Traveling in style

Book reviews, Photographs

On the great liners.

In an age where (mostly white) trash pervades the news cycle, and one in which such human detritus is headed for the Oval Office regardless of one’s vote, it’s a pleasure to contemplate an earlier age of paparazzi which saw the rich and famous photographed crossing the Atlantic in the luxury liners of the inter-war years.


Fred and Adele Astaire on the S.S. Majestic, 1927.

The New York Times reminds us of that age in a splendid piece with many period images, which you can see by clicking the picture above.

For those interested in the great liners I recommend ‘The Only Way to Cross’ by John Maxtone-Graham, available used through Abe Books. The book looks exhaustively at these floating palaces, from the Mauretania and Titanic through the QE2, in both aesthetic and technical detail and is highly recommended. It includes many period photographs.

If you are seeking to get a sense of just how special these great ships were, you can stay on the Queen Mary in Long Beach which is now a floating hotel.

End of Empire

Hall of Shame

Doing a Thatcher.

When Steve Jobs was dying and passed the reins at Apple to Tim Cook my instant reaction was that he was ‘doing a Thatcher’. That strong and successful British leader had ceded the reins of power to a weak nonentity as successor and the general reaction was that this would only make her look better in retrospect. Indeed, in public life, there are any number of such examples – Thatcher-Major, FDR-Truman, Churchill-Eden, Reagan-Bush, de Gaulle-Pompidou. Each transition succeeded loudly in emphasizing the greatness of the predecessor.

And that suspicion has not only deepened since Jobs died some four and a half years ago, it’s being shouted from the rooftops today. Since he rode Jobs’s coattails to record iPhone sales with such stunning innovations like a bigger phone display, a lighter iPad and the Apple Watch with its thrilling selection of bands, we see the culmination of this unimaginative Apple CEO’s leadership in today’s announcement that Apple has invested $1bn of its shareholders’ monies in …. a cab service – an amount which buys Apple but 4% of the company based on its $25bn valuation:

With Apple just having recorded its first quarter of falling revenues since Jobs returned at the helm in 1998, this on the back of a greenmailing investor in the guise of Carl Icahn teaching Cook about shareholder dividends and returns, Apple has decided that its best and highest use of money is to buy into a Chinese Uber-variant named Didi because, after all, there’s a billion of them out there waiting to hail a ride …. on their knock-off Android phones. A Doodoo ‘investment’ (‘bribe’, inept as it sounds, might be closer to the mark, if equally unproductive) if ever there was one.

Meanwhile Apple Mail is broken, El Capitan is a disaster getting worse with each version, Siri’s AI is fundamentally deficient, iOS voice recognition badly lags GOOG’s and the predictive corrections in the iOS keyboard are worse than useless – and positively embarassing when some doofus ‘correction’ slips through and you tell your girlfriend she’s a slut when you meant to compliment her cooking.

Steve, where are you when we need you?


Doing a Thatcher, and spinning in his grave.

Cook, when not donating money to transgender causes, has made a point of making Apple a ‘nice’ place to work, devoid of conflict and tension. I expect to learn that Apple HQ has transitioned to unisex bathrooms any day now. Recall this is the man who, when first CEO, gave all Apple workers Thanksgiving week off …. That same ‘niceness’ thing, the craving for popularity which Jobs never had, was the reason he immediately fired Scott Forstall – the driver behind both OS X and iOS (and, indeed, Siri, which he would have made great had he been given a chance). Forstall was the proverbial irritant, a disruptive force and one with which Steve was perfectly at ease, having been cast from the same mold. When you fire people like that, you forever lose the competitive edge. Apple has managed to do just that under its current leadership.

Royally well done

Photographs

The Queen turns 90 today.

Age has seen to it that Her Majesty no longer rides a horse to review the Guards at the Trooping of the Color, but her energy and commitment remain undimmed. Her life as monarch spans the greatness of Churchill, the first Prime Minister in her reign, the loss of Empire, the even greater loss of Englishness hoist on the petard of multiculturalism – the fruits of Empire – and the loss of English industry to Germans and their ilk.

If she is guilty of poor judgment it is solely in the case of that press whore, Diana, who made the masses her own while executing some sort of confused agenda quite beyond the bounds of logic. Mercifully, a lucky accident solved the Queen’s dilemma.

The beauty of the design of the United Kingdom’s constitutional monarchy is that the moment a majority of voters tires of the system it can be abolished by plebiscite, a process no more difficult than the signature event which crafted English parliamentary democracy in the first place, the beheading of Charles I in 1649. And no blood need be spilled. Sure, ruling monarchs came and went after him, Britain flirted with totalitarianism in the guise of Cromwell, flirted with disaster in the guise of that feckless fool Edward VIII, but somehow common sense prevailed – even if Guy Fawkes did not – and the tide of representative democracy was not to be denied. So if you have petty resentment in your soul for the system of monarchy, forget it. It’s the choice of English voters, after all, and quite likely one of the best economic bargains on the planet. For a pittance of an allowance the Queen does more for tourism and what little remains of British industry than you do. And she provides an invisible governor on the excesses of prime ministers which redefines soft power. The Prime Minister still meets with her weekly in Buckingham Palace and if you think it trivial to stare down the descendant of Queen Victoria, think again.

The hilarious picture above says everything you need to know about the stiffness of upper lips and I was reminded of it when last visiting London, where I grew up, in 1999. Needless to say I attended the Trooping of that same Color and a jolly good time was had by all.


On Pall Mall. Leica M6, 90mm Asph Summicron, Kodachrome 64.

All those images of the Guards remind me of a favorite Churchill story. On being informed that a senior cabinet member was caught importuning with a Guardsman in St. James’s Park he inquired of the circumstances, over his adviser’s determination to have the cad canned:

“At 2am, Prime Minister.”

“2am, you say?”

“Yes sir, in the middle of St. James’s Park.”

“In the park, you say?”

“Yes, sir. In the middle of winter.”

“In the middle of winter you say?”

“Yes sir, and without an overcoat”

“Without an overcoat? Makes you proud to be British, doesn’t it?”

Happy Birthday Queen Elizabeth. May you have many more.

* * * * *

Prompted by the above, my friend Santo Wiryaman sent me a gorgeous video documentary which he filmed in 4K on his new Panasonic G7, narrated by Richard Colton, a retired Park Service historian. If you want to learn more about the forbidding power of the British Army and its Grenadier Guards at the time of the Revolutionary War, this is compelling watching.

Click the image to watch the video.

Santo writes: “…Vitaliy K in Russia sells the G7 with unlimited length 4K recording. Grey market notwithstanding, I ordered one from him (through his shop in Hong Kong) and sure enough, a week later I got a G7 with the 14-42 kit lens with unlimited 4K recording. I should say limited only by your card size. I can record 90 minutes on a 64GB card. Having 4K footage is like shooting with an 8×10 negative to produce 4X6 prints. You can keep your shots wider and zoom-in in post later.”

Northfield, where my son will start prep school this fall, was in the thick of the action, and is mentioned by Colton at 14:31.

Thank you, Santo!

Mediocrity

Hardware

Tim Cook’s Apple.

Along with blazing innovation – a larger iPad, the failed Apple Watch – what lands in my inbox the other day?

There was a reason Steve Jobs famously remarked that Apple did not do focus groups or customer surveys. The company was not Procter & Gamble, selling dish detergents. His company was in the business of innovation, meaning it told people what they needed – iPods, iPhones, iMacs, Mac Pros, MacBooks – not asking what they wanted.

Now we have a CEO focused on trying to thwart the US government’s attempts – marketing disguised as customer protection – to keep Americans safe while making ever fancier watch bands, as Apple becomes just another mediocre non-growth business.