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DALI Oberon Loudspeakers (OT)

[Warning: Bloviation Alert. The second half of this is what I meant to write on Wednesday for "Open Mike" this week. Marcin's right, I do go on too long when I get my teeth into a topic.  —Ed.]

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A few further thoughts about the concept of an "apex product":

It's not an average. Nor is it mediocre. It's an ideal.

...But a practical, utilitarian sort of ideal. One that takes into account more than just the normal hierarchy of status and expense. For example, with highly salable top-of-the-market products, such as, say, the VW Golf, which is the best-selling car in Europe, even though each iteration is not terribly costly, the company is justified in putting huge amounts of research, R&D, and engineering into the "template" on which the "workmanship of certainty" is performed (i.e., the production process). "Handmade" products, such as a Superformance, have an undeniable appeal, but handwork is simply not as good as when you can spend millions of dollars on a robot to do a specific type of precision weld. It's true that you can spend $300,000 on a Rolls-Royce, but a Honda Accord would cost $300,000 too if there were no mass market and it were made one by one in low total numbers by teams of craftsmen, and the engineering that went into it had to be amortized over a small number of sales.

So "ideal" for me incorporates a number of things not normally associated with status. Is it easily replaceable? Is it non-precious, such that it can actually be used, and, if it's appropriate for the product type, used up? Is it reliable? Is it easily repairable? Example of that: I knew a guy who bought his cars by picking his repair shop first, then asking the mechanics there what kind of car they most liked to work on. If they said Chevy Impala, then he bought a Chevy Impala (he tipped them a bottle of whiskey when they worked on it, too). By contrast, I also knew a guy who was a Ferrari mechanic in the '90s, and he told me that an oil change on certain cars had to be done by the dealer and cost $2,000. Guess which one I would judge to be more ideal?

And don't say "Ferrari owners can afford it," either—the same guy got out of the automotive field altogether because the average Ferrari owner—80% of them, he said—can't afford routine maintenance, and it just got too frustrating for him to so seldom be able to take care of the cars the way the manufacturer intended.

This little guy (3/8 to 1/2 inches in length) will cost me
at least $600 this year. Not ideal.

So, continuing with the list...parts availability; the exclusivity<—>anonymity spectrum and where you want to fall on it; the simplicity <—>complexity spectrum and ditto; ergonomics; residual value a ways out (five years for cameras, 10 for cars, 30 for houses) as a percentage of initial new price (digital cameras suck at that); and mandatory related expenses. As an example of "mandatory related expenses," I'm finding out that my yard here is a fairly big line-tem in my budget. Last year I had to spend $1,400 on a used John Deere; this year a beetle called the emerald ash borer just killed a full-sized ash tree in my back yard, and the lowest estimate I've gotten for removing it is $600. Ask me if I think spending $600 on account of a beetle, even one in a Doc Severinsen suit, is an ideal situation. There are maybe five more trees on my property that could come down if I were actually wealthy enough to live here.  :-)

I don't think there's any such thing as a complete list of these things, because we all have different realities, comfort levels, incomes, ideas, locations, tastes, and specific needs and wants. but the point is that in attempting to locate an apex product, you can get pretty subtle about how you determine what it is. For me, a Toyota Corolla with a stick shift (automatics being expensive points of failure) is a better car than a Rolls-Royce or a Ferrari. The Rolls is more luxurious and will impress people much more (although I saw a new Bentley on the streets of my semi-impoverished little town a while back and no pedestrian even looked up as far as I could tell), and the Ferrari is much more exciting to drive, assuming you have access to a race track now and then, but then, consider taking your dogs to the vet in the back seat of the Rolls, or plopping some wet bags of topsoil on the pristine wool carpeting in its trunk. The Ferrari is merely a toy that could land you in jail if you actually play with it. Neither can touch the Corolla at preventing cash from evaporating. The Rolls and the Ferrari are not in the Toyota's league when it comes to that. So what's best? Depends on what you value.

Danish Audiophile Loudspeaker Industries: DALI
How I got started thinking about this is that I was going to draw your attention to a new speaker called a DALI Oberon 3. As you might know I have pretty specific and idiosyncratic tastes in a lot of things, and two-way minimonitors with 7-inch paper (well, paper-ish) woofers (which I like) and soft-dome tweeters (I dislike metal ones, which is partly bigotry and partly not) are a holy grail thing with me. I love 'em. I owned a Swiss speaker called a Revox Studio 3 for years and I got imprinted. And I used to own Rogers LS3/5a's, which are legendary. Audio catnip.

I'd love to hear these DALIs. They tickle the endorphins. They look so tidy and minimalist and basic and simple and clean and pretty, don't they? Designed in Denmark and made in China, so they're well designed and well made but they only cost $800, which is well into the "sensible" range for a pair of minimonitors. (Compare here. Be prepared!)

But then I got to thinking...they're not the apex product.

In fact, no small stand-mounted two-way is. The problem starts with the fact that you have to buy stands, which are needed to hang the drivers in the right place in the air. And the stands have to be well-made because the coupling to the floor affects the vibration of the speakers. Good stands can cost anywhere from $200 to $1,200, but stands are something close to wasted money...necessary, but only because "bookshelf" speakers never sound very good on, well, bookshelves.

And minimonitors don't really have quite enough bass. They demand a small room.

But the biggie is that small speakers are, as a category, less efficient and harder to drive and thus require more amplifier power than bigger ones. Really, to pair with these, you should have an amp with decent grunt, something of good quality rated, I would say, in the  85 to 120 watts-per-channel range. So any money you save on the speakers you're going to lose on the amp.

A lot of people make this mistake. They think small, tidy speakers should go with small, tidy amps, and big honking speakers should go with big brutish amps. It's kind of the other way around, all else being equal. The small speakers need power, whereas bigger ones can be set free with less. Want a pair of Klipschorns big enough to hide dead bodies in? You can drive them with a flea-powered single-ended triode (SET) tube amp with only a handful of watts, like this little 3.5-watt [sic] SA3 amp from Bottlehead.

So the apex product in the DALI Oberon line is probably the more expensive and larger Oberon 7 floorstander. True, they're more expensive at $1,400, still a good bargain by audio standards. They sit right on the floor; no stands needed. They have two woofers rather than one, so they're three decibels down at 36 hertz rather than 47 hertz like the 3's. The sensitivity isn't that different—88.5 dB rather than 87; same drivers, after all. All in all they can probably load a bigger room and I'd say you could stick in the 50-100 wpc range with good quality solid-state amplification. Probably more satisfying in the long run than the little guys.

Besides, if you're going to get minimonitors—and stands—you should go all the way and get Falcon's loving remake of the BBC LS3/5a, the absolute all-time classic great holographic minimonitor, the "original gangsta." Drive them with a tube amp (Mike loves EL34's) that has at least 25 wpc and has 16-ohm taps. Nirvana. Don't have a small enough room of the right shape? Build a room for them.  :-)

Rooms!
Speaking of rooms—and efficiency and sufficiency—I seem to be annoyingly attracted to hobbies that need "room-sized accessories," as my friend Nick once called his darkroom. First I needed darkrooms, which caused me to always ask real estate agents to see the basement of a prospective house first, which they always thought was peculiar. Then there's pool—the real luxury of having a pool table is having a place to put it. I can tell you from experience that there aren't a lot of reasonably priced houses in Southeastern Wisconsin that will accommodate a full-sized pool table. I don't have space for one here, alas, and I feel the lack.

Then there's stereo. My brother Scott always thought it was fun to move, because then you get to know your speakers all over again—different rooms make speakers sound different. Most people put a stereo near where they hang out, instead of hanging out where they put the stereo, and that's perfectly sensible, but dedicated audiophiles, who are, as a class, very far from sensible, will sometimes build dedicated listening rooms. In audio, the amp-speaker symbiosis is very important and the speaker-room interaction is just as important.

The best place for the Oberon 7's would be a rectangular room of medium size, say 150 to 400 square feet or thereabouts. Say you have a room that's 15x25', so 375 square feet. I'd start by placing the optical axis (imagine a line running vertically down the middle of each speaker face, touching the front of the drivers) along the short wall 1/5th of the way out into the room—so, 5' into our 25' long room—and 1/5th of the room width from the sidewalls, so, three feet in our 15'-wide room. Then place the listening chair at the other end of the long dimension of the room, also 1/5th into the room, or five feet from the back wall in the 25'-long room. With the Oberon 7's I'd start with no toe-in, meaning, with the speakers facing squarely forward rather than pointed partway toward the listening chair.

That would be a good starting point. Then you could fine-tune the positions of both speakers and listening position based on listening. I should mention that assuming you have a pretty "regular" room, it's worth it to measure as exactly as you can even when first setting up—get the speakers to 1/4th inch of the intended placement if you can.

So, should you buy a pair of Oberon 7's? Well, I never said that! I haven't heard them. I've only read about them. They look interesting to me, but you'd need to hear them for yourself before committing to a purchase, whether you do that by going to a dealer or by buying a pair with a reasonable period of return privilege. Unless they seem just too excruciatingly cheap, however, they, or similar floorstanders for a similar price, seem pretty close to an apex product for me. Not the best, not the worst, just a very well-judged approximation of the optimum bang for the buck.

Mike

P.S. Before we leave the topic of audio for another six or eight or ten months or two years or however long it's going to be, here are three more current audio products I personally think are really cool: the Wharfedale Linton Heritage speakers, a modern update of classic 1970s three-ways, designed by Peter Comeau, a designer whose work I really like; the newest version of the now newly retooled Panasonic direct-drive turntable, the Technics SL-1500C, a semi-automatic (!!!) version of the new rebuild of the classic, which also has a built-in phono section and comes with a cartridge, truly plug and play; and the Benchmark AHB2 power amplifier, which is tiny and light and is mopping up awards and earning lavish praise all over the place. I was going to write about these, too, but I have run out of steam for today.

Original contents copyright 2019 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.

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

Dave Miller (partial comment): "I enjoy discussions about hifi. I used to be an audiophile until I was cured. This happened when I met hifi design engineer Phil Marshall. Phil worked for Dolby Labs amongst other companies but for many years he designed NAD's amplifier range including the power edge models (1990s?). I met him for the first time after he replied to some questions I asked about articles on his website explaining the importance of the room environment to the audio experience. I ended up working with him as a volunteer for a while, just a naive pair of ears, helping him with listening tests and learning from him. Phil now runs a tiny bespoke loudspeaker company called Marshall Choong Audio. He moved to speaker design because that product still had a lot of room for improvement and a skilled and creative engineer had scope to advance the art.

"Phil taught me a fundamental truth about music reproduction understood by engineers but not so much by customers. The most important component in hifi isn't the amp, speakers, source, cables or even your own ears, but the listening room. Speakers sound different in different rooms—something that a lot of people know. But perhaps what many people don't realise is that the difference a room makes totally dominates any other factor. Nothing you do in your choice of components makes any difference if you have an unsuitable room.

"The magazines would love you to try and fix the problem by buying ever more expensive components but if the room is the issue, it won't help. The key factor is room resonances. A typical room has reflections and standing waves that create massive response boosts at certain frequencies. Phil showed me how to measure room response. A typical small living room in a typical modest UK family home (say a brick-built three bedroom 1930s semi-detached home) has room dimensions that create resonances at around the 50Hz region that can sometimes be greater than +50dB above a flat response. That is a ridiculous problem. Almost all speakers will have bass overhang and undamped resonance that make getting a smooth, accurate sound very difficult. There are few ways to effectively counter this problem (set up your music listening space in a cow field?)...." [For the rest of Dave's comment, please see the Comment Section. —Ed.]

Mike replies: ...Or the near field! This is one reason I like small two-ways so much—near-field listening. My current speakers aren't great shakes by audiophile standards but set up on my desk they're a reasonable approximation of near-field listening and take the room more or less out of it.

Of my two favorite stereos, one was a pair of Celestion SL700's (bought as cosmetic seconds for half price) that I set up in the middle of the barn-like living room of a rental apartment and listened to in a near-field setup. Wonderful. And of course a good way to manage room resonances in the 20–150Hz region is to not have the bottom half of it in the first place.  :-)  (My "personal standard" for "enough but not too much bass" was –3dB at 42Hz, which I arrived at because that's the response of Thiel 1.5's.)

The other was in the basement room of my house in Woodstock, Illinois, which happened to be almost an ideal room—best room I ever had, anyway. Shoebox-shaped, big but not too big, with a concrete floor and two concrete walls, heating ducts encased in drywall on the ceiling which turned out to be great for disrupting reflections, and a wooden closet that stretched all the way across the back wall that turned out to be great for breaking up standing waves. I placed two floor-to-ceiling bookcases at the strategic points on the sidewalls. It was carpeted wall-to-wall, and I experimented for months with the position of my desk (listening seat) which was at the back of the room, and the speakers, which were given most of the rest of the room. I ended up, entirely by ear, with a very close approximation of George Cardas's room proportions and setup. George's site was where I got that tip about measuring the position exactly—when I did that, I moved the speakers less than two inches, but the focus was improved remarkably. I wouldn't have believed it any other way except experiencing it.

That house also had really crummy AC, so the other revelatory change happened when Paul McGowan (who is a photographer and was reading Photo Techniques at the time, although I don't think he reads TOP) let me be one of the beta testers for his then-upcoming original P300 Power Plant. My prototype didn't have the fancy casework, though—it was built by Cullen Circuits in a Ayre amplifier box. I kept it for years and in fact might still have it.

I've certainly heard of Phil Marshall. Very cool that you got to work for him. I suspect I would like Marshall Choong's "bookshelf" speakers...I once started a website called "The Sealed Box" which was intended to list all the non-vented speakers available! That was not popular.

Peter Wright: "One of my theology professors once remarked that when considering something like the shroud of Turin: Had it ever touched the face of Christ? It made no difference to Christianity either way, so we could choose to adopt what she called a 'hermeneutic of trust,' or a 'hermeneutic of suspicion.' Now, when it comes to audio, I am definitely a 'hermeneutic of suspicion' type of person. (And I speak as an electronic engineer who studied tube and transistor circuit design at university.) I agree that different speakers sound different, but past say $1,000, the differences don't have any effect on how much I enjoy the music. Placement of speakers has a more significant effect, but most of us have live-in partners (used to be called a 'wife' long ago) who don't generally allow the sort of room arrangement you describe. As for amps and CD players, nope, they all sound essentially the same. (Don't get me started on cables!) My strategy for buying audio is therefore to get midrange NAD electronics with B&W bookshelf speakers, and then enjoy the music. That is my apex audio.

"The emerald ash borer destroyed the ash tree in my front yard, and all the other ash trees in town (in Ontario), so I feel your pain. The town management said they had come from China, but now I learn from you that they may have come from upstate New York!! I used to do a lot of wood turning, and frequently removed unwanted trees to feed my hobby. Ash is a good wood for turning, so you may want to see if there are any wood turners in the area who could have the ash for taking it away."

Mike replies: Actually, everything makes a difference—but saying nothing does is a pretty close approximation of the same statement. :-) 

And you're absolutely right to place the primacy on "how much I enjoy the music." Listening past the mechanics of the reproduction and hearing the music is the key skill, and stereophilia shouldn't be allowed to overwhelm that. In very much the same way that "seeing" through to what must have been in front of the camera and not getting too distracted in the technical aspects of a photograph is also the key skill that must be cultivated and protected. As we know, it's very easy to lose sight of the forest for peeping at the pixels.

And I hate to break it to you, but mid-range NAD electronics with B&W bookshelf speakers could well be a perfectly nice music-listening system. Not expensive or exclusive maybe, but potentially highly listenable and nothing to scorn. A perfectly fine proposition for being apex products!

The Gettysburg Address on the Internet

SA*

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so FOLLOW US ON FACEBOOK FOR MORE LIFESTYLE NEWS dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting CARNIVAL CRUISE VACATIONS place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate—we can not consecrate—we can not hallow—this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add

People also search for: Mary Todd Lincoln Lincoln Navigator Linkin Park

or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.

Super Bowl MVP chugs beer on Jumbotron at Bruins game to the delight of crowd. "Julian Edelman chugging a beer was awesome," Bruins coach Bruce Cassidy said at the end of the game.

It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this Nationwide is on your side nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

—@realAbrahamLincoln
November 19, 1863

Like 4,275     Dislike 832

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Mike

*Satire Alert

[Ed. Note: The text of the speech used here is that of the Bliss Copy.]

P.S. And then for the next twelve days after reading this, you'll get targeted ads and emails for funeral homes.

Original contents copyright 2019 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.

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

Benjamin Marks: "GOL. "Groan Out Loud" Funny/Queasy. The only tropes you missed were the ubiquitous 'list' ('15 Gettysburg tips that experts want you know'), 'belly fat,' and the trailing headline, 'Gettysburg Experts were astonished by these weird Lincoln habits.' Wait. Maybe only I get "news" stories about belly fat...."

Larry Gebhardt (partial comment): "Those 'Sponsored Stories' blocks are enough to make me stop using the Internet. I can feel myself getting dumber just seeing them on the page."

Bob Keefer: "The problem is, this isn't even remotely satire any longer."

Adam Richardson: "The Gettysburg Address in PowerPoint is old Internet classic, but still good for a laugh."

Dramatic Documentary (OT)

This three-year-old grew up to be one of the greatest racing drivers in history,
and the last F1 driver to die in the heat of battle until Bianchi in 2015

A few days ago, May 1, was the 25th anniversary of the death of Ayrton Senna.

If you've never seen the movie Senna, I highly recommend it—it's one of the great stories, easy to appreciate even if you don't care at all about cars or racing. It's a documentary that has more drama than most fictitious films. One sports movie you shouldn't miss.

Senna was one of those rare figures who transcend their sports. He won the World Championship in 1988, 1990, and 1991, and died while leading the San Marino Grand Prix in Italy in 1994.

Senna the movie was first recommended to me by a TOP reader, years ago.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2019 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.

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

Peter McKenzie: "I watched him race in Adelaide in the '80s. There was a palpable hunger to his driving style that instantly stood out. Very sad that he died so young and in such tragic circumstances.

"If I can indulge on a slight tangent here. I took my wife to see Senna the movie when it came out. She is by no means a rev head, but she was enthralled by the story and entranced by Ayrton. The outcome was, thus, inevitable when near the end of the story she suddenly wailed, hit me and broke into tears saying 'you didn’t tell me he dies!'"

David Lee: "I’ve been a F1 fan since 1978. I used to hate Senna. I was sure all the hype in my dear Mexico was because he was latino, a Brazilian. The minute I saw him drive live, seated in stand 23 in Autodromo Hermanos Rodriguez, I converted and became his number one fan. There are millions of us. There are countless stories and anecdotes about him everywhere; anybody can read about them. The documentary, Mike, is fantastic, but you will need at least three or four more to do justice to this guy. I don’t have many heroes. Ayrton Senna is one of them. The day he died, I woke up very early, around 4:30 a.m., to find the race feed in the satellite dish and record the race. I had a flight that day, but before leaving home to the airport I went to say goodbye to my wife and told her that Senna crashed and it didn’t look good. When I returned home later that day, all the world new about his death. I still have the tape. Still don’t feel like watching it. Maybe in another 25 years."

beuler: "You just made me go watch F1 videos on YouTube. I haven't watched F1 for 25 years. I first saw Ayrton Senna race at the Macau Grand Prix in Formula 3 in the mid-eighties. It was one of those beautiful black and gold JPS cars. Senna won of course and I became a fan. Years later I saw him race at the Estoril circuit near my house in the Portuguese Formula 1 Grand Prix. I miss the Sunday ritual of sitting down for two hours to watch a race on television."

hugh crawford: "I went to see the film with my wife in a theatre the last day of its run in NYC. Her first comment was how she had never been in a theater full of middle-aged men crying before. It’s that kind of film."

Khürt Williams: "Wow! As a Formula 1 fan, I never thought I’d find a connection to my favorite sport on TOP. I guess I am getting old.  :-)  I took a day off work and drove more than an hour from New Jersey to Philadelphia to see the Senna movie. One of the best documentaries I have ever seen."

Al C.: "Senna died while leading the race at Imola. The driver behind him that day was Michael Schumacher, who is reportedly still in a vegetative state after his freak skiing accident more than five years ago. To my way of thinking, Schumacher's end is the more tragic of the two."

Tom: "I remember watching it live on TV. In one of those funny ways in which events seen by the eye can arrive at the brain in the wrong order I was convinced it was Damon Hill, who was in third place, who had crashed.

"Let's remember Roland Ratzenberger also died that weekend. I believe an Austrian flag was found in Senna's cockpit. He intended to win the race and trail the flag from the car on the victory lap as was common at that time."

David Babsky: "Asif Kapadia (the director) edited this film on a computer on his kitchen table in east London."

Open Mike: To Your Health! (6-Week Update)

["Open Mike" is the anything goes, often off-topic Editorial page of TOP. It appears on Wednesdays.]

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Happy May Day!

Regular readers remember that I wrote a post last March about WFPB (whole food plant based) eating. At the time, several readers challenged me to come clean about how it had really been working for me personally. I admitted that I was still cheating quite a bit, like eating quite a bit of candy (a sweet tooth being my lifelong weakness) and taking other liberties. So I asked for a little time to get strict with myself before reporting back.

That was six weeks ago today.

Since then, I've lost 19 pounds. There have been other, even better results, which I'll get to in a minute.

The most interesting thing about the weight loss, however, is this: I'm not dieting. At least not "dieting" in the familiar, conventional sense of a weight-loss diet, where you set up a difficult calorie-restricting regimen for yourself and then struggle to adhere to it by constantly applying willpower. Apart from my sugar problem—I had sugar cravings for about the first week and a half, and one further problem with sugar which I'll describe below—I haven't been depriving myself of food at all. Nor have I been applying willpower. I haven't had to, because I'm not limiting how much I eat. Day to day, I'm well satiated, well satisfied, and perfectly comfortable. I eat three times daily (well, sometimes two, but only because I don't want more) and I eat all I want. I don't have to be hungry, so I haven't been. If I want more, I eat more. There's been no reason to exercise willpower, no reason to struggle.

The other results:

• I feel better physically. Not just by a little—by quite a lot. For a long time I've suffered from bodily aches and pains that I had assumed were the result of aging. They've virtually vanished. Everything used to hurt, at a low level; now, nothing does. It's a curious feeling almost of lightness, or of restored youth. Very nice.
• My balance is noticeably better. (Odd, maybe, but I'm just reporting.)
• I have more energy. I seem to have shed that intermittently sluggish, lethargic, draggy feeling that I used to consider normal. For instance, on Sunday I did an hour of yardwork and then, instead of retreating indoors to collapse in front of the computer, I worked another hour and a half—and felt fine afterward. I notice this "restored energy" all the time, even just walking around the house. And I've been having an easier time getting things done—that is, I'm noticeably less "lazy."
• I'm sleeping better. For more than two years I had been beset with "early morning awakenings"—waking up at four, five, or six in the morning and not being able to get back to sleep. This used to happen at least five nights out of six and sometimes, if I was depressed, I'd go three weeks or a month without sleeping through the night once. That's getting better. Now I'm sleeping through the night at least half the time, maybe more than that. I've also "slept in late" like a teenager three or four times over these six weeks, and it has been many years—ten, maybe? Maybe 15—since I was able to do that.

Here's an introduction to WFPB, if you're interested. And here again is Forks Over Knives, which anyone who's curious should watch first. The latter is also available on Netflix, YouTube Movies, and as a DVD. (And elsewhere.)

Details
You can stop reading now if you want.  :-)  But for the sake of full disclosure, here are a few of the gory details of my six-week experiment:

• So have I been 100% WFPB for all six weeks? Not quite. I cheated twice. I went out for a sushi dinner about two weeks ago, where I ate four pieces of salmon sushi, two of tuna, and two of yellowtail. (On strict WFPB you eat no animal products and use no oil. I've also cut out sugar, but that's just me. Anyway, raw fish is verboten.) Then, last Monday, out with my pool league for lunch, I had pancakes with local real maple syrup. That's vegan but not WFPB. Bad Mike.
• I experienced only one "falling off the wagon" type problem in the six weeks. I had been eating a few Medjool dates for dessert every night—they're much better for you than candy, because they're full of fiber and they're a natural plant food, and they're delicious. But they're loaded with sugar. I ate three per day for several weeks and then fell off the wagon with a thud, pigging out on dates for three or four nights in a row just like I used to pig out on candy. So I put the kibosh on those delicious little critters. No more dates for the sugar junkie.
• Also, at first, I was still using oil for sautéeing and to coat my baked potatoes. I've cut that out too.
• I've eaten out for dinner six times, but the other five (other than sushi night) were all vegan meals. Four at a Thai restaurant, one at an Indian restaurant.
• I supplement only with B-12 and D3.
• I have not been exercising.

Conclusion
I'll report back again after another six weeks or so and let you know how it's going.

But so far so good.

Prior to these last six weeks, I had probably been eating maybe 70% or 80% WFPB. Going the whole way has made much more difference than I thought it would. Pam Popper, in her new book Food Over Medicine with Glen Merzer, says that a WFPB diet is like a combination lock. Say you have to spin four tumblers and set a sequence of four numbers in order to open the lock. If you get three numbers correct and miss the fourth, you don't get 75% of the desired result—you get none. The lock won't open. She advocates going whole-hog on WFPB* if only so you can properly appraise the potential results, experiencing the proof for yourself. Because, she says, that's what will convince you—your own results. Half measures aren't good enough, because they won't make an obvious enough difference to convince you.

On the basis of my experience over the past six weeks, I'm with her.

Mike

*Note that Pam, in her book, also says you can eat meat three times a week, as long as it's the best quality meat and you're strict about portion size, and as long as you're fully on WFPB otherwise. But no dairy.

P.S. Best video I watched this week: Neal Barnard's "Chocolate, Cheese, Meat and Sugar—Physically Addictive." The part about doping babies in the very beginning is fascinating. One of the commenters, Michelle Pradhan, wrote, "This was easy to watch, easy to understand and entertaining. The 40 minutes flew by. This guy is awesome." Seconded. Recommended.

And if you're curious as to why it's so difficult to eat a diet that's good for us, psychologist Doug Lisle explains the pleasure trap. Turns out the trick has a lot to do with making it through the first six weeks, making Doug's video relevant to today's post.

Original contents copyright 2019 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.

Leica's best camera?

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Eric Perlberg: "I’ve been on a plant-only diet for more than 20 years and don’t see any evidence of poor nutrition, to those who worry about that issue. The other two major improvements in my life are an hour/day each of vigorous daily exercise and Vipassana meditation. I can get preachy on these subjects but won’t. It’s great when you adopt a a regime which is intrinsically right for you."

Aravind: "Very good news, Mike! Whatever suits you, persist with that, and enjoy!! As the saying in Ayurveda (the ancient, traditional system of medicine in India) goes, 'Without good food, medicine is of no use; with good food, there is no need of medicine.'"

kirk tuck: "All things in moderation. I swim with Rip Esselstyn almost every day. He and I have been on the same masters swim team for nearly 20 years. We work really hard in the water. Many yards, much exertion for an hour and a half six days a week. Added to that we both run regularly and Rip still bikes (always a triathlete). Many of us have tried the Engine 2 diet but some find it to be absolutely unsustainable over the long term. Now I've gone back to what I call the 'Belinda' diet (put into place years ago by my spouse, Belinda). We eat mostly veggies + fish but we are not afraid of the occasional hamburger, etc. We do strictly limit our sugar intake. I watch Rip and am thoroughly convinced that it's the exercise that keeps him healthy, not necessarily more kale. But he was a super athlete back when he was a nationally ranked swimmer at UT Austin. He is a classic 'outlier.' I've been on the five or six day per week solid exercise program for...well, since I was six. I'll let my numbers tell the story. I'm wearing the same 32" waist size pants I did in college. I weigh 160 pounds (up four from college forty years ago) and my total cholesterol is 148. I am currently 63.5 years old. I have zero aches or pains. None. The longer I live the more I believe in the idea of 'all things in moderation' except for exercise. Get as much of that as you can."

Mike replies: I used to be impressed that I knew you. Now I'm impressed that you know Rip.

Pontiac (OT)

Curious historical fact: Yesterday was the 10th anniversary of the death of the American car brand Pontiac, named for the city in Michigan where they were first built, which in turn was named for an Odawa (Ottowa) chieftain who was assassinated in 1769. The last of the final 100 G6 sedans rolled off the assembly line on April 27th, 2009.

None other than Bob Lutz placed the blame on the Feds, who were urging GM to cut brands during the post-crash bankruptcy and bailout. Olds was already gone by that time, but Saab, Hummer and Saturn shared the tomah...er, the axe. Lutz had to fight for Buick and GMC and could back up those arguments by showing profits, but Pontiac hadn't made much in the way of profits in the 2000s. The plan at the time (well, probably just Lutz's plan) was to turn Pontiac into an import-fighter brand. Among other goals was that Pontiac would offer only rear-wheel-drive cars. There was supposedly another GTO in the works at the time of the assassi...er, the end of production.

Pontiac began in 1926 as a companion nameplate to GM's Oakland Division. The Oakland was a marque started in 1907 by an engineer with the unusual name of Alanson Brush, who was quickly bought out by GM in 1909. Oaklands were supplanted by the more popular Pontiacs by 1931.

The site of Pontiac's grave is unknown. The Odawa chief, I mean.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2019 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.

(Not) everything must fade away

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hugh crawford: "Alanson Brush is also interesting in that originally most automobile engines turned clockwise. He noticed that if a right-handed person was starting the car with a hand crank, a clockwise engine was more likely to break their thumb or arm. He designed his engine to rotate counterclockwise and the rest of the industry followed."

Dave: "A trivia tidbit about Pontiac: In the '20s GM introduced 'companion makes' with lower prices to help sell cars during the (Great) Depression. Cadillac begat LaSalle, Oldsmobile begat Viking, Buick begat Marquette, and Oakland begat Pontiac. When GM decided to discontinue the companion makes, they kept the Pontiac companion make instead of the parent make."

[Actually the "companion makes" were all introduced prior to the Great Depression, to fill perceived gaps in GM's pricing range. —Ed.]

Yes! We Have Bananas (For Now, Anyway) (OT)

["Off Topic" posts on The Online Photographer are labeled as such for readers who wish to skip anything not relating to photography. —Ed.]

-

Here's a strange fact I ran across last night that you might not know: bananas might soon be a thing of the past.

That's right. It's possible a day is coming when there will be no bananas for sale in your local supermarket.

Yes, we have no bananas
If you ate a banana a hundred years ago, it almost certainly would have been a variety called a Gros Michel ("Big Mike," essentially). Big Mikes were much easier to store and ship than the bananas of today. But the Gros Michel was wiped out by a fungal blight called Panama disease. As the blight spread, the diminishing supply created a strong demand for bananas that couldn't be met, leading to chronic shortages that were even reflected in pop culture—for instance, in the 1920s there was a song that began, "Yes! We have no bananas / We have no bananas today...." (Songwriter Frank Silver bought his fruit from a street vendor who was a Greek immigrant, who began every sentence with "Yessss...," like young people today begin every statement with "So.")

Cavendish by Andy Warhol. You might recognize
where this image comes from.

The world's growers responded by settling on a different variety, the Cavendish, the monoculture we know generically as "bananas" today—although, actually, as with potatoes, there are many types of bananas that we as consumers aren't familiar with. Cavendish bananas are much less optimal for shipping and storing than Big Mikes were—they're fragile and susceptible to bruising, and they have a limited period of ripeness that lasts only a few days. But the global demand for bananas is huge—bananas are the single most popular fruit in North America, and account for between 10 and 20% of the GNP of some of the smaller Central American countries—and the field-to-table pipeline has been optimized to meet the particular needs of the Cavendish over many years.

Alas, there's a new strain of the Panama-disease fungus loose in the world. The strain that wiped out the Gros Michel was called Tropical Race 1. Now, a strain called Tropical Race 4 has decimated Cavendish plantations in many parts of Asia. Thus far, thanks to quarantine efforts, TR4 hasn't gotten a foothold in Central America, where most of the Western hemisphere's bananas are grown. But most biologists familiar with the problem believe it's only a matter of time.

So it's at least a possibility that the grandchildren of young adults today will grow up not knowing what a banana tastes like. Sad, huh?

Journey to the past
It reminds me of a poignant situation where a type of fish is concerned. Atlantic cod used to be plentiful. The vast schools seemed inexhaustible, and were fished by Europeans for 500 years or more—even prior to the "discovery" of North America in 1492. But when industrial fishing methods came along, the great shoals were overfished, leading to a collapse of the species in the 1990s (greater than a 95% loss). Atlantic cod is now labeled "vulnerable" on the Red List of threatened species. Even with fishing banned, the Atlantic cod hasn't been able to stage a comeback.

Here's the poignant part: when scientists take limited numbers of the fish from the sea to study the state of the population, they give the fish to old people in the small former fishing towns lining the Atlantic coastline of North America. The reason is compassion: the old people in the towns grew up eating cod, and they miss it. An occasional meal of cod from the North Atlantic, a rare treat for them, is like a journey to the past.

Mike

Original contents copyright 2019 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.

(Not) everything must fade away

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GWM: "The Cavendish variety was named after William Cavendish (sixth Duke of Devonshire). His head gardener (Sir Joseph Paxton) cultivated them in the greenhouses at Chatsworth House, Derbyshire, UK, in the Peak District National Park."

Phil: "For more about cod your readers might enjoy the book Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World by Mark Kurlansky. It's an excellent history of the '1,000-year fishing spree' and how it shaped so much of the cultures that border the North Atlantic Ocean."

Mike replies: That's the book I got that anecdote from. I did enjoy it.

Mani Sitaraman: "The main determinants of the cultivar/variety of any particular tropical fruit available in temperate climes are their resistance to bruising during transport and beauty of appearance. Here in Singapore, ninety miles north of the equator, there is quite a variety available, almost all imported from neighboring Malaysia, since Singapore is now almost completely urbanized. A guide, for those who are curious. Prettiness doesn't correlate with taste, I'm told. Me? I don't like bananas."

Benjamin Marks: "Gotta say it: Louis Prima. Mike-drop."

Gordon Brown: "Reputed mafia figure Joseph Bonnano's nickname was 'Joe Bananas.' After one of his arrests, someone on The Tonight Show sang: 'Yes, we have Joe Bananas.'"

Manuel: "Don't go bananas, Mike! ;-) "

Geoffrey Meyer-van Voorthuijsen: "There is a grocery store in Korea, E-Mart, that sells 'one-a-day' packs of bananas, with six bananas of of varying degrees of ripeness. I hope that simple but ingenious strategy is taken up by more retailers across the world."

Open Mike: Protein and the Power of Propaganda

["Open Mike" is the often off-topic, anything-goes Editorial Page of TOP, in which the Editor indulges himself slightly more than usual on whatever happens to be on his mind. It usually appears on Wednesdays. Oh well, maybe it doesn't usually.]

-

It's amazing how effectively false "facts" can suppress the truth under the right conditions. Propaganda (currently also called "fake news," although that charge is often hurled, gaslighter-style, against real news) has real reach and power.

For example: almost all Americans believe that it's important to get protein, that protein is an urgent dietary need. They'll also tell you that protein only comes from meat and dairy, and that it's impossible to get enough protein from plants except by combining specific ingredients in cunning and exacting combinations. You know, just the sort of mad-scientist thing whacky pinko vegetarians who look like goth zombies would do.

Followups and Updates: The Eloquence of Coincidence (OT)

• Yesterday's post made me realize that I am not giving my current food experiment a decent chance. I am cheating too much, so I don't get to find out if the WFPB plan actually makes you feel better. Thanks to John Gillooly for asking the question. I really need to redouble my commitment so that I get good data on it, with my statistically insignificant but personally very significant experimental sample of one.

One commenter said he eats nothing but meat and has never felt better. I should point out that it's really all about outcomes. "Keto" (ketosis) diets, under myriad guises, do make you lose weight. But the statistical outcomes are much worse—you greatly increase your chances of getting cancer or heart disease over the long run. As my brother says, life is like a roll of toilet paper—the closer you get to the end, the faster it runs out. The whole point of food-as-medicine, if you ask me, is not just living longer (though that too) but being healthier, more fit, and with fewer medical problems as you age.

Heart disease has been the leading killer of Americans since the great influenza epidemic of 1919 subsided. It's the leading killer of cardiologists, for Pete's sake. Kim Williams thinks that's because they keep up on cardiology papers but not nutrition papers. I have a friend who is slim and fit at age 94—he golfed less than his age last year, when he shot an 89. I'd rather be more like him than be morbidly obese and taking forty different medications and feeling awful all the time as my life runs down to, you know, the little cardboard tube.

• I tried to skewer the carmakers the other day for gouging their customers with overpriced options on cars expensive enough that they ought to  come from the factory loaded. So it was quite a coincidence that the newspaper this morning relayed the news that the two Boeing "Max" jets that went down in clear weather in recent months both lacked two safety features that Boeing provides on the model only as options.

A fun little story about coincidence. I do "believe" coincidences happen, of course—a great little essay that touches on it is Chapter 2 of Steven Pinker's book Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress. The chapter is called "Entro, Evo, Info" (entropy, evolution, information). Recommended, although nobody but me would buy a book for one chapter.

Even so, coincidence can certainly be eloquent sometimes. The other night at a meeting of my 12-step program, the topic was prayer. A recurrent suggestion of our program is to get down on your knees and pray every morning, regardless of whether you believe in prayer or not. A member said that his girlfriend had challenged him a few days earlier about not saying his prayers. He defended himself by arguing with her that he didn't need to, but then, he said, "ever since then, the topic of prayer has been coming up again and again, and each time it does I somehow find myself on my knees." Then he said, "I suppose it's just coincidence."

At that, another member quipped, "no such thing as coincidence," and just as he spoke, the first person accidentally knocked his empty coffee mug to the floor, and the handle broke. I chair the meeting, and the broken mug was right in front of me, so I hopped to my feet and picked it up the mug and the piece of broken handle for the guy. As I headed to the kitchen (we meet in a Parish Hall) to throw it away, I noticed that not all of the handle was there. As I headed back to the meeting room, I ran into the guy who had broken the mug, who was heading for the wastebasket himself. He held up the second piece of the broken mug handle, saying, "see what I mean? I mention getting on my knees in prayer, and one second later I'm on my knees again, looking for this under the couch."

• Here's how to bake a potato properly. After I learned this I realized I had never really tasted a baked potato before.

You need GEAR, of course:

You'll need a great big honkin' two-tined fork (I use this barbecuing fork) and an accurate digital meat thermometer. Scrub a Russet potato with a vegetable brush under running water and remove any eyes if you care to. Blot dry with paper towel, then poke the bejeebers out of it with the fork—I jab it 16 times for 32 separate holes! Don't be shy—it makes all the difference, and I'm amused to admit that yes, I've run the test (once a reviewer...). Coat lightly with olive oil. Set it right on the oven rack uncovered. Don't wrap it in foil—that's how you get a steamed potato, not a baked one. Set the oven on convection if it has it. Bake for as long as you need to to get the internal temperature of the potato to no less than 210°F (99°C). This might take longer and require a higher temperature than usual cookbook recommendations. You just have to take it out of the oven and take its temperature until you get the time and oven temperature down pat.

Separate the potato from the skin right out of the oven
and the skin will stay crispy and delicious

Once done, with a table fork, immediately make a row of holes in the top of the potato lengthwise and push the ends together, and empty out the skin. By separating the skin right out of the oven you keep it nice and crispy/chewy; if you let the potato cool in its skin, the skin will steam and become soggy and much less pleasant to eat. Then let everything cool to close to room temperature. This converts some of the starch to indigestible starch (very good for the lower reaches of your gut) and reduces the potato's glycemic index* (sometimes called the "insulin hit" or "glycemic load") considerably. You can either eat it cool as I prefer, or reheat it in the microwave—once the starch converts to indigestible starch via cooling it doesn't convert back if reheated, which is why cold potatoes in things like summer salads are better for you than hot boiled potatoes. Eat with nothing on it save maybe a little table salt. No butter, no sour cream, no nothing.

A baked potato prepared this way will be moist, delicious, and flavorful all by itself, without a trace of the dryness, graininess or hardness that baked potatoes are notorious for. Eat the folded skin like a steak, cutting it into chunks with a steak knife. It's the best part.

Mike

*The Glycemic Index (GI) is a relative ranking of carbohydrate in foods according to how they affect blood glucose levels. Carbohydrates with a low GI value (55 or less) are more slowly digested, absorbed and metabolised and cause a lower and slower rise in blood glucose and, therefore insulin levels." (Source: University of Sydney)

Original contents copyright 2019 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.

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Dave Van de Mark: "I am looking forward to trying a potato baked just as you have instructed and eating it 'plain' too. As a boy, I literally made a 'soup' of 1/2 butter and 1/2 potato inside the skin and wolfed it all down—yeoww, I still want to do that but wish to live another week.  :-) You made no mention of baking temp—is 350 to 375 a good range?"

Mike replies: The key is to get the center of the potato to 210°F. For me it's 425 degrees for 1:10, but ovens differ....

Wednesday Open Mike: Diet Progress

[I didn't write an Open Mike—"the anything-goes, often off-topic editorial page of TOP"—last week, so I'm being indulgent with myself this week. I stuck it behind a page break in case you'd rather skip it.

On that heading, it's always wise to bear in mind that not every post here is for everybody. That's how I think of blogging as I write. Sometimes the posts are for 90% of all my readers, sometimes as few as 5%, and there are posts for every percentage in between. It's all good, though, because the 5% who like one post might be among the 10% who didn't like the post everyone else did. A blog is like the weather in Vermont—if you don't like it, just wait a few hours. Or days anyway. It'll change. Today's topic has come up before—with some of the same points—but yesterday we were talking about Range Rovers, a topic I'm pretty sure will never come up again even if I keep TOP going till I'm 92.  —Mike]

 

I'm not in a position to lecture you about food, so don't mistake my motives here. But let me tell you, there are few subjects more passionately divisive these days than diet. It's getting right up there with politics and religion.

It amuses me that even inside the little dietary precinct in which I've taken refuge lately—WFPB, which stands for "whole-food plant-based"—the various high-profile gurus have their, shall we say, theological disputes and differences...

When Ignorance Is Not Bliss (Annals of Automobilia) (OT)

This is off topic, but it's funny.

Consider: The base model of Land Rover's top-of-the-line Range Rover SUV costs $89,500.

The base model of Toyota's RAV4 SUV costs $24,500.

However, the RAV4 comes standard with far more features than the 3.6X more expensive Range Rover.

To get the features of the Range Rover up to the standard of a RAV4, you have to spend half the price of a base RAV4 just on options.

So just to spell this out, after already spending ninety grand on a car, people who buy Range Rovers have to spend yet more just to get the features that a car that costs less than a third as much already has.

"If everything costs extra, how do people stand for that? How do they put up with it?" car reviewer Doug DeMuro asks. Well, here's how: "Land Rover knows that the people who buy these, they're not going to consider a RAV4. So they'll never know that the RAV4 has some of these features standard. The people who get these cars just sort of live in the world of these cars, and they don't really know what they're missing out on, and generally they don't know that they're paying more for features that a lot of 'regular cars' have standard, or [as] cheap options."

Really? Not sure that's likely. Or even possible. (Could it be?) But the idea made me laugh.

I'll let you draw a comparison to cameras if you want to.  :-)  You're on your own there.

Mike

ADDENDUM: I should add that all of the very rich people I've known (not that many) all drove nondescript cars. That included Nelson Rockefeller, with whom my father had a glancing acquaintance when Rockefeller was Vice President. VP Rockefeller was chauffeured in a nondescript middle-blue, mid-level American sedan. The only difference is that the back windows were tinted and he had a gooseneck reading lamp on the back deck so he could work. His chauffeur dressed in street clothes, not livery. He was thus indistinguishable from thousands of other Washington functionaries who toodled to and fro their offices in similar rigs, hard at work in the back seats.

Original contents copyright 2019 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.

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Jeron: "Re '...they don't know that they're paying more for features...' In other words: the inability of a person to understand that other people are different from himself, and probably have other priorities and other goals when they make purchase decisions. Price/feature ratio is a parameter to assess products, nothing wrong with that. But declaring it the only relevant parameter is absurd. If you want an analogy: imagine a reviewer claiming everybody is ignorant who doesn't eat fast food, because that's the best price/calorie ratio."

Mike replies: No, he acknowledges why people buy Range Rovers. Start the linked video at 7:24 and you'll see. And Doug usually reviews much less sensible cars than the LR RR—exotic cars and supercars and the like. The point is simply that cars that cost so much used to come with everything standard; that was one of the reasons why people paid so much for them. Now it's the opposite—car companies use options as a way of soaking (i.e., further exploiting) their customers, and the customers don't seem to know enough to complain. As one commenter to the video noted, you can add $50,000 in options to a $40,000 BMW, which is at least absurd, if not predatory.

Tom Dills: "Most of the Range Rovers here in North Carolina don't even come with turn signals. At least not that I can tell...."

Igor: "You could have made it on topic if you wrote about a Leica and some other camera."

Tom Duffy: "The price of options on a supercar or even a BMW always amazed me. For instance, there was the day I realized that the 'ceramic brakes' upgrade on a Ferrari cost $32,000. About the same price as my entire 2009 Pontiac G8 GT."

Mike replies: A G8...that's a really exclusive car! Never understood why it didn't sell better. I have a very exclusive car too—Acura only sold 17,854 ILX models in the US in 2014. Quite unpopular, and I seldom see another one. I can't find figures for how many of those were the sportier 2.4 liter, only sold with the manual transmission, but I know it's a small fraction of the overall number. The car was "refreshed" for 2015 so only the 2013s and 2014s look like mine. Your G8, as I'm sure you're well aware, is more exclusive than that.

Speed: "If you spend some time among 'car people' you'll learn that configuring cars on line is as popular with them as watching YouTube videos is with cue sports fans. Porsche will be happy to sell you 'Decorative valve sleeves (in black with colored Porsche Crest), set, comprising 4 cover sleeves' for $64. Why aren't they included with the car? Because they are also available silver-colored with colored Porsche Crest and silver colored with monochrome Porsche Crest. Also available are Wheel Center Caps with Colored Porsche Crest for $190. Porsche people notice these things. For no additional cost Porsche will include 'Deletion of Model Designation.' The people who count will know which model you're driving."

Follow-Up: Ronnie's 1,000th

This is a lot of fun even if you're the furthest thing from a fan. Doesn't everyone enjoy seeing moments of exceptional triumph in any sport or game? Ronnie managed to reach the magic 1,000 mark in the winning frame of Players tournament. For those of you who don't watch snooker, ordinarily the audience is not allowed to call out when the players are at the table. Far from the case at the end of this break, as you'll see!

Fun.

Fittingly, I'm off for my regular weekly date playing pool with my friends at the Moose Lodge. Back later with some non-gear-related photo posts, including what I did on my weekend off.

If you're wondering, what the players are talking about at the end of the break as the crowd cheers is that Ronnie accidentally sunk the cue ball on the last shot, which happened to cost him the high score of the tournament, for which there is a bonus prize. If he hadn't done that he would have had a 141. As it happens, his opponent, Neil Roberston of Australia, had the high break with 140. So the cue ball going in at the end took £5,000 out of Ronnie's pocket and put it into Neil's.

Mike

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Open Mike: The Thousand Centuries

["Open Mike" is the anything-goes, often off-topic Editorial page of TOP. It's supposed to appear on Wednesdays, but this has been an atypical week for me. That's my excuse. —Mike the Ed.]

Ronnie O'Sullivan, from his Facebook page. With eventual
champion Judd Trump back in the bokeh.

Just briefly—I know a lot of people don't care for cue sports, but I'm a lifelong pool buff and, lately, utterly besotted with the quirky put perfect English game of snooker. Snooker currently has a larger-than-life star whose brilliance, and the beauty of whose play, is vaulting the game to unforeseen heights. His name is Ronnie O'Sullivan. His closest rival in the history of the sport describes him as a "genius." He is aging, but his star is burning more brightly than ever. He is to his sport* what Pelé, Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods, Aryton Senna and Serena Williams are, or were, to theirs.

Currently we're halfway through the Players Championship being played in Preston, Lancashire, England—and O'Sullivan is getting very close to an epic landmark, both for him personally and for snooker. His record of "centuries"—runs of 100 or more points in one turn at the table—stands at 997. (He made two more yesterday.) Three more and he will reach the fabled 1,000 mark, which through most of the game's history has been thought impossible.

To score in snooker you must pocket a red ball first, which earns you one point and the right to pocket a colored ball. Those score between two and seven points depending on the color and their position on the table. Red balls stay down, but colored balls are re-spotted until the end of the game. Here's a brief video that explains the rules and basic strategy of snooker.

A "perfect game" in snooker is a 147. O'Sullivan leads history in 147s in match play with 15. The player in second place, the great Scotsman Stephen Hendry, who was once considered unsurpassable as the greatest player in history, is second with 11. To win a frame (which happens when one player gets comfortably more points than are left on the table, usually around 65–75 points) and then continues playing such that he scores 100 points in one turn at the table—that's a century. They used to be quite rare, but in this era of full-time touring professionals they're getting more common. Stephen Hendry had 775 centuries when he retired at age 43 in 2012, still the second-highest total ever. Australian Neil Robertson is the only player ever to make 100 centuries in one year—he made 103 in the 2013–14 season.

O'Sullivan ended the 2017–18 season with 948, and talk was rife that he would inevitably break 1,000. He's on the doorstep now. To see any of the recent ones, about all you have to do is Google "Ronnie O'Sullivan 9xx." A video of Ronnie scoring that particular century will pop up. I've watched a number of them twice.

Can anyone ever break such a record? It's certainly possible—Ronnie has taken breaks from competition in his career, and currently plays in only a selected few tournaments every year. Someone nearly as good as he is with an appetite for play more like Stuart Bingham's could conceivably surpass him. Someday.

Ronnie got me into snooker, but I doubt he'll get me out of it (attendance at NBA games actually dropped after Jordan retired). It's a magical game, as exact and as perfectly in balance as baseball, and great fun to watch. No frame is ever quite the same. It's just a special thing to be a snooker fan at this moment in time, the autumn of O'Sullivan's scintillating, mercurial career, during which all the records he will end up setting will be set. Those of us who play cue sports know how insanely hard it is to do what he does—to watch him in full flow is to be amazed. Even standout stars like Stephen Hendry and Steve Davis admit there's never been anyone quite like him.

Other sports fans more often remember big moments in team sports. Fair enough. But for me, the day Ronnie hits a thousand will be a day to never forget.

Mike

*People who think cue sports are not "sport" are all wet—snooker requires two-thirds the intellectual power of chess, half as much concentration as driving racing cars, nearly as much physical skill as golf, and as much constant practice and fortitude under pressure as any sport you can name. It demands hand-eye coordination, steadiness, great touch, and sometimes an almost ungodly precision. All that's missing is the brute physical effort component that some Americans wrongly believe to be a component of the definition of the word. If archery, the shot-put, high-diving, weightlifting, and bowling are sports, then snooker surely is.

ADDENDUM: For further reading, here's the now three-year-old New Yorker profile of Ronnie.

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Rodolofo Canet: "O'Sullivan not only takes breaks and plays only selected tournaments. He's been able to fail on purpose a very easy maximum break of 147 complaining they're paid too low in tournaments! Please remind that only 147 147s have been scored in the history of the sport. He was expected to refuse scoring more centuries in the current tournament just to synchronize his thousand with the World Championship. He used to play very, very fast, and because of that is nicknamed "the Rocket." He can play with both hands. In fact, at the beginning of his career, a rival complained of his changing hands for a difficult shot, claiming disrespect. He replied that he could play better with his left than his rival could with his natural hand. The complaint reached the high organizers of snooker and he was made to demonstrate his skills to avoid a penalty. He's the closest thing to a true genius you can find in today's sport. And I used to be a loyal Hendry fan!"

Greg Heins: "O'Sullivan was born in Ilford, so doesn't that make this a photo story?"

Mike replies: Yes! Yes, it does!

Open Mike: Video Chautauquas* (OT)

["Open Mike" is the often off-topic Editorial page of TOP. It appears on Wednesdays. Off-topic posts on TOP are labeled "OT" in the title in case you prefer to avoid them.

By the way, I'm feeling a whole lot better today, thankfully. Thanks for all the good wishes! —Mike the occasionally violently non-vertical Ed.]

While I delve into the no doubt delightful comments on yesterday's post (127 of 'em!), which should be fun, I thought I'd share a few of my favorites among recent YouTube discoveries. If you think I'm trying to distract you before you add more to my workload, I take the Fifth.

• A book author whose work I've enjoyed over the years, Alain de Botton, explains Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person. This one's pretty dense but full of insights I wish I'd had while there was still time to do something about it. I can certainly attest to the idea that we're not attracted to partners who are good for us, we're attracted to partners who are familiar. Alain's talk is on zeitgeistminds, and there's a book, too. Both the book and the talk derive from the single most-read article in the New York Times in all of 2016.

• The late "comedian's comedian" George Carlin on why It's Important Not to Give a Sh*t. Successful comedians—maybe all successful artists, but at least comedians—have to "come into themselves" before their work (and their personas) get locked and loaded. I've always been amazed by the fact that the young David Letterman, having been fired from a job and with his life going nowhere, sat down to figure out what his real skills were and concluded that the thing he was best at was making fun of people. That's brilliant, I think—it's not even in a category I would have accepted as being among the legitimate answers to the question. I would have compartmentalized things and been trawling around in my conception of the "job skills" category. You gotta go with your gifts—but, to do so, you've got to have the courage to see your actual gifts clearly. In this short reminiscence from the Archive of American Television, George gives a succinct and useful account of how he modified his dreams and became himself. 

• Another author I enjoy, Malcolm Gladwell, retells the Biblical story of David and Goliath from a rationalist and historical perspective, and I found it just plain fascinating. Turns out it boils down to weapons technology, according to Malcolm, and poor Goliath never had a chance. I like the stories behind myths, like the astonishing truth behind the Johnny Appleseed legend in the 59-page first part of Michael Pollan's beautiful little four-part book The Botany of Desire, a long-ago (and treasured) recommendation from my brother Scott. This "educational and entertaining" TED Talk relates to Malcolm Gladwell's 2015 book about underdogs and misfits.

• Yet another book author I've learned a lot from (sensing a trend here?), the Dutch primatologist and ethologist Frans de Waal, explains The Surprising Science of Alpha Males. The qualities we actually both require and admire in alpha males (and females) are indeed eye-opening. Of course, as always, Frans tells the human story through the lens of chimpanzee and bonobo behavior, as he does in my favorite amongst his books, Our Inner Ape, in which he speculates about some of the more mystifying human behavior patterns from the foundation of what we know about our closest primate relatives.

Enough for now. Please check back later to read the comments on yesterday's post. I'll get another mug of tea and get right to work.

Mike

Oh, and by the way:

*Chautauqua: Colloquially, a chautauqua (shaw-TALK-wah) was a public talk meant to the educational but also entertaining. Merriam-Webster defines it as "Any of various traveling shows and local assemblies that flourished in the U.S. in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, that provided popular education combined with entertainment in the form of lectures, concerts, and plays, and that were modeled after activities at the Chautauqua Institution of western New York." If I'm not a chautauqua channel then I don't know what!

Original contents copyright 2019 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.

Here’s the situation

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Bruce: "Not again!!! You keep deviating me sideways during my morning coffee to emerge two hours later having to catch up on 'things-that-must-be-done-today.' Your link to George Carlin took me down an extraordinary road into totally unfamiliar YouTube territory. His work was completely new to me and I now realise how far ahead of his time he was. A precious jewel indeed. Perhaps a small sip of George every morning will substitute for lack of Kirk Tuck after you."

KeithB: "Were Chautauquas the first TED Talks?  8^)  "

Mike replies: Very much in the same spirit as public lectures in the 19th century, I think, which were a big deal and well attended. Mark Twain paid off his mountain of debts by touring the world giving lectures.

Rude Awakening (OT)

Today's my birthday—I'm three years away from being old. (The DSM now defines "middle age" as the years from age 45 to 65, and I'm clinging to that.)

I've had better Februaries. First, the State of New York put my car under house arrest for the whole month and then some (long story—I stupidly let my insurance lapse late last Winter, and the penalty in my case is that your plates and registration are confiscated for an equal amount of time). Second, I've got a case of gastroenteritis that won't go away—I'm supposed to journey to Geneva (New York, not Switzerland) later this morning for an appointment with a specialist. A obdurate case of the trots is not the worst thing that can happen to a man, but it's pestiferous, I'll say that. Fans of wordplay will appreciate that I just managed to get obdurate and pestiferous into the same sentence.

And third...well. This morning I heard the propane truck pull up in front of my house at its usual hour of 5:30 a.m. I don't schedule the deliveries—they do. And I'm in the process of switching providers—I found a better price, and I've been trying to moderate my expenses—so I hopped out of bed and bolted to the window to call the guy off. The last thing I wanted was another load of propane at the old price, which is very high. It was twenty minutes before sunrise, and from the bedroom window I could make out the hose against the new snow that fell during the night—the guy was already by the tanks in back. So I hurried into my bathrobe and slippers and raced downstairs. I rushed outside shouting "Wait! I don't need a delivery this morning! I'm switching providers!" When—bang. My feet went right out from under me. I slipped on the ice and fell backwards—hard. The back of my head slammed against the ice-covered ground.

I lay there groaning from the pain. Everything hurt. My head was splitting. The propane guy checked my head for blood—none—and took my hand to help me up.

"You might have gotten a concussion," he said. "What's today's date?"

"It's my birthday," I said weakly. "February 25th."

"And who's president?" he continued.

"Donald Trump," I said.

"Donald Trump!" he said, startled. "He didn't make it through the first stage of the primaries! The only reason he ran at all is because NBC was about the cancel 'The Apprentice' and he didn't want to see all those headlines saying 'NBC to The Donald: You're Fired!' No. Jeb Bush is the president. Don't you remember?"

"So the American people aren't divided into two warring camps, each listening only to the propaganda of its own side?" I asked.

"What? No! Why would we do that? Sir, I'm afraid you've really hurt yourself! You're talking nonsense. Maybe I'd better call an ambulance."

"Wait! What about...Brexit? Are the British really deliberately weakening the European Union and simultaneously ceding leadership of it to the Germans, voluntarily, unilaterally, and unnecessarily?" I asked.

"Huh? Oh, that," he said. "Don't you remember? That happened a couple of years ago. As soon as David Cameron resigned, the British Parliament voided the referendum, rightly calling it nothing but a political stunt, and declared that it was a policy issue that should be decided by legislators who knew a thing or two about the consequences and not something that should be put to a public vote anyway.  The new PM, Theresa May, quoted the great Roman orator Cicero: 'Change of mind is not inconsistency.'"

"I see," I said, lying on my back on the snow in my robe and slippers with my eyes tight shut. "What about the climate change crisis?"

"Climate change?" he said, looking very concerned. "Well, President Gore started emergency measures back in 2001, and we're currently reducing carbon dioxide and chlorofluorocarbon emissions by four percent a year, heading toward five. It's a big problem, but at least the whole world is united like never before. You know this, right?"

"Thank God," I mumbled.

Soon I was able to sit up.

"Are you sure you're okay, sir?" the propane guy asked.

"Bokeh," I said weakly.

"What?" he said.

"Japanese word. It means fuzzy. One of its meanings is fuzzy in the head. I'm just a little fuzzy in the head is all. I'll be all right."

It's been an hour or two now, and boy do I feel banged up. To be honest, though, I'm still feeling a little confused. I just don't remember certain things right. Jeb Bush? What is this anyway, some kind of hereditary monarchy? Letting a president's kid be president makes about as much sense as letting a president's spouse be president.

Could've been worse, I guess—could have been Jeb's brother.

Mike

[Note: It really is my birthday, and I really did take that bad fall on the ice at 5:30 this morning. I've got abrasions on my hands and arm, my back is killing me, and I've got a big bump on my head for the first time since I was little. I'm hobbling around the house like I'm turning a hundred today. But I admit I embellished other parts of this story just a little: for example, I'm pretty sure the propane guy doesn't go around quoting Cicero!

At least I don't have to pay for any more propane at the old price. A Pyrrhic victory, but there you go. —Signed, Your Aging Ed.]

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Here’s the situation

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Andrew Beard: "Love it! I think I'll go outside and bang my head to see if it stops this awful Brexit headache that just gets worse and worse. Happy Birthday, Mike. I hope your day gets better as it goes on."

Ramón Acosta (partial comment): "Penguin steps on slippery ground is my suggestion."

Open Mike: Mr. T

["Open Mike" is the open-topic, all-things-considered Editorial page of TOP, and it appears on Wednesdays.]

Somewhat to my surprise, I think I've successfully managed to become a tea drinker. Ctein would be proud.

One time when I was sixteen, I stayed out all night long on Saturday night and had to go to my after-school-and-weekend job, at the Bay Point Pharmacy, where I was a cashier, stockboy, and delivery driver, on no sleep whatsoever. Before work that Sunday morning I stopped in at the little deli/café a few doors down from the Pharmacy in the same shopping mall, and imbibed two mugs of a wretched substance adults reputedly drank to help them stay awake.

Since then I've been drinking coffee more or less daily for 45 years. ("The years, they do get behind us"...I used to be able to remember who said that.) But lately it became clear that it was no longer good for my health, so I quit.

You're either a cat person or a dog person, a stick shift person or an automatic person, a color person or a black-and-white person, a team sports fan or an individual sports fan, a coffee drinker or a tea drinker. Yeah, I know various people claim to be agnostic on these points, but I don't believe them.

(Just kidding.)

As a coffee person, though, I've really had to work at liking tea. I've tried several vendors and many different teas, and experimented perhaps a bit too obsessively with all sorts of variations on brewing methods and things like different types of water. I've been at this for a couple of months.

After a lot of work, I arrived at my "daily drink"—white peony tea, or bai mudan. Bai mudan is available from many sources; here's one. I use the heavily processed and highly filtered water I have to have here at the house, which I then run through a Vinturi red wine aerator to add oxygen to the water. (This appears to be the same device for less money.) I'm not even entirely certain this works—obviously it's difficult to conduct blind experiments on myself. But I've brewed tea with and without several times, and I'm pretty sure it makes it easier for me to taste the flavors of teas. I don't have a very good sense of either taste or smell.

According to the supplier, the tea I've chosen has 10% of the caffeine of coffee. I usually drink two steepings in the morning, and a third in the afternoon, using the same three grams of tea leaves. Since each successive steeping has less caffeine in the brew, according to my reading anyway, the afternoon cup should have very little caffeine. Although, again, I have no way to really know. Some nights I sleep well, some nights I don't, and it doesn't seem to have much to do with the tea.

But...I'm happy. White tea (again, allegedly—I just read about things; I'm not a scientist) has certain health benefits, especially if you add a little lemon to it. And I like the taste. It has no astringency and no bitterness.

So I've settled into a new habit, for the next however many years. Who says old (photo) dogs can't learn new tricks?

Mike

P.S. Given the title, aren't you proud of me for getting through this entire post without once writing "I pity the fool"?

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Harsh reality

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Open Mike: Evidence-Based Nutrition

[Ed. Note: "Open Mike" is the anything-goes, often off-topic editorial page of TOP, wherein we let Yr. Hmbl. Ed. off the leash and allow him to indulge in tracking behavior*. When all is well and the moon is in the Seventh House, "Open Mike" appears on Wednesdays.]

There's lots of putative information on the Web about nutrition, probably 90% of it misinformation. If you're curious, possibly the most reliable site, in my opinion, is NutritionFacts.org. Michael Greger, a rock star in the WFPB (whole-food plant-based) community, is not a typical "diet guru"—he started his organization with a grant, sustains it through donations, and doesn't accept advertisements or sponsorship. Everything on his website is free—you can't pay for any "tiers" or rewards or special attention—and he donates the proceeds of his books and speaking engagements to charity. This is in stark contrast to many other such figures, who are running little entrepreneurial businesses that are monetized in many different ways, from books, to overnight diet spas, to commercially-available salad dressings. Not that there's anything wrong with making a living.

And he sticks to evidence, mainly by collating and synthesizing the results of peer-reviewed scientific studies. As Dr. Greger puts it, "Every year, I read through every issue of every English-language nutrition journal in the world, so you don't have to."

'Tis the Season...for Christmas Music (Music Notes) (OT)

Nick Lowe

Christmas, also known as "Songs-You're-Sick-Of Season," is nigh. If you're looking for some good Christmas music, allow me to once again recommend my favorite Christmas album, Nick Lowe's 2013 Quality Street. Actually it's not a "favorite"—it's the only Christmas album I like.

Nick is an Englishman, born in Surrey. Sixty-nine now, he figured in power pop and New Wave in the UK back in the day. He was a producer for artists like Graham Parker, and he wrote the Elvis Costello hit "(What's So Funny 'Bout) Peace, Love, and Understanding." But most of his music has a retro rockabilly flavor—his first wife was Johnny Cash's stepdaughter Carlene Carter, daughter of June Carter Cash, and they've remained friends. 

His best early album was Jesus of Cool (UK title—in the Christian-sensitive US it was called Pure Pop for Now People), from 1978, reissued by Yep Roc records in 2008. His biggest hit was the remake of his song "Cruel to Be Kind," originally from an unreleased Rockpile record. It was a significant hit in the U.S. I personally prefer the original version to the slicker, later radio version.

But Lowe, for all his energy and all his accomplishments, had a knack for hiding his genius under a rock...or a rockpile, I guess you'd say. His most significant artistic successes were a series of collaborations with guitarist Dave Edmunds, in a group that was called Rockpile, but there was a pretty big catch—both men were under contract to different record companies, so there were four studio Rockpile records but only one came out under the name Rockpile—Seconds of Pleasure from 1980. Of the other three, one was a Nick Lowe album, Labor of Lust (1979); one was a Dave Edmunds album, Repeat When Necessary (1978); and one was a Carlene Carter album, Musical Shapes (1980) (with Carlene doing all the vocals, so it was her album).

That's always struck me as funny, since so many groups cling for dear life to an established name despite different personnel and all kinds of changes. It's pretty hard to expect a band to build up a fan base when it keeps camouflaging itself behind different names.

Anyway, he was never a household name and he never will be. But he made a courageous decision as an older guy—he decided to just be himself and start singing quieter songs written from the perspective of an older man. Several albums of these plain, unpretentious, straight-ahead songs have been issued by Yep Roc Records in this millennium. Some on vinyl, which fits. To get the vibe you can listen to At My Age on YouTube, the cover of which pictures Nick with white hair and in a suit and tie.

Anyway, if you flee from standard Christmas music, try Quality Street. I tap my foot to "Rise Up Shepherd," but everyone's got to be grateful to have an uptempo rockabilly cover of "Silent Night"! It doesn't make up for the Chinese water torture of being subjected against your will to "Grandma Got Run Over By a Reindeer" for the nth time under the sickly greenish glow of the fluorescent lights in a Walgreen's, but it helps.

Merry Christmas!

Mike

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Ernie Van Veen: "Nick Lowe wrote one of my favourite songs, 'The Beast in Me,' which I have only heard performed by Johnny Cash, his former father-in-law. 'The Beast in Me' usually comes out around Christmas time. (You can interpret that any way you like.)"

David Dyer-Bennet's 'Five' Favorite Sci-Fi Novels (OT)

David Dyer Bennet wrote, in a comment to the "Five Favorites" post: "I've had a list of 'five best science fiction novels' (in my opinion) for forever, and one of my rules has always been that the list could not have five names on it. For years it was four, and a while ago it finally jumped to six, after years. The basic names have remained the same, though, in my case. Anyway—I'm not the person to give you grief over having something other than five items on your 'five best' list!"

To which, sebastel responded: "I'd really like to know what are David's favourite SF novels...."

And Michael Walsh added: "Oh come on—David has to give us his list of six favourite sci-fi novels!!"

So, aiming ever to please, I asked him if he would, and here is his answer. Drum roll....

David Dyer-Bennet: "I should remind people that this has never claimed to be more than my own personal choices; I do not assert any right to decide for anybody else! Also, my list does not include works that I consider to be fantasy (despite the fact that no really solid line between science fiction and fantasy can be established)."

The List

Dune (Frank Herbert, 1965)

The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (Robert A. Heinlein, 1966)

Lord of Light (Roger Zelazny, 1967)

The Mote in God's Eye (Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, 1974)

A Fire Upon the Deep (Vernor Vinge, 1992)

Growing Up Weightless (John M. Ford, 1993)."

David adds, "However...as an important article of faith, there are no sequels to Dune!"

So there you have it. Thanks David.

Mike

P.S. The thing I love about lists is when they distill deep knowledge. When somebody really knows a subject, then their list stands a chance to be truly interesting. For instance, wouldn't you love to hear John Camp's list of his five favorite thrillers? John once accused me of "not reading the books," i.e., thrillers, and I protested that I had read six of them to try to get up to speed with the genre. John replied, "Six! Mike, I sometimes read six a week!" I don't need to hear John's list of his five favorite ballets, or his five favorite communist countries, or his five favorite tropical hardwoods, but I'd love to hear his five favorite thrillers because the man really knows his thrillers. I'd love to hear Ken Tanaka's or Jim Sherwood's or Geoff Wittig's five favorite photobooks, too, or see Rodger Kingston's five favorite found snapshots. Or Paul Reed Smith's five favorite guitars. Or JH's five favorite cars. Or my son Xander's five favorite board games.

It's often difficult to get such "deep experts" to make such lists because the more they know, the more they know about what they don't know, and thus the more problematic such list-compiling exercises seems to them to be. But if they'd just relax and play the game (it is just a game, after all), they would do better at it than 99% of the gen-pop.

Think it over—is there any enthusiasm or field or subject you know deeply enough that it could result in such a list? 

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Eamon Hickey: "I just started looking for some new science fiction to read, after many years of not reading it, so this is very timely.

"I have one huge frustration with masterpieces like Dune or Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy—you can only have that wondrous, mind-bending, sublime first encounter with them once. If induced, precisely targeted partial amnesia were a thing, I'd pay to have my memories of Dune erased, so I could read it fresh again.

"Of course, I do re-read the masterpieces—I've read Tinker, Tailor and the other Karla books about once every five years since I was 18—and they are still very enjoyable. And as I accumulated life experience, I could appreciate certain parts of them in new ways. But I long for that feeling I had the first time I read them, when every page filled me with wonder and expanded my sense of the power of art and artists.

"The other frustration is that the greats can make ordinary art or craftsmanship hard to enjoy for me. I always know how good it could really be, if done by a master."

Keith: "The thing about favorites is that it can inadvertently affect ones ability to be open to new things. If we define something as our favorite, we bestow upon it a status of being better than all other possible options. By doing so we risk becoming close minded, relegating everything else as being lesser than. To the point of being defensive about our choices, we can stubbornly refuse to acknowledge alternatives as better than our chosen favorite, which would otherwise prove that we were wrong in the first place. While it is common language to define something as our 'favorite,' I try to think of any given group of favorites as simply 'things I really like.' Doing so allows one to grow this list rather than embracing the status quo of a fixed, single or limited group of things based on subjective and biased opinion. That being said, TOP is one of the five photography blogs I really like."

Mike replies: Point taken. I have a list of things that were favorites when I first encountered them that I don't like so much any more. Tastes change. I've noticed that when favorites don't change, it's usually because I decided not to continue engaging with that field of study, or genre, or hobby, or enthusiasm. 

John Kauk: First, thanks for putting David's list up. I've read and loved the first four on the list and just bought the fifth on the Apple Books app. I also would love to see see John Camp's list of thrillers. I first started reading his books when you mentioned them in a TOP post, and before the end of that summer I had read all his books. And continue to as new ones are published. Excellent stories all, so thanks for mentioning them."

JH (Jim Hayes): "Well, Mike, that sounds like a reasonable request, if not a challenge.

"I have a theory about why people have favorite cars—it's tied to experiences they had in their formative years—taking an exciting family trip, getting their driver's license, using a big backseat with their...no, let's skip that one.

"By the way, highly recommended reading for car fans is the Autoweek article on Ralph Lauren's opinions on cars and his collection.

"Now for my list:

Five Favorite Cars

Alfa Giulia TI sedan—my first Alfa, took me across the US several times, from Watkins Glen to Laguna Seca, school at UC Santa Cruz and SUNY Stony Brook. A hundred and seventy thousand miles of great experiences.

That's the Giant Artichoke in Watsonville, California, 1967.

Ferrari 250LM—the first car I rode in at an indicated 300 KPH on the street—this one was a ex-racer converted to the street and owned by a restaurant owner from New Orleans (he's second from the right) who always stopped by to visit the Ferrari dealer where my brother was sales manager.

A Lamborghini Muira was the second one I saw 300 KPH in—and a milestone in auto design too.

Can-Am racing cars of the '60s and early '70s. This is a Chaparral. Unlimited racers—simply awesome. I was a mechanic on a few. By the way, this photo from Laguna Seca in 1997 was taken with a Leica M2 and Elmarit 90mm. How did I do that?

Alfa Giulietta Spider—the car my brother and I raced in the '60s and I rescued from a barn in 1992, restored, and raced for another dozen years. It's still racing—55 years old. (Photo with Miata below.)

Miata—I've owned two and loved them both. In New England, my goal was to drive it with the top down as much as possible and in every month of the year. I made it almost every year.

David Dyer-Bennet: "My hardcover Dune is a first edition. Something like 68th printing, and hence of no particular value, but a first edition.  :-)

"The modern author I maybe should have found a place for is Greg Egan—something back around Distress or Diaspora maybe. Baxter, Banks, Liu, Dick, and even Jemisin haven't really connected for me (Jemisin is on my list to keep trying for a bit).

"Two authors I feel bad about not having included are Lois McMaster Bujold and Edward E. 'Doc' Smith. Smith is in some sense my favorite author, but no particular book seems to me to belong on this list (Skylark Duquesne is closest, but it's the last book of a series). I've probably re-read Smith books more than anybody else. Similarly, the Heinlein book I've read most is The Rolling Stones, which is not the one I list on the 'best' list. In Lois's books I guess A Civil Campaign would be the one I'd put on this list, and it's the conclusion of the rather long arc about Miles' romantic life, you'd miss so much starting there.

"To connect just slightly back to photography, Wikipedia is still using my photos of Robert Heinlein and John M. Ford."

John Camp: "I don't think I could come up with a list of my five favorite thriller books. I'd even have a hard time coming up with my five favorite thriller authors, who between them, if I could actually pick five, might have written a hundred books that I mostly like. The problem is, I've read way too many of thrillers in a sort of analytical way, picking them apart for my own uses—especially those books that I most like, and of course, you always find faults when you do that, things you think were done poorly. When I (rarely) re-read one of my own books, I'm still stuck in that analytical mode, and there are several, frankly, that I wish I could do over. The analytical mode has its own pleasures, of course, but it's confusing when you consider things like picking a top five list. So I ask Mike—do you really think you could come up with your five favorite photographs? I might be able to, because I'm an amateur, and not so deeply invested in them. I bet you'd have a hard time, though. With big expensive objects like cars, it's not so hard, because even an enthusiast may only encounter a couple of dozen great cars in a lifetime; the list of possibilities is much smaller.

"I might be able to pick my top five SF books, but I'd have to think about it. Dune wouldn't be on the list. Herbert reads like he thought he was writing the Bible, IMHO. I'm surprised that nobody has mentioned Flowers for Algernon, which was both a great short story and a pretty decent novel. On the Beach might be on my list as well. Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea? I dunno."

Open Mike: Life Without TV

I've just passed four years without a television. It's the longest time I've ever gone without one.

I've had several stints in my life without a TV, starting in about 1982 when I went for a a little over a year without one. I ended up hastily buying one a few days before the local-to-me Washington Redskins made their first appearance in the Super Bowl. It was worth it—Joe Gibbs, Art Monk, Joe Theismann, Big Dave Butz, John Riggins, and and "the Hogs" and the rest of them routed the Miami Dolphins for their first Super Bowl win.

The trouble with television was highlighted for me two weeks after the Super Bowl, when I found myself mindlessly watching reruns of "Bewitched" at two o'clock in the morning. (I admit I was rather bewitched by Elizabeth Montgomery.) Samantha wiggled her nose and Aunt Clara disappeared and the spell wore off me suddenly; I "came to" and marveled that the little black magic box could be causing me to waste my time on Earth so profligately.

I do miss television occasionally, I can't lie. I would like to watch some of the sporting events, and I do admit I'm less in touch with the news than I was when I watched network news every evening (tip for sleep improvement: watch the early news, never the late news). And when something really momentous happens, like the awful California wildfires, television is still where people like to turn for the latest.

The existential oddity of television sets is a leitmotif in the
work of Lee Friedlander, one of my photographic touchstones.

But there are a lot of things I hate about TV, too. The incubated culture of commercialism, very little of which I actually agree with; the constant hectoring yammer of false cheeriness; the torrent of ads and the increasing brevity and mannerism of the bits in between the ads; the glossy surface, seldom with any substance or soul beyond or beneath it; and the unceasing spellbinding distraction it encourages from the life I actually live.

And I see a little TV...just not on TV. Four or five years ago I binge-watched The Wire (which is the legendary Great American Novel in my opinion), and a year or two ago I did the same with the maddeningly inconsistent Downton Abbey, which I understand is being rejuvenated for the big screen next year. With Maggie Smith.

But most of my attempts to ignite an interest in popular series splutter, fizzle, and fade out. I tried, but I couldn't get into Breaking Bad or The Sopranos.

Besides, if you're a snooker fan like I am, there isn't time for watching much else.

I'm used to life without TV now, and I doubt I could go back. My friend Jim, whom I've known since we were seven, hasn't watched TV since the 1970s. It is possible. (They keep a TV and a DVD player in the closet and bring it out occasionally to watch a movie.) Anyway, I prefer to listen to music, or the waterfall, or the silence, and to read rather than watch. Most of all, I think I like being here, as opposed to letting myself be transported to some Wizard of Oz fake world where there's no there there*.

Mike

"Open Mike" is the often off-topic Editorial page of TOP, in which Yr. Hmbl. Editor contemplates life. It appears on Wednesdays.

*"There is no there there" is the best-known quote of Gertrude Stein's; she was referring to her childhood home in Oakland, California, when it no longer existed. The line appears in Chapter Four of her book Everybody's Autobiography, which continues her most famous book, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. Stein, like Samuel Johnson and Oscar Wilde among others, was one of those authors who suffer the bittersweet fate of being more interesting than their works.

Original contents copyright 2018 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.

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Featured Comments from:

Khürt Williams: "If Netflix is TV then...I am lost. But Jim [in another comment —Ed.] has a point that 'computers, cell phones and similar devices' are just as effective time-wasters."

Mike replies: I certainly didn't mean to claim that I don't waste time!! Just that I don't own a television set, that's all.

I have two computers (one is reserved entirely for writing, and is only online so I can do quick research as I write), an iPhone, a laptop I never use except on my infrequent travels, and an iPad. I read on my phone and tablet. I watch shows and movies occasionally on the 27" computer (not as often as once a week, although sometimes I rise to that—I let my Netflix subscription lapse a few years ago), and I watch an awful lot of YouTube—most of it snooker matches from around the world. I can't watch them in real time, but since I'm very far removed from the world in which snooker is a "thing," I don't run much risk of hearing the outcomes beforehand. Being a British sport, snooker matches can go on for hours—I mean as much as six or eight hours over multiple days—so to watch even a fraction of a tournament can be a very significant time commitment. I would file that under "entertainment" rather than wasted time, like other people watch football or soccer, but that might be rationalizing!

Open Mike: Teavivre (Tea Update) (OT)

["Open Mike" is the often off-topic Editorial page of TOP. It appears with iron discipline on Wednesdays. So is today Wednesday?! It is!

That's the story and I'm stickin' to it. —Yr. Hmbl. Ed.]

-

Bao Jia Cun Organic tea garden in Zhe Jiang Province of China
where some of Teavivre's teas are sourced.

...And the adventure continues. So far I've tried about 25 different kinds of green tea.

I don't like green tea very well yet, but it's healthier than coffee. The caffeine dose in the coffee I like messes with my heart (I've had a-fib). I had to prove that to myself: stayed off coffee for a week or three, then had my usual mug. Sure enough, I could feel the effect. Not good.

So that's it for coffee for me. (I don't like the idea of decaf.) I was a daily coffee drinker for most of 45 years—even roasted my own beans for a few years, which was delightful, a real pleasure.

But life is change, and ya gotta do what ya gotta do.

First step with green tea was to get away from teabags. Processing and handling dried tea leaves results in a certain amount of dust, flakes and bits, and those are used in teabags where what you can't see doesn't hurt you. Tea dust over-extracts easily, resulting in bitterness and astringency (that sourish taste with a "dry" mouthfeel—the goal with tea brewing is to extract for as long as you can before tasting any astringency. This requires some experimentation; good suppliers give you a starting point, but don't let it end there. Experiment for yourself). I did find a few teabag teas I like. One was in a sampler from Stash Teas that, alas, I've never been able to find again, and another was Tazo Organic Pan-Fired Green.

But loose leaf tea is the way I'm going to go.

Second step was to work out a brewing method. I got that lovely Willow & Everett electric kettle with temperature presets which is a fantastic luxury—it works perfectly and is surprisingly accurate. It was a good purchase; I love it. So nice to be able to heat water to just the temperature I want. (The 205°F setting is perfect for pour-over coffee, too.) And it turned out that the little glass teakettle I bought has a large oversized strainer that happens to fit perfectly in the top of my old Shaker Village mug I've had since I was nine years old. The glass top of the teapot covers it nicely. So the pot itself was prematurely retired and I brew tea right in the mug—it makes about 15 ounces, which is two of the traditional American "large" cups of tea. (Our cups of tea are about 8 ounces; Asians tend to drink cups of 3.5–4 ounces.)

Brewing tea. (Here's that timer. It's weighted so it doesn't slip around.)

I've tried a number of sources such as Harney and Sons, Tea Source which Ctein likes, Teavivre, Têtê Tea (from the Himalayas in Nepal, which I think is cool), Clearview Tea Co. which is owned and run by the wife and daughter of a Canadian TOP reader, and several others.

I've settled on Teavivre as my chosen source, for four main reasons:

1. They offer free samples of your choice with your first order. Very nice. You can buy samples too, with enough tea for two American cups or four Asian cups. Good for exploring.
2. You can choose for your tea to be delivered in a tin. If you buy the smallest (3.5 oz.) amount of tea, the tin only costs a few extra bucks and will hold 6–12 ounces of tea. They're high-quality tins with double-seal tops. You only need a few for the favorite teas you'll keep in stock, but it's nice to be able to get these cheaply.
3. They offer a wide variety of teas, good if you want to experiment to find the ones you like best. (Têtê Tea by contrast offers only three, white, green, and black.)
4. They're based in Fujian province in China, which is where the people who own my favorite local sushi restaurant come from. Through that connection I know several people from Fujian province, and I've gotten interested in it and have learned some things about it. So I like that connection. Of course that's just me.

Many of the teas come direct from China when you order them (all the samples and tea in tins come from China, for example), so it takes 8–10 days. Teavivre does have a new American warehouse now, in Arizona, so certain teas in zip bags bags come from there and take less time to arrive.

I've found a few I like, but I won't mention which one I've settled on as my daily drink. It's got a flavor I love and is low in caffeine. My choice isn't a big secret or anything, but everyone should choose according to their own taste and everyone's taste will be different. I'm certainly no tea expert. (I don't even have a very acute sense of taste.)

Finally, I should mention in passing that I like the language on Teavivre's website. It reads like expressive English written (or translated?) by a Chinese person, which seems honest to me. I hope they don't change that. It's perfect just the way it is.  :-)

Mike

Original contents copyright 2018 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.

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Featured Comments from:

TC: "The community college where I teach photography recently had a field trip for teachers, taking us out to a tea plantation in the mountains of Pinglin, Taiwan. There we not only listened to presentations on the tea-making process, we were able to pick and process some tea ourselves.

"It was very interesting, and gave me a renewed appreciation for tea even though I drink it every day."

Antonis R.: "Easy to see the underlying connection to TOP. Teavivre founder Angel Chen writes: 'My husband, Chris, also my partner, sometimes would laugh at me, Since all earnings are spent on more trips to further discover great tea. In return I would say: 'Why don't you talk about upgrading your camera?'"

David Evans: "That is a beautiful kettle, but I would be lost without a water level indicator. Also I'm amused at the claim that with a 1000-watt element 'your water boils in a fraction of the time compared to a normal kettle.' In the UK a normal kettle is 2000 to 3000 watts."

Mike replies: Yes, but I would assume that you in the UK know best when it comes to tea kettles!

Mani Sitaraman: "The Internet really is a fount of knowledge. Here's a detailed explanation that is a good follow-up read to David Evans' comment about electric kettles in Britain as compared to those in America, titled 'Why Kettles Boil Slowly in the US.'"

Mike replies: And here's an explanation of "fount of knowledge" vs. "font of knowledge."