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Sunday, 12 November 2023

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Genuinely amusing! Thank you. Also instructive and informative. I think I kind of knew this, but it had never risen to the level of full consciousness. Thank you again!

Now... what happened to the iPhone 15 review (submitted by a reader) you were going to post?

In Europe many, maybe most people hang their clothes on clotheslines with pegs. Given the amount of sushine there is in the US, I'm kind of surprised that the practice is so rare there. Your clothes dry more quickly in summer and smell better too. As for photographing them, they are a feature of most Mediterranean cities, usually on balconies or even stretched between buildings. For example these in Genoa

Genoa: washing

My granddaughter wanted me to purchase a 40oz Stanley tumbler for her. TikTok "influencers" have apparently captured her imagination. She couldn't understand my reticence at purchasing a $45 insulated tumbler for her. I informed her that if she couldn't finish her drink in eight hours before it got warm, she poured too much into her glass.

This post cannot be considered complete without mentioning speaker cables and power cords for HiFi equipment. Not to mention little stands for those cords to ensure they do not touch the floor. Some of the above sold for thousands of dollars. It's hard to know if anyone on earth could actually hear a difference over a lamp cord worth 75 cents - apparently not in blinded hearing tests. Yet, People bought them.

Ahem... not sure if you followed the recent International Championship (snooker) from Tianjin. Ronnie O'Sullivan struggled quite a bit in his semi-final, maybe having several kicks according to commentators (no-one really has nailed kicks but generally thought to relate to chalk) - so the new chalk is maybe not so much hype as you make out? He is still one of the few who still uses the 'old' chalk

I wave my private parts at your aunties!

I think you are right: yachts should be measured in feet. Only people who wish to show off measure lengths of yachts in metres. The British who have some considerable history with the sea and do not need to show off measure their vessels, yachts, ships, all of them, in feet, although draught might be in fathoms (interesting useless fact: admiralty defined 'fathom' as 1/1000nm which is 6.08ft but in practice used 'warship fathom' which was 6ft).

Over the weekend I watched a You Tube video by Adam Savage about Apple USB C cords and why they cost $130 as opposed to the same cord from Amazon costing $12. I expected to hear a similar conclusion to yours but was pleasnatly surprised to hear that the $130 might actually be justifiable - It is worth watching this just to see some amazing technologies at work.

"Gizmo Hucksters"?
Do you mean new car sales types?

Wow! Do you think one of those fancy Que Tips would fit on my shutter release button? I'm sure that is just the accessory I need to take better pictures.

The lives that could be changed. The people who could be helped out of the morass of their circumstance and/or misfortune. You could home a thousand homeless souls for the cost of a single billionaires yacht.

Any of those things would bring lasting happiness. But the uberyacht is just a grotesque artifact. A joyless plea to be noticed and admired.

On the plus side, if the world ever revolts, it'll be easier to figure out who should be on the menu when the starving decide to eat the rich.

I jest! [MUST NOT MENTION SECRET PLAN TO EAT THE RICH]. All this writing is making me hungry.

I worried about corosion on the ordinary steel spring, but the big difference was that hanging negs curl more when held only in the center than they do when held all along the top (and bottom).

Not that the cheap wider plastic clips I used cost very much! I certainly started out using clothespins, and they weren't at all bad.

As I read through this post, one thing jumped to the top of my mind. Unlike Nigel, it was not the Sony A9III that popped into my mind - I will be on the waiting list for that and at the same price as its predecessor, the continued improvements will be a welcome replacement of my A9II. But no, what came to mind for me wasn't photographic, it was the insanity of a typical private college charging $90,000 per year. For a commercial photographer, that's a LOT of pictures!! With one already in college and another entering next year this is a daunting reality!

Like Dave with motorcycles, I’ve observed the price bump in hardware (nuts, bolts, etc.). It seems the same products increase in price as they move from: general hardware, bicycle parts, marine hardware, aviation hardware - and we’ve all seen the stories about defense department hammers.

FUD is a well known brand of cheap cold cuts here in Mexico. It stands for fine, unique and delicious. In Old Scots it's quite rude.

I've found that anything labelled as "for cyclists" costs a lot more than equivalent 'normal' items. When I ride my bicycle I wear 'hi-vis' items intended for builders, tradespeople etc. - not cyclists. They're about a quarter of the cost and conform to international and national visibility standards (which most gear labeled 'cycling' doesn't).

I will confess, though, to having 'gizmo' clips for drying film. I once bought some while shopping for darkroom supplies - because they have a hook on top which was just the right diameter to fit a clothes-rack I have, hooked behind my bathroom door (a good spot for drying). They didn't cost much more than clothes-pegs, though.

As for yachts? My only knowledge is through a friend who races his Sydney 38 twice per week. He'd dismiss all those you mentioned as "stink-boats" and would have nothing further (or nothing nice) to say about them.

...Mike

I like the word “shyster”.

Your mother was a hamster, and your father smelt of elderberries.

I will always remember one professor in my university explaining about pricing, and he wasn’t even a professor of marketing. You can take any device, say a multimeter that costs $100. Paint it grey and call it industrial and put a $200 price on it. Paint if white and call it medical, and sell it to a hospital with $400 price tag on it. Paint it olive green and sell it to the military for $800. Or paint it white again and call it Astro and sell it to NASA or similar for $1600.

The Acme Grip Clip makers are missing a FUD trick here; their product is not only low carbon but fully recyclable! : )

OK. I'll say it: Fred Picker, Huckster-extraordinaire.

He was an American achtype: half shaman, three-quarters snake oil salesman in the LF photo realm. The thing was, some of his darkroom products were pretty dang good. I am thinking of his darkroom timer combined with a thermometer. It changed how it measured a "second" based on the temperature of the solution. And the thing really worked. For those of us with basement darkrooms, or who developed film year round (hot in summer, cold in winter) temperature drift in our developer solutions was something we all had to deal with one way or another. Fred's thermometer took one variable out of the equation in a manner I found really useful.

On the other hand: The copy hawking his print washer claimed that "fixer was heavier than water and that it sank to the bottom." MA-lark-Y! That's just not how physics or chemistry work. Still, I owned one and the prints I washed in it are indeed stain and fade-free 25 years later, so they did wash prints well, regardless of the Bull-Dinky claims he made for why they worked.

A lot of my coin made its way into Fred's pockets over the years. And because I enjoyed the products I bought from Fred, I viewed his marketing claims with a certain amount of tolerance. But that's part of the charm of Hucksterianus Americanus as a genus and species.

And as they say . . . born every minute/it takes two to tango/never give a sucker an even break. All as American as apple pie.

Wow. And all I ever wanted out of life was a Hasselblad Lunar and a Kirby vacuum cleaner.

Back in the day, before Radio Schmuck went bankrupt, they used to sell this spray-can stuff called "TV Tuner Cleaner." It was some kind of solvent meant for cleaning mechanical/electrical contacts like the big clunky knobs on TV sets and it actually did a good job. It also undoubtedly enlarged the hole in the ozone layer, increased global warming, and induced asthma in puppies.

Four bucks for a can, although you could also pony up an extra buck for something called "COLOR TV Tuner Cleaner."

The best part was that the chemical name was written right there in the fine print on the can. So if you can't guess the difference between the two, simply note that "name" is not plural.

[

That's very funny, and a perfect example. --Mike]

The Little Mermaid got there first:

I've got gadgets and gizmos a-plenty
I've got whozits and whatzits galore
You want thingamabobs?
I've got twenty!
But who cares?
No big deal
I want more

Of course, Ariel did not know what any of them did. Which is probably not all that different from the folks who should know better.

And I know that you are doing it for humor, Sarah Ruden's The Gospels has a lot of footnotes on each page so they go something like this: *, dagger, Paragraph sign, **, double dagger.

Your "Cocobolo Cowboy" doesn't deserve that credit. "Gizmo" was a common slang term tracing to the early days of WWII. It simply meant gadget or contrivance. "Huckster" was in popular use during the same era. The term was generally applied to salesmen, but most especially to the persistent pitchmen who created and delivered radio and TV commercials, as made famous in the 1945 novel The Hucksters, by Frederic Wakeman Sr., and by the ensuing blockbuster movie of the same name, featuring Clark Cable and Ava Gardner.
Bryan Geyer

P.S.: I'm wrong in citing Ava Gardner as Clark Gable's co-star in that movie. Gardner was in the film, but the female lead was filled by Deborah Kerr, a truly gifted performer who played stage roles as well as movies.

Ah, the spring clothes peg! A brilliant design.

Which, if I believed in God, would convince me the Shakers who supposedly first made them, really did have a direct line to the Almighty.

The late John Loengard produced a fine black-and-white study of the Shaker Village at Sabbath Day Village, Maine. While Sam Abell did his version in colour.

To the best of my recollection, both missed the spring clothes peg.

After years of using dollar-store clothespins, I actually got picky about buying better ones and it was a great decision. I use them professionally, primarily to attach gels to barn doors of lights for filmmaking, but also for many other things during a shoot, so anything that saves me time and works more reliably is worth it.

The premium clothespins I now use have two improvements: the springs have a much greater radius where they extend out into hooks, so on both sides of the clothespin, it is over top of both of the wooden part - this does a much better job of preventing the wooden parts from skewing side-to-side and the entire clothespin falling apart. The second is that there are grooves cut into the wood where you pinch them, to provide extra grip, which is not often useful on its own, but quite useful if you disassemble it and reassemble it with the wooden parts flipped, so the previous hand grips now face inside and are the gripping surface of a more narrow end, looking more like tweezers, and better able to fit into tight spaces.

The second benefit is marginal, but the first cannot be overestimated when compared to standing on top of a ladder trying to attach something to a light, as dozens of people are waiting for you to finish your work, and an inferior clothespin simply falls apart in your hands!

[Have you got a link so we can see what you're talking about? —Mike]

Do you Hi Fi enthusiasts remember Sonic Stones?
For a sum of way more than they were worth you could get 5 or 6 black flat stones to place on top of your speaker. Numerous Stereo magazines published reviews swearing that the sound quality improved.

If it didn't you could skim them across a lake...

Unfortunately the exact clothespins I obsess over are no longer available from the place I got them from, but the Whitmor 6026-868 clothespins looks really darn close!

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