Just a blah photo?

Look again.

Hint. Look at the bark of the bigger trees, especially on the left. Look carefully at the bit of bush in front of the clouds. Do you see it yet?

The photo is actually the surface of water, a little slough in Fish Creek. I just love how good a mirror water can be. Oddly enough, the darker the bottom, and the muddier the water, to a point, the better the mirror. You have to look carefully near the bottom of the photo to see the shoreline.

Just as an experiment I ran it through Photomatix, but was a bit too much and made it obvious. Sometimes less is more.

In case you missed the update, the Conan movie last night was BAD! Which was just what we were looking for. Somehow it came and went at the time without us noticing. Maybe it was just as well.

My current read is The Square and the Power, Networks and power from the Freemasons to Facebook, by Niall Ferguson. I'm just getting into it, but I'm looking forward to where he's going. I've always been fascinated by how and why stuff happens. So much of the history books saw what happened, but don't get into the why those whats happened, or do so only in the simplest terms.

Usually, of course, the answer is money. More of it for someone in charge. I suspect that personal pique drives many events; a powerful man is aggrieved he didn't get his way. But few people are in a position to give orders and expect them to be carried out, and even those people have to worry about what is really happening. They know that sooner or later, people will band together to bring down the ruler.

Then there are the people behind the scenes. The concept of éminence grise naturally ties in with conspiracy theories, in that a person who is not holding an official position none the less wields a great deal of power, often through influencing those in official positions. The phrase originally referred to François Leclerc du Tremblay, the right-hand man of Cardinal Richelieu. Since Richelieu was trying to unify the French state (speaking broadly) such influence was probably to the good as long as you weren't Protestant. Then again, the phrase could also refer to Dick Cheney, the henchman of the first Bush administration.

Then there are the people in the street. Governments have fallen because of mass protests. There's a phrase from the Overlord's Handbook; when your common foot soldier won't fire his weapon into a crowd on your orders, it's time to flee.

Yes, this is outside tonight as I was leaving a photo gig.

Driftwood of the Day
I itched to rearrange this one a bit.