Category Archives: Photographs

21st Amendment

Dining, Photographs

In memoriam of quite exceptional stupidity.

For a nation created in the joint beliefs of self determination and freedom of religion and expression, the United States still boasts more loony puritanical cranks per acre than most. Never was this better illustrated than in the 18th Amendment to the Constitution, passed by the drunken louts in Congress in 1919. This stunning piece of idiocy prevailed until repeal by the 21st Amendment passed in 1933.

There were only two groups who approved. The peddlers of illegal hooch who became wealthy overnight. And Hollywood, which made movies about …. the peddlers of illegal hooch. Congress had proved, yet again, that a basic, unarguable principle of economics could not be changed.

All control drives up price.

The poppy farmers in the Golden Triangle and the hemp growers of South America and the California hills bow daily in the direction of a Congress still in denial of this Great Truth. Or maybe those legislators are simply on the payroll? Either way, we continue to support the drug trade and its extraordinary profits by doing for drugs what we did between 1919 and 1933 for booze. Go figure.

Please. No lectures about your kids getting higher than a kite. It’s called ‘parental responsibility’.

There’s a fine brew pub with a nice selection of craft beers not far from the ballpark in San Francisco named, appropriately, The 21st Amendment, and you can get a beer there for a whole lot less than you paid Al Capone back in the day. My waiter knew his stuff too when I asked him which Amendment made the Volstead Act law, right down to the date! Click ‘No’ on their home page and nothing happens! Gotta like that.

Panasonic G1, kit lens @ 14mm, 1/80, f/3.5, ISO 1600.

As the snap shows, they are proud of their brewers here and I confirm that I was enjoying a light New Belgian Mothership wheat beer with my fish and chips when snapping this, purely to steady my hand, you understand,

Dictator’s window

Photographs

A hot seller.

There’s a run on these in north Africa right now and sales in the Middle East will shortly take off.

Spotted near South Park in San Francisco and snapped on the Panny G1 with the kit zoom at 38mm FFE. Some modest perspective correction applied in PS to repair converging verticals.

You can find South Park here:

It is a small pocket park in an area of quite exceptional charm in the City by the Bay – despite that nearby window!

A bit of fun

Photographs

Four for Sunday.

Some recent snaps just for fun:

Market Street steam. Where does all that steam come from?

Battery Exchange. Wear a hat and you become invisible!

The Embrace.

The Gnome. He has it down, even to the walking stick. Real luck with the lighting.

All snapped on the Panasonic G1 with the kit zoom.

To get ahead ….

Paintings, Photographs

…. get a hat.

“To get ahead, get a hat” was a famous slogan of men’s hat makers in the middle of the last century when every respectable man wore a hat. Come to think of it, a lot of not-very-respectable guys wore them, too.

Speaking for myself, I wear a hat, more correctly mostly a cap, 365 days in the average year, more in a leap year. My choice is one of many English Tweed (sorry, Scottish Tweed) caps in my collection, though now and then you might find me under a Trilby or, on particularly eccentric days, a Sherlock Holmes Deerstalker. This one is ideal for taking street snaps as everyone writes you off as a harmless nut which, of course, you are. Summer, as often as not, finds me sporting a Borsalino linen number and I confess to always having had a hankering for a straw boater but have yet to own one. For years you could have found a Greek fisherman’s number gracing the old noggin and if I ever owned a bowler I am most certainly not admitting that here.

The milliner is a special kind of hat maker, catering solely to the gentler sex. No finer expression of his work – or his clientele – exists outside Degas’s priceless renditions.

And it’s not like he did it once. There are many renditions.

So show me a hat shop and you can bet on one thing. I’m going inside.

Here’s one in San Francisco’s Little Italy and, yes, you know who I was thinking of:

In the hat shop. Panasonic G1, kit lens 1/3rd sec., f/6.3. ISO 320.

1/3rd second, hand held? Yup. Sometimes you get lucky, and no way I was letting this one get away. No time to mess with the wretched little buttons on the Panny to increase the ISO, so 1/3rd it was. Snapped at the Goorin Brothers Hat Shop on Washington Square in Little Italy, San Francisco, which has been selling hats since 1895, when Degas was still doing his thing.