The Online Photographer: Open Mike

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 | Permalink | Comments (7)

Sunday, 09 February 2014

Open Mike: Against a Headwind

My head is full of pictures I didn't take, and they're all eloquent, perfectly composed and thought-provoking. Here's one I missed:

The entire world seems crusted in snow. It's eight degrees out (–13°C) and the wind is blowing, which makes the cold worse. A major thoroughfare near where I live, 50 mph (80 kph) speed limit, three lanes, no sidewalk. The landscape beyond is bleak, white, white steam escaping from squat buildings. Spindrifts of powdery snow in sheets blow across the surface of the roadway. And at the edge of the road, a middle-aged man, bundled up, head down, is cranking a bicycle against the wind and the cold. Pedaling laboriously. A mile away I encounter another citizen on a bike.

'Kay, you don't know much about what's happening there. But here are a couple of things that are pretty safe to infer:

Those people have somewhere they have to get to. You don't go out in this kind of cold on icy roads on a bike because you feel like a burrito or because it occurred to you that it might be time for a haircut. Who knows—but what's the thing most people don't have any choice about when it comes to getting somewhere on time?—work, probably.
They have no other possible mode of transportation—no car, no cab fare, no friend or relative with wheels to give them a lift. Because, again, the only mode of transportation that's worse than a bike in this weather is walking.

It's not the rich getting richer that I worry so much about in my town here in the heartland; it's the poor getting poorer. My guess is that being out on a bike in weather like this means you're in pretty dire straits.

Not too long ago a young man at the Walgreen's told me disgustedly that all the retail jobs in town were cutting back their hours, and that he was down to 22 hours a week behind that cash register. Worse, he said, the store wouldn't give him regular hours—each week his schedule changed. Why was that important? Because it meant he couldn't get a second job—the arbitrary schedule meant he wouldn't be able to guarantee his availability at either one. "But how am I supposed to live on 22 hours work a week?" he asked me, rhetorically.

Didn't sound like fun to me either. But it could be worse. You could have to ride a bike to get there, in the bleak February cold.

Mike

"Open Mike" is the often off-topic editorial page of TOP. It pedals laboriously past on Sundays.

Original contents copyright 2014 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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Featured Comments from:

Thomas Tveit Rosenlund: "I usually do ride my bike to work all year round here in Oslo, Norway. I guess it's about 10 km each way. Most of the winter it's below freezing, and with plenty of wind from time to time, snow and ice are among the other obstacles (but the spiked tires are really good these days). I actually kind of prefer it to my car (parking is impractical), bus (I don't like the bus, it's slow), train or tube (not nearly as flexible). But most importantly I think biking to work is the perfect way to start the day as I work in an office, it's good to have one outdoor activity on the daily schedule."

Mike replies: Ah. So if I had taken that photograph, my interpretation of the photo would be only provisional. And if I were a reporter, then I would have had to talk to the cyclist to see why he was riding his bike.

Mark Steigelman: "You did take the picture, just not photographically. I saw it in my head as soon as I read your terrific description. I, though, imagined the people on the bikes have lost their licenses because of DWIs. The beauty of being the viewer or the reader is that we bring whatever we want to the story or picture. You never know the reality of the situation."

Mike replies: Ah, DWI is a possibility that didn't occur to me. Very plausible.

I do make these same kind of interpretations with photographs, by the way. Well, with some photographs. You're presented with a certain amount of evidence, and you weigh some possibilities as to what might be going on. With me it's seldom just fantasizing, however—I don't bring "whatever I want" to the picture, but try to see the evidence of the picture for what it might be trying to tell me. Always accepting that I might be wrong.

And I think you can know "the reality of a situation"—though perhaps only to a certain level or depth. For instance, with a photograph of a person riding a bike in a snowstorm, assuming you believe the picture at all, you know that a person was out riding a bike in adverse weather. In that case you can reasonably take the word of the photographer about certain things—for instance, the location, the time and day, the velocity of the wind and the temperature—because photographers are people who are as likely to tell the truth as other people are. You might be able to glean other true things from the picture, from his clothes, his bike, his posture or expression, and so forth. You don't know a lot of other things, some of which could be discovered by talking to the bike rider and asking him. My point is that what's usually true is that you can discover some things about the reality of the situation from photographs, a lot of which admittedly you don't know absolutely for sure, and then there are a lot of other things that you really don't know. It's just like evidence of every other kind—it needs to be weighed, considered.

John Denniston: "Peter Penn in his book It's All About the Bike tells a story of moving to a small village in Wales where the only people who were seen riding bikes were those whose driver's licence had been suspended for some reason or other. After living in village for over year and still riding his bike bike every day, a local leaned over to him in a pub and whispered in his ear, 'Did you kill someone?'"

Posted on Sunday, 09 February 2014 at 05:13 AM in Off-topic posts, Open Mike | Permalink | Comments (44)

Open Mike 2: The Problem of Translation (OT)

A week or so ago there was an interesting article in the Times called "Translation as a Performing Art." The author, Antony Shugaar, points out that there are really no untranslatable words, but that there are untranslatable worlds.

I thought what follows might be interesting for those who read my short book review of the Feng/English/Lippe translation of the Tao Te Ching the other day. I simply went to Amazon and made clips of a few translations, which you can compare for yourself.

These are all of the relatively simple first chapter. If even these are too much to ingest, try just reading the last sentence of every version (summarized below).

First up is Arthur Waley, an immensely well-respected earlier scholar (d. 1966):

Next, Stephen Addis and Stanley Lombardo (the latter famous for his "relevant" translations of the Odyssey and Iliad, intended to be simple, plain and direct in order to appeal to college-age young people):

Now the Gia-Fu Feng, Jane English, and Toinette Lippe translation I wrote about:

Here's James Legge, the Scottish sinologist who died in 1897:

Robert G. Henricks:

Red Pine:

Thomas Cleary:

Stephen Mitchell:

Note that I made no effort here to find translations that differed from each other; I just grabbed a few that came up relatively early in Amazon searches or that I knew about—or, in the case of the Addiss and Lombardo and Red Pine, that readers mentioned in comments to the earlier post.

Looking at just the last lines we have:

The Doorway whence issued all Secret Essences

The gateway to all mystery

The gate to all mystery

Where the Mystery is the deepest is the gate of all that is subtle and wonderful

The gateway of all subtleties

The door to all beginnings

The mystery of mysteries / is the gateway of marvels

The gateway to all understanding

So you can see what English-speaking readers are up against here. To really understand which translation might be best for you, you have to read a bunch of the commentaries on each chapter, to get an idea of which interpretations you tend to agree with, and then evaluate which translations tend to provide that viewpoint.

I might (gently) point out, however, that many translations have both certain felicities and certain shortcomings; none are superior in all ways, especially in light of the many interpreted meanings. For example, the first line of Chapter 60 in Feng/English/Lippe says "Ruling a country is like cooking a small fish" with no further explanation. The generally accepted view of this sentence is that when you fry a pan full of small fish, if you try to stir or flip the fish too much, they'll just disintegrate and you'll have a mess on your hands; so you have to be patient and keep your hands off and just let them cook, slowly. My preferred translation doesn't even hint at this explanation, but a number of others do.

And that's just one line of one chapter.

And then (whoa) consider that there are literally hundreds of translations...many more than just the ones available on Amazon now.

Holy mountain-dwelling Sage, Batman.

In the 1950s and '60s, when LPs first began to appear and there were only a few classical music performances available on records, audiophiles identified that people tended to be most loyal to the performances they encountered, and got used to, first: the first performance you engaged with tended to be the one that seemed most "natural" and "right" to you and that you continued to feel sounded like the piece "ought" to sound. The same might be true of Tao Te Ching translations—however you encounter the work first, the one you engage with first, is the one that seems the most right to you going forward.

The Feng/English/Lippe book is the one I encountered first, my gateway to the mysteries of the Tao as it were. Maybe that's why I like it best. But throughout all my subsequent happy tourist wanderings through various versions, interpretations, and translations, it has held up for me compared to many alternatives.

Mike

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

psu: "You will generally find that the 'you like what you learned first' rule also applies to software user interfaces."

JK: "I won't try to pass judgement on these translations, but I can tell you that the one with the Chinese next to it is, by far, the most literal. I've found the same thing myself: if you ever have to publish a translation accompanied by the original language (especially something as impossibly distant from English as classical Chinese), it tends to keep you honest.

"As the old saying goes, the beautiful ones aren't faithful, and the faithful ones aren't beautiful."

FrasSmith: "My current favourite is the Ursula K. Le Guin version (possibly because it's the only one I own).

The way you can go
isn't the real way.
The name you can say
isn't the real name.

Heaven and earth
begin in the unnamed:
name's the mother
of the ten thousand things.

So the unwanting soul
sees what's hidden,
and the ever-wanting soul
sees only what it wants.

Two things, one origin,
but different in name,
whose identity is mystery.
Mystery of all mysteries!
The door to the hidden.

"I like it; it seems to make more sense to me."

Mike replies: As Ursula herself says, her version is a rendition, not a translation: she bases it on the 1898 transliteration version by Paul Carus. She doesn't speak or read Chinese. This doesn't make it worse, necessarily, but it's worth mentioning.

I haven't read her version but based on the 'taste' you've given above, I think I should.

Jim Bullard: "As a student of biblical history I wonder if translators of the Tao run into the same problem biblical scholars do, namely that there are no original texts, only later copies of copies of copies. Before printing presses books were duplicated by hand and changes crept in, mostly inadvertently but sometimes deliberately by copyists 'correcting' what they thought were mistakes in the version they were copying. As a result (in the case of the bible) a comparison of say the 1200+ oldest copies we have of the New Testament, no two are identical. Granted most of the differences are minor but some are not and some of the differences lead to significantly different interpretations.

"The Tao is, I believe, about six centuries older than anything in the New Testament and the oldest existing copies are at least two centuries later than the original.

"And then there is the imprecision of language. One of my favorite pieces of music from Cat Stevens/Yosuf Islam is the Foreigner Suite. Near the beginning and repeated near the end is the lament 'There are no words that I can use because the meanings are left for you to chose,' a thought that I hear echoed in the beginning of the Tao."

Burton Randol: "The inherent ambiguities which are aspects of translation between natural human languages are well-known. I don't read Russian, but have been told by many highly educated bilingual (English/Russian) Russians that it is impossible to capture Pushkin's 'Eugene Onegin' in English. Vladimir Nabokov, who was natively trilingual in English, French, and Russian, certainly thought so, and as a corrective published a literal prose translation intended to precisely preserve the sense, if not the rhyme and meter, of the poem.

"A story, quite possibly apocryphal, but which I have heard since the 'sixties, involves a supposed early machine translation from English to Russian:

'The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak' > 'The vodka is good but the meat is rotten'

"Another similar anecdote, this time from from English to Chinese, or in some versions, from English to Russian:

'Out of sight, out of mind' > 'Invisible insanity'

"For anyone wishing to evaluate the level of truth in these old stories (it's not really absolutely clear), a useful reference is a June 1995 article in MT News International."

Ken Rahaim: "'Holy mountain-dwelling Sage, Batman'— just imagine the variations in the future translations of that line some 2,000–3,000 years in the future :-) ."

Posted on Sunday, 09 February 2014 at 05:05 AM in Books, Off-topic posts, Open Mike | Permalink | Comments (32)

Monday, 27 January 2014

Open Mike: The Indestructible Squeaky Toy (OT for Dog Lovers)

Lulu at twilight in the park, 2009

Medical science cannot cure the common cold. Add to that that human engineering and materials science apparently is incapable of creating a dog's chew toy that a) squeaks and b) that my quarter-pit cannot rip to shreds in a matter of minutes.

Take for instance one particular $9 pet shop toy widely advertised as "indestructible" (the ongoing experiment at TOP World HQ has comprised a statistically significant sampling):

"Indestructible" squeaky toy's best record: approx. 1 hour and 50 minutes (in timed 15 minute daily sessions)

Lulu's best record destroying the same $9 "indestructible" squeaky toy: approx. 7 minutes 30 seconds.

Lulu's groomer Nicole also has a bully-breed who is larger and even stronger and more exuberant than Lulu, which is saying...well, a lot. I asked her if there was such a thing as an indestructible squeaky toy, and her answer was a very emphatic "NO!!" She said she even found a chew toy advertised as "tiger tested," which supposedly survived being gnawed on by full-grown tigers. Her part-pit had it strewn all over her living room in an hour.

This seems like a challenge that humanity ought to be up to, now that it's 2014, but guess not. Just sayin'.

Mike

"Open Mike" is TOP's weekly ramble in the park. Published occasionally on Sundays. A day late this week, and yes, Yr. Hmbl. Ed. is also typically a dollar short.

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Featured Comments from:

Rick Grant: "When I saw the title of this post in my RSS reader I jumped into it straightaway in the hopes of finding the indestructible squeaky dog toy. But alas, there has not been a breakthrough in toy technology. I keep Border Collies and there isn't a squeaky toy that a Border Collie cannot reduce to fragments within half an hour. But for some perverse reason I keep buying them, only to be bitterly disappointed."

darr: "Human engineering and materials science do not equal the indestructible willpower and determination of a bored canine."

Posted on Monday, 27 January 2014 at 01:31 PM in Off-topic posts, Open Mike | Permalink | Comments (21)

Sunday, 12 January 2014

Open Mike: The Print Under the Whatever-It's-Called

[Ed. Note: This post was modified after many of the first comments had come in.]

I found an old print the other day. I was playing fetch with Lulu (in the house—she hates snow because it gets in her pads and makes her miserable) and a tennis ball rolled under the...well, I don't know what the piece of furniture is called—three drawers below, three shelves up top? It must have a name, but I don't know it. An old Victorian one that originally came out of my great-grandmother's house.

When I went to fish the tennis ball out for her, I found a surprising little nest of mess under the whatever-it's-called. The toxic carpet in my house spontaneously generates clumps of dust, and a number of items were hiding there amidst the dust-bunnies, including not just the one but three tennis balls. And one of the many things I found was an old print, curled and covered with dust.

The art photographer John Gossage, who taught a graduate program in photography at the University of Maryland, once came to make a presentation to my class at the Corcoran School, and one of his pieces of advice was to never throw old work away. He was lecturing on process, and talking about how to use old work to direct newer work, and he thought old work provided clues. "Don't throw it away," he said, "keep it. Just throw it in an old box somewhere." With my natural packratty tendencies, I don't need much encouragement. My house is full of old prints.

One of three temperature-controlled storage vaults at sprawling TOP World Headquarters, for "prints," which as you know is another name for unconnected images. There is also a fair number of prints lying about,
including, um, under furniture.

The print I found was from my first year of teaching, which I think was 1985–6. I had let my classes take pictures of each other with my 4x5 and Polaroid film. I'm sure I kept the stack of Polaroids, and they're doubtless still around here somewhere.

Very few kids get to be what they wanted to be when they're little. That's a good thing, because otherwise most of the male population of my generation would consist exclusively of firemen, policemen, and astronauts. I actually remember a big group argument in first grade over which of these three aspirational professions was best. (Each kid was expected to choose sides. I honestly think I tried to argue that we needed all three, to the scorn of my small friends. Pick a side and fight!) And the female population in my demographic would definitely have a surfeit of ballet dancers.

I always wanted to be a teacher when I was little. I knew this from the very first time I sat in a regular classroom in front of a teacher. Sized up the situation and just knew it was for me. I became really conscious of it in third grade, because I realized I was habitually critiquing my poor teacher, Mrs. Enz, as she went along, learning from her not only what she was teaching, but how to teach; that is, when she did something good I'd think I've gotta remember that. And when she did something not so good....

I had to get a retainer cemented into my mouth in third grade to hold my tongue back, because supposedly my tongue was pushing my front teeth forward and was going to make me buck-toothed. I essentially had to re-learn to speak. When I talked I sounded like someone had grabbed my tongue and wouldn't let go. My mother wrote a note for me asking the teacher to have mercy on me and not call on me for a week or two while I got used to it, but Mrs. Enz was having none of that. She called on me more than she usually did during those days, I suppose because she didn't approve of special treatment, or because she thought I needed practice. So she would call on me and patiently wait while I made noises like a strangled cat, blushing bright red in embarrassment, while all my friends giggled at me and mocked me. I remember thinking, hotly, I am NEVER going to do this to a kid once I'm a teacher.

Unlike most people, I achieved my childhood ambition. In my third and last year in photography school we had to do internships, and I landed an internship as an assistant teacher to a photographer named John McIntosh at Northern Virginia Community College. NVCC was actually an extensive photography program, very well funded, with a number of full-time professors and excellent facilites and equipment—it was where all the photography instruction for the entire Virginia community college system was concentrated. They liked me well enough that they asked me to return the next year to teach a Photo 101-102-103 sequence in the Continuing Education Department.

I was mystified to learn that Instructors were required to fill their own courses. Evidently you were supposed to go out and drum up enough business for your class to fill it, by yourself. If enough people signed up, the class would run, and you had a job; if only a handful signed up, the class would be cancelled and you'd be out of luck. With my poor memory for numbers, I can't recall now what the break-even point was. Luckily, my classes filled to the brim without my having to do anything. Which was a good thing, because I didn't have the slightest idea how to go about lassoing enough students if the task had come down to me.

During that year, the Director of the program, David Allison, called me to his office. He told me there was a full-time position as a photography professor opening up, and they wanted me to apply for it. They wanted me to go through the entire application and interview process. He gave me a list of all the things I'd need—a resumé, a portfolio, a jacket and tie, and so on.

Naturally, I thought this meant they wanted to hire me.

"Oh, no," David said. "You're not going to get the job. You don't have enough experience."

Huh?

It turned out he wanted me to apply for the job so I'd be ready to apply for other jobs. David told me they thought I was a natural teacher and they really thought I should make teaching my career, and they wanted to help me on my way. It was one of those compliments that stick up above the waves, and I've never forgotten his kindness to me.

I did go through the entire process, as David had set it out for me, and it paid off right away. NVCC hired a woman who had been teaching at a local prep school...in August. This left the prep school scrambling to replace her at the last minute. Classified ads resulted in lots of applications but not very good-quality ones. So they asked the outgoing teacher if she could help find her own replacement, and she in turn asked her new employer—David Allison—if they could suggest anybody. Fait accompli.

I taught at that prep school for three years, and loved it. Looking back on it from the perspective of advancing middle age, I have only been happy a few times in my life, and those three years were the happiest. Or at least it was the longest sustained such period. (I have not lived a happy life. I really should write my autobiography one day; it would be very entertaining if I were able to be sufficiently honest.) I loved the work, as I always knew I would.

Unfortunately, human beings are predisposed to what my son calls "drama"—interpersonal turmoil. My son, who is more socially adept than I am and much smarter about such things, once quit a good job as a waiter at an Italian restaurant after only two weeks. When I asked him why, Zander, in his laconic, man-of-few-words way, said, "Too much drama. None of it involved me, but it was only a matter of time." Smart kid.

I thought my basic goodness was sufficient armor at that long-ago job, but it was not. A popular young male teacher at a school for girls—and full of female teachers, at least one of them young and elegant and married—is a recipe for drama. And it was only a matter of time.

But still, it was a great job while it lasted. Now, teachers aren't supposed to show favoritism (learned that from Mrs. Memmel, fifth grade), but they're human, and they can't help having favorites. The old Polaroid I found was a picture of two kids, best friends, probably before I knew them well, who later became two of my most favorite students. Just absolutely delightful kids, of the sort teachers privately and quietly consider it an honor to know. (I'm sure you teachers out there know just what I mean.)

Seeing their faces, unexpectedly, in a picture I barely remembered, really took me back. After I carefully wiped the dust off that old print it transported me into a sort of happy reverie of memory. It released a flood of nostalgia that I indulged myself in for hours as I went about my household chores. Sentimental...yeah, sure. So sue me. I am way too sentimental about my long-ago sojourn into teaching; I know that. But if I could have, I would have grown old in that job. And I'm certain I would have enjoyed every year more than the last. I paid dearly and suffered long for some unexceptional youthful indiscretions. There are times when I could convince myself that I have missed teaching every day of my life. That is not strictly accurate, because in truth I don't think of it every day, even every week. But I have always felt like an unhappy exile. I am very aware, very aware, to this very day, that I missed my calling in life—not the happiest of realizations for a man to have heavy on his back in middle age.

So here we come to the point of this whole reminiscence: what are the chances you're ever going to find an old digital file under a piece of old furniture?

All right, calm down. I'm not slamming digital.

But that print was ephemera the day it was made. The kids were just trying the camera, playing with the materials. The only reason they used each other for subjects is that that's what was handiest. The prints themselves were detritus. Never important. If not for John Gossage's advice, I might have tossed them right then and there (I probably didn't because Polaroid was so expensive and it seemed like a waste of money to just throw them away). If they had been digital, we'd have erased that print I found right when it was made, or a day or two later. Even if we hadn't, what are the chances I could come across it adventitiously in twenty-seven years' time?

I don't want to belabor the point, but I also don't want to let this get away without making sure I've made the point. There are obviously lots of advantages to digital creation, digital delectation, and even digital storage. (I'm currently looking for a picture I wanted to use to illustrate this post, and I'm still looking. All those prints in the top picture are not organized, and the only way to find anything is to go through everything.) But we shouldn't let that blind us to the often whimsical and surprising ways that physical prints survive sometimes, and the emotional wallop they can pack when they surface adventitiously again—or when the meaning of otherwise nondescript pictures shifts tectonically with time. Here is a lovely and moving example of the latter, written by Michael J. Perini. It's not either or, it's both, and they're different.

In other words, society needs policemen and firemen and astronauts. Plus a lot of other things besides. :-)

I don't know if you've noticed this, but it's something I'm very aware of: in the photography community, we're actually kinda like a bunch of teenagers when it comes to choosing up sides. It's "team this" or "team that." You've got to be on Team Canon or Team Nikon. You've got to be on Team film or Team digital. Team color or Team black-and-white. Team IQ or Team Lomography. Team darkroom or Team computer (please, somebody stop me). The squabbling almost always seems to devolve to that—or, at least, lots of that clogs up the discussions.

Bah, I say. I always want to advocate for balance...for looking at all things, and both sides of everything. How else can you really understand the ramifications of all the changes that are taking place? You can't just look at how things are getting better. Or rather you can, but that doesn't mean you can't be mindful of things that are getting lost.

I'm most aware of this when we talk about darkroom work. Instantly, everybody assumes we want to know what Team they're on (even here at TOP, where the discussions are often on a higher plane than they are at some other stops out on the Wild Wild Web). Why? Who cares? It's not a contest. Darkroom is dead, a shadow of a niche of a niche. Even in its heyday, the biggest home darkroom magazine had a circulation of 105,000—not exactly Better Homes and Gardens level*. It's almost impossible to talk about process, craft, and the fundamental differences of approach and strategy that the differences highlight—the spectre of choosing sides is always looming above us and casting its shadow. I'd rather look at what we've gained, and also what we've lost. It's not either-or. Balance, balance.

How can you appreciate what you've lost if you can't look at it?

Mike

*Circulation 7,624,505 in the first half of 2013.

"Open Mike" is The Rambler, The Spectator, and The Tatler of TOP. Published on some Sundays. Even when there's football, and I hope you're appreciating that.

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

John Camp: "My mother died on the last day of 2013, at age 93. She'd had a good life, and was a good mother; and I was her oldest son. A few years ago, as she was cleaning out her house to move into an assisted-living apartment, she gave me a shoe box full of old family photos. Most of the photos were the kind of thing that you put back under the bed and mostly forget about; but one of them, a snapshot in black and white, and not more than about three inches by two, shows her as a 25-year-old, hold me as an infant.

"The thing is, not only is a fine memory photo, but it's one of those random masterpieces that accidentally get taken from time to time: pretty woman, by herself, holding a swaddled child madonna-like. The composition and printing are excellent, and tonal variety perfect. My wife wife put it in a small silver frame, and I will treasure it forever."

rnewman (partial comment): "So why not go back to teaching as a part time job? I expect you could easily get an adjunct professorship at one of your local colleges, either in a certificate/degree program or in a non-degree program. I would be a change of pace and expose you to new/different approaches and issues which you might otherwise not be in contact with."

Mike replies: I came very close to switching to a teaching job when I was at the magazine. A contributor was a professor at Ithaca College and there was an opening in their photography program. It went quite far along—I believe I even had a plane ticket (reservation?) for the interview—until one day she called and said, "By the way, there's something for some reason we don't know—where did you get your master's again?" I told her I didn't have an MFA, only a BFA. There was a pause at the other end of the line, and then she went, "Ohhhh..." and I knew that was that.

It's odd that I don't have a master's when I could probably teach in a master's program by now, at least in studio art (that is, not scholarship). I and A.D. Coleman (one of the leading American photography critics of the last half century), of whom the same thing could even more easily be said (except that he could teach scholarship, and probably not studio), once somewhat idly concocted a scheme whereby he would be my advisor and I would be his advisor, and we would work under the supervision of a University department that would go along with the plan. I got as far as getting a thumbs up on the idea from the late Bill Jay when he was at Arizona. But you know how it is; life gets in the way. It's more difficult to do things in life out of sequence.

Lois Elling (partial comment): "May I remind you that you are still teaching; you teach your readers every day."

Mike replies: That's the idea, anyway! Although it's reciprocal—my readers are my teachers, too. Thanks, Lois.

John Hufnagel: "In my part of Pennsylvania, that piece of furniture is called a 'hutch' or a 'hutch cabinet.'"

psu: "This 'shoebox' issue is probably the thing that worries me most about digital pictures. The issue is not so much that I think pictures will get deleted. There is no real reason to delete them these days because storage is practically infinite. The more worrisome issue is that when you leave bits alone in the dark and don't look at them once in a while they rot away, and there is not as yet any real solution to this issue. The only viable backup strategy for the long term is to periodically make copies of everything. But this requires that you have someone around with an interest in making these copies. When that person is no longer around, the pictures will sit in the dark by themselves and just rot away. This probably isn't an issue for 'important' pictures. But one wonders how many other pictures will be lost that would not have been in the past because they could just sit in a box maybe be OK. I wonder what the relative survivability of digital vs. analog shoeboxes is."

Mike replies: It's a very valid question. Obviously the attrition of printed images is massive as well, and it's inexorable too—I once read a fascinating essay by an expert on collectibles who claimed that physical items will be gradually lost even despite efforts to preserve them, something that can be observed even in the small, gradual losses among the world's most valued art objects. Although value is one thing that improves survivability. Among much less precious items, there is a fairly strong effective randomness or unpredictability about what does survive, and how.

Marco Sabatini: "Two citations from ancient Greece: Socrates: I cannot teach anybody anything, I can only make them think. Theophrastus: Education is the kindling of a flame, not the filling of a vessel."

Posted on Sunday, 12 January 2014 at 02:16 PM in Open Mike | Permalink | Comments (70)

Sunday, 15 December 2013

Open Mike: Cameras Not of the Year

The coolest kid in the fifth grade at Bayside School was Murphy Singer, who for some unknown reason decided that he wanted to be my friend. Murphy moved around school with a retinue. I am not exaggerating—wherever he went there were eight or ten kids in his wake. He had runners to get him Fritos and an audience for whatever he said. To my surprise, Murphy invited me to his birthday party, so I invited him to mine in return. My birthday is in winter, but that year I had my party on my "half birthday" so we could do things outdoors. My Dad devised a number of games and contests. One of them was that everyone took off their shoes and created a big circle in the yard. Stationed around it, we all took off running around the circle. The game was that as soon as you got touched by the kid in back of you you were out. The last man standing won.

I was a runner when I was a kid and I was the fastest kid in my grade by a comfortable margin. (Only C.B. Harper in the neighborhood could give me a good race. C.B. was quicker, but I was faster in a straight line.) Pretty soon it was just me and Murphy Singer left. Now, Murphy was a winner—he was competitive and had determination. So I toyed with him. I'd almost catch up to him, and he'd run with a will to escape me; then I'd do the opposite and let him almost catch me, but stay just out of his reach. I was going to see if I could wear him down.

But he was game, and did not wear down. After a while the other kids started to get impatient, my father (who could see what I was doing) started to get cross, and I started to get bored of my plan. So I slowed down and let Murphy win. Hey, he was my guest, you know? And he wanted to win so badly. I, on the other hand, didn't care.

My father was furious. I got a stern lecture about how you should always win when you can, and I spent some time in my room as punishment even though it was the day of my party.

I tell this story to explain why I have never shown my work. It's too...competitive. And I'm just not a competitive type of guy. It doesn't appeal. I decided in art school that my photography belonged to me, and that was that.

I had an early experience (well, several, actually, but this is one) that reinforced that view. For a few years after I graduated I did what I called "plain portraits" that were influenced by Mike Disfarmer (obviously another uncompetitive guy—he took his moniker because he detested farming, the local industry). I made simple, 35mm B&W portraits of unsmiling people, dressed casually, standing and facing the camera, sometimes in front of plain backgrounds.

But as I did more and more work for pay, my style morphed to suit the clients. Many people wanted color; many people wanted to be dressed up and well coiffed; many people wanted to choose their own backgrounds. Before I knew it, I was charging a pretty penny for my work, but I was doing medium-format color portraiture of a decidedly more formal cast.

Then, out of the blue, I got a call from Merry Foresta, a curator of photography at one of the Smithsonian Museums. I never knew how she had learned of me or who had recommended me to her (perhaps she had seen an exhibit of my pictures at a friend's frame shop). But she knew of my "plain portraits" and she wanted to see a portfolio of my recent work in that style.

Trouble was, there was no recent work in that style. All I was doing were commercial portraits.

Oops. As my friend, former teacher, and Zander's grandfather Paul Kennedy used to say: "You know what they say: 'Oh well.'" I had to beg off Merry's request.

So anyway, I've really only ever shown my work once, I think. After graduation, I was asked to curate a large photography show at a Park Service gallery in Washington, D.C. I chose six young photographers I knew. The show took up two floors. I included myself. I showed a set of then-new B&W medium-format work that constituted my self-motivated attempt to "loosen up" conceptually.

As the "frontispiece" for the show, I hung in the doorway of a building a color 4x5 shot of my own, of a northwoods lake. It showed a yellow canoe far out on the lake, hit by the rays of the setting sun. A storm had just passed, and the sky and the lake were the same gunmetal-gray color. It was just meant to be decorative; you know, color.

Even as we were hanging the show, I got inquiries about that print. Trouble was, I had printed it in the beautiful color darkrooms at Northern Virginia Community College, where I had been teaching, and I had only made two prints. One I had given away. So the print that was hanging in the show was the only one I had. Many of the prints in the show were for sale, and I guessed I'd continue to get inquiries about that lakescape. So, to forestall any interest in it, I put what I thought was an outrageously high price on it—$650. (Other prints in the show were selling for up to about a third of that—one photographer in the show had his prints priced at $35, if memory serves. The standard price for a "student" or recent graduate's prints back then maxed out at about $350.)

And I sold three of them! Much to my amazement. But even though I was desperately poor at the time, I turned down the money. I didn't want to have to figure out how to go make more prints.

People have this idea that being an art photographer is somehow less work than being a professional. It's not—you're just working for a different clientele. You still have to promote yourself tirelessly, service your customers, schmooze with all the right people, network, and fit your work to the tastes of the market. It's just as competitive as any other kind of professional photography, and requires just as much assertiveness and just as healthy an ego.

[Disclaimer: The information that follows is all entirely from memory, and the research wasn't rock-solid to begin with. So don't take this as historical fact unless you get corroboration. —Mike with Ed.'s hat on]

The camera that I used to shoot the pictures in that show was one of my favorites. Thinking back on it, it was a "retro" camera even when it was brand new. Heinrich Mandermann was a German industrialist who owned a number of photographic companies, including the famous lensmaker Schneider-Kreuznach, Rollei GmbH of Rolleiflex fame, and Exakta. Evidently he had worked in the Pentacon factory in Dreden as a young man, and had a nostalgic fondness for the ancient Pentacon 6, a 1950s medium-format SLR, itself based on the even earlier Praktisix. So he built and briefly marketed a modernized version with contributions from several of his companies. Although based on the old Pentacon, the camera was called an Exakta (the Exakta 66 Model 2, mine was), and it had modern Schneider lenses. The lenses were breech-lock, a lens attachment method already long outmoded in the '80s when I bought mine. Oddly, the new version was "rubber-armored," which was a fashionable thing to do to binoculars at the time.

1980s Exakta 66. Mine had a different lens than is shown here, the Schneider Xenotar MF. Not only is the lens now rare, but a decent camera to use it on basically doesn't exist.

Not only was I too cheap to buy the metering prism, but I refused to spring for the dedicated camera strap, which I thought was too expensive (it had a curved bracket that fitted under the breech of the lens and screwed into the tripod thread—and it cost ninety bucks. No way). So I shot that camera with the waist-level finder, without a meter (that's where my article "Train Your Brain to Guess Exposure" came from), and I had to carry it around in one hand because I had no strap.

The camera was quite primitive. The viewfinder showed only a portion of what would be on the negative, and what it showed wasn't centered! The bottom edge of the picture was fairly accurate, but the top was wildly off. And the viewfinder image would black out after you took the picture, until you wound the shutter again. The winding mechanism was notoriously finicky—after winding, you couldn't let the lever snap back on its own spring, or it would eventually stop working right—you had to be very careful to let the lever back gently. Many people had problems with overlapping frames.

And yet I loved that camera, and did some of my best work with it. Go figure.

The lens was the best lens I ever owned. Not only was it a great design from a top lensmaker, but I lucked out and got one of those "cherry" examples you come across every now and then...one that is not only within spec, but that happens to be at the very top of the spec. After selling it, I tried to replace it several times with no luck—the otherwise identical replacements lacked that last little bit of magic. I even—true story—saw a print in a gallery show by a local photographer that had the same kind of magic, and I took some pains to track the guy down to find out what lens he was using. Not only was it the same kind of lens as I'd had on my Exakta 66, it was the exact same lens—the woman I'd sold the camera to (Claudia Smigrod, a fine local artist) had sold it on to him! I had recognized the look of my beloved lens just from a print on the gallery wall. I tried to buy it back from the guy who owned it, but by the time I had enough extra cash to make him an offer, he had already sold it. (It really was not a very good camera.)

Looking back on it, if I had wanted to be an art photographer who exhibits, I should have kept that camera and kept photographing in that style and with that technique all the way to this very day. I would have been happy. It was unfashionable and contrarian enough for me, and I loved the technique.

I made a large set of 16x20 prints with that camera that I wish I still had. But I left the portfolio case in the apartment of a girlfriend I was trying to avoid, and by the time I realized where it was, she had moved, and all that work was gone.

That show in the Park was a success, by the way. It was well attended (probably because so many Park visitors wandered in little knowing what they'd find), a lot of the photographers sold work, and we even got written up in the newspaper. But it was a lot of work.

Of course I had to sell that camera to pay the rent one time when money got tight—same as happened to all the rest of my cameras back in those days, even my beloved rosewood Wista 4x5 (Wistas were made a lot better in those days. I've tried to replace that one, too, and the new ones aren't nearly as nice). And then, of course, I started writing for photography magazines. And the rest, as they say, is history.

And in this case all this really is history. Times do change.

Mike

"Open Mike" is the lying-in-the-tall-grass-looking-at-the-clouds page of TOP. It happens on every Sunday that Yr. Hmbl. Ed. has the energy for it.

P.S. And before anyone asks why I didn't just get commercially-made prints made of that lakescape, that just wasn't the ethos then, in my circles. You printed your own work. At that time I wouldn't have considered selling prints I didn't make myself.

Original contents copyright 2013 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 Lamb: "I had an Exakta 66 in the '90s. I experienced no end of focus problems until I worked out that the screen had been installed the wrong way round. The camera suffered from overlapping frames as did most Exaktas. Also, my particular 80mm Schneider lens was good but not magical. Probably, the best thing about it was the packaging. I really liked the boxes it came in it. An odd thing to say but they were the only thing that worked properly. Occasionally, I pine for it until I recall the frustration. I don't regard it as one that got away."

Mike replies: That happened to me too, on one of the cameras I bought trying to replace my first one. I was mystified until I was having dinner with Ron Leven, the U.S. Schneider importer, and he mentioned (with an eye-roll) that they kept getting Exakta 66 warranty returns when all that was wrong was that the focusing screen had been installed upside-down by the factory. As I said, it really was not a very good camera....

Posted on Sunday, 15 December 2013 at 01:03 PM in Open Mike | Permalink | Comments (38)

Sunday, 24 November 2013

Open Mike: Turkeys

"Open Mike" is the Editorial page of TOP. It appears on Sundays. Sometimes. When I feel like it.

I have to be a little careful here. One way to make writing vivid is to hit things a little too hard. You know. Exaggerate. Overstate.

I could offend people if I hit this too hard, so I gotta keep the reins in hand.

But I just thought someone should state the obvious: America is officially no longer thankful. We're now just greedy.

We probably always were, but, like...like...well, like little kids on Christmas morning, we restrained ourselves a little for the sake of decorum. We waited until the Thankgiving leftovers were in the icebox, figuratively speaking, before we stormed the doors of the Wal-Mart and trampled a few of our less-nimble fellow shoppers underfoot.

(Whoa, boy. Easy.)

I'd like to say that I enjoy Christmas as much as anyone. Unfortunately, that wouldn't be quite honest. It's a Type A holiday, and I'm a Type B personality. Well, maybe Type Z. My goal in life is to have only one thing to do every day, and then put that off until tomorrow. The Type A's, on the other hand, just can't wait to get started charging around hither and yon buying up small mountains of presents for the landfill, dragging trees indoors, slathering the house with blinky lights, and blaring that insanely chipper "holiday music" from every fencepost until every public space in the land has been transformed into some sort of Yuletide North Korea.

I'm personally afflicted by getting songs stuck in my head, so I don't even want to hear the titles of Christmas tunes. It's nothing against the tunes themselves: as Edgar Allan Poe wrote, describing "earworm" in his short story "The Imp of the Perverse," "Nor will we be the less tormented if the song in itself be good, or the opera air meritorious."

Like the rankest conservative, I am in favor of a number of social-engineering laws. Except the laws I would favor would be somewhat different. For example, one would be that no citizen shall under any circumstances be subjected to commercial advertising against his or her will. This would get rid of billboards, television commercials, painted public busses, and about 85% of what makes Christmas so oppressive*. I am also in favor of a law which would forbid exposing citizens to Christmas music against their will. I partly define my freedom in a free country as the right to not listen to any music I don't want to listen to.

A move toward legislation of this sort currently does not have support in Congress, that I've heard.

But look, on a more serious note, speaking of freedoms: it is truly obnoxious—no exaggeration—that businesses are allowed to destroy Thanksgiving for tens of thousands of their employees. The powerless shall forever be persecuted, and the religious will evidently fight with firm resolve and spirited purpose any effort to allow the meek to inherit more than the meagerest share of the earth. That much I understand. But let the little people enjoy their freakin' turkey dinners, you goddamn greedy ogres.

That really should be a law: No shopping till sun-up on Friday.

Meanwhile, I will not be doing any shopping at any store that opens before 12:01 on Friday. After Thanksgiving is over. First, we give thanks.

Of course, my little personal protest will have no actual effect. I already have to scrupulously avoid all retail establishments at this time of year, on account of that little problem I have with the music.

Mike
(Photo by Christy of The Daily Dish, used with permission)

[NOTE: TOP will not be updated this coming Thursday, in honor of the quaint and antiquated old holiday of Thanksgiving.

NOTE #2: Six additional paragraphs were sacrificed in the writing of this post. If you think the ones that are left are over the top, you should have seen the ones you're not seeing. :-) —Mike the Ed.

NOTE #3: And bravo to Tim Cook (thanks to Chuck Lavis for this.)]

*As you might expect, I really appreciate the emerging trend in online videos of allowing people to skip ads after the first five seconds. Bravo to that. Of course, since I like it and approve of it, it means the practice will soon be extinct.

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

Benjamin Marks (partial comment): "Over the years, the holidays from Memorial Day to New Year's have blended together in retail America like the East Coast megalopolis from Bangor to Washington D.C.—one giant smear.

"In the spirit of the holidays, I refrain from more than a glancing reference here to the preferred public punishments and pillories of yesteryear, like the stocks, flogging and liberal application of tar and feathers. Ha-rumph."

Ed Hawco: "I feel ripped off. Give us back the missing six paragraphs! ;-) "

Rob L.: "Amen. I also really love B&H and I believe Adorama, who shut down their web ordering as well as their stores for religious holidays. Although, I think at least one of them is open on Thanksgiving...so ya can't win. :-) "

ADDENDUM in the cold light of Monday morning: Regarding Christmas, I might be guilty of self-referentialism. George Carlin has a great joke about drivers. Ever notice, he asks, why everyone who drives slower than you do is an idiot, while everyone who drives faster than you do is a maniac?

The psychological insight behind the joke is fairly profound. It's the reason everyone approves of their own politics. You drive the speed you do because that's the speed you feel comfortable driving. It stands to reason, then, that you believe that speed is the best balance to choose.

If you make the mistake of being self-referential, then everyone who drives faster or slower is in error. They're either driving slower or faster than the speed you think is best. So they're either idiots (i.e., incompetent, compared to you) or maniacs (i.e., reckless, compared to you).

Except, of course, they might not be. What's needed, of course, is a "theory of mind" of other drivers. That is, you have to set aside your attempt to calibrate everyone else to your own comfort level, and first consider that they simply might be doing exactly what you're doing yourself: driving as fast as is comfortable for them. Maybe a faster driver is not being reckless; maybe she has a better car and better skills, and youthful eyesight and youthful reflexes, so she feels comfortable driving more quickly. And maybe she's absolutely right: that is, she really is driving perfectly safely, for her. Maybe a slower driver is an older person who doesn't drive as often and doesn't see as well, so he thinks it's prudent to drive more cautiously. And maybe, for him, it is. Only after you detach the other person's behavior from your own self-selected norms can you more accurately evaluate whether they're actually acting poorly.

It's usually charitable to assume that others are doing the best they can. At least at first.

So here's why this is relevant: the way my own family celebrates Christmas seems just right to me. We strike the perfect balance, I think. It's neither too much nor too little.

So is everyone who chooses to celebrate more or less somehow wrong?

Only if you're being self-referential, assuming that what you do is the reasonable choice and holding everyone else to that standard.

It's quite possible that some people are idiots and some people are maniacs when it comes to Christmas—it's always entertaining to spot the outliers. But of most people, really, you have to step back and say, well, maybe they're just doing what they think is best...for them, and by their way of thinking, and according to their own family customs and their personal energy and level of enthusiasm.

It's not Christmas that I object to. It's the excessive commercial exploitation of Christmas by businesses and corporations—the worship of Mammon.

I especially object to the asinine notion that it's worth obliterating the Thanksgiving holiday just to give Christmas shoppers half a day more shopping almost a month in advance of Christmas. That really does offend me. And I am absolutely offended by corporate bullies who wantonly ruin the Thanksgiving holiday for their dependent employees. That's just wrong.

Preserving Thanksgiving won't hurt Christmas one iota.

It might hurt businesses; but just a little. And it's not the right of business to destroy an old an honored American holiday just for their own gain. It's not like they're being asked to sacrifice all of their Christmas profit; just a little of it.

I'm not anti-Christmas. I'm becoming pretty militantly pro-Thanksgiving, though. Unfortunately it seems like it might be necessary, these days.

Mike

Cyril: "It says a lot about the state of the public debate in North America that a writer has to pre-emptively (and profusely) apologize for writing an opinion piece about...Christmas, of all important things. You should be happy you live south of the border, though. Due to Canada's Thanksgiving being placed in October, the Christmas season here starts on the morning after Halloween, Christmas music and all, making November an even more miserable month than it already is (at least for people who enjoy the sight of a sunny day from time to time)."

Posted on Sunday, 24 November 2013 at 10:37 AM in Off-topic posts, Open Mike | Permalink | Comments (81)

Sunday, 17 November 2013

Open Mike: Weight-Loss Diet Update

"Open Mike" consists of Yr. Hmbl. Blggr. going off-topic in a concerted way. It shows up here on some Sundays.

I'll try to make this short. A lot has changed since my last post on this subject.

I've reached the half-way point in my weight-loss diet. I committed to stay on the diet for 70 weeks, with a target weight loss of one pound a week, because when I started I was 70 pounds overweight (according to conventional BMI calculators, which can easily be found online).

My requirements are a bit demanding. These are my limitations:

I'm quite lazy (about many things, definitely including food);
I can't cook, and I'm unlikely to learn—I just don't like it, and have no talent for it; and
I'm not gonna suffer. I tried "torture diets" and calorie-restriction diets, and they're not for me. Anything that requires the consistent application of extraordinary willpower just ain't gonna cut it for a lackadaisical undisciplined lazy dude who hates to cook.

Here's where I stand:

Week: 35
Weight loss: 35 lbs.

So I'm doing okay. So far.

Note that this level of exactitude is not the result of luck or wisdom, but adjustment: when my weight loss has been more than one pound a week, I took steps to slow it down; and when it was less than one pound a week, to speed it up.

My diet, which I call by the awkward name of "The Gruel-and-Grass Diet" (I was never good at naming things), is very simple. Here it is:

Restrict yourself to three meals a day.
One meal (breakfast) is 1/2 cup of oatmeal, with a few additives to make it more pleasant, and nuts.
The second meal should be 1/2 cup of converted rice, perhaps with a few additives to make it more pleasant.
The third meal should be a sensible prepared meal of your choice. That one meal is where you can introduce variety to your daily fare, and also where you can indulge whichever theory of healthy eating you happen to believe in.
Strictly avoid salt, sugar, fat, and any processed food products designed to induce and encourage cravings.
Weigh in once per week at the same time of the same day, and keep adjusting your habits so you average 1 lbs. of weight loss per week. I use one of these, because I got frustrated with my obviously imprecise bathroom scale. Too much weight loss is as bad as too little.

That's pretty much it. It's not a "lifetime eating plan." It's meant to be a temporary weight-loss diet for normal people who find they are obese and need to lose a great whackin' pile o' poundage. (Losing 70 pounds is not trivial.)

I'm perfectly happy with my breakfast. I eat my half cup of oatmeal with some cinnamon and one level teaspoon of sugar, usually with a small amount of fruit added (raspberries, strawberries, bananas, blueberries, or kiwi). I also eat one-third of a cup of mixed nuts. I mix at least five types of nuts, including pistachios, almonds, cashews, pecans, Brazil nuts, and filberts. Nuts are very good for you, but they're also highly caloric, as I discovered one week when I snacked on them liberally.

With anything you're prone to overeat, such as nuts in my case, it's good to measure it.

I'm not entirely happy with my other two meals. Still tinkering. Mostly, I find it difficult to plan ahead and then cook. To my rice in the evenings, I will sometimes add a cup of cooked wild rice, and I'll use different sauces and marinades to vary the flavor; however it's not easy to find sauces that aren't loaded with sodium and sugar. Sometimes I add half a can of red beans and a dollop of barbecue sauce, which is tasty. Often I have my rice and a large bunch of salad greens, which seems to do the trick. As with the nuts, I mix many different kinds of lettuces and greens, including spinach greens.

Symptoms
I find, somewhat to my surprise, that I really like eating this way. It makes life easier, and I'm mostly very comfortable—I'm only mildly "peckish" for a few hours in the evenings (which is when I used to overindulge). And I miss sweets, which are very similar to a drug for me.

And, as you will hear from lots of people who've lost a significant amount of weight while getting adequate nutrition, I feel so much better it's amazing. I can really hardly believe it.

Of course I still have a long way to go.

I began the journey that resulted in this diet a little over three years ago, in response to a suggestion from my brother, Dr. Scott Johnston, a Ph.D. psychologist. Since then I've surveyed a cross-section of the popular literature (I've read approximately 55 books on dieting and nutrition). My conclusion is that the science of nutrition is currently in a primitive state, about like medicine before William Harvey or epidemiology before John Snow. We lack fundamental clarity. Accordingly, devotees of various belief systems are full of a passionate intensity (exactly as theorists of disease transmission were before germs were discovered), even though the beliefs to which they adhere are widely divergent.

That third meal
It's impossible to dictate to others which belief system they ought to choose. So, for that third meal, you'd follow your own course.

Personally, after reading The China Study at the suggestion of a few readers here on TOP and watching the companion film "Forks Over Knives," available on Netflix, I've adopted for my third meal what a TOP reader named Grant Sellek (he comments as "Arg") named "V+1." Except I'd call it "V+x," where V = vegan and "x" is the number of pounds of animal protein you'll allow yourself to consume per week.

Note that you can be a vegan and eat very unhealthily (what are called "junk food vegans"—after all, caramel popcorn is vegan!), so it's probably better to refer to it as a "whole food, plant based" diet like T. Colin Campbell does.

For me, x = about 1 cup of whole milk a day (split between two large mugs of coffee, the second of which I seldom finish) and maybe a third of a pound of raw and cooked fish and seafood a week (I go out for sushi).

My suggestion is that for your third meal, you should cook for yourself (i.e., don't rely on restaurants) using ingredients (i.e., whole food), and observe reasonably judicious portion control.

Cravings
The principal failing of the current Western industrial diet is cravings, and you're not necessarily to blame. Three years ago, I was deeply curious about the obesity epidemic; I'm not any more. Michael Moss's recent book Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us (a must read) answers that mystery convincingly. Faux-food producers work very hard, with teams of marketers and scientists and virtually unlimited resources, to induce you to overindulge in unwholesome, unhealthy, heavily adulterated foods. You do this "voluntarily," but it's a designed program and they're very, very good at manipulating you.

You need to resist.

The bad news is that temptation is everywhere, and nearly everybody not on a self-regulated diet suffers. The good news is that cravings can be banished relatively quickly if you just cut out the offending substances from your diet. The worst cravings will subside after three days of abstaining, and are nearly gone after ten days. You'll still feel the pull of old habits when you're tempted, but, as new habits take hold, resisting the worst salty-sugary-fatty concoctions becomes manageable.

I will say it's not easy at first. Here are the main things to stay away from:

Sugar, overt (candy, ice cream, pastries, etc.) and covert (hidden in a wide variety of products, from ketchup to packaged bread);
Cheese, especially processed cheese, and all processed meats;
Chips and crackers of almost every sort;
Adulterated and alcoholic drinks including all sodas whether sugared or "diet." ("Don't drink calories" is very good starter advice for people who want to lose weight.) Drink water.

I've also recently been staying away from red meat and milk, but that's my current personal "diet ideology" as mentioned above, so I can't really add those to the list. Maybe you think so, maybe you don't.

The bad side is that consuming these salt-, sugar-, and fat-riddled faux-food concoctions will trigger the cravings anew. So it's very difficult to have "just a little" on the grounds that just a little won't hurt you. Any food carefully engineered to induce cravings will induce cravings not only for more of that substance ("Betcha can't eat just one!"), but also for more food in general. You need to stay away.

Sugar is my weakness. During my 35 weeks, I've lapsed twice—once when I had a very large (and I must say, incredibly delicious) dessert while out at a restaurant with friends, and once at Halloween, when I had candy in the house and was unable to resist pigging out on it. In both cases, it took me about a week to get on track again, and those two weeks were the hardest of my diet period so far. It's like starting over. The cravings are relatively easy to banish, but they will also return easily. You have to be on guard.

Until next time
The good news I'll leave you with is that The Gruel-and-Grass diet is easy, comfortable, and effective. It's a temporary diet intended for weight loss, although I like it so much I'll probably stick with some version of it after the 70 weeks are up. I just need to find more energy for planning and cooking that third meal.

If you're suffering from overweight, I highly recommend the project, however you go about it. It turns out that a lot of the ill effects I'd been ascribing to aging just weren't—they were the effects of overweight and poor diet. The former, of course, is not reversible. The latter very much is.

Mike

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

Romano Giannetti: "I was in a quite easier challenge than you (just 30 pounds to go), and liking cooking and having a normally a Mediterranean diet (I normally live in Spain) so for me the famous diet recipe of Karlos Arguiñano—Just Eat One Half—worked beautifully. But the lesson I learned is that you need to actively control what you eat. The market offering (even in so-called healthy food countries like my Italy and Spain) are mischievous, and evidently the evolutionary mechanisms of autoregulation of our bodies are not working for our modern lifestyle."

BH: "Some of this sounds familiar to me, particularly your long-term, measured approach. I'd tried all the different diets but it wasn't until I changed my mind—my expectations and timeframe—that I started getting a handle on things. I'm currently 12 weeks into a 1.5 lb./week loss plan, and have lost 20 lbs. with very little suffering.

"I have to mention one product that has helped me immensely: Fitbit. (www.fitbit.com). Once I started collecting and analyzing data over periods of time greater than one day, I really changed my approach. My diet is no longer 'blown' by one night out with friends, because I'm always looking at the big picture. Recommended for people who have been easily derailed in their efforts."

Mike replies: Good point. I agree that thinking in terms of longer periods of time really makes a big difference. For example, if every day is a torture to get through, you immediately know you're not on a workable plan. Because although deprivation might seem tolerable for some amorphous undefined period of a few weeks or a month or two, it becomes obvious that it's not tenable if you're planning your diet for a year or more. Also, I agree that it helps you overcome difficulties like lapses and plateaus—if I put on a pound one week instead of take it off, it's not a disaster. I just adjust going forward.

You're right that this is probably a very important mental adjustment to adopt.

Chris Malcolm: "I had to retire early because of ill health. I'd had a heart attack and discovered I was diabetic. I'd lost about half of my sugar-controlling insulin capacity. Instead of the easy option of taking the pills my doc wanted to prescribe, I tried the option of avoiding eating more carbs at any one time than my damaged pancreas could handle.

"My diet ended up quite unlike yours except in three important respects: I avoided junk food; I naturally ate less than I used to; I didn't get hungry. The effects of this diet over the next few years were that I lost weight at about a pound every few weeks, started feeling a lot better, and all sorts of physiological failings which my doc had assured me were the inevitable result of aging started improving. We allowed a huge complex of food supply industries to develop which profited from persuading people to eat more. What on earth did we expect would happen?"

Posted on Sunday, 17 November 2013 at 11:08 AM in Off-topic posts, Open Mike | Permalink | Comments (37)

Sunday, 27 October 2013

Open Mike: Fantasies (OT)

So here's an odd thing. I buy maybe two issues a year of Stereophile, and the last issue I bought had extensive reviews of not one but two components that cost $42,000. That's not for a whole music-playing stereo system, mind you—that's for one component, in a system that will need a bare minimum of four components—plus wires, which at that level will be a significant expense.

Then I bought an issue of Automobile, which I do probably six times a year (I enjoy Ezra Dyer's column). This issue had a comparison between the Ferrari F12 Berlinetta ($323,000) and the Mercedes-Benz SLS AMG Black Series ($279,000).

I was really grateful for that. I've been just agonizing about which of those two cars to buy; I was so afraid of making the wrong choice and regretting it later that I thought I was going to have to break down and buy both of them! The article really let me rest my mind. They say to get the Ferrari, and that's good enough for me.

Leica S (this is the S2): The outlier.

Seriously, though, who cares about these things? I know several people who are (probably) wealthy enough to buy $300,000 cars, but I don't know a single person who would actually spend that much.

As far as stereo equipment is concerned, I have a basic rule: never buy anything with the words "Signature," "Reference," or the name of a precious metal or stone in the name.

I suppose people like reading about such things—$42,000 preamps and $323,000 cars. I don't. I agree that products tend to enter your interest range when they're at the top of or just barely beyond your ability to afford them, but there are some things I really believe I'd never buy even if I were a billionaire. When I read about fantasy cars, I might read about something that costs $90,000. But I don't even want to read about something that costs $900,000. It doesn't entertain me. I'm not interested. It's just ostentation, excess, and showing off, and I'm not susceptible to the allure of any of those things. Even in my daydreams.

The outside of my "fantasy" envelope where cameras are concerned is the Leica S. I'd never buy one, but I'm interested in reading about it. But that's as far as it goes. That's the edge. (My photographic daydreams revolve more around free time, and help.)

Daydreamin': hmm, that looks like a Mazda Miata. Hmm, that looks
like a Corvette LS7 V8. $35,000, not including the car.

So what's the most expensive car you'll daydream about?

Mike

"Open Mike" appears on TOP only, but not always, on Sundays.

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

David Bostedo (partial comment): "...Price is only one factor that affects interest."

David Lonsdale (partial comment): "The main thing is [not to] disrupt the family finances."

Bryce Lee: "Motor vehicle? They are all too expensive in ways other than monetary. In my case, two strikes against me: close to seven feet tall and 400 pounds means nothing 'normal' will fit, although my Honda Ridgeline Truck with the driver's seat set four inches back is OK; my knees still hit the lower controls now and then. Long term? As I age I find the physical requirements of driving aany vehicle to be kind tiresome, and dangerous. So if I had my druthers, 1922 Rolls-Royce with seperate compartment for the chauffeur. It would mean paying somebody to drive, maintain and geneally keep the vehicle looking good. And it would be driven by somebody else rather than me being driven, if you catch my drift."

John Camp: "I don't dream of particular cars, but of particular performance. I want a car that handles well, is fast, and can take at least medium-rough off-road jaunts. (Remember the old saying: a really great 4x4 will get you stuck farther back in the wilderness.) After a lot of research, and looking at a lot of cars, I wound up with the Mercedes ML550. It has decent ground clearance and general off-road ability for the desert southwest, it's very comfortable for long trips, will haul a ton of stuff and a dog, and will do 0-60 in 4.8 seconds. For me, at this point, it's the perfect car. It's not cheap.

"On the other hand, I think the Ferraris, etc., have to be looked upon more as art works than as driving cars. Every once in a while, a Chinese princeling will kill himself in LA in one of them, but even in Beverly Hills, you don't see that many—and almost everyone in the upper parts of the Hills could afford one. But they just seem silly, unless perhaps you are very rich, and collect them very selectively, as art works.

"I think they're also less tenable in the U.S. Europeans, although a certain group of them would deny it, are much more class-ridden than the U.S. That's why even long-time democratic countries still have people called 'count' or 'duchess' or whatever, who are treated with undeserved deference, and a car like a Ferrari becomes a symbol not only of class, but also an object of envy for people who don't belong to that class. So if a middle-class guy gets rich in business, he might buy one to project an image of himself as belonging to that upper class....

"In the U.S., on the other hand, I think the sight of a Ferrari on the street less often brings up a surge of envy, than it does the thought, 'dipshit.'"

Mike replies: I hope no Ferrari drivers read this blog.

AL C.: "I own a Ferrari, an F430, and I enjoy reading TOP. The best description I've heard used re what makes driving a Ferrari such a surpassing experience is that the car literally fizzes. You feel the fizz through every part of your body. It's worth every penny. The only thing that compares is to play a Ken Wilkinson Decca recording through a pair of Genesis Ones. Same fizz."

John: "Back in the days I test drove a Porsche 911 and a Corvette, each for one week. After that I concluded that my own Mazda Miata delivered the most smiles per dollar and actual fun of driving on real roads. Sold the Miata after the second kid was born. One day, I will have one again."

Michael Matthews: "How about more info on that Mazda Miata? If it's a magazine article—what, where, when? I'm blissfully happy in the Miata on two-lane country roads, mild day, top down. But it is underpowered. The adaptation shown is way, way overpowered. But there may be a workable compromise someday. It's wonderful to have a brand new 50-year old two seat roadster, but the (necessary) automatic transmission means it does need a bit of a boost."

Mike replies: It's a conversion called a "Habu" by Flyin' Miata, a shop in Western Colorado. They even have "build diaries" at the website.

The hardnosed rec for a Miata with a useful power upgrade would be an NC Miata (2005–current) with a new suspension and a supercharger. Takes care of the power. (The stock suspension is squishy.) The sentimental recommendation, however, would be an NB, like I have, or an NA, if you are small enough to fit in one (I just barely fit into the NB, and as it is the crown of my head is out in the slipstream). Solution for more power is typically an aftermarket turbocharger, but that's not for me—the only place I miss the power is at low revs. At high revs the stock engine is very nice, at least on Uncle Sam's roads.

Patrick: "As a minimalist, I actually brag about what I do without in a car. I drive about as base a base model car as you can find—by desire—and still wish it had less. Ultimately, I am more impressed by solid engineering and decent craftsmanship in a minimalist design at an affordable price than all the expensive bells and whistles in the world. Any manufacturer can throw a bunch of excess into a car when they price it high enough, but the logistics required to make a good, well-engineered car at a low price are far more impressive to me."

Mike replies: I sympathize. Jay Leno talks about how he appreciates cars that were the product of a single individual's vision. The problem there is that there are no longer any such cars being made...virtually every car readily available to the public is the product of—in effect—a committee. So a car with a strong vision of what you're describing is unlikely to exist, because marketers tie "higher quality" and "more features" together. Cars that are basic in the sense of "no frills" are also likely to be cheap, with compromised materials and components.

MarkB: "In the late '80s, I lucked into a backstage pass for a Pink Floyd concert (long post-Roger Waters) and through some twists of circumstance, found myself talking to Nick Mason (the drummer, whom most backstage didn't recognize) about his '63 ('not '62!') Ferrari 250 GTO and the annual 'GTO Owner's Club Rally' that many well-heeled (and a few less-heeled) enthusiasts participated in.

Nick Mason, drummer for Pink Floyd, and his '63 Ferrari 250 GTO

"Mr. Mason is in the price-no-object category of 'car guys,' but he still wants to drive every single vehicle he owns, and drive it hard. He also said something incredible about his life in the band and their success which provided the money to buy all those cars (somewhat paraphrased by my muddy memory)—'The music and cars...it's all just wonderful stuff made by people who care, but it won't last beyond a single human lifetime...so why not play it loud and drive it to pieces? That's simple enough.'

"My 'dream car' is a 1970 Jaguar E-type convertible. Simple enough."

Dave Stewart: "Come now, Mike, don't be so modest. As I alluded to in reply to an earlier post, I took a recent film photo that was very relevant to you and the website. Now that an appropriate post has appeared, the true TOP-mobile can be revealed. Spied in Inverness (Scotland) on the 28th August. I dusted down the scanner today especially:

Jim G: "If they can't tow a boat or haul 4x8 sheets of plywood, then what good are they?"

Posted on Sunday, 27 October 2013 at 01:57 PM in Off-topic posts, Open Mike | Permalink | Comments (92)

Sunday, 20 October 2013

Open Mike: Photo Essay (Part I)

Today is off-topic day, so I have...a photo essay.

Hmm, that doesn't sound quite right. Is a photo essay really off topic? Sort of, because it has a subject matter, but sort of not, too.

Continue reading "Open Mike: Photo Essay (Part I)" »

Posted on Sunday, 20 October 2013 at 04:40 PM in Open Mike | Permalink | Comments (41)

Open Mike: Photo Essay (Part II)

...This continues the previous post. To keep all the comments in one place, I'll close the comments here; if you'd like to make a comment, please go up to Part I. We'll localize the discussion there.

Continue reading "Open Mike: Photo Essay (Part II)" »

Posted on Sunday, 20 October 2013 at 04:40 PM in Open Mike | Permalink | Comments (0)

Monday, 14 October 2013

Open Mike: I Got Nuthin'

Normally on Sundays I write an off-topic article, but yesterday I had nuthin'. A day late with "Open Mike" this week.

It's been a bad week for me, I have to say. But here's one of the nice things about being middle aged: bad moods aren't so much of a crisis any more. You've learned that they come and they go. When you're young you feel like you have to do something. Once you're older and wiser, you just wait.

I'm "between tables," and I sure miss pool. Practiced at a bar yesterday, and guys like me should not be hanging out at bars. And football was pretty blah in our corner of the world. Green Bay won, but it was an ugly win—game never sparked up—and we lost two good players.

Football is too much about injuries these days for me. It's become a crapshoot; depends way too much on who's healthy and when.

Cowboys-Redskins, another poor game, cost me seeing the big Ortiz homer…and I didn't even care what was going on in the football game. Just watching mindlessly.

Twits!
I don't like New England, but Pats-Saints definitely gets "Game of the Week." Great game.

Don't like Brady, but have to admire him—he played like Joe Montana in the last three minutes. Saints should have been able to nurse that win home. But their offense suddenly started playing like little fat girls when all they needed to do was to hang on to the freakin' ball for a few minutes.

Even that great game had an ugly aspect. Half the NE fans had left the stadium before the big fireworks happened! The Pats got the ball back not once but twice at the end and Brady won the game with an amazing pressure pass with five seconds to go...and half the crowd was in the parking lot.

The way I look at it, if you go to a football game—heck, if you watch a football game, or a game in any sport—you are hoping to get lucky and see something amazing. But for that to happen, you have to keep watching. Often enough, it doesn't happen—you'll watch every play of some ugly grinder game like Green Bay and Baltimore played yesterday. But at the very least, if you've invested in getting your butt to the game, and it's anything like a halfway decent game, you stick around and pay attention.

It's not like it was a hopeless blowout. It was a close, hard-fought, high-scoring game between two of the leading teams in the League. If it's really so important to beat the traffic, why not just stay home in the first place?

I hope a lot of those NE fans who left prior to the big ending are kicking themselves in the arse hard and repeatedly this morning. Complete twits if you ask me.

But now back to those injuries....

Robert Griffin III at Baylor in 2009. Photo by Caesarscott.

Football, for me, is one of those things (and there are many) that really needs a major re-think. The players are so big and the games so punishing that even the best athletes can't hold up over sixteen-plus games played at a frequency of one a week. If you really watch how they smash into each other and get tangled up, the amazing thing is not that injuries fell them like flies but that they don't get injured more often, and worse.

The game is too rough for an athlete like RGIII to survive. Football has half ruined that kid already and he'll be washed up and gone in a few years, wrecked by injuries. Scintillating athlete. But too delicate for football. So many shooting-star players come, shine brightly, and are gone.

Might be for the best. Jim McMahon, QB for the '85 Super Bowl Bears, says when he goes out to get the mail, he gets halfway down the driveway, forgets what he's doing, and goes back inside again. Then he remembers the mail and heads back outside. And the same thing happens again. He says he can go outside and inside five times before he manages to actually get the mail. He wishes now he'd played baseball.

And yet with all the injuries, temporary and permanent, the NFL is still playing the same roster limits it has for decades. Just like when the players played 12 games a season (1947–1960) or when Dick Butkus (6'3", 245) was a monster in size (he wouldn't be today).

If you ask me, the League needs a very basic overhaul. Every team should double their roster and then every player should only be allowed to play half the regular-season games. It would give the players more rest, and de-emphasize the recovery periods from injuries. Even things out. And oh, by the way, cripple fewer people. There's certainly enough money in the game.

And there should be a weight limit for the D-line (not for the O-line). And maybe the game should become non-contact downfield (safeties seem to suffer the worst brain damage). I'm sure some sort of electronic "tagging" could be devised—if there were a will to do it.

Of course, these things will never happen. They absolutely can't, because this is one of those things (and there are many) which have to stay the same because it's the way we've always done things. And things like that can't change.

I've started on antidepressants again. Leitmotif of my life. Maybe by next week I'll be back to normal and in a decent mood again. I'll wait.

Mike
(Thanks to Kim K.)

"Open Mike" is when we let the hardworkin' Ed. loose to write about things he has no business writing about.

TOP's links!

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

Ed Grossman: "As a New Englander and Pats fan, I can tell you that those who left early are mostly claiming they did so in order to catch the start of the Red Sox game. Seamless blend of fact and fiction? Probably. Still, the only ones hurt were themselves. Yet another reason I prefer my sports in the comfort of my home. The Houston Texans 'fans' who cheered when their own quarterback was lying on the ground holding his injured leg? Shame on them. That was a disgrace!"

paul richardson (partial comment): "Sorry to hear you don't like New England...but Brady? If he played in Green Bay, he'd already have been canonized a saint. People would name their daughters after him."

Mike replies: Well, of course. But he doesn't play in Green Bay, he plays in Boston, in the wrong Conference.

And while it's true that all the little girls in Green Bay are named either "Bret" or "Erin," cheeseheads are too sensible to name their daughters "Tom."

Severian: "George Will made some similar points in his editorial of August 3, 2012. The game is simply unhealthy as it is structured today—and I don't see that changing any time soon."

Mike replies: How about that: me agreeing with George Will. This is a weird week!

Posted on Monday, 14 October 2013 at 10:33 AM in Off-topic posts, Open Mike | Permalink | Comments (20)

Sunday, 29 September 2013

Open Mike: Connotation

Miller often woke up early to get the fire going in the old logging camp's ancient stone fire pit, and Pat awoke under the trees to the crisp fall cold and the smell of bacon sizzling in the skillet.

• • •

Henry, slumped in his tattered armchair, smelled of Old Spice cologne, stale cigar smoke, and the slouching ruin of youthful dreams.

• • •

Her beauty was perfect but too unspoiled, too childlike, and he couldn't bring himself to feel toward her anything resembling lust. Even her breath smelled sweet.

• • •

Stephen King has a passage in his book about writing in which he briefly describes a rabbit sitting on a red-and-white checked tablecloth. Then he claims, simply, that what he just did, and what all writers do, is conjuring. He put a picture in your head of something that doesn't exist.

I can't remember what other comments he makes about this. (It's annoying having all my books put away—I'd go find and reread that passage otherwise, and could talk about it a bit more intelligently.) But part of what he's depending on in conjuring that rabbit-on-the-table image in your head is that you—the reader—know what a rabbit looks like and have seen a red-and-white checked tablecloth. He's conjuring, all right, but he's also depending on shared experience.

All of those three short passages at the top of this post also conjure in the common literary way. But all three depend for their richness on your own personal experience—especially, you'll notice, in the realm of smell. Obviously you can't put down smell on a page. Any of those passages might seem vivid to you, but probably only if you've smelled a.) bacon cooking, especially outdoors; b.) the way old smokers smell; or c.) a young person's "good breath." All the words are doing is reminding you of something you might already know.

A tear to your eye
I think many photographs function in the same way. The connection might be tenuous and what it connects to might be fugitive, even subconscious. And it might be quite specific to one person; that is, a particular picture of a crumbling wall might remind you of your visit to your mother's childhood home in another country, which might remind you of your now-deceased mother, and in that way a photograph of a detail of a wall is capable of bringing a tear to your eye. And if other people look at you, mystified, when you show them that picture, you say something like "there's just something about it."

Of course, possibly other connotations are not like that; possibly they're dull and obvious. Or, possibly they're so universal that they're just trite and clichéd.

It's important to remind ourselves, from time to time, that the connotations aren't in the picture, in the same way that the smell of cooking bacon is not there in the words.

Questions
Sure enough. I find myself reading old literature from time to time, and it's obvious to me that quite often the writers are depending on shared experience to fill in the details, unmindful that I'd be reading their words two centuries since they wrote and that I don't know what some of their references refer to. See if you can read Turgenev or Washington Irving and not sometimes come across examples. (It will certainly happen a lot in the near future, when people read about characters putting a record on, or needing a wristwatch to tell the time, or waiting for a magazine to arrive in the mail so they can get the latest news, or saving up for a calculator, or Congress working together harmoniously for the good of the country.)

I'm sure some people who read this will be searching anxiously here for a directive, but I don't have one. I just think that thinking about connotations, personal or universal, might expand how we understand looking at pictures, or perhaps how we expect other people to look at ours. "How do I feel about this," "What makes me feel that way," and "Are other people likely to feel the same way" are questions worth asking—even if we never quite uncover the answers.

Mike

'Open Mike' is when Grandpa wanders off every weekend. We go find him and bring him back home for the work week.

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

David Miller: "I recall the incomparable Isaac Asimov describing a speaker discussing one of his (Asimov's) stories, unaware that the author was in the audience. After the presentation Asimov approached the speaker and thanked him for the presentation, but pointed out that the speaker had, in fact, misinterpreted the story. The immediate response was, 'My dear Mr. Asimov, what makes you think that, merely because you wrote the story, you know what it is about?'"

Richard Tugwell: "David Miller's featured anecdote about Asimov is even more relevant for photography—maybe that was his point—because often with candid or street photography we have no idea what it's about. The viewer is entitled to interpret it in any way they want and may get closer to 'the truth' than the photographer."

Kenneth Tanaka: "'All the words are doing is reminding you of something you might already know.' That's essentially what most scenic landscape photographs are about, too. Without recalling a viewer's fuller sensory experience of, say, a mountain environment, a picture of mountains is, at best, decorative and dull."

dogman: "Growing up, the Holy Trinity of American writers was Faulkner, Steinbeck and Hemingway. I read a lot of them all and loved each of them at the time. As I have aged, I have come to love the works of Hemingway more than the other two, especially his short stories. Why? He wrote in vignettes, without resolution in most cases, and he required the reader to think and fill in the spaces between his words. I guess Hemingway was making the reader do the conjuring. In any event, it works for me. So do the lyrics of songwriter/singer Dave Alvin. Like Hemingway, his stories require the listener to resolve the unsaid. A good example of this is the song 'Plastic Rose.'

"I would like my photos to have that effect. I don't want to be the teacher who explains the subject. I would like to be the storyteller who makes the viewer conjure his own story and meaning for the image. A noble goal, surely impossible to achieve.

"I don't know if it is true or not but I've read Hemingway once made a bet that he could write a short story composed of less than 10 words. He won the bet. I may not have the correct wording but I think it went, 'For sale: New pair of baby shoes. Never worn.'"

Steve Caddy: "Regarding dogman's 9-word Hemingway example: Wow. If you've had the experience of losing a child at birth, you'll appreciate acutely just how powerful that particular piece of conjuring is. A tear to the eye indeed."

Jock Elliott adds: "Hemingway wrote like a camera. Take it from an old English major. He would describe a scene, the actions of the characters, their dialog, but he never, that I recall, described their thoughts or internal state. He left that for the reader to infer from his external snapshot of the scene."

John Camp: "There are a number of common techniques used in fiction, and being specific about the settings is one of the most effective—but perhaps decreasingly so. For example, people spoke on wired telephones (and from phone booths) from the late 1800s until ten years ago. All of a sudden, cell phones arrived, and that changes the way fiction works—you really have to jump through your butt to come up with reasons people can't talk to each other. In my first novel, in a sort of ticking clock situation, two cops rush to a phone booth...and neither has a quarter. Now, there wouldn't even be a phone booth. In 1989, in the first novel that I completed that was actually published (I had a couple flat tires before that), a wrote about a computer expert going into his study: 'Most of my time is spent in the studio or the study, which is dominated by three walls of books and a bunch of personal computers. There's an IBM-AT that's been collecting dust lately, one of the IBM PS/2s, a Mac II, and my personal favorite, a full-bore Amiga 2000. A Lee Data dumb terminal is stuffed under a book table next to an early vintage Mac. A few old-timers from Commodore, Radio Shack and Apple sit in boxes in a corner with power cores wrapped around their disk drives....' You don't have to go back to Washington Irving to make references that will mystify people; 1989 will do it quite nicely."

Posted on Sunday, 29 September 2013 at 01:16 PM in Open Mike, Reflections | Permalink | Comments (26)

Sunday, 22 September 2013

Open Mike: Prayer of Gratitude

"Sight is the soul's perfect delight."

—Unknown

I know what you're thinking—where does an avowed agnostic get off claiming to offer a prayer?

But hey, I'm not doctrinaire. I never assume I have to be right. Aristotle wasn't right about everything. Einstein wasn't either. Newton spent the back half of his life as an alchemist, for pete's sake. The guy who invented the ultra-logical empiricist Sherlock Holmes—the ur-Spock—believed passionately in fairies. (No kidding.) So who am I? I pray. I am reverent. (I even go to church. I like church. They welcome agnostics—I always ask.)

But I digress.

I was coming home the other night when a fast-moving thunderhead passed by. Its passing revealed the setting sun, which lit up the receding mountain of clouds with brilliant yellow-orange light even as it painted the western horizon pink. I was looking at both sides of the sky sitting at a long stoplight at the crest of a gentle rise. I wish I could have stayed there longer. The cars behind me might have objected.

A few nights later it rained, and as I was walking the dog I came across the crest of a hill. It was late dusk, almost twilight. The trees and streets were wet and the air had that earthy smell of fresh rain, but the sky had cleared. The hill was so steep that the streetlight at the bottom of it was almost at my eye level. It spilled a pool of yellow light on the leaves of a tree, a sprinkle of yellow and green amidst the blue gloom. Far behind me, I heard a train horn from a distant crossing.

A few days after that, a cold front moved in, and the sky turned into a theater of the what must have been the most varied and dramatic clouds I've ever seen. Huge, hard-edged cumulus clouds; stormclouds heavy with rain; crepuscular rays from the sun. The wind moving everything around and rearranging the sets constantly. I drove around just looking at the skies. It was an atmospheric supergala. Driving home later, the western horizon was a band of roiled gold underneath a solid wall of dark purple.

This has just been the most beautiful, dramatic spring and summer I've ever experienced in Wisconsin. It hasn't been "beautiful" by the standards of people who just like hot weather, and who don't mind even if it doesn't rain. It's been relatively wet and relatively cold. But it's been visually just gorgeous.

Time and again this summer I've just been struck by the realization that we live in a beautiful world. And when the earth is beautiful, it's heaven.

And I'm grateful. I'm full of gratitude to be here, seeing, and for this lovely season.

Mike

"Open Mike," the editorial page of TOP—frequently off-topic—appears on Sundays, at least when yr. hmbl. proprietor is so moved.

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Featured Comments from:

Moose: "'If the only prayer you ever say in your whole life is "thank you," that would suffice.' —Meister Eckhart."

Luis C. Aribe: "Die Welt ist schön. (Pardon my German.)"

Mike replies: The title of a very famous photography book....

John Krumm: "Ah, you've experienced the pleasure of a colder, more blustery and varied summer, something we are very familiar with in Southeast Alaska (except this summer, for us, which was blissfully and unusually clear and warm, a trade perhaps between the North and South). One of the gifts of practicing photography is an intense appreciation of natural light and form, something I enjoy even without a camera, and your words describe it well."

Posted on Sunday, 22 September 2013 at 03:39 PM in Off-topic posts, Open Mike | Permalink | Comments (31)

Sunday, 01 September 2013

Open Mike: The Gruelandgrass Diet

This isn't going to be a long post, I hope. And please—I'm not lecturing to anyone. I'm merely describing what I'm doing. A personal matter, for me as it is for you. If I sound terse, it's only because I'm trying to cover a lot of ground in few words. (I didn't even get into the behavioral issues, which could easily double the size of this post.)

A while back I got fascinated by the obesity epidemic in America. I had reached a high point (or low point!) of 267 pounds (I'm 6' 1") and it seemed pretty clear that I was cruising toward 300. Within a relatively short period of time—well under two years—I read some 50 books on the subject. Along the way I tried many experiments on myself, including a liquid diet, a no-sugar diet, and Weight Watchers.

My general conclusion is that human science currently knows relatively little about human nutrition. We're in a period of darkness and ignorance, approximately equivalent to the state of epidemiology before the theory of germs was discovered, and our understandings are simpleminded and incomplete. This is why so many theories can compete, inconclusively. (I could write a whole disquisition on this idea as well.)

My motivation is simply to try to give myself a decent shot at reasonable longevity: you just don't see very many obese 80-year-olds. I don't want to go sailing towards old age burdened with a lot of excess weight. Also, I have sleep apnea, and "losing weight" was one of the treatments the doctors suggested.

I stopped reading the books when a) new ones were so much "more of the same" that I found myself simply skimming them, and b) the literary formula of the genre had become completely transparent. (The formula of a diet book goes, very roughly, promise, problem, author's personal testimonial and bonafides, The Solution, supportive scientific gobbledegook supposedly proving the efficacy of the solution, specific recommendations and encouragement, success stories.)

The "promise" is the absolute bedrock of any halfway decent diet book: this book is going to make you svelte, good-looking, popular, healthy, and happy. This book holds the key. And virtually every diet, no matter how crazy, has succeeded for somebody, somewhere.

Unfortunately, I, on the other hand, have no promise for you, and I think you probably shouldn't follow my diet. I think each person's weight-loss plan has to be custom-tailored to their individual circumstances, weaknesses, lifestyle, and tastes. (And beliefs, probably, but I won't get into that too much.)

However, I do think there are a few keys you might find useful. Note the emphasis on "might." These are a few basic principles I distilled out of my reading for my own benefit.

1. A diet can't be torture. Self-inflicted torture isn't sustainable. It inevitably must reach a stopping point. And when you revert to your old unregulated habits you'll gain the weight right back again (as I did after my liquid diet. It worked, but it was utter misery. I thought about food and self-control all day every day. No good.)

2. "Craving" is the cause of the obesity epidemic in my opinion. The food industry has created heavy cocktails of salt, sugar, and fat (not coincidentally the title of the best book on the subject) in a great variety of forms and formats, and commercial distribution has made these not only widely available but virtually unavoidable. Consider a few examples amongst a sea of them: ketchup could be considered sugar sauce; sushi (sushi is the rice, not the raw fish often eaten with it) is made with a sugar and vinegar solution; if you emptied a grocery store of all the products that unnaturally contain added sugars, the aisles would be almost bare (you almost cannot find any brand of bread, soup, or peanut butter, among many other product categories, that don't contain added sugars); and you can buy a single "Baby Ruth" candy bar that contains a quarter of the entire calorie allotment you should eat in an entire day and more sugar than you should consume in a day—and you can buy it at office supply stores, hardware stores, or the gas station, among many other completely inappropriate places.

Just start to notice, if you haven't already, a) the size of candy or dessert products offered, b) the amount of them on display, and c) the variety of places they're for sale.

Wheat also triggers or contributes to cravings in many people. A good book if you feel you're addicted to breads and cakes is Wheat Belly by William Davis, M.D., a cardiologist who noticed in treating people for celiac disease (wheat intolerance) that weight loss was a side effect of eliminating wheat in the diet. (It was one of the books I skimmed.)

Grossly overdosing on these substances, especially (for me) sugar, not only engenders a craving for more sugar but transfers to other foods as well. That is, if you grossly overeat sugar, you'll crave more food of all kinds. (Ask yourself a simple question: have you ever felt "full" or overstuffed, and yet were still experiencing a strong desire for more sweets or more food? Well, that's not "hunger." That's craving. I would be willing to bet that the vast majority of obese and morbidly obese people haven't felt actual hunger in a very long time.) The hardest job of a diet is to control cravings, so that your body's natural tendency toward maintaining equilibrium can gradually be restored.

3. Most popular trusims about diet are wrong, from "move more, eat less" to "calories in, calories out." A good "deep" primer on this is Gary Taubes' Why We Get Fat and What to Do About It. If you think diet is just a matter of calories, I suggest you subsist on 2200 calories of sugar water a day, and I'll choose 2200 calories of fresh vegetables and lean meats. We'll see who's hungrier from day to day and who's in better health six months from now. And if you think exercise is the solution to the obesity epidemic, consider that marathon runners on average weigh significantly more than their counterparts did forty years ago. Exercise is essential to your health for a great many reasons, but weight loss is not one of them. Weight loss is mainly a matter of diet, i.e., what you eat. Even the widespread idea that you must "eat more fruits and vegetables" might be wrong: if you have developed a deeply ingrained craving for sugar, you shouldn't eat a lot of fruit. Many is the "dieter" who temporarily suspends sugar-gluttonly for a diet very heavy in sugary fruits.

4. Understanding the basics of blood sugar, how your body controls it, and its effect on your health, mood, and energy level is essential. Getting a decent handle on the glycemic index and glycemic "shock" or "bounce" is crucial to your success. A good introduction to this is Rick Gallop's pleasant and practical little book The G.I. Diet. The science of this stuff gets very heavy very quickly, and understanding the state of the science isn't going to help your diet. Take the wisdom and let the scientists worry about the science.

5. Americans have a persistent "medicinal" approach to dieting, as if there is a "secret" to it. We have a strong cultural tendency to believe that either eating some specific substance or set of substances, or not eating some specific substance or set of substances will be the magical cure-all. My belief is that this is wrong. A good diet doesn't have to revolve around eating or not eating any particular kind of food. Consider that both the Mediterranean diet (high carbs, low fat) and the Atkins diet and its many offshoots (high fat, low carbs) can work.

Of course, there is a corollary to this principle, which is that we now eat a lot of things that aren't actually food. They resemble food, but they're not—they're faux food. I honestly think, for instance, that eating at any fast-food restaurant more than once a month is not a good idea, and one soft drink a week is too much. Those things are just not really fit for human consumption. On the other hand, virtually nothing not poisonous will kill you if you ingest it infrequently enough. Two Twinkies after every meal is a bad idea. Two Twinkies a year won't kill anybody.

One book that I did enjoy and continue to use, even though it leans a bit too much toward the magic-bullet, food-as-medicine approach, is The 150 Healthiest Foods on Earth by Jonny Bowden. It surveys and summarizes the opinions of a number of nutritionists on the subject in the title.

6. This was the final key in the puzzle for me: You've got to give your stomach something to do. I read this somewhere, and I regret that I can't tell you where. It just locked me on to the solution to the problem in principle no. 1 above. Make sure your stomach has something to work on, and you won't be uncomfortable. The classic proof of this is a photograph of the equivalent number of calories in table sugar and in raw broccoli. I regret I can't find the illustration, but as you might imagine, it's a small heap of sugar and a very large heap of broccoli. Your stomach will be much happier with the latter.

• • •

So anyway, here are a few of the peculiar-to-me things I needed to cope with:

I'm a bad cook, and don't really like food very much.
I'm not hungry in the mornings, or through most of the day; I get ravenous at night. That's when I really need willpower and a coping strategy. YMMV.
I don't have the energy or the enthusiasm to shop for and prepare elaborate meals, and my energy for it ebbs as the day goes on. On the other hand, I work at home and don't need to eat out a lot, which is an advantage. I originally started out eating my two abbreviated meals during the day, then having a big dinner; but it just didn't work, because I didn't have the energy to cook at night. So I switched the "main meal" to mid-day, which helped greatly in my case.
I have a longstanding and pronounced "sweet tooth." This has been a big challenge for me. It took me more than a year to get used to coffee without sugar, for example. (Now, I really no longer like coffee with sugar.)

So I developed what I call my "Gruelandgrass diet." Anticlimactic drumroll:

First meal: After my two mugs of coffee, I have half a cup of "gruel" every morning (a.k.a. porridge, a.k.a. oatmeal), which I eat with cinnamon, 1 packet of Splenda, and one level teaspoon of sugar.

Second meal: Then, I fix a good meal for myself in the "middle" of the day (typically 3–4 p.m. in my case), when I still have sufficient energy to motivate myself to cook.

I don't put a limit on how much I can eat at my midday meal. The rules are that it has to be made from ingredients (that is, not from a package); it has to include a vegetable; it has to contain some fat; it has to go easy on wheat and dairy; and I watch my portions of meat. Most days I have half a ham or turkey sandwich using high-fiber bread, a bowl of some sort of vegetables, and a bowl of soup, because that's easy to fix. And I'm not allowed more than 25g sugar in my "dessert," which I'm careful to eat right after the meal (again, to prevent glycemic rebound. I continue to eat about 44g of sugar a day, even though sugar is the main source of cravings and also my personal weakness. I'm aware that I should probably cut it to about 30g, which I think is about the optimum level for me. Cutting out sugar altogether isn't particularly good for me; it makes me feel mentally fuzzy.)

But when and if I want to, I'll fix myself as elaborate a midday meal as I want: baked salmon, egg noodles, and spinach, for example, or a beef tenderloin filet, red potatoes, and steamed broccoli. I just often don't want that much, or am too busy to cook it.

I still do eat out, but I'm careful. I don't eat out too often, or go crazy when I do.

Third meal: Finally, I have a half cup of Uncle Ben's rice and a glass of whole milk at night. Sometimes I mix it with about a third of a cup of wild rice (wild rice is a member of the grass family, whence the name "gruel and grass.") I use various sauces for the rice, for variety. Very occasionally, I substitute a baked potato for the rice, as a bow to Dr. Kathleen DesMaisons and her book Potatoes Not Prozac. That book is considered politically incorrect (people who take Prozac objected), and her enthusiasm for potatoes as a substitute for sugar was advice she had to back away from, as baked potatoes actually have a higher glycemic index than table sugar(!). The book is no longer in print, but it was important for me, in that it was the first book I read that explained the effect that sugar was having on my health.

It's important (well, for me) that the rice be Uncle Ben's Original converted rice, because its glycemic hit is especially low among rice types.

If I "want more" in either the morning or the evening, I'll have either one fried egg or one 4-oz. packet of smoked salmon with my oatmeal, and I can fix myself a mess of any sort of fresh vegetables at night to go along with the rice. Although most nights I simply don't bother.

These "extras" were very important to me at first, when the cravings were still subsiding. There's good news on that front: cravings from habitual excessive sugar and wheat consumption dramatically decline after three days and are largely gone in 10–14 days. Those first two weeks are hard, but it gets a lot easier.

That's it.

I weigh myself once a week on the morning of the same day each week.

My goal is to stay on the diet for 70 weeks, and my target is to lose a pound a week.

So far I've been on the Gruelandgrass diet for 22 weeks and have lost 25 pounds. If anything, I tend to lose weight a little too quickly, and I've had to increase my calories in a number of weeks to slow down the rate of weight loss a bit. I think in general the only flaw of my diet as it's currently constituted is that it's a little too low-cal; I need to build some more calories into it and then not depart from it quite so much. I haven't quite worked out yet how to do that.

There have been a lot of nice effects of this diet. For one thing, I look forward to my main meal more. It's also nice not having to decide what to eat all the time. As I've "gotten off" sugar, normal foods have begun to seem sweeter. And, I just feel better: more clear-headed, more energetic. Finally, my sleep is improving.

Most importantly, I'm never uncomfortable. It's just not torture. I still have to be vigilant about cravings: if I start craving, it's a sure sign that I've let sugar creep into my eating again somehow (that's how I found out about sushi being loaded with sugar!), and I have to find it and cut it back out. The most common causes of cravings are too much wheat or too much sugar. You just shouldn't experience food cravings, and feeling them is a very good clue that something is amiss and needs to be tweaked.

• • •

Obviously, my Gruelandgrass diet is tailored for me, my tastes, my weaknesses, my cooking abilities, my food tolerances, and my schedule. (One thing you might already have noticed in particular is that I have a high tolerance for eating more or less the same thing day after day. And you might not.)

Unfortunately, I'm not recommending my diet for others. I think that to devise a diet that will work for you, you have to educate yourself, analyze yourself and your own needs and tastes, and arrive at your own strategies. It's possible that your problems are similar to mine or that my solutions will work for you without modification. But not too likely.

My "principles" might give you something to think about, however. If there are any ground-level fundamentals you should take away from this post, in my view, they are that a good diet can't be torture and you've got to give your stomach something to do. Which, when you think about it, are different ways of saying the same thing.

Good luck to you if you're trying to lose weight.

Mike

"Open Mike" is when Your Humble Editor goes rogue every week, and writes about something outside of his field of expertise. "Open Mike" appears on Sundays on TOP.

UPDATE 9/19/2013: I actually made some pretty major modifications to my "Gruelandgrass" diet in the aftermath of all the discussion to this post. I decided to cut out dairy (except for about a cup of whole organic milk in my two mugs of coffee in the morning). I've added fresh fruit to my morning oatmeal and a large mixed salad to my evening bowl of rice. For my midday main meal, I've gone completely vegan...except that I add meat. Add rimshot here. But no orthorexia for me; I'm a flexitarian if I'm anything. My target is to eat a small amount of lean meat once a week, alternating poultry, cooked fish, raw fish, and red meat. To those who say this sullies the purity of veganism, well, I'm an omnivore.

The big problem with this supercharged version of my diet that my weight loss has gotten too fast. My target is one pound a week, and in the 18 days since I've made these changes I've plummeted from 242 lbs. to 236. To slow down the weight loss, I've turned to snacks of mixed nuts (11 different kinds)—very good for you in small amounts, but fatty and highly caloric. I hope to regain an equilibrium of slower, steadier weight loss for the remaining 46 weeks of my diet.

Since making these changes I feel markedly better physically—quite noticeably so. I have more energy and feel more clear-headed, and just feel better. Any residual discomfort with the diet is gone—I'm never hungry, enjoy my food, and don't feel tortured at all. I'm more enthused about a healthy diet than ever.

My old motto was "food is fuel," that idea so loathed by foodies. That's not right, though. My new mantra: food is medicine.

Note that all the comments below predate this Update.

—Mike

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

Jim: "I'm vegan, have been for decades. Works great at keeping the weight down. I eat only very simple food, minimally cooked. No sugar, no salt. Works for me; but, as you say, food evangelism is just a waste of time and energy. The primary problem with in the U.S. is that we just eat far too much of everything. Even if you are moderately active, it takes surprisingly few calories to maintain weight. I don't think most people will be willing to eat as little as required for good weight control. Congratulations on your continued success."

Speed: "On one hand, I don't agree with much of what you say in the first part. But on the other more important hand, it works for you which is what counts. Congratulations and stick with it."

Tony Ayling: "I've often wanted to comment on your posts over the past few years of reading and enjoying your blog but this is the first time I've actually done it. You are right about diet lore being complex and full of contradictions. However, it doesn't need to be! Just adopt a whole food plant based diet and you can't go wrong. Watch the doco 'Forks Over Knives' [on Netflix —Ed.] and read a really interesting book called The China Study by Colin Campbell to learn about this lifestyle. I won't call it a 'weight loss diet' because that implies that it is something temporary. I've been doing this for about a year and at age 66 I have never felt so healthy and full of energy. The food is tasty, filling and above all healthy. You can eat as much as you like and are never having to rely on willpower.

"You don't need the dairy and meat that the modern world is addicted to. Here in Australia a couple in their sixties who are both raw food vegans (they only eat raw fruit, vegetables and nuts) are running around the whole country, doing a marathon every day for a whole year. They are currently on day 245 and have passed the 10,000 km mark. How's that for strength, endurance and health! All on raw fruit and veg! Google '365 marathons' to check them out."

Scott Jones: "I am so surprised that after you read Gary Taubes' book Why We Get Fat that you are still eating so many carbs. After reading about the biochemistry of fat partitioning, I am sure that you now know that carbs drive insulin which drives fat accumulation and makes it unavailable for energy use and you may be one of those unfortunate souls that is extremely sensitive to carbs. It is really the only control point that most people have of altering their fat partitioning genetics. Have you tried an ultra low carb diet? (high fat and protein). It seems to work wonders for everyone I know that tries it. And permanently without restricting calories. The medical community is slowly coming around to the realization that Atkins was right...."

Mike replies: Is there a vegan Atkins diet? That should be the best of all.

(Ignore me, I'm just trying to be funny.)

Posted on Sunday, 01 September 2013 at 01:16 PM in Off-topic posts, Open Mike | Permalink | Comments (81)

Sunday, 25 August 2013

Open Mike: A Little Site

Can anyone explain this? It's the graph of our recent traffic. That top dot is well north of 60,000 pageviews. Clearly, we got bumped by some big site somewhere, but I have no idea who or why.

I'd just like to thank those readers who have placed contributions in the Tip Jar* this past week in support of our little contest. Vous êtes très aimable, as my father used to say, one of the French phases he knew: "You are very kind."

We had a bit of a trauma this summer. Pentax, under new management as you are probably aware, decided to leave us—the new managers have a new advertising and publicity plan, which is perfectly understandable**.

Pentax is no longer a company, in fact: the company is simply called Ricoh; "Pentax" has now been demoted to a model name for Ricoh's line of DSLRs. Sort of the opposite of what happened with Contax in 1972, when a model name was promoted to a brand name.

Our new major supporters are Sony and (as you will see) Fuji, both sponsored by B&H Photo, with whom we have a warm working relationship. My liason at B&H has become a friendly voice on the phone. (One of his funniest lines is when I explain to him why I'm not going to link to some product or post a notice about some deal or other. He'll say, with an invisible but still obvious eye-roll, "Oh, that's right, I forgot, Mike Johnston doesn't like to make money!" Always makes me laugh.) Despite my obstinate insistence on only posting links when I think it's convenient for my readers, rather than just for my wallet, B&H Photo has really been stalwart in its support of TOP.

Pentax, however, had an unprecedentedly long tenure as our little site's main advertiser, and I'd like to thank Ned and Michelle and our other friends at that company sincerely. I admit it was not as crucial to the site's survival as Fabio Riccardi and Michael Tapes were before it, because we're more stable now in general, but it was still very meaningful support.

Pretzels and insects
TOP is in no danger of going away. But—I don't know if you've noticed—the world has changed greatly since 2005 when we started out. Amazon back then was a money-loser whose future viability was being debated; now it's the blob that snacks on bricks'n'mortar stores like a fat guy snarfing pretzels, and threatens to swallow whole industries (run, book publishing!). It and B&H Photo are what keep us alive***. My big worry is that Amazon has so little competition that one day it might simply decide it doesn't need online affiliates directing business its way any more. I mean, Google is afraid of Amazon. You can imagine how a near-microscopic insect like me feels. Along with this, think of how many more sites are competing for your attention these days. Some of which, I have to admit, are really good. Everybody and his brother wants to make money on the Internet these days. I was fortunate to get in when I did. 2005 looks sleepy by comparison.

Consequently, our efforts now are to diversify. All of which is just going slowly, very slowly. Slowly. Let me reiterate: slo-o-o-owly. I spend a lot of time now on our book publishing plans; I'm still struggling against a strong headwind in the effort to increase the physical size of my office (the key to so much else), grinding away at the problem...slowly. And we're revamping our print sales in good ways (I'll have some very significant news along those lines come September, when I'll announce all our plans until approximately February 2014).

And in this big mix, I just have zero complaint about you. At the same time, if I could make a modest and humble request, it would be this: don't be afraid to be pro-active. We're a little site, suviving well so far in a great big scary jungle. We need our friends. If you resent online ads, please don't; please click on that new ad every now and then and see what's on offer behind it. It will do TOP good and help keep it alive. (I will add that I worked with B&H to attract the companies that I felt were legitimately of the most interest to our readers in general; Sony's and Fuji's efforts in the cameramaking field are probably closest to enthusiasts' hearts these days, wouldn't you say? Who else is making so many tasty morsels like the RX1 and the X-Pro1?) (And see, those links made sense there, didn't they? I do too want to make money!)

This is the job of my life, one of the two best jobs I've ever had. I know it must inevitably go away, although I have no idea yet what will kill it. (I'm kind of curious, to be truthful.) But if it goes away tomorrow I'll have fond memories and a feeling of appreciation for TOP for the rest of my life.

And for the record, I never think of TOP's readership as a great big faceless mass of thousands of people. I think of it one person at a time. It's never "them" with me; it's "you." The individual person out there reading this site is someone for whom I just have great respect, a shared interest, and a matter-of-fact background-level feeling, day-in, day-out, of thankfulness. I'm very privileged to have an audience on today's Web. Vous êtes très aimable.

Mike

*I subsequently learned the actual Tip Jar was not even working, which is why today's post is so late going up. And spending two and a half hours on that caused me to miss The Milwaukee Masterpiece, where I had hoped to do some shooting with the D800. So no shooting for me today. A perfect microcosm of my working life! The link in the right-hand sidebar is now very temporarily called "Donate," and I will work on reinstating the traditional "Tip Jar" later this week.

**And I learned another of life's lessons: a handshake deal with the King is as good as gold, but only with the King whose hand you shook. When the old King is beheaded and a new King sports the crown, the new King might well look at you and say—with impeccable logic—"But I never shook your hand." We continue to wish all the people at Ricoh and at the former Pentax all the best.

***I took a page from Jay Leno's book. Jay lives on his performing and personal appearance income and puts all the money he earns from television in the bank (that's got to be quite a big bank account by now). My family lives on Amazon affiliate fees and puts any income from everything else in the bank. Hey, when you're self-employed you have to make your own retirement plan.

"Open Mike" is TOP's editorial page, when Ed. gets to vent. It appears on Sundays.

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Posted on Sunday, 25 August 2013 at 05:18 PM in Blog Notes, Open Mike | Permalink | Comments (39)

Sunday, 18 August 2013

Open Mike: Introvert / Extrovert

Are you an introvert or an extrovert? There are a lot of misconceptions about what the terms actually mean. For instance, I once saw a dictionary definition of "introvert" as "self-centered"! No, wrong.

Perhaps oddly, introverts tend to understand extroverts better than the other way around. Extroverts are more likely to consider themselves "normal" and to think there's something wrong with introverts. There isn't, of course. Both are perfectly normal (although introverts are probably in the minority).

The best sign of which one you are is to ask yourself which condition more easily tires you out and makes you feel you need relief: solitude, or socializing? Introverts expend energy when they're part of a crowd and "recharge their batteries" when they're alone. For extroverts, it's the opposite. But this doesn't mean that extroverts avoid being alone or that introverts don't like people. Surprisingly, it doesn't really predict how "outgoing" someone is. Introverts can be quite social, and extroverts can need "alone time." What's telling is which one has a "limit" for you. The extrovert gets uncomfortable after too much time alone and begins to crave the company of people, and the opposite is true for the introvert: their tolerance for socializing has a limit, and after they've had enough of it they tend to need to get away.

Either type can get too much of a good thing, which is why introvert/extrovert pairs can make good couples: they balance each other out, each moderating the other's natural tendency and helping the other in the situations that are less natural for them.

What's your impulse when you receive a shock like some traumatic bad news? Introverts tend to reflexively seek some alone time in order to "process." I got some bad news yesterday and I went for a long drive alone. Extroverts tend to immediately seek comfort in company and companionship.

You can be a "strong" or "weak" introvert or extrovert. Strong introverts are exhausted by moderate social activities and, even when they spend a lot of time alone, might crave even deeper solitude. Strong extroverts have an endless appetite for people, crowds, or parties, and tend to want companions constantly, for any kind of activity.

It has nothing to do with character strengths or flaws. (Either type can be selfish!) Nor does it predict success. Abraham Lincoln, Albert Einstein, and Warren Buffet are (or were) introverts. Bill Clinton, Mark Twain, and Steve Jobs are examples of successful extroverts.

Alfred Eisenstaedt, who took this photograph, was a strong extrovert

You might think this has nothing to do with photography, but how we relate to the world and other people has a lot more to do with photography than even cameras do. LIFE magazine's Alfred Eisenstaedt was an unusually strong extrovert, which might seem to make good sense given that he was a great photographer of people. He could make anyone comfortable instantly; Jackie Kennedy Onassis, who had her issues with photographers, adored him. But Ansel Adams was an extrovert too. Diane Arbus, a strong introvert, photographed people. Walker Evans was introverted too.

Ever since I studied August Sander in school I've realized that some photographers project themselves on to their subjects. Sander approached his subjects with an attitude that elicited a very consistent response from them; it's not hard to imagine them "reflecting" him back at his camera, in a sense. I don't know, but I suspect he was an introvert who used photography to connect with people—to give structure to his limited socializing. That's just supposition. In any event, how you approach your subjects can have a lot to do with how you relate to the world, and how you relate to the world has a lot to do with how you like to be.

Mike

"Open Mike," TOP's editorial page, appears on Sundays, at least when Mike can drag himself away from the pool table.

TOP's links!

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

Craig A. Lee: "That definition of introvert, maybe even strong introvert, is me to a capital 'T.' I find my day job exhausting just because of the energy I need to expend to maintain the social interactivity. When I get home, I really do have to crash and 'recharge' with some alone time. Additionally, I can only attend parties or similar events for a certain amount of time before I have had my fill of it.

"As for how it relates to my photography...well, I like landscapes, architecture, nature, and abstracts. I am not much of a people photographer with the exception of sports. For some reason I do enjoy photographing sports and people in action even though I am not much of a sports fan either. Perhaps it is because I don't have to socially interact with the subjects in those situations. They are, in essence, an active landscape to me."

LJ Slater: "Were you reading Susan Cain's Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking? I enjoyed her 'graph' visualization: she placed the introvert/extrovert spectrum on the x-axis, and the shy/outgoing spectrum on the y-axis (and it is important to remember that it is a spectrum, not simply a series of compartments, or 'boxes' that we must place ourselves in). I am a dyed-in-the-wool shy introvert. My brother is both extremely shy and extremely extroverted. My father? Very introverted, but not shy in the least!"

Semilog: "Great post. My wonderful wife and I are a classic introvert/extrovert pair. I'm the introvert. Last night I watched the great documentary War Photographer, about James Nachtwey. Nachtwey appears to have the characteristics of a serious introvert."

Ahem: "That reminds me of a joke about Finns reportedly told abroad (I'm Finnish). For the unitiated: Finns are notoriously shy and introverted.

Q: How do you tell a Finnish extrovert apart from a Finnish introvert?

A: Finnish extrovert looks at your shoes when he talks to you."

Joe Holmes: "This new understanding of introverts/extroverts, or at least the recent dissemination of the understanding, has really been liberating. I fall into the introvert camp, but I never would have classed myself that way because I love socializing and I can be pretty good at it. It's just that it's draining. And now I have a great explanation of why, at big gatherings like Thanksgiving dinners, I find myself taking a breather after a couple of hours."

Posted on Sunday, 18 August 2013 at 10:32 AM in Open Mike | Permalink | Comments (44)

Sunday, 04 August 2013

Open Mike: Alt Geekery

I've only recently caught up to the whole concept of "geekiness" in what Wikipedia describes as its "evolved" meaning—an expert or enthusiast who is interested in an intellectual or complex subject for its own sake. Or (more negatively) an odd sort of duck who is way more into something than is healthy, or who takes very seriously something that was meant to be light. (I suspect a Zen pinnacle of geeky circularity was reached recently when Bryan Cranston, who plays Walter White on the TV show "Breaking Bad," attended Comic-Con impenetrably disguised in a startlingly lifelike Walter White mask. If that's not a cool concept, I don't know what is.) I've long noted, however, the tendency of individuals to dive into some narrow subject and stay there for the rest of their lives. Devotees love their subjects in what seems like almost a brain-chemical way.

I've privately mused that this must be an evolved trait related to the basic human unit of the tribe. I'm sure in the ancestral environment of a million years ago, every tribe of hunter-gatherers had a weird guy named Ogg who was just totally into making hand tools by chipping rocks. He was better at it than anybody else; everybody marveled at how good he was; and he made the spearheads and sinew-choppers for the nomad band's best people. And of course he ate, slept and drank rock chipping: he was kind of a bore at parties. He had rivals as well as a gaggle of admirers. And apprentices, which turned out to be a good thing when Ogg died of old age at 26. And his narrow focus on his passion was a real competitive advantage for the tribe and an evolutionary edge for their genes.

In this paradigm, geekery is an evolutionary adaptation gone bad. (I jest. Put down your lightsaber-shaped pens.)

Relief, not replacement
Anyway, Ctein and I learned a lesson last week, separately and independently: that we each have subjects we just love to geek out about but that readers of TOP plainly don't want to read a lot more about. Bottom line: no more columns about billiards or tea. The lonely whisper of the wind and the sound of chirping crickets around here after each of those columns was rather consternating. Ctein set a new record low for comments, and the only thing people wanted to talk about in the wake of my post about my pool lesson last Sunday was whether I should have taken the "on-the-way-there" picture from the car in the rain. Which was interesting, but of course completely beside the point of the post.

We each love those subjects, respectively (that is, he's a tea geek and, lately at least, I'm a pool geek), but Internet audiences are self-selecting, and what qualifies as a break from our normal topic and what is a departure from it is a distinction we have become newly aware of. Off-topic posts should be temporary relief from the usual fare, not a replacement for it.

A genuine Ogg. Pricey, but worth it.

As I always say, one constant of running an interactive website for tens of thousands of smart and informed readers is that you keep learning lessons. We hope to become more adroit in the future about the ways in which we go off-topic.

Mike

"Open Mike" is a series of off-topic and sometimes off-the-wall ruminations from TOP World Headquarters in the heart of urban Waukesha, Wisconsin.

TOP's links!

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

Ctein adds: Dear folks,

No doubt Mike is writing his own clarification, but I figure I better double down on it, because of widespread misconception.

I have no intention of curtailing OT columns, either in scope or frequency! They will continue exactly as in the past. Mike simply felt (and I concurred) that the very small number of comments on two specific topics—tea and pool—meant we had gone on too long on those subjects and started to bore our readers. On just those two topics, not on OT in general. Whether that's true seems to be subject to argument, but there's no argument about OT columns in general.

Mine will continue as before, roughly once a month. In fact, with Column 300 coming up in four weeks, you can count on it. As is my wont for the centenary scribblings, it'll be OT and likely even a two parter, as I tend to tackle big topics on the anniversaries.

And, oh yeah, it's gonna generate comments, I betcha.

Pax, Ctein.

Featured Comments from:

SerrArris: "Mike, please, the tea and pool columns were the most interesting reads last week. I am a fan of your website because it isn't 100% dedicated to photography! I love to read about tea, coffee, hifi equipment, pool, etc. It broadens my vision. But I don't want to read dedicated tea, coffee etc blogs, as they get boring soon (I'm not so much into that topics, but an occasional read is great). For me, your off-topic posts are what makes TOP special. Forget about the 10,000 other readers and continue to write off-topic for ME. Best regards, Markus."

David Paterson: "Phew! For weeks I've been rehearsing ironic posts about the photographic blog which never mentions photography, but just kept holding off, for some reason (that old sixth sense). I'm glad you've seen the light (NPI) but while you're at it, why not include hi-fi in the embargo?"

Mike replies: What?! Everyone loves hi-fi!

David Miller: "WRONG! Mike, sometimes there may be no comments because an item from you or Ctein is complete: informative, well-written, perhaps (as in both the posts you cite) delightful. I had nothing to add, nothing to take issue with, but I enjoyed peering through the windows you opened into places I know nothing about. I love having my world expanded and being conducted on small tours by witty, intelligent, and passionate guides.

"I'm sorry if your loyal readers don't always give you enough positive feedback. But you're grown-ups (well…); I counsel you to have a bit of faith in your own skills and in our ability to let you know if you are drifting into tedium. (Aha! That's the negative aspect of Geekdom that you passed over: the wrong sort of geeks are boring. You and Ctein haven't even come close. If you do, trust us to tell you.) Sometimes silence is a compliment: we're thinking, savouring, nodding quietly to ourselves.

"Your post sent me off to the links for the billiard school. Ctein's sent me off for a cup of tea. Yes, photography is the shared interest that—along with good writing—keeps me coming back daily to TOP; but variety is the very spice of life.

"Write on, gentlemen!

Kusandha Hertrich: "I couldn't agree more with Hugh Weller-Lewis, Benjamin Marks and others who expressed similar sentiments. I read TOP on a daily basis, and have tried to comment only once before this. Doesn't mean I don't enjoy the posts or get something valuable out of them. There are plenty of sites with narrow focus on photography; we don't need another one of those. Balance is important, and striking the right one of on- and off-topic posts is something that should happen. But for me it's the off-topic posts that help me really connect with you and Ctein as people and not just two dimensional avatars on my screen."

Bron (partial comment): "Despite studying photography, and working as a photographer and darkroom tech, and still doing photography, I'm far more likely to skip an equipment post than one of the entertaining, informative OT posts."

Terry Moore (partial comment): "For the record I really enjoy the tea posts—actually more than Ctein's usual. I read the billiards one but they don't do anything for me. More hi-fi OT posts would be fine."

Mike replies: There, y'see, David Paterson? :-)

Rod Graham: "I've enjoyed all the detours also. I thought the billiards piece was fascinating not so much from the pool itself, but from the student-teacher relationship and how much we all can learn from someone who is truly knowledgeable, whether pool or photography."

Bahi: "I like the OTs as well. I'm waiting for the post on beards: you and Ctein, conversation style. :-)"

Posted on Sunday, 04 August 2013 at 03:31 AM in Off-topic posts, Open Mike | Permalink | Comments (110)

Sunday, 28 July 2013

Open Mike I: My Pool Lesson with Jerry Briesath

Driving to Madison through a downpour:
Gloom and doom, sturm und drang.

Driving home after my lesson:
Sweetness and light, and downhill all the way!

Seems like I've been playing hookey a lot recently. A couple of days ago I did it again: I took my trusty Sony NEX-6 and my trusty (well...) J. Pechauer cue and drove to a club called The Brass Ring in Madison for, of all things, a pool lesson.

Normally, instructor Jerry Briesath's students fly in from all parts of the country for three day-long one-on-one sessions with him. As befitting my lowly status as a second-time-around beginner, I drove in for one day-long lesson. (I figure I'll add the other two days as finances allow. It's not a very long drive.)

So how was it? Permit me a metaphor.

You're hiking, and come across a hole in the hillside. You crawl in. To your surprise, you find it's a cave. You explore a little further. It gets a little bigger. By the time you can stand up, the light has faded to almost nothing, so you're exploring very slowly and carefully in the dark. You feel your way step by careful step, groping along the rock walls.

You're thinking, this ain't so much fun. Maybe I'd better bail.

Suddenly, floodlights come on. Before your astonished eyes is a vast fantasical cavern with stalagmites and stalagtites and torrents of crystals embedded in rock walls that shimmer with a thousand mineral colors. There are sub-caverns and grottos and dark recesses and rivulets springing out of the rocks into deep bell-clear pools rimed with sulphur, and there are clouds of sleeping bats and white albino snakes and...

...Over to one side is a friendly, smiling gentleman named Jerry saying, "Oh, and over here...."

That's what it was like.

Well, maybe I exaggerate. A little. Bottom line: it turns out there is much, much more to this than I thought there was.

The Brass Ring is a beautiful restaurant / bar / pool hall in Madison,
Wisconsin. The tables are 9' Diamond Professionals, currently
considered the ne plus ultra among connoisseurs.

Jerry is famous in pool circles as one of the best instructors in America. Unusually, he's been teaching pool for 50 years (cue sports teachers have never been very common, but they were less common 50 years ago). From all I've heard from anyone, he has a reputation within the game that's solid gold.

You know those few-and-far-between teachers you've had who just seem born to teach? One of the best for me was Beth Sieckman, who taught me 7th grade oceanography and 8th-grade paleontology, although I was fortunate to have more than a handful of great schoolteachers in my time. They're people who just have a gift for making complicated subjects simple, meeting students where they are and opening their eyes. Mrs. Sieckman would have glowed just as brightly as a teacher had her passion happened to be Mozart or motorcycle maintenance; she just had the gift. She taught me the discipline of writing, for one thing, more than any English teacher I ever had (and I had some fine ones). I get the feeling Jerry Briesath is cut from the same cloth—the only difference is that he teaches his passion, and that is pool.

And let's face it, there's just nothing more fun for a student, any student, than struggling and struggling to understand something and just not getting it, and then having a gifted teacher come along and turn on that lightbulb over your head! I had not one, but five or six of those moments on Friday. Absolutely the most fun I've had in ages. When Jerry showed me how to play position for six different balls around the table from the same shot, and I did it myself, I was grinning like a kid. Couldn't help myself.

One more example: If you've ever played pool, you probably know what a "hanger" is—it's a ball that's hanging right near lip of the pocket, those annoying shots on which casual players often scratch. Well, it turns out there's a whole encylclopedia of "hanger knowledge." (Who knew?) Not just how not to scratch, but how to change the angle of the shot and the direction of the cue ball after hitting a hanger in a myriad different ways—even how to "cheat the pocket" to affect the speed of the cue ball after the hit by 10X. Applied physics; totally fascinating.

While I take a break, Jerry answers a question from a former student and his friends at another table. As the owner of two Madison pool rooms for many years, Jerry was his own "house pro," and says that was the most challenging kind of teaching—finding a way to increase peoples' enjoyment of the game in just a few short minutes.

He really makes me think that I should start a "photo school" series here on TOP, and try to impart what I know about getting better at shooting. Contrary to what you might think, I've never really done that here on TOP, except perhaps with my "Leica for a year" post.

The give-and-take
Hard to know for sure from just one meeting, but I suspect Jerry is a "people person." I know his famous DVD set, which you can get from his website, is well thought of (and for me it's going to be great for review), but I think there's just a huge benefit in the give-and-take of a one-on-one lesson. To get a guy who's taught thousands of people to look at me and analyze my stroke and tell me what I'm doing wrong is something I can't get from a tape. (Turned out my stroke didn't have some of the common flaws, but did have a couple of others I just wasn't aware of.)

Well, I won't go on and on. Suffice it to say that I almost didn't do this. I played pool for five of my teenage years with my more coordinated younger brother (hi, Scott!), and then just recently took it up again on doctor's orders*. I'm a neophyte, and I originally considered it both presumptuous and indulgent on my own part to sign up for a lesson. But boy, am I ever glad I did. I just didn't know there was so much to learn**. Those "lightbulb experiences" are just so much fun. I've already signed up for lesson #2, later in August***.

Jerry Briesath at the Brass Ring, Madison, Wisconsin. He teaches in Phoenix in the winters, but most of his students fly in from all sorts of places.

Anyway, Friday was a great day for me. (Fittingly, the skies outside even cleared during the four hours we were inside.) It was really ten times better than I thought it would be, and to say I'm enthused is an understatement. Many thanks to Jerry for a great experience.

Mike

P.S. Should you want a lesson yourself, call him: (608) 279-9994. Tell him your heard it on TOP. [Disclaimer: I never met Jerry before two days ago and I get not a penny if you buy a lesson. I'm just another happy student.]

*My doctor said I absolutely had to stop sitting at the computer for such long stretches of time and get up and move every couple of hours, so I cleared a corner of the basement and put a used pool table in it. And it has worked already: for years I've been plagued by neck pain, not terribly serious but chronic, and it's been gone for weeks now. That alone is worth everything I've done so far.

**Really, I had no idea.

**Chris Norris said he almost stopped in at the Brass Ring to see me when he heard I'd be there, since he lives down the street from the place. Next time I'm there I'll alert people, and anyone who'd like to show up after my lesson can come on by and say hello.

Mike

TOP's links!

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

dan meyers: "Yikes, Mike! You're photographing while driving in poor weather, not what I would expect."

Mike replies: Don't worry, Dan, I wasn't looking at or through the camera. Just holding it up and clicking away, eyes on the road the whole time. I took something like 40 shots in three batches to get that one. I don't have to look at my camera at all to turn it on and click away.

Wasn't so successful with the "good weather" shot later...I should have stopped, but I needed to get home to let the dog out. But no unsafe practices in either case, promise. Actually, it was harder to grab the few shots I took during the pool lesson! [UPDATE: See follow-up post two posts above this one.]

Kevin Bourque: "I had some similar "lights on" moments when I did a Howard Bond workshop some years ago. He didn't have any magical chemicals and my gear was every bit as good as his. He just showed me some very practical tricks, and more importantly, gave me new ways to think about what I was doing. We're never too old to learn, eh? Makes we wonder what else I might be good at. ;-) "

Mike replies: It's been a while since I talked to Howard—I really should remedy that. I will say that never taking a photo workshop is one of my great regrets in photography. I was teaching before I even got out of school, and somehow I skipped that phase. I really wish I had taken two or three workshops with teachers whose work I liked and admired during the appropriate phase of my involvement.

Jay Tunkel: "One of life's hardest lessons: You don't know what you don't know."

Chaz L: "Congratulations, Mike, you're learning from one of the very best! I've had the occasional itch to take a lesson from Jerry, but the prospect of flying in for three days always deterred me. If I was within driving distance, it would be a no-brainer. Enjoy applying your new knowledge on the table."

Posted on Sunday, 28 July 2013 at 11:49 AM in Off-topic posts, Open Mike | Permalink | Comments (7)

Sunday, 21 July 2013

Open Mike: The Reductio of 'Pro'

Reductio ad absurdum: Latin, meaning "reduced to the absurd." From the Greek eis atopon epagoge, "reduction to the impossible." A rhetorical technique used throughout recorded history in mathematical logic, philosophical reasoning, and informal argumentation. The idea is that if something becomes absurd when you take it to the extreme, it makes the same notion suspicious even when it's less extreme.

Okay, I promise not to write a Guide to Buying Pool Tables. I realize my "other" obsessions are invading TOP rather a lot these days, and that not very many people are interested in my thoughts about pool tables. Vintage audio, maybe; jazz, of course (everybody loves the jazz); coffee, most certainly: everyone in the world drinks coffee, except Ctein. And nobody minds when I write about my dear doggie, because not liking dogs is a serious character defect that most people would not admit to even if they secretly felt that way. But pool? An acquired taste. Even I know that.

But I think there's an insight somewhere in the area, and I'd like to chase it down if I may. It's even pertinent to photography, kind of.

Continue reading "Open Mike: The Reductio of 'Pro'" »

Posted on Sunday, 21 July 2013 at 12:39 PM in Off-topic posts, Open Mike | Permalink | Comments (36)

Sunday, 14 July 2013

Open Mike (I): Advice to the Young

Victor Hugo said that forty is the old age of youth, whereas fifty is the youth of old age. Truer words were never spoken, if you ask me. Hoo boy.

Everyone ages, just as everyone eventually dies. But just as you can die early or late, you can age well or badly.

I'm not happy about aging—I'm not sure anyone ever has been—but I certainly am finding it interesting. And here's one fascinating fact about it: it appears that, just like the foundations of a good retirement plan, you can do the most to mitigate the bad effects of aging when you're young.

Of course, just as with finances, your youth is when you're least concerned with aging and least likely to do anything about it. There's one nice difference, however: you can't always do much about your finances when you're young, even if you want to, because young people tend to be low earners and tend to need to put most, or all (or a little bit more than all) of their money toward immediate needs; but the same dearth of opportunity is not the case when it comes to preparing for aging. In fact, a lot of difficult things are much easier if you simply start young.

Some good advice from a variety of sources:

• Get out of breath every day. Every day. You don't have to be a nut about exercise; just get out of breath once a day. However you do it—running to catch a bus, sprinting up a couple of flights of stairs, time on the treadmill, whatever.

• Don't start smoking. The conventional advice is to stop smoking, but that's only triage after disaster. By far the better advice, assuming it's still possible for you, is to never start. Nicotine is the most addictive drug known to science, and stopping smoking is incredibly difficult. Not starting, by contrast, is easy. No matter what you do, just never start.

• Similarly: don't gain weight. Never mind losing weight: it's a lot easier and more effective just not to gain it in the first place. Once you settle on a decent, comfortable, average adult weight for yourself, just set that number in your mind and guard it. Know your target and hew to it. Step on the scale every morning and if you get three or four pounds over your number, cut back on your eating a bit until you're back to your optimum. Make that a habit. It's difficult to lose weight—for anyone—and anyone can have a problem with it. But young people tend to be trimmer than older people. It's just a lot easier to never gain lots of weight than it is to gain it and then have to lose it. (Ask anyone who's lost a lot of weight.) While you're trim and healthy, that's the time to make your stand.

• Strengthen your bones while you're young. I have only the haziest idea how to do this, although I believe it involves calcium supplements. Ask your doctor. (Maybe a gerontologist can step in and contribute some expert input here.) But I've read that weak bones are one of the principal problems of old age, and that it's much easier to work on your bone health when you're young than when you're old.

• Keep your muscles toned.

• Take good care of your teeth and gums. Mitch Hedberg said he knows how hard it is to stop smoking: it's as hard as it is to start flossing. Taking care of your teeth and gums is a pain in the ass, no doubt. But get in the habit.

• Challenge your brain regularly. Do puzzles; study a foreign language, even if you're never going to learn it; memorize three or four poems a year (memorization, it turns out, is a great aid to memory. And memory, like bad bone health, is one of the principal afflictions of aging, even for people who don't suffer from one of the dementias).

• Set regular habits as early as you can. Especially, daily awakening time, which is the key to good sleep hygiene. Sleep cycles are tied to how we're programmed for the mating process (it's natural for teenagers to stay up late and sleep late, and socialize into the night), and it isn't really feasible to set good adult habits until you're well into your twenties. But be thinking about it.

Young people tend to find advice from old people extremely tiresome. That's because when you're young, you think the old are a different category, separate sorts of beings from you. We realize, on the other hand, that we are just you, a ways on down the line. So older people love giving you advice. We just wish you'd pay more attention, is all. We wish we had.

Mike

"Open Mike" is a series of maunderings by Yr. Hmbl. Ed. that appear on The Online Photographer on Sundays. I'm going to print this one out and show it to my son, who, all things considered, is doing a really good job in establishing healthy habits—much better than I did at his age.

TOP's links!

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

Stephen: "For bones, unless you've been diagnosed with an actual problem involving the relevant hormones, skip the calcium supplements. Unless you like literally pissing money away. Otherwise, as long as you're eating a reasonable diet, you're getting all the calcium you need. Like so many other aspects of growing old well, exercise is the key. Like muscles, bones respond to use. Or, of course, disuse."

Mike Plews: "I'll be 64 in November which does not make me an expert but here goes anyway:

"If you are young, ask someone my age how many friends they have lost to tobacco-related diseases. I started counting and had to stop to have a cry at ten. The list is longer than that but I just didn't want to go on. Did you know that smoking is a major risk factor for blown spinal discs? Tobacco wrecks connective tissue.

"Taking care of your teeth means taking care of your gums too. Gum disease is linked to heart disease.

"Learn about vitamin D. My doctor is very conservative but two years ago he started checking vitamin D levels in all his adult patients. Nearly all, including yours truly, were deficient. It is generally agreed that you can safely take up to 5000IUs of vitamin D a day. It improves bone health and may prevent some cancers. The down side is that one study shows that vitamin D taken along with calcium can increase women's risk of kidney stones. Google Vitamin D and Creighton University for more information than you will ever need on the subject.

"Get your blood pressure checked and if it's high take care of it.

"If possible enter into a long term relationship with a good conservative family practice MD and listen to their advice.

"And finally, when grandpa drops off the twig and you are going through his stuff, keep the Rolleiflex."

Mike replies: I'll add the bits about gums to the post. Given that I have bouts of gingivitis, I should have thought of that.

As for vitamins: About five or six years ago I saw a show about vitamin D deficiency in the wintertime in northern climes, and as they ticked off the symptoms I realized I had them all, in some form. Although none were probative—that is, if one symptom is "increases depression," the fact that you're a bit depressed doesn't mean you can tell you have a deficiency—I decided to go with the aggregate indication, and started taking vitamin D supplements.

Following the show's advice, I tried to inventory all the time I spend outdoors in the sunlight during the day in the winter. The upshot: the only thing I could think of was that my hands and face were exposed to the sun when I walked between the parking lot and the entrance of the grocery store every other day. That was mostly it. That's about forty seconds of very minimal exposure to the sun.

It is the only vitamin that ever really made me feel better. It made a big difference...very noticeable.

Dan Gorman: "Sensible, wise, and well-intended though this all is, my recollection is that blithely ignoring such advice was an integral part of the fun of being young. But then again, my memory ain't what it used to be!"

Steve Rosenblum: "When I first went into practice as a cardiologist I used to get asked fairly regularly to speak to community groups (or radio stations) about the 'latest research in the prevention of cardiac disease.' These folks would ask me questions about the minutia of their lab tests, the latest vitamins, etc.

"I would say that to get the most 'bang for the buck' in the living-longer department, do these things: 1. Wear your seat belt; 2. Don't smoke; 3. Don't drive when you are drunk.

"These days I would add #4: Keep moving—don't sit all day—do some kind of regular exercise. Walking is fine.

"The rest is really just icing on the cake, statistically."

Mike replies: Isn't fly fishing good for you too? :-)

John Robison: "Right you are Mr. Mike. At 25 years old I was 6'2" and 175 lbs, and walked everywhere; six or seven miles was a stroll. Then I got married and settled into a comfortable life...and put on 60 lbs. in three years. That 60 lbs. has mostly followed me right to now, 64 years old. How I would have dearly loved to followed your current advice about weight.

"Never smoked, but I have a feeling overweight is almost as deadly."

Mike replies: When I was 27 I weighed 178 lbs.—and I'm also 6'2". (Well, I was! Now I'm six one and a half.) But the only reason I was so skinny is that I smoked. Between the devil and the deep blue sea....

Posted on Sunday, 14 July 2013 at 03:23 PM in Off-topic posts, Open Mike | Permalink | Comments (33)

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