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what does your hometown look like? A good question: I suspect most people who have never visited a city have strange ideas about what it looks like.
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yaarrr, tis almost talk like a pirate day and if ye be unlearned, fear not. these scurvy dogs will show ye how tis done.
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people forget that there is more to life on earth than us: if we die off, life will continue in other forms.
Month: September 2006
and he seems like such a normal young man
I actually saw djwudi on the street the other week, as he waited for a bus . . .
As noted on my local NPR affiliate this morning and by anyone with a clue, terrorism isn’t so much about killing as about disruption. e. coli in the greens is all of that.
21st Century Terrorism:
No, if these terrorists really wanted to get under people’s skins, they should have chosen anywhere from one to five small, out of the way, podunk little towns in the midwest. Some little burg in the middle of Nebraska, or Idaho, or Kansas, or Oklahoma. Pick one of those, grab the local phone book, and do a mass-mailing for whatever you can come up with, and dust all the mailers with anthrax (or your weapon of choice). It’s not immediate headlines, but once people realize that an entire town (or a few towns) in the middle of nowhere has been targeted (and potentially decimated) by a bioterror attack…that’s the kind of thing that is likely to get people’s attention.
discoveries
- The Argus DC 1500 digital camera — $.99 at Value Village — is no good as a camera, since you can’t get pictures off of it, but it makes a reasonable webcam with the macam software.
- Japanese saws — ryoba, katana, etc. — are amazing. I saw them at Hardwick’s last week and was tempted, even more so by their website, but didn’t take the plunge until I saw one at Home Depot today. They seem flimsy and oddly-shaped but do they ever work. I would like to clear the deck of some of these camera construction projects — a 4×5 box, a 120 6×12, and a 120 6×17 — but I don’t want to buy any specialized power tools for something I won’t do a lot. They’re not that expensive but the noise they make limits when I could use one.
links for 2006-09-18
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and my local Ace hardware has them for less than $2/each, thanks to a lavish subsidy/promo fee. I bought half a dozen.
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in all the places within a year’s ride from here, she’s the only place to be.
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this looks interesting, if a tad hyperbolic. maybe it’s time to recapture some wild yeasts here, since I let mine get contaminated
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can you do better than a high schooler on the SAT writing section? prove it.
inconvenient truths
[California]’s per capita electricity usage [has] remained flat while it’s increased 50% in the rest of the country. If you look at total per capita energy use, it’s actually declined since 1970 (compared to a modest increase in the rest of the country). At the same time, smog levels in Southern California have been substantially reduced. And do you know why? Largely because California has passed laws forcing it to happen.
Of course, we all know the result, don’t we? As the Republican Party and the corporate community are so fond of declaring, regulation like this inevitably leads to economic disaster. Businesses fail, incomes drop, and the economy goes into a tailspin. It’s nothing short of a disaster.
I don’t want to spoil the surprise but does anyone really think that California in the 80s, 90s, and today is an economic basketcase?
photo captions
Shutterbug: Picture This! – Panoramas:
Monument Valley: This classic panorama came to us from Dave Hughes, who worked with a Leica R4 and Leica Telyt-R 250mm lens on a Manfrotto 3221 tripod and 3030 head. He exposed Fuji Superia 100 film at f/8 at 1/125 sec and stitched 10 scanned vertical exposures together with Photoshop 6.
© 2005, Dave Hughes, All Rights Reserved
I realize Shutterbug is an ad-supported magazine, but I’d like to see a caption like this:
Monument Valley: This classic panorama came to us from Dave Hughes, who spent several hours with maps and calendars to time the light for this shot. He drove 300 miles and slept in his car to make sure he got the light he planned for. He took several series of exposures to ensure he got the shot, then drove back to be at work the next morning.
The only thing they could do to make it more of a sales pitch would be to offer the same bundle of gear used in each shot.
One of my pinhole confréres took this shot:
and here’s the caption:
Waiting To Cross: Mark J. Messerly sent us this unique image made with an Abelson Scope Works Omniscope on Ilford HP5 film with a 15-second exposure. We admit to being stumped as to this piece of gear, but it sure is an interesting shot.
© 2005, Mark J. Messerly, All Rights Reserved
They mean, we don’t know how to advertise this. Finding out what one is wasn’t that hard.
I understand their business model and don’t begrudge them their living, but when it’s more about the gear than the image, the magazine ought to be called “Camera Gear,” he says, as he eliminates any chance of appearing in the magazine.
avoid this book if you value your sleep
“A Game of Thrones (A Song of Ice and Fire, Book 1)” (George R.R. Martin)
Not that I’m going to take my own advice. I just requested books 2, 3, and 4 from the library.
links for 2006-09-17
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we’ve said for years that a small win — $100K — would be just fine with us. freedom to do some things but no the freedom to do nothing.
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how do you get your reputation back? You earn it, difficult as that may be. 200+ years and a uniquely global presence, all squandered.
don’t try this at home
Some neighbors of mine, even more into food quality than I am, have pondered building a wood-fired oven. If they do, I think breads and pizzas will be a great way to try it out, and I think that would be preferable to this:
On most ovens the electronics won’t let you go above 500F, about 300 degrees short of what is needed. (Try baking cookies at 75 instead of 375 and see how it goes). The heat is needed to quickly char the crust before it has a chance to dry out and turn into a biscuit. At this temp the pizza takes 2 – 3 min to cook (a diff of only 25F can change the cook time by 50%). It is charred, yet soft. At 500F it takes 20 minutes to get only blond in color and any more time in the oven and it will dry out. I’ve never cooked a good pizza below 725 – a 5 min pie. And that’s pushing it. The cabinet of most ovens is obviously designed for serious heat because the cleaning cycle will top out at over 975 which is the max reading on my Raytec digital infrared thermometer. The outside of the cabinet doesn’t even get up to 85F when the oven is at 800 inside. So I clipped off the lock using garden shears so I could run it on the cleaning cycle.
I think you can ovens that will get pizza-hot without anything this drastic . . .
I think I’ll take a look at his mixing techniques and ingredients, but skip the chainsaw-modified appliances.
books a-go-go
The Friends of Seattle Public Library Book Sale is going on this weekend, and I took my young bibliomanes for an expedition. We did pretty well, even finding something useful in the Better Books area.
The overwhelming bulk of the books are cheap (like $1/hardback, $.50 paperback cheap) but the newer and/or nicer books, art books and the like, are priced a bit higher. I scored a bound set of Escher prints, 29 of them, for $5. The younger set bagged a bunch of Babysitters Club and Hardy Boys, I grabbed 2 Margaret Atwood [1,2]novels for their mom’s book club reading list, and I found Stereolab’s Margerine Eclipse (CDs are a buck as well). So more than a dozen books and a CD for $18. Not bad. The quality seemed much higher than on previous visits, either it wasn’t as picked over or stuff is being rotated out more aggressively.
And the young book lovers were so pleased with my recent foray into bookbinding they’re making their own. I made a small book press yesterday to make this easier, and we went to pick out cover materials for them. Now we have a couple of additional sheets of Naugahyde, one a deep blue, the other a faux rhino skin. And we got some lengths of ribbon to add bookmarks. One is in the press now, all 96 pages of it, we’ll cover it tomorrow, then do the other. My son’s stitching came out better than mine, and he showed a considerable amount of patience/independence on this. At 9, I would have made a bigger mess, even with help, if I even persevered to the end.
Now playing: La Demeure by Stereolab from the album “Margerine Eclipse”
Now playing: La Demeure by Stereolab from the album “Margerine Eclipse”