A little while ago I got an email via Flickr asking if I would allow one of my photos of Oxford to be included in their online travel guide. I would be credited but not compensated.

I said sure — the site seems more flashy than useful, but at least legitimate. I was impressed that they quoted back my Creative Commons license (free for non-commercial use, with attribution) and indicated that while their site was free, it was ad-driven. Unless you’re Google, to me that means “doomed,” but best of luck on your business plan.

Anyway, it’s up on their site, along with about 10 other photos from the same location: the Pitt Rivers Museum.

If you click through the photo it goes to my Flickr page for it. Not bad.

Usually when it’s our birthdays we have two dinners: one is a big multi-course prix fixe extravaganza at a nice restaurant, and the other is cooked at home. The home-cooked dinners are easy comfort food (in their own way) and unlike most nights, the other person does not have to do the dishes. That’s the real gift.

When I make dinner for Dan’s birthday, it’s ma po tofu, adapted from Land of Plenty by Fuschia Dunlop.

My birthday was more recently. Dan made pastitsio, from Cook’s Illustrated Best 30 Minute Recipe.

Recipes follow:
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Honest Bob show at TT’s tonight:

On the subway platform, heading home, a drunk man approached me and mumbled a long stream of Spanish. I shrugged and said in English, “I don’t understand.”

He mumbled more Spanish. I put up my hands, as if to say, “Hey, what can you do, I’m American, I only speak American.”

He gestured forcifully at the train tunnel and then said, as if suddenly realizing, “No sabes.”

Automatically I agreed, “No sé.”

Then I thought, shit, now he’s going to talk to me. But he only nodded, and started walking away down the platform muttering, “No sabes, no sabes.”

Almost November but the trees are still gorgeous. I took a drive, with the camera but without the dog, northwest into Concord, Acton and Sudbury. I was looking for either abandoned buildings or open space, but this is metro Boston and everywhere the signs warned “Thickly Settled.”

I tried using Clive to locate potential sites, guided by the dearth of streets and historical road names. “Old Mill Road” was a dead end and sounded promising, but the mill, if it ever existed, was now a rifle range. “Caution Live Ammo” was all I needed to see to turn around.

Eventually I found my open space.

And just off Route 2 I found some cows.

On my way home I spotted a large adult deer grazing just off the road. I hung a U-turn and pulled to the side. It took a few minutes of scrambling to screw on the zoom, and obsessively I spent precious minutes locating the lens hood because I was worried about glare from the low afternoon sun. I ran across the street and hopped over a fence, conscious that everyone driving by could see me. I found a small rise that was clear of brush, lifted the camera to my eye and watched the deer step delicately into the woods, vanishing.

From 1955 to 1992, the Gaebler Children’s Center in Waltham, MA served the severely mentally ill children referred to the Metropolitan State Hospital. It closed due to budgetary reasons and as part of the general trend away from institutionalization. Today it sits on a large parcel of state-owned land which includes not just the hospital grounds but also numerous walking trails and nature preserves.

It was not a nice place to be a teenager.

A couple of years ago I opened an account on istockphoto.com. Stock photography websites are (correctly) accused of devaluing stock photography in general, as every jerk with a DSLR can flood the market with lousy pictures with poor white balance and make $.01 per download. I am one of those jerks.

I have earned about $200 in sales from istockphoto, and the vast majority has been from a single photo of coffee beans I shot against some cardstock in my bathroom. Here it is:

It’s not even a good photo, but it’s been paid for 332 times — earning about a fourth of the cost of the lens that took the picture. Recently it occurred to me that my contract with istockphoto is non-exclusive, so if people want to insert my coffee bean photo into their PowerPoint presentations I should allow them to purchase it from a variety of vendors.

I signed up to be a photographer on Shutterstock and submitted the required 10 photographs, including the wildly popular coffee bean photo. Shutterstock indicated that they would review my initial set and get back to me in 2 to 7 days.

Four hours later, all ten photographs were rejected.

So if you are looking for a high-quality stock photography site, may I suggest http://www.shutterstock.com?

I hate the Skybar but I like taking pictures and I’m a good girlfriend.

Honest Bob and the Factory-to-Dealer Incentives, May 10, 2007:

Salad greens:

Minty mojito:

This is galangal. I got it at Whole Foods, the first time I have seen it outside of an Asian grocery store. I bought it largely to take this picture.

That is all.