Yearly Archives: 2020

Vote!

Ramblings

Time to clean the Augean Stables of Republicans.



Send Pig home.

Four years ago – goodness, it seems like 400 – I warned of the coming catastrophe which would result from electing Pig to the White House. It gives me no pleasure to see that I was right and it is a source of eternal shame that 60 million American morons were wrong. They have got what they deserve which includes:

  • 200,000 American murdered by an uncaring Pig
  • Millions more infected with the coronavirus
  • Record unemployment
  • Destruction of our system of laws
  • Destruction of the Unites States Supreme Court and of the judiciary
  • Criminality of mind bending proportions in the Pig family
  • Rule by American ‘Christians’ whose expertise is in looking the other way
  • Destruction of the USPS
  • An existential threat to affordable health care

It bears repeating what I wrote on April 14, 2020 when comparing Pig with Richard III:

A note to Pig voters: This blog is about Photographs, Photographers and Photography. It ordinarily eschews politics. However, at this time of national tragedy, a tragedy whose number of deaths has been compounded by a psychopath masquerading as President, it is every American’s duty to protest loudly and to work for regime change. If you voted for Pig last time and have come around to seeing the error of your ways, all well and good. We all make mistakes. However, if you still fall in the trap of believing that Pig is making America great again and propose voting for him again, not only are you emphatically not welcome here, your very presence disgusts me. Do the right thing. Go elsewhere with your stupidity, your ignorance and your bigotry.

* * * * *

Now we are all voting early as the US Postal Service cannot be depended on to deliver our ballots on time. And yes, I do still believe that, as Churchill once put it, “Americans will always do the right thing, having first tried all the alternatives”. So it’s not enough to vote. It’s the right thing to vote Blue up and down the ballot. Put aside partisan differences and minor quibbles. Forget nonsense about abortion and gun rights. Noise. These have nothing to do with the peaceful governance of a great nation.

Yes, your choice is between a murderous criminal grifter and his enablers or a 77 year old with a GPA of 2.9 who has accomplished nothing in his life other than being on the taxpayers’ payroll for 47 years. But there’s a key distinction. One is a Pig. The other is a decent man, mediocre as he is. Today decent mediocrity is what America needs. Kick Pig and his Slovenian Slut and their many anchor babies out of the sty in which they reside.

Sony a7C

Cameras, Panasonic

Small and full frame.



Great specs in a small package.

By far my favorite camera before I went 100% iPhone and sold all my ‘regular’ hardware was the MFT Panasonic GX7. Small, a Leica format design with an offset finder eyepiece and an electronic shutter stealth mode for silent operation. Paired with the stock 12-35mm Pro Zoom optic, which is excellent, it was the best thing until the iPhone 11Pro came along. I banged away with that GX7 for the best part of a decade and loved every moment of it. Once you set up the menus for your preferred way of operation it became a high quality point-and-shoot delivering excellent image quality and came with a small fill-in flash built in. Sweet.

If the GX7 had a limitation it related to the handling of high contrast subjects, where highlights were all too prone to burn out, even using RAW, dictating underexposure by a stop or two and recovery of the shadows in Lightroom. Panny had crammed 18 megapixels into the 0.375 square inch sensor and it showed. That’s 48 mp/square inch.

So when Sony announced the a7C the other day, it was of immediate interest. A GX7-styled body bit with a full frame 24 megapixel sensor, meaning just 16 mp/square inch. That’s a huge drop in pixel density, which augurs well for dynamic range. But what is especially surprising about the new body is its small size. Compare:

Panny GX7 – 4.8″ x 2.8″ x 2.2″, or 29.6 cubic inch volume, weighing 402 grams without lens
Sony a7C – 4.9″ x 2.8″ 2.2″, or 30.2 cubic inches, weighing 509 grams

Add a lens to each – the stock zoom – and weight increases by a few grams.

So the Sony’s specifications are impressive indeed. The question has to be asked. Does MFT still make sense, given the image quality trade-offs?

One big plus over the GX7 is battery life. Sony claims over 700 shots on a charge; I rarely managed 200 with the GX7.

Now if they added great iPhone features like phone calls, cellular connectivity, night mode, and insanely small size and weight, that would be really something. Oh, and a built-in flash would be nice. Also, at $1,800 Sony is asking too much. At $1,100-1,200 it makes sense. Heck, that’s as much as my iPhone 11Pro.

Age

Motorcycles

Age. You forget things. That periodic table of elements I could merrily recite from memory down to the 60th element or so a few decades ago now sees me stuck at fifteen. Potassium, if I got that right.

And what with American liability law being what it is, with no one willing to accept responsibility for their actions, can you wonder about surgeons’ approach to tool management as a counterpoint to age? Each instrument is inventoried before and after the operation, in the hope that a scalpel, say, is not left inside the patient when he is sown up. I call this the ‘Surgeon’s Rule’.

This disciplined approach works every bit as well for this aging amateur mechanic, for while the risks are lower and the only person left to sue is yourself when you mess up, accounting for all your tools is no bad thing before exiting the hallowed workspace and flooring the throttle.



The wrench section on the peg board wall.

It is proper inventory management which has long seen me hang most of my tools from pegboards, believing that keeping them in drawers is exactly wrong. So forget those dreams of mega-buck SnapOn rolling tool chests. An utter waste of money. A tool you cannot see is a tool you mislay.

Further, those peg boards are white because not only are the stock brown ones depressing to contemplate, sucking light out of the workspace, white also sets the tools off nicely for ease of location.

The peg boards are attached to pine battens, the latter screwed into the wall studs behind the drywall, using a stud finder. That finder is like a politician, lying much of the time, but you get there eventually. The battens ensure that the whole thing is robust – tools can weigh a lot – and also provide offset from the wall for the hooks, once inserted.

Another dictate is that tools should never be stacked, as the one in the back will be every bit as lost as the one in that rolling cart’s tray. As the image shows I break this rule here and there, for lack of space, but overall it’s what you might style a solid effort.

That image speaks to a disciplined filing approach, if nothing else, yet the Surgeon’s Rule let me down the other day, because I failed to follow it. Check the red circle and there’s obviously a 19mm combination wrench missing. It is now to be found in one of my neighbors’ garages as it was left in place by yours truly when tightening the 19mm bolt on the crossbar which retains my old bike’s engine in the frame. I place one 19mm wrench on the left where it ‘locks’ against the exhaust pipe, then have at it on the other side to loosen the crossbar which allows the frame’s downtubes to separate ever so slightly, in turn making the oil filter cover accessible for removal. Not the greatest design by BMW, but not a big deal in the grand scheme of life.

I did not inventory my tools before riding around the neighborhood when the job was completed and later realized I had left the beautiful French Facom wrench in place when riding off. It fell off somewhere in the vicinity of my home and subsequent desperate searches (heck, any excuse for a ride) failed.

So I had to resort to this – mercifully Amazon stocks German Stahlwhille wrenches, if not the even more lovely French Facom ones:



The replacement.

So the rule here is to follow the Surgeon’s Rule religiously. And never, never, never buy cheap, imported tools. Real wrenches are made by Stahlwille and Facom. Yes, a few more dollars but a lifetime investment and one which will repay the premium paid every time you grasp that beautifully finished surface.

First ride – Fall 2020

Motorcycles

The hibernation is over.

Unlike grizzlies, BMW Airhead motorcycles hibernate in the summer, when it’s too darned hot to leave a vintage machine in a 130F greenhouse passing as a garage, here in Scottsdale, Arizona.




Back on May 1, 2020.

So with temperatures finally dipping back into single figures, it was time to get the 1975 BMW R90/6 out of its refrigerated comfort zone and back on the road. Where it belongs.

The Odyssey gel cell battery needed no recharging, having dropped from 13.11 volts to 12.97 volts. On the other hand, the tubed tires did need air, each having lost some 50% of the usual 32/36 pounds in pressure. Easy. Oil? No need to check. German motorcycles do not leak.

So a gallon of high test later – the tank had been drained before indoor storage – a prod or two on the kick starter to get oil to the piston rings, full choke just for the start, a touch on the electric starter button to get that huge, antique Bosch lump of a starter to do its bit, and off we go. Kicking those big twin 450cc pistons into life from cold is no fun. Electric starting is the way to go, introduced in Airheads in 1970.

Nothing, but nothing, beats two motorized wheels.

Meat cleaver

Cooking

A superior tool for any cook.

For an index of cooking articles on this blog click here.

Over a decade ago I extolled the benefits of a good chef’s knife, writing like many before me that it’s the key kitchen tool.

Well, for the last three years my chef’s knife has seen very little use and I prepare three meals daily. It has been replaced – nay, obsoleted – by this:




A superior tool.

This tool is superior to the chef’s knife in just about every way imaginable. The cutting edge is much further from the fingers. The leverage that can be applied on the broad-topped blade is an order of magnitude greater. Rocking the cleaver over vegetables, like onions, to dice and chop them up is trivial and safe. But as the dents in mine confirm, the last thing you really want to do with this tool is use it for hacking up bones. Yes, the steel is soft, meaning it both blunts and distorts relatively easily. I will gradually wear through my dents, but they remind me not to be silly. You never hammer this down on anything. Make noise with it and you are using it incorrectly. Want to hack up bones? Use a saw.

The blade is very thick which just helps with the impression of control and yes, it just fits the sharpening machine I have now been using happily for over a decade:




In the Chef’s Choice sharpener.

What about the Mezzaluna, you ask? After all, celebrity TV chefs are all over this tool:




An awful, single-use tool. Dangerous, too.

I have to tell you that this is one of the worst conceived single-use tools ever. First, all you can do with it is rock it back and forth on vegetables. Second, the unprotected blade will slice you up when you retrieve it from the drawer where you placed it, because it was just too large to hang on the wall.

And unlike the cleaver, it cannot scoop up chopped material for placement in the skillet (the chef’s knife’s narrow blade is also sub-optimal in this task), nor can you use it to gently crush garlic cloves to permit easy peeling – and subsequent dicing. Fughedaboutit. It’s a solution looking for a problem, strictly for poseurs. And if you think this is the right way to slice up a pizza pie, think again and get a pizza wheel. It’s nice having ten fingers ….

Brand choice for the cleaver? I don’t think it matters. Just do not waste your $100 on a costly, hard steel German one which will be hell to sharpen. Instead, get something like my $25 choice and make sure you have good sharpening hardware available. And make sure your cleaver of choice has a hanging hole in the blade, as you will want to hang it in an accessible spot. After all, you will find you are using it daily.

The cleaver rules. All I use the vaunted chef’s knife for today is to split open large melons or cantaloupes. Point in first, for safety, then rotate.