Drew McDermott

In the Gardens

Eric and Jill in the Bishop's Garden at the National Cathedral.

Leaving D.C.

Top: Sanda and Steve just after they graduated from George Washington University.
Bottom: At a barbecue in Dupont, Jeff shows off a bit of his belly prior to taking off for Costa Rica by way of Chicago.

I Hate the Sound of Guitars

Fugazi, performing in Ft. Reno Park.

I think this is from the Ft. Reno show the summer of 1997, but it could be a different year.

About Fuckin' Time

• 37 years later, Lenny Bruce has been posthumously pardoned for his obscenity conviction.
• The Orioles signed Javy Lopez, which just leaves signing Vlad for them to complete the trifecta of off-season signings. That still leaves a pretty big question mark when it comes to the rotation though. Still, for the first time in years, I have hope.
• When it comes to preparing your photos for the web, you really need to understand the importance of the rather confusingly named Unsharp Mask.

Basement Living

In a pool hall in Dupont, Steve prepares to break.

Summer in D.C.

The fountain at the Hirshorn.

Winter is starting to bore me as a theme, so I'm moving on to photos of D.C.

How Many Days Until Pitchers and Catchers Report?

The Canton neighborhood in Baltimore.

I took this photo around 4 in the morning, while walking back to my car after a party at a friend's place. I rarely make it up to Baltimore anymore, which is a shame. Hopefully, I will be up there in the spring though, so I can catch the debut of Miguel Tejada as an Oriole.

Kabaddi, Kabaddi, Kabaddi

Lee, in New York.

• My friend Lee is currently touring Asia as part of a crew doing a documentary about Sepak Takraw and Kabaddi. I don't know much about the sports, but I like their names. Kabaddi, Kabaddi, Kabaddi!
• Sorry about the sparse posting this week, but I've been sick with the flu since Tuesday. I've spent the last two days on the couch, and let me tell you, daytime television really sucks.
• The magnetic poles may be preparing to flip.

Winter in the Sea of Mud

Annandale, VA

This is the last place I lived, just after the first snowfall of December of 2002 actually made it look kind of nice. The snow did a good job of covering up the sea of mud that my landlords left behind after beginning landscaping in August of 2002, which they didn't finish until sometime during the spring of 2003.

Hart and Melissa's Wedding

Glen, relaxing against a tree during the photo shoot for the wedding.

Another major event in my busy summer was Hart and Melissa's wedding. I don't have too many photos, because I was pretty busy with my duties as best man. I did take a few pictures while the bridal party was walking around the College Park campus getting our pictures taken by the wedding photographer.

Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammo for the BFG

• It's hard to believe it, but Doom came out over ten years ago. I can remember playing it my freshman year of college, and just how fun and cool it was. The single player game was good, but multiplayer was a revelation. Up until then, who knew that it would be that fun to kill your friends. Virtually, that is. [via Anil]
• The Israeli tourism industry, which has been a little slow lately, has been staying in business lately by focusing their advertising in America on evangelical Christians.
• Dennis Kucinich's campaign isn't going very well, but he did get a date out of it. Her name is Gina Marie Santore, and she was selected from a field of 80 entrants to have dinner with the congressman from Ohio.
• Nuts to that Lomo, I'm thinking about getting a Zero Image pinhole camera for myself.

Frozen Like Chandeliers

Pittsburgh, again.

Like the earlier picture, this is also on the CMU campus.

He Knows When You've Been Bad

One of my coworkers (who had just returned from living in Germany for 4 years) has just introduced me to Hans Muff. Hans Muff isn't a person, but turns out to be the negative reinforcement that balances out Santa Claus. If you're a bad kid, you aren't just threatened with the prospect of a Christmas without gifts, you also get a beating, and possibly get carried off in a sack by Hans Muff.

The concept of a scary alter ego to Santa made a certain type of sense to me, especially since it comes from the land that gave us the Brothers Grimm, and it certainly doesn't seem as strange as having St. Nick being accompanied by 6 to 8 black men. [At some point after I linked to this article, Esquire took it down, and added it to Esquire Premium, the pay section of their website, sorry.]

From what I have been able to find out, Hans Muff aka Krampus aka Knecht Ruprecht aka Pelzebock is an alter ego or assistant of St. Nicholas. Krampus comes to town on December 5th, the day before St. Nicholas Day, and punishes all of the bad children by beating them with switches. Krampus seems to have varied alot over the centuries but usually appears as a fur covered man with devil horns. In any case, there still seems to be alot of interpretations of Krampus, depending on which area of Germany or Austria you're in. I noticed that just like every other holiday celebration, it seems like people also use Krumpas an excuse to get stinking drunk.

Tired and Cold

Frozen bushes in Columbia, MD.

Winter has definetly arrived, and I was not exactly prepared. To make things worse, my coworkers are contracting various maladies from their childrendisease vectors, and 2 of my roommates are sick as well.

No One Ever Goes Out in the Winter

Pittsburgh during the winter, sometime during the mid 90s.

Some Balls are Held for Charity

• The 20 Things Benefit Auction has begun, drop by and see if anything catches your fancy.
• Moose Peterson wrote a nice guide to using Nikon's TTL flash system.
• Gothamist posted a transcript of Paris Hilton's appearance on Saturday Night Live, which has me singing AC/DC's Big Balls to myself. Actually, now that I think about it, I think I'm singing a mix of the original lyrics and the lyrics to Will Oldham's cover, which are slightly different.
• In the olden days*, Hart used to bombard his coworkers, friends, and acquaintances with e-mails regarding computer security. Recently, he started up a site devoted to security news, which means I'll have less e-mail to archive everyday. Our Outlook servers thank you!

*Editor's Note: A few weeks ago.

My Summer Vacation Pt. 4

Vernon Wells breaks his bat.

The centerpiece of the whole trip was Fenway. I was pretty excited to see Fenway since it is the kind of old fashioned park that served as the inspiration for Camden Yards. We had pretty strange seats, which it seemed were actually on the roof of an adjacent building. Even though the seats were relatively high up, Fenway is such a small park that I wasn't too far from the field.

Unfortunately for Mark and all of the other Botson fans, the Sox lost. Halladay was in control for the whole game, and despite starting to falter in the seventh inning, he pitched the whole game and only gave up 2 runs.

I had wanted to post a panorama of Fenway stitched together from 5 or 6 seperate photos, but my stitching software is on another computer that is not being very cooperative right now, and I'm too lazy to do it by hand. I'll try to get the panorama up another time.

An Unordered List of Unrelated Things

• Coming to a campaign stop near you: Dick Gephardt's Shadow Puppetry of the Penis. [via Swamp City]
• How about some Russian Misery Tourism?
• Witness the horror of Swanson's All Day Breakfast.
• Snowglobes of the Old Testament plagues. I think I'll wait for some frogs. [via Snarkout]
• I'm tempted by the Lomo Super Sampler, but I'm not convinced that I need yet another toy camera.

My Summer Vacation Pt. 3

Top: Part of a baseball diamond in the Commons.
Bottom: In the graveyard at the southern end of the Commons.

I spent a good amount of time wandering around Boston Commons by myself. I took some pictures, read a bit of a book, and talked on the phone with my brother. The weather was beautiful, and a ton of people were hanging out in the park, which made for some pretty good people watching. After wandering around for a couple of hours, I found a nice quiet place, and took a nap for a little while. I was woken up by a group of young, enthusiastic Christians who announced their presence by breaking into song a few feet from where I was napping.

All Christmas, All the Time!

A week or two ago, I was standing in line in the cafeteria, in the midst of my pre-lunch torpor, when I noticed something subtly different about the place. The change wasn’t the food, which ranges from edible to downright horrible, or the décor, which is suitably bland for a corporate cafeteria. It was the music. They had changed the radio station.

Usually, the radio is tuned to an innocuous oldies station, but instead of the normal rotation of the same five or six Motown hits, I was listening to Feliz Navidad, which was followed by I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus. After that came the station ID, which told me exactly what I feared, that someone who works in the cafeteria had turned the dial to 97.1 (WASH FM), the D.C. radio station that’s “All Christmas, All the Time!”

Fortunately, I always eat my lunch at my desk, or WASH FM’s all-Xmas playlist could have driven me into a blinding rage ala 28 Days Later, or at least put me in a very bad mood for the rest of the day. This is to say, I’m not a big fan of Christmas music in general, and for me, a radio station that plays only Christmas music is a little piece of hell on earth.

In fact, off the top of my head, I can only think of a few Christmas songs that I actually like:
1. Christmas in Hollis by Run DMC, because the loop of the horn section in that track is great.
2. Fairytale of New York by the Pogues, because, hey, it’s the Pogues.
After those fine little numbers, I run out of songs.

Now, it is after Thanksgiving, which means that it's officially the Christmas season, so I'm sure I'll be bombarded by Christmas music in a variety of public places. Luckily, I will be able to minimize my exposure to WASH FM, which should keep me sane. I hope.

My Summer Vacation Pt. 2

JR, pictured above, was pretty helpful in guiding me around to Boston during my stay. Not too long after my visit, he left for Los Angeles to attend CalArts. Take a look at this picture, so you can remember when he was just another guy on the bus, and not a bronzed Hollywood producer noisily snorting lines of coke off the breasts of a starlet.

My Summer Vacation Pt. 1

In the interest of being as untimely as possible, my first series of posts will be about my trip to Boston and New York, which happened last July. The idea for the trip sprang from an offer of a ticket to a Red Sox game from Mark, who is pictured above. For those of you who have not been fortunate enough to make his acquaintance, Mark is an aviator, lender of books, and an all-around cranky bastard, which is why we* love him. What was initially planned out as trip to Boston to attend a Sox game later expanded to include a trip to Foxwoods for poker (in lieu of seeing the White Stripes in Providence, due to Jack White's busted finger), and a few days of wandering around New York while losing pounds of water weight due to the sweltering weather.

*Editor's note: This is not the royal we. Several people are fond of Mark, not just Drew.

It's Alive

Welcome to drewmcdermott.com, which I've setup--after consistent and steady nagging from several sources--for some of my photos. I plan to do a picture of the day type thing, with some galleries of new material when I feel like it. Hopefully I'll get around to working on some revisions to the design of the site, but until then, I'll be sticking with one of the Movable Type templates.