The Online Photographer

The Upcoming Pentax Film Camera Project

Dave Etchells, the former head honcho at Imaging-Resource, which was a major source of information online during the Digital Transition (DT), published, not long ago, an excellent group interview with a number of engineers from Ricoh who are involved in the new Pentax film camera project. I admit I haven't read the whole thing yet. It's called "Ricoh’s big bet on a film renaissance: We interview the team behind the upcoming Pentax film camera." Dave was always great at those roundtable interviews. The interview is at DPReview, another major player back in the days of the DT.

My own interest in the new camera went into a steep dive (not to say tailspin) when I found out it was to be a half-frame camera. For some reason the Japanese like these, but I've never seen the point. As a user I have the same problem with them that I have with smartphone cameras (and with a Minox B "spy camera" I shot with once), at least up to the iPhone 13 I currently own: they're great fun to shoot with but don't yield very pleasing prints. History presents us with no masterful body of work in half-frame. I'll bet you can't name one great photographer who is known for working with one. Its only tradition is a commercial one, with a fitful stream of clever but essentially lackluster products going back all the way to when 35mm was a movie film. If Olympus were doing such a project, then maybe, given Maitani's Pen F. But Pentax?

Yoshihisa Maitani's 1963 Pen F half-frame
camera, a hit in Japan. Photo by Hiyotada.

I've tended to skew the opposite direction: accept a bit of struggle out in the field for the sake of better prints. I fully expected the new Pentax to be a 35mm (24x36mm) camera. Pentax made cameras in multiple formats, but its strongest tradition is surely in 35mm. If Pentax had to depart from its magnificent, sprawling heritage in 35mm, I wish it had been in the other direction.

I'm sure Ricoh/Pentax know exactly what they're doing, though—they've put a lot of work and an awful lot of thought and care into this project. And they know their home market, which is the primary target of this project, no doubt.

I haven't read the whole article yet, but I will. It's on my list of things to do.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2024 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

Sal Santamaura: "The point of Ricoh going with half frame? This entire project is targeted to young people who are driving the 'film renaissance.' Film has become extremely expensive. Young people don't have a lot of money. Half frame gets them twice as many images per roll. Any other questions?"

Chris Feola: "Pentax's plan has been for four film cameras. This one isn't for old guys like me; it is specifically designed to hook young people who have never used a film camera. So it's not only half frame, it's a vertical image—just like a smartphone. Assuming this thing sells—interest is high—Pentax is planning three more film cameras: a high-end compact; an entry-level interchangeable lens camera (ILC); and then an advanced ILC. I'll buy one of the half-frames because...well, I pretty much have every other significant Pentax since 1980 in my cabinet, and I've never shot half-frame somehow. And I want to help the Pentax Film Project succeed!

"But now I'm headed out for a walk with my Pentax Monochrome. Thanks!"

Tim McGowan: "There may be a bit of a market for half frame. I’m not sure how pervasive this is, but—there’s a business in Ocean City Maryland—Telescope Pictures. On the beach during the Summer, photographers, working on commission, roam the beach talking people into having their pictures taken. Families and children are the prime target. The pictures are half-frame transparencies mounted into little plastic telescope viewers. It’s big business. Ocean City puts a license up for bid. The top bidder gets exclusive rights to the beach. I just looked up an article from 2010; old, I know. The cost of the license then was around $ 200,000. Down from $ 710,000. Unbelievable. The business then was beginning to struggle because they couldn’t find half-frame cameras and had to switch to digital. The switch added extra cost and time to produce the product. Virginia Beach also has a franchise. Overall the tradition seems to be in decline. Matthew availability of new half frames could be a shot in the arm. Have to keep an eye on it."

Jonathan Hal: "While I am withholding judgement until the camera is actually released, I am much more interested in the similar project to make a new Rollei 35, with flash and autofocus."

Peter, in Boulder: "I wonder if they settled on the half-frame format because so many people now use their phone cameras in the vertical orientation."

A Great Article About Barthes and 'Camera Lucida'

By far the coolest thing about blogging, at least in my personal experience, is that you learn something as the result of almost every post. For example, when I wrote about appliances this week—appliances, of all things—we heard from Rob, the owner of "a large elderly apartment project" who has purchased hundreds of appliances, and Peter Jeffrey Croft, who is an electronics tech. Almost no matter what I write about, we hear from somebody who knows a lot more about it than I do, and we get to access that person's expert knowledge or practical experience. It almost never fails.

People do complain that we get on "jags" a lot, where one post on something leads to more. But that's kinda the way it goes when a discussion topic gets going, that's all. I don't sit down to write multiple posts about anything. It just works out that way.

Anyway, after I wrote "Punctum Def" the other day, an attempt to define Barthes' idea of the punctum, or telling detail, I heard from Ken Dixon, who sent me a link to his essay "Lucida and Me."

"Lucida and Me" might honestly be the best thing I've ever read about Camera Lucida. Ken both takes Barthes to task for his faults and flaws holding nothing back—he is scathing on the topic of punctum and the very word itself—but he is also lavish in his praise for the book's accomplishments, which he communicates with clear-eyed precision. "Punctum" he calls "a needlessly obscure way of saying that certain photographs have a certain something about them that makes them special to certain someones—a commonplace that when draped in Latin becomes a shiny original thing, a breathtakingly sophisticated utterance." Made me laugh. At any rate, managing cutting criticism and fulsome praise in the same short essay is the mark of an experienced writer with a confident compass.

I've always suspected that a telltale of real admiration is when you wish you'd done something yourself—you see a photograph and think "man, I wish I'd taken that." It can happen in just about any field. A chef might wish he had developed a certain recipe after tasting a dish at a restaurant; a songwriter might hear a wonderful song and wish she had written it. It's a bit narcissistic—something is so good that you'd be willing to fold it into the precious self? How kind! Still, I occasionally read an essay or an article and I'll think, man, I wish I had written that. It's jealously to some extent, but also an expression of wholehearted admiration too.

'Too True'
Ken told me that the essay is included in his book Too True, but when I searched "Too True Kenneth Dixon" on Amazon I got crickets. You have to search for K.B., not Kenneth. I have not read Too True yet—I'm in the middle of Autobiography of a Supertramp at the moment—but it's in the queue. I hope I'll have the discipline to write a review of it here once I've read it.

"Lucida and Me" is a tasty intro, tho'. I'll ask you what you thought of it a week from now. Please remind me if I forget.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2024 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

calvin amari: "I note that this critique begins with a contrast: the author 'read the Sontag book [On Photography] many years ago with pleasure.'

"I find that odd, because I think Sontag’s overall view of photography is more skeptical than Barthes’. But might it be that, despite Sontag’s skepticism of photography, Ken Dixon was taken with a good number of the book’s trenchant observations about the medium? Perhaps, for example, Sontag's observation about photographs of politicians that: 'For politicians the three-quarter gaze is more common than [a frontal view]: a gaze that soars rather than confronts, suggesting instead of the relation to the viewer, to the present, the more ennobling abstract relation to the future.' If so, I agree, but that line—and at least a half dozen others that I have flagged in an old paperback copy that is not only heavily dog-eared and underlined but also bears some bruises from being helicoptered across the room at least once—is lifted without citation from something Barthes penned 20 years before: 'A three-quarter face photograph, which is more common than [a frontal view], suggests the tyranny of an ideal: the gaze is lost in the future, it does not confront, it soars and fertilizes some other domain, which is chastely left undefined.'"

Mike replies: Goes to the intensity with which artists/writers/thinkers want to be their idols, perhaps? I believe I read once that Samuel Beckett so admired James Joyce that he not only wore the same type of shoes as Joyce, but in Joyce's size, even though they were too small for his own feet! And another author, I forget whom, who fair-copied their idol in longhand as a way of grabbing on to the elusive magic of the cadence and tone of the admired prose.

Michael Hill: "It's not often I come across someone reading The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp...W.H. Davies is my great uncle so I just had to comment.  :-)  "

Mike replies: Cool!

It deserves to be considered a cult book, since the band Supertramp took their name from it and a famous tragic hero took it as his name (Chris McCandless, AKA Alexander Supertramp, of the book [and movie] Into the Wild. The book is an engrossing read. I haven't seen the movie). Not to the level of The Catcher in the Rye perhaps, but in the same precincts. As you probably know, your great-uncle was skeptical of his own title, but his champion George Bernard Shaw convinced him to keep it!

David Comdico: "Barthes is a great and subtle writer and Camera Lucida is a wonderful exploration of his own phenomenological response to photographs, but it is a categorical error to apply his ideas to photography itself. He more or less admits this, as he does in the epilogue to Mythologies where he concedes a necessary degree of subjectivity which in Camera Lucida is taken to an extreme.

"In short, the punctum is not a photographic property. It is an artifact of (Barthes’) perception and experience. He cleverly does not include the photo which has the most meaning to him, that of his mother, because, he says, it would have little to no meaning to the average reader. There is a fair amount of subterfuge here, related to Barthes’ larger project of de-centering the author and replacing him or her with the critic.

"What’s interesting, and ironic, is how pervasive this worldview has become and how the deconstructionist take is assumed as a given, as 'a thing that goes without saying.' Many photographers now simply think of themselves as critics with a camera, which allows them to be both sophisticated and indolent."

Mike replies: Yes. As I used to say, photography is not about photography.

Open Mike: The Princess Vanishes

Every now and then a particular photograph draws the public's attention. Right now it's a photo of a mother surrounded by her children, all grinning as madly as Americans.

A few past examples of such viral photos spring to mind. In 1994, there was a Los Angeles Police Department mugshot of O.J. Simpson used on the cover of both TIME and Newsweek, two weekly magazines that were major news sources then. Newsweek ran it apparently straight; the one on TIME's cover was given to photographer Matt Mahurin to "interpret," and was labeled, in a credit in small type on page 3, as a "photo illustration." The changes he made were highlighted, of course, by comparison with the Newsweek version, which was easy, because the magazines were usually displayed right next to each other on most newsstands. In TIME's version, O.J. was made to look more sinister and menacing, which of course had racial overtones. Black people were not the only ones who took exception. The managing editor of TIME didn't seem especially sensitive to the resulting storm of criticism, either, even after having had time to reflect on it.

Another was a picture taken in early 2009 of Captain "Sully" Sullenberger's US Airways Flight 1549 floating in the middle of the Hudson River, with people standing on the wing and huddled on the inflatable exit slide prior to rescue. It was taken by one Janice Krums, with a cellphone, the cameras in which were still crude at the time. It was one of the first photographs of the incident to be circulated, an early example of crowdsourced photojournalism before that idea became ordinary.

A third was the 2014 group selfie taken at the annual Oscar Ceremony when host Ellen DeGeneres decided to carry out a carefully planned "spontaneous" selfie shoot with Meryl Streep. But Bradley Cooper grabbed "her" phone, and a whole crowd of movie stars photo-bombed the planned dual-selfie of Ellen and Meryl. The phone wasn't really Ellen's—she owned an iPhone at the time, but Samsung had paid a lot of money to be a sponsor for the Oscars that year, so, after delicate negotiations, Ellen had been presented with a tray of Samsung delicacies from which to choose her phone-for-the-night. The resulting group shot was retweeted 750,000 times in 45 minutes and, according to Fred Graver, a member of Twitter's TV Team in 2014, "broke" Twitter for a short time. (Twitter is now known as "X, formerly known as Twitter.")

Kate's Uncle Gary called it "Sleevegate"

The photo of the Princess of Wales and her three children appears to have been clumsily doctored in small but possibly significant ways. As soon as the discrepancies were discovered, the news agencies all issued kill notices. In the ongoing absence of real information, the picture became the subject of intense scrutiny and speculation. The Princess herself appeared to take the blame, tweeting (X'ing), "Like many amateur photographers, I do occasionally experiment with editing." (Hereby nominated our Quote o' the Day.)

On the subject of scrutinizing photographs for the purpose of divining whatever truth might lie behind them, I hope you have seen The Commissar Vanishes by David King. (I'm sorry, that's his name.) Just from the cover of that book you can get the gist of the concept—as Stalin had rivals murdered, which seems a predilection of Russian leaders, he also had them expunged from photographs. The word was that during the Stalinist years, the CIA had a department whose job it was to scrutinize Soviet publicity photographs for clues as to what was going on in the Soviet hierarchy. That book kept coming to mind whenever my glance flitted across a headline about the photo of Catherine and her kids. You couldn't avoid those. Maybe your library has the book.

Princess Catherine has been out of sight for a number of weeks, purportedly recuperating from a planned medical procedure, which remains the simplest explanation for her absence from view. But a story that's emerging more lately makes it appear that she might be facing the sort of humiliation that in most peoples' lives would remain partly or mostly hidden, restricted to a local community or a circle of friends, but which in her case would be laid bare before the entire world. Humiliation magnifies according to the size of the audience, as you might know if you have ever been shamed in public through no fault of your own; I hope you haven't. I don't have the heart to limn the details. These people might be royals, but they're still people. That's how I choose to read them right now. No direct proof of anything seems to exist—it's overwhelmingly a matter of gossip and the sort of "facts" that often get agreed upon in the absence of facts. Hence all the attention being paid to a picture that is in itself nothing much to go on. Perhaps a young wife is in private pain in a life that is too public for that. And...so? If privacy is the real reason she's out of sight, let her have it. Most couples and all families go through periods of difficulty. Being privileged is no protection. They're still people. Life is not always a fairy tale even for a princess.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2024 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

Malcolm Myers: "As a Brit and a Royalist I thank you for your sensitive post on this subject. It's been headline news over here for no reason I can really think of. It has given the conspiracy theorists in the press a field day. The truth will out eventually I'm sure but everyone is entitled to medical confidentiality, even those in the public eye."

MarkB: "My decades in the ad industry make me certain the unskilled retoucher in her public-facing media team was summarily dismissed, and the art directors given a stern talking-to about 'attention to detail, regardless of the messaging deadline.' (The '...experiment with editing' quote is almost equally ham-handed. Maybe her copywriters should also get the boot.)"

Life in the Big City (OT)

An advertisement seen on The New York Times website.

Whenever I tell anyone I live in New York, they automatically picture the City. Just FYI, I'm nowhere near New York City. I'm actually a lot closer to Canada (two and a half hours to Niagara Falls) than I am to Manhattan (four hours and forty minutes according to the iPhone, but I've never made it that fast—more like five hours to a commuter hub way outside the City and then another hour-plus by train to downtown. Sarah and I used to do it that way. New York might be the best place in the world to visit, but only if you can leave).

Is "studio" a universal term, or just here in the US of A? It means a one-room apartment. With a bathroom and kitchen, but you sleep and live in the same room. I lived in a studio apartment in D.C. for most of the '80s. It started out at $315 a month and the rent more than doubled in the time I lived there. It also had a little entryway and a small dressing room. Anyway, if you want one of those studio apartments—the ones above that cost $775k—good news: they only need 10% down. It's your lucky day.

I'll tell you what. If I buy a $775,000 studio apartment, it had better come with a masseuse for twenty minutes every evening and free sushi delivered for dinner, that's all I can say.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2024 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

Robert Roaldi: "Whoa. You have to want to live there something fierce. Years ago in another life, my company sent me to the NYC office for a day's meetings. I met a guy who lived in Pennsylvania and commuted to NYC every day. From home he drove to a train station that took him to a station in NJ, from which he switched to another commuter line that crossed the river into NYC (Penn station maybe?), then took the subway to the office. It was a 3.5 hour commute each way, every day, except when the weather was bad and it took longer. He only saw his kids on weekends."

Not THAT Ross Cameron: "Yes, we have studios Down Under. Whether by importation of the term, or other reason, I know not.

"I managed to avoid living in one. However for a while I commuted from Sydney to Melbourne on a regular basis for work. My employer used to find the cheapest last minute accommodation available, so I got to see a mix of semi-decent to absolutely dire places to stay. That includes one ‘studio’ that was basically a slightly decorated concrete box. Shower / toilet was a nook created in one corner, with kitchenette in another. Moving around the room involved shuffling around the bed. There was a window, but it faced onto the concrete wall of the next building a few meters away. The studio was only 1st or 2nd floor, and permanently in shadow of the high-rise buildings in the area, reinforcing the vibes. Yes, it was basically a place to sleep and do one’s morning ablutions. Thankfully the next place I stayed was an apartment, and I managed to talk to my employer and the apartment manager about staying at that place for the rest of the gig, and a few others. Still, a first world problem, on many levels."

Alan Whiting: In the UK, it's called a 'bedsit.' Since you're a contemporary of mine, you probably have in the back of your mind somewhere the line from the Moody Blues' 'Nights in White Satin:' 'Bedsitter people look back and lament/another day's useless energy spent.'"

Roger Bradbury: "Often called a studio flat here in England, too, but used to be called a bedsit. I lived in one which only got direct sunlight into the bedsitting room on two or three days a year. It got so little daylight that I needed to have the light on nearly every day, and on the ground floor that meant no privacy as anyone passing by could see in. It was horrible, but I have a bungalow now which is very good; the morning sun comes into the bedroom and kitchen, the evening sun into the living room; ideal."

Mike replies: Sounds very pleasant. In my current house, sunlight makes all the difference: on gray days it's rather somber and drab indoors, but when the sun shines it's like a different world, the visual equivalent of a warm Summer breeze.

House For Sale

Augh. This is very sad.

It's a house for sale.

It's right in the center of East Hampton, a village way out near the Eastern tip of Long Island. As you might know, the farther out you go on Long Island, the more exclusive and the more expensive the real estate gets. It must be beautiful out there—I've never been—but it's still accessible from New York City. My brother, who lived in NYC when he was getting his Ph.D. at Columbia, said New York City was only really livable if you had a way to regularly get out of it.

Have you ever had an art-crush? Some artist/art combination you just kinda love without actually knowing knowing the artist or what kind of person he/she is? I think I kinda had an art-crush on Elliott Erwitt. I love the guy. To me he was both a master photographer and a great artist and a hero, but also a down-to-earth iconoclast who disliked BS and brooked no fools and took a dim view of puttin' on airs. He called photographs "snaps." He was a ninja as a snapper. Very talented eye. And fearless. He manifestly followed David Vestal's terse advice to photographers: "Do your work." I love paging through his books.

It's his house. An estate sale. Elliott died last November.

There was an open house at 1:00 p.m. yesterday. If you look through the real estate photos, you'll see the inside of his home studio, which is a treat...but sad. I guess I was affected by his death because I always wanted to meet him. Although I was kinda scared of that, too—it's a perilous business, meeting your heroes. You never know if they'll be jerks, or maybe just a jerk to you, and that can be hard if it's someone you admire. From what I hear, Elliott was gruff but personable, and funny, and relatable, but I don't know. Anyway, I always carried the idea around in my mind that I was going to meet him one day. Then it was too late for that. Now a stranger gets his house. It's the normal state of affairs; he was 95, and nobody can complain about that. And I have art-crushes on other people who are gone, like Guy de Maupassant and Pieter Bruegel the Elder.

Sorry. I'm maundering. The art is still there. Leaving a rich posterity is one advantage of success in the arts. Guess I'm sad about his passing because of that art-crush all those years. I'll go page through some of his snaps in my copy of Snaps. There is always something there to see with new eyes.

Mike
(Hat tip to Oren Grad)

Original contents copyright 2024 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

John: "He probably bought it way before the Hamptons were the place to network for NYC’s power brokers. It’s sad to read that the listing basically suggests to tear the house down and built something new, but that’s the way to go in those areas. Sickening really."

Jeff Hartge: "Long Island...I grew up on the east end of Long Island (1970s and '80s). I left in the early '90s. During most of the time I lived on Long Island, the expensive parts were the parts closest to the ocean (southern shore of LI). Long Island is split in two (North Fork and South Fork) out at the east end by the Great Peconic Bay. The South Fork was basically 'The Hamptons.' That is where everyone with money lived. I lived on the North Fork. It was actually relatively cheap. It was potato farms and 'Long Island Duckling' farms. At the end of the time I was there, the vineyards started taking over the land on the North Fork. Further, the exurban living concept started really taking flight in the late '90s and people started to move out there and commute to the more urbanized west end of the island (Long Island is 120 miles long—long commutes if they worked in NYC!).

"Today, I can barely afford to visit. There exists no possibility of living there. My parents sold their Long Island home for $240k in 1999 (they bought the home for about $60k in 1973). A few years later (mid-2000s), that same home was $750k. It has since been rebuilt (not much larger though) and is well over $1 million!"

Steve Rosenblum: "From his obituary in The New York Times: 'In the 1970s, Mr. Erwitt was among the first to benefit from the art market’s interest in contemporary photographs as an investment. Brokers bought prints in bulk for tax shelters. "That windfall bought my house in East Hampton," he said.'"

Kirk: "My photographer friend Will Van Overbeek and I played host to Elliott Erwitt when he came in to town to give a presentation to the Austin Photo Society about ten years ago. We picked him up at his downtown hotel, the historic Driskill Hotel, and drove him to the Humanities Research Center on the UT campus, where we all ran into photographer Arthur Meyerson. The curators at the HRC were negotiating with Mr. Erwitt to acquire his archive. They eventually did. Then, since no one had made other plans, Will and I took him to our favorite 'dive' Mexican Restaurant over on the east side of town, El Azteca. He enjoyed the atmosphere and bought a handful of the classic Mexican calendars featuring half-naked female Aztec princess warriors. He thought they were nicely campy. We stopped at Progress Coffee to chill and people watch for a while. Then we all decided to go to the LBJ museum, where Mr. Erwitt delighted in photographing an LBJ animatronic. He also made some wry remarks about the replica of the Oval Office...having been to the real one more than a few times on assignment.

"I helped him set up his Mac laptop for his speech at the Blanton Museum auditorium, and then Will and I sat back in the packed audience and enjoyed the evening. Mr. Erwitt was 84 at the time and still very spry and totally brilliant. Quiet but brilliant. For the entire time we were with him, right up until his lecture, he wore his personalized (by Leica) Leica M7 rangefinder equipped with a 50mm Summicron over his shoulder. His signature engraved on the top plate. A wonderful, old-world-style gentleman who seemed to enjoy every second of his trip to Austin. And I became a permanent Elliott Erwitt fanboy. It was such an unexpected privilege to spend a day with one of my all-time photographic heroes. I'd love to buy his house but I'd hate to live in New York. Too cold too often.

"At 84 he never stopped moving. He was a 'high energy' photographer. And he was completely attentive to everything around him; always looking for the next photo."

Two Interesting Keyboard Videos (OT)

No post today. (Well, except this one, and it doesn't count.) It's Super Bowl Sunday in the USA.

I am waist deep in keyboard shopping anyway. You think shopping for photo gear is hard? It's dead simple and straightforward compared to keyboard-land. Good Lard, as the Irish say. I think I have almost decided on the Kinesis Freestyle Pro, but not quite to the point of pulling that proverbial trigger.

I almost bought a Keychron Q10 or V10 Alice, because the layout is very close to my old Microsoft, but at the last second I realized I was only looking at it in two dimensions! The Microsoft has very slight tenting—only ~5°, but that little bit appears to be crucial. ("Tenting," as you might guess from the word, is raising the middle of the keyboard so your palms aren't flat, but angle a little bit towards vertical.) The Keychron is dead flat. Oops. Back to shopping.

Here are two of the most interesting videos I've found yet. The first one explains QWERTY and how it got that way:

The story of QWERTY is fascinating and a little horrifying! To think the whole world has been following that thoughtless plan for more than a century. I can't believe I've never heard of a Hill Climbing Algorithm before. Explains the U.S. Constitution, too!James's history of keyboards is a very satisfying.

Here's an interesting thing I learned in video about computer optimization of keys: you could make the QWERTY keyboard a whopping 13% more efficient just by exchanging the "J" and the "T." [UPDATE: actually he said J and E. —Ed.]

And the second one is brief tour of what are coming to be called "Next Gen keyboards":

If you haven't been keeping up, this one will seem futuristic. Change is certainly afoot.

That's enough of this. Something different mañana. Go Brock!

Mike

Original contents copyright 2024 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

Bryan William Jones: "A good friend of mine just published Shift Happens, a two-volume love letter to the history of keyboards. Here's the book's site."

Mike replies: Completely sold out, which is perfect for that topic. Seems like most things in the keyboard world are sold out as a usual condition, only occasionally and intermittently becoming available again.

Grant: "Hey Mike Tohnsjon. You are righj. I Jyped jhis commenj jhirjeen percenj fasjer!"

Mike replies: Showing how ridiculously fastidious I am, I actually corrected your comment. You misspelled "jhirjeen" as "jirjeen."

John Camp: "I think the extra efficiency you'd get with the Dvorak keyboard or any of the others is mostly illusory, and would most apply to people who are typists—that is, professional typers of words. I estimate that I type roughly 400,000 words a year. But the thing is, I'm not trying to type 80 or 60 or 40 words per minute, or any other number, because I frequently pause to think, and reconfigure what I'm about to type, or to rework something I already typed, and I don't know how that would fit into an efficiency calculation. I think I'm efficient enough, and wouldn't get any better with any of the other keyboard styles, but what I really need is something that would keep my fingers and wrists from being damaged by the work. For example, if a Dvorak board made my typing 27% more efficient (a dubious claim; read the Wikipedia article,) that doesn't mean that if I type 1,000 words averaging 5.5 letters each, I'd have to type fewer letters. I still have to type 5,500 letters on either keyboard. That's why I mess around with different keyboards—not to reduce the amount of word done, but to reduce the repetitive stress, which some of these other styles might do. I hope."

Mike replies: Fascinating points, and apropos. The task of writing ≠ the task of typing. I note that Next Gen (layered, minimal key count, ortholinear, etc.) keyboards are mostly reviewed by coders (and a few gamers), who have very different needs than writers do. Coders' income, as I understand it, is directly tied to how fast they can type; also, they type all day long, and they seem to be mental ninjas on keyboards, such that they can readily learn alternative layouts (Colemak, Workman, Dvorak) and moveable keystrokes and on and on. I think if I switched to a keyboard on which seldom-used characters were relegated to an invisible (non-legended) function layer, the rest of my life wouldn't be long enough for me to get comfortable with it. A ninja I am not.

I wonder the same thing about the pacing of the work. I used to say that I sound very articulate when I write but that's because no one sees me staring at the ceiling for ten seconds trying to think of the right word. Or going over what I already wrote obsessively to polish every little phrase, hunting for those elusive little ambiguities that scurry around like mice. (A book which might interest you: William Empson's Seven Types of Ambiguity, a favorite of a mercurial English professor I had at Reed College.) I also remember something I read once, which is that H&P typing methods tend to be less susceptible to RSI than touch-typing. However, my brain is getting worse as I get older, and my coordination is suffering incrementally more as time goes by. I would say that what I'm looking for is the ability to type reliably and thoughtlessly. (At present it looks like it's going to be a long road.) Kye Wood put it best:

"THE UNINTENDED BENEFITS: Flow. Touch typing removes the process of conversion from thought—to characters on a page. You just think it—and it magically appears in front of you."

That's what I'd like.

As far as your goal of reducing repetitive stress, you might look into the Glove80, which is the current darling of the keyboard community and appears to be the Kinesis Advantage 2 that we both have, but done better. But personally I think the key for me, pardon the pun, will be a split keyboard that offers tenting. Moving the halves apart and angling them for optimum comfort, and then un-pronating the wrist at least a little, seems like it will do the trick for RSI. And it can be done without changing the standard layout or stagger. You do need to get your arms at the right angle, which might require adjusting chair or desk.

The keyboard I'm most interested in is the Dygma Raise. But unfortunately Dygma is currently in a nine-month desert in which they can't deliver product (the last-gen v. 1.2 is sold out and the v. 2 doesn't ship till October). Such an egregious business blunder doesn't portend well for the survival of the company in the long term, but the keyboard itself looks great. It's mostly a standard horizontally-staggered QWERTY with additional thumb keys added, built-in wrist rests that are cleanable and replaceable, and robust tenting (an add-on to the v. 1.2 and built in on the v. 2). It also has the other features I personally want for no good reason, like shine-through legends, hot-swappable switches, and PBT keycaps.

In the meantime I've ordered a Keychron Q11 (gets here tomorrow) and a set of the brand-new Gamakay Mercury switches (check out that bokeh! I helped create a monster). I'll experiment with that and see if I can figure out what a true split keyboard will do for me.

nivivar: "If you haven't purchased a keyboard yet, I highly recommend one of the Kinesis split keyboards. You can adjust the angles to your liking, making them as extreme or gentle as you would like. This would allow you to slowly adjust to using a split keyboard. There are the Freestyle2 for PC or Mac, Freestyle2 Pro, and Freestyle Edge RGB. I have the Edge RGB. I don't really use the RGB part or the customizable programming, but I do like to have a white backlight sometimes like a laptop keyboard. Lastly, you also get an option with the keyboards of selecting the key mechanisms, so if you like quieter keys or the clicky keys, you get to choose which."

Mike replies: The Edge RGB was a finalist for me, and I wonder if I might have made a mistake in not choosing it. Two turnoffs for me are that the switches are not swappable—I'm sensitive to noise and I'm usually listening to music as I work, so if I get stuck with noise I don't care for I need a way out—and I was turned off by the way Kinesis overcharges so blatantly for the tenting kits, which should really be included in the price. I mean, the Freestyle2 Pro already costs $169, and then they want an extra $53 for the few bits of plastic in the tenting kit. Feels...predatory.

As I say, though, these might not have been very good reasons for passing over the Edge RGB, which I probably would like.

Steve Boyle Composite

It's frustrating for me when I want to talk about a picture but it doesn't have its own URL. I'm not allowed to reproduce it; and then I'm not able to link to it, either. I found some larger JPEGs of this picture, but I can't direct you to them. Grump.

Anyway, here's the closest we can come: go to this link on professional photographer Steve Boyle's website and take a look at the first picture, top left. It's a composite image of all the B.A.S.E. jumpers who safely and legally jumped off the New River Gorge Bridge in Victor, Fayette County, West Virginia, over a six-hour period on the third Saturday in October, either last year or the year before.

The other day I posted the picture taken outside of my first darkroom, as the space appears now, using a recent real estate listing. On the "'No Animals' Adams" post, two before that one, Craig Yuill pointed out that he takes 100% of his wildlife pictures using 35mm and crop-sensor digital, and that "Ansel Adams wasn’t really equipped for wildlife and bird photography." Technological progress has been happening since the beginning of photography in 1839—actually since well before that—but it occurred to me that it would be an interesting organizing principle for a book or show to collect together examples of pictures that couldn't have been taken or made (or couldn't have been taken or made easily) before the era of digital imaging.

Some such techniques seem to have faded since their initial popularity. Do you hear much about Gigapixel images any more these days? I don't think I do. That was a big thing for a while. Doubtless people are still making them, but I don't hear about it. What about those pictures that are constructed entirely in Photoshop, without any help from a lens image? I don't think I've run across one of those in years. (Of course those, like AI images, aren't photographs.) Merged panoramas were a big deal when the capability first appeared in editing programs, but now that any smartphone can do the same thing automatically it's a bit passé, except for those who are being creative with it. That effect with one color object in a field of B&W was popular enough that Steven Spielberg even used it in Schindler's List (1993), but it seems we're over it now. Except in the movie.

Some ideas go from fantasy to reality in a very short amount of time. Didn't the first Harry Potter movie, Harry Potter and The Sorcerer's Stone (2001), feature oil paintings that came briefly to life as live images? Now, with "Live View" on the iPhone—no doubt there's a counterpart effect on Android phones—that's commonplace for a whole lot of people.

Of course, it couldn't be reproduced in a book.

It would be interesting to collect or catalog examples of the various kinds of images we can make now, with today's equipment and software, that couldn't have been made, or couldn't have been made easily, in, say, 1990, or 1980, or whatever year you want to designate as being just prior to the digital era. I'll bet the list could be quite long. Although I find I can't actually think of a lot of examples offhand.

Steve Boyle's colorful, crowded composite would make a nice place to start.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2024 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

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Color House

For those of you who like strong colors, I think I found the house for you—

I especially like the knife holder in the kitchen, and the basement floor in the TV room section. And note that the love of color carries through to the occupants' clothes closet! Seems like it's possible that the owners are selling so they can buy a bigger house and go more all-in on bold colors and custom built-ins.

Don't you get the feeling the people who live in that house must be pretty cheerful folks? Not all doom, gloom, and depression, at least*.

Mike

*I do have to say that the current fashion for grays and even blacks in houses—gray vinyl floors are everywhere, all the walls painted gray, and exteriors painted black, which has got to be the real estate equivalent of a sadness beard—is not to my liking either. I guess my love of black-and-white stops somewhere.

Original contents copyright 2023 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

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louis mccullagh: "Actually this occurs in huge numbers in homes. Ask an estate agent, there are a huge number of house (etc.) buyers who will (irrespective of the age of the fittings) rip out kitchens and bathrooms (and other elements) when they buy a house. Indeed many when finished will then soon sell and move on to another property. This even happens if they actually designed and built the house from scratch. They aim to have show houses, and then get bored or dissatisfied with their own efforts."

Mike replies: It seems self-defeating. Doesn't it just limit the number of potential buyers?

There was a house on a corner near where I used to live in Wisconsin. It had extensive gardens all around it, in an extensive system of tiers and terraces built up with railroad ties. One day a For Sale sign went up. A few weeks later I was walking the dog past it and the owner happened to be out watering. We got into a friendly conversation. Eventually I mentioned to him that, in my opinion, he was probably going to have to take the gardens out if he wanted to sell the place. Well, his attitude took a big change at that. He explained that the gardens were the house's best feature, that he'd been working on them for years, and did I have any idea of the monetary value of all those plants? He pointed at a few that were near us and named their cost to buy. And so on. I heard him out, then simply explained that I'm not a gardener, so if I were looking at his house, the gardens would put me off, because there was no way I would want to take on the care of all that.

Well, the house sat on the market for months and months, through several changes of realtors. Finally after seven or eight months I came by and at least three-quarters of the gardens had been removed and replaced with sod. The house sold shortly thereafter.

hugh crawford: "Are houses really that cheap in Peoria? The house itself other than the entryway is pretty beige. That lighting isn’t helping at all, no sense of what the actual lighting looks like, looks like the photographer just plopped down a giant Chinese lantern behind the camera in each shot. Love the furnishings but they mainly show how beige the actual house is. Are houses really that cheap in Peoria?"

Mike replies: I think houses throughout the Midwest are pretty cheap, actually. Take a look at this house in Milwaukee. Not saying it's to everyone's taste, but it's 7,000 square feet (650 square meters), it's in a desirable neighborhood close to downtown, the lake, parks, public beaches, and a hospital, and it's very nicely built and finished, with a modern kitchen and nice woodwork. Then consider what £1,420,000/€1,657,000 would buy in London or Paris, or how far $1.8m would go in Manhattan, Orange County, Miami, San Francisco, Washington D.C., etc. There's more demand pressure on lower-priced houses, of course, so it's not like you're going to find livable small houses for $80k in Milwaukee or Peoria. But you can do pretty well for $160–200k, all things considered. As an example, take a look at this sturdy little 1930 brick bungalow in Peoria which sold for $176,000.

Ken Lunders: "That is the most hideous staging I've ever had the misfortune of seeing. My eyes may never recover!"

Mike replies: I've actually seen worse, more than once. But as Hugh said, most of the idiosyncratic color in that house is in the furniture and wall hangings, so it would be relatively easy to reverse. The kitchen (counters especially), built-in sideboard, and the floor in the basement TV room are the biggest exceptions.

But don't you get the feeling that the people who decorated that house laugh a lot? That could be wrong. I just imagine them being pretty merry.

Stelios: "If you think that is colourful you should see my house. Blacks and greys are banned. Whites tolerated in small areas (and ceilings)."

Zack S: "This house is ready for Wes Anderson to shoot his next movie in."

Wayne: "My guess is this is a digitally staged house. It all looks too neat and nice, no personal anything, shadows not convincing, etc. Google street shows a dull-looking house although the pic is a couple years old. It may be vacant which would make it easy. This techniques was done across the street from me. Up for sale, pics online, nothing like what's inside."

Herman Krieger: "Rebuilding kitchens sounds counterproductive."

Mike replies: Groan! Herman, you get the last word.

The Best Camera, According to CR

The "Top Picks of the Year" issue of Consumer Reports (CR), November/December 2023, arrived in the mailbox a little while back. I don't subscribe to any paper magazines except The New Yorker, but you get CR as a paper magazine if you pay for access to the website. This issue features full rankings on cooking appliances—oven, ranges, and cooktops—as well as "The Best Cameras from Our Tests."

Cooking appliances did not fare so well. CR looks askance at cooking appliances. Microwaves especially—the pages for microwaves were full of light green (merely good) and yellow (middling or neutral) bars. With few dark green bars (the best rating) to be found. According to CR, the best microwave you can buy, a standout in a sea of mediocrity, is the Panasonic NN-SE7-85S.

So I was almost...well, proud when I came to the Mirrorless Cameras page. Solid dark green bars almost all the way to the bottom, and an unbroken string of those black checkmarks-in-circles that mean "CR Recommended." That's not the only page; there are seven more mirrorless cameras on the page before this one (all CR Recommended) and 13 more on the following page. All of the latter are the lighter green for "good," but even the lowest-rated camera they listed—the Olympus OM-D M10 Mark IV and 14–42mm—did not fall so low as to earn a yellow bar, the meh rating. However, 11 of 13 at the bottom of the list did fail to win the coveted Recommended checkmark.

I know, I know—we don't need no stinkin' CR to choose our cameras. We are way past that. I was just kinda proud, as I say—according to CR, our whole category be boppin'. We strong. They don't like microwaves. They do like cameras.

Top recommendations overall? The Fuji X-T4 (whut? Right, 4) with the 16–80mm OIS lens is No. 1, and the Fuji X-T4 is in second place as well! Paired with the 18–55mm OIS. That seems a little out there, but hey, their house, their rules. The Nikon Z6 with 24–70mm S rounds out the top three (they recommend the plain Z6, but I linked to the Z6II. You can search out a non-II if for some reason you really have to have CR's third-best camera recommendation).

I'm almost right there with them—my top recommendation, for people who do not have a camera at all and want one—which includes virtually not one single person reading this—is a Fuji X-T5 body (Amazon agrees with me; it's their Top Pick too) with the 35mm ƒ/2 Fujicron as a first lens. I'd actually prefer the ƒ/1.4, but that's not a mainstream recommendation any more. I prefer the X-T5 because it has the World's Most Perfect Viewing Screen (IM Hmbl. O) and the 40-MP sensor for great big prints. The X-T4 has the flip-out screen (an anomaly in the X-T[x] line) and the (slightly) older 26-MP sensor which is merely wholly adequate for 99.9% of everything your might ever want or need to do with it. I ought to do an X-T5 vs. Z6II shootout sometime. Who else cares?

But the Fuji X-T4 is the Honda Accord of cameras. Or rather, the Hyundai Santa Fe Hybrid of cameras (that's CR's top pick in vehicles over $30k).

That's random
Oh, and, the weirdest thing the entire issue calls out? Features, even, picture and all? The Kohler Moxie BT showerhead, which they rate highly for its performance as, ahh, well, a showerhead. What makes it weird? It's got a speaker in it. Because naturally. And you thought the folks at CR were all practical and fuddy-duddy and buzzkill! They sing in the shower too.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2023 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

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Kirk W.: "That takes me back to about 1983, when, inspired by my uncle Stu with his Minolta SRT-101 and my eighth grade science teacher’s patience with us as we learned how to thread film on to developer tank reels (shout out to Mr. Jacobsen!), I was in search of my first 'real' camera. I dropped my hard-earned berry picking and haying income on the top-rated Consumer Reports camera, the Pentax ME Super. I remember poring over that list for hours, even pre-internet, being dazzled and paralyzed by the range of choices. There were Nikons and Canons and Minoltas and Olympuses of course, but I can still remember some more obscure brands as well, such as Topcon, Konica, and Ricoh. Looking back now, that was not the ideal way to buy into a camera system, but it did work out. The camera still works like new (at least the last time I ran some film through it) after decades of use and abuse. And it will still be ready to go long after my current magic digital cams are obsolete."

robert e: "Actually, I think we camera geeks do need a 'stinkin' CR'...to help us recommend gear suitable for non-geeks (or for when we want a more casual, forgiving or incognito camera)."

Niels: "My parents always selected larger household acquisitions based on the CR equivalent in my country. They chose the best rated item within their budget—and often that meant buying at a lower price than they originally expected. I think it served them well—I never heard them complain about purchases done this way, although they were generally quick at complaining about a lot of other things.

"When I left home, my mother gave me a subscription to the magazine, but I could never use it the way they did. My compulsive behaviour of researching the life out of anything that I plan to purchase prohibits me from just picking from a list, although it could have saved me much energy it seems: for my first full frame mirrorless camera, I ended up buying a Nikon Z6 with the 24–70mm S—and I am very happy with it! I would never have thought my preferred product would be at the top of such a list. Maybe my requirements aren't as special as I think?

"I should possibly revise my behaviour, although I'm afraid it would violate my nature."

David Dyer-Bennet: "My first SLR was chosen largely as a result of the Consumer Reports rating. In 1969 (bought late in December).

"It was a Miranda Sensorex, and it was not a very good choice for me. I largely liked the quirks, like a removable pentaprism, a bottom-weighted meter (the sensor actually on the mirror), and a front-mounted shutter release (it was considerably easier to hold really steady for vertical shots that way) [Burt Keppler of Pop Photo also liked the front-mounted shutter releases. —MJ]. But it didn't have the range of lenses, especially fast telephotos, that Nikon did. I think Pentax or Nikon would have been better choices for me at that time. (With access to hindsight, definitely Nikon.)

"Of course, as I figured out later, they are rating cameras for, gosh, 'Consumers,' as it says on the cover, and even then I was not anything like a normal consumer of cameras.

"They are the only consumer testing outfit I've encountered who have any understanding of statistics and quality control and such (they get multiple samples through normal distribution channels and test those). But the things they choose to measure and the priority they assign to various things is very much consumer-oriented."

Amazon Warehouse

Ta-dah!

I post this not because you need to know every little thing about my everyday life, but because I wanted to alert you to "Amazon Warehouse" for your photographic purchases. I saved about $65 by buying this in "Used Like New" condition from Amazon Warehouse, options which appear on the page for the item in the right-hand column and down a bit, in the rectangle that is slightly grayed out (see inset). When it arrived it appeared to be an open-box item, but otherwise new.

On the small faucet, for drinking water, I saved about $40 (the new price has been reduced since I bought mine). The one I got was also intact in new packaging but in a re-taped box.

It doesn't look like going to Warehouse directly is likely to be very satisfying—first of all, when I click on "Cameras and Photo," three of the "Sponsored" items that come up are fishing waders, a subwoofer, and peanuts, which seems—how shall I say it—a tad lacking in focus. And the photographic items I sampled did not make it clear what the normal new price is, or made it seem like the Warehouse price was the new price. I was a bit confused.

In any event, this might be something to look out for when shopping on Amazon. Look around the page and see if you can find offers.

Tradeoffs
As far as the new faucets are concerned, I have a feeling I have just bought a present for the next owners of my house. But hey, you gotta have a faucet that works, right? Falls under the category of routine maintenance.

By the way, my Q&D research indicates that "pull-down sprayer" faucets are not especially long-lived. The pull-down parts are under-engineered, and they tend to fail when the faucet ("tap" in Britspeak) is still relatively young, like my old one did (its age: between seven and 11 years). But they're handy. I wouldn't pay $600 for one, or even $400. But you can make your own calculation about that.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2023 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

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Kye Wood: "I'm all for savings. But open box on house hardware is beyond my risk appetite. Scene: plumber arrives. You present the box to him. He opens it and says 'where's the flange thread adapter? It should be in here.' But it probably fell out or was, um...'borrowed,' by the person who opened the box originally. Sure, you can send it back to Amazon. But you've got to eat the plumber's call-out fee and minimum charge. Semper vigilance or carpe widget."

Mike replies: You've just adroitly exposed the risk I took to save that ~$100. Good thing I didn't think of any of that beforehand, because it might have paralyzed me!

Tim Urban Did a TED Talk in the Past

If you're a procrastinator, Tim Urban nailed it once and for all.

His thesis...well, I won't spoil it.

But a similar thing to what he first claimed about his thesis once actually happened to me. I was a freshman at Dartmouth taking an art history course, and near the end of the term we were given two and a half weeks to write a 10-page paper which was to be a big part of our grade. The paper was due at 4:30 on a Tuesday afternoon, just before the professor left her office for the day.

Those were the days before personal computers. It was normal to write a paper in longhand, with a pencil, on lined paper, and then type it on a typewriter to be turned in. As a completely unnecessary aside, I will mention that I completely visualized a laptop computer one day in 1976 while failing to take notes in an astronomy class, right down to the folding book-like design and just about the exact size that laptops eventually turned out to be; the size gauged, of course, by the needed keyboard. My mental image was just about like a current MacBook Pro, although the real MacBook Pro can do a lot more than I was able to imagine. I believe that ideas of coming things often occur to many people's minds just before the things actually come into existence, like the idea of photography occurred to many people's minds in the 1820s and '30s. My imagined laptop was just what I would have needed to take notes in the astronomy class that was happening at that moment—if you overlook, conveniently, the fact that I could not type.

I had it in mind what I wanted to write, but, the day before the paper was due, I still had not actually written anything. So, I thought—calmly—I'll just write the paper today and type it tomorrow.

That I did not do. 

So, with the panic monster still not present, I realized that I would have to pull an all-nighter. No big deal; my sleep problems at the time included an inordinately long circadian cycle, so I was in the habit of pulling at least one all-nighter a week, sometimes just to get myself back in approximate sync with the World's inconveniently short 24-hour clock. So I settled down on my bed with a yellow pad and three sharp pencils and got to work...

...And woke up the next morning with one paragraph on the yellow pad and seven and a half hours to go till the paper was due.

So I composed the paper on the typewriter. What else? There was nothing else left. Typewriters, if you don't remember them, were basically a write-once medium. You could correct little mistakes with Wite-Out, a brand of correction fluid, which itself was invented, and I kid you not, by Bette Nesmith Graham, the mother of future Monkees guitarist Michael Nesmith, who wrote "Mary, Mary," which was later recorded by Run-D.M.C., a founding member of which, Jam Master Jay, was murdered in 2002. (Down, Instant Gratification Monkee*.) You rolled the paper upwards, painted out the mistake, and retyped over it. This was best for small, infrequent mistakes, and more of a PITA if the mistake happened at the bottom of a page. Typing is not a good medium for on-the-fly rewrites. I always say I would never have been a writer if it wasn't for the Macintosh; I've already done more corrections, rewriting, revising, and reshuffling on this little post than would have been possible on a typewriter.

Anyway, I worked at an intense pitch at the typewriter without food or beer for seven hours and fifteen minutes straight.

Well, not exactly straight; in the middle of page seven, I suddenly typed, in a fit of tension-induced mirth, "Quack quack, I am a duck! Ducks do not have to write art papers...", and then proceeded to type three utterly inane paragraphs from the point of view of the duck, chucking maniacally the while. My dormmates at our end of the hall somehow did not find this funny. In my pressurized delirium I was temporarily serious about turning in the duck version, reasoning that the professor, sick of reading papers, would be delighted by the sudden turn. My roommate Roosevelt Morris patiently talked me off the ledge and got me to re-type page seven and get underway again.

I ran across campus and dropped the finished paper in the slot at about 4:28 p.m. The rumor was that at 4:30 sharp, the professor removed the basket inside the mail slot and replaced it with a wastebasket. Or maybe I'm conflating one professor with another. It was a long time ago.

I got an A on the paper. Really. It was possibly the worst thing that ever happened to me, from an academic-process standpoint.

By the way, Dartmouth traditionally did not give grades of A+; A was the highest grade you could get. The idea was that A sufficiently described excellence, and nothing more was needed. Cf. "Mint+++" on eBay: "Mint" does all the work by itself, and therefore cannot meaningfully be plussed. The only thing higher than A was a College Citation for excellence. I later got an A and a Citation in an English class. I'm not even sure Citations were ever given for mere papers.

Anyway, this turned out to be bad for me because it made me believe, wrongly, that I could perform adequately at the very last, last minute. What I failed to realize was that an essential component of last-minute performance was panic, as a motivator, and, if you suffered from the belief that you could do whatever was needed at the very last minute, then you did not panic.

Tim Urban nails all this much better than I just did.

YouTube is an interesting phenomenon. Yes, it's in the process of being ruined by commercialism. (One of my personal axioms is "commercialism ruins everything.") But it's still functioning, more or less, at this late date. It's a giant morass of drek with the occasional absolute gem buried deep within. Not unlike the process of moving tons of earth and stone using industrial methods to find single little nuggets of gold. Although not efficient—nowhere is there meaningful editing or culling—it's still a true pleasure when you unearth, or are given, one of those gold nuggets.

And this is one. This might strike the more disciplined amongst ye like the duck in my art paper struck Rosey Morris, but it made me smile and LOL (yes, actually OL) the whole way through. (Biggest laugh: the bit about getting to know India.) Big thanks to reader Patrick, who gave us this big, fat nugget this morning. And thanks, of course, to Tim Urban—who can not only say he did a TED Talk once, but that he did a great one. I'm sure I'll watch it four more times, as I usually do when I find these rare bits of true YouTube treasure.

Mike

*You saw what I did there.

Original contents copyright 2023 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

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Joe: "Oliver Burkeman's book Four Thousand Weeks and his twice-monthly letter are right on point for these issues. (And his first book, The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking, (obviously on a different topic) is one of my all-time nonfiction favorites.)"

Mike replies: I wrote about The Antidote here. Great book, one of my favorites from this year's reading so far.

Neil Partridge: "I have been a very infrequent visitor to TOP over the last five years due to house moves...family events...and not having the time to take any photos (other than snapshots with a phone). Something nudged me this week to return and I encountered this wonderful video about procrastination. I have recently been wondering whether I should ask for a very late diagnosis of something which has caused decades of depression and an inability to focus. I have only watched the first five minutes, literally laughed OL several times, and found the idea of the Instant Gratification Monkey 100% accurate. Thanks for a timely post, and I look forward to browsing five years of missed posts."

J D Ramsey: "The TED talk was brilliant! The scariest part came at the end with the boxes representing the weeks of a 90-year life. Wait, there are so few! How can that be? OMG, there goes my Panic Monster."

Charles Jacobs: "Mr. Urban is close. But the instant gratification monkey and panic monster are the exact same entity. It is a Clark Kent/Superman issue. You never see both at the same time. When the deadline is close, the highest level of instant gratification is completing the job (with the potential superwin of getting high praise for a job well done.)"

Mike replies: Incisive insight! You may be right!

Open Mike: Peak Track (OT)

The essay I promised you about how photography is not ending is underway, but it needs percolation time. Can't rush some things.

Meanwhile, I thought I would mention how much I've been enjoying the recent World Championships in Budapest. One of the best athletics meets I've ever seen, right up there with Beijing 2008. The USA did spectacularly well, and it seems like there are many young talents in a large number of disciplines, from many countries, all peaking at the same time. Some absolutely wonderful performances and some great stories.

The only dark spot is the absence this year of Sydney Superstar, out with a knee injury, whose Bolt moment you can see here, at the 2022 Championships. "Absolute greatness," as the announcer says.

A few of the many highlights from the 2023 World Championships in Budapest, Hungary:

• Sha'Carri Richardson, who races with the longest fingernails ever recorded in track, has suffered some of the wayward setbacks of an unbridled youth, including her heartbreaking disqualification from the pandemic-delayed 2021 Olympics in Tokyo after testing positive for marijuana, which she had resorted to after the death of her mother. But if you've ever seen a young kid happier about an unexpected triumph than she was at these Championships, I don't know when it could have been. Her mouth was shaped like an "O" for minutes afterward. (By the way, the clip shows a really dire video editing mistake—they cut away from Sha'Carri at the exact moment she sees confirmation that she's won the race.)
• Noah Lyles, Noah Lyles, Noah Lyles. On top of the world. And the USA wins its fourth 100 World title in a row. Rising star Erriyon Knighton grabber silver, on the podium with Letsile Tebogo from Botswana. (Watch for the names Knighton and Tebogo in the future.) Noah Lyles also caused a huge viral explosion with his comments about the NBA. See also his golds in the 200 and the 4x100.
• After her catastrophic fall just meters from the finish line in the 4x100 Mixed, Dutch standout Femke Bol redeemed herself anchoring the 4x100 and in the 400 hurdles.
• Katie Moon and Nina Kennedy agree to share the gold medal in the pole vault. I love this. I used to play Risk with a bunch of people including my friend Jim Schley at Shoestring Farm, where I lived after dropping out of Dartmouth, and, in one game, when Jim and I had the last armies standing, he looked up and said, with a chuckle: "why can't we just live in peace?"

That's not all, but I gotta go. I have to get back to it. I'm hard at work on the post I promised you on Monday, and it will be up soon. It's called "The Antidote."

Mike

Original contents copyright 2023 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

David Drake: "Looking forward to your post Mike. We all have to keep positive and inspired! The antidote is your blog! That’s the best thing about the web is being a part of online communities, whether they are for photographers, marimba dancers or knitters, Being part of a community or communities and sharing our experiences is so important. Sure, I would love to be able to make a living off my work; but just creating something and being able to share with others - that’s the essence of a creative life."

Dan Montgomery: "Track meets always make me cry. Whether it's a middle-school meet or the World Championships, there is always a moment (or many) in which an athlete decides that he or she may not be out of the race after all, chooses to plumb the depths of their own conditioning and tolerance for suffering and pushes themselves toward the finish line through pain that is both off the scale and entirely voluntary. Gets me every time. And you have the surprises whose joy at a win (or a medal or just making the final) tells you something about what it takes to get there. And then you have the people who just lay down the law.

"By the way, it seems to me that the World Championships, which only started in the 1980s, are always great (not that I have seen them all, of course), in part because only the best of the best qualify, in part because the crowds are better informed, in part because the track meet is the whole point, not a subset of a bigger global athletic-cultural-commercial-political spectacle. But yes, too bad Sydney couldn't make it. And, I don't know, did you see Flo-Jo's nails back in the day?"

The Ugliest House Ever

If you like interior photography, or just interiors, Zillow is an historically unique opportunity to sneak a peek into houses everywhere.

Just wondering...does your aesthetic sense extend to a lot of things in the world? I'm pretty convinced that most human beings don't think or feel about the world in this way. How things look—visual priority, you might call it—a sense of the aesthetic style of the world of appearances—just doesn't enter into their perceptions. I think it was either Grant Wood or Thomas Hart Benton who said that middle Americans were the most aesthetically dead human beings in the history of the world, or words to that effect.

But maybe the habit of looking at the world through an aesthetic filter is itself disreputable, I don't know. It does make you judgemental. It's possible that my reflexive tendency to look at the world through this prism is undesirable or misplaced. It certainly seems unfair to look at people this way, although I still do sometimes (we all do, albeit for different reasons. Scott Schuman certainly does. He's one of a small number of photographers who photographs "found" fashion on the street). I've had to train myself to overlook peoples' outward appearances to better see their humanity underneath. I try to be nice to all kinds of people. As if we are all equal, even though it's human nature to strive to pretend we're not.

And I myself don't dress well, speaking of Scott Schuman. Anyone could easily find fault with my appearance.

Trees and houses
But with some things it seems harmless enough. When I was a kid I actually had a mental list of beautiful trees that I had seen in my peregrinations. That might sound weird to say out loud. But I liked trees and I admired ones that were picturesque. Houses are easy to evaluate in aesthetic terms, because they are "presented" to the world by their outward appearance—realtors call it "curb appeal"—and you're not insulting anyone directly if you judge a house while driving by.

The housing stock in America generally is a complete disaster. It's a contemporary American characteristic that we select people who have an innately good design sense, train them to be architects, and then save money by not hiring them to design our houses. Not one house in a hundred was actually designed by an architect for a particular site or neighborhood. It was plucked from a catalog or concocted by a builder. We generally let builders design our houses—which of course results in houses that are calculated to be a.) salable to lowest-common-denominator tastes, and b.) easy and cheap to build. Or simply designed by someone who doesn't have a lot of aptitude or talent for design. That's how we get monstrosities like the ones found at sites like McMansion Hell. The top example on that site right now looks like a deliberate parody. Truly awful. Alarmingly awful. Dispiritingly so. Honestly, go look at that thing—check out the interior; it seriously wouldn't be any worse if it were drawn for an episode of The Simpsons.

The bigger the house, the harder it is to design well. But even garden-variety houses can be really bad. Just poking around on Zillow, it's unfortunately far easier to find ugly houses than attractive ones. But even acknowledging that I can be judgemental in this regard, and that it might not be fair to look for taste and beauty everywhere, this house took me aback:

This might be the worst one-box house I've ever seen. How can you screw up a plain box so spectacularly? Here's a rear view:

I just love that misbegotten little twist of downspout coming from the lower edge of the "mansard roof." That gutter placement is hilarious.

One of the funny things about this is that the real estate listing for this house features 15 photographs of the exterior, including seven of the front of the house. Like it was something to savor. The interior is actually pretty decent. But I'd be embarrassed to live there.

You can find an endless supply of very odd things about houses on the internet, and they always entertain me. Just a few examples and I'll stop:

Someone really didn't think things through here. I even wonder if maybe this isn't a Photoshop joke.

There's more than one way to skin a cat, as they used to say in New England.

What I like about this one is not so much the odd position of the loo, which is weird enough, but the "design" of those steps. Seriously, contemplate those for a minute. Truly postmodern. Someone really got carried away with that.

Passive Design Solutions
And just as an antidote to all the above, here's an example of a good design: Juniper Mountain is a passive house design from Canada's Passive Design Solutions. This house would be low maintenance and have very low energy costs, and it has enough room without being too large. I don't think it has enough storage space for a three-bedroom house, unless it's a vacation home. It would be luxurious as a house for a couple or a single person with one guest room. And I don't approve of the open kitchen (I like closed kitchen plans), but other than that, it's quite nice in my opinion. 

My advice, if you ever build a house: utilize the services of a good architect who specializes in residential design, even if it's a very simple house, and hire an experienced professional contractor. And don't get fancy.

Bad design, like entropy, never rests.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2023 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

MarkB: "You just like that passive house design (Juniper Mountain) because they put a pool table on the plan.  ;-)  "

Mike replies: You got me.  :-)

Bridget Dawson: "Oh my gosh...your timing of this is just right for my husband and I. We are laughing hysterically as we read this. We've been looking for a house in Florida, and we ignore 95% of what comes along because they are all so unattractive. No personality. Why does this entire state look like a giant suburb? Florida was charming in the 1970s, but now it's nothing more than the world's largest parking lot! Everywhere! And it's what's going on inside all these cloned houses that really aggravates us. White on white, with white, in white. Another ugly kitchen with ugly spotted granite countertops, ugly colorless stainless steel appliances, refrigerators the size of a walk-in closet, white cabinets to the ceiling that no one can reach...why does everyone want their kitchen to look like everyone else's? And don't even get us started on the lousy photographs...."

David Maxwell: "You are probably not much into Twitter, but an account on there called Zillow Gone Wild is a lot of fun."

Sebastian Broll: "The loo made my...not my day, but at least my pre-breakfast morning. Cheers from a usually badly-dressed person."

Colin: "Another source of both delight and distress is Zillow Gone Wild."

s.wolters: "Belgium has a reputation when it comes to ugly houses. Several photographers had projects about it and even accused each other of plagiarism in court. There are books and even organized tours, but if you want a quick impression about the scale and the looks of it just google images of Ugly Belgian Houses or try this link. Another is this one."

Mike replies: There's a Middle Eastern country—I think it might be Turkey, sorry if I'm wrong—that has a tax loophole for unfinished houses, which has resulted in countless houses being perpetually half-finished. A different but not dissimilar problem. Of course America sometimes has the opposite problem of Belgium's—too many rules rather than too few, not because of government but in private developments with strict rules on the look, size, color, and even landscaping of every house. I looked at a house in such a development where I wasn't allowed to fence my backyard. Land of the Free?!

I almost bought a lot in a development in Wisconsin until I discovered that I could not legally build a house as small as the one I wanted. Nor was I allowed to build a one-story design. They all had to be 2,500 square feet minimum, two stories, and either beige or light gray in color. One renegade had painted his house pale yellow, no doubt raising the ire and the emnity of the condo association.

jeremy t: "Here is a nice essay that discusses why houses in Belgium are often ugly. There is also a great book by Hannes Coudenys with photographs of some fine examples."

[Ed. note: See both ASW's and Henning's comments in the Comments section. Both are a bit too long to feature, but both are good and illuminate different important aspects of the subject.]

Jim H: "Where I live now (Santa Monica—near Los Angeles) is both ground zero for showing how money, wretched excess and custom homes exemplify bad taste, and also a showcase for some of the best residential architects ever—Charles and Ray Eames, John Lautner, Pierre Koenig, Richard Neutra and even Frank Lloyd Wright Jr. About 10 years ago, having house tours of these famous houses was a big thing, so we got to visit many of these houses and buildings by famous architects.

"You can waste a lot of time in my pages on these tours. I recommend the MAK House Tour first which ends with a visit to Julius Schulman's home shortly after his death while it was being cleared out for sale. Schulman was probably the most famous architectural photographer of all time. We met him once at a tour of the FLW Ennis-Brown house (linked to) and heard him talk about all the famous places he photographed.

"All of these pages are more than a decade old. Some of these photos are from earlier digital photos and some film—the 'Oak Park - 1971' pictures are scans from some Tri-X negatives we shot in a visit to the FLW homes in Oak Park where we joined a college class getting a private tour—long before organized tours. Most of the digital was taken with an Olympus Micro 4/3 camera with the 9–18mm zoom—really nice for architecture."

Yonatan Katznelson: "It seems to me that someone took the euphemism 'throne room' a bit too seriously in that last picture."

John Camp: "Because I've had an odd series of jobs and moves, and because I was lucky enough to get into a house when I was young, I've owned 11 houses in an already long life. I have worked with different architects specializing in residential work on two different homes and both made serious errors that were either expensive to fix or unfixable.

"The most annoying and potentially dangerous error over the longterm was a kind of eyebrow shelter over a front stoop that actually drained onto the stoop—this in Minnesota, which has an extended freeze-thaw cycle in both late autumn and early spring. For two months a year, the stoop was an unpredictable skating rink. The error was unfixable without essentially disassembling the house and rebuilding the entire front. On the other hand, it looked kinda nice, if you weren't lying on your back in the driveway with a broken spine.

"My advice to anyone working with an architect—you're probably smarter than he/she is, and you probably know more about your building site. Question everything, and stay on top of everything. Demand current and specific billing. Be especially aware of climate problems (like the freeze-thaw cycle, or flat-roof sections in areas with lots of snow, or large north-facing windows in cold climates.) Do not sign the standard AIA (American Institute of Architects) contract. Hire a lawyer to write the contract with the architect, and if the architect doesn't like that, find another architect. This will save you lots of money. (The 'standard' AIA contract is bullshit; it protects no one but the architect, and sets up a system that positively encourages the architect to spend as much money on the project as is possible.) Do not allow the architect to order anything from Europe. Anything that you can get from Europe is also made or available here. If you insist on Carrara marble...well, that's unfixable.)

"I could go on, but won't, except for one last suggestion: Buy an existing house that you find financially and aesthetically acceptable, and inspect the hell out of it so you know not only what needs to be fixed, but what you might want to change in the future.

"As for the commenter above with the unfinished wet basement, that can be fixed, without too much cost. And you can finish the basement simply and by yourself. Unless you live in a remote area, there are classes that will help you finish it. I've actually done all this—I've even installed a second bathroom on my own, and I'm not renowned as a handyman."

Around the Web: Signs, Portents, and...Falcons?

AI anyone?

"In recent months, the signs and portents have been accumulating with increasing speed. Google is trying to kill the 10 blue links. Twitter is being abandoned to bots and blue ticks. There’s the junkification of Amazon and the enshittification of TikTok. Layoffs are gutting online media. A job posting looking for an 'AI editor' expects 'output of 200 to 250 articles per week.' ChatGPT is being used to generate whole spam sites. Etsy is flooded with 'AI-generated junk.' Chatbots cite one another in a misinformation ouroboros. LinkedIn is using AI to stimulate tired users. Snapchat and Instagram hope bots will talk to you when your friends don't. Redditors are staging blackouts. Stack Overflow mods are on strike. The Internet Archive is fighting off data scrapers, and 'AI is tearing Wikipedia apart.' The old web is dying, and the new web struggles to be born."

That's a quote from an article on The Verge called "AI is killing the old web, and the new web struggles to be born." The whole article is worth a read. Especially interesting (ominous?) is the notion of Avram Piltch, Editor-in-Chief of Tom's Hardware, that Google might soon be moving away from helping people search for independent information and moving toward simply appropriating it. (Power corrupts, and....)

Disneyfication at National Geographic
Elsewhere in the news, The National Geographic just fired the last of its staff writers, according to multiple sources including tweets from two of said writers, continuing an already-ongoing process of Disneyfication. Disney bought a controlling 73% interest in the 135-year-old National Geographic Society's NG Publishing unit in March 2019. The National Review commented, "...the news that the illustrious magazine National Geographic has laid off all of its last remaining staff writers is a demonstration that we, as a society, have largely chosen to stop paying for news or entertainment, with far-reaching consequences for our lives."

Poetic?
You could be excused for thinking the World currently has a bit of an apocalyptic edge or tinge to it, what with the onslaught of AI, political disunity, the American Midwest currently under a shroud of wildfire smoke, and Texas "rivaling the hottest locations on the planet, including the Sahara Desert and parts of the Persian Gulf," according to NBC. Might be a good time to refresh our familiarity with this poem by William Butler Yeats (pronounced "yates," as you might know.)

The Second Coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre   

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere   

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst   

Are full of passionate intensity.

 

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.   

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out   

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert   

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,   

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,   

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it   

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.   

The darkness drops again; but now I know   

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,   

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,   

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

It just occurred to me that "The Second Coming" might be the greatest poem I know. (The best two-stanza one, for sure.) Better than any horror movie in my view (sorry) and as prescient as Orwell. Always given me goosebumps.

Smoke?
I'm only on the edge of the Canadian wildfire smoke currently, but the AQI here is the worst it's been, 178. The problem is 2.5 nm and smaller particles, small enough to get deep into your body and wreak havoc. To put you in context, a typical human hair is 100,000 nanometers in diameter, so, no, you can't see or feel these particles directly. If science tells you something but you can't sense it, do you tend to believe it anyway? The guy who sold me my house neglected to inform me that the radon level in the basement was 56, because he didn't "believe" in radon*.

You can see the smoke particles as a grayish-yellowish haze when looking at distant objects, even on a sunny day, and if you feel a burning in your eyes or in the back of your throat, you're probably breathing too much of it. You also might not "smell smoke": the VOCs in wildfire smoke generally lose their smell after about 24 hours, so, depending on how long it took to get to you.... Counterintuitively, being farther away from wildland fires is actually more dangerous to peoples' health than being close to one, because many people dismiss the dangers if they can't see flames or smell smoke, or if the smoke isn't thick. I just saw a woman pass by walking her dog.

Fight back!

If you can, stay indoors, don't exert yourself, get into the habit of checking AQI every morning when you check the weather, and get an air purifier, for whatever little room you spend most of your time sitting around in. The one I bought is the Coway Airmega AP-1512H Mighty. The Wirecutter, the product review arm of the New York Times, says, "After nine years, during which we’ve tested more than 50 different air purifiers, we believe that the exceptional Coway Airmega AP-1512HH Mighty is the best among them—as we have since 2015." The otherwise identical Coway 200M, available from the same link, has a more conventional appearance and has control lights that you can turn off, making it better for the bedroom. Both are quiet and efficient. Both are economical, to buy and to run. Available in white or black.

Getting to the point
Oh, and the point I started out wanting to make? TOP doesn't use AI. There is no TOP bot. It's just little ol' flesh-'n'-blood me, aging but game, sitting on the front porch at TOP Rural World Headquarters hunt-and-pecking away at a keyboard. No ChatGTP, no AI, no funny business, with my longstanding and finely-honed (albeit not infallible) instincts for that increasingly rare mental skill, "the evaluation of competing claims."

Same as it ever was.

Well, except for the air purifier.

Don't let it all get you down,

Mike
(Thanks to Jay Townsend and George Andros)

*The official safe level is 4 pCi/L (picocuries per liter), but that was "negotiated for" by the realty industry. The real safe level is 2.5 pCi/L. My sellers cured the issue by paying for abatement after the sale. The current level in my basement hovers around 1.1. I don't spend a lot of time down there.

Original contents copyright 2023 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

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Smoke Time-Lapse

The air quality is bad again today. But check out the astonishing (and, in its way, beautiful) time-lapse image in this article. (You have to scroll down.) Wow. I live straight above the "w" in "New York" on that map, about halfway up New York State, so, as you can see, we're right in the path. Normally, the air quality where I live is unusually good.

But consider that amazing time-lapse map for a sec. To think, Europeans were migrating across the North American continent in wooden wagons pulled by oxen as recently as a hundred and forty years ago; ruts from wagon wheels are still visible on some of the heavily traveled trails to this very day. And now we can make a map like that one from a satellite. The rate of change boggles the mind.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2023 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

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I-R Is Gone

Imaging-Resource, which has been sputtering and dying for some time now, is finally completely gone. Thom Hogan has the whole story on ByThom, which is not gone.

The other of the Big Two major gear sites of the transition period, DPReview, Thom notes, is still on life support "for some reason."

Mike

Original contents copyright 2023 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

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The $20k Car (Culture Notes) (OT)

I had to un-stick the sticky. For some reason, sticky posts make traffic drop. I guess too many people look at the same headline on their devices and just assume that nothing new has been posted.

Just a little note in passing. In 1976, when I was 19, my Aunt Anne, who was an heiress but frugal most of her life, treated herself to an extravagance: a top-of-the-line Mercedes-Benz. It was a 450SEL, and it cost $20,000.

A few years later, my father decided to buy my mother a Mercedes like her sister's as a birthday or maybe anniversary present. I went to the dealer with him. He owned a 1971 Buick Electra 225, and he was fond of saying, when I asked if I could borrow the Buick, "son, that's a six-thousand-dollar automobile." As in, too expensive to risk with the likes of you. A Cadillac, which was what my father really wanted but which I had talked him out of because the writers in Car & Driver scorned them, was the only American car you could buy that was more expensive. When we went to the Mercedes dealership, my father asked to look at the second most expensive Mercedes, one down from the top of the line. My father did not approve of foreign cars, I should add, and he was frugal too, having been born in the year of the Crash with parents who were scarred by the Depression. He looked the car over on the showroom floor, skeptically, and asked his favorite question, "how much?"

I don't know what he expected.

"You won't spend more than twenty thousand dollars," the salesman answered. To express his high dudgeon at that, my father ostentatiously said not one more single word to the salesman, and walked out of the dealership in silence. He expressed his indignation rather more floridly at me on the ride home. My mother did not get her new car.

Inflation is a thing
An article at The Street, by Jena Greene, posted yesterday, points out that now, there are only three new cars left in America that sell for less than $20,000. She names them:

• Kia Rio subcompact sedan: starting at $17,875
• Mitsubishi Mirage hatchback: starting at $17,340
• Nissan Versa sedan: starting at $16,925

I read once, a long time ago, that peoples' sense of the value of money tends to calcify at about age 50. We're mentally flexible up till that point, but afterwards it increasingly starts to seem like everything costs too much. I don't know if that's true.

I'm off this morning to Syracuse, to help my neighbor and her daughter pick up the daughter's new Honda. I don't know what the sticker price is, but I do know it costs more in nominal dollars than my Aunt's fancy Mercedes. Time marches on.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2023 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

Featured Comments from:

Gary: "I don't know if it's true that a person's perception of the value of money tends to calcify at age 50. I do know that inflation of late has been very real. I have a phrase to describe the phenomenon: Everything Everywhere Twice as Much."

garlo: "According to the St. Louis Fed, median sales price of house sold in the US back in Q4 1976 was only $45,500. That is less than 1/10 of sales price by the end of Q4 2022. So I guess car price inflation is not as bad as that of housing cost? Thanks for your efforts to keep this educational site running. Much appreciated."

Stan B.: "I distinctly remember a professor in my second year of college complaining (circa '74) that "there's absolutely no way you can get a new car for less than $2,000!" That afternoon at the school library I saw a print ad for a new Beetle- '$1,998.'"

Mike replies: I took my first driving test days after my 16th birthday, but I had already been saving up for a car for two years at that time. My dad had said he would put me on his insurance, which in those days made insurance for an additional car cheap. As soon as I had enough for a decent used car, my dad changed his conditions—he specified that he would only add me to his insurance if I bought a new car (he didn't actually want me to succeed). So I buckled down and started saving for that sub-$2k VW. But that was the early '70s, one of the times in history when the prices of cars skyrocketed. Every time I started to get close to the cost of the cheapest new car, the cost of it would go up. My memory for numbers is poor, but I believe by the time I had enough for that VW, the cheapest car in America cost $3,600. Maybe it was $3,300. I believe it was a Toyota. Anyway the target kept moving, and I eventually gave up. I ended up not getting my first new car until I was about 30. I believe it cost about $7,500.

Lois Elling: "My parents were both pretty frugal, having lived through the depression. My dad had a good-paying job that he loved, but always bought used cars and worked on them himself. Until he retired, that is, when he took my mom to a Lincoln dealership. Being six feet tall, he wanted something with plenty of headroom. I heard later that she asked him while they were there, 'Herman, do you realize where you are?' Although he was thrifty, he also knew when it was important to spend money for quality—or comfort. He did come home with that Lincoln."

Lawrence Plummer: "But, but, a $20K car in 1976 is $108,574.10 in 2023 dollars!!!"

JH: "I've mentioned before that I've owned a lot of cars in 60 years of driving, so below is the list of all I can remember and the prices on the ones I bought new.

"But first, comments on some car prices. Back in the mid-1960s my brother ran a dealership in Nashville that sold Porsche, Alfa Romeo, Mercedes Benz, Ferrari and a few other European brands you never heard of like Borgward. I do remember some of the prices.

"Around 1963–4, an Alfa Giulietta Spider cost ~$3,000 and a Porsche 356 closer to $4,000. The first Porsche 911's were around $6,000 but the 912 came soon after at under $5,000.

"I think the Mercedes sedans were priced at ~$4,000–6,000 except for the 600 series. One year my brother sold two 600s to executives at Monument Records, both over $20,000. Coupes and convertibles of the 300 series were in the $12–15,000 range.
Ferraris were around $14,000 and my brother sold several each year, one to the son of an oilman who went to Vanderbilt U down the street—his father gave him one each year when he made Dean's List!

"In those days, auto transporter companies were reluctant to carry cars over about $10,000 so we often got a trip to pick them up at the docks and drive them back to Nashville. I drove a $14,000 Mercedes coupe from Mobile back to Nashville once—nearly got thrown in jail in Tupelo, Mississippi, but fortunately had enough cash to pay off the local cops and Justice of the Peace late on Saturday night.

"JH Cars (in order of acquisition), starting when I got my drivers license in 1962. Prices are approximate—memory fades...."

'55 Dodge two-door HT (family)
'57 Ford two-door Coupe (family)
'57 Mercedes Benz 219 long wheelbase/limo
'59/'61 Fiat 1200 (counts twice—became a '61 after being totaled and rebuilt in a donor body)
'62 Alfa Spider (co-owned with brother, raced, sold in ’68, recovered in '93, raced for nine more years)
'67 Alfa TI Sedan traded for first Duetto in 1971 ($2,421—dealer cost—college graduation present from Father)
'68 Plymouth Sedan (company car)
'67 Alfa Duetto
'69 Alfa GT Jr 1,300
'69 VW Type 3 SW
My wife bought a new VW Super Beetle in 1970 for $1,700.
'71 Chevy Monte Carlo (company car) $4,000
'68 VW Bus
'71 Alfa GTV (used, < one year old) $3,000 (sold for $4,500 three months later)
'68 Rover TC2000
'73 Mazda RX-2 (first rotary car in New England) $3,100
'60 GSM Delta w/Holbay Ford 105E
'67 Alfa Duetto (different one)
'75 Ford Granada $4,000
'79 Dodge Omni. $3,000
'84 Pontiac 6000 SW (company car) (leased)
'63 Alfa Giulia Spider $1300, sold several years later for $20,000
'86 Plymouth Horizon (totaled by 240Z) $4,000
'89 Chevy Beretta
'74 Alfa Giulia Sprint GTV
'59 Alfa Giulietta Sprint (racecar) (totalled at Mosport, '93)
'59 Alfa Giulietta Sprint (parts car)
'89 Mercury Sable Sedan (company car) $7,000
'84 Corvette
'70 Zink C4 FV (racecar)
'91 Jeep Cherokee (company car) Tow car too $9,000
'62 Alfa Spider (second time around—see above, sold in 2002 and is still being raced in SCCA and vintage—you would not believe what racing it for 12 years cost!)
'94 Jeep Grand Cherokee (company car, tow car too) $18,000 (leased)
'59 Alfa Spider (racecar)
'73 Alfa GTV
'91 Mazda Miata (used—three years old) $10,000
'57 Alfa Spider w/Pininfarina Hardtop (sreet/racecar) $8,000, sold five years later for $22,000
'97 Jeep Cherokee (company car) Tow car too. $16,000 (leased)
'99 Jeep Grand Cherokee (company car) Tow car too $24,000 (leased)
'59 Alfa Giulietta Sprint (racecar, sold unfinished)
'01 BMW 330i $42,000
'02 MINI $23,000
'99 BMW 323Ci
'04 Ford F150 $20,000
'04 BMW M3 SMG $54,000 (sold for $47,000 after 18 months and thousands of track miles)
'05 Nissan Maxima $30,000
'94 Mazda Miata
'06 MINI John Cooper Works $35,000 (broke even when sold 18 months later)
'08 Nissan Frontier $20,000
'09 Ford F150 $24,000
'12 BMW 128i $38,000 (leased)
'11 VW Jetta Sportwagen TDI Diesel $24,000
'16 Mini Cooper $25,000 (leased)
'16 Honda CR-V $27,000
'21 Honda CR-V $31,000"

Mike replies: Impressive. My life-list is as follows:

• Ancient 1960s rusted-out Toyota, late '70s. A Dartmouth assistant professor flat-out cheated me when he sold it to me. He told me numerous flagrant lies, for instance, that the radio worked when it was simply a faceplate with nothing behind it. I had various misadventures in it (some of which were actual crimes, I'm sorry to admit—I drove it without registration or valid plates). Abandoned in a fraternity parking lot where a tree fell on it.
• New Mazda 323, maybe an '87? Can't remember the year. My mother paid for half of it as a graduation present from art school. Kept it for nine years.
• Dodge Neon "Sport," bought because David E. Davis named it "Car of the Year" at one of his magazines. Worst car I ever bought. It ran well and was nice and tight when new, but after three years it had lost performance badly and was as loose, rattley, and rickety as a 15-year-old car. There's a good reason that you almost never see old Neons on the road today.
• Ford Escort ZX2. Bought new. Kept it for nine years. Mine was a great little car, although other owners did not have good experiences (I always asked other owners when the opportunity presented itself.
• Used Mercedes C-Class. Drove it for two years and it lost $11k in value! The maintenance expenses cured me of any further GAS (CAS?) for German cars.
• Used 2001 Mazda Miata, my only-ever second car. Kept it for three years while I had the Mercedes and the RAV4 and sold it to a TOP reader to help finance my move to the Finger Lakes—which was the exact wrong move, because it would have been perfect for the roads around here, and in fact you see a lot of them here in the summer.
• 2012 Toyota RAV4, bought new on model closeout on 0% financing. Most expensive car I ever bought at $26k. I lost a lot of money on this one too, because I set myself up for five years of ownership and bailed on it early because I missed having a stick shift. It's still the only SUV I've ever driven—not owned, driven—apart from a couple of dealer test drives.
• 2014 Acura ILX 2.4, which has the same drivetrain as the 2014 Honda Civic Si. Nine years later it's still going strong at 114,000 miles, and I intend to try to keep it at least until 200k miles. It's the only car I've liked better when it's older than I liked it when it was new.

So that's eight cars in 50 years of driving. The Mercedes, Miata, and RAV4 were purchased in an orgy of self-indulgence during the years that TOP was making a lot of money. After years of pent-up desire I went wild!

Dave Levingston: "Now at least you can say that you've written your AutoBiography. (Sorry...someone had to say it.)"

Lee and Maria Friedlander Meet Joel Coen and Frances McDormand

As regular readers know (and might be tired of hearing), I refer to The New York Times as "The World's Best Photography Magazine"...although, of course, its photographic content tends to be interspersed with a whole lot of other stuff. And I recommend subscribing. If you don't subscribe, you can access up to 10 articles a month for free. Another way of getting everything is to subscribe to the print version of the Sunday paper, if it's available in your area, as that comes with all digital access included.

Anyway, a number of readers (thanks to all) have tipped me about this: "Filmmaker Joel Coen Puts His Spin on the Photos of Lee Friedlander: Working in his California home 3,000 miles away during Covid, the director struck a sympathetic chord with the venerated photographer. A book and two gallery shows resulted." Not to be missed.

Joel Coen at Cannes, 2001. Photo by Rita Molnár.

Lee Friedlander is, in Yr. Hmbl. Ed.'s humble opinion, one of the two greatest photographers of the second half of the twentieth century, and at age 88 he has published more than 50 books. Joel Coen (b. 1954) is one-half of the famous Coen Brothers film-making team (although recently they have been working separately), whose works include Raising Arizona (1987), Miller's Crossing (1990), Barton Fink (1991), Fargo (1996), The Big Lebowski (1998), O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000), No Country for Old Men (2007), True Grit (2010), Inside Llewyn Davis (2013), and The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018). And The Man Who Wasn't There from 2001, which is my favorite...because it's in black-and-white (please don't kill me, please).

Lee Friedlander, self-portrait, 1994

The catalyst of their project together was the San Francisco gallerist and book publisher Jeffrey Fraenkel, who started his gallery, now on Geary Street, in 1979. His second show back then was Lee Friedlander. 

A couple of quotes from the article I liked. Lee says of Joel, "he says all kinds of nice things that I don’t recognize. Splitting, splintering. Evidently my pictures are that way, but I didn’t think, ‘I want to take a splintering picture.’ If you’ve done the same thing for 60 years, you don’t think of motive very much. I just walk and see something interesting [...] it's just a great game." Joel says, "I’m extremely sympathetic to Lee’s point of view in how he thinks about his own work. It comes up with any writer, photographer or filmmaker, because you’re always asked to analyze your own process or the obsessions of your own work. I’ve always been very much of the opinion that the obligation of the person who makes the work is to make the work, and the obligation of the people who view the work is to think about it."

Most of Jeffrey's books are terrific—some of them are faves. I need another Friedlander book like I need a hole in the head (only because I have no place to shelve books here, and it's a problem)—but I had to order this one from the gallery. Too cool to pass up. The cost is close to $100, after shipping and tax are added. But hey, once they're gone....

Check out the article. Worth a read, and some good links. Thanks to everyone who suggested it.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2023 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

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The Jeff Keller Article

I managed to track down Jeff Keller, who told me that the article I remembered is actually on DPReview, where he worked for almost nine years, beginning right after he closed the Digital Camera Resource Page—which, by the way, was the very first camera megasite, and lasted an impressive 15 years. (TOP is 17 years, 3 months, and 26 days old). Which made me slap my forehead and say, "of course." Not only did I read it when it first appeared, but I wrote about it once before, too. The brain cells where that information was once stored are apparently among the ones now missing.

It's called "Throwback Thursday: the ups and downs of running DCResource."

Mike

Original contents copyright 2023 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

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The Earliest U.S. Veterans

Photo by N.A. and R.A. Moore (Nelson Augustus Moore and
his brother Roswell) of Hartford, Connecticut, 1864

I never knew this until robert e pointed it out yesterday: there exist photographs of Revolutionary War veterans. Some of the youngest soldiers lived into the era of photography. Evidently no one thought to photograph them in the 1840s, but the Reverend E.B. Hilliard wrote a book in 1864 called The Last Men of the Revolution that recounted the biographies of some of the last remaining veterans, and the book contained six albumen prints. The Library of Congress has a set, in the Prints and Photographs Division.

Lemuel Cook, pictured above, lived through the entirety of the Civil War and died just after it ended at the age of 106, the fourth-to-last living Revolutionary War veteran. He fought with the 2nd Continental Light Dragoons in the Virginia campaigns and at Brandywine, and was wounded more than once. He was present at the 1781 surrender of Lord Cornwallis to George Washington at Yorktown. His discharge papers in 1786 were signed by General Washington. Cook lived out most of the rest of his life in various counties here in Western New York State.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2023 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. (To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below or on the title of this post.)

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Mani Sitaraman: "This is simply extraordinary. Seeing the photograph and reading the account gave me the chills. Thank you, Mike.

"And thank goodness for the French photographer Disderi's brilliant idea; he patented the idea of carte de viste photographs in the 1850s, which were trading-card-like photographs of famous people, for people to buy, collect in albums, or trade. That innovation ensured that so many portraits from that early age of photography have survived, as the commercial incentive ensured that numerous copies of each portrait were printed."

Carl Siracusa: "The closing exhibit of the Museum of the American Revolution here in Philadelphia, 'The Revolution's Veterans,' is a whole wall of photos of people who fought in, or simply lived through, that war. When I first saw it I had the same amazed reaction as most people, I assume—there are photos of them?!? Extraordinary, really. Worth visiting this excellent museum for that alone."

robert e: "Hi Mike, Just wanted to point out that even older photographs have turned up since the Hilliard book was published, including from the 1840s and 1850s. Some of them can be seen in this article. And I just learned today that Maureen Taylor, who calls herself 'The Photo Detective,' has published two volumes of photographs (and paintings based on photographs) of people who lived through the American Revolutionary War. The names of the over 100 subjects are on Taylor's own page about the project."

Michel Hardy-Vallée: "Reminds me of that comment by Roland Barthes about the photographs of the last surviving members of Napoléon's Grande Armée: 'these eyes have seen the Emperor.'"

Daniel: "One fact many don't realize is that until the invention of the permanent photographic image we do not know what anyone actually looked like. Many portrait painters through history did a good job but had to please the one who commissioned the painting. How accurate were these portraits? Maybe as accurate as many Photoshopped portraits being done now? Vanity interferes with historical truth."

Mike replies: Some of the Gnostic gospels refer to Jesus as being physically ugly, which might have been one of the reasons why those accounts were nixed at the Conference of Nicea and in St. Jerome's Vulgate.