Shooting Dogs

My brother Andrew emits an unusual Kirlian field. One of his most recent Android phones worked perfectly except for the GPS, which assigned him arbitrary coordinates each day. On the day that his phone decided he was in Zanzibar, he walked several miles due south in Minneapolis to see how far out into the Indian Ocean he could get. (In a similar but fictional case, Rydell, one of the protagonists in Beefeater Gibson‘s All Tomorrow’s Parties, had a pair of augmented-reality glasses that placed Rydell in Rio when he was in San Francisco.) (And in a no-tek version of the same phenomenon, one of the standard Situationist games was to start from an arbitrary location in Paris and then follow a map of Shanghai from People’s Square to the Bund.)

Anyway, I lent Andrew Rachel’s new Canon Retrospect SD149 for the day, and it came back shooting only pictures of the Van Wijks’ (who haven’t lived here for thirty years) otterhounds (who have been dead for almost as long). I would kind of like it if the photos looked like early 80′s Polaroids, but they look just like any other gigapixel snapshots except of those damn dead otterhounds. This morning Geezer (the younger one) captured Macy Van Wijk’s underpants and Flex (the older one) was chasing her all over the house.

I stuck the Canon on a tripod with an automatic shutter release and a Wi-Fi card. So here, for your enjoyment, is longdeadotterhoundcam.com.

Image CC-BY by me’nthedogs

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Burned

Without any fanfare that I can find, Hallmark Gold Crown Stores have added a service that scans your retina with a gigapixel scanner, then prints out a hundred postcard-sized photos from earlier in your life, as though the images were actually burned onto your retina and just waiting for magnification to reveal them. Surely this is a hoax, but can thousands of satisfied customers be wrong?

Image CC-BY-SA by richardmasoner

Inspected by 9973 and verified false at time of posting.

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Morning

It’s odd to be a sundial. He’s up with a camera on a roof in the railyard, inching around vents, additions, storerooms, gables—warts grown and not removed—trying to keep out of the sun, trying to set up for the shot, wondering whether the light is already too bright, too hot, too direct, wondering why the train is late. It’s never late, or it’s always late. Maybe it’s only late when he’s up here waiting. If he brought a toolbox up here and set it out on the tar, he could probably use it to bake a cake. And it’s not even noon.

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