What God hath wrought, let no man Photoshop
Posted: Thursday, July 31, 2008 1:47 AM by Will Femia
The actress Keira Knightley caused headlines on one of my favorite subjects:
Keira Knightley says no to airbrushing her boobs. No, I don't mean boobs, I mean digitally altering real humans to make them look "better" by making them look less like humans. (If you really can't stand to wait for the Salon.com ads, the main visual aids are
here and
here in the Daily Mail.)
Keira Knightley is a curious case because she has the kind of physique
that is typically criticized for creating unhealthy body images and serving as a poor role model for impressionable young people. In short, she has the kind of body other people are usually photoshopped to resemble more closely. Which brings me to a new-to-me term in the field of digital celebrity body morphing: "
reverse airbrushing." Reverse airbrushing is a phrase someone already thought up to describe the counter intuitive practice of using digital photo manipulation to actually make someone fatter.
As you may have heard, the
bountiful booty trend championed by J-Lo has passed (in spite of evidence provided by
this schlocky, mostly-ridiculous-but-still-sort-of-makes-an-important-point survey NOTE: Nudity), leaving in its wake a bony booty trend.
Thus, for the good of us all and the products they sell, thin women are having to be made more perfect, if less recognizable, with a few helpful mouse clicks.
Thighs thickened, arms smoothed, and in cases like Keira's boobs biggened - unless, like Keira, they take a stand.
ADDING: Coincidentally, I happened upon this one this morning:
Researchers Find Thin Models Make Viewers Like Brands More, but Themselves Less (and eat less).
Speaking of lady parts, while it's never good to laugh about natural disasters, since yesterday's earthquake seems to have gone off with relatively little tragedy we can highlight a lighter moment. Those of us who checked Twitter for earthquake references found
this gal to have the
day's winning line in reporting her experience of being in the middle of a gynecological exam when the earthquake struck.
Moving on...
Crocodile Cage of Death - You can never lose when you use the phrase "of death" in the title of anything.
Spherical multi-touch display screen.The Tron 2 (Tr2n) trailer was shown at Comicon but as far as I know hasn't been released online yet. Someone pointed a camera at the screen while it was playing and got
a pretty weak bootleg but it looks awesome nonetheless. Someone else edited the bootleg to make it
bigger and correct the angle.
Speaking of trailers everyone is watching online but that don't seem to have an official release for better quality viewing, here's that trailer for
the new W. movie from Oliver Stone.
"The Orwell Prize, Britain’s pre-eminent prize for political writing, is
publishing George Orwell’s diaries as a blog." (Not yet, soon.)
I didn't see Wall-E but apparently
Presto is the short film they play before the feature movie.
If you paid 36 grand for
a pair of jeans from the 1890's would you try them on or quickly put them in a glass display case?
Awesome: What happens when you pour
a bowl of liquid nitrogen into a swimming pool. (Just a lot of fog but still cool.)
I made a note to read the New York Times article on the
new personal jet pack but then I saw Alan's coverage. Holy moly the guy wrote
the definitive work on jet packs. Someone might as well just copy/paste it into Wikipedia under "jet pack."
Speaking of futuristic transportation, check out
Jack Nicholson's car of the future! If only there was technology like this 30 years ago, by now we'd have completely dumped the oil economy. Oh....
Speaking of the future and corrupt energy economies,
The Solar Billionaires: Who’s Made Mad Money off of Solar Power? (Just kidding. I don't begrudge these guys their success -yet.)
Top 10 Most Pirated TV Shows on BitTorrent - Foolishly I thought this list would reflect what's actually popular on TV, maybe CSI or The Office or something. Instead it's all the cable shows I watch on DVR after my wife goes to bed. Weeds is the only one I've considered downloading on Bit Torrent because I haven't found an easy, free online collection of them and I haven't had Showtime since Mike Tyson got his butt kicked by Lennox Lewis - though to be honest I haven't looked very hard and now I'm busy trying to catch up on last season's Mad Men while it's still free On Demand.
Could this possibly be real or is this another one of those unauthorized Gatorade ads? And P.S. what the heck is a blob jump launch? That's really a thing?
How to carry groceries with a square of cloth - This is the coolest Japanese folding video since the
one-move t-shirt fold.
Al Gore Places Infant Son In Rocket To Escape Dying Planet - Hilarious illustration, and I never realized the similarity of the name Jor El to Gore, Al.
That Ludacris Obama song that Obama ended up having to apologize for is on
the Ludacris MySpace page as Politics as Usual.
NOTE: Pretty clear curses out loud. Fans should stick with
will.i.am. (Even the one with the
weird chanting is better.)
When I saw the headline the other day about the latest high profile terrorist-I-never-heard-of
killed by U.S. forces in the war on terror my reaction was a cynical snort because the news came on the same day as another big headline, "
Bush Leaving Next President Record Federal Budget Deficit." Funny, that. Such is the sorry state of my faith in our ruling powers but even I wasn't cynical enough to think this could be
a recycled terrorist-I-never-heard-of. I guess Abu Khabab al-Masri is a common name or else we're fighting zombie terrorists, in which case things are much worse than I realized.
