Unabashed

The Ansel Adams Shyster

Matt Mitchell — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 14:42:32 +0000

Have you seen this? Some dude bought some film negatives at a yard sale and decided they were long lost Ansel Adams prints and so has begun to sell them. He sells them for as much as $7500, complete with a certificate of authenticity. By all accounts, he’s been an annoying shyster, badgering the Ansel Adams Trust to admit the prints are authentic, but of course they won’t do that, because there’s no way to prove, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that they are.

The shyster in question has “put together a team of experts,” who have of course done exactly as they were paid to do and signed off on the prints as being indisputably Adams’ work.

Opinions, however, do not guarantee authenticity.

To me, this is one huge ripoff of an artist’s name and legacy. It would be one thing to create prints for personal use and claim they are Adams’ work, or even to post them on the web under the artist’s name, free for people to download if they like, under the acknowledgment that they may or may not be actual authentic Adams prints.

But to sell them? To build a business around their guaranteed authenticity? It’s unscrupulous. This man is a shyster and a treasure hunter. Not that there’s anything wrong with treasure hunters in general, except when they are such failures at hunting treasure that they have to invent their treasure. Here is a man wanting to get rich off someone else’s name, someone else’s work, and he’s not a representative of Mr. Adams’ Trust, he’s not a relative, he’s nothing. He deserves less than nothing for his efforts in this, he deserves a nice long prison sentence.

The Adams Trust is suing him, and though I’m often on the side of free sharing, this guy just crossed the line with me: Profiteering in the most despicable manner. I hope the Adams Trust rips him wide open and drains him dry.

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The Wrath of Mother Nature Unveiled [Apocalypse, Vengeful God, Doom] on May 14th, 2008

links for 2010-07-21

Matt Mitchell — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 00:02:49 +0000

4 Ways To Make Cash Online

(tags: blog blogging business ideas money)
Beverage Industry Secrets They Don't Want You To Know

(tags: health nutrition)
Stop paying for cable/satellite

(tags: internet television tv)

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The Gorilla Test Proves Douglas Adams’s SEP Theory

Matt Mitchell — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 16:06:10 +0000

Remember in the HHG2TG books when Arthur and Ford return from prehistoric Earth to modern day by riding a Chesterfield sofa? They materialized, riding the Chesterfield, seemingly out of nowhere on the middle Lord’s Cricket Ground during a match, and at some point after a few more pages Ford began hopping around and acting generally weird (nothing out of the ordinary, that), closing one eye and then the other, waving his arms and staring past people’s heads. He explained to Arthur that he was trying to spot an “SEP,” or, “Somebody Else’s Problem.” It turns out there was a spaceship, plainly visible to everyone in the stadium, but not one person in the stadium saw it because it was “Somebody Else’s Problem.”

As it turns out, as hilarious and fantastic as this seems, according to science it’s actually possible that this would happen. That a spaceship could land in the midst of a crowd of people and not even be noticed.

The effect in the real world is called “inattentional blindness,” although they might as well have given a nod to Douglas Adams and called it the SEP Effect, because that’s essentially what it is. The effect is best illustrated by the video created by collaborators Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris:

Simons told LiveScience: “Although people do still try to rationalize why they missed the gorilla, it’s hard to explain such a failure of awareness without confronting the possibility that we are aware of far less of our world than we think.”

So, once again, the genius of Douglas Adams is irrefutable.