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Open Mike

Open Mike: New Habits

Monday, 06 March 2023

Happy to report that my lifestyle changes are going swimmingly*. My problems are worse than some others have, and not as bad as some others deal with. But they're mine so they're all I can share.

I'm either supposed to do, or trying to do on my own, five things:

  • Go back to my plant-food diet, and stop eating sugar;
  • Wear compression socks;
  • Lose weight;
  • Resume using CPAP; and
  • Exercise.

The Five Doctors (I seem to keep seeing different people) are more or less agreed that I was having heart problems caused by sleep apnea—my heartbeat had become uncoordinated and irregular and my heart wasn't pumping enough blood, so I wasn't getting enough oxygen. This was causing all sorts of symptoms. I've been back on the CPAP for 31 days and the difference is...astonishing. I've gone from extreme fatigue (four naps in one day being the signal that got me to the doctor) to no naps; from oxygen hunger and shortness of breath to breathing normally; from lethargy to energy; from badly fractured sleep (with an avalanche of nightmares) to almost normal sleep; from confusion to normal mental sharpness (such as it is, yuk-yuk).

I've been off sugar and back on my plant-food diet for a mere eight days, and have been working out for only six days, and I've already lost 9.3 lbs. (.66 stone). (I weigh myself first thing in the morning on an excellent scale.) Who knows if the weight loss is attributable to the return of normal heart function, or the diet and exercise, or the resumption of normal sleep, or all those things?

The exercise is interesting. I rather enjoy it. I just take my tablet and read, and that makes the time fly by. I use some combination of a total of five different cardio machines, alternating sitting with being on my feet. I get my heart rate to between 90 and 100 BPM and keep it there. It isn't hard. I'm going to add workouts with dumbbells sooner or later.

Books, books!
I'm really enjoying Bill Bryson's The Body: A Guide for Occupants. I love love love his guided tours of subjects far from my usual field of interest; I lapped up his lovely book on physics, A Short History of Nearly Everything. The Body is equally entertaining, and bits and pieces of fascinating information fly by. For instance, babies who grow up in houses with cats present almost never get asthma. (I'm on the chapter about the lungs now.) His vivid account of how long it took before we accepted that smoking was linked to lung cancer is very telling. There's certainly a parallel to the obesity epidemic: as Dr. John McDougall says, "People love to hear good news about their bad habits."  

Speaking of which, that's what I'm working on now, habits. I'll let you know how it goes. I'll report back in a month or two. I hope I can do this. (I initially mistyped "can't" for "can"...Freudian slip?)

And speaking of habits—to briefly get back on topic—I'm carrying the camera again. Too many pictures were going by in my daily life. From now on, where I go, the camera goes.

Mike

*Except that I'm having trouble with time management.

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

Featured Comments from:

Keith Mitchell: "I also enjoy Bryson's writing. Despite being a recently retired registered nurse, The Body left me with a sad sense of my lack of knowledge but simultaneously a sense that more work and research will still facilitate big improvements to our health.

"Glad to hear you are on the right side of your health concerns and hope that your new habits become embedded quickly."

Steven ralser: "If you want to read further about one of the reasons why it took so long to recognize the link between smoking (and second hand smoke)and lung cancer, read Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming, by Naomi Oreskes [and Erik M. Conway —Ed.]. See also https://www.merchantsofdoubt.org."

JoeB: "Good to hear the phoenix is rising from the ashes. I have found going to the gym an excellent way to organize my day—I enjoy the routine. I also enjoy the results of my workout. The social aspects of seeing the same folks at the same time of day cannot be discounted. Diet cannot be ignored. What and how much is eaten make all the difference in our life. I should have turned green if the saying 'you are what you eat' is true!"

MikeR: "Yay for you! And aren't those sleep apnea nightmares horrifying?"

Mike replies: They certainly are. I didn't think I was going crazy, but I did think the cause was fundamentally psychological. I didn't realize it was a symptom of sleep apnea.

Posted on Monday, 06 March 2023 at 09:51 AM in Off-topic posts, Open Mike | | Comments (7)

Sunday, 07 February 2016

Open Mike: I Miss IBIS

I never learn.

I'm like Charlie Brown kicking Lucy's football....

I was thinking that the A6000 replacement might have IBIS. The A7 cameras have IBIS; the Olympus cameras have IBIS. It was rumored that the A6000 replacement would have IBIS. It seemed like a reasonable assumption. IBIS is one thing I miss.

Instead, Sony improved the autofocus speed and the video performance.

Sony A6300The new Sony A6300

You should never wait for what's coming like you know what's coming. Never assume. Until something exists, it doesn't exist.

I know, I should know! I keep telling other people not to do this, and you would think I could take my own advice.

But no.

Anyway, I'm pretty disappointed about the A6300.

How about you? Were faster autofocus and better video the two things you thought the small APS-C Sony ILC needed?

I have a few additional questions as well.

  • If you have an A6000, were you frequently annoyed with the AF speed?
  • Is the A6xxx the first camera you think of when you think of a need for outstanding focus tracking?
  • Do we really need stills cameras to double as video cameras?
  • Finally, do you ever come running up to kick this particular football only to have Lucy yank it away?

Discuss....

Mike

[UPDATE: ...And we have a name for this! "I have noticed this phenomena more generally as 'pre-release syndrome.' To wit: 'any camera that hasn't been released yet contains all the features you were looking for in your next camera, until it is released.' Or more generally: no new camera can live up to the hype that we generate for ourselves regarding it." Thanks to MarkR for this. —MJ]

[UPDATE no. 2: I went to an opening this afternoon, and hauled the "old" (Sept. 2012, i.e. back when I was young) NEX-6, to refresh my memory and see if the focus speed really needed improving. I can't speak to the A6000, but the NEX-6 is pretty slow, as least with the Sigma 60mm DN I was using on it. —MJ]

Original contents copyright 2016 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:

Dori: "If it had been me there would be weathersealing...might have switched over then, but IBIS would be good too." 

Pete Mc: "Personally? Yes, this is the perfect update. I use my A6000 as part of a pair with an A7R. The A7 looks after high quality, low speed work. The A6000 looks after action—no need for IBIS, just give me better and better AF and I'm happy. I freely admit my use may be unusual, but to me the development of the A6xxx and A7x series as a pair is almost perfect."

Romano Giannetti: "I feel the same. Was waiting for the A6000-with-IBIS unicorn, to buy it with the alpha adapter to substitute my A55. But no.... And the A7 is out of the roof for me. Bummer."

Markus Spring (partial comment): "Maybe it"s due to the geographical situation (I live in Germany, with really short days in winter a.k.a half of the year), IBIS is the feature I treasure most in my cameras, and I wouldn't buy one without it. Especially when creating/taking pictures on a daily basis, additionally to the bread job, times with dwindling light are more the rule than the exception, but thanks to IBIS I really can make best use of them."

[For the full text of partial comments, please see the full Comments Section by clicking on "Comments" below. —Ed.]

JBo: "Not sure why, but I don't like stabilization. Using Nikon talk, using it doesn't feel like 'pure photography.' Seriously though, I've also succumbed to the "waiting for a perfect camera" syndrome more than once...I was almost sure things I was waiting for would happen, because it was so logical and desirable for me, and everyone surely shares my logic and desires, don't they?

"And I was waiting for:

  • Small, FM-style Nikon F mount mirrorless full frame with a viewfinder optimized for MF legacy lenses—got Dƒ instead.
  • Small, rangefinder style autofocusing mirrorless full frame with compact Leica AF primes—got Leica SL instead with a huge zoom.
  • Longer battery life in every new mirrorless camera—seems to gets shorter instead.

"In more than one way photo equipment reminds me of modern politics—I never seem to get what I vote for. Well, Fuji seems to be the one brand that actually delivers most of the things I wish for—hence I'm a little afraid they may lose the next elections. ;-) "

Huw Morgan (partial comment): "There was also a much-needed improvement to viewfinder resolution. I'm not sure the A6300 upgrade will propel a6000 users to part with cash, but there are many NEX-7 users (like me) who will probably upgrade to get the better focus performance. The sensor hasn't been rated by DxOMark yet, but if the high ISO noise performance is significantly better than the NEX-7, then an upgrade will be a no-brainer."

[We called the NEX-7 "the most desirable camera on the planet" in 2011. —Ed.]

tex andrews: "Well, I'm not in the market for the A6300 or any other apsc camera, but with Sony I don't think the company is thinking about photographers' needs, per se. I am not saying they are indifferent, at all. But I think their main targets are Nikon and Canon. Thus it seems to me, from their every move for the past six years or so back to the A900,that they are ticking off items from a list (or two lists): 'Why is mirrorless inferior?' and 'Why is Sony inferior?'

"So, Price: box ticked in Sony's favor with both the A900 and the A850 especially, the first FF camera to break the sub $2k mark. Sensor MP number: box ticked in Sony's favor with the above two cameras, then with the A7R, and now with the A7RII (and the 645Z before it...). ISO/DR range: box ticked in Sony's favor with the sensors generally, but especially with the A7S and 645Z. And when they jumped into the mirrorless pool, they did so in such a way that they reduced their mirrorless competitors to other, lesser players, and probably quashed any hope Nikon or Canon had in making inroads there.

"But there were still a bunch of criticisms and niggles: the EVF-OVF battle, AF performance, Canon's video performance, the menus and haptics, etc. But Sony is chipping away at all of these as well, improving EVF's to the point where OVF is really only a personal preference, not one merited by any technical issues, improving low-light AF radically, improving video performance a great deal, second now only to the brand new Canon 1DS-MK-7-WXYZ-44-Q (and I'll bet not for long...remember, Sony has a long video history, broadcast quality), and 'improving' (translated: fixing) the menus and haptics as they go along. And with the new lens line, plus what they have brought out in E mount over the last several years by themselves and with Zeiss—and radically with the legacy lens abilities—chipping away at that 'no lenses' problem (or canard, depending on POV). They have some more boxes to tick off, but....

"Yes, all this pertains to us as users, but I think secondarily. Sony has two bigger fish to fry, and that is beginning to look more and more possible, as opposed to something most would have considered a fantasy six years ago. Contrast with Pentax and Fuji and to some extent Oly, niche makers whose prime targets seem to be photographers themselves, based on the way the cameras are made and perform. By the way, I had a very interesting discussion with a Pentax manager in the fall at the PhotoExpo show that really underscored this for Pentax (and me), as he discussed what he could about that company's upcoming FF camera."

Eolake: "Oh I hear you. I love my Olympus system. So big now. But occasionally my gaze strays to 'other women' who are mighty fine. Such big and beautiful eyes. Sony...Fuji...Canikon...[Skkrrrrreeeaaachtc] Oops, forgot: no IBIS.

"It's like looking at beautiful cars until you remember that these models have no steering wheels."

Andy Kochanowski: "Never even gave it a thought. Here is the funny thing about the former NEX line: for what it does, it is almost absurdly perfect. It's a mirrorless replacement of a mid-line DSLR, the type of camera that you would take on vacation, to shoot street photography, or maybe for a quick documentary project. It works unobtrusively, it gets decent battery life, its extra batteries are cheap, and you can control the basic functions you need without ever going near a menu.

"You could buy the A6000 for something like $400, which is what I paid for mine, and for another $150 get a perfectly decent image-stabilized kit lens. Is the kit lens a Zeiss? No. Is it decently, nicely sharp? Yes. Does Sony's software correct distortion in camera? Yes. Do its JPEGs look perfectly good? Yes. Does it use the best APS-C sensor in the world? Yes. What else do you need?

"I'm not immune from liking and occasionally wanting a cool, retro buttons 'n' dials, milled, black rangefindery camera. The Pen-F looks great, and I can just imagine how nice it would feel in hand with one of those Oly/Panny lenses. All the Fujis look cool as heck. Like an M6 with a Summicron made relevant for the digi age. I get it.

"Here is the thing. The AF in the A6000 is darn near instant. Unlike every other mirrorless I've used, and it's been a few, in real life it's easily on par with what was state of the art DSLR autofocus of  a couple years ago. My A6000 can track a moving, running dog. My various Leicas and Panasonics couldn't. When I go out to shoot street stuff for a few hours, I get instant focus where I want it without even thinking about it. Can I say it again? It cost $400. [They're for sale new right now for $498, and are apparently staying in the lineup. —Ed.]

"From what I can see, Sony tweaked the few things in the A6000 that would make a better experience for the shooter. The A6000 sort of clatters a bit. The shutter now has a quiet mode. The EVF on the A6000 is good enough, but apparently the new one is OLED and like the A7's. Those are great. The A6000 feels a little plasticky (unlike the original NEX-7 which felt like a tank). The new camera is supposedly all magnesium and better weather sealed. And it's all supposedly even faster and gets better battery life.

"And in about a year it will cost $600.

"So no, IBIS doesn't even cross my mind."

[Andy is a talented street shooter who has written about street photography here on TOP. —Ed.]

robert e (partial comment): "'Instead, Sony improved the autofocus speed and the video performance.' Shouldn't that sentence start with 'Kidding!'?"

Michael H: "I'm a NEX-7 owner who has been waiting for this one...I wanted improved focus (check), silent shutter (check), equivalent or better EVF (check), and IBIS (arrggh!). If the ISO performance is much improved then I won't worry about the absence of IBIS and I will buy it. If an ISO improvement doesn't allow for an extra stop or two advantage then...???"

Posted on Sunday, 07 February 2016 at 01:13 AM in Cameras, new, Open Mike | | Comments (87)

Sunday, 31 January 2016

Open Mike: Valentine's Day (and Some Hard Math)

Frenchkisscover

A cheerful plug—this is not objective or disinterested, because I love this book (I own a print from it), and Peter is a good friend, and Peter paid me generously to help publicize the book when it first came out. (It was a big success, thanks in part to me, and by "me" I mean you.) But—French Kiss is the perfect Valentine's Day gift. If you already own the book, you can probably attest to that. And if you order before the end of the day on Tuesday you can get it in time for Valentine's Day on the 14th. (International orders might not arrive in time.)

French Kiss print

This is the print I own from French Kiss. This would be a great
shot even without the cat.

There are five hundred copies left of the second (and probably last) printing. It's a really nice book, suffused with a lighthearted spirit of romance and the affection that passes between lovers and friends. The book was made to be a gift, with a stout and handsome red cloth slipcase. If one friend doesn't like it, another will. Can't lose.

The real deal
On a different subject, what do you think the chances are of this?

Klondike deal

This isn't a setup, this was a real deal, with a well-shuffled deck, dealing in rows from left to right. I once had my arithmetical skills derided by no less an eminence than Daniel Boorstin, celebrated historian and author and the Librarian of Congress at the time, and I doubt I could calculate the chances of one ace showing in a game of Klondike, much less all four, still less the chance of all four showing in a row. By the way, the idea of having to take a statistics class is a component ingredient in my idea of hell. I've never taken a statistics class—I only know just enough about it to know that it would torture me. Anyway, after some hard thought about my lack of mathematical aptitude and my ignorance of statistics, I've concluded that, in all mathematical likelihood, it's going to be a long time before I see this again.

Good Sunday to you. Gordon Lewis's thoughts about the new Olympus Pen-F on the morrow.

Mike

[UPDATE: As Gerry pointed out in the Comments, I should have said probability, not statistics. My bad. —MJ]

"Open Mike" is the Editor's page of TOP and is often off-topic or personal in some way. It appears on Sundays.

Original contents copyright 2016 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.

TOP's links!

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

Patrick Perez: "I gave my copy to my girlfriend for Valentines Day two years ago. But now she's my wife so I still get to see the book."

Duncan: "Here's my back of the envelope calculation for the probability of getting four aces in a row. It is .000014775, or 1 chance in 67,681.25 deals of the cards. So unless you play Klondike something like 2,000 times a year (assuming you've got another 35 years left), it's unlikely you'll ever see this again. If you want the gory calculation details, let me know and I'll send them along."

John Camp: "You're a smart guy, so you probably don't lack an aptitude for math, but probably probably lack an interest in it. When I took ninth grade algebra, I got a C, and was lucky to get it—when my father pushed me on it, I told him that nothing I would ever do in my life would require me to know algebra. I was wrong about that, but something interesting happened in demonstrating my wrongness. When I was a newspaper reporter, I was packed off to a special intensive class at Northwestern to study statistics and probability and polling; I did quite well, because everything I studied had a practical application. Twenty years later, when I was involved in archaeology in the Middle East, I took a community college course in surveying, which included trig. I did quite well in trig, because again, it had a demonstrable relationship to something practical. So math without a demonstrable application was hard to me—but with an application, not really a problem. I suspect there's some math involved in lens calculations, and you're a lens guy. Does that math defeat you?"

Mike replies: In my very earliest exposure to arithmetic, I was quite put out by numbers because no one would tell me what. That is, when they said "what's two plus two?", my response was "two what?" It seemed obvious to my childish brain that "two" means "...of a kind," and you can't add two of one kind to two of another kind. For example, two sheep plus two sheep is four sheep, but two sheep plus two oranges is still two pairs of things and not four sheep or four oranges, and two sheep plus two days is not four of anything.

Elisabeth Spector: "Hmmm...my back-of-the-envelope calculation gives 1/67,659 (admittedly with some rounding error)—similar to Duncan's result. So, did you win the game with this auspicious start?"

Mike replies: I play Klondike allowing only two single-card-turn passes through the deck, so clearances are rare, but, yes, this one scored a 52.

Yonatan Katznelson: "The back of my envelope agrees with the back of Duncan's envelope. Explanation (even though you didn't ask, and which you can ignore): To deal the pictured Klondike hand the four aces have to be in positions 8, 14, 19 and 23 of your well-shuffled deck. There are three other sets of four positions in the deck for the four aces that result in seeing them displayed in a row like that—so four total 'good' ways of positioning the aces in the deck so they come out in a row. There are 270,725 (52C4) possible placements for the aces in the deck, so the probability of seeing 4 in a row like that is 4/270,725 ~ 0.000014775."

Rube Redfield: "Statistics has nothing to do with math (neither does Sudoku), but everything to do with probability. I teach statistics (along with a basic 'learn your digital camera' course) at university in Japan and I am sure you would love it. I do it in a computer lab; the computer does all the math, everything is hands on, and the graphics are both beautiful and instantaneous. All you have to do is learn how to interpret them."

mao: "Given that you have two sets of answers from your readers, and you claim to be bad at math, what are the odds that you picked the right one for the Featured Comments? My reading of the problem agrees with the low probability camp, but to achieve better agreement on answers you receive, you may need to improve you skill at writing math problems  ;-)  "

Mike replies: ...Which deficiency certainly stands to reason. Also my lack of concern about discrepancies in the answer.

For the record, the problem, I think, is four aces next to each other but in any order of suits and anywhere in the array (four possible positions). Reason? Well, I dunno. But I think the fact that they were all in a row increased my sense of wonder at the occurrence, whereas I don't think I would have been any less amazed if the row of four was in any different position in the array (i.e., all the way to the right or all the way to the left or with two other cards to the left of the aces instead of one). Which is a totally subjective and impressionistic reason for formulating a probability problem, but then, the only college-level math course I ever took was called "Math for Poets."

Posted on Sunday, 31 January 2016 at 12:11 PM in Books, News and Occasions, Open Mike, Peter Turnley | | Comments (28)

Sunday, 24 January 2016

Open Mike: Hal and Marilyn's Money Exercise Part III (the Conclusion)

{Part I}

{Part II}

So then. A crazy blogger has bequeathed you twenty million dollars, under the condition that you spend half on your self and half on other people. You've made a list of everything you plan to do. Then you prioritized it, so you've got your items in order.

So now here's what you do. Strike off any items in the top five that are unrealistic—pie-in-the-sky, over the top. For instance, that gold-plated bathtub.

Then count off the top ten remaining items and strike off anything below them in your list.

Now comes the fun part.

Looking at the list you have left—ten things for you, ten for others—how many are things you could do with the resources you have right now?

The central insight is this: Some of the things most of us dream of doing if we got a windfall, we can actually do without one.

In bringing daydreams down to reality, you do have to adapt. You might need to be creative. For instance, if your list said, "Buy 100 antique motorcycles!" think hard—can you reasonably afford to buy one antique motorcycle within the next, say, three years? Could you find any other way to satisfy that ambition? Would a small collection of model motorcycles work, or is there a way you could find to ride antique motorcycles? You could create a life-list, like a bird-watcher. If your list said "Buy a brand new house for ten lucky poor families in town," how about volunteering your carpentry skills to Habitat for Humanity? Maybe you can't build a whole house for a disadvantaged person, but you could help shingle a roof.

Or you could modify the 100 motocycles item to, "Be happy with the eight antique motorcycles I already have."  :-)

The list, of course, is only a way to get a handle on your heart's desires—what you would do if you could. Often we carry these "if only" plans and ideas around in our heads and our hearts. If only I could, I'd set up a trust fund for dear ------. If only I could, I'd have eight dogs. If only I could, I'd travel to Italy just to see an opera.

But you only have one life. Gotta live. Many times, we can do some version of what we desire to do, if we're willing to bring it up out of the level of daydream and into conscious reality and decide if it's really something we care about.

Daydreams do tend to be extravagant. But the opposite is true too. I remember hearing an $80 million lottery winner interviewed on the radio. Naturally he was asked what he planned to do with the money, and he said he was going to buy a new car and pay off all his bills. Driving in the car, listening, I laughed and said out loud, "gotta dream bigger, dude." The point being, a lot of the things we want to do are actually within our power to do. Is "pay all my bills" on your list of things you'd do? Because you can do that, most probably. Take stock of where you stand, write everything down, come up with a plan, cut your expenses. Hire two hours of an accountant's time to go over everything and come up with a strategy that will work for you. If you want to pay off all your bills, you can get there. (Good goal, too, by the way.)

If your list said "travel the world!" Well, think hard. Where do you really want to go, and can you afford that if you save up for it? Many people can do some version of some of their daydreams. For instance, I had always wanted to own a BMW. But when I really looked at it, BMWs have changed so much that they're no longer what I once liked. So I bought a used Miata for three years. Enjoyed the hell out of it, then sold it on. So now I've done that...my "smallened" version of my lottery daydream.

Some things just aren't practical or reasonable without actually getting a windfall. For instance, my list said "Pay off both my brothers' mortgages, and pay for college for [the one remaining niece who hasn't been to college yet]." Well, that doesn't make any sense with my current resources—both my brothers' families make more money than I do and they're doing fine on their own. But on the other hand, a daydream I had a number of years back was to give $50,000 or $100,000 to the medical clinic  for uninsured people in my former hometown. Not being able to do that, I gave the clinic $1,500 over five years, which was all I could afford. That's not flashy. But I'll bet they didn't mind getting it, and it probably did a bit of good for someone.

Part of the beauty of the exercise, too, is that it allows you to retire some of your daydreams. Or get comfortable with the idea that it's just a daydream and that's all it's ever going to be. That means no Gulfstream G280 for me. But then, when I really think about it, I go whole years without ever setting foot on a plane, and there actually aren't very many places I really want to fly to!

I'll give you one little hint to think about as you process your own list to come up with ideas. Happiness research is pretty clear that spending money on experiences usually has a bigger payoff in happiness than spending money on possessions. As I always say, I'm just sayin'.

And many times, a possession is intended to be an experience...if you follow through. For instance, that trumpet you've always had a hankering to buy—it's kinda nice as just a possession, sitting up on the mantlepiece looking pretty, but if you actually go through the process of learning to play it, then it's an experience. Books perfectly embody this idea. If you buy a nice book, it's a possession. But if you read it, that's an experience.

I hate to bring this back on topic—it's off-topic Sunday, after all—but this pertains to cameras. It's how you engage with using them that takes them from "possession" to "experience." You already know that, I'm sure. Think of the camera you bought that was the biggest waste of money—the expensive one you hardly ever used. Then think of the camera you really bonded with, used for years, and got the most out of. Which one brought you more happiness? So in massaging your list, favor experiences over possessions.

Anyway, good luck with your list. I hope you find a few daydreams to give up, a few to act on, and that acting on those few brings you some happiness. And thanks to Hal Shook and his late wife Marilyn. For the exercise. I'm sure I've modified it according to my own thoughts, but then, you can do the same. I only knew the two of them for four days on a retreat in the Shenandoah Mountains way back in the 1980s. But they left a lasting impression on me. Obviously!

My funniest memory of that experience also involves a list. Hal told of how he was left reeling by the death of his first wife. He said he was depressed for two years. Then he woke up one morning determined to find a new wife. So he wrote down everything he was looking for in a woman. He read the actual list to us. Which was hilarious, because right beside him sat Marilyn, beaming, and every item on Hal's list described her to a T—her upbeat attitude, the way she wore her hair, right down to her preference of wearing big scarfs. Marilyn's obituary said she and Hal "had what can only be described as a 43-year honeymoon."

Tomorrow, I hope, an account of my [awesome/brilliant] visit to gearhead paradise.

Mike
(Thanks to the Shooks and Life Management Services)

"Open Mike" is the off-topic Editorial page of TOP, when Yr. Hmbl. Ed. lets himself off the leash to talk about another of his varied interests. It appears only, but not always, on Sunday.

Original contents copyright 2016 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.)
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No featured comments yet—please check back soon!

Posted on Sunday, 24 January 2016 at 10:53 AM in Off-topic posts, Open Mike | | Comments (10)

Saturday, 16 January 2016

Open Mike: Hal and Marilyn's Money Exercise Part II (And Some Other Off-Topic Items)

The other day, in Part I, you took an imaginary $20 million and wrote a list of what you're going to with it, spending half on yourself and half on others or on charities.

You might have noticed that performing Part I—if you actually put pencil to paper—brought up a few insights.

Part II is this: Take the lists you wrote, and prioritize it, from most to least important.

Since this is off-topic and Sunday is our usual off-topic day, I'll post Part III (when the payoff comes) next Sunday. So you still have time to do the work if you want to participate. Again, I think you will find it interesting, and it might end up giving you some practical information. We're not entirely playing games here. The point of the exercise is a good one.

'Chess with balls'*
I've become a big fan of snooker, for several reasons. First, the parlous state of American pool**; second, in stark contrast, the orderly, tidy and civilized presentation of the British and international snooker game; and third, the game itself.

Pool can't seem to figure out a game that really works—one-pocket is too esoteric, straight pool is boring to watch and can keep one competitor away from play for interminable periods; 9-ball places too much emphasis on the break, which is only barely controllable at the best of times; and so on. No one game really "works," such that formats for competition are always changing, and people keep trying to come up with better games (most recently, Joe Tucker's American Rotation).

Snooker, by contrast, is like American baseball: fundamentally perfect in its exquisite balances, its arc, and its variety of fascinating aspects. Like baseball it can be understood both at a basic level or on a subtle and profound plane. Each snooker frame, for instance, necessarily begins with a safety battle in which the tension between risk and reward is brought to the fore.

At first blush, snooker looks to Americans like a quintessentially British sport, which is to say eccentric, over-involved, and a spot daft: vaguely Monty Pythonish. But that's wrong. It possesses variety and complexity, and requires great skill, strategy and luck in ideal proportions. A lovely game.

If you'd like to try a snooker match, watch this one, between two-time Masters champion Mark Williams, one of only three players to win snooker's triple crown, and Ronnie O'Sullivan, the sport's biggest star and five times the Masters champion. A competitive match that ebbed and flowed, and that features some scintillatingly good play. The basic rules are simple: the colored balls have higher point values, but to earn the right to try for one you have to pocket a red ball first.

And if you want to see just how well the game can be played, watch Mark Selby's clinic in the first four games of this match. Both are from the current Masters tournament, which concludes today (Sunday).

Note: Please don't post any spoilers for any of the Masters matches!!! I haven't watched all of them yet, and I don't want to know who won what. Thanks.

From Go Dog Go By P D Eastman

I do not like my hat
I get the best advice from readers. Someday soon I am going to do a post collecting the best of all the wonderful tips I've gotten.

Meanwhile, a question. As recently as last week we were having nice November days. Then Winter very belatedly arrived. Now it's gone again, but it reminded me it exists. Oh yeah, Winter.

So is there any such thing any more as a warm winter hat? I seem to be able to find only the sort of light, stretchy, wool-like (but seldom wool) beanie cap of the sort that Millennials wear as apparel even when it's warm outside. Makes sense, because I got my hat from my son, and it says "UW Oshkosh" on it. I actually do like it. But I also need a soft, comfortable, pocketable, but warm Winter hat. There is not as much blood in my head as there used to be, as evidenced by my declining proofreading abilities. My feet neither, but the mysterious puzzle of socks is another post.

This could test the collective knowledge; I'm not sure such a thing as a warm hat exists any more, outside of Russia. (The Russians seem to do Winter hats the best of any people on Earth.)

Any ideas? Just askin'.

Hope you have a nice Sunday. Keep your head warm.

Mike

*"Whoever called snooker 'chess with balls' was rude, but right." —Clive James

**Compare pool to golf. The 37th player on the money list in pool in 2015 didn't even crack 30 grand. The 37th-ranked player on the golf money list earned $2,298,516.50. Pool is in a serious depression. In pool there are guys in the top 50 who, when they travel to tournaments, have to sleep in their cars. In snooker, the top prizes are considerably higher, and in the 2014–15 snooker season, 37th place was good for £58,739, about $83,000.

"Open Mike" is the off-topic editorial page of TOP. It can be eccentric, over-involved, and a spot daft.

Original contents copyright 2016 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:

Hendrik Broekman: "I wear a Stormy Kromer Original all winter long. When it gets too cold, I pull a hood over it. The brim is stiff and gets in the way of shooting portrait orientation, but then I just reverse the hat. They're accurately sized so that they don't blow off easily. My wife hates it but it elicits a lot of positive comments from the greater world."

John Gordon: "Try an NZ Lothlorian possum fur / merino wool beanie. The possum fur is hollow fibre and said to be the world's best insulator. The socks are good, too. I've got both. They work."

Mike replies: I think I might have to get one of those just for the pleasure of explaining that my cap is made of possum fur.

Adrian adds: "In reference to John Gordon's possum merino fur wool hat. He is absolutely right. No hat is as comfortable and warm. And if you are flinching at the idea of wearing a cute opossum on your head, then don't! The Possum (Trichosurus vulpecula) is no relation at all to the North American Opossum (Didelphimorphia). The Australian native Possum was introduced to New Zealand in the 19th century where with no natural predators its population exploded. Possum-ravaged forests are devoid of the once abundant bird life so there are extensive pest-control programmes targeting the introduced mammal. So wearing a possum fur hat promotes environmental values!—unless you are a Vegan. Then that's a whole different can of beans."

Michael Roche (partial comment): "It's interesting to compare the two sports, snooker and pool. They appear to be very similar but in fact are very different in many respects. Snooker as seen on TV is tightly controlled and well packaged with its clean-cut appearance, players' dress code straight out of stately mansions of long ago, referees mimicking butler-type figures, players with a very strong sense of ethics, i.e., calling fouls on themselves before even the referee does—all this leads to a strong sense of theatre which is attractive to watch and also to product endorsement.

"Contrast this with the way pool is presented and I think we can see why it is struggling to attract audiences.

"Although snooker is enjoying something of a revival at present, largely due to Barry Hearn taking over, and also the unbelievable talents of Ronnie O'Sullivan, as a participation sport it has lost a lot of its attraction. There are a few reasons for this falloff by the general public in playing the game: a) the game is extremely difficult to become proficient at and almost impossible to reach the level of even the lowest ranked professionals; b) unlike pool the size of the table makes it unsuited to all but the largest of family homes which means having to frequent some public snooker halls in what can be very insalubrious areas in most cities."

Mike replies: Having tried hard to buy a house (my old house in Wisconsin) with enough room for a full-sized pool table (9x4.5 feet), I can only imagine the difficulty of siting and maintaining a snooker table in a home. You would need not only a dedicated room, but a very large one.

Bob Blakley: "I was trapped in an English manor house for a week one time at a meeting, and the only real thing to do whilst drinking in the evening was to play on the snooker table in the basement. It's always mystified me that on such an enormous table they can't find room to put pockets larger than the balls."

Mike replies: Trapped in an English manor house? Sounds like an Agatha Christie novel! Was anyone murdered?

Posted on Saturday, 16 January 2016 at 10:21 PM in Off-topic posts, Open Mike | | Comments (78)

Saturday, 12 December 2015

Open Mike: Frank's 100th

Sinatra

Saturday night—Today is Frank Sinatra's 100th birthday. As you might have heard.

The only child of Sicilian immigrants, Sinatra was in many ways the prototype of the modern superstar.

When I was a raggedy young art student living in a tiny walk-up apartment in Georgetown, I liked to walk. I could walk for miles, and was in the habit of getting out of the apartment at eight, nine or ten at night and walking for a few hours. Often there were things going on at the Kennedy Center, and sometimes I could get in and see them—if I came in 45 minutes or more after a classical concert started, for example, sometimes I could get the ticket-takers to waive the charge for a single obstructed seat, and I'd join the audience between pieces.

One brilliant warm Spring night there seemed to be a lot of excitement radiating from the Kennedy Center as I walked past along the Potomac. Had to be somebody big—it got so you could recognize the signs, feel the energy in the air. So I went up to investigate. There were cars and people everywhere, but the police had one of the driveways barricaded off and there was a knot of people clustered by the barricade. There was just one single car parked up by the door all by itself. I sort of snuck up through the bushes on the grass so I could get a better look. A cop was there to motion me to go no farther. I can still see it in my mind's eye: an utterly perfect, spotless, gleaming vintage Bentley, looking regal. I indicated the car and raised my eyebrows. The cop nodded.

"Mr. Sinatra's."

Ah.

The singer had a fabulous stereo, too—three-channel, on which he listened to three-channel master tapes (pictures here). Bet that would sound great even by today's standards. Weird factoid on that score: Sinatra had one punctured eardrum. It's what kept him out of the ranks during WWII, back home singing torch songs for all the lonely women. Maybe his '40s stuff was the foundation of his popularity—he sang songs about loneliness, sounding like the sentiments came straight from his heart, when so many people really were lonely.

I must admit I've never been a true fan. When I was young, Elvis was for grownups, and Sinatra was for older grownups. Even the Beatles and the Stones were for kids who were teenagers when I was in grade school. (I'm "Generation Jones." If you were born between 1955 and 1965, Google it.) But of what I've heard, I like his '40s stuff best, too.

 (Music by Jule Styne, lyrics by Sammy Cahn, arrangement by George Siravo.) More here.

Whether you're a fan or not, it's kind of interesting to think back as these cultural milestones click past. Happy Sinatra Centennial.

Mike

"Open Mike" is the off-topic editor's choice page of TOP. It usually appears on Sundays. Some weeks it's a day late, some weeks, a day early.

ADDENDUM: The Internet Is Amazing Part 253,781,463,920: Here's "Mr. Sinatra's" (as the cop said) 1963 Bentley S3 Saloon as it looks today...and from about the same angle I saw it from all those years ago at the Kennedy Center, even.

FS-bentley

Still looks pretty good. It looked better when it was 20 years old instead of 52, under the night sky and the bright lights of the Kennedy Center, guarded by police.

Oh, and the Internet says the concert happened in April of '83....

Original contents copyright 2015 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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Posted on Saturday, 12 December 2015 at 05:42 PM in Music Notes, Off-topic posts, Open Mike | | Comments (18)

Sunday, 06 December 2015

Open Mike: No Timberrrrrr! Moment

Tree-felling-3-BW-small

You might remember that I belatedly discovered a beautiful Japanese maple tree in my new yard. (Pictures in this post.) It announced itself by keeping its leaves past the time the others lost theirs, and turning a brilliant scarlet-orange. (I have a dwarf Japanese maple too. Amusingly, I learned that they dump all their leaves at once: one day they're all still on the tree, the next day, wham, they're all on the ground.)

The Japanese maple was not getting much sun from the East and South thanks to the ridge and several larger trees hulking over it. The little tree's branches had spread out yearningly to the West, as if trying to reach for the only sunlight it could find.

The biggest problem was a stand of large trees right next to it—two big unhealthy ones whose trunks had crossed, one ash and the other cherry, and a smaller healthy one a few feet away whose branches had interposed into the branches of the maple like an arboreal Venn diagram. With all that canopy cover nearby, the little tree was strangled for sunlight.

I had in mind opening things up for the Japanese maple to help it thrive. But it looked to me like it would be a tough task to remove the big trees I didn't want without damaging the little one I wanted to keep. I couldn't quite see how it could be done. But maybe somebody could do it.

I was walking Butters when a local arborist, Fisher's Tree Service, was removing a large trunk-log from a culvert down the road, so I stopped and asked them how much it would be to remove my trees. They quoted me a great price, as long as I could be patient and wait till they had their main equipment in the area working on a bigger job. That was several weeks ago. I was supposed to call their office and set it up, but I neglected to.

Three guys showed up anyway, this past Thursday morning. The day was so heavily overcast it was half-dark at mid-morning, not the best light for taking pictures. But of course I did anyway.

And they did indeed bring some serious equipment. They had what looked like an elongated dump truck with a claw crane, and a chipper truck, and an enormous hydraulic articulated arm mounted on a truck—I didn't confirm this, but my Internet digging identified it as a Posi+ 70' stacked-boom man-lift, a type of boom truck. You can get a good view of half of the arm in the top picture. (It's foreshortened in the picture below.) It could get way up. Not a job for anyone who's scared of heights.

Tree-felling-6-BW-small

Note the holes in the trunk of the tree. Those look like condominiums for
somebody—did we leave some critters homeless with this operation?

It's always a pleasure to watch skilled workers work. This was clearly a routine job for this crew, and they set about their work methodically and almost silently, working cooperatively as a team and communicating, if they needed to, with nothing more than brief hand gestures. They had the process down pat. The guy in the crane would let a thousand-pound log fall into the air and just give it a flip with his elbow on its way past him so it landed in the right place on the ground. Other trunk sections they lowered to the ground using ropes. These guys are so good they probably don't even realize how good they are. Amazingly, they were working in close proximity to a rhododendron on the ground as well as the Japanese maple, both of which we wanted to keep, and they hardly touched either one. All that heavy wood raining on to the ground and the only casualty was one branch of the rhododendron. They plucked out those giant trees from in between the two smaller, fragile plants like it was the easiest thing in the world.

They patiently removed the trees from the top down. There was none of that classic "timberrrr!" cut-from-the-bottom-and-let-'er-fall-over stuff. This was as close as we got to that:

Timer-comb

In the first picture they're keeping pressure on the last section of trunk using a rope from the claw so that it won't fall on the rhododendron. The boss looks on with interest from the bucket of the aerial lift. In the second picture, over she goes...

Tree-felling-2-BW-small

...And then into the truck with the claw to be carted away.

Fisher-tree-service-BW-small

Here's the crew that did my work: George Fisher, Jason Tietjen, and Eric Fisher, of Fisher Tree Service, Bluff Point, New York, 315/536-2743. They do very good work. Note the damage in the trees revealed by the chainsaw cuts.

Tree-felling-5-BW-small

Butters rockets past the three new stumps at full speed.

Tree-felling-7-BW-small

Come Spring, the Japanese maple (foreground) is going to find conditions in the neighborhood much improved.

Mike
(Thanks to Mrs. Fisher for the names for the caption)

Original contents copyright 2015 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:

Mark Jennings: "Hello Mike, Those big holes could be pileated woodpecker work that has been shaped by weather, rot, and squirrels or raccoons. Insects, birds, squirrels, raccoons and even black bears will use big hollow trees. Black bears, of course, need a bigger entrance, but sometimes they can be found asleep quite high up in old snags. In any case, in the woods hollow trees are a big deal for many species. In the yard they can be a nuisance or a hazard. I understand your aesthetic and practical concerns.

"The arborists' picture reminds me of old logging crew photos from the early 1900s. I live in timbering eastern WV. It also reminds me that often the best stories are found close to home. They tend to be heartfelt."

Yvonne: "Over the years, we've spent a small fortune on tree work. I love watching experienced arborists—they are amazingly skilled and adept at climbing trees too. As we walk around our older suburban neighborhood, I see countless trees that could use the services of a good arborist, but sadly few people want to spend their money that way."

Posted on Sunday, 06 December 2015 at 10:38 AM in Open Mike | | Comments (34)

Sunday, 29 November 2015

Open Mike: Theory of Diaries

[Note: I had promised Chapter Three of "Mastering Photography" for today, but it's just not quite cooked yet and I don't want to rush it. Here instead is a bit of a meditation on blogging that started as a response to Peter Croft. I can't be sure—my email records don't go back that far—but I think it was a question from Peter that inspired "On the Sharpness of Lenses" on mir.com many years ago.

I could be misremembering that. One aspect of my work life is that thousands of names go by without faces attached, and for a person with a primarily visual memory that can get confusing! —Mike the Ed.]

Peter Croft (partial comment—see the Comments section to the previous post for Peter's entire text): "I started my blog in May 2009...I've done 729 posts so far and I usually write something on average every second day. It's just a diary really, on anything and everything to do with my life. I never feel lost for words. It's mundane stuff (my car got bumped from behind on the road yesterday, so I'll gnash my teeth about that). Occasionally I get a bit more profound and I'm quite proud of a few of my posts. I always keep posterity in mind, thinking of Samuel Pepys's diary. Who knows whether someone in 500 years time will read my words about what life was like in the 2000s.

"I'm also an obsessive keeper of lists and notebooks. When I retired in 1999 I started keeping notebooks of every cent I spend. People say, 'I don't know where the money goes!' I do. It keeps my mind sharp too, as I mentally retrace my day's activities and where I was and what I spent.

[...]

"I get maybe two comments a year. I don't know whether I'm too boring or too ready to take up the cudgels. I admit I do have strong political views and opinions. Oh well, it's really only my on-line diary, written for myself so it matters not. I just feel the need to write."

Mike replies: It's known that a higher-than-random percentage of successful people keep (or kept) diaries or journals.

I haven't been able to find more about the "theory of diaries" so I haven't written much about it, but an article I read once made an impression on me. It claimed that writing diaries leads to greater accomplishment. It's said to work by improving your consciousness, and bringing into better awareness patterns and habits that are more below the surface for most people, which in turn improves your planning and your direction in life and helps you progress. The writer's conclusion was that maybe it's not that accomplished people keep diaries; maybe it's the other way around, that the process of keeping a diary helps people become more accomplished.

Fascinating idea.

I do have to say that TOP is not a diary and it's not actually personal. As quirky and self-involved as I sometimes get, I have to say I always have the audience in mind and I am always (really without much in the way of exception) writing for others—to entertain or to enlighten or just to provide "virtual company." There's a lot of "me" in some posts, but it's always "for" you. So TOP doesn't function as a diary. In fact, I have a poor memory for what I wrote about on TOP in the past, last month or last year—so it's interesting, to me, too, to occasionally go back and scan over old posts.

As far as comments go, blog-writing is a numbers game. Only something like 2% to 4% of my readers ever buy things through my links, for instance. It's only because I have so many readers that that works. And only about 5% of my readers ever comment. That's one in twenty, though, which seems like a high ratio to me. And the highest percentage of a day's readers who have ever commented on any given single post is somewhere around 1%.

Peter might want to think about "inviting" comments more effectively. I'm almost always genuinely interested to hear from readers—often it's the way that I get to enjoy my own blog! (Since I write most of the posts, those aren't so enlivening for me.) But it's a knack to learn to leave "conceptual space," if you will, for others to step in to. There have been times when I've published beautifully presented guest posts that draw very few comments. It's because they're self-contained—"sealed," one might say. They're interesting to read, but they don't invite conversation. I try to leave some open ends in posts, because I'm eager to hear from readers.

Peter-croftPeter Croft. He's the one in the kimono.

Every day in its day
But back to the Theory of Diaries. Think of addiction: the great insight of the founders of Alcoholics Anonymous was to understand the pattern of addiction and turn it on its head. Addiction works one day at a time; we think, "I'll just get high one more day and then I stop tomorrow" or "I'll just get drunk today but this is the last day, then I'll deal with it tomorrow." (Cf. the song by Jane's Addiction, "Jane Says.") Bill and friends got the idea to use the same strategy for sobriety: it's too daunting to quit forever (the idea can be so dismaying that it causes people to give up right on the spot), so all you have to do is stay sober for one more day—"one day at a time" in the mantra of AA.

The advantage of keeping a diary or journal of your life is that it helps you keep better track of all the perpetual tomorrows. It lets you see your patterns more easily. For instance, I've been wanting to write a book. But I've been wanting to for thirty-five years. In my mind it's always something I'm about to get started on—it's an ambition that's always in the present. But actually doing it is something I always put off.

That's the kind of thing a diary helps you with—if I kept a journal, I might be able to look back and think, "jeez, I've been thinking this way since 19xx. I'd better get to it." Or "this never happens; I'd better give up that ambition." It helps track your changes, your thinking, your priorities, helps you be more conscious of actual vs. perceived progress and stasis.

For the Theory of Diaries to work, it specifically shouldn't be literary—just write down what you did, who you were with, what your top concerns are that day, what you're working on and thinking about. But be practical. Think in terms of your life and its direction—your "progress" through your life you might say.

I have a friend who kept a journal for a number of years, and when a new situation presented itself that related to a period of her past, she was able to go back and reread her journals for clues as to how she was thinking and feeling back then. That's another useful feature of a diary. It's data. A record. Mining it can help with the kind of insight that helps you to evolve and progress in your life and understand yourself better.

Another friend kept notebooks for years, in which he wrote down useful ideas, quotes he liked, reactions to art, all sorts of things—they were like creativity-incubators. I always thought it was the same book he was carrying around with him, but then in his college room I saw about nineteen identical volumes lined on his shelf and I realized he was filling up book after book. Then the time came when he stopped. But he retains the metal habits that he developed while he was journaling—he's still very good at recalling quotes with exactitude, and he remembers names of artists and book titles. It was as if his period of notebooking groomed his mind, and eventually his mental habits were secure enough that he no longer needed the physical notebooks.

Can't do it
I've never been able to journal or keep a diary myself—I always got too distracted by ideas to keep a suitably simple record. I used to joke that if I had my life to live over again, the one thing I'd do is take better care of my teeth. But actually there are two things I'd do—take better care of my teeth, and keep a journal or diary.

Perhaps it's true that the great decline in the habit and practice of writing things down augurs against this for younger people today. Nobody works on penmanship, nobody writes letters (especially on paper)—the traditional arts known collectively as "letters" are in decline and disarray. Still, I believe that to write a diary or journal is great advice for young people who want to monitor their progress in life and improve their chances for success, accomplishment, progress, and for "knowing thyself."

Mike
(Thanks to Peter)

P.S. Notice how the third- and second-to-last sentences invite comment. See what I mean about that?

"Open Mike" is the off-topic weekly editorial page of TOP, not that I don't editorialize at least mildly throughout the week. "Open Mike" appears on Sundays.

Original contents copyright 2015 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.

TOP's links!

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

jeffrey K Hartge: "I started 'journaling' around 2010 (at the age of 42). I did it as a check against my changing recollections of the past. I wanted a more accurate accounting of my perceptions at the moment that I could look back on and see how much 're-imagining' I do with respect to my past.

"Anyway...

"One of the first byproducts of my journaling efforts was an explosion in productivity. Most days my journaling starts with "to do" lists for both the day and the remainder of the week.

"These to-do lists, in my mind, have several clear effects:

  1. Just the act of writing the list down allows me to be free of the mental energy of trying to remember the list. Now, I can move on to processing the elements of the list.
  2. The act of writing it 'makes it real.' I now feel compelled to do something about it. This also leads to my thinking about each item on the list more realistically. I stop wasting time with pipe dreams (that I don't have the resources to accomplish) and focus on what I really think I can accomplish.
  3. Seeing different activities on the same page causes me to prioritize. I think about what I really want versus what would be nice to do versus something that just seemed like something I should do. I find that I start with the items on the list that I can get done quickly—this gives me an immediate sense of accomplishment.
  4. It also allows me to realize the longer term tasks as longer term tasks. I then create sub-task lists for those items. I then, simply, 'nibble' at the sub-task lists each day.
  5. By revisiting the lists each day, it helps me keep in perspective the 'down the rabbit hole' type tasks/activities.

"The other major consequence of 'journaling' was an improvement in my recollections of events from the immediate past. Just writing things down allowed me to lock in the events more clearly.

"Journaling is an activity that I hope to impart on my sons. I definitely can see the benefits and have a level of regret that I did not start earlier.

"I started my journaling by writing in little black sketch books. About three years ago, my brother convinced me to get a tablet computer with a stylus. I was uncertain about spending so much money and so I purchased a refurbished one. That turned out to be one of the best purchases I ever made. I carry it with me everywhere and add notes throughout the day...every day."

Speed: "My photographs are my journal."

Mike replies: I used to try hard to do that, because I'm visual as well as verbal and my memory is mainly visual. I tried to make half my shooting a "diary of my days" and half for more artistic purposes.

The job I did was only "okay" at best. Many of the things I really wanted to remember most I didn't get shots of, and many of the quotidian things that happened that I did get shots of, I didn't need to, or care to, remember.

A further problem is similar: that the quality of a photograph is not commensurate to its significance or importance. Even among the pictures I did take, often I got wonderful photographs of things that were not meaningful to me, and woeful snapshots of things that were extremely important or dear to me.

Terry Letton: "There has to be a hell of a story about that picture. Inquiring minds want to know."

Peter Croft: "There's a big smile on my face at seeing my words and that image used. Thanks Mike. The Yalta scene was a Photoshop exercise in a course I did in 1994. May I recommend Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self by Claire Tomalin as the reading about Samuel Pepys. I've read it twice and might even read it again, as I enjoyed it so much. I find it fascinating to read what he did in the 1660 period, and especially to think that he never knew the music of Bach or Handel or Mozart or Beethoven. Even Shakespeare's plays were young then. His writing was not especially literary; it's just the small details that fascinate me, such as getting a builder to make alterations to his house. I hope someone in some future century might see my minor musings and find them interesting."

JK: "I started a travel journal when I went to Japan as a student in 1976. But then I ended up staying on in Asia and my travel journal became, well, just a journal. Which is to say a bit of daily meditation, a kind of regular calisthentic program for writing, an aide memoire (and digital since the mid-80s, so easily searchable), and a 40-year conversation with myself. I can't imagine my life without it."

Posted on Sunday, 29 November 2015 at 10:55 AM in Blog Notes, Open Mike | | Comments (27)

Sunday, 22 November 2015

Open Mike: TOP's 10th Birthday

In a few days—six to be exact—The Online Photographer (TOP) turns 10. I'll make an announcement when the birthday rolls around.

It gets an average of 19,000 pageviews a day, almost all of them on the main page because it's formatted as a simple weblog. Including its life at the old Blogspot site, there have been 6,693 posts and some 208,326 comments. I work about 340 days a year, including most weekends.

Whew.

All of the comments are moderated. Almost all of the them are cordial and collegial, and sometimes they're more interesting and more informative than what I've written. It's probably the thing I'm proudest of—I think I've attracted the most mature, most knowledgeable, most courteous group of readers on the Web. People who fling insults or who are spoiling for a fight go away, because they are not indulged here.

Ten years ago....

TOP started in 2005 because I was desperate. I had been without a job and very partially employed for four years, and was the single parent of a 12-year-old. I got a lot of help from my family but I came very close to losing my house. In 2004 we had our electricity cut off three times, and on the third of those occasions the electric company sent a man in coveralls in a cherry-picker truck who physically cut the wire to the house. We lived in darkness for three days while the food in the refrigerator spoiled.

Had to do something, so I did this.

In those days I was freelancing for money. The big problem of freelancing is "accounts receivable." That's when you've done the work, sent the bill, but have to wait to get paid. Sometimes it takes a very long time. Sometimes the check never comes.

It's still a big problem. Right now, two of my debtors have not paid me in well over a year, and by their own accounting they owe me more than £6,800 and €3,160 respectively. I've been counting on that money, but it's becoming clear that I will never see it. I'll have to write it off. The underlying problem there is, I've already paid taxes on some of it, and both creditors will no doubt send a 1099 to the IRS next year, just as if they had actually paid me. While neglecting to mention that they never actually did. And I'll be expected to pay taxes on the rest of it.

Seems unfair to have to pay tax on income you never actually received, doesn't it? What to do. To butcher an old saying, I guess I'll drive off that bridge when I come to it.

From freelancer to entrepreneur: frying pan > fire.

It's always something like that, times about 13. I really just want to write, but sometimes "all those other things" take up what seems like the lion's share of my time.

All you professional photographers out there know exactly what I mean. That's the life, ain't it?

I shouldn't complain. (One of my favorite grumpy-old-guy expressions is "can't complain—but sometimes I still do.") This stuff doesn't write itself, but it's pretty amazing that you can make a decent living doing something that's as fun to do as TOP.

That won't last forever. Earnings from the site went up up up till 2013...and since then have, shall we say, subsided.

The reasons are plain. The huge growth period of digital camera sales is over, and camera sales are declining. More than that, it's that there's much more competition out there now. TOP is as popular as it ever was. But the word has gotten around that photography sites can be lucrative, so they've been proliferating. (Some better than others. Some a lot better than others.) Think of all the photo-related sites you've visited recently that didn't exist ten years ago. In fairness, some of the newer sites seem quite good. But it means fewer and fewer people buy goodies through TOP.

So when we turn ten, buy TOP a birthday present or two, willya please? That is to say, buy something for yourself. Use my Amazon link for some of your seasonal shopping? Pretty please, with a cherry on top?

I joke sometimes that you have to buy yourself a present if you want to support TOP, and you certainly can (I am at your service as a Camera and Lens Purchase Enabler), but you actually don't have to buy anything you wouldn't be buying anyway. And I'm not asking you to do all your shopping from here—those other sites you like deserve some support too. (I guess. I had to say that.)

Just don't forget old TOP altogether. Ten years on the Internet is like a 30-year-old cat or a 969-year-old man. But we're still here too.

Here's the link:

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

That link can be bookmarked.

The rules are, anything you buy counts, but you have to shop for it and buy it after going to Amazon from the link. Anything already in your cart or Wish List doesn't count, even if you put it there on a visit linked from here. You have to find it and pay for it all in one go for me to get credit for the referral.

Of course you can find Amazon on your own. But if you go there from here, some of your money goes to us. It's not extra to you. You'll pay the same price either way.

I probably won't make this pitch on TOP's actual birthday. As you know, I only remind you to use my links about 1/400th as many times as, say, Ken Rockwell does. (Lots of people who do this make much more money than I do.) You know what they say: sigh.

Senior docent
Years ago I heard a lovely story on a show about centenarians. One little old lady they interviewed had retired when she was 65, and for the next 20 years had great fun socializing with her friends. Then, one by one, her friends started to sicken and die. At age 90, most of her friends were gone. She moved into a little apartment and started closing down her life. In her own words, she was waiting to die.

Ten years went by.

On her 100th birthday, "I looked myself in the mirror and said, 'well, looks like you're not going to die. Better get a job.'"

So she got herself a job as a docent in a small museum across the town square from her apartment.

After nine years, given the turnover among docents, she had outlasted everyone and become "the senior docent." Made me laugh. I'll say she was.

Interviewed at age 109, she said, "I don't know what to expect now."

When I started TOP in 2005, my greatest ambition was to keep it going for an entire year. One whole year—that ambition seemed fantastical, far-fetched and unlikely.

I don't know what to expect now.

Sincerely, though: thank you for hanging around, and for helping TOP hang around.

Mike
(Thanks to every TOP reader, regular or occasional)

Original contents copyright 2015 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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Posted on Sunday, 22 November 2015 at 12:26 PM in Blog Notes, Open Mike | | Comments (104)

Sunday, 08 November 2015

Open Mike: Sorry, Neighbors!

I'm sensitive to noise. Not on purpose—it's just the way I am. Can't help it.

Most human beings, I can attest with bitter certainty, are utterly insensitive to noise pollution. Not one in ten people is annoyed by the intrusive cacaphony that surrounds us, and those of us who do care are so outnumbered we don't count.

All kinds of intrusive annoying noises plague me, but the very worst offender at this time of year is the dreaded leaf blower. I'm good with words, but I am at a loss to express my loathing of leaf blowers. The very nethermost region of Dante's hell has only two occupants—whoever it was who inflicted leaf blowers on the world, and the guy who decided that back-up beepers on heavy construction equipment should be audible from three miles away. The two of them deserve whatever torments perdition can inflict.

(In hell, the next level up contains every Harley rider who ever uttered the words "loud pipes save lives"—but didn't wear a helmet.)

But now I'm going to hell too. The reason? I bought a leaf blower. My first one ever. I feel so bad.

Leaves-small

But something had to be done. You want leaves? I got leaves. TOP Rural HQ is on about 1.8 acres, ringed on two sides by a fishhook of very steep hills covered with mature deciduous trees. It's quietly dramatic and undeniably beautiful. But there are leaves all over everywhere.

One of the most annoying things to me about leaf blowers is the mild mental illness that causes leaf-blowing perfectionism. So many citizens who are proud blowers of leaves seem to take pride in getting every last single leaf, driving me and my fellow noise-sufferers out of our minds in the process. When I lived in Waukesha, my compulsive neighbor would keep his leaf blower shrieking away for such interminable periods of time that I would be driven out of house and home—I'd have to leave and go do errands for a few hours because I just couldn't stand any more of the noise. Note to my ex-neighbor: dude, LOOK UP. See all those leaves still in the trees? There are more coming. It's no use for you to get every last single leaf on the lawn. Just get most of them and call it a day. Don't worry about leaving some behind.

Japanese-maple-smallHere's the prettiest tree in my yard at the moment, an unpruned Japanese maple.

Japanese-maple-2

I used to fantasize about sneaking into my neighbor's garage late at night and stealing his old, noisy leaf blower...and putting in its place a newer, quieter model. He did eventually get a much quieter leaf blower, which was truly a blessing to the neighborhood. If only he hadn't worn out the old one first.

Quiet is always one of the first things I look for when I buy most anything. Dishwasher, computer, lawn mower...even my new leaf blower. I did buy about the quietest one it's possible to buy—a Stihl BGE 61. I'm sure I shouldn't have bought a corded electric model. My yard is too big for it. But I just couldn't bring myself to buy a loud gas-powered leaf blower. I'll go over to the dark side...just not that far over.

...Yet. I'm quickly learning that even with a leaf-blower, moving large amounts of leaves around is not easy. I might have to succumb to the Tim Allen version at some point.

Might as well. I'm going to hell already.

Sorry, neighbors!

Mike

"Open Mike" is the Editorial Page of TOP. It appears on Sundays, if all is well with the world.

Original contents copyright 2015 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:

Tom Burke: "I have never understood what you do with leaf blowers. Well, OK, you blow leaves with them—but why? Where do you blow the leaves to? What do you do with them when they're blown? Can you blow wet leaves? Is there a legal requirement to do something with fallen leaves that leads, inevitably, to leaf blowers? Above all, why not just leave them where they have fallen....?"

Mike replies: Well, a) try finding the dog poop on a lawn that's covered with leaves; b) if you leave them, it rains a few tines and you've got a slick, sodden, slippery mess; and c) matted leaves kill the grass. You'd have to at least mulch them. And that doesn't clean up the leaves that are on the driveway, in the gardens, on the walk and patio, etc., etc....

gbella: "The quietest leaf blower I can recommend you is this special device called ‘rake.’ Also, it is the cheapest and it lets you do exercise for free!"

Posted on Sunday, 08 November 2015 at 10:37 AM in Off-topic posts, Open Mike | | Comments (122)

Sunday, 18 October 2015

Open Mike: Out and About

A few people have been wondering about why I haven't shown any pictures since my move. The reason is that I haven't shot much.

It's not your (i.e., TOP's) fault. I have a dog (Butters) who suffers from separation anxiety, and I'm "anxious" myself (formally, in terms of my attachment pathology), so it's not that easy to leave the house. Butters ramps up into hysteria and I feel guilty and troubled and resentful. Leaving the house is an ordeal.

But I went out shooting for two hours yesterday. I was inspired by TOP reader and friend Earl Dunbar, who stopped by the Fortress of Solitude for breakfast. He was in the area shooting with his Chamonix. Yesterday was the first time I'd done much shooting since I visited S. last Spring. (I showed you those.)

Silos-small

Low-sun-small

Lowns-penn-yan-small

Crescent-moon-small

These mini JPEGs are the "work prints" so to speak. The real pictures would be the finished inkjet prints on paper. These might look a bit too contrasty, dark, and oversharpened on your display (and yes, it bothers me that you can't see them "right." And that I can't either, since I don't have my planned P600 yet.)

Of course the pictures would have to survive my working method to get to the finished print stage anyway. If I were a photographer right now* I'd be going out every day, and adding a few more workprints to the pile every day; and then working to cull the pile into the pictures that kept their legs. As the pile gradually built up and winnowed out I'd end up with thirty or forty pictures at the end of a year. Then I might have something.

It's always fun to go do a little shooting. Every time I go out I get something. As I say I seldom leave the house.

The top three were all taken with the Fuji XF 14mm ƒ/2.8, and the last one with the XF 35mm ƒ/1.4.

Mike

*Whenever people ask me what kind of photographer I am, I say "I'm a writer."

Original contents copyright 2015 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:

Michael: "Mike, I just have to ask about that first photo, 'Silos.' It is lovely and gives me a sense of space I appreciate all the more since I too am stuck in the house a lot of the time for reasons rather like yours (so you have my full sympathy). However. The horizon tilts from left to right, and I'm trying to figure out if that is a feature or a bug. Since coming home once with a lot of shots by the North Sea which turned out to tilt, yes, I've had a nervous tic about this. Any helpful comments?

"Thanks."

Mike replies: The slope of the land there is nothing compared to the hills you have to climb to get up there. It's a very hilly area, with farms and especially vineyards on much more "tilted" land than that.

If this is a bugbear for you, I have two suggestions. One would be to force yourself to tilt all your horizons for a year, to make yourself stop worrying about it (and during that time, look at lots of Garry Winogrand); or, alternately, buy yourself an X-T1, because there's a horizon level in the nice generous oversized viewfinder.

Eric Erickson: "Mike, I recently aquired a Fuji XT-1 to add to my ever growing collection of cameras, and was considering both of the primes you used for the images, the 23mm and the 14mm. Based on the pictures you included, I like the way the 14mm works a little better than the 23mm. Any thoughts on which you like better in terms of quality, and as to usefulness of the focal length? My own judgment is that you would use the 23mm lens a lot more than the 14mm lens but the 14mm may well be a better lens? I am glad you are shooting, this is the best time of year in the North for photography in my opinion."

Mike replies: I used the 35mm ƒ/1.4 (~52mm-equivalent) for the last shot here; none of these pictures were taken with the 23mm. All three—the only three Fuji XF lenses I've used, by the way—are excellent lenses, and I doubt you could find anything to complain about with any of them.

I'd caution you from drawing conclusions about any lens from four pictures, however. It's possible to get a sense for some of a lens's characteristics (not all!) from online images, but when I do it I typically study hundreds of images, not just a handful.

As for the usefulness of the focal lengths, I've written elsewhere that I've been very surprised by the 14mm. I've never been an "ultrawide" shooter before, but since getting that lens I've used it more than any other, even the 23mm, which at ~35mm-equivalent is my longtime "home" focal length. I don't know what this is about, but I can tell you it makes the 35mm (52mm-e) seem like a telephoto to me suddenly!

Posted on Sunday, 18 October 2015 at 09:09 AM in Open Mike, Random Snaps | | Comments (31)

Sunday, 11 October 2015

Open Mike: Scott and Marlene Out on the Salar

Old friends Scott and Marlene visited the TOP Sanctuary in the Finger Lakes this lovely weekend, and brought with them perfect October weather. They've left; they're out on the Bluff bicycling now.

Screen Shot 2015-09-03 at 8.24.04 AMThe Bluff of Keuka Lake in about 1921. It's the center part of the "Y."

We talked all night and all morning, and (as always happens, not just with them) I learned things. Their youngest daughter is nomadic in South America right now with her Chilean boyfriend, and on a meetup with her, I think it was, they visited the Salar de Uyuni in Bolivia. Salar is Spanish for salt flats, and Salar de Uyuni is the largest salt flats in the world, visible from space.

They said they were driven out into the middle of the more than 4,000-square-mile immensity, and proceeded to do what most people do once the wonder of the landscape wears off...namely, fool around with photography.

Macfarlane-salar-1

The lack of perspective cues in the landscape make it easy to play around with scale.

Scott-marlene-salar-2

Cf. "White Men Can't Jump"—or white people in this instance, Scott said that they were only a few inches above the salt in this picture, but putting the camera very low makes it look like they fell out of a plane.

The Salar is high in the Andes at an elevation of 12,000 feet.

I'd never heard of these practices (or the place) before, but Marlene says lots of people get into it. Their daughter Abby used her Olympus Stylus 1 to take the photos.

Scott says of the Olympus, "it has turned out to be an excellent travel camera, compact, robust, relatively unobtrusive, and the EVF is handy where the sun so often shines while the 10.7x zoom has allowed her to take some good wildlife photos (something the 2.9x zoom on my Sony RX100 III is useless for). It's not as good in low light, but that was a trade-off for the rest.

"One other reason to visit that area of Bolivia are the photogenic flamingos hanging around, by the thousands, in the shallow, salty lakes of the Alto Plano, up thirteen, fourteen and fifteen thousand feet above sea level."

After it rains, the Salar becomes a giant mirror, as seen in this shot by someone else.

Looks like fun, doesn't it? I need to stop thinking of ideas for things I'd try. I'm not in Bolivia.

Mike
(Thanks to Scott and Marlene)

P.S. Oh, and speaking of old Woody Harrelson vehicles, Scott said that compared to big sites like dpreview, TOP is "like Cheers," to which Marlene added that I'm Sam. Funny. Do we have any readers named Norm, Cliff, or Carla?

"Open Mike" is the whatever's-happening Sunday sometimes-off-topic page of TOP.

Original contents copyright 2015 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:

Norm Nicholson: "Yes, Sam, I'm a regular and a Norm, and people have told me that I remind them of Norm. But, I don't think I'm as warm and fuzzy as Norm."

Mike replies: Well, I have to say it: NORM!

Posted on Sunday, 11 October 2015 at 06:08 PM in Open Mike, Random Snaps | | Comments (5)

Sunday, 04 October 2015

Open Mike III: Seven Dangers to Human Virtue

  1. Wealth without work.
  2. Pleasure without conscience.
  3. Knowledge without character.
  4. Business without morality.
  5. Science without humanity.
  6. Worship without sacrifice.
  7. Politics without principle.

(The "Seven Social Sins" of Mohandas K. Gandhi, known as the Mahatma*)

Funny how there can still be great things out there that you can discover from a T-shirt.

Mike
(Thanks to the guy who was wearing the T-shirt)

"Open Mike" is the Sunday off-topic edition of TOP. There usually aren't three of them.

*"Mahatma" is a transliteration of the Sanskrit for "great soul."

Original contents copyright 2015 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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Ed Hawco: "A T-shirt is the best place to discover it. You certainly won't learn this by observing the world around you.  :-/  "

Posted on Sunday, 04 October 2015 at 12:42 PM in Off-topic posts, Open Mike | | Comments (21)

Open Mike II: Sex Ratio by Age (Or: Men Die)

A friend mentioned a while back that "there are lots of lonely older women out there." Seemed like a truism I've heard before, but it didn't sound reasonable. Why aren't there just as many lonely older men?

Turns out my sense of "reasonable" was wrong (as that sense often is, in many people and about many things).

Sex ratios by age
I found a website by a statistician from Brooklyn called Jonathan Soma that purports to analyze the number of single persons in America by age. He did it by compiling census data and then charting the number of "unmatched" singles in various age ranges for various metropolitan areas, controlled for population. Here's what that means: say you have 1,000 single people (never married, or divorced). Four hundred and fifty of them are women. If you then "match" an equal number of single men to the number of women, you have 900 people split equally between the sexes. In this instance, that means you have 100 single men left over—or 100 "unmatched" males.

On the graphs below, of the Eastern half of the United States, the number of unmatched males per 1,000 single people is represented by blue circles of various sizes; the number of unmatched females is represented by red circles.

I first set the sliders for an age range of 25–34. Look at that picture:

Screen Shot 2015-10-03 at 12.58.25 PM

Just as young men always suspected! Lots of unmatched males almost everywhere—a shortage of females. (For me it was even worse. When I arrived at Dartmouth in 1975, coeducation had only recently begun, and the ratio of male to female undergraduate students was 3:1. Not a problem for the suave and sophisticated, but for us bumbling and underexperienced males, cruel!)

Why? Well, the sex ratio at birth in the United States, as in Britain, is 105, meaning 105:100, or 105 males born for every 100 females. And women statistically marry at a somewhat younger age. Beyond that, I dunno.

But as the age range goes up, gradually the excess of males evens out and then begins to be replaced by an overabundance of females. By the time people are in their 50s, the situation has thoroughly flipped. Look at the graph for the age range of 50–59:

Screen Shot 2015-10-03 at 12.57.29 PM

By this age, there are unmatched females almost everywhere. That giant red circle in the far lower left represents McAllen, Texas, a city of 136,000 where in 2012 there were unmatched single women at a rate of a whopping 372 per every 1,000 singles. Even after you discount for independent Texan ladies who'd sooner cope with a rattlesnake bite than a grumpy old male critter messing up the house, that still leaves a disconcerting number of lonesome fiftysomething women yodeling plaintively by the fencerail in the moonlight. If you're a female in your 50s in McAllen and you're hoping to get hitched, your best first step might be to move.

Maybe try Evansville, Indiana, the site of that tiny blue circle in the middle of the map. That represents 17 unmatched men per thousand singles in their 50s. All seventeen of whom are probably puzzled as to why they can't get a date. (Sorry, am I anthropomorphizing statistics here?)

Not only that, but the situation for women in their 50s might be even worse than the graph shows. Wealth and power are known aphrodisiacs; without getting into the issue of whether the effect works both ways equally, it's at least true that gender inequity has meant that more males enjoy wealth and power than females. Presumably, some wealthy and powerful single males in the 50–59 age range might be competing for younger females, further reducing the number of same-age singles available to women in that age range.

Risk-takers, loggers, and dudes who won't go to the doctor
But the question that fascinated me was: why are there so many more older single women?

And it turns out: men die.

We just die more. Throughout our lives, men engage in more risk-taking behaviors; we have a higher rate of drug abuse* and are about twice as likely to become alcoholics**. Men commit suicide at a greater rate than women. More men die in combat. More than three times as many men as women are murder victims. Congress still prohibits the Centers for Disease Control from studying gun deaths, but no one disagrees that gun violence kills more males than females. We aren't typically as anxious or as careful as our distaff counterparts, or as constrained by what other people think. We're apparently stupider: most Darwin Awards go to men. Injury from many causes (fighting, traffic accidents, political violence, crime, showing off, extreme sports, playing with fire or firearms or fireworks, etc.) is a major cause of death worldwide (about 10% of all deaths), and far more men die of injury than women. Men tend to more heavily populate the most hazardous professions (like the three most lethal jobs in America, which are logging, commercial fishing, and piloting airplanes, in that order). In addition, some men have a tendency to be stoic or macho about their own healthcare, and do things such as neglect routine medical checkups even when they can afford them.

Although not dead, far more men are in prison than women, and that presumably takes the single ones out of circulation. In most cases, anyway. And prison populations are aging: "prisoners above 55" has been the fastest-growing group among incarcerated men throughout the 2000s.

Also—I find this poignant—being single itself is something of a health risk. Married men tend to be a little healthier and live a little longer than their same-age single counterparts.

Apparently all this adds up as the years get behind us.

[UPDATE: Tom Burke pointed this out: "There has been one huge change in female mortality in the last century or so. The great killer of women, the 'hazardous activity' that women engage in exclusively—that is, childbirth—has become much less hazardous in the last 150 years (thank goodness). This alone would affect the proportions, because the risk from the male-exclusive 'hazardous activities' hasn't similarly changed."]

Not destiny
If you're looking at those alarming charts with a personal interest, however, bear in mind that statistics aren't destiny. Just because the odds might not be entirely with you doesn't mean you can't succeed. Young men find girlfriends all the time, and older women find new love—even in McAllen, Texas, there are still 314 men per 1,000 single people. A female family friend of ours found love in her late 60s, and began a rich and rewarding relationship that continues a decade and a half later; and my own dear mum got remarried at 57 to a man her own age, and they've been together for going on 24 years now.

But if you're a single man over age 60 trying to find a woman your own age and can't, well, you're probably not trying hard enough. Most likely, you don't even have to move to McAllen.

Mike

"Open Mike" is the "whatever durn thing Mike's got himself interested in this week" off-topic section of TOP.

*Men and women seem to become addicted at equal rates once people experience addictive drugs past certain thresholds, but more males expose themselves to the experiences than females do.

**Alcoholics do dangerous things when drunk and die younger so reliably that the gene for alcoholism gradually gets weeded out of ethnic populations: rates of alcoholism are highly correlated to the length of time a population group has been exposed to alcohol. In China, for example, where people have been exposed to alcohol for 5,000 years, deaths from alcoholism are low. But many American Indian tribes have been exposed to alcohol only for a few hundred years, and alcoholism is rampant among them because the gene predisposing them to it hasn't gone through millennia of negative natural selection. The Navajo Nation, America's most populous Indian tribe (the Navajo reservation is larger than the State of West Virginia), estimates its tribal members die of alcohol-related causes at a rate 514% higher than other Americans—and America as a whole is already in the high range for both alcoholism and alcohol-related deaths.

Original contents copyright 2015 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:

Geoff Wittig: "The male/female disparity is really just a powerful example of the brilliant effectiveness of natural selection. It works like this: There is indeed an imbalance in male/female numbers at birth, 105 males per 100 females. But it starts earlier than that; the disparity is more striking in utero, where early in gestation it's more like 120:100. It turns out male fetuses are less 'fit,' less likely to survive than female, at any stage of pregnancy. Hence a substantial majority of extremely premature infants who survive are female. (One theory holds that the nearly useless Y chromosome leaves males handicapped with only one copy of the functional X chromosome genes, where women get two, and the increased attrition of males is partly due to this 'sub clinical' x-linked disease).

"The increased mortality in males from birth onward due to our relative frailty and stupidity, not coincidentally, evens out exactly at reproductive age, where males=females. Nature is smart. Once we're done reproducing, males are relatively speaking more redundant than females, hence there is less evolutionary pressure to maintain our life expectancy."

Martyn: "Ha! At college (in the UK) I had the opposite situation—it was a teacher training college (as they were called in the '70s) which had transitioned from a 'Home Economics' college to one for general teacher training. The emphasis was still on HE so the ratio was around 10:1 female to male.... Happy days indeed."

Steve Jacob: "I think eventually the idea that there is something wrong with being single wears off, especially for women. As a recent divorcee friend of mine said... 'My kids eventually grew up, became self-sufficient and left home. I just wish my husband had done the same thing.'"

Posted on Sunday, 04 October 2015 at 12:29 PM in Off-topic posts, Open Mike | | Comments (16)

Open Mike I: The Mash and the Fury

C60Crew is back in a big way, opening up my mind and embiggening my ears. Legendary DC dj Kim (aka KK), who hasn't been on the radio in decades but whose voice is still sometimes recognized around town by deep savants, has dished up some delights for our delectation.

Here's the page. Everything from "Touch of Evil" on up is new. Even if your tastes are relatively adventuresome I suggest you start on "The Mash and the Fury," a winsome wash that's like the memory of a hot-day tour through open countryside. Warm and easy on the ears, it's been accompanying my mornings every day of late, soothing and salving my sore soul.

By the way, my only stereo these days is iMac > Halide HD > Audioengine A5+ powered speakers.  I love the Halide and I still highly recommend the speakers even if you run them off your computer's soundcard. For those who enjoy my various hi-fi writings, I just ordered the Audioengine S8 8-inch powered woofer for the desktop system (the woofer will reside on the floor, though) and I'll be reporting on that in a future Open Mike. I'm hoping the woofer will enable me to get the speakers raised off the desktop, putting them a little more into free space and dispensing with the bass reinforcement of the boundary.

C60Crew will not be for anyone who says "I listen to all kinds of music," because what they'll encounter is in the nature of all kinds of music, and they will not like that. But if you have big ears and miss real radio, a treat. Hope you like "The Mash and the Fury." If you like that one, try "Blue Bonnet" next.

Mike
(Thanks to KK)

"Open Mike" is the Sunday off-topic page of TOP.

Original contents copyright 2015 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:

Andrew: "Thanks for the link. I enjoyed 'The Mash and the Fury' very much. Some familiar and new tunes. I'll work through the rest of the lists.

"In these days of Spotify et al it's great to listen to playlists compiled by music fans with depth of knowledge rather than algorithms."

Dennis: "Man, I hope the metals used in the converter were mined and refined during the proper phase of the moon because that makes all the difference.😂😂"

Mike replies: I don't know what you mean. The Halide HD is not even close to being an expensive digital-to-analog converter...in fact, it's not even expensive as a USB-to-RCA interconnect! If you want an expensive DAC, try the Berkeley Audio Design Alpha DAC Reference for $4,995, the Light Harmonic DaVinci for $20,000, or the dCS Vivaldi for $34,999.

And when I bought my Halide, it cost $600. The current price of $465 puts it close to a budget component. I think it's a very good deal and very high value. And you get the interconnect thrown in for free, which warmed the cockles of this particular cheapskate's heart.

Posted on Sunday, 04 October 2015 at 10:58 AM in Music Notes, Off-topic posts, Open Mike | | Comments (17)

Monday, 28 September 2015

Open Mike: Puffing and Printing and Other Odds and Ends

"Open Mike," my Sunday feature in which I gab on more than usual, is sometimes a day late. Like for instance this week.

Eclipsed eclipse: I was very disappointed last night. I had a vision of sitting on the balcony and watching the Super Blood Moon eclipse over the towering trees, and the day had been clear and lovely. But clouds moved in at exactly the wrong time and I couldn't see a thing. Rats.

Dew Drop Inn: This weekend I enjoyed a visit from my artist second cousin Elizabeth Claire Rose (check out her website) and her husband Eric. They moved to Pennsylvania from Montana two years ago. Eric worked ski patrol and wilderness rescue and was a wildland firefighter (he points out that it's not always forests that burn) in Montana; now he's a brain-trauma rehab nurse. Elizabeth and Eric were my fifth set of visitors since I moved in here on August 19th, which is more visitors than I'd get in any given year in Wisconsin. They are dynamic young people, accomplished and interesting, and I really enjoyed reacquainting. We had a campfire out back at the fire pit.

Elizabeth-claire-rose

Intaglio etching by Elizabeth Claire Rose

My little stretch of East Lake Road is four miles from end to end, which means if I start at the house and go to one end and then the other and then back home again, I've gone eight miles. I biked that the other day and saw nine human beings the entire way, comma, yikes. That's only slightly better than one human-sighting per mile. At night you can hear the coyote howling out on the bluff; from the sound of that spooky nocturnal chorus I think there might be more coyote around here than human beings. Say what you like about Upstate New York, pro or con, one thing for sure is that there just aren't a whole lot of people here.

I might need every visitor I can get, is what I'm saying.

Big announcement! Tune in Wednesday of this week for some exciting photographic news from a good Friend-o'-TOP. You know him well, and he's back in a big way.

Puffer: I'm not a big fan of Nike, but I am a fan of its advertising agency. (Or agencies.) The company's latest ad amplifies on its "just do it" mantra in a nice way. It seems to say that just being in the race is a victory.

It's a sentiment I can get behind. Last Winter I went to the YMCA in Corning and did some sprints around their indoor track. Big mistake. Afterwards, my knees hurt so badly and for so long I thought I'd done permanent damage. Only then did I dive in and read up on re-entry running, and everyone says that when you're older and haven't run in a long time it takes a long, long time to strengthen your legs and bones enough to run and that you've got to take it slow, slow, slow.

So I started walking every day, sometimes twice a day, eventually adding very short sections of very gentle jogging. Again and again I'd feel my oats and overdo it (I like speed—a sprint is my reward), then get right back into it after laying off for a couple of days for recovery.

I'm happy to say all that groundwork has started to pay off. I'm now up to two miles a day, with more jogging than walking (pushing 60, I subscribe wholeheartedly to Jeff Galloway's run-walk-run method)—I'd say I walk no more than a third of my distance, sometimes more like a quarter. Yes, it's an open question how long my knees will hold out, but I'm hyper-conscious of my body as I run, and my form, and I'm in it for the long haul, so I'll be careful and continue taking it easy. It's certainly nice to huff and puff every day—feels great. I like running.

Print Offer: ...Coming right up. I'll let you know in advance about the date it starts, so you won't miss it. This one's a single print, a sweet treat.

Printer: I've taken the plunge and purchased an Epson P600 printer. Ctein's advice was enigmatic: "You're going to like the P600 for black-and-white printing better than any other inkjet printer on the market now. Whether you should buy it is another question," quoth the hirsute Gandalf-y Dumbledore-ish one. That was it. No further elaboration. Shall I cast rune-stones and scrutinize them for signs as to what he meant? No, no...tea leaves, it should be, of course.

If anything at all significant comes of this you will hearing more about it in coming days and weeks and wintry months; if nothing does, then you won't. Either way I won't gab on about it here. (You know, "just do it.") I purchased the P600, a box of 11x17-inch Canson Baryta Photographique paper (which features on the front of the box a photograph of a man who is worried about the high cost of the paper inside), and...well, a box. To put the prints in. I have high hopes, good spirits, and optimism.

Canson-manSee the worried man? He's thinking, 'Good Lord, this costs $2.50 a sheet!!'

Trubba: Mike got himself in trubba again yesterday. (I seem to be getting myself in trouble a lot lately.) This time, I said, "I could come up with a whole long list, a learning program if you will, of very specific exercises to help people to see better with a camera." This disappointed a number of people. Reader Ernest J. Zarate held my feet to the fire, writing, "Why offer that you have all this knowledge and skill, just to say, 'Well, I possess this knowledge, but, no, I refuse to share it with you'? It boils down to: you could, but you deign not to. What? Are the very people who support TOP via the mechanisms you've set up for that purpose not worthy?"

Um, ouch! That smarted.

Of course you are worthy. But what I had in mind would have to be a book. It's not top-o'-the-head knowledge. And, about researching and writing and illustrating a book, I feel somewhat the same way I feel when people suggest that I travel, or lecture, or teach courses, or visit foreign countries, or do personal appearances. Namely, that if I were doing all that, I would not be doing this. Most people who care one way or the other don't want to endure my silence for eight months while I go write a book. I blog, and that's what most people want me to do. Y'see how that goes? I could do all sorts of other things, but then I would not be writing TOP. I joke that my ankle is chained to the leg of the [sit-stand] desk, but really, that's as it ought to be.

You've got me right where you want me.

Right where I should be.

Right?

Diningroom-2-small

Mere decor: I've never decorated a house before, really. Turns out it's kind of fun. I only have about nine pieces of furniture to buy, and I'm not going overboard of course, but I feel like I'm getting everything just about the way I want it. It's like the house itself is a minor work of art: you envision, then reify. All about proportion and appropriateness. It's very satisfying the way it all seems to be coming together.

I can't find the comment in which a reader recommended Horning Chair Shop, a Mennonite furniture maker near here, but if it was you and you're reading this, thank you. They're very nice people up there—the shop is at a farm—and make solid, wholesome furniture. They will eventually be building me a game table and a couch.

What's your sign? Oh, and take a look at the sketch for the sign out front:

Top-sign...Of course, I'm hoping we'll get the name spelled right on the actual sign. It's "Johnston with a 'T,'" as everyone named Johnston always has to say.

For some reason I'm very jazzed about the sign.

More anon, as ever. À votre santé.

Mike

"Open Mike" is the detectably more self-centered than usual weekly editorial page of TOP.

Original contents copyright 2015 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:

David Philips: "We had clear skies in Massachussetts last night and though you can see countless eclipse photos today I'll show you my sequence anyway:

David-philips-eclipse

"I also started running recently and though I only have 60% of your years the walk-run method made it possible for me to get into it without hating it. I still haven't learned to love running on roads but now that I'm able to run a few miles without stopping I've started going into the woods. There's something special about running through the forest."

Geoff Wittig: "Coyotes are one of the distinctive features of rural New York these days. They're so canny and elusive you rarely actually see them, but at night they're frequently heard. I listened to them for a while last night while shooting the eclipse, which was beautifully visible just 30 miles west of Keuka Lake as the crow flies (sorry!).

"Our local coyotes are actually quite different from the Western variety, as they're much bigger (up to 70 lbs) and sometimes hunt cooperatively, both ascribed to their possession of up to 20% wolf DNA. I really like them, as I find their nighttime 'singing' pleasantly haunting, and they've cut down on the numbers of racoons, which around here are more nuisance than 'Disney cute.' A lot of the older locals despise coyotes, sort of a lingering legacy of the urge to exterminate every predator not on two legs, I think."

Rodger Kingston: "I love your Sunday OT Features, no matter what day of the week they appear. With regard to Jeff Galloway's 'run-walk-run' training program, nothing new there. When I was in Marine Basic Training over 50 years ago, that was how we did forced marches, except they called the components 'march' and 'quick time' (with a third component, 'collapse,' often showing up at the end)."

benny_pea: "Any chance of finding out where one might get a copy of that etching? It really is rather beautiful...."

Mike replies: Elizabeth sells them in limited editions of usually somewhat fewer than 30. You should contact her, but might get a belated reply, as they are hiking in the Adirondacks. She charges in the range of $200–$500, so they're not expensive.

Scott L.: "Re 'I'm not a big fan of Nike, but I am a fan of its advertising agency,' The Onion said it best many years ago in an article called 'Nike to Cease Manufacturing Products':  'Citing creative confinement and a desire to focus exclusively on what it does best, the Nike Corporation announced Monday it will cease manufacturing athletic shoes and other sports-related merchandise in order to devote itself fully to the creation of state-of-the-art television advertisements. "The last few years, it became impossible to maintain our high standards of advertising while faced with the daily distractions of making sneakers," said Phil Knight, Nike founder and CEO. "By discontinuing our entire product line, we will ensure that Nike remains the world's leader in the field of incredibly cool TV commercials well into the 21st century."'"

Roberto: "Epson P600 and Canson Baryta? Did the same and very happy with it. I suggest you buy also a box of matte paper, like the Canson Rag Photographique (you need to use the matte black for something anyway). I got it in the Canson Discovery Pack and I'm quite impressed."

Jim Freeman: "The decor in the dining room looks somewhat Eggleston-like, probably just a coincidence. Your joy with the move to New Yawk comes through in nearly every post."

Joel Becker: "I love the outdoor sign, but please, please leave '.com' off of it. It looked bad in 1999, and it looks bad now. If you want to specify the web address (as opposed to the entity name), put it at the bottom sized to fit in one line."

Mike replies: Really? I don't have that sense. What do other people think of the ".com" on the sign? There's still time to change it.

David Dyer-Bennet: "You may have the extra 't's people keep leaving in my last name!"

Posted on Monday, 28 September 2015 at 11:32 AM in Open Mike, Print Offers, Printers and Printing | | Comments (105)

Sunday, 13 September 2015

Open Mike: The Fate of Stories (OT)

The comedian John Mulaney has a bit in which he ridicules the emotional reticence of  the Irish. “I'm Irish,” he says, “and Irish people, they don’t tell you a thing. Irish people keep it so bottled up. The plan with Irish people is, ‘I’ll keep all my emotions right here’”—he clutches the middle of his chest—“‘and then one day, I’ll die.’”

Which is good comedy, but also the fate of stories.

I like people, and I’m sad when they die, but I also fret about the wholesale death of stories. It's like the extinction of the birds. Almost all stories die. Or rather disappear, when the people who know them expire. It gets to me every time I pass an old age home or come across a nameless carte-de-visite portrait in an antique store. Everybody has a story, but some peoples’ stories are astounding. They disappear anyway.

Historians don’t help; historians just give us a sense of false security, like someone’s paying attention—you know, it happened, after all, so it won’t just be lost. We live our little lives thinking known things are just known. And yet you probably can’t even name your own great-grandparents. They’re that far forgotten to you. And you’re one of the few people by whom, to be fair, they really ought to be remembered. Never mind if something really intricate and astonishing and memorable happened to one or another of them. Each one of them lived a whole long rich life, replete with events and struggles and successes and failures, and all you probably know about them is that they all each had at least one child.

Almost all stories die. On the other hand, some bad ones never do; I’ve read the freakin’ Iliad three times. I’m like Charlie Brown kicking Lucy’s football with that book. For some reason I think finding a better translation is going to make it a better story. But they can translate that thing a hundred times and it’s never going to be as good a story as it was to people who truly believed the gods were in charge.

And that’s another thing about stories—sometimes even the people they happened to don’t know them, entirely. Because we can only understand with our own understandings. Homer thought that when it rained a lot it was because Poseidon was angry. Q.E.D., according to Homer. That was all he knew, that's how he explained storms that thwarted human will, so that’s all he could report: we can't put out to sea; Poseidon must have not wanted us to. If you really look into things, though, you'll find there’s always another dimension of a story left to discover.

Homer wasn’t much for coincidence. If Achilles got struck by a deadly arrow in the heel, well, it had to be because the goddess made his body invulnerable everywhere else, right? Legend has it that the arrow that killed Richard the Lionheart made so paltry a wound that the King plucked it out, cast it on the ground and kept walking. It wasn’t the gods that made the flesh wound turn gangrenous and, eventually, mortal. But the chroniclers of Richard’s time knew nothing of septicemia or the germ theory of disease. The teller of tales can only chronicle what he knows. We each of us can only track the paltry arrows of our own thoughts.

I'm sympathetic to Mulaney's Irish. It's sometimes better, as they say, to let sleeping dogs lie. (Is that an Irish expression?) When Keith Richards wrote his autobiography, he said he had to spend two years immersed in reliving his own life, and you got the impression that wasn't exactly easy. Still, I think everybody should write an autobiography. Otherwise, the stories that you know the best, the stories that are so important to you, will only go away, lost like a bird falling out of the sky.

Mike

"Open Mike," the whimsical editorial page of the always mutable TOP, appears only, but not always, on Sundays.

Original contents copyright 2015 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:

a top reader: "Mike, I agree with you that everyone should write an autobiography. And regarding Keith Richards, I say that people with demons especially should write autobiographies.

"And when I say, 'write an autobiography' I actually mean, 'tell stories.' Storytelling is a powerful therapy. I've had my own troubles. My adolescence was dark, troubled, and deeply traumatic. For years I couldn't go out in crowds, I couldn't go to new places, I couldn't meet new people, I couldn't do new things. I could only live my routine. I could only sit with my back to a wall. I could only socialize with the people I knew. I could only eat at the restaurants I knew. I could only sleep in my own bed, with the door closed, the windows blacked out, and every source of light--down to the LED clock--extinguished. I still couldn't make it through a day without nightmares or a night without flashbacks.

"Even living my regimented routine—living the same day every day, no matter what—there were ghosts everywhere. Everything I heard was an echo of something darker. Everything I saw was reflection of the worst moments of my life.

"The thing I did was write. I wrote short fiction. I wrote long fiction. I wrote tall tales. I wrote short novels. I wrote critiques. I wrote histories. I wrote biographies. I wrote autobiographies.

"I told stories.

"From thirteen to twenty-five, I wrote three or four pages a night, five nights a week, and I rewrote it all on top of that. Doing the math—Courier New 10pt, single spaced, 1" margin, I come up with something like 16,000,000 words. I'll be the first to tell you that most of those words were garbage. I'm not a very imaginative story-teller and I'm not a very good writer, but I did it anyway. I wrote for myself, and for the most part, my audience was one. Sometimes it was two, occasionally it was three, and once or twice it became hundreds or thousands of people—but one was my target, and that was liberating in its own way. I could tell the same stories over and over again, picking away at little bits and pieces of my past. I could tell them in whatever form seemed best—sometimes my past came out as autobiography, sometimes as fiction, sometimes as dialogue, sometimes as poetry, sometimes as history, sometimes as simple chronology.

"Over the course of those 16,000,000 words I gave my ghosts names. I wrote down all those echoes. I described the reflections. I took the incomprehensible overwhelming mass of my trauma and...didn't exactly explain it, but I explored it, I explicated it, and I came to know it, to accept it, and to manage it.

"I still carry ghosts. I still hear echoes. I still see reflection. I still have bad nights. I still have bad days. I still have bad weeks. I've even had a few bad months recently. But the bad years are over, and have been for a long time. I can go new places. I can sit with my back to a crowd. I can sleep in strange beds. I credit that to story-telling. To autobiography. I recommend it highly."

Don Craig: "So here's a story about finding a story by finding an old luggage tag while mud-larking (sifting through the mud near the river banks at low tide) on the Thames in Greenwich. It takes the internet and some interested helpers to assemble the tale, but it's remarkable how much was retrieved from that luggage tag."

Carl Blesch: "The problem with the stories that my deceased family members told is that I didn't listen. Oh, I remember hearing some, but I was too full of my own life to want to really listen and prompt them to elaborate. Several times my father talked about how he used to spend his university summers working at Glacier National Park. But to this date, that's all I know. Why did he work there? How did he get the job? Who did he work with? What did he do? What did the workers do after hours? (Now there's a loaded question!) After he passed away, I found a leather-bound album of photos from those summers. Now I sure wish I'd listened.

"I've already started writing my stories for my children, knowing that they aren't interested now (and believe me, I can't blame them), but at some point in time, most likely after I'm gone, they may be."

Posted on Sunday, 13 September 2015 at 01:41 PM in Open Mike | | Comments (23)

Sunday, 06 September 2015

Open Mike: At the CMoG

We went to the Corning Museum of Glass yesterday. Although it's "in the middle of nowhere" in Corning, New York—a small town of <12,000 people that's one of the last true "company towns" in America, being the headquarters of the multinational Corning Inc., formerly Corning Glass Works—CMoG is a world-class museum that wouldn't be out of place if it were right on the Mall in Washington D.C.

Cmog-4Xander at the Corning Museum of Glass

There's too much to see in one visit. There are multiple demonstrations nearly hourly—I could sit through the glassblowing demo repeatedly and not get bored—and I especially appreciated the hands-on "Ask Me" carts scattered around the exhibits, staffed with what appear to be high school kids who explain various aspects of history or technique.

The new addition, which opened last March, is called the Contemporary Art + Design Wing. It's wonderful—a beautiful, spare space suffused with natural light, currently displaying a collection of artworks that happen to use glass as a primary material.

Cmog-1Xander in the new wing. I'm sorry I didn't think to note the artist or title of this piece. [UPDATE: It's "Glass Sticks" by Jun Kaneko—thanks to
Ken Tanaka for this. —Ed.]

Obviously photography is allowed—the crowds were waving cameras about incessantly. As was I.

Really, huge kudos to the museum staff and governing board for this fabulous addition to an already fine museum. Extremely well done.

The place of fire
The word "fireplace" is taken, but here's the place of fire at the new house:

Fire-1-small

We had the inaugural bonfire last night, despite the recent heat wave we've been experiencing. This was the previous owners' favorite thing about the house—sitting around the backyard fire-pit on a nice evening.

I've noticed that you have to take a lot of pictures of fire to get one that looks like fire. It can look like a lot of strange things, not all of which fit our conventions about what fire looks like.

Fire-2-small

Has anyone else noticed that sometimes with Fuji cameras, the out-of-camera JPEGs look better than what you can get the RAW file to look like in ACR? Is that a known known? I don't keep up.

Not to be immodest, but I think I look great in anything
I've noticed that Abby got unfairly left out of these pictures. I left myself out too, so I'll close with a selfie:

Me, texting to S.: This is how bad I am at shopping: I stopped at Target meaning to buy bath towels, and what I came out of the store with was...a lampshade.

S.: So how does it look on you?

M.:

Lampshade

S.: Don't drive like that.

Good point. She is sensible.

Hope you're having a nice Labor Day weekend. It's going to be a quiet and lonely day here...S. has been away and now Xander and Abby have departed too. It was so great having them here. A very special visit. They just left, and I miss them already.

Mike
(Thanks to Xander for posing for Dad at the Museum)

"Open Mike" is Yr. Hmbl. Editor's own page of TOP. It appears on Sundays.

Original contents copyright 2015 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:

Kenneth Tanaka: "I'm envious, Mike. (No, not of the lamp shade.) I'd love to visit the Corning Museum one day. Back in the very early 1980s in my engineering days while working on a project with Owens Corning's Research Center in Granville, Ohio, I gained an enormous admiration and fascination with the company. It was, at least at that time, perhaps the ultimate in understated-but-overperforming engineering-oriented companies. I can only imagine that their museum reflects this.

"The glass sculpture you've shown is by Japanese artist Jun Kaneko. It's titled 'Glass Sticks' (2001). Kaneko is a Japanese ceramic sculptor who was featured here in Chicago's Millennium Park a couple of years ago with 'little' (6') cute figures that little kids loved!

"Re: Fuji cameras and JPEGs: Shhh, don't tell anyone but I nearly always use Fine JPEGs straight from Fujifilm cameras, particularly since Fuji introduced an understated 'Classic Chrome' color profile to their cameras. I can work hard on a RAW file to get to the level of detail and tone that the camera can often produce automatically...or not!"

Mark Kinsman: "Geez, Mike, I never thought you'd be such a shady character."

Darlene Almeda: "Did the lamp shade make you feel light-headed?"

Jim Allen: "Your selfie got me to laugh, but your intro photo is just terrific. Thanks for the quick museum review. If I'm ever in the neighborhood, I'll be sure to spend too much time there."

Mike replies: Thanks for the compliment!

Bob Blakley: "The Corning Glass Works is one of my favorite places on earth. We went there several times when I was a kid, living in Ithaca and then Buffalo. The demonstrations are absolutely mesmerizing. So much craft and tradition—plus fire!"

Albano: "The Fuji JPEG thing is a myth now. In Camera RAW, just go to Camera Calibration tab and choose the Fuji profile you use (Provia, Velvia, etc.) instead of Adobe Standard, and your raw will look EXACTLY like the out-of-camera JPEG. Trust me, I did the test, shooting RAW+JPEG, and they look exactly the same (except the RAW has more fine detail and gets lens corrected). Try it."

Lars S. replies to Albano: "Contrary to what Albano reports, I found in my testing, that the Fuji profiles in ACR don't match the out of camera JPEGs completely. They are mostly close, but then there's always a difference in the tone curve or in the way certain colors are rendered. To me, the JPEGs seem to have that 'just right' quality, that I have difficulty achieving with Lightroom. I tired to correct it by creating my own presets based on the Adobe profiles, photographing test patterns and trying to match the JPEG, but I just couldn't get there. The JPEG engine seems to have some more logic than just simple color shifts that can be replicated in Lightroom.

"Maybe someone more skilled could do it, but I had to give up. I still mostly use RAW, since I often do extensive edits where I need the flexibility that RAW gives me, but nothing beats the out of camera colors for when you want to have a beautiful picture that is 'just right.'"

Posted on Sunday, 06 September 2015 at 10:25 AM in Open Mike, Random Snaps | | Comments (38)

Sunday, 30 August 2015

Open Mike: Pots of Gold

I've been writing about photography since 1988, when Fred Picker goaded me into writing an article on spec by telling me I was a punk and couldn't possibly get an article published in a magazine. (That first article was accepted, as were several hundred after that.) That, and subsequent editing and online jobs and activities, have put me in an unusual position. I became a sort of host, discussion leader, clearinghouse, observer of the scene, and pundit rolled into one.

As such, I've been aware of various leitmotifs over the years, low-level but persistent themes that run like threads through my work and my days. One of the more noticeable of these is what I call the photographer's lament: photographers ask, why am I not getting more attention? Why am I not earning more money? Why that person and not me? Why is the world not beating a path to my door?*

Upon reaching a certain level of competence or accomplishment we seem to feel that we should start getting attention.

I see this as more a characteristic of the activity of photography itself than it is a commentary on any individual's skills or talents. There's something about the way we commonly conceive of this activity that encourages the thought that we should be rewarded, somehow, for being able to do it.

Maybe it's the fact that some people are rewarded for it. Everyone knows the examples of the professional photographer and the artist-photographer, who, they imagine, are showered and fêted with money or recognition or both.

Not so often, really. The average "name" photographer is more like a recording star who no longer has a record contract. They, too, are usually feeling some version of the photographer's lament...just at a higher level than most of the rest of us. Fees are down, nobody's paying for original photography any more, I'm not selling many prints, my last book didn't sell well.

My question is, why does the idea persist that fame and earnings—more broadly, attention and admiration—should naturally be contingent on practicing this activity? What is it about photography that makes us feel we should get attention for doing it?

Look at other recreational activities. Water skiing, hunting, woodworking, bird-watching, cooking, video-gaming—or any of a thousand others. I suppose in each of those fields there are a tiny minority who get paid for what they do or are famous for it, although I can't name a single water-skiier nor imagine how someone who's good at knitting might become well known for it. Mostly, such things are their own reward. We hike in the woods, or travel for miles to eat at a nice restaurant, or teach our dogs tricks, or arrange wildflowers in vases, or work out, visit famous battlefield parks, or build model railroads, or sew, because those things are fun for us, that's all.

We don't think, hey, I'm really good at scrapbooking. When am I going to get an award for this? Or...you know, I'm a hell of a great foodie. I go to the farmer's market every week and I read a ton of recipes. Why is someone not giving me money?

For a small number of people, photography is a career. But those people work really hard at identifying markets, building up client relationships, and giving customers what they want. And it's true, a small number of photographers get their work published in books or shown in museums, or they sell prints for what seems like a lot of money. And they work just as hard at that...it's just a different kind of work, is all. You could probably do one of those things occasionally too, if you really worked at it. And if you didn't need your day job.

But for the most part, photography is just a fun activity. A recreation. An enjoyable pastime. We do it because we enjoy it.

I often encourage people to work in a more focused way, to be more organized and deliberate and conscious about their work, to undertake projects, or to finish or "redact" their work more fully. I encourage photographers to concentrate on what they're best at, and be sterner editors of their own work—generally, to do what needs to be done to enable their work to communicate to others, to be seen by others, more readily. But that's just because I think those things make photography more satisfying and enjoyable, that's all. Not because I'm trying to encourage people to believe there's a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

So if you ever find yourself thinking, why am I not famous, or when am I going to make a little money at this, or any of the other gnawing dissatisfying insecurities that seem to crop up for all of us from time to time, I'd encourage you to ask yourself a question: why do you really do this, anyway? Concentrate on finding the things about photographing that are within your control that make it fun and gratifying as a recreation, a relaxation, and a rewarding activity in and of itself. It might or might not change the way you work. But it might make you happier.

Mike

*The famous "build a better mousetrap" saying is a folk distillation of a quotation by Ralph Waldo Emerson.

"Open Mike" is the editorial page of TOP, in which the Editor allows his opinionations free range. It appears on Sundays.

Original contents copyright 2015 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:

Rich Reusser: "My daughter is having some success as a model in L.A. so she gets to see the minority of photographers that are 'elite' as well as the working class variety. She called to tell me one particularly famous fashion photographer has a spiritual guru by his side at all times. This is how I would know I found the pot of gold."

Mike replies: Is the spiritual guru a leprechaun?

Ruby: "I always wanted a camera (I got a Vivitar 110—with flash, no flash cubes for me!—for my 10th birthday, and a K1000 for graduation). Life got in the way for quite some time, but eight years ago I began to study more seriously. Of course I had those relatives saying 'You should open a business,' and I dutifully looked into it. I spend a lot of time looking at photography. I am competent, sometimes good. I really enjoy taking pictures, and even editing them. I don't want to have to think about promotion and making other people happy. Sometimes the act of taking the picture is the best part of the experience. This post articulated something I've been trying to explain to relatives who think profit is the only reason to pursue photography."

Bruce Mc: "I have worked with a famous photographer or two. As you mention, there was a lot of attention given to the techniques and just plain hard work involved in advancing their career. There was also a drive, a dissatisfaction. Just taking good photos was not satisfying to these people. Having their work celebrated was very important to them emotionally."

Steve: "I highly recommend a book called The War of Art by Steven Pressfield. It's mainly about writing, but you can apply it to any creative field, especially photography.

"I tried, and failed, to start a winery here on the west coast. After 10 years I had to pull the plug. There was a certain je ne sais quoi that seemed to land on some people and not others. I wouldn't even call it luck. We all worked like dogs but there was something I was lacking that others had. Now I make waaaay more money in IT and have way more free time to pursue photography. As in the wine business, I'm sure it's the same in photography. Ninety percent of your time is selling your product and 10% actually doing. I am not a good salesman...."

Posted on Sunday, 30 August 2015 at 10:43 AM in Open Mike | | Comments (62)

Sunday, 02 August 2015

Sunday Open Mike [Mike Update 2]

[In case you haven't been keeping up...TOP is on partial hiatus as Editor MJ moves from Wisconsin to New York State. Technical Editor Ctein has been filling in partially with columns and reviews of his own, but the site is being updated only intermittently. This is likely to continue until I am able to close on my new house and get the office set up again.]

The great relocation has happened. Finishing the packing and preparing for the movers was truly grueling and stressful, but Michael and Emily Ray of First Choice Moving came to my rescue and I ended up not having to move myself.

I had originally envisioned putting half my stuff in storage (which was accomplished) and then loading the rest into a 15-foot U-Haul Truck, putting my two largish pups in the cab with me, and towing the car behind.

I'm very glad that vision didn't have to become a reality. Michael and Emily and four of their employees helped me finish packing, and then we headed to the Public Storage facility at 7 p.m. on Thursday to get the rest of my things. Shortly after 9 p.m. a dim light went on in my brain, and I remembered something about the facility closing at night. So I called Public Storage's Customer Service Call Center and was informed that yes, the locked gate stopped working at 9. And we were still inside. The representative told me that it was "possible" she could override it. And if she couldn't? "It opens again at 6 a.m.," she said. "That's not long from now."

Sleeping in the back seat of the car the night before a 500 mile drive? Another vision I'm glad did not have to come to pass.

I slept at my friends' lake cabin that night—the scene of so many joyous gatherings with friends over the years. Come morning, I headed back to the old house to finish preparing it for the buyers' walk-through. I left them a card and a bottle of champagne in the fridge. At noon or so I'd finished the multiple jobs and errands and dumpster searches and went to pick up the dogs. I had taken them to Camp Bow-Wow for two days specifically to tire them out prior to the trip. And off we went.

Midway to Ohio I learned that the closing, conducted in my absence, had gone well.

The drive was exceptionally beautiful—the traffic was stop-and-go from O'Hare to the Indiana border—it took forever and delayed our progress significantly—but I-80 at the top of the state of Indiana is lovely in a lush Summer like this one. At least if you like heartland farm country, which I do. On the way to Cleveland the full moon rose straight in front of us and I composed a hundred photographs in my head, using the gradually brightening moon, the gradually darkening sky, and the ever-changing roadway and roadside scenery.

(I used my imaginary Fuji 50–140mm lens that I don't own yet. Naturally, it worked perfectly.)

Butters, Lulu and I stayed in a Residence Inn by Marriott in Mentor, Ohio, on Friday night. The dogs were great on the trip—well-behaved and docile—but Lulu couldn't help but be protective that night at the hotel, growling at at the muffled noises in the hallway and barking a warning every time she heard a muffled voice. When Lulu is scolded for barking she has a hilarious response—she barks with a soft, repressed "woof" that I swear is the canine equivalent to human whispering.

As soon as Keuka Lake came into view, all my worries vanished. Yesterday was a magnificent day, with bright sun, a fresh breeze, and high, brilliant clouds. The new place looked lovely, and the bank appraiser, whose services are the last thing holding up the closing, was waiting on the steps out front.

Driving around this area, I can tell you one thing for dead sure: I'm about to become a photographer again, in a much more serious way than I've been able to be for quite a few years now. This countryside inspires me, and I resonate to it. I see photographs everywhere.

So we're here, and everything has gone well so far. Now I just have to wait for the closing. In the meantime, we're at a rented lake house in the area for a week's vacation.

The hard part is over!

More anon,

Mike the Ed.

Original contents copyright 2015 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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Posted on Sunday, 02 August 2015 at 04:22 PM in Blog Notes, Open Mike | | Comments (25)

Sunday, 19 July 2015

Open Mike: My New Favorite Thing (OT)

["Open Mike" is the off-topic editorial page of TOP, where I write about other things. It appears on Sunday, at least if things are going well. —Mike the Ed.]

So this is my new favorite thing, and I warn you this is boring:

Vitamix

It's a Vitamix, a.k.a. a heavy-duty high-speed blender, which is a cross between a blender and a food processor.

As regular readers of this site have been hearing from time to time, I've been investigating food and diet for four years now. If you'd prefer not to be bludgeoned with more, just don't click past the link....

Continue reading "Open Mike: My New Favorite Thing (OT)" »

Posted on Sunday, 19 July 2015 at 11:59 AM in Off-topic posts, Open Mike | | Comments (58)

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