Controlling the money supply...

The Wikipedia article on Yapese rai stones is fascinating:

"Although the ownership of a particular stone might change, the stone itself is rarely moved due to its weight and risk of damage. The names of previous owners are passed down to the new one. In one instance, a large rai being transported by canoe and outrigger was accidentally dropped and sank to the sea floor. Although it was never seen again, everyone agreed that the rai must still be there, so it continued to be transacted as genuine currency. What is important is that ownership of the rai is clear to everyone, not that the rai is physically transferred or even physically accessible to either party in the transfer. In this, the rai stone monetary system can be thought as an early example of a distributed ledger, similar to those used in modern days blockchain technology. 

... 

In 1871, the Irish-American David Dean O'Keefe was shipwrecked near Yap and was helped by the natives. Later, he assisted the Yapese in acquiring rai and in return received copra and trepang, which were valuable exports in the Far East. O'Keefe provided the Yapese with iron tools. As a result, a form of inflation set in and rai stones acquired with his help were less valuable than more ancient ones."

"Cocking the hammer on her Glock with a click!..."

That's some sexy Nikon F5 product placement in The Lost World: Jurassic Park. When the movie came out in May of 1997, the F5 had been on the market for a year and was still the $3,000+ king of the camera hill. 3D color matrix metering, five autofocus points, built-in motor drive that could shoot at eight frames per second; the marketing slogan was "Imported From the Future".

There's one problem with the scene above, where the camera reaches the end of the roll of film and suddenly starts rewinding, startling the baby dinosaur by making the whirring mechanical buzz everyone in the theater would have been familiar with as "camera rewinding film".

Well, two problems, actually.

The first is that the F5 didn't automatically rewind its film at the end of a roll. You needed to tell it when you wanted it to rewind. As a matter of fact, since inadvertently bumping a rewind button at the wrong time could be an expensive disaster for a pro photographer, it required a complicated hand jive involving a shielded button and a locked lever at opposite sides of the camera's back. (This survives in the two-button setup to format cards in Nikon's pro digital bodies.)

The second is the noise the camera makes as it rewinds. Like I said above, everyone in the theater would know what it was because it was the sound Uncle Fred's Kodak made when he was done with a roll of film at cousin Suzy's birthday party. That's why the foley artist put it in there; it's the stock "camera rewinding" noise.

The Nikon F5, on the other hand, has a film transport so silent that unless you're in a very quiet room, you won't hear the camera rewinding at all. Other than the faint vibration in your hand, there will be no clue that the camera is silently whirring the film back into the canister for processing.
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Overheard in the Kitchen...

Me: "Dammit!" 

RX: "What's wrong?" 

Me: "There's not a cloud in the sky." 

RX: "That's the first time I've heard someone say that in a disappointed tone."

See, I had plans to go to Holliday Park this morning fairly early with a wide-angle lens, a red filter, and a Nikon full of black & white film to take pictures of the ruins with a dramatic sky for a background. Looks like that's getting put off until tomorrow morning.

Showing up with lube would be inappropriate and awkward.

My 72 year-old mother just informed me she is going to her first "sex party" and doesn't know what to bring.

After some delicate questioning, "Gender Reveal, Mom. It's called a Gender Reveal."

— Balm Threat (@balmthreat) June 15, 2020

Automotif CLXVIII...

Sunbeam Alpine, Nikon F5, Ilford Pan F Plus

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Annoying Terminology...

Two phrases often used in journalism get under my skin because of the ignorance in which they are rooted.

The first is when it's intoned that someone shot "an unarmed man". There's no requirement that someone be armed or not to use lethal force. You may reasonably believe they are armed. You may reasonably believe they are trying to become armed. You may know they are are unarmed and yet still have a reasonable belief that they still present an immediate, otherwise unavoidable, threat of death or grievous bodily harm to yourself or another innocent individual.

Actually, that latter part is the whole nut of whether deadly force is legal or not: Do you have a reasonable belief that they present an immediate, otherwise unavoidable, threat of death or grievous bodily harm to yourself or another innocent individual? If so, their actual status of being armed or not is immaterial.

The other annoyance is when the newsreader breathlessly intones that "the death has been ruled a homicide." Well, no duh, Sherlock. We all saw him shoot the guy right there on video, and he was delivered to the coroner full of bullet holes, so we didn't need to wait on the official ruling from the medical examiner to know this; that was just a formality.

All "homicide" means is that a dude was killed by another dude, as opposed to dying of natural causes or being hit by a mysterious piano falling out of a cloudless sky. It's not a criminal ruling. It's up to the legal system to determine if the homicide was a justified one or not.
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A glimpse of the past...

Now and again The Onion shows a little spark of the wit that used to make it consistently fire back in the Web 1.0 days...

"While Sheila does enjoy our extended line of breakfast foods, that is only one small facet of her rich and complex identity as a human being: Sheila also speaks fluent Italian, likes U2, is bisexual, and enjoys cross-country skiing. Let us make it clear that Sheila never serves the pancakes herself, but now and then goes to a diner near the courthouse where waitresses and waiters of a variety of races serve them to her.”"

Maybe someday it will ascend back to its former glory and not leave the Babylon Bee and Duffleblog to carry the load. Satire is getting increasingly hard in this ever more ridiculous cyberpunk dystopia.
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Mo'cycle!

There's a dude in the neighborhood who's been here at least as long as I have, and on nice days over these last dozen years the curb in front of his house has been graced by a succession of cool and eclectic bikes, mostly British or Italian.

Yesterday I stopped and parked my bicycle to get shots of this 1951 BSA with the RX100 in my shirt pocket...

I had the Nikon F4 along as well, loaded with Ilford HP5 black & white film, but it'll be a while before we can see those...
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The latest battle in the hashtag wars...

Apparently the K-Pop division flanked the QBoomer corps and pushed them into the sea in the battle of the hashtags...

"For some reason, K-Pop fans decided to start tweeting popular QAnon hashtags like “#QAnon” and “#WWG1WGA,” shorthand for the conspiracy theory’s slogan “Where we go one, we go all.” Understandably, this was more than a little frustrating for the Q-obsessed conspiracy theorists. Hilariously, this resulted in even more conspiracy theories involving George Soros and antifa to explain the surge in K-pop tweets including the QAnon hashtags."

Imagine trying to explain any of this to your 1999 self.
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Hey, look!

There's a new Sunday Smith post up at the poor, oft-neglected other blog!

This post brought to you with the assistance of History of Smith & Wesson and Smith & Wesson Hand Guns. (The latter work, by the way, is a delightful period piece originally published in 1945 and an absolute steal in the Kindle version at a dollar ninety-nine.)
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Automotif CLXVII...

1969 Chevy Camaro RS/Z28 parked out in front of the Safeway at 56th Street & Illinois Avenue. My headcanon says the original owner popped for the dealer-installed crossram dual-4bbl intake setup, but I didn't wait around for the driver to get back to see if they'd pop the hood. It motored off while I was coming back out of the store with my Ruffles and French onion dip.

It's days like this I'm glad I bother to drag a real camera around with me.
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Pöpcýcle Fïsh!

Found on Facebook, with help from a friend...

Holden approved!

Holden doesn't look to be a purebred example of any of the three main cold-weather landraces: Maine Coon, Norwegian Forest Cat, or Siberian, although one or the other of his parents likely was. I've taken to just referring to him as a Northern Floofloaf.

He's got the dense multilayered coat and ear tufts, as well as the big furry paws, complete with tufts of fur between his toes that give him often hilariously terribad traction on hardwood floors when pursuing Huck.
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Itch Scratched...

I was wracking my brain trying to tell Bobbi the name of the story that had H.P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard as traveling companions across the prairies of Hell in the afterlife.

It was "Gilgamesh in the Outback", by Robert Silverberg, in the shared-universe anthology book, Rebels in Hell.

That's the book in the series that also has Martin Caidin's "There Are No Fighter Pilots Down In Hell", which is a must-read for aviation geeks, being a tale of a "Devil Went Down to Georgia"-style duel between said Devil and the (fictional) greatest 'Murrican fighter pilot ever, with the stakes being the souls of all the fighter pilots, which are held in Limbo by the power of the titular song.

Anyway, back to "Gilgamesh in the Outback"... Apparently Silverberg had so much fun writing it, that he wrote two succeeding novellas in the setting, and the three are available combined into standalone novel form as To the Land of the Living.
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Automotif CLXVI...

'86-'89 third generation (A70) Toyota Supra, which is maybe my favorite, appearance-wise. It also remains affordable relative to the increasingly-unobtainium 1990s-vintage A80 Supras.

Normally-aspirated ones were reasonably quick for their time, with a DOHC 3-liter straight six putting out 200bhp.

The A70s were just a little on the plush side, and just a little too lardy, to be considered sports cars, as though they were constantly reminding you of the "+2" part of "2+2". Think of it as a Japanese Camaro RS, with the Turbo version being a Tokyo-edition IROC-Z.
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Overheard in the Office...

I'm sitting at my desk, Bobbi is down the hall in the tub. Suddenly I hear a voice from the bathroom!

RX: "Can you bring me a pencil?" 

Me: "A what?!?" 

RX: "A pencil. There's one stuck in the wooden block mounted over my desk..." 

Me: "Sure, yeah, I mean... I heard you, it's just that I've been on this planet just over half a century at this point and that's literally the first time I've ever had someone in a bathtub ask me to bring them a pencil."

(She needed to mark a particularly annoying vocabulary error in the book she was reading, not scrawl a new geometrical proof on the bathroom wall.)
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Filters...

Unlike Ilford's page explaining the use of colored filters with B&W film photography, Hoya's page actually gives photographic illustrations rather than just text.

Come to think of it, it's weird that Ilford's page doesn't include illustrations, since they're basically in the "illustrating things" business.

Anyway, this is triggered by the arrival of a Tiffen 77mm Red 25 filter here on my front porch.
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Not Exactly Sunshine and Buttercups

Yesterday before lunch I finished The Last President, which is the final book in the Daybreak trilogy.

I'll just make three spoiler-free comments:

1. While the author is no bloodthirsty GRRM, he's not afraid to whack a viewpoint character to whom he's let you get good and attached.
2. While there are a couple of straight-up good guys and one or two boo-hiss villainous characters, most everyone on every side is pretty three-dimensional. Sometimes you find yourself cheering for characters you'd started out viewing as mustache-twirling bad guys...and vice-versa.
3. I did not see that ending coming. Heck, I didn't even really see the middle coming. This is no formulaic set-piece a la Stephen King's The Stand.

Also, social media groupthink scares me worse now than ever before.
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It works!

Roberts uploaded scans from my test roll in the F4 and there weren't any light leaks & exposures looked good.

Slow shutter speed with the 50mm f/1.4 wide open & 200 speed film

Looks like it's good to go!

Dinosaur

I wish I'd grabbed an F4 back when the film camera market was at its bottom, back around 2014 or so. Secondhand camera sellers like KEH were knee-deep in good condition used ones for not much over a hundred bucks. Now it's looking like even scuffed ones, like the...er, "well-loved" sample above from Roberts, are going for $200 and up.

The reason I wanted one is because it's a neat camera to have if you like Nikon's pro cameras; it's the first Nikon pro body with autofocus and automated film handling.

The reason I didn't want to pay much for it is because it wasn't going to see a whole lot of use. I already have an F5, which has an autofocus system that is loads faster and more accurate and is my most frequently used film camera.

Also, while the F4 still has old-school dials for things like shutter speed and exposure compensation and you still need to use the aperture ring to adjust the aperture manually rather than spinning a control wheel, it's still way automated and electronic so it doesn't scratch the same itch as my MMM* Nikon FM2n. So it's more historically interesting to me than anything; it's like having a black powder revolver that you take to the range only rarely because it's a hassle, but it's still neat.

Right now I'm waiting on the test roll to get processed down at Roberts. I'm not a huge fan of plain old Fujicolor 200, but they carry 3-packs of the stuff at Meijer's, CVS, Walgreens...heck, even at Amazon, so it makes for a reasonably inexpensive and easy way to check a new film camera for light leaks or shutter issues.

If the test roll turns out good, I'll throw a roll of Ektachrome in it and go have some fun.


*Metal, Mechanical, Manual

Bloating

I recently saw a current production Honda Fit parked next to one of these o.g. CR-V's in the grocery store lot.

They were about the same size. https://t.co/aQVDdKt4oA

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) June 10, 2020