Being an internet refuge for Graeme McMillan
From the Guardian’s Photo Blog:
A boy jumps from a pier of bridge against the sunset across Han River in Wuhan, China. Photograph: Barcroft Media
There’s something so ridiculously summery about this image to me, and so serene, too. Everything is weightless, waiting for the splash.
From the Guardian’s Photo Blog:
Smoke from the Carpenter 1 fire in the Spring Mountains range is illuminated by the setting sun as it billows behind hotel-casinos on the Las Vegas Strip. Photograph: Ethan Miller/Getty Images
I’m pretty sure that’s the very definition of foreboding, that photo.
COMICS, EVERYONE.
Seriously, Jack Kirby (with inker, D. Bruce Berry, in this case): This is just amazing. Manhunter is something that Kirby did for one issue, an edition of a series called First Series Special, in the 1970s, and it’s this entirely unfinished story filled with melodrama and potential and everything that I love about superhero comics. There’s so much there there.
Plus, that costume design is so, so great.
From the Guardian’s Photo Blog:
A vendor displays bananas at his stall in the Somali capital Mogadishu as Muslims prepare for the fasting month of Ramadan. Photograph: Feisal Omar/Reuters
In the immortal words of Gwen Stefani: “Let me hear you say this shit is bananas/B-A-N-A-N-A-S.”
So, I may have accidentally disappeared from this site a little last week. It wasn’t intentional, I promise; I just found myself entirely snowed under with work as I started writing for the Hollywood Reporter’s Heat Vision blog and realized worryingly quickly that I had underestimated just how much additional work that would actually be in reality (I gave up two other gigs in order to free up enough time, but the workload didn’t translate as I’d initially thought). That it was also a holiday weekend – Huzzah for July 4, which came at the right time to stop me feeling completely overloaded – both helped and didn’t help everything, as it frontloaded things onto the start of a week that was already busy but also gave me some breathing room that I wouldn’t have had otherwise. Anyway, I’m sorry for disappearing without notice, and will try not to do it again in future. Well, except for next week, which is Comic-Con which I’m working for Wired.com, and therefore will be crazy and quiet and AIEEEEEE.
(That I am now writing for Wired, Time and the Hollywood Reporter, by the way, is both surreal and slightly scary to me. This has to be the peak, right? It’s all downhill from here on, as I flame out in spectacular fashion.)
From the Guardian’s Photo Blog:
With 13 days to go until the royal baby’s official due date, four oversized babies wearing nappies and crowns advertise Paddy Power bookmakers on the tube for baby betting odds. Photograph: Rex Features
I’m pretty sure I speak for everyone in response to this photo when I say “WHAT IS THIS OH GOD MAKE IT GO AWAY.”
From the Guardian’s Photo Blog:
Shop till you drop: A young girl lies on the floor of the toy store. Photograph: Paul Hackett/Reuters
Today’s toy stores and killing children. Let’s just take a moment and think about that.
For once, not from the Guardian’s Photo Blog, but from the New Yorker:
Everyone at the apartment of Roberta Kaplan, the lawyer who argued Edith Windsor’s successful challenge to the Defense of Marriage Act, exploded in screams and sobs when the ruling came down. Kaplan called her mother and said, “Total victory, Mom: it couldn’t be better.” Windsor said, “I wanna go to Stonewall right now!” Then she called a friend and said, “Please get married right away!”
Photograph of Edith Windsor and Roberta Kaplan by Ariel Levy.
Rest in pieces, Defense of Marriage Act. After yesterday’s appalling Supreme Court decision regarding the Voting Rights Act, this was a relief, and some good news from a court that has demonstrated that it isn’t always on the right side of history.
From the Guardian’s Photo Blog:
An Indian man struggles pointlessly with his umbrella as waves lash the shore during a high tide in Mumbai, India. Photograph: Rajanish Kakade/AP
Despite everything, I’m choosing to look at this as an essentially optimistic photograph. Sure, when you look at it in one way, the poor man clearly had no chance of staying dry with one umbrella against all of that, but if you choose to look at it more favorably, the very fact that he tried seems kind of wonderful, don’t you think?
