"ShowPony" is Texas slang meaning an extremely attractive young lady.

She came up and got a beer from me at the Art Car Parade. After I popped my eyes back in my head, I waved the camera at her, and told her that some sights just have to be recorded for posterity. :-) She then ever so graciously agreed to pose for a pic.

As we were posing for the pic, I asked her if she noticed that her high beams were on. She laughed and said no, she hadn't. I replied that since it wasn't cold at all, I'd accept that as a compliment. :-) She laughed some more. I further allowed as how I thought I should point out the fact. She said she didn't mind, laughing even more. (I'm purty sure it wasn't her first beer)

Yes, I got her email address. No, you can't have it. :-)

The Art Cars 1|2|3|4|5|6|7|8 The Art Bikes The Art Folk Technical Notes

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These pics were all shot with an Agfa 1280. This camera was pretty hot stuff when I got it a few years back, though it's no longer bleeding edge gear.

Resolution was set on 780S, and I mostly left the camera on automatic. The cars came by too quickly to have time to mess to much with manual settings. If there's one thing I don't like much about the camera, it's the relatively long time that it takes for it to write to the memory card, and rest itself for the next shot. I did manually focus on a few of the pics.

As the day wore on, it became progressively cloudier. Not actually dark, but the light was diffused, and pics of the taller vehicles lacked the contrast they might have had against a clear blue sky, especially if the car was light colored. Take a look at this pic of the ZebraCar as an example.

The pics were all closely cropped. Most of the enhancement work was done in the simple built-in editor that comes with ACDSee. Some of the ones that needed more work I took into Paint Shop Pro 6.0. They were sharpened about 50%, had the gamma popped up to about 1.5, and the brightness and contrast jumped about 25 and 30 each. Those are general numbers. I edited them in roughly chronological order, so the gamma numbers tended to go up as I went. They were all then saved with the jpg compression set to about 70%. This got them down to about 10% of their original size, in combination with the cropping and resizing

Here's a sample before and after. I did compress the before a bit, getting it down to about half the former size, just to make it easy on the bandwidth challenged, like me. :-(

I didn't really spend too much time on each pic. Once I found the range of values that worked well enough, I just started slamming the pics out. There were over two hundred, after all. I'm sure anyone that wanted to spend more time could tweak any one individual pic a bit better.

The Art Cars 1|2|3|4|5|6|7|8 The Art Bikes The Art Folk Technical Notes

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The news here is reporting that three thugs attempted a home invasion today.

They must have forgotten that Texas is not one of those states that discourages the personal ownership of firearms for self-defense.

The home owner shot and killed two of them. Score one for the prevention of crime at it's source, though of course the headlines were several points smaller than they would have been had the guy mistakenly shot his pizza delivery guy.

Despite my own experience in trying to teach pigs to sing, I on ocassion get ensnared in a discussion about gun control. So, in order that I might in the future just offer a shortcut to a page, rather than laboriously type out more messages, I thought I'd get at least one entry here on gun control.

Then, like those guys in that old bar joke that have told each other the same chesnuts over and over so many times they've numbered them all to save time in the retelling, I can just say, "Ho Hum, been there, squashed that. See 2002-05-05, and get back to me OK?" I'm just going to give titles to the various arguments that they trot out, (there's like only five or six, and I've heard them all a zillion times before) and add to this entry as needed. Pretty soon it'll be done, and I'll never have to waste another keystoke on this again.

Today's lesson:

"What Would Jesus Do?"

In the other end of this conversational teeter-totter today, I was presented this argument, with the proponent making the case that Good Xians should be unwilling to kill another human being.

I don't find the argument too convincing, for a few reasons...

First, if one wants to chug the Bible straight, Jesus did use violence, when he grabbed some whips and scourged the pigeon vendors out of the temple. I think the record shows that he was not averse to the use of violence to pursue his aims. If you don't want to accept the Biblical record on this, then the entire WWJD argument falls apart.

Second, the doctrine of Just War has long since reconciled the Xian faith to the use of force. They pretty much had to, as it was necessary to their survival. Without some sort of armed and armored Defenders of the Faith, the culture that nourished Xianity would have long since become extinct in the light of pressure from the Islamic world, if nothing else.

The was Something Else, of course, that being the presence of pagan warlords that were perfectly willing to convert to the faith, so long as they didn't have to relinquish their martial ways.

Poof!

Transition made, complete with silver-tongued shamans ready to supply the needed doctrinal explanations, with that huge rubber-paged tome that is the Bible providing the scriptual foundation for just about any behavior, which it still does to this day.

It was easy for them, as nobody really read the Bible back in those times, except the shamans, and they hadn't really even settled which of the various available manuscripts belonged in the True Word of God (and still don't agree), so they could have been quoting the Epic of Gilgamesh, for all the newly converted knew.

In a skinny instant, Xianity morphed from the religion of the downtrodden, and the enslaved, (emphasizing eventual justice, and reward for suffering, in the hereafter) to the religion of the conqueror, where victory in battle, wealth, and temporal power, meant that god Was On Your Side, and a sign of god's favor due to your obedience to, and congruence with, His Plan, a belief that the Episcopelians, and victorious high school football coaches immediately following the State Championship still hold, to listen to them speak.

Lo and behold, I have digressed... weren't we talking about self-defense as regards gun control?

Passive resistance works not at all on criminals - it has sometimes worked on governments with strong legal systems and a tradition of protection of individual civil rights. The Romans didn't seem to be horribly affected by it, and in fact pretty much settled the Jew's hash for them a few decades later when the legions effectively killed off the Jewish nation, and scattered the survivors across the Mediterranean in slave chains.

To be fair, looking at the history of that war, it doesn't seem there were too many Jews actively pursuing a course of passive resistance, so this might not the best example to use. Other than, ostensibly, Jesus, already back in heaven and smiling down on his Chosen Ones as they clinked around the Empire in their collars and chains, emptying chamberpots and tilling the fields, when not serving as targets of opportunity in main events at the Flavian.

I imagine it's a lot easier to give up your life for your fellow man, when you know you're just gonna snooze in a borrowed tomb for three days, and then reunite with your father in Etenal Bliss. Or does he still feel pain every time we sin? The nuns were never too clear about hat. Sometimes one, sometimes the other...

The Maccabees were more terrorists, err...asassins err... freedom fighters, than anything else. Though, it's been my experience that pacifists don't read much history, or they wouldn't be pacifists, so maybe you can get away with that argument if you need to use it on the street or at a cocktail party.

Finally, a question for you any pacifists out there in cyberpsace - should the passengers of Flight 93 meekly accepted their fate, knowing that to do so would have most likely meant that, besides themselves, hundreds more would die when that flight reached it's destination, or was it morally superior to take arms against that sea of troubles and by opposing end it? (apologies to the Bard)

That's not a rhetorical question. If you feel that non-violence is always the answer, and that killing someone else is never the higher ethical thing to do, please dissect this instance, and explain to me how and why their actions were not moral.

Pacifists are like hothouse orchids in the winter - they can only thrive in a protected environment. Ironically, they owe their continued abilty to express these impractical, idealistic notions to the very folks they oppose.

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