The Bush goes to the Steppes

From the New York Times:

ULAN BATOR, Mongolia, Nov. 21 - If you are an American president in need of just a few hours of temporary political asylum - no debate about Iraq, no Chinese leaders resisting the American agenda and plenty of adulation - here is an approach: Come to the endless steppes that Ghengis Khan made famous.

Hey - it's been a long time, but the pillager is back.

When Air Force One descended low over the barren but breathtaking landscape here, few Mongolians had ever seen anything like it.


Mongolians near the airport have never seen a 747? What the fuck?

I sincerely doubt it - if Air Force One can land there, odds are it ain't the first 747 to ever land there. Lay off the hyperbole, David.

None of the previous American presidents had made the journey while in office.

Because why? Care to fill us in instead of being a travel writer, David?

And so Mongolians came into this tattered post-Soviet capital, past what will soon be a monument celebrating the spectacular victories eight centuries ago, when the Mongol empire stretched from the Yellow Sea to Baghdad, to hear George W. Bush tell them that today, "Mongolia and the United States are standing together as brothers in the cause of freedom."

I'm sure they're all breathing a sigh of relief.

There is something else that seemed to thrill Mr. Bush about Mongolia: presidential entertainment is vivid.

Does he get free tickets to see Jarhead?

As his limousine raced across the steppe,

Must have been pretty fucking bumpy. Oh, wait - you mean the ROAD on the steppe.

a team of Mongolian warriors - carrying spears and shields and wearing the body armor that Ghengis Khan used to subdue territory that Mr. Bush is still grappling with 800 years later - suddenly appeared and galloped alongside

He wouldn't tolerate this from an American on a Palomino. Or am I wrong?

Pity. I hope he enjoyed his vetted show.

.....Iraq, Every Day, Everywhere

If Mongolia won its way into Mr. Bush's heart with its unflagging support for the war in Iraq, its attitude was the exception on his four-day trip. The war is deeply unpopular in Japan, his first stop, and his motorcade did not exactly attract huge crowds.

I don't like to hang around slaughterhouses, either. They smell like shit and death.

Things were worse in South Korea, where the defense minister announced, as a fact, that South Korea planned to trim its more than 3,000 troops in Iraq by a third next year.

Whoops!

Mr. Bush's aides scrambled to win a retraction. The president's national security adviser, Stephen J. Hadley, called the South Korean foreign minister and was reassured, he said, of the country's "commitment to the mission."

We're committing to the mission of winning the war on terrorism by helping you commit to winning the war on terra!

President Bush may love Texas, and his ranch, as he reminded Mongolians when he compared their land to his beloved state. But his enthusiasm does not extend to another Mongolian passion - horses.

"I maht act like a cowboy, but I'll be damned if I ride one of those four-legged devils. Rummy told me that those bastards are off-limits."

When Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld was here a month ago, the Mongolians presented him with their highest honor: a beautiful gelding that he named Montana. So in a delicate act of diplomacy, the White House secured an agreement that President Enkhbayar Nambar would not give Mr. Bush a horse. But since the secretary of defense had to look his gift in the mouth - leaving it here, at least temporarily, because it was a bit difficult to transport on his official plane - Mr. Bush found another way to saddle up.

"I'm here on an important international mission," Mr. Bush said at the opening of his speech in Government House. "Secretary Rumsfeld asked me to check on his horse."

Heh heh. Rummy, we needed some glue to hold our Iraq strategery together...sorry 'bout 'yer horsie.

-D

Cloning Tips

Lordy, it's been a while.

I've been cloning out some older film scan master files, and I thought I'd share some good ideas.

Good Idea #1: Clone at 100%.

Look, it's just not a good idea to try to clone out defects at anything less than 100%. You'll kill your eyes, miss details, and waste paper when you have that "A-ha" moment upon realizing the print you're about to deliver has ph* from the original film right along the edge, where everyone will see it.

Good Idea #2: Get a scroll mouse.

Cloning always involves moving through an entire image, and a mouse with a scroll wheel makes this arduous task a lot easier. Whether you are cloning out dirt from your digital camera's sensor or scratches from a careless film processing company, paging through 300 megabytes of image data can be no fun. A scroll wheel won't have you doing somersaults, but it does speed things up.

I usually clone from the top left corner to the lower right. I used to move in blocks by using the Page Down key, scanning the image on the screen for defects, then hitting Page Down again until I'd reviewed one vertical "row" of the image. Then I'd click once in the bottom scroll bar to move right and start using Page Up to move up along the next row.

Like mowing a yard....ad infinitum. This takes your hands off the mouse a lot, adding the risk of nasty computyer-related wrist injuries.

The ability to notch slowly and precisely up and down through an image (as opposed to a page at a time with the Page Up/Down keys) is a godsend on my 300-600MB 4X5 scans. I use one hand on the scroll wheel and mouse buttons while another toggles the option key (to define the origin for cloning or healing brushes).

Another advantage is that the scrolling action, while a little slower than typing Page Up several times, is a lot better at helping you catch dust. The picture should be moving along slowly in front of your eyes - almost scrolling, but at a much more controlled and constant speed. The advantage is twofold - no artifacts from redrawing (at least on my computer) and your eyes' natural propensity for catching small objects in motion against a background is apt to help you notice miscellaneous gradoux.

On Mac OS X, holding the shift key causes the scroll wheel to switch axes; once I reach the bottom or top of an image, I can precisely move over to the next "row" by holding Shift and moving the wheel one notch down to nudge to the right. I'm pretty sure it'd work this way in Windows, too.

Good Idea #3: Practice using the Cloning Brush

This sounds like an entry into the "duh" awards, but at least with film scans, repeated abuse of the healing brush will soften and mush out the grain structure. In a big print, you'll definitely see this effect, and it is distracting.

Photographers I talk to often have the attitude that the "Healing Brush makes the Cloning Brush obsolete". That might be true in many cases, but it's still a good idea to practice being precise with the cloning brush. It takes some practice and skill, but before long, you'll be Option/Alt-clicking at a mad pace.

Another reason to stick with the cloning tool is along the edges. If you have your film scanned full-frame like I do and use cropping guides instead of cropping your originals, (cropping originals is destructive editing, and that's a Bad Thing) you'll find that the healing brush's intelligence is limited along the edges of an image. To do it's magic, the healing brush averages pixels from around the brush area into the brush area; it's almost impossible to use this tool to hide defects along edges because the black edges are "averaged" into the image area.

I had another good cloning idea, but I forgot what it was.

*ph - a catch-all term for those curly-cue pieces of dust. I'll let you guess at the etymology.