I can be stubborn. And especially when it comes to something like this. A few years ago at the Marketplace Co-op in Disney Springs I saw a display selling customized protective cases for your smartphone. You could get one with all sorts of Disney artwork on it, and you could buy it with your name printed on it. They had a machine that printed them up to order right there. In the display was one of their Disney Pride examples.
You have to appreciate how Disney’s marketing to gay folk makes a kid that came of age when I did feel. Sure it’s commercial, but I was there the month after the Pulse shootings and I saw how shocked everyone down there was. All that down low wink, wink unspoken acceptance of their LGBT guests changed almost overnight. It’s a small world after all.
So the moment I laid eyes on that smartphone case I had to have one.
It’s been on my iPhone Xs for years, but suddenly last December its plastic frame started breaking apart. I was in California and my brother did his best to glue it back together for me. When I got it home the frame simply started breaking apart in other places. I’ve had this experience before with other things made of this hard plastic, and I knew it would only get worse.
Many years ago I bought what was then a very expensive Minolta dImage 7hi. At the time the first affordable digital cameras were coming out and that Minolta had excellent specs. It was a great little camera, I took it with me on a bunch of road trips. But it was made of this same sort of hard plastic that just starts falling apart all of a sudden.
So there was no fixing that smartphone case and I started looking for a replacement. Disney sells a bunch of Pride merchandise including smartphone covers, but the iPhone Xs is so out of date now I couldn’t find another one. I tried looking for something like it from a third party but ran into the same problem.
Apparently the Xs is already vintage. It’s even hard to find generic cases for it, but I figured I’d try one of those and simply move the custom printed back panel to a new case. It took a lot of searching but I finally found a case that had a transparent back cover that I thought would do the trick. But…no. When the case came I discovered that it was so tightly fitted to the phone I couldn’t put the Disney Pride insert into it and close the case around the phone again. It was too thick. And…being made of that same hard plastic, it was also beginning to come apart at the edges.
So I went though the usual period of being distraught and then getting all stubborn. Okay, thinks I…maybe I can scan in the artwork and print it out on a piece of photo inkjet paper.
A little scanning and GIMP-ing and printing, a little X-Acto work (all those years spent as an architectural model maker still come in handy…) I had my new Pride insert. It fit…barely. And what I ended up with was artwork that was actually more vibrant than the plastic insert I got at the Marketplace Co-op.
I ever get a new iPhone I can probably copy the artwork to a new sheet of photo paper and put it into whatever generic transparent case I can find for it. I’m set. Yes, there are other newer designs out there for the new iPhones, but I like this one.
This is bouncing around on the schadenfreude channel…
Go read it Here. You wouldn’t need to have Mentor of Arisia’s visualization of The Cosmic All to know this was going to happen eventually. But you would have had to know where Dreher was getting his money from. Now we do. We can adjust our visualizations accordingly.
Seriously…what’s really significant about this article is something the public really needs to be more aware of. A good many of these high profile right wing republican pundits are funded entirely by a single hyper rich benefactor. Usually those benefactors stay behind the curtains and the pudit is seen to be paid for their work by the publications their columns appear in. But…no, and Dreher’s case is instructive. Most if not all of the right wing swamp publications operate at a loss. They get funding in various discrete ways from those same hyper extreme, hyper rich benefactors. Now we know those same benefactors also pay the columnists they love outright as well. Dreher’s columns appeared in The American Conservative, but his paycheck came exclusively from the hyper rich and hyper extreme Howard Ahmanson.
Ahmanson came across my radar long ago as a source of funding for anti-gay and religious extremist politicians and political action groups. Back then he was a supporter of R.J. Rushdoony’s “Christian Reconstructionism” movement, an offshoot of Calvinism, which holds that the second coming doesn’t happen until after God’s kingdom is established here on earth, neatly reversing what evangelicals believe the end times timeline to be. Reconstructionists intend the world to be governed by Mosaic law wherein blasphemers, adulterers, homosexuals and disobedient children, among others, would be stoned to death. Ahmanson almost never gives interviews…apparently he suffers from Tourette’s Syndrome…but as I recall, in one he averred he had moved on from Rushdoony. But who really knows?
That Ahmanson found joy in Dreher’s writing is highly unsurprising. That the breakup came when Dreher couldn’t stop himself from talking about black men’s dicks is also in its way unsurprising, given the rumors surrounding Dreher which I won’t repeat here. It You could say it was preordained.
This is making the rounds. I’m pretty sure what her religious reasons are for not wanting to use Windows and Apple computers. I used to joke that Leviticus forbids operating systems that support multiple threads, but this is about the LGBT friendliness of these companies, and perhaps to a degree the progressive/democratic politics of their boardrooms.
Employee claims she can’t use Microsoft Windows for “Religious Reasons”
I recently hired a new employee for my team. Everyone thinks she is a great addition, and she is clearly very talented as demonstrated in her interviews.
The problem came up during on-boarding when we supplied her with her company laptop. She said she would need it configured in a Linux based operating system because her religion does not allow use of Apple or Microsoft owned operating systems. We only currently have hardware configurations for MacOs/Windows and our expectation was that she will use Windows along with the rest of our team.
She says that she can fulfill all job duties without Windows and I am inclined to believe her but corporate policy dictates WINDOWS and my management is not on board with her request for Linux.
What actions can either (1) I take as a manager to protect her rights and get upper management onboard with her religion or (2) I take against her with management for failing to fulfill her job duties?
I’ve never come across any situation like this and am completely confounded as to how I should handle this.
Tell her your transgender IT support person will set her up with the computer of her choice. Then see what happens.
In the current issue of Consumer Reports I see that Mercedes automobiles are on their shit list again in terms of reliability. There entire US lineup is rated below average reliability. It’s like they’re back in the later 90s/early 2000s again. What a shame. On the other hand when it comes to used cars the E Class from 2013 to 2019 is in their “Used Cars We Love” list for better than average reliability. Those are the W212s, which mine is…a 2012…and it was always getting top marks on reliability, but CU isn’t going back that far in time now. I’m getting close to 180k on the odometer and the car is still a champ. But I do the maintenance.
I’m taking Spirit back out to California this spring. This time I want to try driving through a bunch of northern states bordering Canada that I’ve never been to. The big open road trip is what these diesels were made for. Hopefully I’m still up to it.
So soon after my one year of retirement anniversary, like a mugger, March 6 is waiting just around the corner. Where do the years go?
I stayed so long after closing one night enjoying the company of someone in Germany (Epcot) that cast members had to escort stragglers away from World Showcase and toward the exits, lest we get eaten.
Just a couple short years later I was the one eating. Eating a Very Nice Kobe Steak at the Brown Derby, when I got your angrygram. Never contact me again in any way shape or form… I have a question. How do you contact someone with a shape? I can see ways, and I can see forms, but shapes? By way of reply to your tetrahedron of March 6 please review the enclosed dodecahedron… Thing of it was, I hadn’t said anything to you that day that I didn’t many times before. You knew. You remembered. It was okay. We would chat for hours on the phone, toss emails back and forth (hope you’re still enjoying the Nissan Leaf. Bunch of Teslas with charging stations in my alleyway these days) and photos (still not sure what you meant by sending me that picture of the beach), sit together for a while after hours and chat happily. But that was when our conversations were private.
So here comes another March 6. And oh look…in the New And Improved Rockville (Now North Bethesda!) there’s an upscale Brazilian steakhouse not far from the old homesteads! Perfect for a day of remembrance.
Such a perfectly styled coiffure. You should start wearing it long again, now that you don’t have the Mouse to answer to.
Finally…Finally…I got the pencils all done for A Coming Out Story episode 36. Tomorrow I’ll start on the inks and shading. The rest of it should go faster now. It’s the pencils, where the artwork begins, that I always have to struggle with the most.
Probably still another couple weeks before it’s up…
The More Racists Change The More They Stay The Same
This from the Washington Post…
Musk defends ‘Dilbert’ creator, says media is ‘racist against whites’
The Tesla and Twitter chief blasted media outlets for dropping Scott Adams’s comic strip after the cartoonist’s rant against Black people
It’s to the point now where all you need to see is the name associated with the news item and you know pretty well what it’s going to be about before you even read it. Musk is is one of those and so is Adams and that still hurts a bit because I used to love Dilbert. But that was back when I saw it as Dilbert being a somewhat naive computer geek like myself, surrounded by assholes the cartoonist was making fun of. It seems that over time Adams began to identify more with the assholes than the geek. I think it was when I saw the cartoon comparing a woman breast feeding a baby in public with a man pissing on flowers to water them that I began tuning him out. It was one of those things that tap you on the shoulder saying look at that…no really look at that… But there was still the occasional cartoon strip I found hilarious. Then he went all in for Trump, who was like the pointy haired boss personified and amplified and I just closed the book on him, wondering how much of what I enjoyed in his cartoons was really there to begin with.
That’s the way it is with artists and creators you come to love and enjoy. What you see in their art is what you experienced seeing it and it’s mostly you. It isn’t necessarily what the artist themselves put into it or intended. But at least Adams was a creator. Musk on the other hand, is just rich.
He bought his way into Tesla and eventually kicked out its founders. SpaceX was born on his money and his need to cut the cost of rocket launches so he could start a garden on Mars. But it was built with the rocket engineering talents of others who came from the industry. Both those companies, so I’m told, had a board of directors and staff whose only job was to manage Musk’s mood swings and nutty ideas and try to keep him focused. In Twitter we’re seeing him totally in control and unfiltered, really for the first time. And it’s really a squalid sight to see.
They say men don’t change, they reveal themselves. But if money is power, then absolute money also corrupts absolutely. This is a man who never really developed any internal brakes, and now all the possible external ones are gone. Maybe that’s what happened to Adams too, but with a lot less money.
Replying to tweets about the controversy, Musk said it is actually the media that is “racist against whites & Asians.” He offered no criticism of Adams’s comments, in which the cartoonist called Black people a “hate group” and said, “I don’t want to have anything to do with them.”
I’m sixty-nine years old and knocking on the door to seventy. You have to appreciate how familiar this all feels to someone who actually lived through and remembers the civil rights protests of the 1960s. The white backlash rhetoric has never changed. Every tiny improvement in the status of racial minorities in this country, every miniscule effort to uncover and learn from the history of slavery and race segregation in America, has been met with howling about reverse racism from the usual suspects. None of it sounds any different than it did back then.
I did not expect my golden years to look so much like my childhood…
I will usually let the calico stay inside when it gets close to or below freezing outside now. This has been a long time coming. It was several years ago she would not come inside at all, and just a couple years ago she would not stay for more than it took to look around and quickly exit. Now she will stay overnight if it’s really super cold outside, and she will come in for a while during the afternoon if it’s cold enough outside.
While inside, she usually stays on the first floor, though in recent weeks she has taken to exploring the second floor, and even coming upstairs while I’m in my den to insist on being paid attention to, and then maybe to be let back out. Often when it’s an overnight I’ll come out of the bedroom to see her laying on the floor at the top of the stairs. She’ll give me until about nine before she starts meowing that it’s time for me to get up and let her out.
But things have reached the point here, where if the calico is inside napping in her bed, and I’m upstairs working, and she hears me close the upstairs bathroom door, it isn’t long before I hear her yowling outside the door demanding I open it so she can see what’s going on. This morning it escalated to paws under the door.
(sigh) Cats! Everything you think is only a behavior of domesticated cats is a misunderstanding. None of them are domesticated. Some of them just choose to live among us, and we let the ones in that are too small to eat us.
Cute young guy trying to take a picture of himself in the kitchen mirror with his first 35mm SLR…
I was going through my archives looking for more shots around Congressional Plaza for the next episode of A Coming Out Story and I came across this and zoomed in and I thought…wow…did I really look like Finn Wolfhard back then??
This would be sometime in 1971. I’m either 16 or 17. I’ve got the Petri on a tripod in the dining room pointed at the large mirror over the kitchen sink. I’m guessing I did it that way because the light in the dining/kitchen was better than in my bedroom. At this point I’m still just finding my way around 35mm film photography. I may have just bought the Petri.
I dug up the roll and I can tell from the way I sectioned off the negatives I hadn’t even begun my catalogue system yet. The catalogue entry says “Date Unknown”, that it’s tri-x pan and that I’d developed the roll in D-76. “Date Unknown” is what I put on the stuff I’d developed and stuck into #9 letter envelopes before I got serious enough to safely store and work out a catalogue system for them. They’re not all in great shape.
I’m trying really hard to get the pencils and inks done, finally, for ACOS episode 36 done, and it’s really driving home how necessary it is to have reference photos. I took lots of photos of the apartments I lived in back then, but precious few of the area around them and so much has changed over the years I can’t just go visit and take a few reference shots.
Right now I’m really regretting I didn’t get some shots of the shortcuts I used to take to walk across the railroad tracks to get to the Giant or to Congressional and the Radio Shack before they started building Metro. Nothing there is like it was. There was an old wooden bridge over the tracks I could walk across to get to the Giant from Wilkins that they took down years ago. I discovered it was part of an old abandoned roadway that connected Rockville Pike (Montgomery Avenue back then) to the old school and then to Parklawn Cemetery. You could still see fragments of it in the woods and near the Pike back when I was a teenage boy. It’s all gone now. The entire area where I walked across the tracks to Congressional is now the Twinbrook Metro station.
Nothing is like it was. I can’t just go down there and take some shots of the old neighborhood. The old neighborhood, except for the apartments anyway, is not there anymore. Somehow I need to recreate it. Or at least a good enough representation that I can be satisfied with it.
Nothing is like it was. I’m not like I was. Just look at that photo! Wish I’d known how cute I was back then, I might have flirted with a little more confidence. Of course back in 1971 that could have got me killed.
I didn’t bother with Alfie when it was released because in 1966 I would have been 12 and that sort of movie just wouldn’t have appealed to me. And given the sexual content in it I would probably not have been allowed in the theater anyway.
So I looked at the Wikipedia entry and…wow…Alfie was a real dick wasn’t he. This is a comedy? But what struck me even more was that it seems on the surface to be the sort of morality story that American evangelicals would applaud. Especially the part about Alfie having a breakdown after he arranges for one of his lady friends with benefits to have an abortion…
…Lily informs him that she is pregnant from their one encounter, and they plan for her to have an abortion. Lily comes to his flat to meet the abortionist. During the procedure, Alfie leaves Lily and walks around. He catches sight of his son Malcolm outside a church and witnesses the baptism of Gilda and Humphrey’s new daughter. He watches as they exit the church as a family. The abortion traumatizes both Lily and Alfie, with him breaking down in tears when seeing the aborted fetus, the first time he confronts the consequences of his actions…
That almost reads like a Made For Evangelicals movie. The Jack Chick sermonising at the end of it right before the back panel sinner’s prayer almost writes itself. But no…this is not a movie Evangelicals would like.
It’s the song sung at the end of it. What’s It All About Alfie? It gets to the heart of the movie and it’s stuck in my thoughts ever since Valentine’s Day. Bacharach and David understood the story better than most of its reviewers of the time. It’s a perfect rejoinder to the life Alfie was living.
What’s it all about, Alfie?
Is it just for the moment we live?
What’s it all about when you sort it out, Alfie?
Are we meant to take more than we give?
Or are we meant to be kind?
And if only fools are kind, Alfie
Then I guess it is wise to be cruel
And if life belongs only to the strong, Alfie
What will you lend on an old golden rule?
As sure as I believe there’s a heaven above, Alfie
I know there’s something much more
Something even non-believers can believe in
I believe in love, Alfie
Without true love we just exist, Alfie
Until you find the love you’ve missed, you’re nothing, Alfie
When you walk, let your heart lead the way
And you’ll find love any day, Alfie
Alfie
And there’s why evangelicals hate it: The movie is about Alfie’s inability to love anyone but himself (if that). That is the moral center of the story. Not that Alfie had sex out of wedlock. Not that he got one of his lady friends an abortion. It was this
But when I think of Burt Bacharach and film music, my mind goes first to an earlier movie. For years, I had the notion that “Alfie” was a comedy, and in 1966 I guess it played that way to a lot of people, including lead actor Michael Caine, who said he knew “Alfie” would be a hit when he heard laughter floating out of the cinema during dailies. By the time I saw it, imagine my surprise. “Alfie” is incredibly sad, the tale of a man who can’t love or be loved in return, a damaged character who does nothing but damage other people. Such jokes as there are fall squarely in the “wry chuckle” range.
Listen to Bacharach and David’s title song, and see if you don’t think they perceived the film the same way I did. Cher sang the version that plays over the end credits of the American release, and it was Dionne Warwick whose rendition became a hit. Myself, I prefer Cilla Black, who sang “Alfie” for the British release. She wasn’t as good a singer as Warwick, which Bacharach later acknowledged, but Black’s version is the most haunting. Maybe the emotion in her voice came from her familiarity with London, with the scene, with men like that. Maybe it was exhaustion. Black recalled doing almost 30 takes of the recording, until George Martin, in the studio as producer although Bacharach was running the show, said gently, “Burt, I think you got it in take four.” I don’t know which take is here on YouTube, but Black was right, they all look done in, even the dapper Bacharach, clad in one of his signature turtlenecks. But Bacharach was also right, whatever he was doing, because this song will rip your heart out…
I had to go buy a copy of the Cilla Black version of this song and Farran Smith Nehme who wrote this tribute is absolutely right. Black’s version is the one.
Without true love we just exist, Alfie.
This is exactly what evangelicals don’t want us to hear. Time and time again what they say during arguments over same sex marriage is that marriage is not about love. They’re being completely serious. It’s some sort of duty…to god, to society, to raise children, to model gender roles…but it is not primarily about love. Of course love is a good thing to have in a marriage, an important part, but not the most important part, not the critical part. It’s just…nice to have. But not necessary. That really is their thinking.
I have had it said to me over and over: Marriage is not about love. We’ll all be hearing it again when the Trump supreme court decides to review Obergefell. Marriage is not about love. But without true love we just exist.
Browsing my gay studies bookcase, I opened my copy of the Kinsey Report again because I wanted to see if I had snagged a first edition. But there is no printing information on the copyright page. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. It’s an old original hardback edition though, that I found ages ago in a second hand bookstore in Havre De Grace, along with a copy of “Homosexualities” by Bell and Weinberg, another book routinely lied about by the culture warriors.
I open it up to look at the copyright page…then I read the first paragraph of the Preface…
Seen from the four points of the compass a great mountain may present aspects that are very different one from the other – so different that better disagreements can arise between those who have watched the mountain truly and well, through all the seasons, but each from a different quarter. Reality, too, has many facets – some too readily disputed or denied by those who rely only on their own experience. Nor can science itself rightly lay claim to finality, or the complete comprehension of reality, but only to honesty and accuracy of the additional facets, it may be permitted to discover and report. I say “may be permitted” since the human race is familiar with the suppression of truth in both small matters and great. The history of science is part of the history of the freedom to observe, to reflect, to experiment, to record, and to bear witness. It has been a perilous, and a passion of history, indeed, and not yet ended.
-Alan Gregg, Preface to Sexual Behavior In The Human Male by Alfred C. Kinsey, Wardell B. Pomeroy and Clyde E. Martin, 1948.
The struggle between science and dogma in one paragraph. It could be about anything, not simply the explosive topic of that study. It could be the opening lines to a study on evolution, or the geologic history of planet Earth. “The history of science is part of the history of the freedom to observe, to reflect, to experiment, to record, and to bear witness.” Whatever the specific thing is that MAGA want to suppress, at rock bottom it is always this freedom to observe, reflect, experiment, record and especially to bear witness. It is always basically about that.
I’ve been reading and saving copies of the Gay & Lesbian Review since it was The Harvard Gay & Lesbian Review. It’s a literary journal and its given me pointers to lots of good reading that I would never have known about otherwise. Bunch of what’s on my “gay studies” bookcase are there because of something I read about in this magazine.
Sometimes it takes me a while to get around to opening an issue though. I only sat down with the November-December 2022 issue yesterday. That issue’s theme was the 50 year anniversary of the delisting of homosexuality as a mental illness in the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. It’s an event the secular and religious right routinely lies about so it bears retelling, and especially from people who were directly involved. Five really good essays about it in that issue.
But tucked within its pages I find another book I want on my bookshelves.
This is the sort of thing I’m gratified to see more and more of every year. This history of our very existence was hidden from sight for so long, because it had to be, because if you were outed, like Len eventually was, the consequences could be anything from you had to leave town like Len did, or you were sent off to a mental institution, or you were found dead somewhere.
When I came out to myself in 1971 I had no clue about any of this history. It is slowly emerging as boxes of old photographs are uncovered and shared with scholars who dig deeper into it. And of course, the republicans are doing their best to keep this history from being taught wherever they have control of the statehouses. We have to be invisible, else people will see that we’re as human as anyone else.
I’ve been a camera kid ever since elementary school, but it wasn’t until I got into high school and a friend showed me how to develop film that I really took off with it. This was 1970-72 and back then the camera at the top of the pecking order was the Nikon F. It was legendary among professionals and dedicated amateurs. It was also very expensive, even in its most basic form way beyond my reach. I knew it to be the gold standard of 35mm SLRs. But the more I studied it, the less impressed I became.
(The names throughout the story have been changed to protect the innocent…and the not so innocent…)
I’m sure I had the insufferable streak in me too. It comes with being a teenager. But I also had the geek gene, and by my junior year I’d researched all the 35mm SLRs on the market, examined as many as I could at various camera stores, and I had issues with the design of the Nikon F. It struck me as a very clunky piece of equipment, and especially it’s big bulky TTL (Through The Lens) metering prism that seemed a ridiculous kludge. And why the hell did you have to take the camera apart (okay…take the back off…) just to change film? WTF?? But the F was the gold standard of professional photographer equipment and the only thing I could figure was that it, like the Kirby Vacuum, had a lot of attachments so it could be everything to everyone.
When Canon came out with the F1 and its system in 1971 I was overjoyed. Here was a camera that got everything exactly right. I flipped burgers all summer long to get one.
Time passes…the universe expands…I began making good enough money I could afford all the Canon FD lenses I’d ever wanted, and there were many good ones on the second hand market. I bought a second generation F1 body, and then the third and final one. But a chance encounter with a Nikon F2 at a camera store in Kansas gave me some second thoughts about Nikons, and cameras in general. There is something about these older, all mechanical devices that reaches into you, like a handcrafted musical instrument, or a fine automobile with a stick. Something you miss in a lot of digital equipment today. But maybe that’s just the kid I once was, remembering how it used to be, talking.
So I bought that F2, and later believe it or not, a Nikon Ftn. Professional black for extra coolness points. My Canon F1s are still the favorites (although the Leica M3 a friend sold me is threatening to knock them off that pedestal), but I take the Nikons out and about whenever a certain frame of mind occupies me. All I can tell you is it’s something about the mechanical feel of the cameras.
And it interested me enough to dive a bit deeper into the history of these cameras over the years. And because of that I understand a little better about why the Nikon F is as big of a kludge design as it is. And yes…it is.
Let me say this in advance: The basic Nikon F body is actually as solid and durable as its reputation says. This thing will go to hell and back for you. The meter prism though, is another story. I seem to have had good luck with both of mine as they are still fully functional (just don’t get me started on that screwy center weighted pattern). But I’ve bought the basic prism finders for both of those cameras, just in case. And while yes it is every bit as solid and robust as it’s reputation…it’s still a kludge. A kludge can work perfectly and reliably and still be a kludge.
Why do you have to take the back off the Nikon F to change film? Why is the shutter release in such an awkward position? Because they basically scaled up their rangerfinder to make their first SLR and that’s how the rangefinder was built. I’ll give them that they got a lot right…the instant return mirror, titanium shutter (which the rangefinders had since 1958), user replaceable focusing screens and viewfinders. But it’s such a mess of good stuff and why the hell did you do that.
The metering prisms especially. There were three generations for the F body, and the first of them is like a showcase of why I had issues with the reputation of Nikons back in the day.
Here it is…
When I first beheld this, I gave it more credit than it’s due. I figured, oh, the engineers weren’t quite all in on TTL metering so they put the meter on the outside facing forward. Okay…fine…lots of makers did that, usually by adding a clip on meter to the top of the camera. In fact, Nikon did that before they came out with this. But why the hell is that prism so goddamned large. Okay…they had to work out the mechanics of getting the shutter speed and aperture in the viewfinder….right? No. You saw the aperture in a window above the eyepiece. Dig it…you want to know your aperture, you take your eye off the viewfinder and look at the little window above it. Or…you know…you could just look at the lens. But it gets Better!
Here…let me show you the on/off switch…
Yes…that’s right. They call this finder the “flag” finder for a reason. The on/off switch is just a cover over the metering cell. Since it used a cds cell (Cadmium Sulphide) which changes resistance to the current based on how much light is hitting it, you can effectively turn off the meter by covering over the cds cell. With no light hitting it the cell is at 100 percent resistance. Flip the “flag” out of the way and the cell gets light and current flows through the meter. Voilà! An on/off switch! This is truly engineering brilliance.
Let it be said that this effect has probably saved a lot of light meter batteries from an early death. You put the lens cap on and even if you’ve forgotten to turn off the meter, it’s effectively off anyway.
Notice how you set the max aperture of the lens by way of fiddling with the film speed dial. That was a perennial problem for the Nikon photomic viewfinders all the way to the F2a. To do stop down metering all you need to do is turn the meter on and stop the lens down to the taking aperture and read what the meter is telling you. But you really can’t focus with the lens stopped down. So there’s Open Aperture Metering, which is you take a reading on what’s coming through the lens at it’s max aperture. But then the meter needs to know what the lens maximum aperture is. An f1.4 lens is going to be sending more light to the meter than an f2.8 lens.
So on this viewfinder you match the lens aperture to the film speed. On the best of the F photomics, the FTN, you set the max aperture of the lens by doing what they used to call the Nikon shuffle: mount the lens then twist the aperture ring all the way to high, then all the way to low. Forget to do that and the meter will give you the wrong exposure because it does not have the correct max aperture for that lens (when you mount the lens the meter defaults to f5.6 and that’s what it’ll think the lens max is until you fiddle with the aperture ring).
It wasn’t until Nikon came out with the photomic F2A that they figured out how to do open aperture TTL metering with automatic registration of the lens aperture. But you need the “ai” lenses for that to work. Give them this, they figured out how to do an on/off switch much sooner.
Okay…yes the camera bodies are practically bombproof. You put a standard plain viewfinder prism on either the F or the F2 and you have a camera that will get you through almost anything. And this is why the standard prisms are becoming expensive and hard to find in good condition. Bring along an F2 with a standard prism, and a good handheld light meter you are ready for almost anything.
That said, if I had to do some work in a disaster zone I would be bringing one or more of my Canon F1s. They’ll do the job. Or…that darn Leica! I was never much fond of rangefinders until I got my hands on that camera. I read some poor soul who had to sell his M3 say that it was a God level camera and he was right. I felt so sorry for him.
The Nikons have a distinctive mechanical feel that suits me. Sometimes. Given how much I used to badmouth them back in the day I know a bunch of classmates that would laugh themselves silly if they ever saw me with one. Okay…fine. You live and learn. They’re good cameras. Mostly. Somewhat. Just don’t get me started on how legendary they are. You’ll get an earful.
That R. Crumb comic page nearly everyone knows titled, Keep On Truckin’…which he called “the curse of my life” and “that stupid little cartoon” because it’s been so ripped off and commercialized…that’s actually his riff on a 1936 song by Blind Boy Fuller titled Truckin’ My Blues Away. Each panel in the comic has a line from the song, and a Crumb drawing of various city folks strutting along to the tune. It was a fun little comic and I am truly sorry it caused Crumb so much grief when the rest of the world seemingly just appropriated it. But that happens to artists when some random little thing they do suddenly clicks in the mass conscious. At least he finally did get his copyright back on the artwork.
When I thought to do my own take on Randy Newman’s You Can Leave Your Hat On, I decided to do it in the spirit of the R. Crumb comic, with each panel containing a line from the song and some artwork to go with it, but not an exact rendering of the song, just letting the artwork bop along with it. And I am making Amazing progress on it now. A big part of that is self acceptance of the fact that I’m not a fast worker, I can’t just dash out a drawing, and that I am a hunt and peck draftsman and that is how it will always be. And so I’m finally adjusting my work habits and expectations around all that, instead of trying to be something I am not because I believed I should be that or I wasn’t any good. Also, that I need to walk away from the work periodically and come back to it to see it with fresh eyes, and see what is right and what needs more work.
I find that I am at my best when I let my work habits align with my nature and that I can push myself to get it right if I align my work habits with how my brain tackles a problem. It’s okay to be a hunt and peck draftsman. It’s okay to take my time on a drawing if it’s having a difficult time coming together. It is important to not accept less than the best I can do. I have to look away from my drawing board periodically or I stop seeing the whole for that one part of it I’m struggling with. Once I did a drawing of a seated barefooted figure, and I didn’t notice until I saw the finished strip on the computer screen that I’d drawn them reversed left/right. ACK! See…I drew him with his legs crossed but I put the feet where they would have been if his legs weren’t crossed. I didn’t notice the mistake I was making while I was making it, because I was so focused on getting the feet right. ACK! I fixed it in the computer but it’s still like that on the original artwork. This is what happens if I don’t take short breaks from the drafting table and then come back to it with fresh eyes. If I give it enough time and sweat the thing I want to happen on the drawing board eventually does happen. It’s okay not to hurry it.
The great political cartoonist David Low once said of his workflow that each cartoon took three days to do: two days spent in labor, and one day spent removing the appearance of labor. Herblock did a cartoon every day for the Washington Post for decades and his best was every bit the equal of Low’s. We’re all different in that way. You work what you got.
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