Apparently it’s annother anniversary with Earthlink. They send us a link to an anniversary page that shows a present with confetti raining over it. Despite the fact I hate Earthlink, confetti always manages to make me feel special. Inner child goes, “Look, confetti!” for one split second. But even the inner child knows better and shoves the present back, crying, “You don’t care about me. Stop pretending you do!”
My brother-in-law calls. H.o.p. picks up the phone. They talk a long time about cartoons. “Is it a Looney Tunes?” I hear H.o.p. say.
The serial arsonist (well, the accused) who attempted to torch the apartment building autumn before last (or is accused of it) was in court this week. I don’t know what happened with that. I have heard it turns out he knew one of the tenants. Perhaps that explains how he got inside the building. I go to the Atlanta Journal Constitution online to see if they’ve any news on the case but there’s no report.
There are however those pics of the Japanese Prime Minister with the Bush and Presley families. There are first 13 pictures of the Prime Minister enjoying himself at Graceland. A number of pics of the folks having fun putting on Elvis’ aviator sunglasses. And then pic 14 shows “Civil rights leader Benjajin Hooks accompanies Bush and Koizumi at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, where Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. The hotel visit followed a tour of Gracelend.” Then pictures 15 and 16 show the Prez and Prime Minister having bar-b-que. 13 pics of Graceland and aviator glasses. 1 pic giving a nod to Martin Luther King. 2 pics decoted to bar-b-que.
H.o.p. is going through stop animation blogs. One is kept by a guy in Louisiana who in April was writing about how difficult it is to find some materials for his stop animation puppets in the hardware stores with the rebuilding after Katrina.
Speaking of Katrina, I have another picture I’m working on right now, a restoration of a photo damaged by Katrina. Get the photos through the hard work of the people at Operation Photo Rescue. This one is a black and white image of a woman seated on a sliver of moon, backdropped by a painted background of evergreens, lake and mountain. I wonder where she was. This has been a fun one.
The OPR people continue to upgrade the efficiency of things, making it easier to connect restorers with images, and have put together a forum for news and sharing tips etc. A remarkable thing they’ve doing.
A lot of the photos to be restored seem to be wedding photos and baby photos. The wedding photos and baby photos are a top emotional priority for people. But that isn’t all. Photos of people cooking. Photos of people playing. Servicemen lounging with sweethearts on Louisiana lawns. Priests with parishoners and infants being christened, reflecting the Roman Catholic heritage of the area. Photos of sailors reflecting the seaport heritage of the city. As you work and go through the photos it becomes more and more like rescuing an underground history of an area. These aren’t the images that show up in historical societies. They’re the ones tucked into people’s home albums (many glued by the flood waters to the plastic sleeves) and the snapshots in the shoeboxes, the polaroids with names of individuls penned in at the bottom.
Women throw flowers at their weddings, couples cut cakes, infants peer up at the flash of their first photograph.
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