Several readers have emailed me asking what the hell I am on about in my post yesterday re. John Campbell and his rodent-like visage-distortion on the back of Wellington buses.

For their benefit, and for the benefit of anyone else who may be wondering, it was (mostly) satire. And in an homage to Monty Python, here's the previous sentence in visual form:



Yes. Mostly satire. I mean, some aspects are for real -- I feel bad for John having an ostensibly-objective rendering of his features distort in such an unfortunate manner, but I don't believe it was deliberate.

Nor was it I who distorted the image. The light waves bouncing off the back of the bus were detected by the photo-sensitive cells in my phone's camera, encoded and compressed as a JPG-format file in its flash-memory file-system, transferred using the Universal Serial Bus protocol to my computer, cropped and composed using Adobe Photoshop CS2, and saved and uploaded to my website. No tampering of any form was undertaken.

Nor is this a Campbell Live (CampbellLive?) publicity-stunt, at least not that I know of.

There are several other buses of differing makes and models driving around which have much less distorted John Campbells on their back-ends, so the answer is actually that a stock-standard image/decal for the campaign is effected by an unfortunate distortion on one particular model of bus.

Of course, if he was a parliamentarian, he could bring charges -- or at least sue.

Labels: miscellany, photos