There’s an article in the NY Times today about the meat storage box at the famous Peter Luger Steak House in Brooklyn.

It’s a 2,000-square-foot industrial walk-in cooler (located below the restaurant’s kitchen) packed with 30,000 pounds of raw, aging meat. Read the article for more info if you like words.

But if a 360 degree panoramic photo of all that meat is more to your liking, then check this out!

Vegetarians beware.

WOW! I just came across these beautiful 360 degree panoramic images taken inside of the famous CBGB club in New York City. The images (by Jook Leung) were taken 2 days before the club closed its doors forever on October 15, 2006.

If you’ve never been inside CBGB, here’s your chance to see it in all its glory, with 33 years of personality applied to every square inch of the place.

You can read the history of CBGB here on the official CBGB website.

Oh, and just in case you’re wondering what CBGB and OMFUG mean, here’s a clip from the CBGB website:

The question most often asked of me is, “What does CBGB stand for?” I reply, “It stands for the kind of music I intended to have, but not the kind that we became famous for: COUNTRY BLUEGRASS BLUES.” The next question is always, “but what does OMFUG stand for?” and I say “That’s more of what we do, It means OTHER MUSIC FOR UPLIFTING GORMANDIZERS.” And what is a gormandizer? It’s a voracious eater of, in this case, MUSIC.

360 VR pictures of CBGB (by Jook Leung) from the 360VR.com website.

Bruce Schneier’s latest Guardian column points out the absurdity of harassing photographers “to prevent terrorism”:

“Except that it’s nonsense. The 9/11 terrorists didn’t photograph anything. Nor did the London transport bombers, the Madrid subway bombers, or the liquid bombers arrested in 2006. Timothy McVeigh didn’t photograph the Oklahoma City Federal Building. The Unabomber didn’t photograph anything; neither did shoe-bomber Richard Reid. Photographs aren’t being found amongst the papers of Palestinian suicide bombers. The IRA wasn’t known for its photography. Even those manufactured terrorist plots that the US government likes to talk about — the Ft. Dix terrorists, the JFK airport bombers, the Miami 7, the Lackawanna 6 — no photography.

Given that real terrorists, and even wannabe terrorists, don’t seem to photograph anything, why is it such pervasive conventional wisdom that terrorists photograph their targets? Why are our fears so great that we have no choice but to be suspicious of any photographer?”

(verbatim via)

Happy New Year everybody!

I spent New Year’s Eve watching my wife Michelle Dortignac perform in an amazing show called Cirque Le Masque: Carnivale.

Cirque Le Masque performed six shows over three days at the beautiful Patchougue Theatre, on Long Island. The late show on New Year’s Eve featured a New Year’s party at midnight (during the intermission) replete with Champagne toast and hors d’oeuvres for the whole audience! Nice way to ring in the new year!

Michelle performed a fabulous duo trapeze act with fellow aerialist Kristen Olness; and she also choreographed and performed in a triple silk act along with Kristen Olness and Hilary Sweeney. Michelle, Kristen and Hilary were brought together for this show by Laura Witwer and Angela Jones of ImaginAerial.

All of the performances in this show were STUNNING!

I took a few pictures from the wings on stage-left during the early show, and then more pictures from the balcony during the late show. You can see a mix of my pictures of the Cirque Le Masque show after this:

NOTE: Click thumbnails below to enlarge; then click the RIGHT or LEFT EDGE of enlarged images to move though the gallery of images. (You may also use the right or left arrow keys on your keyboard, once you have opened the first image.)

Matt Keating played next door at the Brooklyn Lyceum on Sunday night. The set featured songs from his upcoming release, QUIXOTIC. I took a few pictures, and above is a slide show of those shots. It’s built using the cool flickrSLiDR, and the images come from my new Flickr account. I’m totally new to Flickr, but loving it so far. I’m such a tech/photo-head that I can’t believe I never checked Flickr out before.

For anyone who does not yet know; Flickr is a place where you can host and share all your images online. But the really great part is that you can embed slideshows and galleries of your pix in your blog or website. All of the image are stored on Flickr, and just show up in your web page. Enjoy!

BTW: Matt Keating was great! You can hear samples (or even buy some) of his current and past records here.

(*Dollar amount in millions)

Details here.

This story made the rounds in January, 2005 when it first broke, but I never saw it. I couldn’t resist posting it here now.

(Text and images from an email I recently received, and assorted web sources. FYI: SNOPES says it’s mostly a true story)

…Some news accounts (including the one sped from inbox to inbox in early 2005) asserted the orphaned hippo was swept into the sea by the tsunami that devastated numerous coastal countries in the Indian Ocean on 26 December 2004, yet wildlife officials were alerted to the imperiled hippo before Christmas, when hoteliers in Malindi spotted the little fellow, in the company of a number of adults of his kind, foundering in the surf off the coast. By the time wildlife officials arrived, Owen was alone, having become separated from his herd. Had he not been rescued, the ocean’s waters would have done in the youngster because long immersion in salt water would have led to fatal dehydration.

The dehydrated hippo was found by wildlife rangers and taken to the Haller Park animal facility in the port city of Mombasa.

Pining for his lost mother, Owen quickly befriended a giant male Aldabran tortoise named Mzee – Swahili for “old man”.

“When we released Owen into the enclosure, he lumbered to the tortoise which has a dark grey colour similar to grown up hippos,” Sabine Baer, rehabilitation and ecosystems manager at the park, told Reuters on Thursday.

Haller Park ecologist Paula Kahumbu said the pair were now inseparable.

“After it was swept and lost its mother, the hippo was traumatized. It had to look for something to be a surrogate mother. Fortunately, it landed on the tortoise and established a strong bond. They swim, eat and sleep together,” the ecologist added.

“The hippo follows the tortoise exactly the way it follows its mother. If somebody approaches the tortoise, the hippo becomes aggressive, as if protecting its biological mother,” Kahumbu added.

“The hippo was left at a very tender age. Hippos are social animals that like to stay with their mothers for four years.”

She said the hippo’s chances of survival in another herd were very slim, predicting that a dominant male would have killed him.

Officials are hopeful Owen will befriend a female hippo called Cleo, also a resident at the park.

Pictured above, is my very own meteorite. Awesome, isn’t it!

But it’s not really in outer space. It’s in my office, on my desk.

Okay, I had a bit of fun with Photoshop and a digital camera with a decent macro lens setting. (Thanks to Google Earth for the Star Field image in the background.)

Here’s an un-altered picture of the meteorite fragment that shows its real size a bit more accurately.

+ enlarge

I bought my meteorite for $10 in a cool little shop in NYC called Evolution. Evolution is like a mini museum, where everything is for sale: animal skulls and skeletons, fossils, insects, geodes, and of course… meteorites.

The following information about the Campo del Cielo Meteorite comes from the Montreal Planetarium website.

Official Name: Campo del Cielo is the name of the arid plain where this meteorite was found. But the plain gets its name from the meteorite! Dozens of place names were given to the fragments of this meteorite, which were found over a very large area.

Location: Northwest of the village of Chorotis, straddling the border between the Argentine states of Chaco and Santiago del Estero. The region is situated 800 kilometres northwest of Buenos Aires.

Fall or Find: Campo del Cielo is a find. Carbon samples found under the ejecta from the craters were dated using carbon 14. The date obtained was 5,800 years ago. So the craters cannot be older than that. The fragments are altered and rusted, but some areas present a fresh crust, which points to a fall in the recent past. Most of the dates proposed vary between 4,000 and 5,800 years ago.

Date: Spanish explorers discovered the meteorite in 1576. It was already known to the indigenous people.

Mass Recovered: At least 100 metric tons of the Campo del Cielo meteorite have been recovered over the last five centuries. If we consider the total mass of the fragments, it is the largest meteorite in the world. The largest individual fragment of Campo del Cielo weighs 37 metric tons.

Number of Fragments: Thousands of fragments were collected. Three fragments alone-weighing 15, 18, and 37 metric tons-account for two thirds of the meteorite’s mass.

Strewn field: The craters are oriented from northeast to southeast, forming an impressive strewn field of 18.5 by 3 kilometres.

Crater: Some twenty craters have been identified to date. The largest is 100 metres in diametre and the smallest, 20 metres. The largest craters contain no fragments-they were ejected on impact. Some impact structures are elliptical in shape. This form is due to the angle of fall of the meteoroid fragments. They struck the ground at an angle of 9 degrees to the horizon.

Circumstances: Spanish explorers discovered the meteorite with the help of native people who told them about a mass of iron that fell from the sky. The Spaniards collected a few fragments of the meteorite during expeditions in the area between 1576 and 1783. A 15-metric-ton mass was discovered in 1813 by a man named Don R. de Celis. Several masses weighing from several hundreds of kilograms to a few tons were found in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Each fragment was given a name : Mesón de Fierro, Runa Pocito, Toba, Hacha, Mocovi, Tonocote, Abipon, and Mataco. One of the most recent discoveries was in 1970. An 18-metric-ton fragment was revealed during excavation of a crater by a scientific team. It lay 5 metres below the bottom of the crater.

History: In 1990, a mineral collector promised Robert Haag that he could arrange the purchase of a Campo del Cielo meteorite weighing several tons. The mineral collector supposedly had an agreement with the owner of the land where it lay. Haag paid the negotiator and travelled to Argentina accompanied by an entire team to transport the enormous mass. Once the meteorite had been loaded on a truck, the police arrested Haag. In this province of Argentina, meteorites belong to the government and not to the landowner. Haag had to pay a fine for attempting to steal a national treasure. He had been duped! This meteorite fragment is still in its home province.

Type: Iron meteorite

Class: Coarse octahedrite: 3-millimetre bandwidths.

Group: IAB

Composition: Campo del Cielo contains 6.68% nickel, 0.43% cobalt, 0.25% phosphorus, 87 parts per million gallium, 40 ppm germanium, and 3.6 ppm iridium. All the rest is iron.

This iron meteorite is distinguished by the presence of silicate inclusions in its iron matrix. The few octahedrites that present this feature were probably formed by a process other than melting and differentiation.

Scientific contribution: Researchers who have studied the Campo del Cielo strewn field have noticed a reddening of the clay near the points of impact. According to these scientists, the same phenomenon might explain the colours seen on the surface of Mars.

“The Tribute in Light was a temporary art installation of 88 searchlights placed next to the site of the World Trade Center from March 11 to April 14, 2002 to create two vertical columns of light in remembrance of the September 11, 2001 attacks.”
(From Wikipedia)

On March 11, 2002, the night that they illuminated the “Tribute in Light,” I took a ferry across the Hudson river to get some pictures of the lights over lower Manhattan. Attempting to reconcile the new skyline in my mind, I tried imagining where the Towers had been. But with all of the chaos and emotions of the previous six months, I found it hard to remember their place and scale in the skyline.

About a year earlier, I had been in the same place (a park on the riverside in Jersey City, NJ) taking daytime shots of the not-yet-disturbed NYC skyline for use in the wedding invitations that my fiancée Michelle and I were designing.

With no particular goal in mind, I opened both sets of images in Photoshop (image editing software), and found two taken from the exact same spot; one from before, and one after. I overlayed the two images (before and after) and lined up all of the buildings exactly. The Towers were now exactly where they had been. Kind of spooky in a way, but I had this idea now…

Keeping the newer night-time shot as the dominant image, I cut away everything in the older day-time shot until just the Towers remained. Since the older image was taken during the day, the two WTC buildings had a ghostly white feeling, being surrounded by all the darkness of the newer image. I faded the day-time layer back to about 18% transparency, added a bit of outer-glow, and tinted the Towers slightly purple to match the tint of the lights coming from below in the newer image. (These “lights below” were actually emanating from the still-very-active collapse site.)

The result is what you see in the above image. Personally, I felt it had a sense of serenity to it. After all of the destruction and devastation images we had been seeing over and over again, this had a certain calmness to it.

The process here starts with raw coffee beans roasted in small batches, 30lbs at a time.

The raw coffee beans are placed into a cylindrical roasting oven by hand.

Paddles inside the oven slowly tumble the beans during heating. Beans are roasted at about 425-475 degrees for about 12-18 minutes, depending on the type of beans and desired darkness.

At the precise moment, the hot beans are dumped into an open hopper with rotating paddles that stir the beans while air is blown from below to cool the beans and stop the cooking process. During this phase, any loose chaff (hulls, casings) from the beans falls through the grating at the bottom and is removed.

The cooling completed, roasted beans are ready to be put into bags for sale.

Next, the beans are placed into a bagging machine that dispenses exactly the right weight into hand held bags.

The bags are manually closed and marked with the roasting date.

The roasting date is the key. Fresh roasted coffee should be brewed and consumed within 10 days. According to coffee roaster Diedrich Coffee’s website, “Freshness is probably the most misunderstood factor about coffee. The date of the roast is the key to freshness. Without sophisticated packaging, coffee beans lose more than half of their flavor within two weeks. After six weeks the oils become rancid. Exposure to air and moisture accelerates the decomposition of the flavors. Freezing the beans may stop this decomposition but freezing also destroys the delicate oils and aromatics. Never freeze a quality fresh roasted coffee.”

You can read more about what makes an “Exceptional Cup of Coffee” here.

Good morning!