Your Daily Photo (Is This Christmas-y Enough For You? Edition)

Actually I guess this isn't Christmas-y at all, so most likely you'd answer no to the question posed in the title.

(does work for a belated Saturnalia, so for all you pagans still celebrating the ancient Roman traditions, enjoy!)

Your Daily Photo (Just Cause Althouse Posts Pictures with a Particular Color Scheme Doesn't Mean I'll Always Do the Same Edition)

I'm not a copycat, I'm more of an homage-ist. Plus, I took these photos first (from the Getty Villa set back in late May, so really, she's copying me...)

Shots presented as originally posted at Flickr, don't think too much retouching was done on any of these.

Should she and Meade find themselves out this way later this summer, Getty Villa should definitely be a place high on their lists to visit, if only as a place to snap some pictures.

Speaking of Green and Purple, Voices Green and Purple, by The Bees...

Your Daily Photo (I've Got Your PINK Right Here, Althouse Edition)

Althouse has been posting a series of lovely photos with pink objects today, here's my contributions (all from my Getty set, altered with Photoshop Elements, using their smart brush tool, one of my photos could have been posted unaltered, but that didn't stop me from changing it anyway)

This post was not sponsored by Pink Taco, just in case anyone worried that I might be doing some viral marketing on the side...

(food's not bad there, by the way, and the wait staff tends towards ridiculously gorgeous)

Your Daily Photo (Being In Focus Is Overrated Edition)

This shot, not quite in focus, just a hair off, but I think being slightly off improves the composition (and Flickr users would seem to agree, it's the shot that's received the most hits since Flickr decided yesterday became today, Flickr stats seem to flip at UTC+0, rather than local time for each user). In some things good enough turns out to be better than being perfect. I swear that makes sense, somehow.

Didn't take any new pictures yesterday, so you get consecutive days of Getty Villa pics, and you are going to like it. Almost took a picture of a business stating proudly with a sign on their front door that they had "Mexican Coke" available, but decided it would be too much of a hassle. The "Mexican Coke" phenomenon has been going on for awhile, in this case it isn't a matter of storefronts openly selling nose candy (that'd be Coca Colombiana, or so I'm told), instead it's a thing that's pretty popular throughout the Southwest, and that's Coca-Cola bottled in Mexico. Why would someone import a non-alcoholic beverage made with Mexican water? It's not the crisp, clean Mexican water people are after, but that pure uncut sweet funk that folks remember from back in the day when soda was made with something called 'sugar'. Coca-Cola insists that sugar based Coca-Cola and high fructose corn syrup based Coca-Cola taste the same, but the steady stream of bottles and cans coming north suggests many people assume differently.

The main reason we get HFCS in all our sweetened crap, while the rest of the world still relies on cane sugar has everything to do with pork barrel (to the tune of $40B annual subsidies for corn in the USA) and electoral politics (I'm giving you the Stink-Eye Iowa), and nothing to do with taste. There's no hard data to support the claims that HFCS is worse than sugar, all the human studies have looked at correlation between obesity and diabetes rates and the increase of corn syrup in the diets, but the mechanism of the link, or if there is any causation at all, remains elusive.

Doesn't matter to me one way or the other, I just drink diet soda when I drink soda, but mostly I drink (filtered) tap water. And yes, I call those sugary (or nutrasweet-y) soft drinks, soda, it's one of the few remaining terms with strong regional quirks in American English. I was born and raised in a 'soda' county, so that's what I call the stuff.

Even I'm confused as to what any of the above has to do with the profile of an attractive young woman snapped furtively and slightly out of focus while she perused antiquities, but I'm sure there's a connection in some way (probably has to do with a theme of 'sweetness').

Your Daily Photo (I Call This One, 'Roman Style Fountain of a Bacchanal Figure and Gadzooks Check Out the Badunkadunk in the Background' Edition)

What more can be said, really (alternate title for this post, "This One is For Tracy Jordan").

More shots snapped at Getty Villa yesterday (mostly badunkadunk free).