Superb image.
From the long running Patek Philippe advertising campaign, what father would not want this for his son?
Father and son
Yearly Archives: 2015
Peter Sellers
Amateur snapper, famous name.
Those who grew up with Peter Sellers’s comedy saw the early surreal radio work with Harry Secombe and Spike Milligan (‘The Goons’) for the BBC gestate into the dark comedy of Kubrick’s ‘Dr. Strangelove’ and later into the slapstick money maker that was the Inspector Clouseau series of movies made by Blake Edwards.
His performance in Kubrick’s masterpiece (Kubrick only made masterpieces) is notable for the fact that Sellers acted three rôles – the US President, the RAF officer and, most memorably, the crazy German scientist, Dr. Strangelove, modeled on the no less crazy real life clone, Edward Teller, the proponent of pre-emptive nuclear strikes against the Soviet Union. Sellers was also set to play the bomber pilot charged with nuking Moscow, but evaded the part claiming injury to an ankle. There are many versions of this story, but that seems to be the most credible, for you could not possibly have two personalities more different than those of Sellers and Kubrick. The one spontaneous, with a quicksilver wit which dictated that one take was all his short attention span could tolerate. The other cerebral, plodding, intense, leaving nothing to chance and thinking a dozen takes par for the course. Sellers simply wanted out, so feigned the injury. Quite how these two collaborated to craft the greatest black comedy made is a mystery, but we should all be grateful they did. At the conclusion Kubrick remarked that “Sellers is the only actor you pay for four parts and get three”.
Sellers as Strangelove.
Strangelove’s prescription for surviving the coming holocaust, in the obligatory heavy German accent:
The last few minutes of Strangelove contain some of the greatest tragicomedy ever put on the screen in a movie with great performances all round. The closing line “Mein Führer, I can walk!” constitutes a perfect ending to a perfect movie.
Sellers, like many of his ilk, suffered the curse of the comedian, forever insecure and worried that his fame might fade along with his wit. He really should not have worried, having a genius for self reinvention. Once as a kid I recall him on a BBC consumer show where he called in for a job interview affecting an Indian accent – he was roundly turned down – then seconds later called again, this time in perfect BBC English (like they used to speak until populism reared its ugly head), and got the interview. This debunking of bigotry has stayed with me all these years. No-one has equalled Sellers’s genius for mimicry.
There’s an excellent documentary on Sellers’s interest in photography where much of the content was provided by his burgeoning archives, for Sellers was a committed snapper and movie maker from the earliest days of his success. He invariably had the latest in gear and such was the man’s character that he gave generous gifts of hardware to many friends. Now a UK web magazine named Creative Review has published an interesting piece on his photography and you can see more by clicking the image below.
Click the image for the article.
Steve and Airheads
4 years on.
Steve died four years ago today and we will soon be enjoying the Aaron Sorkin biopic. starring the splendid Michael Fassbender, who happens to be a devoted biker himself. In fact, he does not even own a car.
Some six years ago I wrote of the visceral appeal of old motorcycles and my BMW R90/6, a 1975 model, remains in service today and I still enjoy the heck out of riding it. These older BMWs, air cooled with the horizontally opposed cylinders poking either side into the airstream are, appropriately enough, referred to as ‘Airheads’. BMW continues to stock almost every part for machines made since 1972, which is remarkable, as are the prices!
Few know that Steve was a BMW bike rider before migrating to Mercedes cars later on:
He’s riding a late ’60s R60/2 with the lovely Earles front forks named after the British inventor, Earnie Earles. The design, way ahead of its time, ensured that there was no dive under heavy braking while also providing the solidity needed for hauling a sidecar, a not uncommon form of transportation in a still poor, war torn Europe back then.
My R90/6 had been in storage for four years while I enjoyed a 1989 R100RT touring machine; that has now moved to a good home and I am returning to my first love. I have owned the R90/6, for over 25 years. I am the second, and likely last, owner.
Totally devoid of electronics, my beast nonetheless refused to start owing to an electrical problem. Electricity, as we all know, is the work of the devil. After locating the correct wiring diagram (there are several for 1975 – don’t ask) I printed it on no fewer than eight sheets of paper using Split Print so I could actually trace the wiring. Finally diagnosis pointed to a blown diode in the headlamp shell, a veritable linguine of wiring, and after replacement the God of Tesla spoke once more to the electrical systems.
Linguine – or is that spaghetti – wiring inside the headshell.
As befits Real Men, the machine has a kick starter which you can see me use in the video taken by my son, in addition to a more modern electric one. Refresh the page if it does not come up. This is the first time the bike has run in four years. Note especially my ancient Airheads T shirt. You can hear the massive clunks from the gearbox as I shift – early airheads were always thus, and at 60,000 miles the ‘box is as good as new:
The pause at the end of the driveway is to turn off the choke using the relatively inaccessible lever on the airbox.
Laying up any machine for so long a period of time is never good. Drain all the fluids and your seals dry out, only to leak once the fluids are replaced. Don’t drain them and water vapor enters and starts to rust parts out. I had taken the precaution of draining everything and was rewarded with two leaky petcocks supplying gasoline to the carburetors.
Then the clutch cable was disclosed to be on its last legs, frayed beyond belief. You can’t win.
It’s always something with old machines.
The new cable in place. Aaah!
Setting the points gap on this 19th century device is never fun and was always the cause of much Garage Language, until I chanced upon an elegant tool designed and machined by Paul Tavenier (Amazon carries the tool. But of course):
Paul’s supremely elegant points tool.
The tool is placed over the spigot once the advance mechanism is removed. There’s no need to set TDC – the tool emulates it, the collar separating the points to maximum opening. Push it on, adjust the points gap until the included 0.40mm feeler gauge is a sliding fit, and you are done. Bliss.
Airheads came with exceptionally complete tool kits and were sadly discontinued in 1995 in favor of modern marvels which need a PhD and a computer to fix. That and lots of money.
The Airhead toolkit, supplemented by Paul’s tool and spare points. The spare coiled spring in the center is one of two keeping the center stand up when raised.
There are few tasks you cannot complete with the above, aided in no small part by the exceptionally elegant and modular design of the machine.
Now one thing led to another and as is the wont of Airheads we chatted a bit about our machines. Paul happens to have been riding his R90/6 for 35 years now, making me a relative novice. Well, wouldn’t you know it, he is the same Paul Tavenier who was on the original Macintosh design team! Paul writes that Steve’s earlier R75/5 sat in the inner lobby of the Bandley 3 building at Apple for many years, on display as an example of what great design is all about.
Thank you, Paul. Airheads Rule. And Steve, you are much missed.
Photographic tributes? You will not find a finer one than mine.
Tracker blocking
Stopping evil.
Jean-Louis Gassée, former head of Apple France, writes a weekly column on his Monday Note blog which is always interesting. A few weeks back he wrote this interesting piece addressing the growing use of tracking software which allows the not-so-nice people at Google, and its runt offshoot Facebook, to Do Evil. Meaning that these crooks steal your tracking history for sale to the highest bidder, their customer, also known as an advertiser. You are not Google’s customer. You are Google’s merchandise, your behavior unwittingly sold every second of the day. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you agreed to their carefully obfuscated terms of service – I need no lessons in the law, thank you. I know theft when I see it.
One of Gassée’s points is that with the wimpier processors found in portable devices, especially iPhones and iPads, this invisible but very intrusive software has a significant effect on the speed with which content loads while all those nasty trawlers lodge inside your CPU and memory. With iOS9 being released by Apple today, I got off my duff, loaded it up on the iPhone and sundry iPads and immediately installed Marco Arment’s aptly named ‘Peace’ app which permits trackers to be blocked. Arment is a long time Apple developer, is a person with a great track record and I have been a happy user of his apps for years. Sure, there are free variants out there, but why not go with a known quantity? All of $2.99. The effect was immediately noticeable. One of the worst offenders is the New York Times and pages now load far faster on my iPhone and iPad – no measurements needed. It’s obvious.
Then the other shoe dropped and I realized I had to install tracker blocking in Safari (I already use AdBlock to stop intrusive advertising) on my desktops and laptop, so I zipped over to Ghostery and downloaded and installed a conceptually similar app for OS X browsers. Marco Arment’s ‘Peace’ uses the same Ghostery back-end on iOS. Once installed, Ghostery places a small ghost icon to the left of your URL bar and when trackers are in effect a red numbered flag tells you how many you are blocking – this is what you see when you click the icon:
The liberals at the NYT aren’t past making a silent buck off your reading.
No surprise that Google Analytics and Facebook feature in just about every tracking err… tracking, and I’m not even a member of that great 21st century time sink for those with IQs in double digits and below known as Facebook users (they are more accurately described as ‘used’ than ‘users’).
So there are two benefits of using tracking blockers. First everything in your browser loads noticeably faster, meaning less time lost and less battery drain. Second, you get the smug satisfaction of thwarting those who Do Evil. Given that this is an existential threat to Google’s revenues, you can bet they have large teams working overtime on working around this. Until then, I have a smile as large as a Cheshire Cat on my mug.
Apple is to be congratulated on making tracker blocking available in iOS (you need recent versions of the iPhone or iPad for this to work – an excellent excuse to upgrade). And JL-G is to be congratulated on bringing this issue so eloquently to the fore.
I checked this blog to see if some trackers had somehow insinuated themselves and found but one – Google Translate. If you use the translate option (scroll to the bottom of this page) Google will know all about it. If you read English, nothing about your coming here is known to anyone – except you. Google’s translation is mostly awful anyway, but there for those preferring not to use the Queen’s English.
The one tracker in effect – turned off here – on this site.
Update not 24 hours later:
I take everything I said about Arment back. This just sent to me by a Guardian reader:
“The maker of Peace, a bestselling ad blocker for iPhones, has pulled the app just days after its launch saying the app’s success “just doesn’t feel goodâ€.
Marco Arment, co-founder of Tumblr and creator of the Instapaper reading app, launched Peace on 16 September. The $2.99 app became the bestselling app in Apple’s iTunes store almost overnight.
Peace takes advantage of iOS 9, Apple’s newly updated mobile software, to filter out mobile ads and tracking on other apps and websites. Mobile advertising is the fastest growing sector of the ad business and seen by most publishers as vital to their future finances.”
Well, I got mine ….
One of the basic facts of life is that those with bleeding hearts generally have zero grasp of economics. Just buy someone else’s product because he has just helped them get rich.
Now the fellow has rebated the money rather than giving it to a good cause like education:
Update October 1, 2015:
Now that Apple has refunded me my $2.99 for Peace, why not just stick with it, free as it is? because there will be no updates fromn the fool who passes as developer.
Go to this excellent New York Times piece (talk of biting the hand which feeds you!) and download Purify from the App Store for $1.99. It works just like the article says and you should get support going forward.
Art Wolfe
No competition.
Your chances of taking wild animal pictures as good as those made by Art Wolfe are precisely zero.
Using the latest technologies. Click the image for the video.
Whether it’s remote dollies, drones, aircraft, you name it, Wolfe has been at it 40 years and no piker on ‘safari’ has a remote chance of equalling his 40 years of applied skill in the business.
In the brief video – click the image – he asks whether it has all been done before? From the amateur, weekend snapper’s perspective the answer to that question is the same as it was 50 years ago. A resounding ‘Yes’. A few specialists like Wolfe change the landscape and the amateur is far better off buying their images and videos than wasting money on a trip to some godforsaken hole without antibiotics or clean drinking water. Best enjoyed from your sofa at home.