This will be one of those entries where you realize how incredibly out of touch I am with the mainstream. For a while I've seen subway ads for "Trimspa," the diet product endorsed by Anna Nicole Smith. Apart from the fact that she's wearing a full wetsuit in the 'after' photos, I always noticed the ads boasting: "#1 in Hoodia Gordonii." I puzzled over how many meanings this could have. Was Hoodia Gordonii a place? A category of diet products or a contest between them? Another kind of category, like an extreme sports league? The silliness of the name contributed significantly to my fascination, because it didn't really sound like it could be any of those things without my having previously known about it. Then I passed a nutrition store yesterday and realized the answer was one I hadn't thought of: an ingredient.

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A new project has occupied my researches of late. I'd like to be able to document my surroundings with photographs. The faces of the people passing by on the street, and sitting across from me on the subway, items for sale in stores, little fleeting scenes that pop up in front of me. Anything really, but most importantly things that disappear too fast to capture with my regular camera, because it takes several seconds to start up, or too sensitive for the bulky regular camera, like people.

Some photographers are skilled at capturing people candidly. They have some combination of these qualities: quickness, sneakiness, a long zoom lens, or just being very personable and therefore innocuous, not drawing attention to themselves. I seem to be the personified antithesis of these necessary qualities. Every time I merely take out my regular camera, just taking pictures of scenery, people start giving me suspicious looks. When I was in Paris and tried to get more adventurous, I pissed off a couple of people, but fortunately neither were in a position to come after me (but that's a story for another day). So I shall have to make up for my shortcomings with special equipment.

The requirements are these, in roughly descending order of importance. The camera must be concealable on my person. I must be able to aim it to some degree, in an innocuous way. It must be able to stay on for a significant period of time, without turning off automatically as many cameras do, and without killing the batteries too quickly. It must be able to operate silently (but if not, I can probably go in and rip the internal speaker out) and without any bright lights flashing (see previous). I must be able to in some way (hacking the electronics if need be) connect a remote trigger so that, for example, I can take a picture while keeping my hand in my pocket even if the camera is elsewhere on my person.

I think that's most of the must-haves. It would also be great if the camera can adapt to interior lighting (such as on the subway), if it turns on quickly and has little shutter lag, if it can have a zoom capability (that would also have to be triggered remotely), and of course the more resolution the better. But these things are tall orders for tiny cameras.

Next time I'll talk about some of the cameras I've chosen to start with and the different technical approaches one could take to various aspects of this problem.

JV recently pointed me to two great resources:

Videos of the British Prime Minister's Question Time. Never could seem to catch this on C-SPAN and now I know why, it airs at 7am on Wednesdays, when I'd never be awake, and at 9pm on Sundays, when there are 10 other good shows on. JV also helped out with this primer on the policies of the three main parties.

The Complete Sherlock Holmes. So far I've gotten through "A Study in Scarlet." I may regret it later in life when my eyes melt from endless scrolling, but I actually like reading on the web, even long pieces. Without as many page breaks it goes faster for me, and I tend to do more of it, because I'm already in front of the computer most of the day.

Like most sites that feature user reviews for products, Netflix filters out the riffraff by showing the "reviews voted most helpful" on the main page for the product. The result in this case is that usually at least one of the three featured reviews (not including the three most recent reviews shown below them) tells you what people who like the movie like about it, or offers some historical perspective, and is therefore very helpful in deciding whether or not I should rent it.

But something seems to be going haywire today. On several movie pages I've looked at today, the featured reviews seem to be among the least helpful. The first time this happened it was really quite annoying, because the first review gave away the ending of the movie! And the review had no business being on that page, because it had received 2 votes of "helpful" to 109 "not helpful"s. So to give you fair warning, if you haven't seen the movie Layer Cake, and you're at all interested in it, don't read the user reviews! I have to imagine a lot of people are going to have the movie ruined, because an article just appeared in the Times about the movie's phenomenal success on DVD, which is outpacing its theater earnings ninefold.

At first I couldn't find a similar problem on the pages for other movies, but after some more browsing it seems to be spreading, and the results have been more amusing than in that first case. I'd always been impressed with how cogent and knowledgeable the user reviews seemed to be, and now I'm getting to see the other half. The stupid half. Examples:

Another featured review of Layer Cake:

"I could not sit through this movie. My Boyfriend watched it and said it made not sense."
0 out of 22 people found this review helpful.

A featured review of Funny Games:

"Movie not in english!! ruined my weekend...couldn't watch..who wants to have to read the movie???i got a headache after 5 minutes & took it out!"
2 out of 59 people found this review helpful.
(Note: the reviewer rated the movie 5 stars out of 5.)

From a featured review of Requiem for a Dream:

"Don't be decieved by the good acting and film score by Kronos."

From a featured review of Manhattan:

"This Movie is entirely in Black and White. I wish I knew this before I watched it. I had just finished Schindler's List and was not in the mood for another B&W movie. Probably the main reason I gave it such a low rating."

A featured review of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid:

"I really like seeing these 2 together, but there was something missing in this movie. I can't really put my finger on it, but something was missing."

Well, in the middle of collecting these, I just started seeing "Netflix Site Error" when trying to access any page on the site. Guess they found this.