Google, auto-enhancing images

[Peanuts, January 1, 1994, with “Auto Enhance” off and on. Makes whites greyer!]

I noticed a strange development a few months ago: images in new OCA posts did not match the originals in color. The problem was especially noticeable with white backgrounds, which turned dingy grey. The changed colors are the result of a Google feature (not bug!) called “Auto Enhance,” and auto-enhance (as I will call it) can be turned off only in Google+. In other words, one must sign up for Google+ to undo changes to photographs uploaded to Blogger (and stored in Google’s Picasa Web Albums).

I have no interest in Google+, and at some point I realized that auto-enhance affected only JPEGs, not PNGs. So I began uploading only PNGs. But yesterday a PNG came out with a sepia tint. I tried getting the image into a post via Flickr — doable but kinda cumbersome. So I reached for a cliché, gritted my teeth, signed up for Google+, and turned off auto-enhance.

The good news: you can delete a Google+ profile and auto-enhance will remain off. At least so far. My mantra: Sign up. Turn off. Drop out.

Note that deleting a Google+ profile does not mean deleting a Google Account. Google blurs the distinction by referring to a Google+ profile as “your entire Google profile.” To delete “your entire Google profile” sounds pretty drastic. But “your entire Google profile” is your Google+ profile. Deleting a Google+ profile deletes a Google+ profile.

Some relevant reading
Delete my Google+ profile (Google Support)
How to disable auto enhance (Picasa Resources)
Stop Google from “fixing” pictures that are loaded through Blogger (Blogger Hints and Tips)

MLK

[“Martin Luther King Jr. (L) greeting demonstrators at the Prayer Pilgrimage.” Photograph by Paul Schutzer. Washington, D.C., 1957. From the Life Photo Archive. Click for a larger view.]

From Standford University’s Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute:

On 17 May 1957, nearly 25,000 demonstrators gathered at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., for a Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom, featuring three hours of spirituals, songs, and speeches that urged the federal government to fulfill the three-year-old Brown v. Board of Education decision. The last speech of the day was reserved for Martin Luther King’s “Give Us the Ballot” oration, which captured public attention and placed him in the national spotlight as a major leader of the civil rights movement.

The text of the speech is here. It makes for interesting reading in a time of increased efforts to suppress voting.

The compleaten angler

From the local news: “A festival in east-central Illinois will soon show off its best anglers and explain why it’s important to eat them.”

Thank you, local news.

Related reading
Also from the local news

A joke in the traditional manner

Why did Oliver Hardy attempt a solo career in movies?

No spoilers. The answer is in the comments.

Related jokes
Santa Claus : Samuel Clemens : Hardy Mums : Bela Lugosi

[“In the traditional manner” means à la my dad.]

Ph.D. debt

“A new crowdsourcing project provides an eye-opening glimpse into the hefty amounts of debt some graduate students take on to pay for their education and how hopeless many of them feel about their prospects for repaying it”: The Cost of a Ph.D. (The Chronicle of Higher Education). The project, in the form of a Google spreadsheet, is here: Ph.D. Debt Survey. It’s a sorrowful thing to read.

Something I said in a post last October: “Borrowing any amount of money to finance graduate work in the humanities is folly.” William Pannapacker’s advice about graduate work in the humanities is simpler: “Just don’t go” — unless you are well-heeled or well-connected or supported by a partner or are earning a credential and your employer is paying. Hard times here and everywhere you go. Times is harder than ever been before.

Winter, ookyook

Winter is ukiuq, or ookyook. Remember ookyook?

“One could have Timofey televised”

[Vladimir Nabokov, Pnin (1957).]

Nabokov seems to have imagined — if only as a horrible pipedream — the end of the classroom and the rise of something MOOC-like. Phonograph records and televisions for all!

Related reading
All Nabokov posts (Pinboard)

Party?

The January/February Atlantic asks a question: “What party would you most like to have attended?”

I am not a party person. But I would like to have attended the party given by Timofey Pnin in Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Pnin (1957). Partly to see Pnin (a mensch among men), partly to sample Pnin’s Punch (“a heady mixture of chilled Chateau Yquem, grapefruit juice, and maraschino”), partly to hear the dowdy conversation (“This beverage is certainly delicious”), partly to take in Nabokov’s satiric picture of life in a New England college town. I would volunteer to stay late and help Pnin with the dishes.

At the risk of repeating The Atlantic and myself: What party would you most like to have attended?

[Sad: The Atlantic asked this question of its readers on December 22 and has had one response. So I think it’s fine to ask the question here.]

Word of the day: chinoiserie

Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Day is chinoiserie:

chinoiserie \sheen-wah-zuh-REE\ noun
: a style in art (as in decoration) reflecting Chinese qualities or motifs; also : an object or decoration in this style

This word always makes me think of Duke Ellington: the Ellington-Strayhorn adaptation of Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker turns the “Chinese Dance” into “Chinoiserie.” And The Afro-Eurasian Eclipse (1971) begins with Ellington’s own “Chinoiserie,” a feature for the tenor saxophonist Harold Ashby. Here is the studio recording and, even better, a performance from a 1973 concert. That concert, released as Rugged Jungle (Lost Secret, 2003) is ample evidence that even in its last days, the Ellington band could be a force of nature.

Domestic comedy

“Let’s get Kleenex. It’s a name I’ve grown to trust.”

Cf. Einbinder Flypaper.

Related reading
All domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)