12:33 – It’s a standard Saturday around here, if a bit brisker than expected for this time of year. Barbara just finished cleaning house, and I’m doing laundry interspersed with working on the biology lab book.
I also need to get the table in my office cleaned up and set up for tabletop photography. Many of the images for the book are shot through the microscope, but many more are standard tabletop shots. And at some point I’ll shoot the cover for the book, which’ll probably feature a microscope, Petri dishes, and other biology-related lab stuff. I’ll take some pains with illumination for the cover shot, but I’m hoping that I can get away with quick-and-dirty flash illumination for most of the table-top shots, using on-camera flash with one or two slave flashes for fill.
17:50 – It’s been a long time since I studied Greek, and even then it was classical rather than modern Greek. But today I realized that Google Translate probably supported Greek, so I entered the name of the Greek finance minister, Ευάγγελος Βενιζέλος, into Google Translate and asked it for an English translation. The English version was, and I am not making this up, “Joe Isuzu”.
Well, okay. I am making it up, but not by much. All politicians lie pretty much constantly, but Evangelos Venizelos makes most US politicians look like paragons of honesty. I was about to say, “like Honest Abe”, but the truth is that Abraham Lincoln was a lying weasel like the rest of them. But not as bad as Venizelos. I’ve noticed that none of the images I’ve seen of Venizelos is in profile, presumably because his nose is about 10 meters long by now.
His latest porkie? After meeting with the troika, Venizelos says that Greece has met all of their terms, and is absolutely certain to get the next tranche of the bailout. I’m sure that comes as a surprise to the troika auditors, since Greece has met literally none of their terms, nor even come close to doing so. Nor even tried to do so. As to any assurance that the next tranche will be approved, Venizelos may be right, but if he is it has nothing to do with Greece meeting the terms; it’s simply overwhelming fear on the part of the EU and the IMF that a Greek default will cause the euro to collapse almost overnight. And that fear is well-founded.