Got some feedback from a reader this morning: there have been no thoughtful essays on TOP recently, he said, and way too many gear articles. He reduced his Patreon donation by a dollar. Which is really indicative of how fundamentally decent and thoughtful TOP readers are; he could have cut it off altogether, but he didn't. He also took time to give me his feedback, which was considerate of him. I'll take readers like that.
Funny, though. I kinda thought we'd been talking recently about Bill Jay, artist's statements, and early-in-life accomplishments/setbacks. And not enough about gear.
You're aware that most sites are all about gear, right? There's a good reason for that. It's what draws eyes. People are hounds for gear talk. It's what fires the machine, what stokes the furnace. And what keeps this particular claptrap steamship afloat. Back in the heyday, I could track it: traffic was a reliable bellwether of it. A decline in the daily numbers meant: uh-oh, time to get back to talking about gear.
Ah, shoes!
Maybe I just haven't written anything about the gear that guy is interested in, is all. Gear talk is like advertisements. Ads are just a nuisance...unless you happen to be interested in what's being advertised. Then you're all over it.
The same thing goes for shopping in general, actually. I fell in love with a woman long ago who loved shoes. She had forty pairs of shoes to my three, well on her way to being Imelda Marcos*, and when we were out on the town we had to stop at every shop that carried shoes. This greatly surpassed my interest in the subject, which was H—>0**. So I'd go around saying that I hated shopping. But that wasn't true; all I meant was that I had to spend an inordinate amount of time standing around in shoe stores***. But cameras were another story. They bored her, but if I could tack on to the end of my life the amount of time I've spent shopping for cameras, it would be quite a bonus.
I hated ads on TV so much I got rid of my TV. Haven't had one for seven years now, a fact that my cable provider is completely incapable of comprehending. I resist ads on YouTube as best I can. But if there were commercials for pool tables, I gotta be honest, I'd be riveted. It all depends on what ignites your endorphins, right?
Hubris
So anyway, on the topic of TOP content, just a couple of warnings in advance: someday, I'm going to write an article about how to buy a pool table. This will have 97% of you rolling your eyes (a figure which I will endeavor to reduce to 92% by striving to be entertaining), but it's bound to happen so I'm just giving you fair warning. Sorry! I'm also going to write a post—one post—about the American election before it happens, because I have a thoughtful perspective to offer. That will not violate the rules of the website: the rule is "no gratuitous political provocations," not "no politics" at all. It's a long, well-established principle for the press to endorse political candidates in editorials, and I'm gonna latch on to that even though it's hubris to imply that my little blog is a part of "the press."
My dilemma on that score is that silence is irresponsible, from a civic participation perspective.
But don't worry...there will be only one post about the election, and only one about buying a pool table. And you've already been warned once that they're coming, and you'll be alerted again. Both posts will be well flagged, and both will be hidden behind a page break. You'll easily be able to skip them if you prefer. So neither will assault your eyes or your sensibilities against your will. No harm, no foul.
Oh, and by the way...two other readers increased their Patreon donations today (and thanks to them), so all is well. The claptrap steamboat steams on along down the river, for now.
In the end, a blog's a blog. Don't like something, skip it and wait...something new will always be along. And one thing does tend to lead to another. For instance, this post started out talking about complaints regarding our content, and is just about to end up at...the Bible. Take that, other photo sites.
Of course, there's nothing really new under the sun****, and the good thing that comes along will be broadly similar to what has come along before; it's like the weather that way, in that it changes in innumerable and varied ways and yet the changes are always broadly the same and the same sameness is always coming back around. Same as it ever was.
Enjoy your Sunday! Now then, back to gear.
Mike
(Thanks to David)
*Wife of a now-historical Philippines dictator who notoriously enriched himself from the public treasury. (A term for that is "kleptocrat," a cool word even though it describes a disreputable thing.) When they fled in disgrace the wife famously abandoned a vast wardrobe and 1,220 pairs of shoes, exaggerated in the public stories at the time to 3,000. My girlfriend could relate.
**I shouldn't use terms from calculus given that I'm innumerate. But I think what that means is that you take the distance of a point from zero, divide it in half, and then divide that in half, and keep on doing that an infinite number of times; what you end up with is very close to zero but never precisely zero. Thus, as close to zero as you can get. I learned this in a long-ago class called, no kidding, "Math for Poets," so of course I could be remembering it poetically and not mathematically. If so I'm sure I'll be corrected, which means I'll learn something today.
***And if that woman who liked shoes was still in my life I'd be counting my blessings every day, and I'd buy her a new pair of shoes every month. Every week if I could afford it. I'd squire her to the shoe store and stand around without complaint while she shopped, and even tell her she could take her time. With the passage of time comes gratitude. Not to mention regret.
****If you've never read Ecclesiastes*****, you really should. Seriously. It's wonderful.
*****"Ecclesiastes" is a Latin transliteration of the Greek translation of the Hebrew word "Qoholeth," which means a speaker to the assembled throng, i.e., a preacher.
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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:
Bruce Appelbaum (partial comment): "In 1983, during the Marcos years, I spent some time in Manila for business. The joke going around at the time was:
Q. How did Imelda Marcos come by all her money?
A. Mining.
Q. Mining?
A. Yes, that's mine, that's mine, that's mine.... "
Bill Tyler: "So about calculus—and nothing to do with photography. You're talking about the notion of a limit—something you approach but never reach. Photographically, it's the perfect print—the one you are striving for, but can't quite ever reach. No matter how good the last one is, there's always something that could be better. The mathematical definition is a little subtle. The idea is that for any number you care to pick, no matter how small, as long as it's not exactly zero, the thing approaching the limit will get closer than that. There's a sort of relationship to fractions themselves. What's the next bigger fraction than 1/2? Is it 2/3? 3/5? 17/33? 63/128? 10000/20001? There is no next fraction. No matter what you pick, there's something else in between, closer to the goal."
Peter Wright: "I did a lot of calculus back when I was doing post graduate research. I developed sets of simultaneous non-linear integro-differential equations with six unknowns and time variant coefficients. Once I got the hang of it, solving them was quite straightforward. I didn't immediately recognize your calculus expression, but I knew you meant to say that your interest was asymptotically approaching zero. (When it comes to women's shoes mine does too.)
"Ecclesiastes is my favourite book of the Old Testament. My wife gets it mixed up with Ecclesiasticus (strictly speaking part of the apocryphal or deuterocanonical books that not all denominations acknowledge). But Ecclesiasticus is now renamed Sirach (no doubt to avoid confusing people like my wife). I endorse your suggestion to read Ecclesiastes; it is as relevant today as it was 2,500 years ago. For anyone looking for a good introduction, I suggest When All You've Ever Wanted Isn't Enough by Harold Kushner. (The author is more famous for When Bad Things Happen to Good People.) Kushner uses Ecclesiastes as the foundation for his book.
"That's what I love about TOP. It sometimes covers things close to my heart, that I normally never come across on the internet, least of all on a photography blog!"