Author: Vin
Shooting Immersive Videos
Join my wife and I in a video experiment: I’ve lately begun creating ‘immersive videos.’ For example, this one from aboard a tourist cruise on the Bosporus. After being trained in still photography 50 years ago (i.e., 1973-1976 at the Rochester Institute of Technology, back then sometimes known as ‘Kodak’s Photo School’, I mostly switched to videography two years ago. Moreover, I’ve now begun experimenting with immersive videos, what some people call ‘360 video’ but (to describe it more accurately) shoot video 360-degrees in all directions. For example, if you’re viewing this 31-minute video, you’ll probably be able to experience what I mean by immersive. This technology was initially created for viewing in Virtual Reality googles. However, it can also be used with goggle the way this video demonstrates: My wife and I had some spare time during October while in Istanbul, so we boarded a tourist cruise boat on the Bosporus shortly before sunset (scroll the video ahead until its last quarter.) My first experience with this cutting-edge of video actually began nine years ago when while teaching postgraduate New Media Business I purchase a Samsung Gear 360 camera. Resembling a white tennis ball atop a tiny tripod, the Gear 360 camera could capture immersive still photos and immersive video. Unfortunately, its videos and still photos were only in HD resolution (1920×1080 pixels) and viewable only via Samsung’s special software. By contrast, this 4K-resolution (3840 x 2160) video was shot with a pole-mounted DJI Osmo 360 camera which is the size and shape of a cigarette pack. (If the quality of this video isn’t 4K when you view it, click the YouTube ‘gear’ icon and switch to a higher resolution version.) What I like about shooting immersive video is that had I missed something interesting that occurred behind, atop, or under me after I finished shooting the video, I can later edit the video as if I had intended to capture that occurrence. I also like immersive videos because these allow the viewer the ability to anything and everything that occurs around the camera. While in Istanbul, I also shot immersive videos while walking through that city’s famous bazaars. I also shot some inside mosques in Istanbul and later Cairo. I post some of those here in the coming weeks.
Click Singing in Xhosa
Yesterday, I posted the Ndlovu Youth Choir of the Republic of South Africa singing Queen‘s Bohemian Rhapsody in the Isizulu language, and I noted that language’s click consonants which are common to Bantu languages but virtually unknown in Indo-European or East Asia languages. Enjoy this six-minute video of South African singer Siki Jo-Ann singing in Xhosa language of South Africa, the second most popular native language in that nation, a wonderful language in which clicking is most prominent. It starts with a two-minute humorous skit between a white South African and a black South African joking about those clicks. Siki Jo-Ann enters at the two and one-half minute mark, singing the clicks of Xhosa.
Zulu Queen
And why not Queen‘s Bohemian Rhapsody sung in Isizulu by the Ndlovu Youth Choir of the Republic of South Africa? isiZulu (note the lower-case initial i) is a Southern Bantu language of the Nguni branch spoken in, and indigenous to, Southern Africa. It’s one of the Republic of South Africa’s official language, spoken by a quarter of that nation’s population, and was the native language of Nelson Mandela. I first heard it during 2009 while working at Rhodes University in South Africa’s Eastern Cape province. You’ll hear in it some of the click consonants common to Bantu languages, a common sound unheard of in Indo-European or the languages of East Asia. (Tomorrow, I think that I’ll post a video clip of Siki Jo-Ann who sings in the Xhosa language of South Africa, the second most popular native language in the nation, a wonderful language in which clicking is most prominent.)
Stop Acting Like This is Normal
Four weeks after one-time convicted felon Adolph Hitler was inaugurated as German Chancellor and 92 years before the 34-times convicted felon Donald Trump‘s second inauguration as President of the United States, and four weeks after Adolph Hitler was inaugurated as German Chancellor, Dutch pyromaniac Marinus van der Lubbe, set afire the German Reichstag parliament building. Arriving at the scene in Berlin, Hitler called the fire a “sign from God” and during the following day triggered the German ‘Enabling Act‘, emergency legislation that suspended not only the homeless German legislature but also suspended freedoms of speech, assembly, and other civil rights throughout Germany. He alone became the absolute dictator of that nation. German freedoms and civil rights wouldn’t begin to be restored until a dozen years later when conquering Allied troops seized Berlin from the Nazis. Hitler, a felon who in 1923 fomented a violent, failed uprising for which he served prison time, had better initial luck than Trump, now a convicted American felon who four years ago fomented a violent, failed uprising for which he is unpunished and on the loose, seized the Reichstag fire as excuse to gain a dictatorship. So, Trump has concocted an ’emergency,’ claiming that a Venezuelan-based drug cartel has ‘invaded’ the U.S. He fraudulently (he is, after all, a convicted fraud) claims that this permits him to trigger the little-known Enemy Aliens Act of 1798, which permits a U.S. president to deport, without trial or judicial hearing, foreigners who he believes are a threat to the nation. The Enemy Aliens Act was controversial 227 years ago, nonetheless today. Although federal courts have now blocked Trump’s implementation of the Enemy Aliens Act, he nevertheless has used it as a lynchpin to seize more dictatorial control of the nation than any president during the past 80 years or more. In this 19-minute video podcast, American political commentator and journalist Ezra Klein compares American citizen’s slow reactions to Trump increasingly dictatorial seizure of power as akin to the metaphor of frogs who don’t yet realize that they are being fatally boiled because of how gradually the heat is being applied; how so accustomed they have become to the gradually increasing danger until the realization of dangers comes too late. He issues an alarm, an alarm call to America to stop acting as if MAGA politics is normal.
Welcome to the 21st Century: the Bulletproof Volvo
Stuck in traffic? Worried about those other drivers or pedestrians? For decades, Volvos has been renowned for automotive safety in case of collisions. Yet why not purchase a Volvo armored against terrorists, MAGA cultists (i.e., we know they don’t purchase Volvos), and psychopathic citizens? Yes, to fit your modern lifestyle, you too can purchase a large family SUVs XC60 and XC90 with bulletproof protective armoring. These vehicles, now available from any Volvo dealers, are ballistically certified to NIJ IIIA standards in combination with VPAM 2009, the extensive 360° armoring can help protect all occupants in the event of a security threat. Available in both electric and hybrid gasoline/electric versions, these cars are available both to private and corporate customers.
America Ranks Behind 20 Other Nations in its Citizens’ Inability to Pay for a Healthy Diet
So, why has the United States government, led by a convicted multiple felon, reduced the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), the country’s largest nutrition assistance program? More than 42 million Americans use the SNAP program, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture data. According to that department , more than 62% of SNAP participants are in families with children, and more than 38% are in working families. The State of New Mexico has the largest share participating in SNAP, with some 21% of the population helped by the program. The program provides crucial support for families with low-paying jobs, low-income older adults, people with disabilities and others. The answer is Republican politicians’ evil disregard for struggling citizens. Lack of healthy nutrition for those citizens is an actual problem. Yet that problem isn’t as important as are continuing cuts to the wealthiest citizens’ taxes. It more important to Republican politicians that the small minority (i.e., fewer than 5 percent of the population) of citizens, who can easily afford adequate nutrition, pay ever smaller taxes, then are the actual struggles of a larger number of citizens in need of adequate nutrition. After all, didn’t doomed Queen Marie Antoinette say to her to struggling French families with low-paying jobs and low-income French senior citizens who couldn’t afford bread, “Let them eat cake!” Today’s MAGA Republican party would be proud of her!
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Perhaps it will be like the ‘Hotel California’ in that eponymous song by the Eagles: ‘You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.” North Korean murderous dictator Kim Jong-Un and his family open his nation’s Wonsan-Kalma seaside tourist resort town. Where might tourism come from to fill the resort town’s 20,000 hotel beds? Russia seems to be the likely answer. Western economic sanctions against Russia for its disastrous invasion of the Ukraine has greatly limited the nations in which Russians can vacation (Egypt, Dubai, and Thailand are among the nations that still allow them). Frequent flyer Ben Schlappig offers some thoughts at Wonsan-Kalma.
My Favorite Beach in the World
I’ve swum in the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian oceans and the Caribbean and Mediterranean seas. I’ve trod the beaches of numerous American, Mexican, Brazilian, Hawaiian, Caribbean, South African, Balinese, and Persian Gulf beaches. Yet my favorite beach in the world, where I’ve lately been staying, is this one on my wife’s native island. It is superb, always sunny year-round, and free to use. See why in this six-minute video.
These Next Four Years
If the choice in the 2024 U.S. election had been Harris versus Romney, or vs McCain, or vs Bob Dole, or vs George W. Bush, et. al., in other words, a political contest between two honorable candidates and respected policies, then I could accept the advice of the many MAGA supporters who now triumphantly cackle, “Accept the decision of the American people!” What an hypocritical irony that these same hypocrite MAGAts still refuse to acknowledge Joe Biden’s absolute and thoroughly proven 2020 victory over the now Convicted Felon. They now in 2024 claim that the Convicted Felon won a ‘massive mandate’, yet refuse to acknowledge at all that Biden won the 2020 popular vote by 7,059,422 votes, which is more than three-times the 2024 popular vote victory margin of the Convicted Felon’s paltry (2,289,255 votes) victory over Kamala Harris in 2024. Indeed, I have no reluctance at all acknowledging that the winner of the 2024 U.S. Presidential Election is a Convicted Felon. He who won popular vote by an even slimmer margin than Jimmy Carter did in 1976 (1.5% versus Carter’s 2.0%) and by one-tenth the popular vote margin that the 17% margin that hapless Republican Herbert Hoover won in 1928. As I mention in the ‘Massive Mandate’ fallacy section below, the Convicted Felon not only won fewer than half of all votes cast for president in in 2024 but also that more American voters in 2024 voted against the Convicted Felon than for him during the 2024 election (do see the incontrovertible simple arithmetic of that in the ‘Massive Mandate’ section below). What I do have trouble with is that a minority but plurality of American voters, like toddlers, willfully or ignorantly stuck their fingers into the political electrical socket in the dim hopes that their doing so will improve their lives. I’ve recently heard some MAGAts claim that the Convicted Felon’s election victory by a minority yet plurality of American votes casts ‘proves’ that he is the correct choice; that he is the righteousness one; and that any criticism now of the Convicted Felon indicates not that the people who voted for him were wrong but that any critics of him are. Such MAGAts delusionally forget that it was in a fair and free election during 1932 that a minority yet plurality of voters elected Adolph Hitler to lead Germany. History has long proven that a wrong choice, an […]
The Red Pyramid
The Red Pyramid, constructed 2575–2563 BCE (4600 years ago) by Pharoah Sneferu. Located at the Dahshur necropolis, 55 kilometers south of Giza, Egypt. Photo taken November 3, 2024.
All But Tut (Tutankhamun, That Is)
The long-delayed Grand Egyptian Museum (GEM), originally scheduled to open in 2013 and house more than 100,00 artifacts from Ancient Egypt, including the complete collection from the tomb of Pharoah Tutankhamun, finally opened on October 16th — except for the complete Tutankhamun collection. That, for the time being, remains at the old Egyptian Museum downtown at Cairo’s Tahir Square. Last year at this time, Emma and I and our Saudi friend Tariq, who resides in Cairo, were given a private tour of the GEM’s central atrium, a tour that the GEM operated as a trial run before its grand opening. It was wonderful, whetted our desire to see the GEM’s thousands of artifacts. With 81,000 square meters (872,000 square feet) of floor space, GEM is the world’s largest archeological museum and is located adjacent to the Great Pyramids of Giza. So, Emma and I have now decided to return to Egypt next month and see it. We’ll invite our friend Tariq. We’ve now renewed our visas. This will be our fourth trip to Egypt since 2022. We are gradually becoming old Cairo hands.