Bonus: Did you hear about the CNN anchor quitting over his intelligent tweets on the matter?
Argentina
Over twenty years after the horrific terrorist attack in AMIA, nothing has been solved yet even though it is widely known that the attack was perpetrated by Iran and Hezbollah and there’s evidence the Argentinian government was bribed to block the investigation. Now the Argentinian Prosecutor Alberto Nisman is found dead on the eve of eve of a congressional hearing. Suicide? Yeah right. More info.
It’s inconceivable that a government would work to protect those responsible for an attack on its territory that killed over 80 Argentinian citizens. But this is exactly what’s happening. Also, this happened this week in Argentina.
This website is now 12 years old. That means we have quite a bit of readers for whom The MKX has always been around. Kind of how cars and airplanes already existed when I was born, just more significant.
My parents came to visit and on my request brought along three fat photo albums from when I was born. I needed to show my wife that our son does indeed have an eery resemblance to my extremely young self, if not my adult self.
As you’d expect from photos that are over *ahem* twenty years old, they’ve suffered from some terrible degradation (older post on the subject). Not surprisingly, the photos degraded differently based on the photo development process and paper used. Some even got extremely blurry – and I think those are a lost cause.
So obviously I need to scan them all. To make the digitizing work worse, and unlike my wife’s old photos, these are glued to the album pages with transparent cellophane on top. To try and pry the photos off the album will most likely destroy them, so they need to be digitized off the page. I think this means that using a digitizing service like we did before will not be possible.
Here’s what the album looks like:
On these pages: My uncles Sammy and Eli, myself, my aunt Jave, my great-grandmother Leike, my mom, and half of my brother Jaco’s face.
Like crap (please don’t get me started on idiotic Instagram filters people are using nowadays).
I already finished scanning one of the three albums. It wasn’t a fun process. I used an Epson Artisan 837 and the built-in Image Capture application that comes with OS X. I scanned everything at 600 dots-per-inch, which I believe easily exceeds the sharpness of the old photos.
One nice thing about Image Capture, is that it can auto-detect the photos on the page, and scan each one of them as an individual file.
It will even fix rotation! Unfortunately I didn’t have great luck with this because, as you can see, the glue is extremely yellow at this point so the program had trouble recognizing where the photos are. I would end up selecting the photos by hand.
This made the process quite tedious:
Take out page from album
Remove cellophane
Place on scanner
Go to computer, press “Overview”
Wait
Adjust what photos will get scanned
Press “Scan”
Wait
Flip page to scan the other side
Repeat process from #4 to #8
Put cellophane back on page
Reinsert to album
Hardly a model of speed, automation, and efficiency.
I will refine the process for the other two albums, no doubt. For one, I will skip overviews and just scan full pages. It will make scanning a lot faster. I will also try and connect the scanner over USB rather than WiFi. I have a hunch that this was the main bottleneck to the scanner’s speed and not so much the digitizing itself.
But this means that I would need to cut individual photos out from a single page scan to individual files as a post-processing step. My goal is to automate this – research needed and advise appreciated.
The last step: fixing the colors of the photos. I played around with adjusting all the color curves of a specific photo manually on the excellent Pixelmator. This is what the original photo looks like:
Chanukah 1978 at the kinder in Monterrey. Ironically, I’m not even in this picture but it’s appropriate given the time of year right now. I recognize almost everyone on it, though, in spite of the crappy quality.
It took a bunch of tweaking, but the results seem pretty good:
Chanukah 1978 at the kinder in Monterrey, color corrected. #nofilter
Not bad, huh? (you can click to zoom in)
Of course, fixing each photo manually like this would take a tremendous amount of time. I think the way to go, barring a completely automated solution, is to group photos by era, album, and photo paper; since those would all degrade the same way. I can then apply the same combination of color-correcting filters. I haven’t yet figured all of the details out, so this is material for a future post. Far into the future most likely.
For now the important thing is to scan the rest of the photos so we can freeze the color degradation.
Yesterday Roberto Gómez Bolaños passed away. I spent way too many hours watching his shows and so did the last three generations of Spanish speakers across the world.
It’s been years since The Ugly Nun was last seen. Many were hopeful that was the end of it. They will be disappointed. Tonight there was a confirmed Ugly Nun sighting, and it gets worse: in spite of being celibate, she appears to have procreated.
Oh, the humanity!
They’re ugly. They’re holy. They’re constipated. And they’re way past their nap time.Like Mother Superior, like son.Sixth Street doesn’t stand a chance.
Disclaimer: the smaller Ugly Nun is actually a paid actor, his name is Ilan Kirsch. The larger one, nobody’s sure what that is.
First and foremost, allow me to introduce myself. My name is <yet to be named> Kirsch and this is my first post on The MKX®. I’ve had a crazy week so I thought I’d share some of it.
So there I am, chilling and floating in warm amniotic fluid, minding my own business. I’ve been doing the same thing for what feels like forever, but I’m not sure… my memories of anything over 9 months ago are kind of hazy. In any case, I’m chilling in the dark enjoying some half-digested frozen yogurt through my umbilical cord when suddenly I start getting pushed out. Weird stuff… at first it was only now and then but later it got more frequent, like every five minutes apart or so. Then it hit me.
I’m being evicted.
What.
The.
Fuck.
My guess is that the guy in charge of my personal finances forgot to pay the rent or something. Oh, I’ll make him pay big time, don’t worry. Perhaps a college fund. Maybe I’ll wreck his car too someday just to spite him.
In any case, they are pushing me out for what seemed like two days, and it’s working. Eventually I see the light at the end of the tunnel and being the brave adventurer that I am, I decide to slide out.
It wasn’t easy. I don’t know who designs this stuff but believe me, my head was bigger than the exit hole and not barely. I bet I left some damage behind me.
What happened afterwards was a blur. Dude with gloves catches me, skinny white dude cuts my umbilical cord with scissors (more on him later), some woman grabs me, they’re cleaning me and measuring me and checking me out like I’m some kind of weird specimen. Finally they put me down on top of a tired looking brown woman.
Me, after being evicted. Understandably, I was in a foul mood.
Immediately it hit me: this is the person I need to enslave. I stared long and hard directly at her eyes, in order to subject her to my will. It worked, she will forever remain under my control.
That’s me waving at the camera, being held by one of my servants. In the back, the servant with the food.
In a crazy stroke of luck, given that my tummy got disconnected from my other food source, this woman has the ability to produce milk from her chest. This handy little trick has turned out to be very useful ever since.
The next couple of days were kind of odd. Different people started to show up. Some worked at the place we were at, referred to as “The Hospital”. They were nice and didn’t seem to be as scared of touching me as the others. Then there was the food source person I refer to as “Ima” and the tall skinny guy with the curly hair cord cutter SOB I refer to as “Papi”.
The rest of them are easy to catalog. If they are brown, then they are related to Ima. If they are white then they are related to Papi. Except for the loud bald guy, he’s Papi-colored but is actually related to Ima. Something must’ve gotten horribly mixed up there, I suppose. They are all really nice in spite of talking to me in funny voices, but my favorite one is the one I call “Bobe Raquel”. She’s so warm and cushiony and smells good!
Just as I was getting used to the harsh military environment of The Hospital, they decide to take me somewhere else: Bungee jumping! Or at least I thought so, since I was strapped to a ridiculous harness. Disappointingly, I was then taken to a freaking four cylinder Elantra! Talk about a tease! The only thing I can conclude is that Papi is a huge idiot at the wheel. He better stay off that iPhone of his.
Ready for extreme sports… not!
Eventually we arrived to what I refer to as “My Palace”. I was taken to my main chambers. They are all light blue filled with white furniture. Who decorated this dump? Do they expect me to live inside a Martha Stewart catalog?! First thing I do when I get a chance is a layer of paint, hang some posters of girls in bikinis, and maybe install a hot tub.
Living in My Palace is not bad. I arranged for one of my servants to hold me most of the time. The one known as “Savta” takes the night shift, Ima feeds me whenever I feel like it, and Papi carries me too but he’s a scam: no matter how hard I suck his puny flat chest, NOTHING comes out. Dry as a bone. I’ll have to look into how to repair that, maybe on Yelp?
For the most part, this is what I’ve been up to all week: Being carried, being fed, taking dumps.
So let’s talk about poop.
I eat a lot, I mean how could one reject the banquets I’m being offered? And whatever comes in, must come out. Simple physics. The funny thing is, whenever I relieve myself, the person that looks the most relieved is Ima. Haha seriously, she’s obsessed with my feces or something. I swear she seems to be keeping track of color, consistency, date and time ON A FREAKING APP. What a weird fetish.
Something interesting happened last Saturday. Papi and uncle Moi were staring at a big bright rectangle for two hours. He seemed really into it. On the rectangle there were moving pictures of little guys running after a sphere in some sort of arcane ritual. In the background, annoying yells in Spanish.
I think I can get into this arcane ritual, seems like fun. Also, I think the big bright rectangle and I are going to be good friends.
Finally, you may have noticed I don’t have a proper first name. People have been calling me all sorts of things but nothing consistent. The ones who speak Hebrew often call me “matok sheli” which I find a little disrespectful. The Spanish speaking ones say “mi Rey”, much better – they should know their place.
But I heard a rumor: apparently I’m getting an official name tomorrow at this event called a “Bris”. I’m not sure what that is exactly, but I bet it’s fun for me! I mean… it’s gotta be, right? Right?
I’m sorry for the delay posting this. Some life circumstances sort of got in the way. You can now stop desperately reloading. Fear not: I have not died of non-stop bloody Soylent diarrhea and I am in good health. I just didn’t post. And now, back to our regularly scheduled programming…
Thursday night I went to sleep after eating nothing but Soylent in the last 24 hours. I had a very vivid dream of me eating a warm thick bowl of oatmeal. I remember its smell, texture… This experiment is messing with my mind.
Breakfast
I woke up on Friday and prepared my pitcher of Soylent for the day. It took 3 minutes. Since I didn’t leave the pitcher in the fridge overnight and now I know better, I added a bunch of ice to the mix.
At my desk in the office, I had my glass of Soylent. Not bad. Like revenge, Soylent is a dish better served cold. Once again I finished feeling satisfied but not full.
Lunch
A co-worker passed me with a plate from the cafeteria: their Greek Plate (chicken, tzatziki, little slices of pita)… After 13+ years, I’ve developed an indifference at best, dislike at worse for cafeteria food. I’ve had this specific dish many times and while it’s not not bad, I don’t particularly like it. But it looked especially appetizing this time.
At 1:15 I decided to “eat” “lunch” which is a lot later than my usual time. Either Soylent is very good at keeping me satiated or my body is suppressing my hunger since it knows what’s coming to it. Whatever the case, I started drinking it at 1:20.
In the afternoon I got a slight headache but I wouldn’t pin it on Soylent. People get headaches. I’ve also been terribly thirsty.
Dinner
It’s Friday night, and I mother in law cooked a big Shabbat dinner. Being the good son-in-law that I am, I decided to take a break, enjoy food and the company of my very round pregnant wife, and spend some time meditating on the merits of giving up old fashioned food.
Flatulence
Indeed, as many people pointed out on the Internet, it mostly went away on the third day. I’m sorry I wrote about the topic so much but it turned out to be relevant to the discussion.
Reader Carolina is worried that the first ingredient listed is sugar. But it’s not! It’s maltodextrin, which is… huh, kind of like a sugar. Shit.
Reader Gabriel posted a very misguided article on Soylent. Sorry dude, the article gets it wrong at the most basic level. Soylent is not for hipsters: it’s not organic, vegan, overpriced, nor sold out of food trucks. Soylent is for overworked nerds.
At work, several co-workers who had never heard of Soylent were incredibly puzzled. Are you on a diet? No. Is it for weight loss? No. Is it some kind of cleanse? No. Then what the hell are you doing? Science!
Other co-workers who had heard about Soylent were very curious. Several tried it. None were disgusted, with one exception: Frank who had done Schmoylent, the sketchy Soylent knockoff, found it disgusting. I suppose Schmoylent is better.
My mom vigorously opposed me doing Soylent. She watched the movie and I suppose the mental association was just too strong, in spite of my assurances that this thing is beige and most likely not made of <<SPOILER ALERT>> humans.
I did more reading about Soylent. Here’s a pretty rough thread on some of the issues with Soylent.
Closing remarks
I’m done with this stuff. All in all, this was an interesting experiment. Sure, I failed to eat nothing but Soylent for a week. Sure, I am a fraud. Sure, many readers secretly wanted me to write this from the toilet while dealing with horrible, debilitating diarrhea. None of this came to pass.
Interestingly, it seems quite viable to survive, at least for short periods of time, on nothing but Soylent. I wouldn’t go much longer than that though. The people behind it are not nutritionists nor medical doctors, and the fact that you can survive for some time does not mean you can or should go for extended periods of time on it. Let’s wait and see how some more adventurous/stupid souls do a couple of years from now.
A guy from work is buying my remaining supply. And I will close with this short video:
