The Online Photographer

Stand-Up Desks (OT(?))

So—as you might be aware if you're a faithful reader—I've been having some health problems, and trying to effect some lifestyle changes.

My practical photographic expertise was as a custom printer, back in the day as they say, and, say what you will about the darkroom, at least in the darkroom you were standing up and moving around all day long. Now there are days where I get up in the morning, sit down at my desk, and, apart from occasional trips to the bathroom and the kitchen—and sometimes fifteen minutes sitting in front of the television while I eat—I'll still be sitting in front of the computer 14 hours later.

And the topic of the dangers of sitting too much has been making the rounds of the media lately. (Google "sitting bad for you" for multiple examples.) So I've been trying to rig up a standing desk.

I had one of these in the basement:

So I hauled it upstairs and set it up next to my sitting desk. I bought a second monitor which I mirrored to my iMac. There remained the problem of the keyboard; you can't connect two keyboards to the same computer, at least as far as I know. An Apple employee provided the obvious answer: use a wireless keyboard and just move it from the sitting desk to the standing desk by hand.

(Why both kinds of desk? Simply because I don't think I can stand up all day. At least not at first.)

But the Balt Diversity Stand pictured above is really a lectern, not a desk. It barely has room the keyboard and mousepad at the same time, and it's not very sturdy.

And of course I've been having all sorts of problems with the computer. I use the Microsoft Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000, and the wireless version has a peculiar funky glitch (in keeping with tradition—I don't think I've ever used anything made by Microsoft that doesn't misbehave): it won't work right when Time Machine is updating. What's up with that?

The great sourcing search
Visits to several local furniture stores, including one that boasts of having five acres under one roof, turned up not a single example of a standing desk. In fact, most of the salespeople I spoke to didn't know what a "stand-up desk" or a "standing desk" was. Dead end.

Well-made furniture: the Key West from standupdesks.com.

Then I discovered standupdesks.com (Amish Country Furniture Sales). They specialize in stand-up desks. Not only do they offer dozens upon dozens of choices, but they'll custom-make one for you to your specifications. This has got to be the option for people who need a presentable piece of fine furniture in their homes or workplaces.

But there's a catch. (At least for me.) Sitting desks are pretty easy to size, because chairs are adjustable and most people are of similar "height" when they're sitting down. The standing desk is a touchier proposition. Small changes in elevation make a big difference in comfort and ergonomics, and the desk needs to be customized to your height and arm length*. If I were to buy a custom-sized stand-up desk from standupdesks.com, it would be utterly typical of the mocking Universe for me to spend a lot of money on one that turned out to be two inches too short or too tall. So I started to fret and worry about the ideal height of the desk, and which desk to order. And did nothing. Too many choices. Indecision will turn me to stone as surely as gazing on the head of the Medusa.

Eureka!
Then, on the way home from the doctor yesterday, I passed an office furniture store, and, purely on a whim, turned in.

Lo and behold: what should catch my eye virtually first thing inside the door, than the Jesper Sit-Stand desk from Jesper Office of Branchburg, New Jersey (relocated from Denmark [the country]). It's a pleasingly well-made and apparently very sturdy table in several shapes, sizes, and wood finishes that's motorized. It moves up and down, quietly, at a rate of two inches per second, at the touch of a button. It goes from a height of 25" to 52" (63 to 132 cm). The site boasts that it will fit individuals from 4'11" (150 cm) to 6'11" (210 cm).

Having just one desk at which I could both sit and stand would mean I could go back to the wired keyboard, i.e., the one that actually works. And having an infinitely adjustable height means I won't have to worry about getting the height exactly right sight unseen.

This will happen down the road a piece, because I'll have to reorganize my entire office to make this fit. (And because I lack the scratch at the moment, being, um, Nikon-poor.) But this is the solution.

Here's a video of the Jesper Sit-Stand in action (start it at 45 seconds in if you're in a hurry. You can leave the sound off, as it's nothing but bad disco music).

Cool, huh? That's the one for me. Eventually.

Mike

*Here are the sizing guidelines if you're interested: a standing desk should come up about to your elbow when you're standing comfortably and bend your arm; adjust from there. Similarly, the top edge of the monitor should start at eye level, and you can adjust for personal preference from there.

Original contents copyright 2012 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.
A book of interest today:

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Jack: "Can I order one through your Amazon link?"

Mike replies: Jeez...YES ! I didn't even think to check. Amazon has everything.

Diego: "Why get a stand up desk, when you can get a treadmill desk!"

Mike replies: Wonder if Amazon sells hair shirts, too?

Dale: "For what it's worth, I also use that keyboard—I liked it so much, that within about a week of first using it at the office, I also went back to the store to buy one for use at home. For longer composition and 8-hour days at the computer, they're much nicer than 'straight' keyboards—and my wrists thank me at the end of the day."

Mike replies: It's not only all I ever use, it's all I can use now...I can hardly even type at a regular keyboard any more, I'm so used to this. The wireless one is the fifth or sixth one I've had.

NL: "I sit at a desk all day and had back issues for years. Here's my simple solution: get a standard office chair, and take the back off. It is usually bolted on somehow, and comes off easily. You end up with something like an adjustable padded stool. What's really bad for your back is slumping against the backrest, so that your lower back is convex. During an eight or ten hour day, it is almost impossible not to do this. However, with no backrest, you can't slump. It works great for me."

Bill Pierce: "This is not an 'off topic post.' You have saved a lot of us who are turning into desk jockeys, in small part because the wet darkroom is now the dry desktop."

Bruce Crawford: "I've had a motorised sit-stand desk for 6.5 years now after injuring my back and spending five weeks at home staring at the ceiling. In the early days after returning to work it was very useful to be able to take breaks from sitting but still get work done. I don't stand with it much now (foot problems) but the easy adjustability is still useful as I can readily change the desk height for different tasks, i.e. typing, reading, eating (yes I eat lunch at my desk), etc., without necessarily going to standing height.

"Another useful feature of a standing desk is that it reduces the amount of time people camp in my office since if I'm standing they feel they have to as well."

Bryan Willman: "I have a large-as-possible version of something called a 'Geekdesk.' Good news—it's a nice desk, and you can set it to any possible height you might need. Bad news—you will very likely fine-tune to some sitting position and leave it there. The ergonomics will be the best ever—the reduction in sitting, not so much. Good luck."

David Aiken: "Before I retired I worked in the health and safety area for an Australian federal government department, and office ergonomics was one of my major areas of concern. Standing desks are a very good idea but you also do need the ability to sit as well, and there are two ways to achieve that. The first, the one you're pursuing, is an adjustable height desk that can be raised for standing and lowered for sitting. Motorised are definitely the best option but can be expensive. There is, however, an alternative.

"You can also use a fixed-height desk that is the right height when you're standing, and use a draughtsman's chair, basically an ergonomic chair with a high support stem, to raise your height when seated to an appropriate height for the desk. Ergonomically this is just as sound an approach and it may well be cheaper.

"I'd correct your height recommendation and suggest that the desk height be a centimetre to two centimetres below standing elbow height, and add that you should make sure you don't have your shoulders raised when you measure this height. Your arms should be hanging naturally from the shoulders at the time. If in doubt, get a slightly higher desk—you can always raise your own height a little by standing on a sheet of plywood, or two, or three. Basically, you can raise your own standing height fairly easily just by standing on a low platform, but you can't lower your standing height. Since most people buying a fixed height desk won't be able to have it made to size, this is the bit that rarely gets mentioned. Buy higher rather than lower, then stand on something to raise your height to that of the desk. The alternative is to stick something under the legs of the desk to raise it, but it can be trickier getting something exactly of the same height, and of the correct height, to stick under each of the legs. It's a lot easier to play with a couple of thicknesses of plywood or MDF and a small mat or some carpet tiles to make a low platform to stand on, especially if you're not good at carpentry.

"The people who will have the most problems are those at the extremes of the height range, the shortest and the tallest. The tallest may have difficulty finding a desk high enough for them; but if they get an adjustable one, they shouldn't have any problems at the sitting end of the adjustment range. Short people may run into the opposite problem, they should be able to find a desk that adjusts high enough while they're standing but won't go low enough when they're sitting. Their solution at the sitting end is to adjust the height of their chair to the desk in the sitting position and to then use a footstool to provide support to their feet.

"And, as someone else observed, break up your working day by varying your activity and posture."

Peter: "I bought the Jesper sit/stand desk about nine months ago and I have to say, it is possibly the best purchase I have ever made. I now stand almost the entire time I am at work, except when I am having lunch. When I do want to sit, a simple press of a button brings the desk smoothly down. I can then move it back up to accommodate any particular task; reading, working with a keyboard, drawing, what have you. Being fully adjustable, the desk top is always exactly the height I want. It makes an enormous difference in how I feel at the end of the day, and completely eliminates that sludgy feeling we get when we are trapped in a chair. I recommend it for anyone who has to spend long hours at a computer. One of the unanticipated benefits is that it helps avoid eye strain, as you can readily step back from a monitor and aren't forced to view it from the same distance all the time."

OT: Bummer

The "big storm" we've been promised for days is so far a big fat weakling, short on cold. I woke up this morning at seven to the wrong sounds—no joyful scrape of snowplows, only the vague, soft, watery noise of desultory rain and melt, and that "tearing paper" sound of tires on wet pavement as the occasional car goes by. Bah. The whole fall's been balmy; winter has had a tough time getting out of bed. The boys were in the basement last night waxing their snowboards. They're in for a letdown.

One annoyance: the following snippet of idiocy from the local weatherman. "It's forty-two down in Kenosha. Further north—look at this!—it's much colder in Germantown." Germantown temp: 33°F. "Much colder"? Where you from, bratwurst-brain? That barely falls into the category of cold; for Wisconsin teens, that's only a few degrees below T-shirt weather. Then again, if I had to stand up in front of a camera and talk, it would sound like demented glossolalia in no time at all, so maybe I shouldn't criticize.

Hopefully the weather will improve later in the day, and we'll get something out of these "blizzard warnings" the weather channels keep tantalizing us with, get out from under the rain-snow line. Maybe we live too far south now. Maybe I have to move to Saskatoon.

Mike

ADDENDUM: The Plews homestead in Western Iowa. Photos by Mike Plews.

And here's David Miller's workshop and backyard, 1.5 miles south of Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada:

David says, "We are having a fine winter here: snow and cold and clean dry air like it used to be when I was a boy. It's wonderful!"

I'm jealous.

Original contents copyright 2012 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Jim: "Same with weather-people here in Texas, just a different scale. Last week we were warned to expect temps below freezing for several hours!!"

Mike replies: Funny. Another thing that amuses me is that when a snow is coming, the grocery stores are jammed with people "stocking up." And yet, almost always, easy travel is disrupted for something between maybe two and eight hours during a snowstorm, and that's it.

HT: "Ha! I read this and thought, 'Only a professional blogger with a ten-second commute to work could have penned this.' I've lived in Minnesota all my life so I know what winters are supposed to be like. Be careful what you wish for!"

Dave: "Predicting a storm's track is very difficult. In the case of Midwestern winter storms, a fifty-mile bobble in the storm's track can completely throw of the snowfall forecast. The heaviest snow always falls slightly north of the low pressure center. South of the low, it rains. It's a unique dynamic of warm gulf of Mexico air mixing with arctic air—I can't think of anywhere else in the world that has such unpredictable and volatile weather. I grew up in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, and had many hoped-for cancelled school days ruined by slight changes in the jet stream."

OT: Live Music Is Not Better

A modern console stereo from Symbol Audio, $26,000.

Looks like this is "Off-Topic" week at TOP. Ctein's writing about tea again (see below); I've been deeply troubled by, and preoccupied with, the Massacre of the Innocents in Connecticut, and had to write about it twice (and I want to write about it again, but am going to refrain); and then, in the comments to the "Geeky Tweaker" post, Nigel had to go and ask this question:

Tell me, Mike. Do amazing hi-fi systems sound better than real instruments? If you had an acoustic guitarist in your living room would it blow your hi-fi away? If one goes to a concert, say an acoustic one, and hears a trio play, is it better than the most expensive hi-fi (like the one in the picture)? I don't mean to be sarcastic, but I am interested in the subjective pleasure of wonderfully reproduced music in a room.

This is the sort of question I'm powerless to not answer. Tiny claxons go off in the nearly empty corridors of my brain; audio question! Must be addressed!

Sigh.

The answer, Nigel, is that a stereo system, at its best, will most likely be an adequate simulacrum (especially with acoustic guitar music, which is relatively easy to reproduce well)—but the real thing, while it won't "blow your hi-fi away," will sound better.

The difference—and it's a large one—is that with the stereo system, I can listen to Andres Segovia, Leo Kottke, Chet Atkins, Robert Johnson, and Wes Montgomery in my living room, whereas the best I could theoretically do with a live guitarist would probably be a neighbor or relative who plays a bit, or a local guitar teacher who's available for hire. It's a big difference. Music first, sound second.

Beyond that, I can't fit a symphony orchestra in my living room, and some musical performances were never played live, from "I Am the Walrus" to 32-track electronica to Glenn Gould.

There's a huge body of conventional wisdom—conventional sanctimony might be more like it—which holds that live music is always better. That it's "the absolute sound," the reference to which reproduced music should aspire. Not to me. I've heard just as many poor-sounding live performances as I've heard poor stereos. Great-sounding music is rare—and just as rare either live or reproduced.

Live music might sound more realistic at best. But...

• The performances might not be the ones I want to hear: for instance, I once paid previously perfectly good money to see Neil Young perform one of his greatest guitar anthems, "Like a Hurricane," on solo organ. Right guy, right song, wrong night.
• The performers might be having an off night. I once went to see the great flutist Jean-Pierre Rampal, who insisted on conducting—badly—for half the concert. It was only slightly more relevant than watching him paint a house.
• The performers might be impaired. I had the misfortune to see the Pogues live once, and Shane McGowan was so blindly drunk he wouldn't stop raving into the microphone...and you were sorry when he did. The experience was such torture I haven't willingly listened to the band or the singer since.
• I might be uncomfortable in my seat or find the surroundings offensive: I saw the blues legend Freddy King once, while I was sitting next to a large table of very drunk, very loud servicemen who seemed to have been placed there by Satan specifically for the purpose of ruining everyone else's evening. And...
• Yes, the sound quality might be bad. I heard Dizzy Gillespie in a 40-table jazz club, and he had the trumpet and the drums miked. It was physically painful. Anyone who can't hear an unmiked trumpet and full drum kit in a room the size of a large living room really doesn't deserve to hear them, if you ask me. I actually complained directly to Dizzy about it, face to face, in person. My brushes with greatness are usually not what such encounters are meant to be, unfortunately. Big sigh.

That's not to say it's not worthwhile to hear real musicians playing live. It certainly can be. I stopped going to most concerts years ago because the music is too loud to hear, but I still go hear classical music or acoustic jazz from time to time. Occasionally, live performances can be transcendent—I got to see Lynyrd Skynryd play a 15-minute version of "Free Bird" in concert, before the plane crash, and that was fun. Sometimes you get lucky. And sometimes you just need to get out of the house.

For better or worse, though, recordings are the main form that music performance takes in our culture. It's the best way to listen to music, in my opinion.

Live music can be nice...but it's often just no substitute for the real thing.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2012 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

John MacKechnie: "That band may suck on Floyd, but I hear they do an Amazing 'While My Guitar Gently Weeps.'"

HT: "I discovered this far too late, but your typical rock shows are much more enjoyable when wearing earplugs. I know it sounds counter-intuitive. But as you point out, popular music concerts have the volume turned up way too loud anyway. Quieter volume would be ideal, but the next best thing is to wear earplugs. Rock show decibels will exhaust your ear after a few minutes but wearing earplugs will let you enjoy the show in its entirety and, yes, you'll still hear the music just fine. The only thing that will truly be muffled is the crowd noise of those nearest to you. (And that's a good thing.)"

Ed Kirkpatrick: "I have been to my last rock concert.

"I am a huge Mark Knopfler fan. I consider him a fabulous guitarist and songwriter, I have everything he ever released. I wanted to see him for years. So when he brought his show to Wolf Trap Park at the Filene Center a few years ago we paid a lot of money for great seats. A nice part about an evening at this venue is that you can bring a picnic and enjoy food and drink before the show at many lovely spots in this outdoor park so lots of people pay to lay around on the lawn area and party, me included. However, as soon as the music started the behavior of the audience just ruined it for me. Drunk fans in the house seats and the lawn area continuously hooted and shouted, some people in front of us decided it would be fun to stand up and dance and sing and we had to stand just to see the show. The lighting engineers blasted extremely bright lights called blinders directly at the audience and it did literally, if temporarily, blind us. I have been told by some who know that this is done to defeat unauthorized video recording. What the whole experience did for me is convince me to just stay home and listen to good music on my system. So I agree that recorded sound is better than live, at least in the rock concert world.

"Oh and the beer is a lot cheaper!"

Son of Tarzan: "Having had the truly distinct pleasure of hearing three of the acoustic guitarists you mentioned above about 30–40 years ago, Segovia...concert hall, Atkins...small club venue in Chicago, and Kottke in a coffee house in Milwaukee, I can attest to the fact that there is no comparison to the feel of live music.

"When you are caught up in the sights and sounds of the live experience, sound quality is but one of multiple sensory stimulation one enjoys. In the confines of your own 'listening chamber,' no matter the price of the equipment, the media, or the construction of the room, lacking the peripheral parts of the performance,  people, place, and presence can not compare.

"I listen to the three artists listed above and many other types of music that I have experienced in person quite often on my 15+-year-old system, sometimes from vinyl, sometimes from CD or even sometimes in the car. The detail of the sound is still not the driving factor in my enjoyment. Especially now, decades after seeing and hearing them in person, the most important part of the experience is the memory of the event."

Dennis: "Amen. Amen. I couldn't agree more. Live shows (rock at least) tend to be over-the-top loud now and you get the feeling that the performer is just running through the material. I too saw Lynyrd Skynyrd appproximately six months before the crash. That and the Who (with Keith Moon) and will cherish those memories until my dying day. There was something special there that doesn't come 'round anymore. Better the controlled environment of my living room, with DTS and HD video."

Joe: "I grew up in a small town in Pennsylvania, and though my father loved classical music (especially Stravinsky), I never heard a live orchestra until I was away at college. My father did have a terrific stereo, and a great record collection, so I did grow up familiar with many great orchestral pieces.

"Then during my first year off at college, I went to see a performance one of my favorites, Stravinsky's Firebird Suite, my first time hearing a live orchestra. And I was totally blown away. I had never heard what real violins sound like, and it was like night and day. It was as if the instruments were breathing, like they were alive. I'll never forget it.

"On the other hand, I've had the opposite experience, like Mike describes. Hot Tuna played so loud it was painful. I've gone to see Keith Jarrett play solo improvisations at Carnegie Hall three times and one of those times he was in such a foul mood that I wish I'd stayed home. (The other times, though, were transcendent, and have not been released as recordings.)

"What can you do? You pays your money and you takes you chances."

Norm Snyder: "Growing up in Detroit, in the 'sixties, a close friend's dad owned a club called Baker's Keyboard Lounge, which only held about 110 people. There were a lot of great jazz musicians to be heard on their tiny stage. A few times, if an act had cancelled, my friend's dad would turn to his son and any friends who happened to be hanging around in their living room and say, 'Who would you guys like to hear?'—meaning, he'd see if he could book them. That's how we all heard Mose Allison, live, for the first time. Sonically, the club was great, but I also have recordings of his from that period and later that are good quality, and a pretty good system at home. Nothing can compare to the experience of being in the room, as the music was created. The phrase 'You had to be there' really applies.

"I think that's as true of recently enjoyed live performances by jazz and other musicians, as it was (admittedly in my memory) with Mose Allison that weekend long ago. Being in a small club, with live instruments/musicians involved a kind of participation and sharing of an energy that recordings can't ever really capture."

Mike replies: Norm, I hear you (maybe this post should have been titled "Live Music is Not Necessarily Better"), but you were luckier than most. Then, too, there's live and then there's live. In high school I used to travel to Chicago to hear music at the blues clubs, and enjoyed it hugely.

One of the most raucous and most fun was a wild set by Otis Rush, in a small club where the audience was in very high spirits and completely into the music. Otis chicken-walked the bar with his guitar, to great applause. Cut to college, when I was on a committee to bring concert artists to the 3,000-seat auditorium. We booked Otis Rush and his band, paid extra for their travel expenses. I was greatly looking forward to the event.

But apparently no one else was. Otis and his ensemble set up in the middle of the much-too-big stage looking like a small island in a big sea, and played to a house that was about one-third filled. Nobody sat in the front rows. And most people were sitting there quietly with an arms-crossed, "show me" attitude. No energy from the audience at all. The band clearly was not enjoying the experience either, although they tried their best.

Really taught me a thing or two about "music."

Jim Hart: "The Keyboard is still there, still operating. It is now the 'World's Oldest Jazz Club,' having first opened in 1934."

GH: "Live music is amplified and mic'ed in completely different ways than recorded music, so you're really at the mercy of the room and the engineers every night. I played in bands in Los Angeles for 10 years in just about every club around, and I don't ever recall the music sounding as good as a recording. Some rooms, like the Viper Room, tend to do a better job than others, but it's hard to replicate an album recording, especially if there are several members in the band. I'd say that seeing live music is about the energy and experience, but recorded music generally 'sounds' better."

Poagao: "I was fortunate enough to see Ennio Morricone direct music that he composed for films, and that sent a shiver down my spine. Yet even that shiver derived from hearing the same pieces played by cheap Italian orchestras on tinny TV speakers when I was a kid."

Player: "Recorded music is the idealized version of how the artist wants the music to sound; live performance tries to match that ideal but falls short. Recorded music is the standard; live performance is the reality."

OT: Tea and Placebos

By Ctein

Each of my tea columns generates a certain number of queries about my tea-brewing practices. I figure I should devote a column, then, to how I drink tea, not what I drink. Before I dive in I want to state that I think most of the import of personal tea rituals is psychological. That does not make it less real nor less important!

Partly it's the placebo effect. For a remarkable range of physical ailments, if you tell people you're providing them with a treatment that will address their illness, a surprising percentage of them show physical improvement or even a complete cure. This is solely due to the "power of suggestion," but it makes a real physical difference; convincing their minds that the body is being treated causes genuine and objectively-measurable physiological changes.

This is why medical studies are only trustworthy when they're done in a double-blind fashion, where neither the doctor nor the patient knows if the treatment is real. Many drugs fail to pass clinical trials not because they don't produce marked improvements in the patients, but because ordinary sugar pills produce nearly the same degree of improvement.

(Of course, it's really important to make sure you're using a genuine placebo—some decades ago, the researchers who used lithium carbonate as an "inert" stand-in for the compound they were testing got quite a surprise...and opened up whole new areas of psychopharmacology.)

It's also why you can never disprove the efficacy of physically-nonsensical things like homeopathy and magnet-laden bracelets. It's been shown beyond any question that they cannot and do not have any direct physical effect. But, if you tell people they work a certain number of people will show improvement, hence the ongoing testimonials in their support. For some percentage of people, there will be genuine physical change, because they believe there will be change.

Of course, a lucky rabbit's foot would have just as good effect...if the patient had equal confidence in it. That's not the point. The point is that placebos work.

What's that got to do with tea drinking? Just this: if you genuinely believe your method of making tea produces a superior cuppa, there's a fair chance that it will actually taste better to you. It doesn't really matter whether a double-blind study would show that there is no objective difference.

And then there's aesthetics. If you don't think aesthetics affect taste and palatability, engage the following thought experiment: imagine I take your fresh garden salad and douse it with food coloring so it is all mottled dark olive-brown, gray, and black. Will it taste as good? For a few of you, maybe. For most of you, definitely not.

So, category: tea ritual; subcategory: mine.

I use tap water. Can't speak for the quality of other people's water but our local water is pretty good, and I've not noticed any difference between tapwater, bottled water, and filtered water. I heat it in a Pyrex measuring cup in the microwave. I take some of the hot water and give the leaves a quick rinse, 10–15 seconds, and pour that off. Supposedly this "wakes" or "freshens" the leaves. Me, I have serious doubts that it makes any genuine difference that a few seconds difference in brewing time wouldn't account for. I figure maybe it cleans a little bit of dust, dirt, and detritus off of the leaves, if there is any.

I do it for a more important reason. I hold the tea up to my nose and take a nice deep breath of the rich fragrance from the freshly-wet hot leaves. Mmmmmm, lovely! Primes my head and taste buds for that first cup of the morning.

Then I brew my cup, sit down with the morning paper, and enjoy.

That's what works for me.

Ctein

Original contents copyright 2012 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

James Sinks: "I always start my brew by sticking my nose in the bag/tin/tupperware and getting a good snootful of tea scent. I fill the tea bag with my fingers because I enjoy the feel of the tea leaves. I brew with tap water heated in an electric (and sometimes electrified!) kettle. I linger over the tea as it steeps, enjoying the smell of the strengthening brew. When it's done, I pull the teabag out, give it a gentle squeeze and either put it on a plate for a second/third/fourth brew or toss it onto the compost pile."

Mike adds: Generally I try to avoid sticking my nose too far into other authors' posts, since I get my own turn often enough. But I can't help recommending the Bonavita Electric Pouring Kettle, which I use for coffee. Seldom am I so completely satisfied by a product. A few buyers have complained of rust—Chinese metallurgy is always an adventure—so be sure to check yours while still in the return period. Mine has been constantly wet for a year and on close inspection shows not a speck of rust. This product works really well and is very convenient. I use mine every day and remain uncommonly pleased with it.

Peter Nigos: "Ctein states that (the effectiveness) of homeopathy and magnet labelled bracelets can never be disproved. As he enjoys his morning cup, perhaps he should consider the argument put forward by Bertrand Russell—that a rational man is not required to disprove nonsense. Russell famously suggested (probably in 1952) that there is a china teapot in elliptical orbit around the Sun somewhere between Mars and Venus. It is too small to be found by any telescope. You don't need scientific tests to disprove this hypothesis. As far as is known, Russell never considered whether the teapot was full or empty."

Andrew Molitor: "My favorite remark, usually applied to audiophiles but it works as well for pixel peepers and tea drinkers: Just because it's not there doesn't mean you can't hear it!"

Mike replies: Not sure which of today's posts this belongs under!

Bill: "A very interesting post. The placebo effect you describe applies as much to cameras as it does to tea. Take your sentence, 'If you genuinely believe your method of making tea produces a superior cuppa, there's a fair chance that it will actually taste better to you.' This can be slightly modified to read 'If you genuinely believe your Fuji/Panny/Leica produces a superior picture, there's a fair chance that it will actually look better to you.' Which is partly why we see so much partisan language on different internet forums."

Open Mike

 Why I'm NOT in Favor of Gun Control

Regular readers might know that one of my mantras is "editors needed everywhere." It's something I say when I run across a hilarious ambiguity or a howler of a typo.

A truly tragic case where an editor was sorely needed concerns the poor wording of the Second Amendment. There are actually several slight variants, but basically it goes, "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."

Um, what?

That's just badly written, is all. Nobody knows quite what it means, and nobody has ever known what it means, exactly. "State" as in a whole country and its government, like when Louis XIV said "I am the State"? Or an actual U.S. State, such as, say, Connecticut? Does "people" mean populace (collectively), or persons (individuals)? How exactly does "shall not be infringed" interact with "well-regulated"? Those ideas seem to contradict each other. Some people think "Militia" is equivalent to "The National Guard"—but others dispute that. And so on.

Sometimes when words are inscrutable their ambiguity can be exquisite, pregnant with nuance—but this gabbled sentence is not worth all the close textual analysis it's been subjected to. It's just a mess. Any high school English teacher would have circled it in red pencil and scrawled "Vague" next to it in the margin of the page. Any editor would have gone to whoever wrote it and said, "Uh, we have a problem here. This is unclear. What exactly are you trying to say? Let's do a little more work on this."

This is why I'm not in favor of "gun control." I'm in favor of the repeal of the Second Amendment.

...But not permanently. What I think we ought to do is this:

1. Repeal the Second Amendment.
2. Draft five alternate versions that are well-enough written to be clear in their meaning—ranging from one extreme to the other. The NRA could draft the wording of one outlier and the other end could be an outright ban on any citizen owning or possessing any sort of firearm for any reason. The three options in the middle would range between those extremes.
3. Hold a single-issue national referendum. A vote. Make it one of those nifty "instant-runoff" votes (you can Google that) where every voter gets to signal his or her first and second choice, so that a vote for one of the extreme positions wouldn't necessarily remove a person's vote for one of the more moderate positions.
4. Re-insert whichever one wins into the Bill of Rights.

Then, nobody gets to complain. If we as a people (populace) decide we want to arm ourselves to teeth even if somebody's little girl gets shot in the face for no reason every now and then, well, fine. If we decide that anyone who ever lets a gun into their home gets thrown in jail till they rot, well, the people have spoken. (We wouldn't decide either of those things, of course.)

And if we decide that, hey, we're actually a sentient, reasonable, and essentially benevolent nation of humans who can actually do a decent job of balancing freedoms and rights when we set our minds to it, such that most of us will be reasonably happy with the result and as few people as possible will object....

Well, we are, you know. We're not bad people. We're decent people. We should act like it. All we need is a little more clarity, so we can at least all understand what our principles actually are.

The laws we enshrine in our foundational documents might not make everyone equally happy, but they should at least be clear.

Mike

"Open Mike" is the Editorial Page of The Online Photographer.

Original contents copyright 2012 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Parick Perez (partial comment): "As reasonable as your suggested approach may be, implementing it would require first a new amendment implementing the process."

Ed. Note: In the case of partial comments, please see the Comments section for the full text of that reader's comment.

rnewman (partial comment): "Actually, the wording was much clearer to the readers in 1787. Remember the context. The Revolution had officially ended a few years earlier. Everyone (almost) owned at least one firearm. For many it was a need to get food by shooting it. For many more it was a means of protection against crime. The concept of a police force, as developed by Ben Franklin, didn't apply to most of the country. Each individual was expected to protect himself and his family with whatever force was needed. Further, in 1773, the British governor of Massachusetts seized all the firearms the redcoats could find in Boston to prevent any objection to his actions. Finally, remember that the term 'militia' meant something different than today. No national guard or army reserve. If called, every ablebodied free man was expected to respond, bringing his own rifle/musket, with ball and powder.

"All this was common knowledge and of recent memory to the people in 1787. I expect they largely understood that the amendment had a twofold purpose. It was to assure that one could protect family and home against threats, and it was intended to assure that no one could 'hijack' the government, and if a militia call was needed, that they could respond."

Steve Boothe (partial comment): "Actually, the meaning of the Second Amendment is quite clear and concise. A well-regulated militia is defined elsewhere as all able bodied males 17 to 45 years old. Organized militia consists of National Guard and Naval Militia; unorganized militia consists of everyone that meets the requirements that are not in the organized militia. There was no organized, federally funded militia (National Guard) until 1903. The State is the United States, all inclusive. 'The people' has been defined through numerous court rulings over the past 200 years as individuals in the 1st, 2nd, 4th, 9th and 10th amendments. There is no debate, only attempts at obfuscation by detractors. The right of the people (individuals) to keep (own) and bear (use) arms, shall not be infringed. Plain and simple language if ever there was."

Dave: "I have a kindergarten aged daughter. My sense of apathy towards our legislative process has quickly turned to rage. Thanks for the sensible idea."

Paul Amyes: "The sad fact is that to non-Americans it seems that the right to bear arms is more sacred than the right to live. It seems absolutely crazy that the murder of so many people can be seen as collateral damage for allowing an armed society. There seem to have been so many shootings where the death toll is in the tens to twenties and that doesn't seem provide any impetus for change. I wonder how many more will have to die before the average American citizen says enough is enough. America is a great country with so many benefits but the firearm problem is a huge blight."

David L.: "I am in favor of gun ownership having grown up with guns on a farm. However in my opinion, the problem is not so much the guns, but the gun culture. I see it too much in this country. There is a level of insanity in gun culture/doomsday preppers. Guns have fetish status to many people, they provide strong feelings of power and invincibility. I go to gun ranges and see so much zeal with weapons. Pick up any firearm magazine for more examples.

"Old taboos against guns targeting people are faded. When I was young it was inconceivable to point a gun at another person. Guns were for hunting, and for the army. If there was an intruder it was normal to persuade him to leave, while displaying one's firearm, sometimes unloaded. It was considered poor taste to use silhouette targets as I remember. People simply were not targets. Nor were innocent people. That was very taboo, but not today apparently."

T Bannor: "The reason for the Second Amendment was not, in part, because the founders feared a takeover of the government, as seems to be widely believed. It was because many of the founders did not believe in a standing army. Hence the 'security of a free state' verbiage. If you don't have a standing army, you need an armed populace to defend the nation. Switzerland has this arrangement today and has higher gun ownership than the U.S. The difference is, training and membership in the militia is mandatory."

OT: Teas, Please!

Ti kwan yin bricks are one of my regular special treats. When nothing else is striking my fancy in the morning, this tea always satisfies.

By Ctein

As promised, dear readers, I'm back on the subject of teas. Those of you who are fearful of being induced to part with more of your hard-earned pesos may want to skip this column.

This time I'm going to tell you about two of my favorites. The first is well-known: ti kuan yin, a.k.a. Iron Goddess. I was introduced to this delight on my very first foray into the realm of high-end teas, when I visited Aroma. During our tasting session, Haymen, the proprietor, served us up a delicious Iron Goddess, which was possibly my favorite tea of the whole session. Unfortunately, it was also the most expensive; I recall it being in the range of a dollar a gram, which at the time was extremely expensive for tea. Very regretfully, I declined to purchase any, explaining that it was beyond my budget.

I did purchase some $200 worth of tea that day—as I've explained previously, while that seems extravagant, it was more than a year's supply. I could tell that Haymen and his wife Ying were pleasantly surprised by the amount I spent. Haymen gifted me with the Piao I Perfect Infusion Tea Pot, which has been my preferred brewing method ever since. As we were packing up to go, Ying proffered a small package as an additional thank you for my purchase: about 25 grams of the sublime Iron Goddess.

Now, that's what's known as building customer relations! I'm not at all a frequent visitor of their establishment (it's been years, and I'm really due for another trip), but the number of customers I've referred to them has paid them back tenfold, I'm sure.

(Those of you involved with customer-oriented businesses, keep this in mind.)

Ti kuan yin comes in a variety of grades and at least two different forms, most commonly as tightly furled pearls, each about the size of a kernel of unpopped popcorn. A scant, level teaspoon of those in the infuser is quite sufficient, and good easily for four or more brewings. It's quite amazing; every time I brew it I don't believe I put anywhere enough tea in the pot, but the leaves swell up astonishingly. This is a tea where a very little bit goes a very long way. It also takes a substantial brew: 5–7 min. with 90°C water is a common recommendation, and it's really not too much. This produces a remarkably delicate beverage; Iron Goddess does not let go of its flavor easily.

I suggest you skip the cheap stuff and spend as much as you can afford; it will be worth it. I haven't tried it, but I suspect the "under the table" ti kwan yin from Aroma will be spectacular.

Currently, my staple ti kwan yin comes from TeaSource (a small chain of independent tea stores in the Minneapolis area that also does mail-order) in the form of small bricks (top illustration). It's one of the favorites in my cabinet, and less than half a brick carries me all day in my infuser. It's looser than the pearls, so it takes less brewing; 3–5 min. is sufficient. Compared to some of the teas I've mentioned in the past it's a little spendy (~$2/day) but it's a lovely indulgence and you can always buy modest amounts if you want to be frugal.

Rare in the West
Last spring, TeaSource also introduced me to something brand new: "dark tea." It's a category of tea that's been essentially unknown in the West; when I bought a brick, the clerk said they were the only U.S. source for it at that time. What caught my attention was that it looked much like a pu erh (below) but tasted very different. It was not smoky but complicated, tasting both rich and light at the same time.

Dark teas look like pu erhs and are prepared and brewed like pu erhs, because it turns out pu erhs are a regional subset of dark teas.

It looked like a pu erh and brewed and behaved like a pu erh, demanding boiling water and welcoming multiple pours that changed from cup to cup, but it wasn't a pu erh. Most curious.

On my next visit, enlightenment was forthcoming. Dark tea is not a variety of pu erh; pu erh is a variety of dark tea! Pu erh is a regional designation, indicating dark teas that are prepared in or near Pu Erh county in China. Other dark teas come from other regions; the dark teas that TeaSource carries are primarily from Anhua County, I believe.

If you're intrigued by the idea of pu erhs from my last tea column but put off by their often heavy and smoky flavors, you might give these anhua dark teas a try. I've bought few, starting with that "Fu Cha Whole Leaf Brick" that was bargain-priced and, in my opinion, worth many times what I paid for it—what's pictured on the right-hand side in the photograph above are the remnants of what had been a fairly substantial brick, on top of the card that came with it. I drank a lot of this! None of the ones I've tried taste like pu erhs; if I tried to categorize them, I would say they have the floral quality of oolongs, but they're deeper and richer.

Unfortunately, I can't locate these teas on TeaSource's website. I don't know if they don't sell them by mail or if I simply haven't searched properly.

[Ed. Note: I spoke to Bill Waddington, the owner of TeaSource, and he freely acknowledges that the dark teas on his "old and creaky" website (which they're now in the process of revising) are not in the right place—most of them are hiding under Shop for Tea > Black Teas > China Teas > Hunan. Here's a link.]

Next time, more on the art and indulgence of tea-drinking from your effete, intellectual columnist.

Ctein

Regular columnist Ctein has been doing a year-end catchup on off-topic columns, having stayed too much on topic for months on end.

Original contents copyright 2012 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.
A book of interest today:

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

steveH: "Since the last tea post, I've been enjoying a silver needle and a jasmine black dragon pearl tea using the Piao i. Thought they were expensive, but a little goes a very long way. Very nice, and thanks to Ctein for pointing them out."

Ben: "I heard Bill on NPR a while ago, and he was talking about dark teas. We've been meaning to order some but haven't yet...I think we will now! Thanks for the recommendations."

Martin Doonan: "While I have absolutely no interest in tea drinking (I really don't like the stuff, apart from occassional Japanese brews), I'm finding this whole series fascinating. Who'd have thunk there was so much to tea!?"

Bill Waddington, owner, TeaSource: "Hi Ctein, what a wonderful article and photos, written with accuracy, clarity and panache. I don't always see that in articles about tea. And you are right, Dark Tea is an amazing thing. I first found Dark Tea about 10 years ago while wandering around a wholesale tea market in western China, and at first I thought it was puer. However, the old Chinese gentleman at the display table emphatically pointed to the tea bricks on his table and said, 'No puer! Dark tea!' And that was the extent of his English. I spent the next 10 years learning about Dark Tea. Another cool thing about this tea is it was deliberately designed/manufactured around 1300 years ago to be an everyman/inexpensive tea—so it's always affordable.

"Also great writing about TKY and oolong. Strongly suggest folks try out Taiwan oolongs also. They are doing some amazing things.

"I'm new to the blog, so I apologize for the length of this comment. But what wonderful articles etc. I'll be browsing for awhile. Thanks to all involved."

OT: Graphic Novels and Series

By Ctein

A graphic novel is to a comic book as, well, a prose novel is to a short story. Make that a clichéd short story. Traditional comic books are, for the most part, formulaic and structural the same way a TV drama (or a pop song) is. Graphic novels try to tell far more complex and elaborate stories in far less traditional ways than your monthly "Spiderman."

The scope and scale of the graphic novel is limited only by the author's imagination...and their discipline. Occasionally they are created and published as a single project, but far more frequently they appear in serial form as comics until the whole work is done. Assuming it ever is. These projects can take a dozen years to complete. Too often the story never gets finished, or begins to meander hopelessly.

Buying into a serialized graphic novel is an act of faith by the reader that is not always rewarded. It is not an inexpensive act of faith, either. Individual trade paperbacks and collected volumes may be reasonably priced, but a story may take six or 10 volumes to tell. In recommending some of my favorites, I've chosen ones that are all (more or less) complete. Most of these have Wikipedia entries, so I'm keeping descriptions to a minimum for reasons of space.

I'll start off with two that tackle the same question: how do you write a genuinely interesting story about an omnipotent being? I'm talking about someone who wouldn't give Superman a second glance. What can you say about such a person that wouldn't be boring as all hell?

Iredeemable, by Mark Waid, asks, "Being super-Superman and having the entire world depending on you has to be one hell of a psychological burden, so what happens if he snaps? What are the consequences of an omnipotent being having a psychotic break?" I thought the ending was too cute, but the ride is definitely worth it. Try Volume I (of ten) and see what you think.

La Muse, by Adi Tantimedh (Author) and Hugo Petrus (Illustrator) says, "How do you make an omnipotent being interesting? You make her completely irresponsible." Well, why not? There is pretty much nothing she can screw up so badly that she can't undo it. Oh yeah, and give her a long suffering and normal sister. The result is lighthearted, silly, and funny (in an apocalyptic way). It's also just one volume, so it's entirely affordable.

Strangers In Paradise, by Terry Moore, took 15 years and 93 issues to tell, but Terry's a professional and he made it through to the end. At its core it's a romance, in a ménage à trois, "Kill Bill," weirdly lighthearted kind of way. David's in love with Katchoo but she's in love with Francine who isn't at all sure who she's in love with. Well, not for many issues...and, boy, do they have issues (rimshot). For a start there is Katchoo's past as an agent/consort with a criminal band of killer Amazons who've infiltrated the U.S. government. Then there's the money she stole from said organization. Not to mention Francine's ex, Freddy Femur and Katchoo's terrifyingly competent (or maybe that should be competently terrifying) half-sister, Tambi.

I can't recommend Terry's more recent 30-issue novel, Echo. It ends far too abruptly with way too much deus ex machina and way too many unanswered questions. The coda simply does not make any kind of logical sense. I honestly don't know what Terry had in mind, but it reads like he decided, "Oh, to hell with it" and just threw the project away.

Next is the true opus magnus of the field, several intertwined novels, really. I'm speaking of Love and Rockets, by Los Bros Hernandez. It ran 50 issues over 15 years. It kind of breaks my rule because it's not really complete. It's an ongoing saga. Furthermore, publication of the 50 issue run became erratic as The Brothers admitted that they were having trouble keeping to the discipline of producing regular issues. It shows in some of the stories, I think. There seems to be some loss of coherency towards the end. Or maybe it's just that the stories are so complex and intertwined that I lost the thread. I'd have to go back and reread all 50 issues to be sure. Nonetheless, it sets standards for this field that few others have met in terms of writing, character development, and artwork. The three most major novels are collected in these books:

Locas: The Maggie and Hopey Stories

Palomar: The Heartbreak Soup Stories

Luba

Finally, the most "literary" of all my recommendations: Sandman, written by Neil Gaiman. This, contrary to my opening paragraph, was originally published as a monthly series of comic books by DC.

The focus of Sandman is on Dream, one of a family of immortals. They are more like elemental forces than gods; they include Delirium, Desire, and Despair, and what is arguably Neil's most popular character, Death. She featured in two stand-alone novels, The Time of Your Life and The High Cost of Living. The collected series of 10 volumes, each of which is more or less a standalone novel, is rich and wonderful and I hated when I was done with it so much that I started all over again.

It took the series a while to find its footing. Therefore I do not recommend that you sample it with Volume 1. A better taste might be Volume 5, A Game of You. Don't worry about jumping in in the middle.

But, I think the truly outstanding volume and the one you should really begin with is Brief Lives, Volume 7. It's brilliant, and the prose is everything you could hope for from Neil. Let me close this column by quoting from the first page of Chapter 3, part of a short essay on what it means to live long:

There are not many of them, all things considered: the truly old. Even on this planet, in this age, when people consider a mere hundred years, or thousand, to be an unusual span.

There are, for example, less than ten thousand humanoid individuals alive on this planet today who have personal memories of the saber-toothed tiger, the megatherium, the cave bear.

There are today less than a thousand who walked the streets of Atlantis (the first Atlantis. The other lands that bore that name were shadows, echo-Atlantises, myth lands, and they came later).

There are less than five hundred living humans who remember the human civilizations that predated the great lizards....

And so on.

That's it for this week. Next time it's back to teas. I've discovered something new (to me) that I just have to tell you about!

Ctein

Wednesday columnist Ctein launches a series of OT posts this week to catch up on them—he's been staying on topic too much. Have faith.

Original contents copyright 2012 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Ben Marks: "Oh. Wow. Taste in these things is intensely personal, but I have to say, Ctien's recommendations do not have a false note among them. Would add V for Vendetta, Watchmen, and Scott Pilgrim, although they stretch the definitions laid out above. For what it is worth, I think the Hernandez Bros.' work stands with any (any) literature produced in the last century."

Open Mike: Texas Wants to Secede

Apparently a number of citizens of the State of Texas would like to secede from the United States following the re-election of President Obama.

For once, I side with the most rabid of right-wingers: I say, let's let 'em.

Please?

It's not that I dislike Texans, mind you. I like every Texan I've personally ever met. It's just that I would really be interested in watching this happen. I think it could be tremendously entertaining.

Presumably they would make do with their current State Constitution for a while, but why wouldn't they write a whole new Constitution? They could. They could change the whole government if they wanted to. Even the type of government. Just the arguments over all that could keep us entertained for years.

They'd even be free to rename the new country (Conservatopia?)—although admittedly "The Republic of Texas" has a certain majesty to it. Let's face it, Texas is a great name.

Guns would be legal, or maybe mandatory, but would they have an army? A draft? For sure they'd only have one political party. The Ten Commandments would be on every courthouse lawn, no doubt, but would they actually write Old Testament injunctions into their new laws? Those tend to get dicey when it actually comes down to specifics. To obey Leviticus or not to obey Leviticus? You can see how much fun this might be.

There would be a few disadvantages, of course. The map of the U.S. would look funny until we got used to it. College kids would need passports for spring break on South Padre Island. And all our flags would have to be changed.

Unless we just split California in two to make up for it. That could work.

The new country would be responsible for protecting its own stretch of the Rio Grande, which could get ugly. We'd have to protect our own borders with Texas, too, though, since, presumably, vans packed full of desperate Texas liberals and hippies from Austin would be trying to sneak back into the United States all the time.

Or would Oklahoma and Louisiana want to join the new country? How would Texas feel about that? "Well...."

On the good side, the Dallas Cowboys would no longer be America's Team. And, no more U.S. presidents from Texas. Works for me.

There would be some questions, of course. What about Federal installations and infrastructure, and their share of the national debt? I say they should pay us back. Well, at least partly. And they'd need all new treaties with all the rest of the world's countries and so forth. All the while trying to keep their government really, really small.

Some people worry that the new country wouldn't do very well. But it would be the 40th largest country on earth and have an economy larger than Australia's, according to what I've heard. They'd do fine. This is no reason not to let them go.

Really, this is something I'd like to see. Talk about political theater. Just think of it: the election for the presidency of Texas. Wouldn't you like to follow that? Best reality TV ever.

And who knows, maybe they'd come up with something better than what they've got now and we could all learn something from them. Could happen.

Anyway, Texans are petitioning for their independence, and, by rule, the White House owes them a response sometime around mid-December. I can synopsize it for you right now: it will say "Read the 14th Amendment, ya knuckleheads!" Only more politely, and with lots more words. (Article 1 basically says States can't deprive American citizens of their rights and privileges as American citizens.)

They're no fun.

Oh well.

Mike

ADDENDUM Monday morning: My feelings are a little hurt that this post set a record for traffic on a Sunday, for the whole seven years I've been doing this. Jeez,  if so many people are going to come read something I write, couldn't it at least be something about photography? Sniff.

Secondly, of course I was just poking fun here. But if you're interested, the Wall Street Journal says there would be one particularly big upside and one equally big downside to secession for the states where the biggest petitions are coming from, in an article called "What seceding from the U.S. will cost you." I admit the upside is a biggie. Thanks to Paris for the link.

"Open Mike" is a series of off-topic ramblings that sometimes appears on Sundays.

Original contents copyright 2012 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.
A book of interest today:

(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Ken White (partial comment): "Texas fought its own war of independence and made quite a good job of doing so. Many Texans take great pride in having been an independent country. It's interesting to live in Texas not having grown up here. It is a state of mind as much as a state within the union of the United States. It is a big place full of friendly people with big ideas who dream big dreams. Don't mess with Texas."

Marc Gibeault: "It's even more fun from here (Montreal)."

Stephen (partial comment): "As a native Texan, I would like to point out the following [...] around 117,000 people have signed their name in favor of this concept. According to a quick Google search, the state population is currently in the neighborhood of 25.6 million. This means that those 117k signatures represent less than half of a percent of Texas citizens. Again, less than 1/2 of 1%. (Assuming I did my math right. Which is always an assumption....)"

Mike replies: We're in bad shape if I'm the one who's supposed to be checking anybody's math.

MJFerron: "As one who lives in the Austin area I can assure you despite what one may read there is zero talk of secession of any kind in regular daily life. Nothing. It's just fluff and newspaper filler. Do I believe a state has the right to secede? Hmm, maybe under the right set of circumstances which I don't think exist at the moment."

John Camp: "I'd say that roughly half of the interesting people in the U.S. come from Texas. I'd include George Bush, who I found interesting: 'I just want you to know that, when we talk about war, we're really talking about peace.' Also, Kinky Friedman: 'Remember: Y'all is singular. All y'all is plural. All y'all's is plural possessive.' One of my Rules of Life was formulated while driving along I-40: 'Never order a chicken fried steak at a Holiday Inn in Amarillo, Texas.' As a new New Mexican, I'm proud to say that we threw Texans out of here on several occasions. Unlike Mike, I have met some Texans that I didn't like, but, I have to say, there weren't very many of those; they tend to be pretty likable, compared, say, to people from either major coast. What other state has an entire town devoted almost entirely to art (Marfa) or almost entirely to books (Archer City)?"

OT: Music Notes: Oh Well

Billy Gibbons in Finland, 2010. Photo by Antti Salonen.

Remember my post in 2010 about cover songs? I've got another one for you covers mavens—Bill Gibbons of ZZ Top performing a cover of the 1969 Fleetwood Mac hit "Oh Well" off a new Fleetwood Mac tribute album called "Just Tell Me That You Want Me." ("Oh Well" was from the old Peter Green Fleetwood Mac, not the Stevie Nicks / Lindsey Buckingham radio pop band of later days. I wish Jack White would cover it too.)

Unfortunately (and annoyingly), you can't buy the single track from iTunes, but you can stream it here, among other places. I am not recommending the whole album, let's be clear about that.

Mike

UPDATE: Curiously, none of the early Fleetwood Mac studio stuff is on iTunes, but I found the original "real" Peter Green version of "Oh Well" on YouTube. And realized I hadn't heard it in years. Many, many years. Strangely I guess, it sounds too fast to me now, when, in its era, it was daringly slow for radio, about as slow as it could be.

And here's Hypnotized.

P.S. About the footer link: Richter doing the Schumann Fantasy is...wow.

Original contents copyright 2012 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.
A recording of interest:

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Featured Comments from:

Jim Simmons: "Always tickled to see pictures of hairy Billy. My best concert experience ever—1971, sitting on the floor of the Fayetteville Arkansas Roller Rink, 20 feet from Billy and pals playing for three straight hours. Ratty amps, ripped clothes, boots taped together with duct tape. And Billy with very short hair and of course beardless. My girlfriend was from Houston and knew the guys a bit, said Billy had just had a weekend stay with Houston cops and for fun the cops gave him a haircut. He kept reflexively reaching up to pull the hair off of his face, but there was no hair there. They were hot that night, although that could have something in the air other than the music!"

Tom Kwas: "My Mom, who died last year at 88 years old, liked ZZ Top, and actually went to a concert a while back. This posting reminds me of that, and her...."

OT: Lovely Typose

My friend-I've-never-met and onetime TOP contributor Paul Butzi and I, purely for amusement and not a bit for spite, often trade examples of typos, misspellings, misspeakings, poor grammar, and general linguistic idiocy encountered on the 'Net. I dasn't give examples from fellow photo sites, lest I offend*, but here's a nice one from Amazon:

My husband bought this [toaster oven] so that we could use it to cook in the summer time so that we didn't have to use the big oven and heat up the house. I do believe it helped us save some money on eclectic bills.

Good one! Personally, though, I think that's a miscoinage: I would nominate "eclectic bills" as a good name for those mysterious little ancillary bills you get after a stay in the hospital. You get a big bill from the surgeon, a bigger bill from the hospital, and then a whole bunch of little piddley bills you couldn't possibly explain or decode if you had to:

Frendokensiologist, consult, 5 min., $82

Little do you know, but what that means is that a friend of your doctor, whose name is Ken, stuck his head into your room and said "How're you feeling?" and then disappeared. His name is Bob, so Ken's bills to Bob's patients are from the Frendobobsiologist.

Those eclectic bills can add up, too.

Mike

*Although I was startled to encounter "framer ate" on a photo site the other day, which I thought was lovely for a typo. (Think about it.)

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Original contents copyright 2012 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.
A book of interest today:

Featured Comments:
(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)

Ben Rosengart: "Luminous Landscape gave us the wonderful phrase 'hare's breath,' which is still capable of sending me into paroxysms of laughter when I picture my wife's reaction: a single tiny pant. 'Framer ate' is of a category which said wife and I term 'superb owls,' after a correction offered by MS Word when she was writing about a sporting event some years ago."

Ri chard Newman: "You're lucky...Frendobobsiologist bills are usually at least $182. Maybe the bill was a typo??"

Mike replies: You laugh, but I was at the ophthalmologist's a few months ago and when I went to pay, they handed me a printed bill for $2,450.00. When I recovered a normal cardiac rhythm, I inquired, and it was, yes, a typo. The bill was $245.00. True story.

Will Whitaker: "While employed for a while at a major bank I had to request an annual report from AT&T. It came direct from their corporate communications department addressed to Mr. William Shitaker. I wanted to write them back with a copy of the address label to tell them they were full of whit, but thought better of it."

OT: Monday Night Melee

Sure, it was exciting. Yes, it was different.

But it sucked.

I seldom quote myself—bloggers can be self-involved enough without going that far—but this is what I said about the replacement refs on Sunday:

Finally, there's the fairness issue. One reason I watch sports is because everybody gets held to the same rules...unlike in life, where unfairness abounds and people get away with all kinds of nastiness and skullduggery. If I start feeling like the outcomes of football games have to take into account all sorts of blown calls and blatant cheating, I'm just not sure how I'm going to feel about that.

Well, be careful what you wish for. Because now I know.

Great game, right? Except for the fact that it was decided on bogus calls. There were mistakes, sure ("It's a touchdown!" "No it isn't!" "It's 3rd and inches on the one-and-a-quarter!" "No it isn't! It's first and goal on the one!" etc.). And the replacement refs tried their best to control the game by flagging everything except illegal contact, which they apparently don't know is a rule. But to flag everything, you've got to be able to tell what's a penalty and which player committed it. If you can't tell the difference, then it doesn't help to try to be strict.

Bah.

Nicely managed ending to that game, wasn't it? This entire season has an asterisk by it already, if you ask me. The results are contaminated. The refereeing isn't just poor, it's atrocious, and the result are out-of-control melees that are a disgrace to the sport. (I looked up the word "melee." It's pronounced "may-lay" and it means "a violent free-for-all." Works here.)

The fake refs are essentially retraining the players—teaching them that they can get away with a lot more cheating, and retraining them to play dirtier and more dangerously. (My prediction: before too many more weeks go by we're going to see a crippled knee or two, and players out for the season—or for life—due to injuries from illegal blocks or tackles. Remember where you read that.) It's getting so bad that it actually occurred to me last night to wonder if the real refs are going to be able to get the players back under control again when they return.

The real pity was that it was a tight and hard-fought and very interesting game for about 45 minutes. Green Bay got its ass completely kicked in the first half but also mostly shut down the Seattle offense, and then McCarthy made radical adjustments at the half and the Packers neutralized the overpowering rush and clawed their way back into it. Too bad so many drives in the fourth quarter were decided by missed calls or wrong calls, because it would have been really interesting to see who would have won the game that had been underway, the game that should have been. We'll never know.

Just a disgraceful game. I looked up the word "travesty," too, and that one means "any grotesque or debased likeness or imitation."

In this case, of pro football. Or should we start putting that word "pro" in quotes?

Mike

UPDATE Thursday a.m.: The lockout has ended, and I can go back to being a football fan again this weekend. Sigh of relief.

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Featured Comment by Craig: "I live in Chicagoland and I am a Bears fan, meaning my two favorite teams are the Bears and whoever is playing the Packers. But...I watched the slow motion over and over again as we all did, and cannot figure out how it was ruled a Seahawks touchdown. Further, it is completely beyond me how the review booth saw it the same way. Some tweeter quoted on ESPN said it was the first time in NFL history a QB threw a game winning interception. That would be PIYP funny, except that the Packers were truly and clearly cheated out of a win."

Mike replies: Rumors: that the review from the booth is what Aaron Rodgers is most furious about (he can't speak freely or he'll be fined), and even Seattle running back Marshawn Lynch thinks Seattle lost the game.

Featured Comment by c.d.embrey: "I stopped caring about the NFL when 'Monday Night Football' hired Dennis Miller as a commentator. This is a good demonstration of the 'Law of Unintended Consequences'—I've never watched another NFL game, including Super Bowls, since. I wonder how many people will stop being fans because of the 'amatuer refs' fiasco? When I stopped jonesing for the NFL, it gave me a lot more time to do something useful with my limited time."

Mike replies: Dennis Miller can do that to you. His great gift—and it's rare—is to be a reactionary idiot while at the same time sounding like he's smart.

More generally, I've always wondered about this sort of thing. American Airlines sponsored the televising of a tennis circuit I really appreciated way back in the '70s, and I flew American whenever I possibly could for years. I also hold grudges. If some company or organization does something really stupid or venal or shoddy, I remember it and act accordingly. There are three or four companies whose products I simply refuse to buy—don't care about the details, I just refuse. And I refused to watch baseball for three or four years after the '94–'95 strike—it just completely disgusted me that a couple of hundred very, very lucky guys who play games for a living couldn't figure out how to divvy up several billion dollars between them. Not that baseball noticed I was gone.

Yet there doesn't even seem to be a term for this phenomenon, and little discussion of it. What's the opposite of "consumer loyalty?"

Featured Comment by speed: "On the bright side...you got a blog post out of it."

Open Mike: Refs

I assume there must be some fans of American football out there in the audience. So can somebody please explain to me what's going on with the refs?

Halfway through Week Three, it's looking to me like the NFL is bent on proving that the regular refs are worth their weight in gold. As soon as the Bears seemed to have their game wrapped up, I switched to the 'Skins-Bengals game...and I can hardly remember seeing a game that seemed more out of control.

There was one incident where a Redskins receiver who was double-teamed got blatantly interfered with by both defenders, who had him on the ground by the time the ball arrived—and no call. During the bizarre ending of the game the refs seemingly let the whole Cincinnati team and staff wander out on the field; there were problems with the clock, half-calls, long waits for reviews...a bit of a mess.

Then the network switched to another game, N.O.-K.C., and the same sort of thing seemed to be going on—a long wait to sort out what appeared to be a non-call on the field.

What the heck happened to the regular refs and when are they going to be back?

I obviously haven't been paying enough attention.

Mike

Illustration: Referee Alberton Riveron by Bill Frakes/SI

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Open Mike: HD Downloads

Charlie Haden and Hank Jones at the "Come Sunday" sessions. Photo
courtesy Emarcy Records.

I love music listening—that's all I do, by intent, listen—and I've been an "audiophile" (for some definition of that contentious term) for most of my life—all of my adult life. I'm not a nut about it. Every seven to fifteen years, finances and patience permitting, I revamp my stereo system into something a bit more tolerable than it was, then I fuggedabboudit. When I lived in Woodstock in the late '90s, I actually took out a bank loan to buy a new stereo. It's that important to me.

I've been in the midst of that periodic upgrade recently, and I'm pleased to say it's been going well. I had a great room in Woodstock (best ever) and I have a bad room now, but I've been hearing better sound recently than I've ever had before.

What touched this all off is that my previous system had two sources, one old and one new: vinyl and computer USB audio. But the bare-bones approach I used—it was based around a headphone amplifier as a preamp—was limited to CD-quality resolution for the computer audio. And I wanted to experiment with HD audio.

Surprisingly, perhaps, one of the best upgrades in this whole process has been one of the cheapest. Accordingly, I have a recommendation for you, but I have to warn you, it comes at the end of this post, and it's a bit of a trek to get there...

OT: Congratulations, Andy Murray!

I know we have a lot of readers in Great Britain, so let me just say...

...First Fred Perry beats Don Budge, and now this!

Heh.

But seriously: congratulations. Tremendous. What a fabulous match—easily one of the very best I've seen. I'm exhausted, and all I did was sit on the edge of my chair for five hours. That match had everything. Really terrific tennis.

Cheers! Now you lot* better turn in; tomorrow's a workday.

Mike

*Am I allowed to say "you lot"? I sometimes wish I were British.

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Featured Comment by robert p: "You think you're exhausted—it didn't end till 02:15 over here!"

Open Mike: Five Books To Make You Think

Michel de Montaigne by François Quesnel and
Geoffrey Canada by Marco Grob

Recognize this title? You've seen it before—I stole it from Ctein. I've wanted to write my own take on the idea ever since his column appeared.

I can't speak for Ctein's picks, but my choices are books that will make you think as a side-effect—while you're being entertained. None of these five books are too heavy...depending, of course, on how much thinking they inspire in you. They're books that are deserving of the highest accolade my own writing ever got (from Sally Mann)—they're "tasty."

In no particular order—

Fist Stick Knife Gun: A Personal History of Violence by Geoffrey Canada. (The title refers to the increasing lethality of the weapons commonly used in inner-city fights over the years.) You've probably seen Geoffrey Canada on television*—as the Founder of the Harlem Children's Zone, he's become a leading social activist and educator, and he was the kid who was waiting for Superman in the award-winning movie Waiting for Superman. Before all that, however, came this 1995 memoir about what it's like to deal with daily violence while growing up as a poor kid in the inner city (in his case, the South Bronx). Just read the short first chapter about the stolen jacket (which you can do online), and you'll get the measure of this one. It's a wonderful little book, one that I read shortly after it came out (on my brother's recommendation—hi, Scott) and have never forgotten

Religion for Atheists by Alain de Botton. (U.K. link; U.K. cover shown.) My favorite book yet from one of my favorite writers. The author freely admits that his title will turn off people on both sides of the debate; atheists will react by saying "but I don't need religion!" and the religious will say, "but I'm not an atheist, so this book isn't for me." But not so fast. The book is an entertaining and enlightening (and dare I say, original) look at the way religion and its institutions function at a social and emotional level to keep communities healthy. Botton, who describes himself as "very respecful [of religion] and [yet] completely impious," necessarily overlooks religion's shortcomings, and some of the "solutions" he offers in the spirit of being helpful are only remotely likely to come about. But those are quibbles here. It's a delightful short read, and if this one doesn't make you think, then...well, you're probably not a thinker. Note that I've linked to the hardcover—that's deliberate. It's a lovely little example of fine bookmaking, and you'd be cheating yourself out of a pretty little artifact for your bookshelf by reading the book (um, like I did) on the Kindle.

Lies My Teacher Told Me by James W. Loewen—who, by the way, looks a bit like Abraham Lincoln might have if he had grown old. This is an almost outlandishly popular book for a history title, having sold more than a million copies since 1995. Intellectually, it's like candy. Just a treat. Every nation has it "mythos"—the inspiring lore that props up its power structure and unifies its citizens, like the "fact" that George Washington chopped down a cherry tree as a boy and then refused to lie about it to his father**—and there's nothing wrong with that on the face of it; peoples and nations need their stories. But the truth behind the stories is often far more fascinating, and, not surprisingly, reflects human nature with greater authenticity. (Note that the readers' reviews on Amazon run on arguably longer than the book itself, and contain every conceivable slant on interpretation. I suggest you just read the book yourself instead; it's easier, and much more fun, and afterwards you can make up your own mind.)

Montaigne: Essays, translated by John M. Cohen. (U.K. link.) Sarah Bakewell's brand spanking new biography of Michel de Montaigne, How to Live, which I loved, has ignited a brushfire of interest in the French philosopher and writer, inventor of the essay and type genus of the reflective introvert. And that got me to thinking about reading Montaigne. Screech, in England, and Frame, in America, are considered the standard translations, and although of course I have the 1300-page Frame tome (doesn't everybody? I can't conceive otherwise), which is always described as "contemporary," it's actually pretty creaky, being as old as I am (vintage 1957), and Frame tries to respect the somewhat unfamiliar diction of Montaigne's 16th-century French. Like most people, I read several of the essays in school, and acquaint myself with one or two more from time to time, and then put the brick back in place up on the shelf. So I did a little readin'n'research, and concluded that the best volume for actually reading Montaigne is John M. Cohen's Penguin Books selected works. Cohen's English has an easy fluency that I find good to read, and, let's face it, you really don't need to read all of Montaigne to get a good idea. Better to read Cohen's selections and Bakewell's biography together. Frame's language, admirable though his translation undoubtedly is, seems halting and a bit opaque by contrast.

Our Inner Ape by Frans de Waal. (U.K. link.) The author looks at human nature through the prism of primatology. Some readers complain that he anthropomorphizes chimpanzees too much, although that might just as well be a function of human beings' extreme reluctance to associate any of our own honored feelings and impulses to animal behavior and instinctual programming. Theory aside—this is a popular book rather than a scientific one—the renowned Dutch ethologist and primatologist is a facile and entertaining writer and a fine storyteller, and at the very least you'll come away from this book having "met" the bonobo as a distinct cousin of the chimps (and of ours), and with a heightened sense and appreciation for the drama of the lives and societies of these amazing creatures. (If you can read the famous story of Luit without emotion, you have a steelier heart than I.) He also really does make you think about our animal nature—however you come down on the issue in your own mind. Not the last word on human nature—what is?—but a rewarding (and thought-provoking) read for sure.

Mike

*Apologies for linking to a right-wing conservative show***.

**Itself an invention, made up by a popular biographer of Washington, Mason Locke Weems, after Washington's death.

***UPDATE Monday the 3rd: 'Kay, so here's the joke. The Colbert Report, the source of that interview link, is a liberal show, but the premise of the show (and the source of much of the show's humor) is that the host is a right-wing demagogue. On the show, part of the gag is that Stephen Colbert, the host, always stays in character. So what I'm doing here, y'see, is continuing the gag, by pretending that I think The Colbert Report actually is a "right-wing conservative show." If I had really linked to a right-wing conservative show, I wouldn't have apologized for it. Because that wouldn't have been funny. Are we clear now? It wasn't my intention here to insult anyone. My mistake, to assume that everyone would know the premise of that show. Incorrect assumption, it turns out.

"Open Mike" is a series of off-topic posts by Yr. Hmbl. Host that appears only, but not always, on Sundays.

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Featured Comment by Dave: "Great list Mike. Lies My Teacher Told Me has been on my night stand for over a year. Maybe I'll finally pick it up. While your on the subject of books that make you think I'd like to suggest Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny by Robert Wright. Nonzero really changed the way I think about world history and human relations. To me, Nonzero was just as big of a mental bombshell as Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel."

Featured Comment by valerie: "Have you seen Sacred Economics? Charles Eisenstein...if not check it out!"

Featured Comment by Ed Kirkpatrick: "Might I suggest, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern by Stephen Greenblatt? 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Non-Fiction; 2011 National Book Award for Non-Fiction. Couldn't put this one down...."

Mike replies: Great minds think alike; it's on my bedside table.

Open Mike: The Saga of the Speakers, Part II (OT)

New midrange and tweeter drivers installed by AudioVentures of Waukesha. Note well-made inserts filling in the larger openings for the stock drivers.

-

[Note: "Open Mike" is a series of off-topic essays by Yr. Hmbl. Blggr. that usually appear on Sundays. This one's a little late.]

-

You might recall that I wrote under this rubric a few weeks ago about my momentous recent purchase of new/used speakers. My old ones were teenagers, and I had been getting a little impatient with them.

I'll sum up the previous article so you don't have to go re-read it: I chose a used pair of "budget" speakers from a "boutique" high-end or audiophile name brand and bought a secondhand but supposedly never used pair from a seller on Audiogon. And they turned out to be so incredibly badly and cheaply built that I half suspected they might actually have been counterfeits.

A brief tip about buying stereo equipment: never buy the budget line. Like any generalization this isn't always true, but in general, whatever your budget, you want to stay in the middle part of a manufacturer's lineup or higher. Even McIntosh, a legendary American maker of very high-quality, very well-built traditional components, known for its preamplifiers among other things, once made a cheap-crap budget preamplifier (the C15). It came out in 1998 at $1,500—and it was much worse, and much more poorly made, than preamps from manufacturers whose best preamps cost around $1,500 at the time, despite names that weren't nearly as prestigious. Stick in the area of the product lineup that made the name famous; don't assume that the name will somehow elevate the cheaper offerings.

One of my mistakes in buying these speakers was in buying the $2,500 offering from a manufacturer whose mainstream, bread-and-butter products are in the $5,000–10,000 range. Big mistake. (Note that I'm referring here to new, retail prices—I was buying used, and I paid a lot less.) It would have been a lot smarter to buy from a manufacturer whose best-selling or top-of-the-line products are in the $2,500 new/retail range.

The enchanted stereo store
I've been an audio hobbyist for most of my life, and I've even written on the topic of the unfortunate decline of stereo and audio retail stores. So when my new/old speakers arrived with the woofer drivers on one channel dead, I didn't know where to take them to be repaired. I Googled "speaker repair Milwaukee" (Milwaukee being the nearest large city to me), and one of the first results that came up was a shop nearby that specializes in bringing old speakers from "my" era back to life. It's called Audio Ventures, and it's run by Bill Waara, who is my age, and his young nephew Andy.

It's also close enough to my home that I could walk to it—and I never even knew it was there. This is a mystery so strange it borders on the supernatural. The windowless storefront is small and unprepossessing, and I guess I must have assumed, years ago, that it had to be some gnarly little car-audio joint or something. I've driven right by it hundreds of times—many hundreds of times—without even seeing it.

Turns out it's not gnarly or small by any measure—it's a wonderland. Although up a flight of stairs from street level, it has a beautifully finished reception area, multiple equipment showrooms, a large shop, and several large warehouse rooms chock full of neatly arranged classic and vintage stereo equipment.

Visit? Friend, I could live there.

So I've thought about this, and I've come to a tentative conclusion: I think the explanation is that it actually wasn't there all those times I drove by. I think it magically appeared the instant I needed it—and that both Andy and Bill are in fact enchanted leprechauns. This is not the Occam's Razor explanation, but best fits the available facts as I perceive them.

My big leap of faith
Audio Ventures is nominally famous for restoring old JBLs, but that's really just the tip of a big 'berg. They rebuild all sorts of speakers and many makes of vintage electronics. Bill Waara turns out to be not only a speaker repairman, but a speaker designer—and a really talented one, according to my ears. My very experienced ears. He played me a long audition on some monitor-style three-ways that I thought couldn't possibly be that good, and they were tremendous—it was one of the ten best speakers auditions I've heard in my life. And I'm the type of guy that I remember the other nine. So what were they?

When I first saw these, I thought, "Those aren't going to convince me."
How wrong you were, woofer-breath.

They don't even have a name. He designed and built them himself. Bill doesn't make "models"—each of his creations is a one-of-a-kind custom job. It comes from having developed a personal style and a technical approach over the course of repairing literally thousands of pairs of old speakers—any of which might range from a clean-and-resolder job to a total rebuild with all new drivers and all-new, custom-made crossovers.

Bill has a signature sound—open, vivid without being harsh, very dynamic, and that sound great loud. (Great soft too, but most speakers sound okay at low volumes. Not very many sound good at high volume.) Not an accident that his audition was meant to reproduce what you'd hear standing in "about the eighth row" of a rock concert. It did, except it was better, cleaner, clearer, and more articulate that any live music I've ever heard.

I was so smitten with Bill's skills that I took a very big (and potentially very stupid) leap. Rather than return my sub-par speakers to the guy who had sold them to me, I opted to have them rebuilt.

Speaker designer Bill Waara of Audio Ventures next to one of his
one-of-a-kind custom creations. The man's an artist.

This is not a smart move, on the face of it. I was going past the point of no return—literally, because obviously once I had them rebuilt I could no longer return them to the guy who sold them to me. Rather, I would end up with a pair of non-resellable, one-of-a-kind speakers in which I had sunk way too much money (despite a partial refund issued by the seller). If I hated the finished result, I'd be stuck with a very expensive white elephant.

But I took the plunge.

Two coils and a cheap cap: one of the great swindles in audio is encapsulated in the word "minimalist." What it means 90% of the time is, "we're saving on parts." This is the entire crossover of one of my new/used "audiophile" speakers ($2,500 retail, remember(!)) as it came from the factory. (Note the broken solder joint, the culprit behind the dead woofers.)

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Things of beauty: These are the two crossovers Bill and Andy of Audio Ventures designed and build for my restored/rebuilt speakers.
Do they sound better? Like night and day.

What we really needed to do was to get better midrange drivers into the things. The midranges of the original speakers were inexpensive, low-quality drive units that created a large suckout at the upper end of their range that was not subtle—you could hear it plainly on most program material. I opted to have Bill replace the tweeters too, simply because he has his favorite drivers and he knows how to cross them over. I just wanted to give him some design flexibility, rather than make him start from unmapped territory with tweeters he wasn't familiar with.

We left the original four woofers alone.

And the result? Oh, but you will have to wait again, Grasshopper. That's for Part III of this saga, coming up in "Open Mike" a few weeks from now. Suffice to say...well, what, you think enchanted leprechauns who appear out of nowhere just when they are needed are going to create speakers that aren't magical?!?

Mike

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Question from Ed Kirkpatrick: "Sounds like great fun Lucy, but you need to 'splain what a crossover is and how it works...please?"

Mike replies: In multi-driver speakers, each driver or drive unit is assigned one part of the frequency spectrum to turn into sound. In a classic three-way, you have a "woofer" driver for the low frequencies, a "tweeter" driver for the high frequencies, and a midrange driver for the frequencies in the middle, where most of the music is. (Think shadows, highlights, and midtones respectively [g]). But the signal comes in from the amplifier all in one piece, and where the loudspeaker as whole stands or falls is how the duties are passed off between these (in this case) three ranges. The "crossover" refers to the electronic bits that determine which driver takes which part of the signal to turn into sound. In a "passive" (unpowered, non-adjustable) crossover, which is essentially a filter, the goal  is the seamless integration of the three drivers such that they all sound coherent together and together create a reasonably flat frequency response over the whole audible spectrum.

Crossover design is an art in itself, and it's also the part where most manufacturers skimp, because the bits are on the inside of the speaker where most purchasers never look. As you might expect, there are various "schools of thought" when it comes to crossover design and implementation amongst audio aficionados, but that's another story.

The biggest expenses in marketing commercial home audio speakers are a) the cabinet, b) shipping the cabinet (they can be big and heavy, which makes them expensive to shift about the world), the cardboard boxes and padding in which to ship the cabinet (I kid you not, this is a significant expense for speaker manufacturers) and advertising and marketing. The parts that ought to be the biggest expenses are...well, the parts, meaning the drivers and the crossover. But this is in fact where manufacturers have the opportunity to cut costs. And this they often do...sometimes with a vengeance.

Featured Comment by Robert Roaldi: "Do you have any idea how much it cheers me up to hear stories like this about people with deep knowledge who actually know what they're doing? Somehow, and I can't prove this, this culture actively tries to get rid of people like these. This is just my opinion, of course, but it's a deep gut feeling I have."

Mike replies: Me too. I was talking to Bill Waara about the way that a lot of audiophiles have trouble stepping outside of what I called the "status ranking"—the idea that speaker A which costs x "must" be superior to speaker B which costs y because they've been told it is. And Bill said "I have spent my whole life outside of the status ranking." A memorable quote, for me.

Question from Manuel [see the rest of Manuel's comment in the Comments section]: "Your new midrange driver appears to be sourced from Focal, the French brand once known as JMLab. Am I right?"

Mike replies: You are correct sir. Bill appears to be partial to Focal drivers, and in fact among commercial speakers that I've heard, his custom speakers sound most like Focal Utopias to me.

Featured Comment by Dan: "Now I'll have to check this place out the next time I'm in Milwaukee—I have an account I call on there. I had something similar done with some speakers my brother built. Beautiful cabinets and an OK sound. He had been guided by a guy who had owned a speaker company out of SoCal. So I took them to Van L Speakerworks on the 5700 block of Western Ave. in Chicago. He worked magic on them. This was in the mid '90s. Have never tired of them and am impressed every time I listen."

Mike replies: I know Van. I once wrote an article called "The Great Chicago Audio Walkabout." The concept was that I visited every audio emporium I could find in the greater Chicagoland area—this was when I lived there, of course—and did a serious audition of the best high-end demo system at each shop. Then I evaluated the sound of the respective demos based purely on sound quality, with no thought given to anything else. The article was rejected by several magazines and never published—it naturally criticized several influential dealers—but the winners of the Walkabout were Van L Speakerworks and Holm Audio, two very different dealers who nevertheless both knew good sound.

Featured Comment by Jim in Denver: "I've been into speaker building since I was quite young, helping my father.... At a glance I can most certainly verify that the crossover components are of fantastic quality. And the Focal aerogel midrange? Wonderful! Eagerly waiting the next installment of this story. :-) "

Thank You, United Kingdom!

Four years ago, after the Chinese had done such an overwhelmingly impressive job hosting the world at the Beijing Olympics, Boris Johnson's acceptance of the Olympic flag had a frumpy, deprecatory air about it, as if the English weren't even going to bother to try to top the Chinese.

And of course I didn't go in person. But from everything I saw and everything I've read, it sure looks like Great Britain pulled off a simply splendid world party—and did it with enthusiasm, good grace, and appropriately high spirits. The London games had many memorable moments. And it would appear the host city and nation pulled the whole thing off with brio, élan, and nary a (significant) hitch.

Do you all still say "jolly good show" over there—or is that a cliché now? In any event, well done, U.K., well done—thanks for hosting the world. You did a great job.

(And congratulations on your great whacking heap o' gold, too. That was impressive.)

Mike

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Featured Comment by Eric: "A personal story.

"When I moved to London from abroad 18+ years ago I found a country paralysed by strikes and splintered politically well into the process of winding down the Thatcher revolution. The election of Tony Blair in '96 briefly brought hope that that new third way solutions and Cool Britannia were the future. Shortly after we were rocked by the tragic death of Diana, mismangement leading to the Millennium Dome fiasco, followed by a series of shocking rail disasters leading to the deaths of commuters resulting from corporate malfeasance unacceptable in a first world country. Our National Health Service and educational system seemed in disarray. The country struggled with questionable techniques which the Blair gov't used to take us into a not terribly popular war in Iraq followed by another divisive war in Afghanistan.

"We won the bid for the 2012 Olympics with amazed disbelief in July 2007, and not 24 hours later London was rocked by 'home grown' terrorists attacking, injuring and killing our own people. Shortly after the attack, a young Brazilian man was murdered by the police who mistook him for a terrorist, symptomatic of a national suspicion which pitted different ethnic groups against each other. These were divisive times indeed.

"The Blair government became increasingly unpopular. Blair handed the baton of government to Gordon Brown without an election, and Brown, a taciturn and brooding man, well reflected the gloomy national mood. When the world economic crises struck in 2008 the U.K. and especially London were at the centre as we are arguably the largest financial centre on the planet. Our government had to nationalise banks and big payoffs to top bankers became a national scandal exacerbating the class issues which have long existed here.

"A new coalition government implemented an intense austerity budget which among other things led many to question its £9.3 billion ($15 billion) commitment to the Olympics even as much of that money reclaimed derelict polluted land in east London and rebuilt neglected infrastructure. We are a nation of whingers with long memories for slights. Unresolved issues of class, race and ethnicity are national wounds. Last August we were rocked and shamed by riots which partly resulted from failing social attitudes and policies on immigration and multiculturalism but also by the unabashed selfish greed of many of the rioters.

"The national skepticism that we could successfully take on as large a project as the Olympic games was palpable everywhere. We were a rudderless nation which was not comfortable in our own skin. We had clearly bitten off more than we could chew.

"That it rained almost constantly from April through to July this year seemed an ominous omen of just how much would go wrong once the Olympics began. And then at the last moment it because clear that the contractor G4S couldn't live up to their commitments to keep the games secure and were vastly understaffed The deployment of the army and the police and installation of missiles on the roofs of blocks of flats that we watched on the evening news conjured up the image of Britain the police state.

"I think nobody has been more shocked by the success of the games in their totality than we were. For the first time in my 18+ years living in the U.K. (where I'm now a citizen) I've experienced a palpable sense of national pride and identity among all of my countrymen of all colours, class and ethnicity. We, the often querulous peoples of the U.K. were over the last 17 days transmogrified into Team GB.

"Magical!"

Open Mike: Stakistics

David Rudisha listening to the Kenyan national anthem at his gold medal ceremony. The names "Rudisha" and "Bolt" belong in the same sentence. (Photo: screen shot from NBC Sports.)

So I've been addicted to the Olympics for the past two weeks. I'm preparing for withdrawal—and even so, I will be unprepared. So I've been watching a lot more telelvision than I usually do. If I had the stomach for this much television as a regular diet, I'd write a media-watch column—there really are some entertaining idiocies that flutter past.

For example, I swear I heard the following on the national news the other day. The story was about the employment report, and the point being made was that businesses were hiring. So they cut to a business owner, who says this: "We've hired six new employees this year. Started out the year with four or five people, and now? Twelve."

Made me laugh. I'm bad at arithmetic, but even I can tell that that is not the guy you want to be going to for your statistics.

(In related innumeracy, the local weatherman was reporting on the rainfall totals, and he pointed to my county, where the map was clearly emblazoned with "0.20," as he intoned, "...and a quarter of an inch in Waukesha." Again, not good at fractions here, but....)

Nice guys finishing first
I've been doing pretty well with the Olympics. Thursday was genuinely thrilling, with the incomparable Usain Bolt adding to his legacy and legend in fine form, and a Masai warrior from Kenya named David Rudisha delivering an accomplishment as stunning as Bolt's in Beijing, setting a world record and getting the gold medal in the gruelling 800 running from the front. Wow. (Most records in that race are set with the help of a "rabbit," a fast runner setting the pace in the first part of the race before fading back.) I've run 800s, way back when, and that is one damn tough race*. They showed a special on him, and he seemed like a nice guy, too. It's the first WR in the 800 at the Olympics since 1976. 

I have to remember that name. David Rudisha. There really is something magnificent about truly great athletic performances—people doing things nobody else can do.

I had a rough time getting into the beach volleyball, but I finally managed. Every time I turn it on, I picture myself trying it for about two minutes, determining quickly  that jumping and running on sand on purpose is stupid, and heading for the beach towel. Turns out it's not a bad game, though, although I'm still not sure why. At least it moves along.

I'm sure I'm not the first person to note that some Olympic events have a decidedly arbitrary feel about them. I mean, throwing a ball on a chain as far as you can might be traditional, somehow (I always picture a guy being released from a chain gang, celebrating), but who's the guy who said, "I know! We can all get on kid's bikes and go like crazy over a bunch of bumps!" It's very entertaining, though. Even though that poor girl who face-planted into the front side of a bump isn't going to know where she is until about next Wednesday.

The guy who decided they should play a variant of soccer in a swimming pool went too far, though. It might be fun to do, but I'm sorry, that's just too dumb to be a sport.

I had in mind coming up with more Olympic events in the same spirit—here's one: climb up and down a telephone pole, then race a hundred yards on a pogo stick. Sound like an Olympic event to you?

Here's the thing—I'd probably watch it.

Mike

P.S. This is the OT column for this week. Come back tomorrow morning (or tonight) for some entertaining camera geekery.

*Seriously, if you are young enough and fit enough that you're sure it won't kill you, go find a quarter-mile track and run around it twice as fast as you can, then tell me if you've ever been able to make yourself feel worse in such a short time.

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Featured Comment by Jim Costello: "I kind of lost interest after the Greco-Roman Synchronized Equestrian Water Polo was over."

Featured Comment by Isaac: "Water polo was, along with wrestling, the most difficult sport I have ever played. It was brutal. Agree that it isn't much fun to watch though. There are professional leagues in Europe."

Featured Comment by David A. Goldfarb: "As far as I'm concerned, nothing beats a good badminton scandal."

Mike replies: Wasn't that great? Two teams both trying their best to lose. They could make that into a whole category if you ask me.

Featured Comment by Kevin Purcell: "The Outside Magazine profile of Rudisha's coach, Brother Colm O'Connell, is online—it's called 'The Irish Priest Who Trains Olympic Gold Medalists.' Isn't that apropos of the previous column about the death of magazine stands and rise of online magazines?"

Too Close to Home

The red dot on the left is TOP World Headquarters. The dot on the right is the scene of this morning's Sikh Temple shooting.

Between 1880 and the beginning of the First World War, there existed a fashion for assassination in Europe, in the name of anarchism, nihilism, and propagande par le fait. That carnage pales compared to the number of French aristocrats who died in murders committed by duel during the reigns of Henry IV and Louis XIII, in the name of "honor," a practice once so widespread that its decline could hardly be conceived. We appear to be in the grip of another such murderous fashion in my own once enlightened country; we can only pray that this senseless fad will pass quickly.

Mike

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Featured Comment by Ian Goodrick: "I live within site of the one of the largest Sikh Gurdwara outside India in a town in the U.K. that has had a Sikh community since the early 1960s, and I can say that the Sikh community is most welcoming to visitors.

"A couple of weeks ago when the Olympic torch was being transported across the U.K. it was taken to the Gurdwara as part of the celebrations prior to the opening ceremony. I went there to see the torch relay as I knew I could get some nice pictures.

"When we got there everyone we spoke to, invited us to come in to the Gurdwara and have a look around and as we had not seen the interior since it was finished we were happy to visit. We were 'adopted' by a young boy who my wife had taught at a local school who proudly gave us a tour of the interior. We were also invited to eat in the Langar hall and again we were welcomed and sat and eat with about 300 other people, sitting cross legged on the floor of the Langar.

"I know my experience is not out of the ordinary as several of my work colleagues are Sikh. They are all religious, but that part of their lives is always separate and private and never impinges on work and we are all given treats of sweets and food at the time of Sikh festivals.

"Knowing this just makes the shooting near you all the more shocking and tragic."

[Ian has some pictures of the Sikh Gurdwara ("Gate to the Guru," the place of worship for Sikhs) near Gravesend at his website. —Ed.]

Featured Comment by Mark Sampson: "Anytime something like this happens it's too close to home."

Mike replies: Just so, Mark. Randomly occurring violence should be equally alarming wherever it occurs, not just when it's rearby. The alaming thing about it is that it can happen anywhere, not where it actually has happened. Still, it's human nature to be more threatened by nearer events, and by associations in our thoughts...for instance, I'll bet a lot more people have felt a little more uncomfortable in movie theaters since the Colorado shooting, even though that's not strictly logical.

Open Mike: Our German Connection

Most Americans aren't "from here." We "come from" somewhere. My own heritage is mostly English and Scottish—both of my parents' families come from Indianapolis, Indiana, a center of the Scottish diaspora in America.

Wisconsin, where my father relocated our family when I was seven, absorbed immigrants of many nationalities—Czech, Polish, Swiss. They're all outnumbered, however, by the Germans. In the same year Wisconsin became a state, 1848, many Germans were forced into exile by the collapse of the Revolutions of 1848, and many—mostly from Mecklenburg, Pomerania, and Brandenburg—came to Wisconsin. Here, those reformists and former revolutionaries created the basis for Wisconsin's progressive political traditions.

In the second half of the 19th century, more than a million Germans immigrated to America. Milwaukee, then and now Wisconsin's largest city, was deliberately transformed into a center of Germanic culture. It became known as Deutsch-Athen, or "the German Athens." In 1900, fully one in three Wisconsin residents was either German-born or had at least one parent who was. German was the primary language of the Milwaukee public schools until 1922—all the way through the First World War.

According to local historian John Gurda, there were two heavy body-blows to Germanic culture in Milwaukee in particular and Wisconsin in general in the early 20th century. The first, of course, was the First World War, when suddenly German descent was something Americans wanted to be very quiet about. Much of Milwaukee's German pride was de-emphasized in those years. The second was Prohibition—Milwaukee's German culture had revolved about beer-brewing and beer-imbibing, and although many of Milwaukee's famous beers—Blatz, Schlitz, Gettelman, Pabst, and Miller—survived, Prohibition interrupted many Germanic traditions locally. Today, all but one of the great beers are gone. Miller, the sole survivor, is still brewed here, but the company is owned by the British.

Wisconsin's German heritage isn't so evident now on the surface of things. Our most important immigrant group is now Mexicans. We are still the sister-city of Schwerin, the capital and second-largest city of the northern German state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, where many of our German families originally came from, but relatively few residents of the city know that. Still, many of the city's most prominent families have German surnames. And although "Smith" is said to be the most common surname in America, here in Wisconsin they're far outnumbered by "Schmitts" and "Schmidts."

Mike

"Open Mike" is a series of off-topic posts by Yr. Hmbl. Ed. that appears only, but not always, on Sundays.

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Featured Comment by Aubrey Silvertooth: "There are still a bunch us here in Texas. Many did change the name from Schmidt to Smith during World War I. That almost caused a divorce between my German great-grandfather and my English great-grandmother. The discord lasted until 1972, when he passed away. She almost had a coronary when she saw the headstone at the cemetary said Schmidt instead of Smith. There are a slew of Czechs down here as well. Come visit one day!"

Featured Comment by Paris: "It is odd to think about the inter-European prejudices that used to be common here. My wife's best friend from high school was warned, seriously, not to marry her German surnamed boyfriend because 'Germans all beat their wives.' It's been 30 years and so far so good, but we're keeping an eye on him. My father, whose surname was not obviously Italian, went away to college in the 1930s, when 'wop' and 'guinea' jokes were common. He never told anyone about his nationality, and never brought a college friend home to meet his immigrant parents."

Featured Comment by Carl Blesch: "I have to weigh in here as a Milwaukee native of German heritage. I was told that my grandmother's brother, a university professor in the early 20th century, had to stop teaching German during WWI, and to keep his job, learned Spanish and started teaching it. One of my early ancestors, upon emigrating from Germany, opened a brewery in Green Bay. I saw a photo of it in that city's Neville Public Museum. During my 1950s–60s childhood in suburban Milwaukee, I took gymnastic lessons at the Milwaukee Turners, a club descended from the German 'Turnverein' tradition. And I remember attending the annual folk festival at the Milwaukee auditorium, which of course was dominated by Milwaukee's two predominant ethnic groups, the Germans and Poles."