"This place is so beautiful," Bianca said the other night, aiming her camera at a row of glass bottles shaped like turkeys that were filled with red chili peppers.  "Look at those turkeys," she exclaimed.  "Look at that upside down sign for a two dollar sandwich." 

Actually it was five dollars for half a sandwich but the point is, when you have a camera in your hands and the light is right, the world can suddenly look very different.  A kind of magic happens.  WIthout warning everyday things shake off their utilitarian identities and are transformed into compositions of pure wondrous shape and color.  You think: I've never seen it like this before.  It's the camera doing it.  You become aware of everything as potential composition.  

Outside on the street Bianca wants to shoot the row of taxi cabs, all lined up and yellow and ominous in the dark.  So beautiful.  The cab drivers waiting around want twenty bucks for the picture.  You see?  The camera changes everything.  Even cab drivers realize the magic.  They know they are about to be transformed into pure shape and color.  

It's the overwhelming amount of possibilities that astonishes me sometimes.  The sheer quanitity.  The abundance. 

H.G. Wells's The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth was published in 1904.  It's the story of an experiment with food gone horribly awry.  FIrst it's chickens, then rats, who eat the specially engineered food and become giants and have to be killed.  Then the children eat it and they become giant, and then, as you might imagine, things really get out of hand.