Won't someone please give Peter Jennings a little more room?
Photo editing in the wrong hands can be painful, even a little
dangerous.
Doesn't it just hurt your neck to look at this picture? The more you
look at that picture, the more your head wants to tilt over,
instinctively trying to get his attention so you can snap your head up
straight as if to say, "See? Just straighten your neck. It's that
easy."
I look at it for more than five minutes, and I have to go home and
beg the wife for a neck massage. She just sticks the base of the
blender on my neck and hits "Puree." Then she goes back to chasing our
kids all over the place.
I mean, he's got to have a crick in his neck from sitting like that
all day. If his banner was just a few pixels taller he could straighten
his neck out - and he'd probably have a more cheerful disposition. He
might refer to the United States as "our country" instead of "this
country" more often, but that's probably a displaced-Canadian thing. Or
a journalist-trying-to-be-impartial-and-nonpatriotic thing.
Reporters, after all, are supposed to be impartial people. Jennings
probably writes a lot of his own stuff - and I suppose he uses a
computer too, although I wonder if when we see him typing it's just for
show. Surely he has a staff that does all the typing and an assistant
to read his mail for him. (And also to keep a sharp eye out for powdery
substances.) Like Al Gore inventing the Internet, he probably has
someone do it for him so he can get the credit.
Speaking of Al, what's with that beard, eh? Some sort of disguise,
probably. Some sort of Secret Service trick they use for when the
former Vice President wants to go out in public without being mobbed.
But now the secret is spoiled, because we've all seen it.
That reminds me about the Vice President, shaking hands, and
SpaceCamp. Some years ago I had the opportunity to meet Dan Quayle. He
certainly doesn't remember me, but maybe his Secret Service detachment
remembers the fat guy with a beard that stood up at Space Camp when he
wasn't supposed to stand up, and made them all stick their hands in
their jackets. Probably not. I got to shake his hand anyway. I've
washed that hand hundreds (more like thousands) of times since.
He actually gave a kind of passable speech, although I can't
remember quite what he said except "space is good."
Space is good, except when it is being used for missile defense or
government plots and alien invaders. Being from Kentucky, the world
"alien" meant "not of this world" long before it meant "can I see your
green card please" like it does out here in California. To folks in
Kentucky, people from other places are "y'all'er not from around here,
are ye." No one in Kentucky seriously says "furriner" for "foreigner"
unless they've been watching too much Beverly Hillbillies. Oh, and for
all our non-U.S. readers, that whole "Beverly Hillbillies" thing is
talking about Tennessee, not Kentucky. And Kentucky is a place, not a
way of preparing chicken.
Anyway, back to my point about missile defense. If you want Jennings
to stop having that little lilt in his voice that says, "Missile
defense is an unproven boondoggle," you're going to have to give him a
taller office - or a shorter chair maybe. Anyone would be grumpy if
they held their neck tilted like that all day long.
So, let's fix Mr. Jennings using a little trick I like to call,
Fixing Mr. Jennings.
First I cut out his head using GraphicConverter. Then I rotated it
-20 degrees and got this: 
Next, I pasted it back onto the logo. A light touch of a few pixels
later, a little Gaussian blur, a little unsharp masking, and
voilà! I have given the man a few more years of pain-free
living. Next thing you know, they'll be posting this picture and
claiming it was their (or his) idea all along.
Amazing what you can do with a nice program and a little patience.
Well, you technically have to have both, and we all know that
GraphicConverter is a really nice program. I note, however, that his
right eye looks smaller than his left eye. You could probably fix that,
too, if you had a little time. Myself, I need to let some things stand
as nature intended.
Have fun GraphicConverting!
