March, 2007

This is one of my favorite recent photos.

Today we took Sophia to get Easter pictures taken by a photographer that has live bunnies. We can't wait to get the proofs back and see how they turned out.

Our friends, Paula, Justin and Lucas Lee went with us. Lucas is 15 months old. He didn't like the bunnies so much, but was still adorable!

Here is one of the bunnies trying to escape. We think maybe the bunnies were just as scared of Lucas as he was of them.

My brother and sister-in-law just had a new baby boy last Monday...Samuel Hugh Twiddy was born on March 19th. We're very excited and can't wait to meet our new nephew.

This is a picture of our niece, Claire, meeting her new baby brother. We hear that she adores him but just doesn't understand why she can't play with this great new baby doll!

Seriously, taking some pictures of babies is a thing unto itself. There's very little contrast in baby skin (no sun damage, no wrinkles, no tattoos), so adjusting an image according to its histogram the same way you would a photo of an adult give you a total mess. (Witness the way-wrong hair color against death palor skin in this photo.) I finally figured out that I should leave relatively few dark pixels in the image and not worry about everything bunching right up against overexposed. One pleasant side effect is that you can see a lot more definition in Sophia's fairly-dark eyes. And I like her eyes a lot.

This is a clip of Sophia sneezing and hiccuping from Dec. 16, 2006 - she is 10 days old. Babies hiccup a lot and Sophia is no exception. We were inspired by the lzmk blog to start adding video to our website so look out for more baby action to come!

A long time ago, but I'm a little behind on the photo processing.

Arica and I have been watching the Wire on DVD, and our language has gotten atrocious. Not fit for polite company.

The popular story of the origins of Monopoly – the bigger-than-Jesus Parker Brothers board game – has become enough a part of American cultural literacy that it has developed an apocryphal (and almost certainly fictive) crust. (For example, I was pretty sure that someone once told me that it was invented by a hobo or something.) But it turns out that the real story is better than any of the myths (and much better than the commercially-acceptable "official" history).

Part of the problem is that the popular story leaves a good 30 years off of the game's history, and part of it is that the official story doesn't feature any Quaker women. But the biggest problem with the popular narrative is that it leaves out the quirky and unique contributions of the individuals and communities who played the game before Charles Darrow "invented" it in 1934. The American Interest gives us a glance at the real story in "Monopolizing History". You really must bookmark the AI piece to read when you have a few minutes. For now, here's a quote that highlights one of my favorite tidbits about the game's original designer and her original designs.