of following a single group of marines from deployment, into combat, their return home and, in many cases their subsequent redeployment to Iraq. Read's website shows many of his photos and I also came across this excellent 10 minute video interview with him talking about his project. Read obviously has a comradarie with the troops so it is ironic that his photos of the dead Iraqi civilians were what helped spur the outrage that lead several of the troops to be charged with crimes. |
 |
| A few weeks ago all the cool bloggers were linking to Flickr MiniCards by this British printing company called Moo. You pick images from your Flickr account to be printed on the cards. It's $20 for 100 cards. I figured I'd be trendy and order myself a box. The images don't have the resolution I was hoping for, although the card stock and packaging is nice. The cards are long and narrow. It's an odd aspect ratio that calls for some serious croppng. You can see the images I used on my flickr account. |
 |
| Me at La Costeña Burritos in Mountain View.
Miranda is this technopop group from Argentina that got very popular all over Latin America this year and last. I first heard their stuff on Super Estrella, the latino pop radio station in LA and loved them immediately [I miss that station]. Here are their videos on YouTube of their two big hits, Don and Yo Te Dire. |
 |
| Um Veado
That's Portuguese for deer. It's also slang in Brazil for gay. I go hiking at lot at this county park nearby where the deer are tame and everywhere. I was joking with some friends of mine in Brazil that I think of them whenever I see these deer [Vocês sabem quem são]. YouTube I've been surfing the long tail of videos on YouTube. I'm totally lame for not embedding these vidoes and making you click thru to their site: Todos Me Miran. Gloria Trevi's big comeback hit. As my friend Jesse says, finally an anthem for the tragic drag queen in us all! Ni Una Sola Palabra, Paulina Rubio. Only slightly less gay than Gloria Trevi, the single from her new album. Check out her gold cape. Diva Superstar! Influencia, Charly Garcia. The god of Argentine rock. He's got this whole Keith Richards, leathery rockstar, should-be-dead onda about him. This is from 2002, 30 years earlier and you get... Cancion Para Mi Muerte, Sui Generis. Filmed at the BARock festival in 1972. Charly Garcia is the young, nerdy piano player barely seen. This song, along with most of Sui Generis' stuff is the kind of stuff Argentinos will sing around a camp fire. It's very hippie-ish and melancholy. It's superfamous altho not everyone likes it. My friend Julian once said it was musica para cortarse las veinas [music to slit your wrists by]. Thanks to pirated MP3 CDs I have every single album by Charly Garcia and his related groups. I rank him with Brian Wilson and Paul McCartney as one of the greatest writers of melody in pop music ever. Cuando Pase el Temblor, Soda Stereo. They've got the new wave look down. This song and Soda Stereo was big not just in Argentina but all over Latin America. They're much better known than Charly. It's Time to Disco from Kal Ho Naa Ho. A Bollywood music sequence that my friend Jeff sent me. Just because. |
Back to Suburban Ennui
 |
| A new construction. The carpenter shouted out, asking if he should smile. |
 |
| Another lackadaisical attempt at landscaping.
Buenos Aires: LIne of Sight on Edificio Otto Wulf, my second favorite building in Bs.As. and former home of the Austro-Hungarian Empire's embassy. My favorite building is Edificio Kavanagh. |
 |
| Jed in SF
MIchael Lewis columns on Bloomberg New Fuji Camera has fewer megapixels so as to improve picture quality. Read more. [Better color range and contrast] Weird Al; White & Nerdy. YouTube. Parody of Chamillion's "Ridin' Dirty". |
 |
| Blue Angels in San Francisco. OK, so it's a bombastic marketing tool for military recruitment but, damn, those planes are loud and they fly close. |
 |
 |
| The loudest cheers at the air show were for the migrating birds. |
 |
 |
| Painted mailboxes in Los Altos. See also, painted trash can (in Brazil).
Interesting discussion on the phenomenon of "ghetto lattes" at Starbucks. |
 |
| Banana slug
How can two airplanes collide in empty airspace over the Amazon? Too much precision. Brilliant. The Vice President of Bolivia is a "bachelor". This fact is slyly inserted in the 3rd to last paragraph of this profile of Alvaro Garcia Linera in Saturday's New York Times. Does anyone use the word "bachelor" anymore? It seems so 1950s Rock Hudson. I assume it's a coded reference to rumors of Garcia Linera being gay. Go google it yourself. It's 2006. Can't a Times profile address the issue directly rather than use coded language and antiquated code at that? They also call him "urbane". Another nail in the poofter coffin. |
 |
| Purisima Redwoods Open Space Preserve, just south of Half Moon Bay. The area is a second growth forest, having been logged about 120 years ago. You can see in the photo that all the trunks are about the same size and narrow. Still, it's my favorite OSP [that's open space preserve] on the peninsula.
Blogger Bluejake's Rouen: Manhattan & Ash in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, in May and then October. My favorite new blog: Quaffability (via Sean Timberlake, no relation). Their tag: Mostly Wine, mostly under $12, mostly from Trader Joe's. I love the web. I fucking love it. |
 |
| Fried yummy-ness at Barbara's Fishtrap in Half Moon Bay. My thanks to Bryan for pointing this place out to me. |
 |
 |
| Exactly a week ago I saw the Giants beat Arizona in a fast and dramatic game in SF. Behind most of the game the Giants tied and then won in the bottom of the 9th with a home run by Moises Alou. This game came a day after the Giants had been mathematically eliminated from the playoffs so none of it meant very much. The first picture makes the park look huge because I took it with a wide angle but really it feels small, especially compared to Dodger Stadium, where I saw a game in August. Update: My thanks to Bob for helping me fix the color on the second photo.
Colliding with death at 37,000 Feet. This has got to be the strangest crash in the history of aviation. Two planes in, traveling in opposite directions, the collide in mid-air in the middle of the Amazon. One plane, a full 737, crashes killing all 155 aboard. The other, a corporate jet, survives and makes an emergency landing. The jet, it turns out, is carrying the New York Times Business Travel columnist who writes about the experience in the above link. I remember flying over the Amazon last year. Smoke from the slash & burning obsured the landscape [but only down low] and gave it a blue cast, making it look like the ocean. The expanse is huge. That two planes could collide in such empty airspace boggles the mind. |
A few more random Los Altos homes
 |
| Not everyone in suburbia obsesses about landscaping. |
 |
 |
| Other homewoners like to hide behind dense foliage. |
|
|
 | Hi. I'm a 32 year-old American currently living in Buenos Aires. Before that I lived in California, Sao Paulo and New York and if you browse through the archives below you can see photos of all those places. I also have an old geocities page with some outdated information but also more photos of Buenos Aires, friends and my 9/11 pictures. |