Surreal moment from the folk festival before the third act of the finale concert. I'm lying pretty far back soaking in the sound and half-asleep when the CBC host-announcer gets up on stage and goes: "and everyone let's give a warm welcome to a philanthropist .. lover of the arts and music .. a filmmaker .. give it up for STEVEN SEAGAL."

I leapt right up and squinted at the stage. Yep, there he was dressed all in black. The martial arts star of "Out for Justice", "Above the Law" and "Under Siege" is up on stage introducing the bluegrass musician Ricky Skaggs. The applause is muted and possibly a bit fearful. Is Seagal -- also a volunteer deputy in his home town in Louisiana -- here to bust us for smoking weed? Is he going to confuse the capoeira act for real fighting?

Updated: they have suspended their RSS syndication.

This may end up with my quitting Flickr finally.

Yesterday, a local photographer I know Andrew Ferguson realized that photos being posted to the Vancouver Flickr group were being streamed automatically onto a blog called Thatsvancouver.com (which has a series of sister blogs for other cities) and alerted others in this thread. A quick look confirmed that they had several of my photos as well. All photos show up with the text: "__(photographer)___ has submitted to the pool", when really they submitted to the Vancouver pool, not consented to have it autoblogged by this other site.

I ordered the Taschen hard cover of Brassaï's "Paris" such a long time ago my credit card expired since and I had forgotten I had wanted it or ordered it. No matter, it arrived today. Quite cheap as it was a pre-order. Not complaining about that. But it also lists two other books that it says had been shipped to me. Really? Where are they? Time to go back to Amazon and ask some questions.

As for the book. It's gorgeous. 191 pages of content, big beautifully printed black and white at a pre-order price that was basically lunch money (okay, deluxe lunch money). I love Taschen.