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Mobile World Congress is officially not over yet, but — as it happens every year — the big announcements are all behind us.

Looking back, there’s no denying that MWC15 was big, perhaps bigger than ever. When our team convened to make a list of the coolest stuff we’ve seen this year, it was actually quite hard to narrow it down to 10. We don’t remember that happening in the past couple of years.

Besides Samsung’s duo of Galaxy S6 devices — an obvious top pick — we’ve seen quite some interesting smartphones, quite a few wearables, and one or two tablets.

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Huawei Watch

                                                                                                 Image: William Sands/Mashable

The trend for smartwatches this year was fanciness — in the lead-up to the Apple Watch, companies launched elegant smartwatches with classical looks. And the Huawei Watch was definitely something we wouldn’t mind carrying on…

The weekly photo challenge this week on the Rule of Thirds inspired me to get out in the garden with my macro lens.

As my other blog is better suited to displaying photographs I published the post there.  Do pop over for a look.

Rule of Thirds: Improving plant photos.

FROM

Huffpost Politics

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Gene Alday, a Republican member of the Mississippi state legislature, apologized last week for telling a reporter that all the African-Americans in his hometown of Walls, Mississippi, are unemployed and on food stamps.

“I come from a town where all the blacks are getting food stamps and what I call ‘welfare crazy checks,'” Alday said to a reporter for The Clarion-Ledger, a Mississippi newspaper, earlier this month. “They don’t work.”

Nationally, most of the people who receive benefits from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program are white. According to 2013 data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which administers the program, 40.2 percent of SNAP recipients are white, 25.7 percent are black, 10.3 percent are Hispanic, 2.1 percent are Asian and 1.2 percent are Native American.

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Click link below for story, slideshow and videos:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/02/28/food-stamp-demographics_n_6771938.html?cps=gravity_2425_1904266142248927825

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18 months old.
175 pounds!
and growing!
Say hello to Hulk.

Read and see more here: My Modern Met

GREENWICH VILLAGE 1960’S

Yoichi R. Okamoto. President Lyndon B. Johnson meets with Martin Luther King, Jr. in the White House Cabinet Room, 18 March 1966.

Bob Dylan in New York

[Image via Vogue]

When seeking to romanticize or humanize the turbulent lives of the Kennedys, few photographers came as far as Mark Shaw, who toured with then-Senator Kennedy during the 1959 presidential campaign, and eventually followed them to their home in Cape Cod. The President liked the pictures so much that Shaw eventually became the family’s de facto portraitist.

Andy Warhol and Edie Sedgwick

[Image via Christie’s]

Many photographers besides Warhol himself tried to capture the copacetic energies of Warhol and the heiress and model Edie Sedgwick. Among the few successes was this three-part portrait by David McCabe, which echoes Warhol’s fascination with the New York tower as a metaphor for fame.

Andy Warhol and Edie Sedgwick

[Image…

Being an evil genius needn’t be expensive.

Consider the simplicity and economic efficiency

of filling a merry-go-round with Alzheimer’s patients

& donning one, very scary mask.

Me, my sister and our Grandmother at the beach. Good times!!!

My friend Tony came for lunch yesterday and brought with him some lilies….and so of course I had to paint them this morning while still fresh…..

This is a rapid watercolour, allowing the fluidity of the paint to weave its own magic.    

I draw with the brush.     It’s important to remember that a watercolour does not have to look exactly like the subject.

The subject is merely a jumping off point….and my aim is to capture the essence of the flower rather than an exact replica.

To complete, I added a magical hummingbird.

A bientôt.

A recent trailer for the Second Best Marigold Hotel featured a 65 year old Richard Gere. 

He is the one actor I have loved at every age, starting with An Officer and a Gentleman. There was something about him; a depth of emotion, a troubled soul masked in anger. He claims to have discovered Buddhism in his  unhappy twenties. So did I.

He can trace his ancestry to the Mayflower, was raised in Philadelphia, went to college in New England on a gymnastics scholarship, leaving after 2 years for the theater.

He studied in Nepal and Tibet, taking up humanitarian causes and funding efforts in AIDS awareness, ecological concerns, animal rights and protection of indigenous folk around the world, authoring the book “We Are One: A Celebration of Tribal Peoples”and donating its royalties to Survival International.

Stalling a bit in the 1980’s, his commercial success rebounded with Pretty Woman. Some…