Each and every tourist group we get here at the south pole has their own personality – some of them are quiet and burnt out after a long ski journey. Some of them are jubilant and exited to be here after a relaxing plane ride. Some of them speak english, some dont. And some like to get tattoos at the south pole.
A few weeks ago, a tourist flight arrived at the south pole carrying American tattoo artist Jarod Powell of Farsyde Tattoo in Koloa, Hawaii. Jarod came prepared with his traditional tattoo kit, and was quick to set up shop right at the geographic south pole. Although his time here was short, he gave a few of his fellow adventurers commemorative tattoos. A few photos of the process…
Jarod’s setup, with the brand new 2013 Geographic South Pole Marker.
The pilot of the Basler airplane on which the group flew gets his mark.
Another member of the group gets a small mark on her finger
About a half mile grid north of the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, there’s a strange, frozen monument: Spoolhenge. Originally these giant spools housed the cables and pipelines that now wind their way through, around, and under the south pole station. When the supplies were offloaded from the spools, these empty monsters were stacked up on the ice to create the Spoolhenge monument.
Cable spools, standing frozen on the polar icecap.
On my way out to the reels…it’s about a 10 minute jog out. Starting from DZ, past the Cryogenics Laboratory, past a few berms, and then out to the frozen giants.
Interestingly, it looks like Annie Noble did a whole art expo on Spoolhenge.
Over labor day weekend I attended the 39th annual Telluride Film Festival. This was the fourth or fifth time that I’ve gone to the festival, and it was a great time, as always. Below is a wrapup of a few of the notable movies I saw:
The day before film festival begins, the town of Telluride uses the Elks Park outdoor space to show one old school movie, just for locals. This year they showed Rock N Roll Highschool, starring The Ramones. It was a fun, weird, trippy throwback, and featured fun music by The Ramones – a band I had never really listened to before. Before the cityfolk rolled into town for the proper film festival, it was fun to hang with the local crowd and watch a strange movie. Trailer:
By far the most fun movie at Film Festival. The music, acting, and scenery in The Sapphires was great. I loved seeing the recreation of the Vietnam War social scene, and it was interesting seeing a different side of the war. Although I don’t listen to a ton of “soul” music, I loved the tracks in this movie, and the energy of the girls was great. Highly recommended for a fun, interesting film. Definitely go see it! Trailer:
This is it. This was my movie for the 39th Telluride Film Festival. By far the best movie I saw – Superstar combines an intersting and complexly surreal storyline with engaging and interesting characters, and is presented with visionary cinematography. I loved the geometric shots, attention to visual detail, and tripped out surrealistic vibe of the film. Sitting through a few hours of subtitles was well worth it for this film, and I’d highly recommend going to see it. As an added bonus, I even got a strangely “meta” photo with star Kad Merad. Trailer:
Direct from Norway’s tourism board, check out this mega 360 degree photo taken hovering in the air above Geirangerfjorden. Click through to check out interactive features, including maps and other views. Created by Making View.
Does a higher HIT bit get you better camera “resolution”?
The Descriptive Camera works a lot like a regular camera—point it at subject and press the shutter button to capture the scene. However, instead of producing an image, this prototype outputs a text description of the scene. Modern digital cameras capture gobs of parsable metadata about photos such as the camera’s settings, the location of the photo, the date, and time, but they don’t output any information about the content of the photo. The Descriptive Camera only outputs the metadata about the content. … After the shutter button is pressed, the photo is sent to Mechanical Turk for processing and the camera waits for the results. A yellow LED indicates that the results are still “developing” in a nod to film-based photo technology. With a HIT price of $1.25, results are returned typically within 6 minutes and sometimes as fast as 3 minutes. The thermal printer outputs the resulting text in the style of a polaroid print.
French designer Pierre-Stéphane Dumas has put a new spin on camping outdoors with his series of tent-like chambers shaped like igloos, under the name Bubbletree. Each bubble suite is fit to be fully furnished with enough space for a bed and resting chairs. They come in two forms—transparent and half-opaque—for different settings, whether you want to lay back and take in your surroundings or simply have a private lodge outdoors.
