Authors that write footnotes can kiss my arse

None

NIKON D70 - 1/160 sec, f6.3 at 50mm

I've just (now) finished reading a book called Whatever happened to Tanganyika? by a guy called Harry Campbell, with a foreward by Alexander McCall Smith, whoever the hell he was.

It's a short, mostly witty and lightly entertaining book about all the places on the planet that no longer exist, along with their stories. Places like Burma, Rangoon, Biafra, Yugoslavia and Ceylon. Places that probably still exist in that dusty old Atlas that your Aunt Gerald gave you when you were a kid, but don't exist anymore in Google Earth.

Unfortunately the book was completely buggered up by bloody footnotes on every page. The book is only 139 pages long but it has 196 footnotes. That meant lots of pages have more than 1 of the bloody things. Some had 5 or 6 even and the footnotes spanned over a couple of pages.

I can never tell when you are supposed to read the bloody things. Do you read them as soon as you see the footnote number? Or do you wait till you've finished the chapter? One way buggers up the flow of the page and the other means you spend ages hunting back through the page trying to find what sentence the footnote belongs to.

I hate sidebars in magazines for the same reason. If you can't write a single coherent story that includes your witty asides within the body of the sentence or paragraph then there is something wrong with you.

So that's it, all authors and writers, are now officially on my shit list!

The Photo

Ha Ha, 401!

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Posted: Thursday, 10 July, 2008 22:41

Captured: 2008:03:27 19:17:07

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For some reason I'm reminded of this http://incredimazing.com/page/Works_Cited_Fail
Charles - Thursday, 10 July, 2008 22:53
Thoroughly impressed with this shot Dave, the off-camera lighting, the low saturation, the sharp glint in her angry eyes. The vignetting is so good I can't even tell if its from a back-shot light or done in Post. The only thing I would have liked to see was some bounce from the right to offset the half-moon effect. P.S. I think you should pay your models lots of money.
seriocomic - Friday, 11 July, 2008 10:52
Thanks seriocomic. The vignette was achieved via a Gobo'd flash right behind her. There was another flash camera left and behind the camera. Unfortunately by then I'd run out of strobes, so none from the right. And believe me, I pay my models extremely well.
Dave - Friday, 11 July, 2008 11:19
Alexander McCall Smith wrote "The No1 ladies Detective Agency" a very good book
Ma - Friday, 11 July, 2008 11:23
I know you are reading strobist too much when you have a Gobo'd flash at the rear - I still think that a white card or silver reflector to the right would have eliminated the need for another light-source - but I have only used additional lighting on one shoot. Another P.S. - can you tidy the saved comment page? I only got a blank screen last time - doesn't pixel-post have a cleaner system yet? AJAX Commenting?
seriocomic - Friday, 11 July, 2008 15:38
Apologies for the blank page, I have a bit of code to Twitter our house twitter account when ever a message is posted and Twitter has buggered that up of course and so broke the page Or, I could have have put some more error trapping for that occurrence but that's not fun.
Dave - Friday, 11 July, 2008 15:59
great portrait.
MÃ¡rio Martins - Monday, 22 September, 2008 9:52

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Authors that write footnotes can kiss my arse

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