Category Archives: Main stuff

Days of Future Past

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A couple of weeks ago I was rummaging around in my freezer when it became painfully clear that I needed to free up some space.

The time had come when those two, half-used bags of Trader Joe’s chicken breasts covered with freezer burn needed to go. Oh, and the four bags of equally freezer-burned edamame, two containers of chili leftover from last Christmas and … alright, all those yellow boxes.

I’ve acutally been storing these yellow boxes in at least 3-4 different freezers for years. Some of them from as far back as 1994. How many people can say they have stuff in their freezer from 1994?

It occurred to me, finally, that I was never going to open up those yellow boxes and consume the contents of them. Or the two cans that were stacked in there with them. So I took all those yellow boxes out of the freezer, along with the two cans that were stacked in there with them, piled it all up on my workbench out in the garage.

After removing the two bags of frozen chicken breasts, four bags of edamame, two containers of chili leftover from last Christmas and all those yellow boxes from my freezer, I found I had lots more room in there to store some other items which used to fall out on the floor whenever I opened the freezer door.

OK, now take a look at the above photograph and raise your hands if you know what it is. Continue reading →

iTunes does not lie

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Stephen King writes a column on the last page of Entertainment Weekly, I think it’s every other week, called “The Pop of King.”

Yes, I read and even subscribe to that degenerate and hedonistic periodical — and the print version at that. Hey, I work in publishing. I’m watching an entire industry, once noble, vital and relevant, spin down the toilet and more than 25 years of my life with it.

I know that my lonely subscriptions to Entertainment Weekly or Rolling Stone or DigitalPhotoPro or even National Geographic are not going to save those organizations from their ultimate and inevitable demise. But I would bet that the people who pour their hearts into and make a living from the publication of those print products appreciate the fact that there are still some people who like to drape it over their knees and thumb through the pages while riding the bus or sipping coffee or while seated on their personal, porcelain thrones.

This weeks King column refers to a previous column he wrote about his top-20 favorite rock songs of all time. He mentions that Connie Francis’ “Stupid Cupid” is actually on his list and that some of his readers thought that to be “insane.”

So this week he revisits the topic (can he not find anything else to write about? I mean he’s Stephen freaking King, c’mon, our industry is dying here!) and looked at his iTunes library, sorted it by playcount and gave us the REAL list along with the number of times each song was played.

So, I did that.

Don’t give me any grief here, I don’t write this blog as a way to make a living and I earn not a nickel from doing it so I’m not doing my own industry any harm by regurgitating less-than-original ideas. And no trees, that I know of, were harmed in the publishing of this content. If you can call it that.

On to the list! Continue reading →

record fall

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Hey, it’s my blog. Nobody said I can’t post a photo of my own damn self. Dooce does it all the time. And she gets like a gazillion page views a day. Of course, she’s actually kind of hot.

I was feeling like posting tonight and I was digging around for a piece of art to launch something in my head and well, this is it.

I know it’s not pretty (unless you’re a Nikon man) but it gives me something to talk about. So if you have no interest in cameras or Nikons or photography in general, I suggest you go here.

The photo above was taken by my colleague and long-time bud Chris Chaffee in the newsroom of the old Press-Courier in Oxnard, CA sometime around 1985.

I’d wish I could say that it’s much earlier because nobody should be wearing a mustache like that past about 1970 unless you are a cop, a firefighter or a huge Freddy Mercury fan.

I’d also like to say that it’s much later than that because I can’t really have been without hair on the top of my head that long ago.

Now that I’ve dispensed with the predictable OMG, the hair! commentary, I can go on.

For those of you who may have just googled Nikon and got to this place on the interwebs I offer you this:

Hanging around my neck are a fair amount of good, old Nikons. And by the way, if I were in water that was over my head, I would surely drown.

There are no less than four Nikon F2s, I can’t recall which ones are which anymore but I believe there are two F2SBs and two F2ASs. Three of them have MD-2 motor drives on them with battery packs (again, can I say, HEAVY?) and that’s all Nikkor AIS glass mounted on those bodies from left to right: 180mm f2.8 ED (sweet), 55mm f2.8 Micro-Nikkor (seriously sweet), 24mm f2.8, 85mm f1.4 and that’s an old 300mm f4 mounted on an FM2 with an MD12.

There’s a Minolta Auto Meter IIIf (I still have that somwhere) at the top and there are two Domke bags thrown in for good measure.

Sink like a stone I would.

Of course, I never ran around with five cameras hanging from my neck but it was typical then, as it is now, to carry two.
And back then you didn’t really have quality zooms to work with so you carried four or five lenes in your bag and a couple of strobes and batteries and chargers, probably a police scanner and misc. other stuff.
By the way, the Nikon F2 system, although bulky and heavy as shit is probably the most durable, flexible, responsive, fast and well-made professional SLR camera ever built. These things were just a marvel of precision and mechanical engineering.

And when you weren’t shooting with it, you could use it as a weapon.

A couple of other observations, notice the fact that I am standing in the middle of the “slot,” this is the position of the last editor to read copy before it gets typeset and the guy who ultimately gets his ass chewed off by the editor when there are any typos or other errors in the paper, and that I am smoking and there is a full ashtray right in front of me.

Yes, you used to be able to smoke in the newsroom, actually I think you could drink whiskey too.

Also, check out those fab CompuGraphic One terminals. Nice. They did nothing but set type and were connected to a mainframe that took up an average bedroom-sized room. These were pretty much brand-new then.

I wish I could read the date on the paper in the foreground but all I can see is that it is a Tuesday and this is the “street” edition.

The headline could have been written yesterday.

This was shot on Kodak Tri-X pan and probably pushed to 1600ASA and processed in Diafine and printed on Kodak EkatmaticSC fiber-based paper developed in Dektol.

The good ole’ days.

My knees hurt.