The Online Photographer

Open Mike: Three Cheers for Dentists

Do you know how a cow dies of old age? Its teeth wear out. When it can no longer grind up grass, its jig is up.

In ancient eras, many human beings also met their ends because of dental problems and complications arising therefrom.

I spent 11 1/2 hours with my dentist yesterday. Well, not continuously—off and on. We started with one long emergency appointment at eight o'clock in the morning, met again at 5:00 p.m., and finished up the first stage of a root canal at 7:30 last night. The hyperemic tooth which has been giving me fits in recent weeks had finally gone into its Red Giant phase. The level of pain was...impressive. I'm not intimately acquainted with major pain, thank you god, but the pain of that tooth at least makes the cut to the big leagues, I would guess. It was like a tungsten fire burning in my jaw. (One of his patients who had the same thing told my dentist she would rather give birth again.) When it spun out of control the pain made me sweat, and feel dizzy.

Tark Barsamian and staff a couple of years back

I have an outstanding dentist. Very skilled, and devoted to his work. A genuinely nice guy, too. He is Dr. Tarkis Barsamian, a.k.a. "Dr. B."—Armenian-American, as you can tell from the name (my college dorm-mate Greg Aftandilian taught me that names ending in "-ian" are usually Armenian). Very interesting guy, too—it was nice to get a chance to talk with him at length, even as he was depriving me of pain meds.

Blamed, stood up, and welched on
I would have thought that dentists would find their work fulfilling. They're relatively well compensated, and they unambiguously help people.

Not so much, it turns out. People don't like going to the dentist, and blame dental difficulties of their own making on their dentist. Dentists get stood up a lot—people avoid their appointments (I do that. I've long suffered from an uncontrollable fear of dental work, triggered by a bad experience decades ago). They get stiffed a lot, too. Tark told me that some people who treat him like their best friend when they're in distress in the middle of the night suddenly unpack a trunk full of excuses when it comes to paying the bill.

Which is an injustice, seems to me. Where would we be without dentists? Sure, having the work done is unpleasant—but not nearly so unpleasant as not having it done. Before yesterday, I had never looked forward to a root canal before. Last evening I was positively eager for it.

On the trail of a tooth
Much of what Tark did with me amounted to detective work. It was fascinating to watch him on the trail. A hyperemic tooth "refers" pain—the inflamed nerve is bundled next to the nerves that lead to other teeth, making them hurt too, even though they're not affected. I could have sworn the tooth that was giving me trouble was no. 19, and if if it wasn't, then it was no. 14. Through a series of diagnostic tests, including several rounds of selective anesthesia, plus X-rays, plus a careful collation of his notes going back several years, added to good intuition and 28 years of experience, Tark figured out that the culprit was really no. 15, which surprised me. It really didn't seem to me like that one hurt as much as the others.

But he was right. Today I'm pain-free for the first time in a month and a half, and I got a full night's sleep last night for the first time in a long time. And no longer do I have to bombard my poor sufferin' kidneys with ibruprophen every five hours. I feel great.

I'm determined to pay every penny of the bill with nary an echo of complaint. And I'm never saying another word against dentists who buy themselves Leicas, either. As far as I'm concerned, every dentist should get a couple of Leicas just as a general thank-you.

Dr. B. is a great doctor and a great craftsman, and I mean both as compliments. Oh, and did I mention that Friday is Tark's day off? He had been helping his son renovate some rental apartments, and he arrived at his cold, darkened office for our afternoon appointment in work clothes. Part of the job, he said. He quoted Telly Savalas with a laugh: who loves ya, baby?

Dentists are your friends. Treat 'em well. Here's three cheers for dentists, the world over, and all they do.

Mike

"Open Mike" is a series of off-topic posts that appear only on weekends.

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Featured Comment by Dwight: "I'm not sure if he told you, but #15 is frequently the hardest tooth in the mouth to do a root canal on. A lot of dentists would have needed to refer that treatment to a specialist. I'm glad Dr. B. was able to help."

Featured Comment by DC Wells: "Ditto on the value and kindness of dentists, Mike. And glad to hear you are feeling better for a change. I sent this along to my dentist. She and her staff have taken very good care of my teeth for quite a few years."

Featured Comment by Anupun Sra-lum, DDS: "As a long-time loyal TOP reader and a dentist by profession, I feel so great reading your compliments to Dr. Barsamian. Your kind words to people in my profession make me feel so proud being a dentist. You just make my day. And after spending 26 years performing dental treatment, I still cannot afford a Leica."

Who Writes the Dilbert Blog?

Since Ctein has patently introduced the subject of Big Mysteries in the previous post, I'd like to review a strange case that has to do with our very own Universe, i.e. the internet. There is on the internet a blog called The Dilbert Blog that is written by a man who is signs himself "Scott Adams." Opinion is divided, but the growing concensus seems to be that Scott Adams cannot be the Dilbert Blog Writer, also called "D." S. Adams (the reason for the use of the first initial will become clear in a moment) is a cartoonist who is only "just good enough" at drawing, which is one of the main things a cartoonist does. Almost nothing is known about him apart from a few tantalizing details such as the fact this his tie flips up at the end for no apparent reason (see photo). According to the so-called "Identity theorists," who are surprisingly numerous, Scott Adams cannot be the author of the Dilbert blog. Their case seems persuasive, at least on the surface. First of all, cartoonists don't have to write much. The most words that the real Scott Adams is called upon to write in a day might approach eighty, and then only on Sundays. It is even rumored that the real Scott Adams refused to speak at all for some number of months, hardly likely to be a characteristic of a blogger who goes on an on all the time about a lot of crazy stuff, like how there is no such thing as Free Will and that we are all programmed but not by DNA. (Today, for example, "Scott Adams" seems to make the case that he is not rich, which seems to bolster the case that "D" cannot be Scott Adams, the cartoonist, who is third down from Oprah on the "Has All the Money" list.)

Searches have been made to determine the identity of the actual Dilbert Blog author, but the problem so far has proven remarkably robust and resistant to solution. Amateur sleuths amongst online aficionados have advanced a number of theories, and passions are running ever higher amongst the various schools of thought. Books have been written advancing various theories. Each book seems plausible, while you are reading it. But then, each proposed candidate seems to have at least one big problem that seems, on the surface, insuperable. I'll mention just the main proposed candidates:

• The Majority Douglasite Position: This group holds that the Dilbert Blog is written by Douglas Adams. On the plus side, he is a writer; he has the right last name; he clearly has the needed imagination to write about lots of whacky fictional ideas; and he was prolific, so the burdens of daily blogging would probably be a workload he could handle. Problem: he is dead. That is explained by "Douslasites" using some rather convoluted arguments: to wit, that he is not really dead, but only faked his own death by staggering around and clutching at his heart like Fred Sanford before being taken away by some out-of-work actors dressed as EMTs. Bolstering this theory is "his" suspiciously plain, uncreative headstone in Highgate Cemetery.

• A minority of Douglasites believe that Douglas Adams actually did die at that Montecito gym, but that he wrote all of the Dilbert Blog entries in advance for gradual release in the future. Problem: the Dilbert Blog occasionally makes references to events that have occurred since May 11, 2001, when D. Adams died. This requires further explanations like the positing of a living henchperson to insert the contemporary references, which for one thing violates Occam's Razor, besides requiring a successful ongoing conspiracy of silence (and as we all know, conspiracies of silence can only be successful when they're imaginary). It is possible that Douglas Adams was psychic, and knew what was going to happen before it happened, although his record in that regard falls far below that of George Orwell. And some things just don't seem predictable, like how weird Michael Jackson was going to get.

• The "Oxfordians." Some people believe that a cartoonist who flunked out of art school could not have the high level of verbal skills evinced by "the Dilbert Blog Writer." They note that the supposed writer's IP address was briefly exposed by hackers for four hours in 2007, and that the IP address thus revealed was that of one Earl Oxford, a flamboyant* Summa Cum Laude graduate of Harvard and the multimillionaire owner of the "Duke of Oil" chain of oil-change shops. Although of course not witnessed by reporters, Earl Oxford allegedly starred in lots of Hasty Pudding shows in the Arena where he showed a dazzling gift for witty repartée. Problem: like, er, "some" other Harvard students, Oxford is known to be toweringly egocentric and a profligate braggart. If he is writing the Dilbert Blog, why would he try to pass himself off as "Scott Adams" rather that taking the credit for himself?

• Barryism: Some believe that the Dilbert Blog writer is Dave Barry. Problem: Barry has his own syndicated column, and, as a humorist himself, could be considered a competitor of Scott Adams. Why would he write mini-columns in another blog under a different name? Why not just do something other than links on his own blog? Barryism is the least popular of the Identity theories.

Undated black-and-white snapshot of Scott Adams. Photographer unknown.

Of course, there are a few people who believe that the obvious solution is also the true one, namely, that Scott Adams actually writes his own blog. They get shouted down at conventions, however. The mystery lives on.

Mike

*This word means "gay."

P.S. We really are going to have to get back on topic, before we lose every single reader we have left.

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Featured Comment by Kevin Bourque: "My money is on Charles Addams, who is 1) a cartoonist and 2) no less dead than Douglas Adams. Besides, can you prove I'm wrong?"

Featured Comment by Paul Pomeroy: "I can't seem to find the link to it now but I was just reading about this woman in San Francisco named Vivian Maloof who was either at an estate sale or dumpster diving when she discovered 16 crates containing nearly 100,000 unpublished Dilbert cartoons and a box full of pens (with a note explaining that these were actually undeveloped cartoon strips).

"She wasn't sure who the cartoonist was or if they were actually any good, the article said, but had started a conversation up on Snickr in the Street Cartoonists group to get some feedback. Seems no one there found them all that interesting, though. The conversation had quickly drifted off topic and, of all things, they'd ended up discussing which small cameras they loved most.

"It could be worse, I suppose, but probably not much weirder."

Featured Comment by Archer Sully: "Everyone in Silicon Valley was sure that Scott Adams worked at our respective companies. Although I think there was an Eddie de Vere at SGI, where I worked."

Open Mike: The Progress of the 'Collection'

Last winter my New Year's Resolution was to start a photograph collection—just start one—and the enterprise has gone somewhat better than expected. I have acquired some fifteen prints, and so far framed four of them, with several more in the queue for framing.

Many of the prints are pictures I originally featured on TOP, or that I found through TOP. To begin with I bought this print from Cosmin Bumbut in Romania (it took a while to track him down), which I had beautifully framed with an antique-looking beaded molding. Hanging in a place where I see it every day.

I traded Peter Turnley some prints for his workshop advertisement (in the left-hand sidebar), and thereby acquired several, including a beautiful Voja Mitrovic print of this picture. By the way, I don't know if you actually see the site (many people now read TOP through feeds), but there's a new ad under the Pentax ad at the top left—Peter's having his usual annual Holiday sale and offering all of the prints in his portfolio for not very much more than our Print Offer prints cost. So if you were one of the people who liked pictures of his we didn't offer—like the dude in wheelbarrow and the black cat—step right up.

Recently I discovered Laurent Gloaguen's Galerie du Cabestan in Montréal, thanks to a comment left by Ed Hawco. I featured one of his maritime reprints from old negatives in a "Random Excellence" post. My post led to a number of sales for Laurent, so he sent me a print of "Catboat Mary" as a thank-you. Laurent's work is very much in the spirit of TOP's own print offers—very high quality for very modest prices. I don't quite know how he can offer such beautiful prints, matted, carefully annotated, and beautifully packaged, for the prices he charges. Quite remarkable bargains. Anyway, I very much love his platinum "Catboat Mary," from a negative by John S. Johnston (no relation, except that we both probably have ancestors who hailed from the same patch of Scottish ground), which could almost have been taken on the lake where I grew up spending the summers.

From Mosaic Records I bought a modern open-edition inkjet print of this Francis Wolff picture of Sonny Clark. (I bought it before the price went up.) Not a collectable, really; like the Catboat picture, it just has the status of a modern reproduction. I'm a bit of a Sonny Clark nut. I love his the contrast between his plainspoken utter lack of flourish and his deep musical sophistication; I could listen to the guy comp. I do, actually—I collect recordings on which he was a sideman (the Wikipedia discography is by no means exhaustive—he played on Blue Serge, for Pete's sake). Unfortunately the print is not great—too light (often the hallmark of the inexperienced printer) and the tone in the piano keys is not held. I don't think I'll frame it because I'm not sure I can live with the print quality.

And what arrived in the mail the other day to my surprise but a very nicely-done inkjet print of this 1976 locomotive shot by Marcelo Guarini (the one in the Featured Comment of that post, naturally). He notes that it was taken at a very slow shutter speed, and so isn't completely sharp, and that what appear to be lighter streaks against the smoke was in fact heavy rain. A successful print regardless, and as usual I like the TOP connection.

Also just recently, I was especially pleased to finally consummate a long-discussed deal with Diane Bush for a print of this wonderful portrait of Milton Rogovin. Diane couldn't find the negative, but she eventually found a vintage print—one of two signed to her by Milton. The print arrived just the other day, in the most extravagant packing ever. It's just lovely, and I will treasure it.

She sold the print to me for $100, but I felt it was worth more so I sent her an extra $150. (It's worth more than that, too, but that's better than $100.) I think that makes it the most expensive print I've acquired so far. I like vintage 35mm work, and I do like pictures of photographers.

Diane will be having a show soon in the Las Vegas area called "True Brits." I wish I could see that.

Those aren't all fifteen, of course. For one thing—which I'm not overlooking—several readers also sent very nice prints as gifts, which was extremely kind.

But that gives you a taste.

And by the way, I think this is the first time I've ever truly kept a New Year's Resolution all through the year!

Mike

P.S. I haven't forgotten about Part II of the Kindle post, either. I just haven't written it yet.

"Open Mike" is a series of personal, off-topic, or light posts that appear only, but not always, on Sundays.

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Open Mike: Visuals

Spotted in a recent Christmastime catalog from Pottery Barn. They're selling old film cameras as decorator accessories—"nostalgic display," as the copy puts it.

-

Photo by Daniel Buck, from the epic "Show off your camera!" thread
at the Large Format Photography Forum.

Note lower left-hand corner. Inadvertent mislabeling—I'm sure this means the picture of the view camera was taken with a "35mm Digital," but still, it struck me as faintly poignant....

Incidentally, the picture shows an 8x10-inch Tachihara 810F (the F refers to the color scheme—mahogany with chrome metalwork and black bellows. The camera is available with this wood, these bellows, and gold metal (the GF), chrome metal with black rosewood and black bellows (the BR), or mahogany wood, gold metal parts, and red bellows (the GFR), for the truly extroverted). Oddly, the Tachihara is one of the cheapest 8x10 cameras you can buy, cheaper even than the Chinese Shen-Hao—$1,695 for the basic single-extension model, vs. $1,895 for the Shen-Hao. They're sold, special order, by Jeff Taugner at Badger Graphic Sales here in Wisconsin.

And if you look carefully at the picture above, you can see a spotmeter sitting on the camera bed.

-

When a famous photograph becomes a meme. The new Sri Lankan 1000 Rs note.

-

Oops! Veiled hostility from the presenter? (From an online video review of the Shen Hao TZ45-IIB.)

Speaking of video reviews, I like 'em:

This is Andrew Sanderson's video review of Mike Walker's Titan XL 8x10 (the British refer to the measurements backwards, and, actually, there's a long story behind why. But we won't get into that.) Every time I see a video review of a view camera, it makes me covet it. Mike, by the bye, is the latest in a very long and indubitably grand tradition of English camera fabricators. In fact, in some quarters classic folding field view cameras are known as "English cameras."

-

Kerik Kouklis, Prom Night 2008

Latest fad: Petzval swirl!

8x10 collodion on aluminum, Derogy portrait lens. Kerik says, "The kids thought it was 'F-ing awesome!! How'd you do that?!' "

-

'Net flotsam. Category: "Police fails."

Dilbert has it right....

(Mouse pad $7.99 at the Official Dilbert Store.)

Finally, naked camera porn. (Warning! Link* might not be appropriate for all photographers!)

Have a nice Sunday.

Mike
(Thanks to David Minick and Markus Spring)

*From a review of the Shen Hao FCL 810-A by Andrew Bruce.

"Open Mike" is a series of personal, off-topic, or light posts that appear only, but not always, on Sundays.

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Open Mike: Vinyl Nostalgia

Here and there, the cyberchatter has been registering the news: Panasonic finally pulled the plug on its venerable Technics SL-1200 turntable, which has been around since striped bellbottoms and jewfros* were popular.

Some reports are treating the event as if it were significant. It isn't, really. The old Technics, a true dinosaur surviving from the Cretaceous Period, a.k.a. the early '70s, is just an old, outmoded product that stayed alive way past its natural retirement date. The only reason it survived as long as it did was that it's been the default choice for wedding DJs (some SL-1200s come complete with DJ travel cases) and scratchers, both of whom like the fact that direct-drive turntables get up to speed quickly. Hi-fi aficionados left direct-drives behind for belt-drives several geological eras ago. (I've owned several direct-drive turntables, including one gorgeous and expensive one, and they're good in every conceivable way a turntable can be good except one: they don't sound great.)

New vinyl section at local Best Buy. I'd buy the Smiffs.

Vinyl resurges...to 4%
Actually, although it's still only a small fraction of the music market (and will never again be anything more than that), vinyl sales have been rising for several years in a row—I recently came across a whole big display of vinyl records at my local Best Buy (see above), and Amazon has a dedicated vinyl record portal.

And there are lots and lots of great turntables available at every price point, from the Music Hall MMF 2.2 ($449, a lively if somewhat rough-edged cartridge, I believe made by Goldring, included) to the Rega P3-24 and P5, to the Clearaudio Concept and the current darling of the high-end press, the made-in-the-USA VPI Classic. Or try the Sotas, made somewhere in the vasty reaches of Chicagoland, as featured on the TV show "House." Sota makes an unsuspended budget model called the Comet as well as a number of higher-level models with suspensions such as the Sapphire.

Sota Sapphire. Note lack of arm—at this level, you
choose your own cartridge and arm.

(By the way, if you're wondering how to suspend an unsuspended TT like the MMF 2.2 or the Regas, here's what you do. Go to the plumbing section of your local hardware mart and look for 1 1/2" pipe end caps in the plumbing section—the ones I found are made by Fernco and are called "Qwik Caps"—and then get some standard racquetballs. The racquetballs fit nicely in the depressions in the end caps. Multiply by four, and presto—a Q&D turntable suspension. Of course, a solid support underneath everything helps a lot. Believe it or not, there are custom "isolation bases" audiophiles pay hundreds of dollars for that are based around...you guessed it, plain old racquetballs.)

Personally, I like the MMF-2.2 as an entry-level model (I owned one and liked it), and I currently use the Rega P3-24 with a PSU, modified with a Groovetracer subplatter.

Another thing the mainstream press gets all wrong is the constant repetition of the old saw about how all you have to do to get great records is to head out to flea markets and garage sales where you'll find thousands of collectible records going begging. That might have been true twenty years ago, but not any more. If you're lucky enough to find a few records you actually want at a yard sale or a Goodwill, chances are they'll have dog-eared and water-damaged covers and surfaces trashed by too many playings under heavy, bad, dirty "needles." Nope—the appeal of records these days is to buy new ones, which are essentially lovingly made, remastered, deluxe replicas of great masterpieces. On the bad side, they're expensive as hell—$25 to $50 each. On the good side, they're made to a breathtakingly high standard all but unknown back in the days when vinyl supposedly ruled. Check out Music Direct, The Elusive Disc, or Acoustic Sounds to see what's available.

Currently on heavy rotation chez TOP. It's a 10-incher, with four cuts. Part of a small custom pressing for a special order from Japan; I got one of the leftovers on closeout for $12. Bought a handful of 10-inchers at that price and am making my way through them slowly.

I think vinyl records have captured as much as 4% of the current music market...and I probably spin vinyl records 4% of the time. (The rest of the time I listen to the computer through a USB DAC. What I don't have is a CD player. There's no need; if I want to listen to a CD I just pop it into the computer and copy it to the hard drive, and listen to it from there.)

One of the things I like about vinyl these days is that I tend to leave the same record on the 'table until I've played it many times and have gotten to know it thoroughly (which I obviously couldn't do if the TT was my only source). No reason to do anything like that with computer music, much of which I tend to listen to once or twice and then...er, well, lose. It's not lost literally, it's just that I forget about it and it goes into extended hibernation somewhere on the hard drive.

If I had my latest return to vinyl to do over again, I probably wouldn't bother—it's involved and expensive, even if I do find happiness in it. In any event, there's really no need to mourn for the old Technics. If you have one, you can continue to enjoy it, and if you happen across someone preaching on the internet about the deep meaning of its demise, haul out the old salt lick. Vinyl has reached equalibrium in its little niche (just as film will one day, I'm convinced) and will continue to survive just fine.

Mike

"Open Mike" is a series of off-topic posts that appears only—but not always—on Sundays.

P.S. I was going to include a list of favorite records I've bought recently, but only about a third of the list I came up with are still readily available. Vinyl tends to come and go, which is only appealing in that I'm not a serious collector. If one were, new vinyl would be a dangerous thing to get obsessive about. On the other hand, if anybody knows where I can get a copy of Howe Gelb's "'Sno Angel Like You"....

* 20 Badass Jewfros.

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Featured Comment by Jeff: "Still going strong with my Sota Sapphire (with Cosmos arm board) and Wheaton Tri-Planar arm (now known without the Wheaton). I bought the table at a shop near Wheaton, Maryland more than 25 years ago and the arm was personally set up on my table by Herb Papier, the late Tri-Planar founder. Several Lyra cartridges later and the music sounds as wonderful as ever. Maybe even better with the quality of some new vinyl, remastered recordings and the improved cartridges."

Mike replies: I met Herb Papier a time or three. Never could afford one of his tonearms; still can't. As with cameras, though, I envy those who got good stuff and stuck with it. A few years back I knew a guy who was still using Marantz Model 9's he'd bought new. Price those on Ebay! A suitable occasion for that most overused of words: awesome.

Featured Comment by Rene Hermanides: "Tip of the day: The DVD It's a Vinyl World After All by Michael Fremer. A lot of information about vinyl manufacturing, cleaning, collecting etc, but also a report of a mastering session at Blue Note. Gives a nice overview of the 'vinyl world.' "

Featured Comment by paul logins: "Wow. That's a surprise. Didn't know those giant black frisbies in my attic have music on them. Will have to check this out.  :-)"

Featured Comment by max: "On the relevance of the 1200s, there is one displayed at the London Museum of Science and Technology, as one of the defining tech objects of our times."

Open Mike: Does Recycling Matter?

Help me out here: I'm currently in procrastination mode. Full-steam-ahead, no-holds-barred, all-out procrastination mode.

When I'm feeling cyncical, I wonder if maybe all the stuff I carefully separate out of the trash for recycling just gets collected at great expense and dumped into a landfill anyway. Or if it costs more to process than it's worth.

So I did a little research. And it seems that, in my county, at least, recycling does matter. The Waukesha County Materials Recycling Facility (MRF) processed 21,096 tons of recyclables in 2009, from 25 of the county's 37 communities. How much is that? More than 1,000 semi trailer loads. If you lined all those trucks up bumper to bumper, the line would stretch for 12 miles. That seems like a lot.

It reduces pollution, too. The reduction in greenhouse gas emissions from recycling all those materials last year was equivalent to taking 5,691 cars off the road for one year.

It saves space in landfills, too. (I love how certain know-nothings like to claim we can't possibly run out of room in landfills in America. As punishment for being idiots, they should be assigned the task of finding more landfill locations and arguing with angry local residents who don't want anything resembling a landfill anywhere near their property.) Total landfill space saved by our county's recycling efforts was 51,595 cubic yards. And how much is that? The equivalent of a football field piled 30 feet high. That's not huge, but that's only from one county for one year—and I wouldn't want to have to move it all with a wheelbarrow. (There are 3,140 counties or county-equivalent municipalities in the U.S.)

Finally, it saves energy. The 13,187 tons of paper plus 7,711 tons of plastic, steel, glass and aluminum containers shipped to markets from the Waukesha MRF last year saved enough energy to supply 3,794 homes for a year. (There are 156,000 homes in the county. Again, it's not huge, but it's enough to be significant.) Carting stuff to the landfill costs money; the recycling program earns money. So recycling saves tax dollars.

Less of everything—but a good economy for owls
My county, despite increasing population, has been generating fewer recyclables. The amount collected saw a 12% decline between 2005 and 2009. But it's not all going in the ground: trash destined for landfills has also decresed in the same time period, by 4%. The County Executive says several factors contribute to the recycling decline, including "lighter weight containers, changes in packaging (i.e., glass to plastic), smaller newspapers and magazines, declining circulation numbers, and the economy." So the bad economy is good for that one thing, at least. (Not much else, I'm afraid.)

Meanwhile, moving on to other local news, Mike wins: it's now too cold for mosquitos! They're all gone. It was 38°F this morning when I got up (that's 3.3°C). Victory! Death to mosquitos.

And the owls are here. Finally. Every year the owls come through the area and stay for two or three weeks. When I hear one hooting late at night, I go outside and listen, and I can hear another one answering from a distance—and another, from another direction and a greater distance. Talking, I guess. (I take a flashlight when I go outside, and shine it up into various trees, but I've never seen an owl. You have to be a little careful outdoors at three in the morning shining a flashlight around. It could look suspicious. It's a quiet neighborhood.)

They were late this year, the owls—usually they come around earlier in the summer. You can always tell if they haven't been here yet because there are rabbits all over the place. Then the owls come through. And when they leave, no more rabbits.

I guess I'm done. If I was looking for an excuse not to recycle, I didn't find it. I do a lot of shopping via the internet—I'm sure I'm not Amazon's best customer, but I feel like I should be up there on the list—and over the past couple of months a pile of discarded cardboard boxes has gradually grown to unruly size on the back deck. The recycling rules demand that it all be cut into flats no more than 2 x 4' in size and bundled for pickup. It's not that bad a job, but I don't enjoy it. I've been procrastinating all day.

Best get to it.

Mike

"Open Mike" is an off-topic ramble that appears on Sundays—unless, that is, the focus of your humble author's formidable procrastination skills is the writing of a new "Open Mike." 

UPDATE by the dawn's early light: 7 a.m. Monday morning:

...Procrastination is one thing that I am really good at. (The recycling truck doesn't come until 9 or 10, so there's still time!)

UPDATE #2: I got the second of two bales of cardboard out to the alley just as the recycling cart was collecting up all my stuff, at about 11:30, and had a nice short conversation with the garbage collection guy.

Me: nice day.
He: I couldn't tell ya that.
Me: At least it's not hot.
He: I couldn't even tell ya that. I don't know if it's what the politicians want me to say!

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There's Going to be Much Less of Mike

(On- and Off-Topic Updates)

Yesterday was my day off. I spent my day off yesterday watching spreadsheet tutorials! Happy-go-lucky me. I am such a sybarite.

Lillian. A recent Mike-snap.

Less of me: I am speaking of course of my ongoing weight-loss diet, Week Eight of which has just concluded. I'm happy to report that I saw 234 on the scale yesterday, down from a mid-winter high last year of 264. In other words: I'm still a load, but less of a load than I was a short time ago.

I'll write a little more about the diet below, for people who might be curious (I do have some rather shocking news about it).

Paris Prints
...But first, before I lose absolutely everyone's attention, a print sale update. We're still reeling here at TOP International from the stupefying success of Peter's Paris Print sale. We've decided not to release numbers this time, but it was...amazing. Thank you all so much. It has also kept me truly busy these past two weeks, although it's not like a day's work would kill me. In Paris, Voja is printing at full speed, which must be an awesome sight. Peter is set to mail the first batch of orders tomorrow, and he'll be flying to Paris to pick up the remainder of the prints—that's most of them—later this week; he's decided to hand-carry them back to New York himself just to be safe. Mailing will proceed swiftly thereafter, from Manhattan. I'll keep you posted.

We're still missing a few payments. If you ordered but haven't mailed your payment in, you're on the verge of being too late; please don't delay any further. I assume in most cases the checks are in the mail...especially from Australia, where Peter's pictures were inordinately popular for some reason; we got several dozen orders from Oz alone.

What's that were you saying, fatso?
And now about the diet, which is possibly as off-topic as it's possible to get for a photography site. But hey, as I sometimes say, whatever else this may be, it's still my blog. So here goes. Here's the shock about my diet: I actually like it. Really. It's a good way to eat, for me. I started in with stern ambitions to be wholly compliant with the official scheme, but of course (me being me) it wasn't ten days before I had modified the plan to suit myself. The straight Optifast plan is that you get six "shakes" a day, spaced two or three hours apart, and they replace all your meals. On my renegade, modified plan, I've been drinking four shakes (9 a.m., noon, 3 p.m, and 9 p.m.) and eating one 700 to 1000 calorie meal (at 6 p.m.). 

I'm strict about the meal. I count calories fastidiously, and stick to healthy foods.

The weird thing is that this works for me, just as a normal way of eating. It suits me. The shakes are fast and easy to consume during the day, when I'm working and wouldn't normally want to eat anyway. They don't interrupt work. And by eating one planned, calorie-restricted meal a day, I'm actually enjoying my food much more than I used to. It turns out you can eat a really formidably huge dinner for 800 calories if you just eat actual food and forego things like butter and mayo and oil and anything cooked in grease.

...But the sweet tooth has long been my Achilles' heel. For desserts, I've been using "Mousse Temptations" by Jell-O or a cup of vanilla Activia yogurt. The former especially, but both to some degree, are what Michael Pollan* calls "foodlike substances." In the case of the Jell-O concoctions, one is nice but it's not even tempting to have two—they're so devoid of any nutritive value or anything actually gratifying to your body that there's really nothing there to crave; it's just a little sweetish palliative for the tongue after a solid meal.

By the way, I think we should now consider the American food supply officially unsafe. It is so packaged and processed, so larded with chemicals and not only sugar, fat and starch but sugar-like, fat-like and starch-like substitutes, so severely adulterated, that much of it really doesn't qualify as "food" at all—it's just a neverending avalanche of glutinous foodlike material we can eat as if it were food, material cannily designed to appeal to our palates and to make our bodies crave more. They could throw away 70% of the crap in our grocery stores and not get rid of anything we need. And they're madly lacing pretty much the entire food supply with sucralose before adequate studies have even been conducted. (But it should be safe. Can you say "asbestos," or "margarine"?)

I'm seriously considering a photo project on all the weird places you can buy unhealthy crap to stuff your face with in America—there is a candy aisle at the office supply store, fer chrissakes. This has gotten out of hand.

At any rate, I'm shooting for 205. Thirty down, thirty to go. I'm not under any illusion that the second thirty are going to be anywhere nearly as easy as the first, so wish me luck. Although so far I'm not complaining; so far so good.

Back to the spreadsheets. I do hope to actually write a little more later today...about photography, even!

Like a guy like me would have time for a thing like that.

Mike

"Open Mike," an off-topic ramble, appears irregularly on TOP but only on Sundays.

*Seriously, if you have not read The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals yet, you really must. One of my favorite non-fiction books of recent years, hugely informative, endlessly interesting, and a delight to read.

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Original contents copyright 2010 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.

Sunday Open Mike: Porsches In My Way

I had a fun day on my day off yesterday. Our local Mercedes dealer, which also sells Infiniti, Maserati, and Porsche, had a driving school day. You got to hop into a Boxster or Cayman with a driving instructor and flog it around a tight little course laid out in their stock lot with white lines and cones. After a couple of laps, you switched places with the instructor, who then demonstrated how it's really done.

The dealer is Mercedes-Benz of Elmbrook, which is now located in Waukesha, not Elmbrook. (I assume the name will be changing once the new location is established. Although the Lakers are still named for Minnesota lake country.) It's a division of International Autos.

I drove a Boxster a bit sloppily (never drove one before, never drove their cones before) but, if I do say so myself, quite quickly. At least quite a bit more quickly than most of the other participants were managing. Then Cass Whitehead took the wheel and showed me the difference between real race drivers and guys like me who normally drive like they have their free arm draped across the top of the passenger seat. As Cass said, "It's like go-karts, only with a car." He'd been doing it all day—in fact, in his role as Lead Instructor at the Porsche Sport Driving School at Barber Motorsport Park in Leeds, Alabama, he does it year-in, year-out—but he didn't seem bored. He knocked off a crisp, fast lap that pasted us up against the seat side-bolsters, and put li'l ol' me in my proper, ah, perspective.

Driving school is in a peculiar class of activities at my stage of life: it's in the category of "always wanted to...and still might." (Most "always wanted tos...." are now in the "...but never will" box.)

I'm going to have to revise my opinion of Porsches. When I was first driving on the north shore of Milwaukee in the 1970s, 911s—especially Targas—were the "chick cars" of choice for the hip young housewife, who drove them about the same way their younger doppelgangers now drive the gussied-up trucks called SUVs. To the amusement of my friends, I worked out alternate lyrics for a song called "Porsches in My Way," sung to the tune of "Smoke Gets In Your Eyes," which I was wont to croon whenever I got trapped behind a Porsche doing an imitation of a tortoise.

The other demo the dealer was offering was an extended test drive in the new Panamera (it's pronounced "pan-uh-MARE-uh."). I had no expectations whatsoever for that exercise. The Panamera struck me from the start as a conceptual monstrosity, like a BMW SUV or a Leica rangefinder with a 28–300mm zoom. But...well, it's not. It's actually a pure delight to drive—it reminded me of that Mozart quote about how the pianoforte should be played in his piano concertos—"It must flow like oil." The Panamera is as close to the experience of a flying in a glider as you can get on the ground. In my experience at least. Lovely.

Fun couple of hours. No Porsches in my way, either, all day.

Mike

P.S. Why no pictures? Because your idiot host carefully charged the camera battery but then came away from the house with camera in hand but without a card. Sheesh. Keep it together, Mikey, keep it together.

"Open Mike," which consists of off-topic posts on a variety of subjects written by Yr. Hmbl. Ed., appears intermittently, but only on Sundays.

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Featured Comment by Rex Kersley: "Reminds me of an old joke: Guy hires a odd job man to paint the porch. When he returns there is a note, 'Sorry Boss, couldn't find the Porsche, so I painted the Ferrari instead.'"

Featured Comment by Michael: "I've got the answer for forgetting to replace the card in the camera. Always carry a spare in your wallet. Works for me anyway."

I Am Beaten

I can't think why you might be curious, but just in case you are curious, this year, mosquitoes own Wisconsin. My rectangular patch of it, at the least. We've had unusual and copious amounts of summer rainfall, which apparently contributes to mosquito prosperity and mosquito fecundity. Plants desirable and not have also benefited. The yard is normally sere and semi-dormant by August, but this year there is lush greenery growing voluminously everywhere.

I just got in from attempting to do some weed-whacking in the back yard, trying to do my duty to fight back against the weeds. The insects were defending their homeland vigorously. I am bigger than they are, and fancy I have better technology. In most battles in my yard I like my chances (although the besieged juniper stump is still holding out). But the mosquitoes are guerrilla fighters. They are motivated, mobile, and greatly outnumber my forces. Their attacks are persistent and relentless. I withstood the one that flew into my eye, and the one that flew into my ear. I lasted until one of the little devils flew right down my throat. I have retreated.

(Left: Aerial map of battlefield)

The screens are sufficient to keep most of them out of the house. I often work until dusk shrouds my office in gloom, and this summer I not infrequently see the shape of a mosquito float serenely past between me and the monitor, in silhouette. This causes me to erupt in a frantic spasm of clapping. Sometimes I get them. Most times not. I have not given up the fight for the indoors.

Benjamin Franklin said that beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy. I believe it was an atheist, although it might not have been an atheist, who said that the existence of mosquitoes proves the opposite.

I plan to retake my territory and airspace for good at first frost. 

Mike

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Original contents copyright 2010 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.

Featured Comment by John Scott: "Watch this. It will provide a) a humbling perspective on your problems and b) a highly satisfying revenge fantasy."

Mike replies: Very, very cool. Mini Star Wars! Like a lot of TED Talks, it's a long way to go if you don't have the time to spare, but worth it. For those of you who are busy, you could start at about ten minutes in—the preamble is that they're investigating eliminating malaria by figuring out ways to attack the mosquito.

Featured Comment by Michael: "A little story I call 'In the House of Compassion':

A while back—quite a while back—I was doing some research with Buddhist forest monks in Sri Lanka. At one monastery I was put up for the night in a separate house, a single-room cell which had been freshly whitewashed inside and out with the word for the Buddhist virtue of compassion (for all living beings) painted over the door. I had forgotten all my anti-mosquito paraphernalia, and as soon as I turned down the kerosene lantern to sleep, the attack began. Every few minutes through the night I would rise up and slap away at them. I missed most, but discovered in the morning light that those I had hit had something in common: they were the ones who had drunk my blood, which was smeared, with their guts, in little dark marks all over the fresh whitewash around the bed.

"I thought it best not to raise the topic with my hosts. Nor did they, gracious as they were, bring it up themselves."

Mike replies: . Funny! I have a similar story. I was once besotted with a girl whose mother had taken up with a fairly noted German theologian. This man had a philosophical aversion to taking any life at all—he was the type who would capture a spider and release it outdoors rather than kill it. Well, they moved to South America, and within two weeks, the German theologian had taken to standing quietly in the kitchen in the dark, then flipping on the light and hacking away in a frenzy at the inch-and-a-half-long cockroaches with a machete before they could scurry to cover.

We all have our limits!

Featured Comment by Andrea B.: "The husband was once bamfoozled by the sight of me dancing around a bit disheveled in the middle of the room waving the vacuum cleaner hose around in the air. 'Mosquito,' I sez. 'Carry on!' he sez."

Sunday Open Mike

Anybody read any great books lately? I'm looking for what to read next....

Mike

And a P.S.: Historically I get my best book recommendations from my brother Scott, and he and I have a friendly guideline we call the Pinker Rule. The name comes from a Stephen Pinker book that starts out very promisingly but, after the first third, descends into unreadability. He recommended it warmly to me and I read the first third of it with interest but then hit the heavy slogging and bogged down. Some time later, feeling somewhat rueful, I reported my failure back to him (is "bailure" a word? A failure which involves bailing out? If it isn't, it ought to be—my life, at least, is littered with bailures), and he admitted that he too had read the first third of the book and then stopped as well—he apologized, saying he simply hadn't gotten far enough along in it when he recommended it. Ever since then we've observed the Pinker Rule, meaning that either one of us must have read all the way through a book before we're allowed to recommend it to the other. You are under no compulsion to accept any rules from me, so this is a humble request, not a requirement, but if you could please perhaps consider the Pinker Rule in your suggestions I'd be grateful. Just in case. As you know, life is short, books long.

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Featured Comment by Mark Cotter: "The Ongoing Moment by Geoff Dyer (U.K. link). It explores the recurrent themes of American photography during the twentieth century. An excellent read, interesting without being overly academic. Just bought Gerry Badger's new book: The Pleasures of Good Photographs (U.K. link)—looks good but I've not started it yet."

Featured Comment by yunfat: "Sebastian Junger: WAR. Just check out the photo on the back from Tim Heatherington, you will know it's for you."

Mike replies: I wonder if that's the same Tim Heatherington who used to be Richard Avedon's assistant.

Featured Comment by Stephen Best: "I read Thomas Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge from Project Gutenberg recently with the Eucalyptus app on my iPhone. I was sceptical that the small screen would be readable with my less than stellar vision but it worked surprisingly well. I've been working my way through Hardy over the past few years and still probably like The Woodlanders the best. Maybe one day I'll make a pilgrimage to Wessex. Current reading is David Malouf's latest and a weighty tome on CSS."

(Ed. Note: Since I have no real way to discriminate between recommendations, and there were well over a hundred awaiting me when I woke up this morning, I will (mostly) dispense with the usual "Featured Comment" format and just list a few of the recommendations that seem interesting or unusual in some way. These will be chosen more or less at random, so please don't feel slighted (in the slightest) if your own recommendation isn't listed. It will be in the comments. I do read everyone's comments, and I extend my thanks to all, as well.

And in a necessary nod to Mammon, our Amazon links (I fear this post is going to be extremely expensive for me):

Amazon U.S.
http://www.amazon.com/?tag=theonlinephot-20

Amazon U.K.:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/?tag=cdrebyc6-21

Amazon Germany:
http://www.amazon.de/?tag=cdrebyc603-21

Amazon Canada:
http://amazon.ca/?tag=theonliphot-20

These links can be bookmarked.

I don't have an affiliation with Amazon France. I've applied, but was turned down. I really don't know why, although I suspect the problem is at my end and not theirs. —Mike)

Kafka on the Shore (Dan K)

Man's Fate (Erik)

The Broken Shore("Very Australian.") (Ann P)

Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work (Ross Chambers, Dave, and Carl)

Featured Comment by Iain Dawson: "Have you read Fred Ritchin's After Photography (published by W.W. Norton)? I found it a very thought provoking account of where the 'digital revolution' in photography could be taking us (U.K. link)."

Snow Crash (John H. Maw)

The "Reacher Novels" by Lee Child ("Light but engaging action thrillers.") (Jim, and Gary Fitzgerald)

Stieg Larsson's Millennium Trilogy Bundle: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest (Recommended by Leigh Youdale, Dave Pawson, Simon, Dave Hodgkinson, Bill Anderson, stuartf287, Greg Anderson, Hugh, Mike Chisholm, and Al Patterson) ("If you liked The Da Vinci Code you'll like these." —Leigh. "Not put-downable." —Dave P.)

Dalva (Jean-Louis Cuvellier)

Featured Comment by Barnard Scharp: "Ctein's Post Exposure. Fits in with your current project (though I can imagine you've already read it)."

Mike replies: Oh yes.

The Invention of Solitude (XebastYan)

Blindness (Mr C, nacho)

Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives ("Best thing I've read in ages.") (Scott)

The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine ("Inside stories that answer the question, 'What happened?' to cause the recent and ongoing financial meltdown." —Speed.) (Recommended by Speed, MikeB, Harry, and Stephen Gilbert)

Kristin Lavransdatter ("Borrowed it from the library and had to buy my own copy.") (Ruby)

The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work (Rob)

Cloud Atlas (Neil)

Featured Comment by David Miller: "Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass. Parts of its long, rambling, cosmic, earthy journey seemed to make the very ground shake beneath my feet! How have I managed to avoid it all these years? Finally reading it in my sixties I was suddenly reminded of so many things that I knew when I was twenty-one, which I have somehow lost touch with over the intervening years. (Echoes of Bob Dylan singing 'Ah but I was so much older then; I am younger than that now....') Life-changing—it opened my photographer's eyes wider than they've been in a long while. Have fun with the darkroom. (When will you find time to read?)"

Bridge of Birds: A Novel of an Ancient China That Never Was ("I doubt [this is] the kind of thing you had in mind.") (Will Frostmill)

The Meaning of Life ("Everything you need to know in a 'slim, profound, accessible volume.'") (richard)

The Value of Nothing (James Bullard)

Featured Comment by Thomas Osborne: "I set out to read a book a week this year. I was doing well until I started Roberto Bolaño’s 900-page 2666 in May. Of the 23 books I’ve read, I'd recommend three recent titles: Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits by Linda Gordon; Half Broke Horses by Jeannette Walls (with a Lange photo on the jacket); and American Salvage by Bonnie Jo Campbell. And one from 30 years ago: Woody Guthrie: A Life by Joe Klein."

Sh*t My Dad Says ("Got it for Fathers Day and couldn't stop laughing.") (Roger Engle)

Featured Comment by Michael W: "I'm enjoying The Odyssey by Homer. Fitzgerald translation. Wonder where I got the idea to read that."

Mike replies:  :-)

Any book by Michael Pollan. (Tom)

Mike replies: I agree, Tom. Except the little Rules book.

The Art of Racing in the Rain (Don Olson)

Featured Comment by Frank Gorga: "May I recommend: Through an Uncommon Lens: The Life and Photography of F. Holland Day by Patricia J. Fanning. See here for details. In addition to being an interesting character in his own right, Day invited Clarence White to his summer home in Maine early in White's career and thus was in some ways responsible for the 'Maine School.' (Disclaimer: Patty is a colleague and friend of mine.)"

Vanished Smile: The Mysterious Theft of the Mona Lisa (Ken Tanaka)

Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things (Kevin Schoenmakers)

Featured Comment by Matthew Robertson: "Keeping it in the family, John Camp is an occasional commenter here, and his pen-name of John Sandford is always one I look for. Good crime fiction, and he knows his photography."

Open Mike: Blog Notes

We get traffic: On Sunday (it's still Sunday as I write this), TOP got 44,000+ visitors, which is our second-best traffic day in the past three months, and (I didn't actually check) almost certainly our best Sunday ever. And that's without a new post for Sunday—the excess is viral attention being paid to the "Letter for George" post, news of which appears to be wending its way through the tubes of the internets.

Unfortunately, a few people who aren't regular readers aren't grokking it. I've been called some names by people who don't come around here much. Occupational hazard, I guess. But 98% of readers seemed to understand.

We eat Himalayan: I'm happy to report that I got to eat lunch with my old friend, good friend, and very smart friend Ctein last Friday. He was in Madison for "WisCon," which sounds like Wisconsin without the sin but is actually a major feminist-themed science-fiction convention. We went out for Himalayan food at a Nepalese restaurant (a first for me—it was very good) with Ctein's friend Peggy, a mathematician and vocal artist. Believe it or not, it's been 13 years since Ctein and I have seen each other in person, so it was really a treat. Ctein is surely one of this particular galaxy's most interesting people.

We hit you up: It's that time of the month again. As I've mentioned before, hopefully not more than once a month, all this stuff doesn't write itself! If you want to help out, especially if you never have before, you can support TOP in one of three ways: make a direct donation, make a recurring donation—or just buy something for yourself from Amazon or B&H Photo using our links, which can always be found in the right-hand sidebar.

When you buy yourself something through our links, those two affiliates pay us a small commission out of their profits. You don't pay any more for your purchase, but everything you buy earns money for TOP, as long as you start from here when you actually make the purchase. (Items already in your Shopping Cart aren't counted—even if you linked from here when you put them in there.)

Of course, it would be nice if you bought yourself one of these (seriously, who buys those?), but, believe it or not, even buying something small helps out: the percentage we get for everything goes up as the item count goes up. A few notable anomalies on Amazon: we get a straight $25 for any computer purchase, no matter how large; MP3 songs do count; but Kindle books do not. Our highest commission, though—a whopping 10%—is on Kindle readers.

We find out fascinating facts about you: I have no idea how they know stuff like this, but at my friend Stephen Gandy's recommendation I went to one of those analytics sites today, and they say that, relative to the entire Universe of web users, TOP readers tend to be: 35 and older, male (that's photography in general—I believe TOP has more female readers than most photography sites), and—our strongest index—we have far more readers with post-graduate degrees than is average on the web.

We get the best comments: If you missed Jillian's poignant "Featured Comment" to the "P.S., but not to 'George'" post, be sure to go read it. I found it very touching, though tragic. What a thoughtful parting gift from her "camera hobbyist" husband, in several different ways.

Mike

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Featured Comment by Tom Brenholts: "Regarding buying at B&H or Amazon through TOP; here's an easy way to do it without having to think. Enter the sites through TOP, then bookmark them. After that, any time you go to B&H or Amazon the link comes up as having entered through TOP. Here is what my browser shows: http://www.amazon.com/?tag=theonlinephot-20 Then, every time you buy anything from Amazon, the credit goes here. No fuss, no muss, no brain strain. Buy a book, credit here. Buy a gas grill, credit here. Buy the three howling wolves shirt, credit here. Buy a 7D (I did), credit here."

Mike replies: Thanks for that Tom. That does indeed work for Amazon, but I'm told it does not work for B&H Photo. With B&H, it's best to come here and click on the advertisement. That does the trick.

Sunday Open Mike: Television

This post might be of interest only to readers from the U.K.

...All right then, only to a few readers from the U.K.

I believe it was an Englishman, John Berger, who pioneered the idea of "writing" criticism by simply juxtaposing pictures. Berger—who strikes me (although I might be completely wrong) as one of those rare happy people who do whatever they want through life and are somehow valued and rewarded for it—has written extensively about photography. The books of his I have, both of them entertaining and enjoyable, are Ways of Seeing and About Looking. It's Ways of Seeing in which he constructs essays made entirely out of pictures. I'm going to try the same thing here, after the break.

But on to television. I guess I'm a fairly obsessive guy. It's a useful characteristic for an artist (remember the fictional novelist played by Jack Nicholson in "As Good As It Gets"?)...or for a blogger. With me, it counteracts my basic ennui and inertia. My compulsiveness shows up in the way I watch television, too. I really don't have many favorite television shows, but every now and then I'll get obsessive about one and blast through its entire history in short order. I never saw an episode of "Seinfeld" when it was a current show, but as soon as it went into reruns I watched all 174 episodes over the course of about eight months—one every weeknight, on local broadcast T.V.

My taste is...idiosyncratic. ("Idiosyncratic" is a polite way of saying "peculiar.") I watched every episode of "Deadliest Catch," sequentially. (Told you I'm obsessive.)

Last year I got going on a wonderful Canadian law-enforcement drama called "Da Vinci's Inquest," watching one or two episodes a night, and got weaned of it only because hulu.com, my source for that one, only offers the first three seasons. That show is nearly perfect, in my opinion. A welcome dose of realism and a wonderful weaving of storylines, as though we in the audience actually have brains. Great writing, excellent acting, and, for the main part, outstanding cinematography (although the style changes markedly from time to time. Maybe ordinary people don't notice things like that). The other six seasons are out there waiting for me. I'll track them down sooner or later.

Another favorite is the American version of "The Office," but only as long as Jim and Pam's affair is incipient: just as soon as they actually got together, the show was effectively over, and should have been ended right then and there. It's been a cadaver ever since, rote and pointless. (The wedding episode was especially horrible.) Steve Carrell, in the often overcooked part of boss Michael Scott, is thought to be the star of the show, but he's not—he's actually just the clown figure, the comic foil, like Kramer on "Seinfeld" or Ted Baxter on the old "Mary Tyler Moore Show."

I've never seen a single episode of "The Sopranos." At some point I imagine I'll catch up with that, and watch it straight through.

Well, anyway, on to the point. I mentioned last week that I've been watching the BBC car show "Top Gear" lately. My source for that one is iTunes, which has an incomplete motley of back episodes available, but I'm in full-on into-it mode, watching maybe one show a night, sometimes two.

Okay, okay—last night, until late, three. A veritable "Top Gear" marathon.

Pretty early on, something about the dynamic of the three main characters—the "presenters"—just seemed awfully familiar. Jeremy Clarkson is the boss, the ringleader, and seems to hold the other two in genial contempt. It's clear he thinks he's indisputably superior to them, even though he's one of them. The second fiddle is Jeremy's main henchman, Richard Hammond, short, intense, eager to please—he's sometimes in league with Jeremy, at other times the object of Jeremy's abuse and derision. Although Hammond stands up for himself and his own views from time to time, he's a follower. Finally there's James May, thoughtful, distracted, somewhat sweet, but decidedly bumbling. He gets the brunt of the mistreatment from the other two, until you sometimes wonder why he hangs out with them at all—it can seem like he's just tagging along. And yet, in his dry, witty way, he can be the funniest of the three. He's responsible, at any rate, for most of the laughs, one way or another.

So where have we seen that dynamic before? With apologies to John Berger, what follows is my entire critical exegesis of "Top Gear," entirely in pictures, and I'm sure I can't be the first to note the similarities....

Open Mike: The New Ride

Salesman Levi Goines of Mercedes-Benz of Elmbrook stands
next to the car he sold me, a silver 2007 C280.

So...turns out, the answer to my question from last Sunday—"Volkswagen or Hyundai?"—is, of all things, "Mercedes-Benz."

Once Steve Rosenblum reformulated my priorities for me, the choice didn't take too long to make. The "Baby Benz"—which I bought used for about the same money as the new cars I was looking at—is thoroughly engineered for crashworthiness and has about every safety feature known to Man: all-wheel drive, traction control, ABS brakes, airbags out the wazoo, brights that can be seen from space, and so on. Seemed like the perfect car to share with Zander as he learns to drive. (He'll be more careful of it than he'd be of a beat-up elderly Ford, too.)

If it's a good choice for him, though, it's an unusual choice for me. It's as if I were buying a new camera and decided on a 1Ds and an all-in-one zoom lens the size of a Yule log.

In the course of my shopping odyssey I did find the perfect toy car for Mike. I liked the VW GTI a lot, and it had a decided practical side for an only car, but as a toy it paled in comparison to the Chevy Cobalt SS, a car that's been discontinued and is almost gone from dealer lots. The Cobalt SS is no frills, looks like an econobox, and drives like a race car. It has a superb, highly flexible 260 horsepower turbo four in a 2,926-lb. body (vs. the GTI's 200 hp and a hundred and eight more pounds of curb weight), a road-gripping suspension that can't be flummoxed by pavement nasties, and an outstanding short-throw shifter with a very positive action. Just a delight to drive—very much the car equivalent of the perfect Mike camera. Then consider its excellent Recaro-style front seats and jazz on the satellite radio, and I was in my automotive heaven.

Perfect Mike car: The Chevy Cobalt SS. Photo by Erich Healey.

By the numbers, the Cobalt SS is faster than the 1993 BMW M3 (a 6-cylinder, RWD car) and the 1989 V8 Corvette—and that's only because it can't get its power to the pavement. To that end, it has "launch control," an anti-burnout mode also found on Corvettes—you floor the throttle and the launch control limits the revs to 5000. Then you pop the clutch and feel the muscles in your neck. There's a lot more to a car than just straight-line acceleration, of course. The Cobalt SS is the current unofficial record-holder among front-wheel-drive cars for a lap around the Nürburgring.

It's almost painful to forgo the chance to buy a Cobalt SS new. But I can only afford one car at a time, and it would have been well into stupid territory to buy it as a dual driver to share with my 17-year-old new driver son. Also, my insurance agent offered the opinion that "insuring a 17-year-old for a Cobalt SS would have been through the roof." So the choice came down to: Cobalt SS for me and the 11-year-old Ford ZX2 for Zander, or a safer, more crashworthy car for both of us to share.

The Benz is a completely different driving experience, and one that is not at all unpleasant. It "wants" to be driven in a slightly brisk but essentially decorous and stately manner. You can feel the road nicely, but the suspension flows like oil. It's the very first car with an automatic transmission I've ever owned. I find driving automatics difficult and somewhat disconcerting—unnatural, really—and it's going to take some getting used to. But I'm sure I shall.

Its styling is lovely save for the slightly extroverted taillights, and the plethora of luxury features in its cockpit are delightfully over-the-top, with every luxury touch I could have dreamed up and then some. Lights everywhere, auto- and power-everything, dual climate zones, all for the earnest pampering and cossetting and cocooning of the lucky driver. I feel like quite the serious, privileged fellow proceeding magisterially down the boulevard. (As my friend Art wrote to me, "So, when did we grow up?")

I'm told it's "not as luxurious" as bigger Benzes or the serious models from the upscale Rising Sun marques, and that's an astonishing notion to me. It's by far the most luxurious car I've ever owned. Zander actually really likes it, too. If he gets "typed" for life to this style of car, he could certainly do worse.

I must add that the Mercedes people really have the sales experience down pat. Although you naturally have to disappoint all the salespeople you deal with during a car search except the last, I've met some nice folks all the way through my car-shopping journey—notably Adam Rolfson at Hall VW (whose website bringbackbrettfavre.com went viral in a way TOP has never approached), Chef Newhouse at Wilde Honda, and Mark Kelm at Boucher Chevrolet (really sorry I couldn't buy a car from you, Mark!)—but my experience at Mercedes of Elmbrook was noticeably a cut above. I met Levi Goines at the Milwaukee Auto Show, and he convinced me to come by the dealership even though I assured him repeatedly that there was no way I was ever going to buy a Mercedes anything. Shows how much I know. Levi fits my idea of the perfect car salesman: friendly, informative, helpful, and not pushy. If you're looking for a Mercedes in Southeastern Wisconsin or even from Chicago, please tell him I sent you.

My Old Faithful Ford is no more, bless her shining chrome heart. She's off to wholesale. A Pentax K-1000 of cars—built in November, 1998, in Mexico, and sold new to me in Chicago as a '99 model. It went a hundred thousand miles with nothing more serious than a loose tie rod—a cheap fix—providing fun, entertainment and staunch service all along the way. Great car. I'll miss it, and I'll think of it every time I hear Neil Young sing "Long May You Run*." The Benz actually has some formidable shoes to fill.

Mike

*Which was written about a car, despite its being pressed into service lately as an all-purpose musical-elder-statesman anthem.

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Original contents copyright 2010 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.

Featured Comment by Marc Lawrence: "Mister Johnston, that is no 'baby Benz,' good man. Meet our dear little fellow, known as 'Scruffy' (yeah, I name my cars, wanna fight about it? :) ):

He is both shopping trolley and dog-car. Okay, my requirements may have been just a tad different from yours, even putting aside that the 'baby' was not available to you. Nice choice, Mike (though I'd also have been empathetic with the Golf). So, what's his/her name? (I name my cameras too, and they're a crowd. It's only a problem amongst company.)"

Featured Comment by Grant Peterson: "Last July 12th at 1:00 a.m., a 23-year old kid—drunk, high, asleep at the wheel, or texting—veered off the road in front of our house, cut a ten-inch maple trunk clean in half, obliterated an iron post, and landed in our living room, all spun-around backwards. He must have been going 70 mph (as estimated by the cops), and by the time I got out of bed to see what was the matter, he'd taken off running down the street (later we found out he holed up in his girlfriend's house, about half a mile away).

"My p/s digital wasn't working, so I shot my Voigtlander Bessa L with 25/4 and a flash, aimed at the near pitch darkness, and got these photos. The car, a Mercedes, came through it remarkably well, and its driver, even better.

"Ultimately the guy was caught, he wrote a truly heroic letter of apology that may be the best letter of a apology ever written, and his dad's insurance paid for the house-fix, including eight five-inch cement-filled iron pipes that'll stop the next Mercedes that tries the same trick.

"I can't afford a Mercedes, but if I could, I sure would. Main thing: Good car choice!"

Open Mike*: Buying a @#$!@% Car

Okay, completely hypothetical question for you, detached completely from any real situation: Let's say you have to buy a new car, because your old one is older than the latest batch of 'tween stars** and a new set of struts would cost approximately twice what the car is worth, and your son is about to get his driver's license and you're pretty sure the old buggy would not hold up under the added strain. And let's say you knew this day was coming, and you'd been saving up a down payment for an embarrassingly long time, and reading a lot of car magazines. And you went down to the Auto Show when it hit Milwaukee (say you live near Milwaukee) to see just which cars you could actually shoehorn your fat ass into and out of without cracking bones in either your spine or your knees or risking making a ludicrous spectacle of yourself at a high curb.

So you're ready to go. But, being a good shopper but rather astonishingly poor at making actual decisions, you're kind of going around and around.

So let's say it's basically come down to two choices. On the one hand, there's the Volkswagen GTI, which is what you really want, because it's a hot little car but not ridiculously hot, and not ostentatious, which (if it was) wouldn't suit the rest of your lifestyle, since, let's say, the rest of your lifestyle is kinda frumpy and downmarket. And it's tallish so it's easy to get into and out of. And there are a bazillion aftermarket parts available, which includes multiple choices for back seat covers, so you could keep Lulu's claws off the upholstery.

But on the other hand there's the Hyundai Sonata, which comes with a stick shift, and has a decently spirited engine. This makes it unlike the frigging Mazda 6 and Honda Accord and Ford Fusion, all of which are built to accommodate six-cylinder engines but only come with a manual transmission on the four-cylinder versions, and, although there is a certain symmetry to one's personage in a car that is too overweight for its powerplant, the effect of all these cars is a certain anemia. So anyway the Hyundai weighs just that little bit less and has just those few extra horsepower that it seems adequate as opposed to anemic.

2011 Sonata, with exaggerated Californian styling.

In fact the Hyundai is the hard-boiled practical choice in just about every way. It has a longer warranty. XM radio is not an extra (we're saying you listen to jazz, in a market where the last commercial jazz station bit the dust two years ago). And it is a whopping six grand cheaper, which all by itself is an awful lot of money to your hypothetical self. In fact you're kind of balking at the fact that the only GTI at the local dealer has fancy wheels you don't even like that tack an additional $750 on to the price of the car. You're just enough of a skinflint that it bothers you to spend $750 on something you don't really want. Oh, okay, easily enough of a skinflint.

But the GTI is just so sweet. Rides like butter, sweet shifter, nice torquey engine (I probably forgot to mention you tend to prefer good torque to high-revving fours like the one in the Civic Si, since it makes ordinary driving in traffic more entertaining). You don't care for the dopey plaid seats or the red stitching on the steering wheel, but in terms of mechanicals it's basically exactly what you want—and you're essentially the type of person who only cares about mechanicals. (Although the incredibly crappy interior of the Chevy Cobalt SS outweighs its wonderfully capable drivetrain. Even you have your limits.)

Biff and Ashlee pose next to a 4-door GTI. Note dopey wheels.

And did I mention that you're 53 years old but have only bought three cars in your entire lifetime? That Bill Clinton was President when you bought your last one? So that whatever you buy, it's likely to be with you for a very long time, and, when you think about it, spending twenty grand and still not getting what you really want seems like a false economy, in a way?

Finally, say that of the only two real "car guys" you know (hello Art, hello Paul), one loves Volkswagens with a passion, and the other hates Volkswagens with a passion, making objective judgments a bit hard to come by locally.

So anyway, what would you do, in this purely hypothetical situation? The practical choice, or the indulgent option?

Just curious.

And as for me, it's back to car reviews, as I sink ever deeper into the tarpit of shopping paralysis.

Mike

*A week or so ago, a reader took me to task for not writing about photography enough. Which, of course, made me want to write a whole week's worth of off-topic posts. I resisted that temptation; regular readers will recall, however, that on some Sundays I write off-topic posts under the heading "Open Mike."

**Apropos 'tween stars, I have to note, if you happened to see "Saturday Night Live" last night, that being just tall enough to look Tina Fey right in the boobs is an enticing thought even for an middle-aged guy. Maybe especially for a middle-aged guy.

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Original contents copyright 2010 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.

ADDENDUM: I got a not-quite-appropriate comment I didn't post from a reader who is unemployed (which I highly sympathize with—as I've said before, been there, done that, and I realize it can range from an inconvenience to a very serious personal and family crisis). He suggested I should invest in the "local" (i.e., U.S.) economy. The Volkswagen GTI is built in Wolfsburg, Germany, but the 2011 Hyundai Sonata is built in Montgomery, Alabama—where Hyundai employs some 2,700 people. Only the transmission is made in South Korea.

Of the other cars I've looked at, the ones from the solidly all-American nameplate, Ford, namely the Fusion/Milan twins, are built in Mexico—as was my current Ford, a 1998 Escort ZX2.

The Subaru I test-drove is built in Indiana (I pass the plant when I drive to Indianapolis to visit relatives), the Honda Accord in Ohio, and the Mazda 6 in Michigan.

I'm mainly interested in cars with manual transmissions, just because that's what I'm accustomed to and enjoy, so that's been my first exclusion criterion for cars to look at. Manual transmissions are very scarce here in the Midwest, where they are very unpopular—my Ford dealer checked, and there is not a single manual-transmission Mercury Milan for sale in the entire state of Wisconsin. Hyundai expects to sell only 2% of its 2011 Sonatas with stick shifts. (Presumably this will affect resale value, too. On the other hand, it's a theft deterrent.) Anyway one of the upcoming "American" cars that is expected to be available with a stick is the 2011 Buick Regal. The first ones sold here will be built in Russelsheim, Germany (the car is sold as an Opel in Europe and as a Vauxhall in the U.K.), with production transitioning to Oshawa, Canada in calendar 2011. The same car will be built in China for the Chinese market.

So is it more patriotic to buy a Mexican Ford or a Hyundai made in Alabama? I can't answer that. The point is simply that things are not always what they seem when it comes to "buying local." —MJ

Open Mike: Uh-oh

I copied the title of this post from Ken Rockwell. Speaking of Ken: you might not have him to kick around for much longer.

So let me just ask you: do you think you don't have to pay sales tax on mail-order purchases you make from other states? If so, you're not alone. But it's not true. Actually, the difference is that you—the buyer—are personally responsible for remitting the sales tax on items you buy that way—the seller is not responsible for collecting it from you. The reason nobody actually pays it is because states have no feasible way to track what you owe them and no jurisdiction to punish you if you don't pony up.

And therein lies the rub. A battle is brewing. (Actually it's been brewing for a while now.) California is making a second attempt to force giant internet suppliers like Amazon to collect state sales taxes. Amazon, and other mail-order discounters, are relying on a 1992 Supreme Court decision which held that retailers do not have to collect sales taxes in States where they have no physical presence—stores, warehouses, offices, that sort of thing.

This frustrates California lawmakers, who want the "e-tailers" to collect the state's taxes anyway. So they're trying an end-around: they're saying that the presence of affiliate websites in the state amount to a "physical presence." That means people like Ken, who lives in California...and, over here in Wisconsin, me. Ken puts a link to an Amazon product on his website, a reader of his buys it, and he gets a "commission." The commissions are small, but they add up. That's how websites like his (and mine) provide us with a living, or part of one. It's a nice system for us. And for you, because only sites that attract lots of readers are able to generate appreciable income. So, by definition, it's only the popular sites—the sites lots of readers like—that become effective affiliates.

I don't have any problem with people paying taxes. The problem is how Amazon and other "e-tailers" are intending to fight the battle. If the California legislature passes a law saying affiliates amount to a physical presence in the state, then Amazon is just going to cancel its contracts with all its affiliates in California. No more affiliates, no more "physical presence" under the new law, and Californians can keep ordering from Amazon without Amazon having to collect sales taxes from them. The new law is neutralized.

Trouble is, California affiliate sites would then become "collateral damage." People who previously cracked their personal nut with affiliate income would be out of business. Lots of Californians who have painstakingly built up internet businesses would be suddenly out of work. Bye-bye KenRockwell.com. And, if Wisconsin follows suit and is similarly cut off by Amazon—or if Amazon just decides to stop its affiliate program nationally because of headaches with conforming to a patchwork of state laws—bye-bye TOP. 

I'd have to go get a real job. Wouldn't be the worst thing in the world. I'd survive; people survive worse things every day. (To quote Yitta Schwartz, from this rather astonishing article, "When there are so many problems in life, I should put myself on the scale?") The main thing that would make me sad is that I feel I'm kinda good at this job, and probably wouldn't be contributing as much to other peoples' happiness if I were spending forty hours a week selling shoes or used cars. (Not that there's anything wrong with that. I've worked worse jobs.)

Let's just say I'll be watching developments with...interest. Gulp.

Mike
(Thanks to Lynn Burdekin)

P.S. Oh, all right—you can consider this post my once-monthly plea and plug to buy your B&H Photo and Amazon purchases through our links. And, as ever, thanks!

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Featured Comment by Hudson: "Part of the problem is that there are 11,000+- sales taxes in this country. Okay Mike I just bought a thingy from you, I live in State, County, City, School District, Mass Transit District, Billionaire Sports Owner Stadium District, Development District how much sales tax do you collect? In my state we have to only keep track of about 4 sales tax rates, and they do not match up with zip codes (idiots). If there is going to be a tax on internet sales, it needs to be one tax for the whole country, if I had to keep track of 11,000 tax rates, I would just give up and go out of business."

Featured Comment by Patrick Henry: "This push is actually coming from Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart is lobbying heavily for this. You can imagine why. The Wal-Mart lobbying is subtly mentioned here. Yet another reason not to shop at Wal-Mart."

Open Mike: Lady Day

Of the two greatest female singers of the jazz era, the langorous and mournful Billie Holiday, seen here performing in 1947, was the "moon" to the ebullient and energetic Ella Fitzgerald's "sun." Photo by William P. Gottlieb.

A very brief guide to buying Billie Holiday on record:

1933–1942 were the so-called "Columbia years," named after her main label during the period. These were the years in which she became famous as a pop chanteuse and was in full voice and flower. On disc, the period is extremely well-served by the currently going- but not gone-out-of-print budget Spanish import of the out-of-print Sony Legacy box set, which contains remastered versions of the recordings in ideal presentations, for a cheaper-than-cheap price (~$5.50 per disc). This traces the arc of her ascent. The Columbia material was traditionally known as the "good stuff" that made her reputation, and was once preferred by the public and by record collectors.

In 1939, mainly because Columbia refused to record the harrowing "Strange Fruit," Billie freelanced for Milt Gabler at Commodore Records, mainly in two sessions, one in 1939 and one in 1944. Although not the best single-disk introduction to Holiday—it's a transitional period musically—the Commodore sessions are essential for any collector, as this was the formative period of her mature style—and it contains some of her signature tunes, "I Cover the Waterfront," "I'll Be Seeing You," "Embraceable You," a lovely rendition of "On the Sunny Side of the Street," and of course the 1939 "Strange Fruit." However, no one but the most fanatic completist needs all the alternate takes that are available, none of which are really very different from the master takes (although I confess to marginally preferring a couple of the alternates). The single disk with just the 16 "master takes" is the one to have. You can also get "The Commodore Master Takes" by searching that phrase on iTunes.

In 1942-44 she began using heroin and recording for Gabler at Decca. This was probably the happiest period of her professional life because Decca treated her like the 1940s version of a superstar, getting the best songs for her to sing and pulling out the stops when it came to orchestral accompaniment. Holiday reveled in the treatment she received at Decca and the respect she was accorded. However, although well served on The Complete Decca Recordings, this period didn't cover much ground and is probably the least essential major Holiday for the modern listener to own. It still belongs in a more complete collection of her best, though.

Although her Decca period didn't wind down until 1950, her career was permanently (and some think fatally) interrupted in 1947 when she was arrested and jailed for the better part of a year on drug charges. Worse, upon her release from prison she was permanently denied a cabaret card, meaning she could no longer perform in establishments that served alcohol—which of course meant most of them. Her drug use, legal problems, money woes, and personal problems escalated and intensified in the late '40s and throughout the '50s until her death, and she became a sort of postwar Michael Jackson, notorious with the public (and getting much more attention from the white press for her troubles than she ever got for her singing) as an aging former star providing a lurid spectacle as she went down in flames.

Light and shade
From a creative standpoint, however, the best was still to come. In 1952, Norman Granz signed her to Mercury, the parent company of Verve. In the seven years before she died in 1959, she recorded nearly 100 songs for Verve, now known as her late or Verve period. The standard line is that this period is a triumph of experience, judgment, and musical intelligence over declining vocal ability, but the fact is that her work during this time is very uneven. A good number are excruciatingly awful ("unlistenable recordings made when she could barely find the energy to enunciate or keep in tune," writes Gary Giddins). But the best of Billie Holiday's Verve recordings are one of the glories of recorded music. In recent years the reputation of her Columbia period and her Verve period have flip-flopped; most Billie Holiday lovers now admire and prefer the later period over the earlier.

And most, although not all, of the best songs from this period are present on the Verve compilation All or Nothing at All. It comprises all of Songs for Distingué Lovers and Body and Soul, plus six or seven more high points plucked from other records of the period. In toto it's a great work of art and both a pleasurable and a moving listening experience, whether dipped into, selected and excerpted, or listened to straight through.

Notorious
Also, importantly, for me at least, it contains none of the songs from Lady in Satin. The controversial Lady in Satin is really a case study in misguided pop cultural assumptions, and encapsulates down into the present day the misunderstanding that always existed between Billie Holiday and the broader American public. Very regrettably, Lady in Satin has gotten the reputation as her "best" record, for two reasons. First, Billie herself said at the end of her life that it was her favorite. But to interpret this, you need to consider the context—Billie always considered recording with a full string band to be a mark of respect to her, and the treatment she got while making this record at the very end of her short life must have felt like a return to the treatment she got during her salad days at Decca—it was her last star turn, a reprise of her former glory. And the album was released in June, 1958, and she died in July of 1959—so she never had a chance to get any perspective on it. And second, it's beloved of myopic "audiophiles" as the best-sounding Billie Holiday record, due only to the recording of the strings, ignoring her voice, which makes no sense at all. For this reason, Lady in Satin is often purchased by neophytes as "the best," and their one and only representative Billie Holiday record.

That is just so...wrong. Her voice on this record is ragged and hoarse, her range—always limited—even more truncated, making the contrast with the Nelson-Riddlesque Ray Ellis string arrangements almost bizarre in its cognitive dissonance. Personally, I have no objection to the completist owning this record, and no quarrel with the Lady Day aficionado who finds great pathos and meaning in her performances here, as some do. But the ruin of her once sweetly expressive voice is shocking, and as a listening experience the record is a travesty because of the hokey, sappy, horrible strings-all-over-the-place soundscape. However jazz fans might feel about it, it should not be anybody's only Billie Holiday record. I don't even own it.

If you love Billie Holiday, or jazz—or music—suggest that your friends get All or Nothing at All as their one-and-only Billie Holiday record, and make sure they don't think that having Lady in Satin as their sole sample disk means that they've got any idea what Billie Holiday was all about. It's the biggest anomaly in her entire extensive catalog.

Look for the "Originals" strip on the left to be sure you're getting the proper songs in the proper order

To round out a great Billie Holiday collection on record, the other essential from the Verve years is the great Lady Sings the Blues, a perfect record and one of the high points of music on record for me.

Happily, the record was reissued on CD by Verve in 2007 with its proper songs in proper sequence. With Wynton Kelly on piano, Kenny Burrell on guitar, Aaron Bell on bass, Leonard Browne on drums, Charlie Shavers on trumpet, Paul Quinchette on tenor sax, and Anthony Sciacca on clarinet on the first eight songs, and Bobby Tucker on piano, Barney Kessel on guitar, Red Callender on bass, Chico Hamilton on drums, Willie Smith on alto saxaphone, and Sweets Edison on trumpet on the last four. By sure not to be fooled by the PolyGram pastiche with the same cover, or by other pretenders! The album has been "issued" in many forms over the years, some of them horribly mangled.

Having All or Nothing at All and the proper version of Lady Sings the Blues is a way to neatly possess almost all of the very best, and none of the worst, of late-period Billie Holiday, who was only 44 years old when she left this Earth but had lived a very full life as an artist.

Mike

(Originally published in 2007 on CD Reviews by C60 Crew.)

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Featured Comment by Cheryl Jacobs Nicolai: "Mike, did you know that in addition to my day job as a photographer, I'm also a singer? One of my favorite gigs is at a cabaret, where I get to do my favorite songs from Billie Holiday, Nina Simone, Etta James and Jones, even reaching back to Bessie Smith et al. The audience at the cabaret is very diverse, which means I get to expose college students to music most of them have never heard. It feels a bit like preaching the gospel."

Open Mike: The Red Cloud School

Charles Milton Bell, Red Cloud in Native Dress with Breastplate, 1880
(Photo: Smithsonian)

In this season of charitable giving, I'd like to mention once again the people and kids at Red Cloud Indian School on the Pine Ridge in South Dakota.

The school is named for Red Cloud (Lakota name: Makhpiyaluta or Mahpiua-Luta, literally "Crimson Cloud"), a leader of the Oglala Lakota (Sioux) tribe who was, more than any other Oglala chief, associated with the painful transition of his people from resistance fighters to subjugated population.

2009 is the 100th anniversary of Red Cloud's death. 

The Red Cloud School boys' basketball team, seen here winning the Region 8A championship, were invited to scrimmage at halftime at a Denver Nuggets preseason game on Oct. 3, 2009. (Photographer unidentified)

Red Cloud School is a Catholic (Jesuit) elementary and secondary school for Lakota children and young people. It is located in Shannon County, South Dakota, which is one of the three poorest of the 3,140 counties in the United States. (Another of the three is right next to it.) Pine Ridge Agency is the 8th largest Native American reservation in the United States, larger than the States of Rhode Island and Delaware combined. The sprawling community is beset by severe poverty-related health, unemployment, and substance-abuse problems. 

Sophomores Justice Kills Straight, left, and Simone Shot With Arrow hang out in the Cuny Commons area of the newly renovated portion of Red Cloud Indian School after the building's dedication ceremony on Friday morning. Oct. 16, 2009. (Photo by Kristina Barker, Rapid City Journal)

Red Cloud School serves 600 young people, 99% of whom are Lakota. It is staffed primarily by Lakota and strives to preserve and teach Lakota heritage as well as prepare students for college. It offers a Montessori School for preschool children and maintains a heritage museum. The college placement rate is 90%, which is good by any standards, but amazing for a school in such at at-risk community. The kids work hard and strive to make the most of their education.

I first began donating to Red Cloud School at the recommendation of photographer Aaron Huey, whose scarifying pictures of life on the Pine Ridge we linked to in October. Unfortunately, the school's website is down at the moment, but, if you wish to, you can give a gift here.

Mike

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Featured Comment by Joseph Vavak: "One of the great injustices going on in this country involves a tiny village just across the South Dakota state line called Whiteclay, Nebraska, and the people of the Pine Ridge. Whiteclay has a population of 14 yet has four stores that sell about four million cans of beer annually. While alcohol is outlawed on the reservation, its authorities cannot control what goes on past the state line and the state of Nebraska has continued to fail to do anything about the situation.

"My visit to Whiteclay left me completely appalled by what I found there. It was a mid-Sunday afternoon and there were people passed out on the side of the highway, others staggering around and empty beer containers littered everywhere. I felt just sick to see something like this in my home state. The worst part is that most people, even those in Nebraska, don't know about the situation. To learn more about Whiteclay and ways to help bring about change, you can visit the website."

Featured Comment by Mike Nelson Pedde: "Great idea, Mike. Pine Ridge is like a third-world country in the middle of the richest nation on earth. The people there are wonderful, though."

Featured Comment by Mani Sitaraman: "I am shocked to learn the following from Wikipedia: '...The population on Pine Ridge has among the shortest life expectancies of any group in the Western Hemisphere: approximately 47 years for males and in the low 50s for females. The infant mortality rate is five times the United States national average...." The Pine Ridge residents have a per capita income about a tenth that of the average American. For another summary on the community, check this out."

Open Mike: The Superefficiency House

I don't hate shopping. I hate buying.

It's fun to shop—fun to have something to obsess over, something to anticipate, something to aspire to. It's fun deciding what defines me—what suits my tastes and requirements. Fun defining those requirements. Fun justifying my choices—if only to myself. Conversely, there is something hollow about not having anything to want. Frequently, for me, actually buying something is...a bit of a letdown.

I'm going to admit something very embarrassing here. A while back, there was something I really wanted. I loved to pore over the catalog, read reviews, look at pictures. Then I bought the item. After I bought it, I caught myself settling down in the...well, in the reading room, preparing to pore over the familiar item in the catalog yet again. 

You got that? I was still "shopping" for something I already owned. Sheesh!

I think one of the reasons actually buying something can be a letdown is that we don't actually "own" a lot of the things we buy. I've truly owned a number of my cameras over the years, but there have also been cameras I bought that didn't "take." I just possessed them for a while. I've actually purchased cameras I didn't take a single picture with. Those cameras might have been my property for a while, but they weren't really mine. Not in any significant sense.

There are all sorts of problems with actually buying things. One is that it closes down the possibility of buying something else ("opportunity cost," in econ-speak). Some people like coming to a final decision; not me. I hate giving up possibilities. Another is that there's shopping, and there's shopping—by which I mean, there's shopping for the hypothetical Mike, who has enough money to buy what he wants and a place to put it—and a whole lifestyle to match the item in question—and then there's shopping for the real Mike, who has to be sensible and frugal and for whom every actual choice is a compromise, and whose lifestyle just doesn't suit objects that are too, er, elegant, or luxurious. A final problem is the frustration of buying something that doesn't live up to its promise—that is, making the wrong choice, despite all the effort. 

I make up for these downsides, in part, by shopping for things I'm never going to actually buy.

Phantom rides
Unlike Ctein, I do like cars. And over the decades, I've successfully shopped for dozens of cars. I just never bought any of them, is all. I'm great at shopping for them. I choose cars that are not impractical and not inappropriate (even in my daydreams I do not buy supercars—I dislike ostentation, actual or fanciful). I've done this many times over the years. I've owned some great cars, in my dreams.

Another thing I like to shop for is houses. I enjoy imagining the house I'd build, if I could build a house. I'm never going to. But I enjoy looking at floor plans, investigating building methods, collecting ideas (if I had another life to live, I'd be a builder of efficient but elegant lowish-income housing, I think).

I have strong opinions about imaginary houses. My house, were I to build one, would be engineered—not designed, engineered—to be as efficient as possible. What does that mean? I mean it would be as maintenance-free as possible, and cost as little to run as possible. I've got lots of ideas along these lines.

I've also discovered (this probably won't surprise you, given my opinions about cameras) that I'm against almost every current fashion.

For instance, I think the houses we build today are way too big. I like small houses. Less to heat, less costly to fill with furniture. More efficient all around. Studies have shown that most people do most of their living in just 640 square feet, regardless of how big their houses are.

Because I like small houses, I hate two-story rooms, which are all the rage right now—every new house has to have "open to below" on the second floor plan. They're a waste of space in my opinion. With rare exceptions, I also dislike their cavernous, barn-like feel. I have no idea why these so-called "cathedral ceilings" are popular. Pure fashion.

I don't like lots of windows. (An excess of window area has been reflexively popular for a long time now.) Why, you might ask, if I like light, would I not like windows? Because I'm a book collector and and photographer—I need interior wall space! Walls to put bookshelves against, and walls to display art on. The more walls, the better. Some well-placed windows are essential, but needless windows are complications—they cost lost heat, require expensive window treatments, and ruin the utility of interior walls. In my current (very small) house I have at least two windows I'd get rid of if I could.

I also dislike open-plan houses. Partly for the wall-space reason, partly for reasons of privacy and purposing: separate rooms are more luxurious in my book. Big rooms are no better than small ones—they just contain more wasted space, and are draftier, harder to heat, and harder to furnish. People have this fantasy that big "open plan" rooms equates to family togetherness—nonsense. Overly large rooms just makes it harder for different people to do different things without bothering each other, is all.

Finally, I detest huge bathrooms. A bathroom is not a place where I want to go hang out. A bathroom is a utility room. No reason for them to be tiny, but 8x10' is overkill, and the current fashion for bathrooms the size of living rooms is absurd. 

Anyway, it's probably a good thing I'm not going to build a house—it would be so unfashionable that it would be hard to resell!

I don't spend a lot of time doing this. But it's been a source of recreation over the years. It's just shopping, really. But shopping the way it ought to be done—for fun. Without all the hassle and responsibility of actually buying.

Mike

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Featured Comment by nic: "I'll never forget one of my grandfather's favorite sayings...'Wantin' is better than gettin'."

Featured Comment by Chuck Albertson: "I wish I had an 8x10' bathroom. I could convert it to a darkroom."

Open Mike: Albatross Update

This post is actually on-topic—it's just woefully unseasonable, that's all. Except for those of you in Australia, New Zealand, Africa, and South America.*

As you can see, Gruesome got her albatross bars since I first mentioned them last Sunday. I like them a lot, too—they suit me much better than flat mountain-bike bars. These came off the back of one of Grant's tandems (thanks again, Grant).

Here's another view. It's a good thing I didn't try to install them myself, because all the cables had to be lengthened. Anyway, to paraphrase the old Groucho Marx joke, I wouldn't want to ride any bike that had me for a mechanic.

Notice the black plastic bracket in the middle? That's what makes this post on-topic rather than off. The bracket is for a thing called a Topeak TourGuide Handle Bar Bag...

...Or, as we would call it, a camera bag. Here's the bag on the bike. It has a rain cover in case I get caught in the rain. The shiny thing on top is a map-holder. It's removable.

The bag holds an SLR with ease...

...And even a 2 1/4 camera (here a Bronica SQ-A). It will hold my Bronica rangefinder as well, and my DSLR with a prime lens. Of course it holds the Panasonic GF1 with plenty of room to spare.

The bag unclips from the bike easily so you can carry it with you when you lock up and leave the bike.

And, finally, for you North Americans and Europeans: I promise to try to link back to this post next Spring, when you might actually care! 

Mike

*See! Sometimes I do remember that Summer's coming down under.

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Open Mike: Snow Leopard Reminder, Blog Notes, Mike Notes

I was hurt to the quick of my Scots soul the other day (I blame my "cheap gene" on my Scottish heritage—this is naught but base bigotry, so, sorry, all you Scottish people), when several readers revealed they had bought extremely expensive cameras recently but forgot to use my links, even though they like TOP and had intended to use them.

Oh, dear.

Days when people buy cameras are cause for celebration around here. I'm a camera store, you know, and a book store.

It's a dilemma. I can't remind people every day to use my links, because it would bore you, and it would make me come off like a greedy bugger, which is the case but not something I like to have pointed out all the time.

Amazon and B&H don't charge you any more when you buy through TOP, they just divert a bit of their profits to me. And not many people buy much of anything in February or August. I don't really know why. It's when they're paying for Christmas and for summer vacation, maybe?

August has been a tough month. I need to sell 64 more items (they don't have to be expensive items, just items) through Amazon to make it to the next percentage tier, and I'm never going to make it. Not enough days left in August. Scots soul, melancholy, woe is, etc.

Anyway, just a reminder that if you are going to buy Snow Leopard from Amazon anyway, might as well buy it through TOP! Thank you. Thank you. Greedy bugger out.

Blog notes
We passed 35,000 comments on the day Ted Kennedy died. Not all about Ted—I mean since TOP started here at TypePad in June, 2007. (I was on Blogger before that.) The 35,000th commenter was awarded $10,000 and a Nikon D3X. (Well, not really, but how would you know?)

We have some big anniversaries coming up—on Tuesday, it's Ctein's third anniversary writing regularly for the site (to mark the occasion, he's going to pass along something a little birdie told him), and in November we come to the end of our fourth year in existence. Four years. Who'da thunk? I have a personal milestone coming up on September 10th, too, but I'll tell you about that when we get there, if I feel like it.

Also, I need to announce that I've brought my link ad program to a close. The square "Sponsor" ads are still available, and the three larger ads at the top left-hand side of the page. (There aren't actually three ads there. There has only ever been one—first it was Fabio Riccardi at LightZone, now it's Michael Tapes at RawWorkflow.com. But there are two more spaces available just in case Nikon, Canon, Epson or Adobe ever get wise to the fact that we have a big, smart, influential readership. I'm still waiting.)

Mike notes
I'm writing a book. After a couple of false starts, I decided to write a book about photography that is 100% new from start to finish, imagined afresh and freshly expressed. My goal is to make it fun and tasty to read for people like you, i.e., the people who read this site. My objective is to try to put in everything I've ever learned about photography, photographers, cameras, and pictures—even though sometimes I feel like that isn't much. In fact I'm toying with the idea of calling it Everything Mike Johnston Knows About Photography Isn't Much. The work is going surprisingly well—turns out, despite the working title, I know rather a lot about photography, once you wind me up and set me on a level surface and point me in the proper direction. There's a lot I don't know. I'm all too aware of that. But I know enough that all the things I don't know don't seem like such a lack. So far some of the chapters are "Lighting," "Beautiful Cameras," "Making Money," "Having Fun," "The Magic of Lenses," and "Going Fishing" (that last is about editing). Among others.

I worry about two things, first that it isn't technical enough and people won't buy it as a how-to book. Seems people really like how-to books, and they like how-to books about very specific nuts-and-bolts subjects. This is more of a "why-to" manual. Second, I worry that no one has ever written a book like it before. Here's something Paul Krugman wrote this on his blog the other day, which contains an idea that I liked (he was talking about the reappointment of Ben Bernanke to the Fed):

I do have one qualm, though, which isn’t really about Bernanke, but rather about the broader symbolism of the reappointment—namely, it unfortunately seems to be a reaffirmation of Serious Person Syndrome, a.k.a. it’s better to have been conventionally wrong than unconventionally right.

Thus, you’re not considered serious on national security unless you bought the case for invading Iraq, even though the skeptics were completely right; you’re not considered a serious political commentator unless you dismissed all the things those reflexive anti-Bushists were saying, even though they all turn out to have been true; and you’re not considered serious about economic policy unless you dismissed warnings about a housing bubble and waved off worries about future crises.

Serious Person Syndrome—so true. It's better to agree with everyone else, and do things the way everyone else does them. I tried to pitch my book to a "serious" publisher, and they sent me back a formula for how they like their books to be organized and written. Mine will not be organized and written that way. Maybe people will not like that. I am forging ahead anyway. The success of TOP is giving me the time and the opportunity, and I feel obligated to try to take advantage.

Hope you have a nice Sunday. I am going to try to unchain myself from the computer. I intend to watch some golf on TV, take the dog to the park, and fret some more over whether I should buy an A850 or not. (I don't know why I linked that—nobody has ordered an A850 through our links yet. Probably five people bought one, and intended to use our links, but forgot.)

Mike

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"Featured Comment by Fraser: "Mike, as a Scot, no offense taken. I regularly roll around on my big pile of money like Scrooge McDuck, contemplating getting my castle wired for electricity and subsequently dismissing it on the grounds of cost.

"I look forward to you book being published and will definitely borrow it from the library once it comes out! ;-)

"Sláinte, Fraser"

UPDATE: Whoa, 55 items sold on Sunday! And I made a full tenth of August's Amazon income as a result. Thanks, everybody. Among the things people bought: A copy of Graham Greene's The Quiet American; a KitchenAid blender; a Sony A900 (thanks for that, really); an MP3 of "The Young Big Bill Broonzy" (Bill Broonzy is an ancient bluesman, for those of you who don't recognize the name—and by the way, MP3's do count);a Kindle book of Guilty Pleasures; a Leatherman MultiTool—and, yes, three copies of Snow Leopard.