And So It Goes...

I was driving home from a short work trip to Ohio when I heard the news of Hank Aaron's passing on the radio. It left me unexpectedly verklempt.

Watch Aaron's record-breaking home run here. Do you see what he didn't do? There was no exulting at the plate. No standing there and watching to see where it went. The Hammer hit the biggest home run in baseball and started legging it towards first like it was just another hit. That was sportsmanship. 

Of course, back in those days if you'd had the gall to stand at the plate with your arms raised and watch your home run leave the park, the pitcher would have put the ball in your ear on your next at bat, whether it had been your first homer or your 715th...

A Lack of Comprehension

"If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat." -Sun Tzu

I realize that in the Manichaean environment of modern politics, everybody's somebody's fascist or communist. Surely, however, people who make a point of commenting on politics would have a basic grasp of the viewpoints of those they consider their ideological foes, right?

Not so fast.

Jacobin is an explicitly socialist quarterly that sets itself up as a younger, hipper alternative to traditional, stodgy outlets of the American far Left like The Nation. Think Reason but for beard oil-using craft beer drinkers who prefer Das Kapital to Atlas Shrugged.

From where they're sitting, you can't slide a sheet of paper between the political positions of Joe Biden and, say, George H.W. Bush, so they greeted the recent inauguration with a cover spoofing the incoming administration and the general Democratic reaction to it with a bit of tongue-in-cheek Byzantine iconography. 

You'd think that if depicting Obama and the Clintons as seraphim weren't enough of a giveaway that it was satirical mockery, the RQ-4 Global Hawk drones flanking them would be, but no. Plenty of commentators have spent so much time huffing their own side's farts in hermetically-sealed political bubbles that they seemed to think it was serious.

Tim Pool, citizen journalist. https://t.co/DoJi26j7IL

— Jacobin (@jacobinmag) January 21, 2021

(Including some I'd have thought would know better.)

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A little good, a little bad, a little happy, a little sad.

I saved up from some writing projects to buy a birthday present for myself. I'd mentioned earlier that I wanted to do a project this year where I did a bunch of photography with the little Nikon 1 system.

So I scared up a used Nikon 1 V2 body from KEH and, since candid portraiture of my friends is my favorite kind of photography, I rolled the dice on a low-priced 1 Nikkor 32mm f/1.2 on eBay. The 32mm/1.2 is a very well-reviewed portrait lens and the best piece of glass for the Nikon 1 system.

The camera body arrived from KEH and was exactly what I'd hoped for: Basically functioning like a 5/8ths scale Nikon DSLR. Unlike the original V1, the V2 has a control and menu layout that's instantly recognizable to a DSLR shooter.

The lens though...I should have known better. I knew I was rolling the dice buying a lens from a private individual at that price, especially a dude whose reviews on FB made it clear he wasn't really a photographer. 

The 32mm/1.2 had a known issue where the aperture blades would get stuck stopped way down and this one has it. The aperture wouldn't open wider than about f/11, and sometimes f/16. Sometimes it would stick completely closed. I should have bought one from a shop that knew how to fully test it or listed it as factory refurbished, having had the aperture blades replaced. This lens was discontinued several years ago and repair parts are next to non-existent. As it is, I basically set a handful of Benjamins on fire. Whee.

Oh, well. "We get too soon old and too late smart", as the saying goes.

I'm going to get one of the (much cheaper) white 10-100mm zooms and go to the zoo as soon as the weather turns warmer.

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Sunday Smithery has occurred.

There's a new Sunday Smith up at The Arms Room blog: a 1948-production .38/.32 Terrier.

Opening the Window

Smith & Wesson's current small frame size, the "J-frame", is best known in its 5-shot .38 Special variation, the Model 36 Chiefs Special.

Originally, though, the small-framed hand ejectors were designed for...actually, developed hand-in-hand with...the .32 S&W Long cartridge. The .32 S&W Long wasn't actually all that long, unless you compared it with the original .32 S&W centerfire cartridge (now sometimes erroneously referred to as .32 S&W "Short".)

When Colt's released a snub-nosed version of their D-frame .38 Special revolver, the Detective Special, Smith originally responded with a 2"-barreled version of their .38 Regulation Police. Because these short-barreled .38 S&W revolvers were on frames originally intended for the .32 cartridge, they were referred to as the .38/.32 Terrier. The bottom revolver in the photo below is a very early postwar Terrier.

From top to bottom: J Magnum frame, J-frame, I-frame

When Smith & Wesson started making small-framed .38 Special revolvers in the early Fifties, the cylinder window of the then-current Improved I-frame* was too small. To fix this, a new frame size was introduced: The J-frame. Essentially, the J was an Improved I-frame with a lengthened frame window to allow a longer cylinder to be fitted. They made J-frames and Improved I-frames side by side until the early Seventies when the Improved I was discontinued and all small-frame Smiths, regardless of the chambering, were made on J-frames. The middle revolver above is a Model 37 Chiefs Special Airweight from the mid-1970s.

Starting in 1996, Smith introduced yet another iteration of its small frame. Taurus had released its 5-shot small framed Model 605 in .357 Magnum in 1995 and S&W returned fire by offering .357 Magnum versions of its small frame. The existing cylinder window was again too small, and so the regular J-frame was supplanted by the "J Magnum" frame. The top revolver is a Model 432PD in .32H&R Magnum from the early 2000s, showing the longer cylinder window of the J Magnum frame.

*The difference between the I-frame and the Improved I-frame is that the latter used a coil mainspring like the later J-frame, rather than a flat leaf mainspring. The easiest way to tell them apart at a glance is to check the frontstrap for the presence of a strain screw. The coil mainspring guns won't have one.

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Places to Go...

This looks like it might be an interesting creative nudge!

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Places to See...

Huh. Apparently there's a small motorcycle museum up in Winnemac that has lots of very early motorcycles.

That might make a pretty cool day trip!

In the meantime, here's a picture of an old SOHC Honda CB750.

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Frozen Fingers

Behold the Kodak S1100 XL, a repackaged Chinon 3001. I had one of these back in the early Nineties when they were still shiny and new and fairly expensive.

Unlike cheaper point and shoots, the S1100XL has a fast 35mm f/2.8 lens and relatively sophisticated autofocus for the era. The way the flash pops up puts it far enough off the centerline of the lens to avoid the worst of red-eye and I used to put a piece of frosted Scotch tape over the flash itself to serve as a diffuser.

This one came off eBay for next to nothing early last year and it's sat on a shelf waiting for me to throw a roll of film in it and check it for light leaks. Earlier this week I had a couple other rolls to drop off, so I put a roll of Kodak Gold in the S1100XL and drove downtown. Parking on Vermont Street out in front of the World War Memorial was free, since MLK Day is a city holiday. 

The park across Vermont to the south of the World War Memorial has a lovely fountain in it, but the fountain is down for renovations...

On opposite sides of the fountain are sculptures of Pan and Syrinx...

By this time, the snow flurries had picked up and my fingers were getting numb. I went back to the car and drove over to Roberts to drop off the test rolls and headed home.

Looking over the finished product, it seems the Kodak is functioning properly. No signs of light leaks and the focus and exposure look good. I reckon it's good to go.

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How things work.

At this link, you can find a neat site that explains how camera sensors and lens optics work together to make pictures. It's very informative, starting from first principles, and there are lots of sliders to manipulate for a very hands-on learning experience. Like a quality children's museum except for grownups and you don't have to worry about snotty little fingers having been all over everything.

Definitely some first rate edutainment.

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Multiple Presidentiality Disorder...

In what looks to be evolving into a tradition, the period following the inauguration of a new president is turning into a festival of wish fulfillment via Executive Order. International agreements will be left or re-entered, massive projects canceled or inaugurated, via Oval Office fiat.

Any group of foreign powers who thinks they can count on the US to stay the course for more than four-eight years is looking increasingly delusional. Any large corporation that wants to engage in a big infrastructure project that can't be finished inside a single presidential term is going to have an ever more difficult time attracting investors.

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Tribal Media

Nothing says "well-adjusted"...or is more emblematic of Twitter in general...than jumping into a debate between two total strangers (one that fizzled out four days ago at that) with a bunch of vitriol, straw-manning, and snarl words.

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) January 21, 2021

Street Machine?

The cool kid street photography cameras all seem to be super compact things with APS-C sensors (big for a pocket camera; the same as in DSLR's) and fixed wide-ish angle lenses in the 28-35mm range. This guy is using a Nikon Coolpix A, this dude used a Ricoh GR II, and this cat's a fan of Fuji's X100 series.

Thing is, those are all pretty spendy entrance ramps into a type of photography I don't know if I'm any good at or not. A used Coolpix A is gonna be at least $400 and the Ricoh GR series or one of the various Fuji X100 variants is going to be at least half again that for a tatty older one. They do tickle the wantsies but...a fixed lens?

Luckily I can simulate this with gear I have on hand! The original Canon EOS M body (available used for less than two bills) is small and smooth like a bar of soap and easily goes in a coat pocket while wearing Canon's well-regarded 22mm f/2 EF-M pancake, which gives an equivalent focal length of 35mm and can be found used for well under $200 as well.

So my EF-M, which had been gathering dust on a shelf as something of a failed experiment on my way to buying the M6, has a new lease on life for the nonce.

Overheard in Front of the TV...

RX: "Does the Vice President have their own theme music?"

Me: "Yeah, the 'Bucket of Warm Piss Fanfare'."

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Dinosaur Poopers

That's not a metaphor for politicians. We're talking actual fossilized dinosaur poopers.

"The world’s oldest known all-purpose orifice sits in a fossil display case in the Senckenberg Natural History Museum in Frankfurt, Germany, so close to the glass that enshrines it that you can “put your face up to it, like this,” said Jakob Vinther, a paleontologist at the University of Bristol in England, holding his hand a couple inches from his nose."

I saw All-Purpose Orifice open for Public Image Limited back in '94.

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Tangentially related...

I've always been low-key fascinated by Albania. Any place with Roman ruins, centuries-old hillbilly feuds, and the Accursed Mountains can't help but hold my interest.

There's the distinctive-looking Albanian SKS which is, second only to the East German one, the crown jewel of the insular and lowbrow world of SKS collecting.

In fiction, young Lieutenant Otto Prohaska stumbles into a plot by Serbian anarchists and has to flee homeward across Albania on foot to warn the Archduke. It's one of the most memorable parts of the entire series of books.

For a more factual view, albeit just as darkly humorous, P.J. O'Rourke spends a chapter of Eat the Rich looking at the Albania of the early 21st Century, recovering from a 1997 civil war triggered by an economy that collapsed under a tottering pile of pyramid schemes.

Finally, the Wikipedia entry on "Hoxha's Mushrooms" is a heck of a jumping-off point for a wikiwander in its own right.

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The Tale of the Vanishing Air Force

Albania's story during the Cold War era is an interesting one. Occupied by Italy immediately before World War Two, it spent the war like the rest of the Balkans, a swirl of guerrilla warfare where bands of partisans, both communist and anti-communist, chased each other and the fascist occupiers up and down hill and dale.

After the war, the Albanian communists came out on top and the country was effectively a satellite of the Soviet Union. Or at least they were until after Stalin died and Hoxha gradually decided he was more communist than the Soviets. After the breakup with the USSR, Albania was cozy with the Chinese for a while until that relationship, too, boarded the last train for Splitsville in the Seventies when Mao kicked off.

Albanian J-7 (Chinese MiG-21 clone)

This left Albania, a lightly industrialized country, smaller geographically than Maryland and with fewer people than Kansas, to try and support a fleet of over a hundred jet fighters on its own. The results were sadly predictable...

Due to the collapse of relations between Albania and the Chinese, maintenance became extremely difficult and the number of deadly incidents involving Mikoyan fighters increased. Despite Albanian efforts and some initial success in repairing the engines of the MiGs, the lack of specific jet fuel forced authorities to start production locally, resulting in low-quality production (the first attempt was in 1961, when the Kuçova factory produced the special jet kerosene called TSI). The fuel shortened the lifespan of the jet engines and was often blamed as the main reason for several deadly incidents. 35 Albanian pilots lost their lives from 1955 to 2005, mainly due to MiG mechanical failures.

I discovered this when I happened to chance across the Wikipedia page for the Albanian air force and noted it currently consisted of nothing but a handful of helicopters these days. A few years ago they basically took all their remaining high performance jet fighters (the ones that hadn't made like Texas lawn darts or been left on blocks after being stripped by black marketeers during the civil war) and put them on eBay.

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But what color are the elephants?

The constant media drumbeat against cocaine hippos is to distract you from the real danger: meth elephants

— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) January 18, 2021

"Pablo Escobar’s hippos are taking over the marshlands of Colombia — and need to face the same fate as their late owner before they become impossible to control, scientists have warned."

As an aside, I saw Pablo Escobar's Hippos open for Nine Inch Nails back in '95.

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Space Cam

I thought it would be fun to finish out the winter doing a bunch of work with the Nikon 1 system, just for fun. Even though it's officially dead, gone, and buried by Nikon, who would probably prefer people forget its oddball initial misstep into the world of mirrorless cameras, I find they have a certain quirky charm.

The 1" sensor, which is the same size as the one in my usual RX100 shirt-pocket camera, means that not only are even quality lenses extremely compact, but the camera bodies are, too. The J4 in the picture above is wearing the 1 Nikkor 18.5mm f/1.8 which is, given the crop factor of the small sensor, the equivalent of a 50mm/1.8 on this thing. It gets good reviews and takes sharp photos, especially with the aperture set in the f/2.8 to f/4 range.

The 18.4MP J4's body (at least the front, top, and bottom) is aluminum and the whole thing is noticeable smaller than the original plastic-hulled 10.1 megapickle J1 pictured below. It's less than 2.5" high and not quite 4" wide; about the size of a deck of cards. I really dig the white aesthetic, too. It looks like something the crew of the Discovery would have brought along in Kubrik's 2001.

The cool thing is that the body and a full panoply of lenses will go in a small camera bag that would normally hold a DSLR and a single lens.

The first warm-ish week, I'm taking it to the zoo. Also, I'm thinking about trying to shoot some magazine photos with it. I'll bet it's more than capable!

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Now Screening...

At the suggestion of a blog reader, the next item on the binge viewing list here at Roseholme Cottage is Matt Groening's latest effort, Disenchantment. We watched the first two episodes over dinner tonight and it did not disappoint.

Automotif CXCVIII...

Behold the nadir of the Ford Thunderbird, the Eighth-Generation version from the 1980-1982 model years.

This was the second round of downsizing for Ford's personal luxury coupe, which entered the '72 model year as a nearly five thousand pound boulevard barge built on the same platform as its sister ship, the Lincoln Continental Mark IV. The first round of downsizing saw the '77 T-bird moved to the Panther platform shared with the Torino, Cougar, and LTD II. That downsizing shaved nearly ten inches of length and a thousand pounds of weight off the '72-'76 cars.

For the Eight Generation, the Thunderbird was moved to the Fox platform, also used by the Fairmont and Mustang. This whacked another foot and 700 pounds off the bill of lading.

Styling-wise, the car kept a lot of the baroque cues from the bigger Seventh Generation version, which looked weird all crammed together on the smaller body.

Under the hood, the base motor was a 255 cubic inch version of the Windsor V8 making a weaksauce 115bhp, with an upgrade to a 131 horsepower 302 available on the option sheet. Performance was...less than stellar.