Santa Cruz.
Panny GX7, 45-200 Panasonic lens at 171mm.
At the Beach
Monthly Archives: July 2014
Point Lobos
Paradise on earth.
Enjoying a spot of R&R along the Monterey coast, this is what we saw:
China Cove, Point Lobos.
Lizard, Point Lobos.
Beach, Point Lobos.
Bird Island, Point Lobos. Coromorant at take off.
Cormorant colony, Bird Island, Point Lobos.
Reflections, Point Lobos.
Painter, Point Lobos.
Seal Rock, 17 Mile Drive, Pebble Beach.
All pictures on the Panny GX7 with the splendid 45-200mm OIS Panny zoom, mostly hand held.
The photographer? Here he is at work – my son Winston, now 12 years old.
Oklahoma!
All that is good and great.
The screen was like nothing I could have imagined. It was simply vast. This was in 1956.
My dad had taken me to the Leicester Square Odeon cinema and the movie was Rodgers’s and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! America. My first childhood inkling of my future home.
Back then actors had to sing (on pitch), act, dance, emote and generally be perfect to succeeed in Hollywood, and you can very much see survival of the fittest from the cornucopia of talent on display here, never less than in Shirley Jones (with her wonderful coloratura soprano) and Gordon McRae.
Yet maybe the greatest magic here is from that technological wonder of twentieth century film, Technicolor. Evidently there are two masters – a 2.55:1 on 35mm film and the real thing, the 2.20:1 70mm original. That’s the one I have and while sometimes characters are cut off at the edge of an already ultrawide image, the quality – today – is breathtaking. You can see just how wide 2.20:1 is from the black bars in the images below, taken from a standard 1.78:1 (16:9) TV screen.
I finally got me to watching it for the first time in 57 years, yes siree, and it is a wonder to behold. And how often can you say that a childhood memory is better today than it was over a half century ago? The widescreen images capture the vastness of the American prairie like no other system possibly could.
Shirley Jones and Gordon McRae.
Jones soliloquizes in gorgeous Technicolor.
Somehow she morphs to a much haughtier Bambi Linn at the start of the surreal dream sequence.
The dream sequence becomes a Western Can-Can with Rod Steiger, no less, with imagery Dali would approve.
Drama reminiscent of Géricault’s ‘The Raft of the Medusa‘.
Oklahoma!
An extraordinary accomplishment in American musical theater with cinematography, music, singing and dancing (choreographed by none other than Agnes de Mille) to die for.
Rodgers and Hammerstein at their very best.
6TB drives
Capacities increase again.
Western Digital just announced 5 and 6TB capacity HDDs, the latter just $300.
Expect to see 10TB before long as new technologies achieve the heretofore impossible. The HDD is far from dead.
600,000 books. $10 monthly storage cost.
Amazon moves forward.
For $10 a month Amazon will allow you to read any one of some 600,000 titles for no additional charge. As I buy some 6 books a month from them this is a slam dunk.
The library as we know it has long been doomed, and this will only spur its demise. High time we redeveloped all that costly real estate and put it to better use. Yes, Hitler would be proud. Now we really can burn all those books with no feelings of remorse, together with the diseases they carry in their pages.
The next step will be to extend this service to art and photography books which take up the most space and poundage in the average home. Please, Amazon, get on it. And while you are at it, Mr. Bezos, wrest control of obscenely priced academic books from the likes of the thieves at Pearson and add them to your service.
Signing up is a one click thing and this is the result:
