I didn’t hear all of it, but the Donald’s speech was good. I suppose I should not have been surprised. He almost always spoke well in his many campaign appearances. My guess is Stephen Miller is still involved with his speech writing.
He seemed to completely rule out a 3rd party, which is very interesting. I imagine the GOP is a bit nervous now.
As is often the case with Trump, he was a bit over the top. For example, when talking about what his administration did with Project Warpspeed. It’s great to hit those points and get them out in the public, but praise the researchers, clinicians, doctors and nurses who did the work. Share the credit. It would make him look less narcissistic and could bring others into his tent.
He looked very good. Relaxed. Thinner. Healthy.
Rufus,
Edward Hopper: my first reaction as well.
Trump at CPAC: have some thoughts, will try to put them together later.
I for one have no problems with a freshly energized Trumpian wrecking ball. He’s good at knocking stuff over. Will need someone else to actually fight to win and rebuild. Which is me being insanely optimistic.
Trump is Mao. Guerrilla Genius. Abject failure in office.
Need some Machiavellian with smarts to follow in the quiet behind the whirlwind and step in at the decisive moment.
Fade to Black with Aubrey Beardsley’s sketch of a rather Slovenian-looking Salome holding a dripping head. Trump’s prophet gig being completed.
“It was a dark and stormy night …”
Look up “abject” and “failure.” Conceivable too. Then there is “Rome,” “construction,” “day.” Big words and concepts.
I watched a few minutes of the speech. Trump is usually very good at complementing the worker bees but Pfizer stabbed him in the back by holding up final approval of the first vaccine until after the election.
He did look good and may be the healthiest ex-president in years. On 2024, I would say it is less than 50/50.
“Trump is Mao. Guerrilla Genius. Abject failure in office.”- Zaphod
I consider him Trump the Disrupter. I think it was always unrealistic to think one man was going to “drain the swamp”. First he had to get the malaria carrying mosquitos under control.
As to his performance in office, it took him several years to find out who he could trust in DC, and it was a pretty small cohort. Most of the GOP regulars are Wall St Globalists, and they were very effective at subverting his agenda.
A second Trump term, should he decide to run, will be more effective– though the Republicans will still be as duplicitous as ever.
Good morning
Read something about sailing. MikeK and Rufus I believe.
America Cup final March 6. New Zealand and Italy. The technology on the rigs are unbelievable. All carbon fiber. Foil technology and no doubt more that is top secret. 40+ knot speed.
Remove the sail and you’d think it was alien space craft skimming across the water.
Anyway plan to watch if interested.
America’s Cup 2021, Oh my. Check out this photo. Even the officiating motorboat is a high tech high speed catamaran, so it can keep up with the sailboats?
This ended my sailing days. Mine is in that pile of fiberglass on that levee. At least the city hauled that mess away and didn’t charge the owners anything
Luckily I didn’t have much money into a Cal 20. Some lost it all with no insurance.
I think a 3d party in a 1st past the post system is a chancy proposition in the best of times. In this country, multi-state 3d parties are evanescent or they have a hobbyist constituency, and that’s been true since 1862 or thereabouts. The only exception was the old Socialist Party during the Debs era (1904-24), and they were only truly consequential in Wisconsin.
What’s interesting now is the crevasse between Capitol Hill / K Street and street-level Republicans. Only a single-digit minority of street-level Republicans were dissatisfied with Trump; there is no popular NeverTrump dispensation. At the same time, about 70% of the congressional caucus appears to fancy that members of this single-digit minority are suitable for leadership positions in Congress. Betwixt and between, you have state officials in party and government, some of whom were aghast at the behavior of the Vichy Republicans in Congress and some of whom (Johnson in Michigan, Raffersperger in Georgia, Hogan in Maryland, Ducey in Arizona) are at least as bad.
Sail? Who needs a sail? Unicorn farts provide the energy. Carbon fiber? Where does that come from? Ultra high strength rigging (Dynema? from ultra high molecular weight polyethylene and such) where does that come from? From unicorn feces. White privilege on them “boats!” Systemic racism/Americas Cup indeed. its a RACE! 🙂
A second Trump term, should he decide to run, will be more effective– though the Republicans will still be as duplicitous as ever.
Some portion of the Republican congressional caucus is there for a purpose more elevated than feeding bon bons to their donors and lining up business opportunities in the Washington lobbying firms. Not sure how many. Sundance is of the opinion that about 1/3 of the Senate Republican caucus are for sale. McConnell is without a doubt a mendacious crook and McCarthy is a vacuous apparatchik who has been on the payroll of legislative bodies since he was 22 years old.
Zaphod…I certainly wouldn’t call him an ‘abject failure’…with a conventional-politician president, we’d be looking at getting a vaccine (maybe) around the end of this year, for low-volume shipments. We certainly wouldn’t have had anything like the Abraham Accords.
My take is that Trump is a creative and intuitive thinker; he sees things others don’t see, or at least seems them much sooner than others do. What he’s not good at, however, is translating his insights into terms that conventional-linear thinkers, of the type that prevail in media/academia/bureaucracies, are capable of easily understanding.
David Foster; Zaphod:
My take is that Trump could have worked literal miracles and those in the media/academia/bureaucracies would not have given him a moment’s credit. In fact, I think they did understand that many things he was doing were good, but they didn’t care because they were out to destroy him no matter what he did.
And although is personality is abrasive, that was not the reason they did it. It is, however, just another reason they hate his guts.
I took the photo a few years ago after I got out of an evening concert at some venue in Massachusetts; I forget where.
I’ve heard others describe POTUS 45 as “naive.”
He seemed to appoint & invest great trust in people who would work directly against his stated policy interests. Sure, he’d fire some…but the replacements & those he didn’t fire would continue to undermine him. The Swamp he promised to “drain” got worse. At least we now know how bad the real cleansing of those stables is going to have to be. (pardon the mixed metaphor)
For a guy who spent most of his life in NY & FL…he understood/understands the foreign policy realm better than any careerist diplomat or politician. And the Boss is right…he could have cured cancer & spun straw into gold & we’d still likely be where we are today looking at the death throes of the Republic.
“Abject failure” as a conversation starter is much like the question
“Other than that Mrs. Lincoln how did you like the play?”
Not that the problem is CRT, socialism/communism street violence, CCP practices, the CCP virus, election irregularities. The problem is President Trump was not successful enough or successful at anything? Strawman much?
This is a recording of a conversation inside the Clubhouse app – a new audio only social media app where moderators in “rooms” can choose who to allow to speak, inviting people “up to the stage” from the “audience.” Lots of famous and semi-famous people have been having discussions there.
This particular room had a coup by a bunch of “woke” people who kicked all the white people out of the conversation in the name of “anti-racism”.
Later they brought progressive liberal, Bret Weinstein, into the conversation.
Bret is an Evolutionary Biologist who became well known after there was an uprising of the “anti-racists” at Evergreen College where he worked. During this uprising, staff were held hostage. Bret now has a popular podcast (The Dark Horse Podcast) and is associated with “The Intellectual Dark Web (IDW) – which is not an official group, just a label given to heterodox intellectuals of various persuasions in the podcast world, most of whom have been targeted by the woke mob with slander and attempts to cancel them.
Bret is also the originator of the “Articles of Unity” movement, which attempted to offer Americans an alternative pair of candidates to Trump or Biden with the “Unity2020 campaign”. This campaign was sabotaged and censored by the tech giants using false claims about it as justification.
After the woke mob had their coup in the Clubhouse room, they “called out” Bret Weinstein, who was listening in the audience, and demanded he confess to being a white supremecist. They then proceed to spew their utterly typical hateful nonsensical bullshit at Bret.
[…]
@ around 2:00:00 the coup begins
@ around 2:45:00 Bret Weinstein is brought into the conversation and about 9 minutes later, the hateful “anti-white” rhetoric begins.
@ around 3:17:00 they cheer the “Haitian Revolution” – which was the mass murder of the French in Haiti – including the women and children.
@ around 4:24:30 it starts getting genocidal
One lady says outright that she wants people to be, “anti-white” and makes the often repeated claim that, “whiteness is violence.”
I hope this gets some traction and goes viral. People need to know that there are people out there who truly support genocide.
Neo,
Provincetown? Somewhere else on the Cape? That was Hopper country—he had a studio in Truro.
Trump is a New Yorker. He’s brash, aggressive, competitive, doesn’t talk in complete sentences, has a street level vocabulary, and has a rhinoceros thick skin. He actually thrives on conflict. In other words, far from a typical politician that thrives on going along to get along while exercising an extensive vocabulary to dazzle the proles. He will not change his style. That is who he is.
Our government was designed to be slow paced and deliberate in its movements. As it has grown to leviathan size and become a huge bureaucracy that works primarily to enlarge itself and can’t seem to accomplish much except to spend vast amoun
ts of money, a shakeup was long overdue.
Trump attacked problems with an eye to actually accomplishing something. Not only did he want to solve problems and quickly, he also talked openly about what he wanted to do. There has never been a more transparent president than Trump. This was an affront to the whole federal system. To make matters worse, Trump was a show man who quickly garnered a loyal following of lower and middle class citizens. That was even more frightening to the progressives. It is the reason why there was a massive effort by a large number of both left and right institutions to ensure Trump’s defeat in November.
In spite of everything they threw at him – the Russia hoax, two impeachments, constant attacks by the MSM, sabotage by enemies inside the administration, constant political games by the Pelosi Schumer partnership, and more; he accomplished nearly everything he promised during the campaign. He is a mortal danger to politics as usual.
His vision of putting America’s interests first, bringing manufacturing jobs home, securing our borders, demanding reciprocal and free trade, peace through strength, and backing law and order resonates with enough Americans that it will be the platform of the Republican party going forward. If he chooses to run in 2024, I think he has a good chance of getting the nomination. If he doesn’t run, there are capable people, available, though few with his gigantic work ethic and unflappable desire to actually solve problems.
Hubert:
No, not the Cape. I think perhaps Newburyport, but I really don’t remember.
Natalie S.,
I am fairly familiar with Bret Weinstein and his ordeal at Evergreen, as well as what he has been up to lately.
I wrote in a prior thread that there is a great deal of racism in “minority” communities and it can only be fixed by people within their community calling them out. Some are already doing this. I haven’t listened to the Clubhouse recordings you linked to, but based on your description I actually see promise in this. The faster racists overreach, and the louder they shout, the sooner (I believe) we will reach a point where good people that share their external traits (skin color, gender, ethnicity…) will stand up and call them out for the bullies that they are.
Sailing…
jack, it saddened me to click on the link to the photo of your former boat. I mentioned a friend I sail with is close to buying a used, large, trimaran. I recently sent him a meme (you’ve likely seen it) of someone burning a $100 bill. The caption read, “If you can smile while doing this you are ready to own a boat.”
The new, carbon fiber, aerofoil keel boats are insane. When I first bought my little toy boat I thought the fastest way to travel was with the wind to my back (I soon learned this is called a “run”) and never guessed one could sail faster than about 80% of the current wind speed. As I read more and sailed more I learned it is possible to sail faster than the wind speed, and the wind to one’s stern is not the way to do it.
It’s such a fascinating past-time. Part physics, part gymnastics, part artistry and a large part magic. One of the most incredible things for me is that time warps when I sail. I don’t mean that figuratively. I mean it literally. Even when I wake up from a night’s sleep I can almost always guess the time within about 10 minutes. I think most all of us have internal clocks that are pretty accurate at gauging the passage of time. EVERY time I sail, time slows. I’ll swear I’ve been out for 45 minutes only to learn it has been 3 hours. It is incredible. I hope to get to a point where I am able to captain boats large enough to spend a few, comfortable days on. My wife and I will likely try such a vacation in 12 – 18 months (pandemic pending) to see how we like it. I have no doubt we will like it. A lot.
And Mike K., if you didn’t see my follow up to your post about your run from California to Hawaii; incredible!!
J.J.,
Based on my impressions I find your summary of Trump and his Presidency spot on, except for the final paragraph.
I think you did a great job of distilling the man and why things played out the way they did.
I’ve never been a boating person at all. I got seasick on a ferry once. That was kind of interesting. But I’m glad for those of you that can get out on the water.
Rufus T. Firefly and Hubert above: I also thought that was an Edward Hopper painting when I first looked at it! I was glad when Neo told us it was a picture she had taken; otherwise I would have been wondering about it for hours.
Neo, that is a rather cool picture. Thank you.
Neo – I love the Open threads – so much so that I keep them in open tabs to follow the conversations.
However, that means I have a lot of open tabs that all say Open thread.
May I request that you put the date in the headline of each post, so that they are distinguishable in the tabs and also in Bookmarks?
(even though they are numbered in the URLs, that doesn’t show up in the “name” that my browser displays)
Thanks for all the lovely pictures.
Re: Hopper…
I went there too. I think it’s the dark blue-greens and blacks against the bright, golden interior lights. However, really, that’s only Hopper’s “Nighthawks” (1942). Most of his paintings are in daylight, though with a similar that-ness sense of stillness.
The poet, Mark Strand, wrote a marvelous, short, intense book titled, “Hopper.” Strand was the perfect poet to write a book on Hopper. Strand’s poetry has a special, personal stillness which relates well to Hopper’s. I wish there were more books like this.
________________________________________________________
…so when we look at the painting of a building or an office or a gas station, we say it’s a Hopper. We don’t say it’s a gas station. By the time the gas station appears on canvas in its final form it has ceased being just a gas station. It has become Hopperized. It possesses something it never had before Hopper saw it as a possible subject for his painting. And for the artist, the painting exists, in part, as a mode of encountering himself. Although the encountered self may not correspond to the vision of possibility that a particular subject seemed to offer up. When Hopper said, in an interview with Brian O’Doherty, ‘I’m after ME,’ this is undoubtedly what he meant.”
I’ll be glad to go but good luck with giving me some culture … LOL
For those with an interest in sails that go fast, I found a few good videos.
This one is windsurfing in Primbee Australia set to soundtrack that has vocals that sound like a knockoff of the BeeGees. (Songwriting credit is to Paul and Linda McCartney.) The first 1:15 is boring, and it doesn’t get cooking until 2:00. Stick with it to see a crash and expertly performed stunt jibe turn. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bYtDBZkrpM
This one is windsurfing on ice, in Finland. Very lovely smooth ice, but not high wind. The board is like a big skateboard with ice runners on the trucks. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_qiBWQpnq_Q
That guy on the sailboard is really moving. Having said that, from using a GoPro when cycling, there are some psycho-visual funnies occurring because these action cameras are very wide-angle. A GoPro has a full frame equivalent focal length of 16.5mm. Amongst other things, wider than normal lenses make things appear further away — so for same forward velocity, the foreground will appear to be coming at you faster. This is a feature, not a bug on an action camera because everybody wants to be speedy action hero, myself included!
And isn’t it great that we can now stick high res stabilized cameras on just about *anything*. I can watch this kind of footage for hours on end.
PS: Was commenting on the Australian footage. Just saw the 100km/h video. That’s FAST! He’s doing well to do that without any eye protection.
Let’s tie both themes together; Hopper and Sailboats!
Tom Waits’ album, “Nighthawks at the Diner” was inspired by Hopper’s painting, as well as Waits’ life experience as a late night habitue of crummy diners.
Waits coulda been a comedian:
________________________________________
I was always—er—kinda wanted to like consider myself kind of a… pioneer of the palate
A restaurateur, if you will
I’ve wined, dined, sipped and supped in some of the most demonstrably beamer epitomable bistros in the Los Angeles metropolitan region
Yeah, I’ve had strange-looking patty melts at Norm’s
I’ve had dangerous veal cutlets at the Copper Penny
Well what you get is a breaded Salisbury steak in a Shake ‘n Bake
And topped with a provocative sauce of Velveeta and uh, half and half
Smothered with Campbell’s tomato soup, huhuhuhuh…
See I have kinda of a, well I order my veal cutlet
Christ, it left the plate and it walked down to the end of the counter and it—I just
Waitress named Irene, boy she’s wearing those rhinestone glasses with the little pearl thing clipped on the sweater and…
My veal cutlet come down, tried to beat the shit out of my cup of coffee but…
Coffee just wasn’t strong enough to defend itself, uhuhuhuh…
Rufus, Yeah, Tucker Carlson regularly shows John Kerry windsurfing. The elitist schmuck!
Zaphod, I know what you mean about wide angle lenses. But I scanned the comments on the Primbee video and found this.
Brent Weeks
How fast are you traveling? It’s very cool.
Paul van Bellen [videographer]
1 year ago
I think they hit max 42 knots.
42 knots = 48.3 mph
@TommyJay:
That’s plenty fast enough!
One fun thing about the Covid Travel Ban is that all the adventure sports types in Hong Kong can’t hop off on a plane and head to Thailand, Borneo, Bali, or Wherever to break their collective necks… so they’re attempting to do so right here.
Twice now, I’ve seen guys launch themselves off the smallish mountain out the back and paraglide down to the beach… and that’s just randomly when I’ve been out and about, so must be happening many times when I don’t see it. Technically it’s illegal in this location — so it’s like they hit the beach have gathered up chute and absented themselves in a New York Minute.
And kitesurfing has exploded in popularity. Plus every kid has a skateboard or two (one powered, one the old style).
If I had a lawn, I’d stop telling people to get off it and build an assault course and charge reasonable fees. Gotta move with the times.
Zaphod,
We have people who paraglide hover in the updraft from the onshore breezes hitting the sand dunes several miles from my house. That’s legal and relatively safe.
I don’ know of anyone who’s died doing that. On the other hand we kill about 4 people every year on average with tourists walking out on the rocks in the shoreline and getting swept off in a massive crashing wave.
You’ve jogged my memory. There seems to be a fashion for scrambling around rocky coastlines and hiking, scrambling, climbing up hilly watercourses. For sure there’s more of an annual death toll from these two activities in HK than from paragliding.
I know of a very successful professional gambler who grew bored with life, needed more challenges and took up free climbing. Survived and is now a major Democrat Donor. Even Gravity conspires against us!
There’s something magnificent about guys like Dean Potter. Tragic end, but he wouldn’t have wanted to end up on a syringe driver.
One small objection: your wing suit footage is a trifle staid 😀
No, the dog was the big feature my wingsuit video. Yours is very thrilling. Dean Potter tried to fly between twin rock spires when he died. Gotta get that nearby, high relative velocity rush.
RE: Your gambler friend. Maybe God and Einstein are socialists?
TommyJay:
Wow on the Bixby Canyon Bridge ‘tube!
I’ve driven over it several times on the way to Big Sur but never had the eye-in-the-sky perspective.
I’ve also listened to this hypnotic “Death Cab for Cutie” song many times and never made the connection.
Greenhouse gas should cause an imbalance in the earth’s radiation budget. Why? Heat trapping gasses ought to keep more heat closer to the earth, instead of letting it seep out to space. Right?
But what do actual satellite measurements show? ERBe
“Faulty Hypothesis? NASA ERB Measurements Don’t Show Significant Radiative Budget Differences
By P Gosselin on 28. February 2021
“NASA earth radiation budget measurement from satellite data don’t support global warming claims.”
Oops? Tell us more? Analyst Zoe Phinn expands:
“According to the greenhouse gas theory, infrared absorbing gases are supposed to be preventing radiation from reaching space, thus causing warming at the surface.
If God Played Dice with the Universe, fitting a Polynomial Logit Model to Happy Valley and Shatin Race Course outcomes wouldn’t have made this guy richer than Croesus. Or another formulation could be that God starts out with Fair Dice and Heaven helps those who load them up, tip the scales, finesse the wheel, etc… Now that could be consistent with self-made wealthy progressive noblesse oblige.
Aren’t boats supposed to be “on the water”. How do airplanes with misty bottoms qualify?
Any good links for applying this technology and/or wind power to really large shipping container type boats/ships? But I guess if you are that top heavy you need a keel that will almost reach the Marianas trench?
huxley,
If you ever make back out this way on a Saturday, there is an online scheduled docent’s tour of the Point Sur Lighthouse in the Big Sur area. I’ve done it twice. They take you up into the lighthouse and onto the outside walkway near the top. The top of the lighthouse isn’t much higher than the nearby cliffs, but for some reason it is very wind blasted and vertigo inducing and has great views.
Zaphod,
The 1941 Ektra was indeed a cool camera. The Cadillac of rangefinders. Some features anticipated the Leica M3 and Nikon SP of the 1950s. It was a chunky beast, though.
The M1 Garand rifle, the Mark 1A Fire Control Computer, the SIGABA cipher machine, and the Ektra–all from back in the days when we could still build things like that.
I used Nikon rangefinders and postwar Contaxes. My go-to camera was a 1958-vintage Nikon S2 black dial with a 50mm f/1.4 Nikkor lens or the very underrated 35mm f/2.5 Nikkor. Like this guy:
Finding an example of the pre-war Contax II in good working condition is a challenge. (Also: unsightly Zeiss bumps.) I went with a postwar Contax IIa with the f/1.5 Sonnar or f/2.8 Biogon.
Many happy hours doing black-and-white street photography in Chicago and cities in other countries twenty-plus years ago. Paris was my favorite. Preferred film: Ilford FP4 Plus. Priced like Unobtanium now.
If you haven’t already got it, I can recommend “Collecting and Using Classic Cameras” by the late and much-lamented Ivor Matanle (he died in February 2019):
I’m convinced I saw him at work on the shingle at Brighton back in 1999. Didn’t have the guts to introduce myself as a fan. I wish I had. A lovely man, judging by his books.
@Hubert:
Thanks for the book recommendation. I don’t have it. I do have the 1973 15th Edition of the Leica Manual book and the late Roger Hicks’ Rangefinder Book.
I saw a guy in my local park last year sporting a Nikon S or SP — not sure whether it was an original or a Japan Market re-release from the early 2000s.
There’s something about precision mechanical artifacts. I know that if I lived in a jurisdiction where it was possible I’d collect firearms for this reason as much as for the practical ones.
In this fine Spring weather I’m seeing youngsters getting around with Olympus OM-1s and upwards. Some also sport 1970s fixed lens rangefinders. This in HK. Similar in Bangkok.
Oooh. Ilford FP4. I used to pull the development down to an ASA of 60 or 80. So nice.
R2L, Several years ago I read that people in the container ship business were looking at adding parafoils to their ships. These sails would be like the kitesurfing parafoils only much bigger of course. Also, instead flying at altitudes of 10’s of meters, they would fly at many 100’s of meters in altitude. Windspeed usually increases greatly with altitude. I think the idea was not to eliminate engines, but to cut fuel consumption way down.
I like to wander the city at night with my clunky obsolete CCD sensor Monochrom-M. Never going to be any good at it, but it’s enjoyable and no need to worry about (trigger warning) White Balance!
Later can sit down at leisure with Silver Efex Pro and decide which film emulsion I used to take the shot. 😛
Hopper did some other nocturnals in addition to “Nighthawks”: “Automat”, “Drugstore”, “Night Windows”, “Rooms for Tourists”. No nocturnal seascapes that I can think of, though.
One of his most powerful paintings–a crepuscular rather than a nocturnal–was “Dawn before Gettysburg” (1934):
“For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it’s still not yet two o’clock on that July afternoon in 1863, the brigades are in position behind the rail fence, the guns are laid and ready in the woods and the furled flags are already loosened to break out and Pickett himself with his long oiled ringlets and his hat in one hand probably and his sword in the other looking up the hill waiting for Longstreet to give the word and it’s all in the balance, it hasn’t happened yet, it hasn’t even begun yet, it not only hasn’t begun yet but there is still time for it not to begin against that position and those circumstances which made more men than Garnett and Kemper and Armistead and Wilcox look grave yet it’s going to begin, we all know that, we have come too far with too much at stake and that moment doesn’t need even a fourteen-year-old boy to think This time. Maybe this time with all this much to lose than all this much to gain: Pennsylvania, Maryland, the world, the golden dome of Washington itself to crown with desperate and unbelievable victory the desperate gamble, the cast made two years ago.”
– William Faulkner
Not to derail your open thread but here are the organizations and individuals behind the “saving” of the 2020 election that was written about (confessed to) in the Molly Ball Time magazine article.
A digital Leica. Never handled one of those. It must be great for shooting with at night. And digital darkroom work is a lot easier than the old way of doing it. Look Ma, no chemistry! I’ve got the 13th edition (1956) of the Leica Manual and Data Book (but no Leica). Have to check out Hicks’ book.
Firearms: move to our Perishing Republic, man (southern or mountain states). Failing that, check out this channel:
The proprietor, Arizona-based Ian McCollum, has a wealth of technical knowledge and a weakness for French firearms. Or, for that Commonwealth flavour, this Canadian dude in the Maritimes:
Hubert, thank you for that link to Hopper’s “Dawn before Gettysburg”. That is a powerful painting. I had no idea that Hopper had ever done historical pictures.
John F. MacMichael,
Nor did I, until I came across it in a book of Hopper’s paintings published years ago by Abrams: https://bit.ly/3c0jFuV.
“Dawn before Gettysburg” was in the now-defunct Westervelt-Warner Museum of American Art in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. It “exited” the museum in 2011:
Not sure where it is now–probably in a private collection. A friend who used to work at the University of Alabama and who visited the museum when old Jack Warner, the CEO of the Gulf States Paper Corporation, was still in charge told me that most of the collection was sold off over the years by Warner’s son, with many paintings going to Alice Walton (Walmart) and Bill Gates.
“In light of the sale of [Asher Durand’s] ‘Progress’, and the potential for as yet unknown additional paintings to leave the collection, the Tuscaloosa News asked Mr. Warner if he regretted passing control of the company to his son. ‘I damn sure regret it,’ he replied.” (https://www.artfixdaily.com/blogs/post/6777-two-american-treasures-sold)
I’ve been following ‘Exotic Firearms Jesus’ at Forgotten Weapons for a while now.
Am considering taking up the now fashionable sport of undocumented immigration should the situation become more fluid. Bad as the situation in the USA might be, I figure it’s going to be worse in much of the Rest of the West later on. And I’m a bit old to be taking up farming in the Crimea.
Remember the Winslow Homer painting vignette in the Gettysburg movie?
The Union officer on the right is Brig. Gen. Francis C. Barlow, division commander in Hancock’s II Corps. Harvard man and founder of the American Bar Association. Former Fox News military analyst, committed never-Trumper, and Russiagate nutcase Ralph Peters has a brilliant portrait of Barlow in his superb series of Civil War novels, starting with “Cain at Gettysburg”.
I binge-read his Gettysburg novels. And the Owen Parry Welsh Civil War detective ones. (I find it hard to take the Welsh seriously – got Fluellen in Henry V on my brain.) Must have done this pre 2016 as had never made the mental connection with *that* Ralph Peters. Wow. Well he writes masterfully about War even if he’s got a bad case of the Slavophobia.
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Looks like an Edward Hopper painting.
I didn’t hear all of it, but the Donald’s speech was good. I suppose I should not have been surprised. He almost always spoke well in his many campaign appearances. My guess is Stephen Miller is still involved with his speech writing.
He seemed to completely rule out a 3rd party, which is very interesting. I imagine the GOP is a bit nervous now.
As is often the case with Trump, he was a bit over the top. For example, when talking about what his administration did with Project Warpspeed. It’s great to hit those points and get them out in the public, but praise the researchers, clinicians, doctors and nurses who did the work. Share the credit. It would make him look less narcissistic and could bring others into his tent.
He looked very good. Relaxed. Thinner. Healthy.
Rufus,
Edward Hopper: my first reaction as well.
Trump at CPAC: have some thoughts, will try to put them together later.
I for one have no problems with a freshly energized Trumpian wrecking ball. He’s good at knocking stuff over. Will need someone else to actually fight to win and rebuild. Which is me being insanely optimistic.
Trump is Mao. Guerrilla Genius. Abject failure in office.
Need some Machiavellian with smarts to follow in the quiet behind the whirlwind and step in at the decisive moment.
Fade to Black with Aubrey Beardsley’s sketch of a rather Slovenian-looking Salome holding a dripping head. Trump’s prophet gig being completed.
“It was a dark and stormy night …”
Look up “abject” and “failure.” Conceivable too. Then there is “Rome,” “construction,” “day.” Big words and concepts.
Carny World
https://thezman.com/wordpress/?p=22988
Another take on the Cuomo Pile-on.
I watched a few minutes of the speech. Trump is usually very good at complementing the worker bees but Pfizer stabbed him in the back by holding up final approval of the first vaccine until after the election.
He did look good and may be the healthiest ex-president in years. On 2024, I would say it is less than 50/50.
“Trump is Mao. Guerrilla Genius. Abject failure in office.”- Zaphod
I consider him Trump the Disrupter. I think it was always unrealistic to think one man was going to “drain the swamp”. First he had to get the malaria carrying mosquitos under control.
As to his performance in office, it took him several years to find out who he could trust in DC, and it was a pretty small cohort. Most of the GOP regulars are Wall St Globalists, and they were very effective at subverting his agenda.
A second Trump term, should he decide to run, will be more effective– though the Republicans will still be as duplicitous as ever.
Good morning
Read something about sailing. MikeK and Rufus I believe.
America Cup final March 6. New Zealand and Italy. The technology on the rigs are unbelievable. All carbon fiber. Foil technology and no doubt more that is top secret. 40+ knot speed.
Remove the sail and you’d think it was alien space craft skimming across the water.
Anyway plan to watch if interested.
America’s Cup 2021, Oh my. Check out this photo. Even the officiating motorboat is a high tech high speed catamaran, so it can keep up with the sailboats?
This ended my sailing days. Mine is in that pile of fiberglass on that levee. At least the city hauled that mess away and didn’t charge the owners anything
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hurricane_Ike_Port_Arthur_TX_docks.jpg
Luckily I didn’t have much money into a Cal 20. Some lost it all with no insurance.
I think a 3d party in a 1st past the post system is a chancy proposition in the best of times. In this country, multi-state 3d parties are evanescent or they have a hobbyist constituency, and that’s been true since 1862 or thereabouts. The only exception was the old Socialist Party during the Debs era (1904-24), and they were only truly consequential in Wisconsin.
What’s interesting now is the crevasse between Capitol Hill / K Street and street-level Republicans. Only a single-digit minority of street-level Republicans were dissatisfied with Trump; there is no popular NeverTrump dispensation. At the same time, about 70% of the congressional caucus appears to fancy that members of this single-digit minority are suitable for leadership positions in Congress. Betwixt and between, you have state officials in party and government, some of whom were aghast at the behavior of the Vichy Republicans in Congress and some of whom (Johnson in Michigan, Raffersperger in Georgia, Hogan in Maryland, Ducey in Arizona) are at least as bad.
Sail? Who needs a sail? Unicorn farts provide the energy. Carbon fiber? Where does that come from? Ultra high strength rigging (Dynema? from ultra high molecular weight polyethylene and such) where does that come from? From unicorn feces. White privilege on them “boats!” Systemic racism/Americas Cup indeed. its a RACE! 🙂
A second Trump term, should he decide to run, will be more effective– though the Republicans will still be as duplicitous as ever.
Some portion of the Republican congressional caucus is there for a purpose more elevated than feeding bon bons to their donors and lining up business opportunities in the Washington lobbying firms. Not sure how many. Sundance is of the opinion that about 1/3 of the Senate Republican caucus are for sale. McConnell is without a doubt a mendacious crook and McCarthy is a vacuous apparatchik who has been on the payroll of legislative bodies since he was 22 years old.
Zaphod…I certainly wouldn’t call him an ‘abject failure’…with a conventional-politician president, we’d be looking at getting a vaccine (maybe) around the end of this year, for low-volume shipments. We certainly wouldn’t have had anything like the Abraham Accords.
My take is that Trump is a creative and intuitive thinker; he sees things others don’t see, or at least seems them much sooner than others do. What he’s not good at, however, is translating his insights into terms that conventional-linear thinkers, of the type that prevail in media/academia/bureaucracies, are capable of easily understanding.
David Foster; Zaphod:
My take is that Trump could have worked literal miracles and those in the media/academia/bureaucracies would not have given him a moment’s credit. In fact, I think they did understand that many things he was doing were good, but they didn’t care because they were out to destroy him no matter what he did.
And although is personality is abrasive, that was not the reason they did it. It is, however, just another reason they hate his guts.
I took the photo a few years ago after I got out of an evening concert at some venue in Massachusetts; I forget where.
I’ve heard others describe POTUS 45 as “naive.”
He seemed to appoint & invest great trust in people who would work directly against his stated policy interests. Sure, he’d fire some…but the replacements & those he didn’t fire would continue to undermine him. The Swamp he promised to “drain” got worse. At least we now know how bad the real cleansing of those stables is going to have to be. (pardon the mixed metaphor)
For a guy who spent most of his life in NY & FL…he understood/understands the foreign policy realm better than any careerist diplomat or politician. And the Boss is right…he could have cured cancer & spun straw into gold & we’d still likely be where we are today looking at the death throes of the Republic.
“Abject failure” as a conversation starter is much like the question
“Other than that Mrs. Lincoln how did you like the play?”
Not that the problem is CRT, socialism/communism street violence, CCP practices, the CCP virus, election irregularities. The problem is President Trump was not successful enough or successful at anything? Strawman much?
Thanks Zaphod, for the wisdom.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?fbclid=IwAR1ca4JbYa-QxF4Mxz5EExbP1L5CDlevhHEi2mhz1-uvVOlXXQrtLCeDL7k&v=YyCj5UaG1kI&feature=youtu.be
(Taken from a Facebook post):
This is a recording of a conversation inside the Clubhouse app – a new audio only social media app where moderators in “rooms” can choose who to allow to speak, inviting people “up to the stage” from the “audience.” Lots of famous and semi-famous people have been having discussions there.
This particular room had a coup by a bunch of “woke” people who kicked all the white people out of the conversation in the name of “anti-racism”.
Later they brought progressive liberal, Bret Weinstein, into the conversation.
Bret is an Evolutionary Biologist who became well known after there was an uprising of the “anti-racists” at Evergreen College where he worked. During this uprising, staff were held hostage. Bret now has a popular podcast (The Dark Horse Podcast) and is associated with “The Intellectual Dark Web (IDW) – which is not an official group, just a label given to heterodox intellectuals of various persuasions in the podcast world, most of whom have been targeted by the woke mob with slander and attempts to cancel them.
Bret is also the originator of the “Articles of Unity” movement, which attempted to offer Americans an alternative pair of candidates to Trump or Biden with the “Unity2020 campaign”. This campaign was sabotaged and censored by the tech giants using false claims about it as justification.
After the woke mob had their coup in the Clubhouse room, they “called out” Bret Weinstein, who was listening in the audience, and demanded he confess to being a white supremecist. They then proceed to spew their utterly typical hateful nonsensical bullshit at Bret.
[…]
@ around 2:00:00 the coup begins
@ around 2:45:00 Bret Weinstein is brought into the conversation and about 9 minutes later, the hateful “anti-white” rhetoric begins.
@ around 3:17:00 they cheer the “Haitian Revolution” – which was the mass murder of the French in Haiti – including the women and children.
@ around 4:24:30 it starts getting genocidal
One lady says outright that she wants people to be, “anti-white” and makes the often repeated claim that, “whiteness is violence.”
I hope this gets some traction and goes viral. People need to know that there are people out there who truly support genocide.
Neo,
Provincetown? Somewhere else on the Cape? That was Hopper country—he had a studio in Truro.
Trump is a New Yorker. He’s brash, aggressive, competitive, doesn’t talk in complete sentences, has a street level vocabulary, and has a rhinoceros thick skin. He actually thrives on conflict. In other words, far from a typical politician that thrives on going along to get along while exercising an extensive vocabulary to dazzle the proles. He will not change his style. That is who he is.
Our government was designed to be slow paced and deliberate in its movements. As it has grown to leviathan size and become a huge bureaucracy that works primarily to enlarge itself and can’t seem to accomplish much except to spend vast amoun
ts of money, a shakeup was long overdue.
Trump attacked problems with an eye to actually accomplishing something. Not only did he want to solve problems and quickly, he also talked openly about what he wanted to do. There has never been a more transparent president than Trump. This was an affront to the whole federal system. To make matters worse, Trump was a show man who quickly garnered a loyal following of lower and middle class citizens. That was even more frightening to the progressives. It is the reason why there was a massive effort by a large number of both left and right institutions to ensure Trump’s defeat in November.
In spite of everything they threw at him – the Russia hoax, two impeachments, constant attacks by the MSM, sabotage by enemies inside the administration, constant political games by the Pelosi Schumer partnership, and more; he accomplished nearly everything he promised during the campaign. He is a mortal danger to politics as usual.
His vision of putting America’s interests first, bringing manufacturing jobs home, securing our borders, demanding reciprocal and free trade, peace through strength, and backing law and order resonates with enough Americans that it will be the platform of the Republican party going forward. If he chooses to run in 2024, I think he has a good chance of getting the nomination. If he doesn’t run, there are capable people, available, though few with his gigantic work ethic and unflappable desire to actually solve problems.
Hubert:
No, not the Cape. I think perhaps Newburyport, but I really don’t remember.
Natalie S.,
I am fairly familiar with Bret Weinstein and his ordeal at Evergreen, as well as what he has been up to lately.
I wrote in a prior thread that there is a great deal of racism in “minority” communities and it can only be fixed by people within their community calling them out. Some are already doing this. I haven’t listened to the Clubhouse recordings you linked to, but based on your description I actually see promise in this. The faster racists overreach, and the louder they shout, the sooner (I believe) we will reach a point where good people that share their external traits (skin color, gender, ethnicity…) will stand up and call them out for the bullies that they are.
Sailing…
jack, it saddened me to click on the link to the photo of your former boat. I mentioned a friend I sail with is close to buying a used, large, trimaran. I recently sent him a meme (you’ve likely seen it) of someone burning a $100 bill. The caption read, “If you can smile while doing this you are ready to own a boat.”
The new, carbon fiber, aerofoil keel boats are insane. When I first bought my little toy boat I thought the fastest way to travel was with the wind to my back (I soon learned this is called a “run”) and never guessed one could sail faster than about 80% of the current wind speed. As I read more and sailed more I learned it is possible to sail faster than the wind speed, and the wind to one’s stern is not the way to do it.
It’s such a fascinating past-time. Part physics, part gymnastics, part artistry and a large part magic. One of the most incredible things for me is that time warps when I sail. I don’t mean that figuratively. I mean it literally. Even when I wake up from a night’s sleep I can almost always guess the time within about 10 minutes. I think most all of us have internal clocks that are pretty accurate at gauging the passage of time. EVERY time I sail, time slows. I’ll swear I’ve been out for 45 minutes only to learn it has been 3 hours. It is incredible. I hope to get to a point where I am able to captain boats large enough to spend a few, comfortable days on. My wife and I will likely try such a vacation in 12 – 18 months (pandemic pending) to see how we like it. I have no doubt we will like it. A lot.
And Mike K., if you didn’t see my follow up to your post about your run from California to Hawaii; incredible!!
J.J.,
Based on my impressions I find your summary of Trump and his Presidency spot on, except for the final paragraph.
I think you did a great job of distilling the man and why things played out the way they did.
https://stream.org/i-knew-the-name-of-the-dragon/
Mark Gauvreau Judge offers some creative writing.
I’ve never been a boating person at all. I got seasick on a ferry once. That was kind of interesting. But I’m glad for those of you that can get out on the water.
Rufus T. Firefly and Hubert above: I also thought that was an Edward Hopper painting when I first looked at it! I was glad when Neo told us it was a picture she had taken; otherwise I would have been wondering about it for hours.
Neo, that is a rather cool picture. Thank you.
Neo – I love the Open threads – so much so that I keep them in open tabs to follow the conversations.
However, that means I have a lot of open tabs that all say Open thread.
May I request that you put the date in the headline of each post, so that they are distinguishable in the tabs and also in Bookmarks?
(even though they are numbered in the URLs, that doesn’t show up in the “name” that my browser displays)
Thanks for all the lovely pictures.
Re: Hopper…
I went there too. I think it’s the dark blue-greens and blacks against the bright, golden interior lights. However, really, that’s only Hopper’s “Nighthawks” (1942). Most of his paintings are in daylight, though with a similar that-ness sense of stillness.
The poet, Mark Strand, wrote a marvelous, short, intense book titled, “Hopper.” Strand was the perfect poet to write a book on Hopper. Strand’s poetry has a special, personal stillness which relates well to Hopper’s. I wish there were more books like this.
________________________________________________________
…so when we look at the painting of a building or an office or a gas station, we say it’s a Hopper. We don’t say it’s a gas station. By the time the gas station appears on canvas in its final form it has ceased being just a gas station. It has become Hopperized. It possesses something it never had before Hopper saw it as a possible subject for his painting. And for the artist, the painting exists, in part, as a mode of encountering himself. Although the encountered self may not correspond to the vision of possibility that a particular subject seemed to offer up. When Hopper said, in an interview with Brian O’Doherty, ‘I’m after ME,’ this is undoubtedly what he meant.”
–https://www.painters-table.com/link/new-york-review-books/mark-strand-edward-hopper
Mrs jack wants to go and give me some culture. Coming to Houston.
https://vangoghexpo.com/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=rmkt&utm_campaign=96180_iah&fbclid=iwar02zyo3_-vfhbyw-hamndxui-0v06lgoyg3r-a9vlmhrw0mtl2uc48donm
I’ll be glad to go but good luck with giving me some culture … LOL
For those with an interest in sails that go fast, I found a few good videos.
This one is windsurfing in Primbee Australia set to soundtrack that has vocals that sound like a knockoff of the BeeGees. (Songwriting credit is to Paul and Linda McCartney.) The first 1:15 is boring, and it doesn’t get cooking until 2:00. Stick with it to see a crash and expertly performed stunt jibe turn.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bYtDBZkrpM
How fast can a sail and board go? Apparently up to 100 km/h. Very specialized stuff.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wGC6CoSZkmc
This one is windsurfing on ice, in Finland. Very lovely smooth ice, but not high wind. The board is like a big skateboard with ice runners on the trucks.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_qiBWQpnq_Q
That guy on the sailboard is really moving. Having said that, from using a GoPro when cycling, there are some psycho-visual funnies occurring because these action cameras are very wide-angle. A GoPro has a full frame equivalent focal length of 16.5mm. Amongst other things, wider than normal lenses make things appear further away — so for same forward velocity, the foreground will appear to be coming at you faster. This is a feature, not a bug on an action camera because everybody wants to be speedy action hero, myself included!
And isn’t it great that we can now stick high res stabilized cameras on just about *anything*. I can watch this kind of footage for hours on end.
PS: Was commenting on the Australian footage. Just saw the 100km/h video. That’s FAST! He’s doing well to do that without any eye protection.
Let’s tie both themes together; Hopper and Sailboats!
https://linusfontrodona.com/2017/12/12/edward-hopper-xi-the-sailing-boats-oils-and-watercolours/
TommyJay,
Regarding the windski guy doing 51+ knots…
Yikes!!
Amazing. He’s a regular John Kerry!
Tom Waits’ album, “Nighthawks at the Diner” was inspired by Hopper’s painting, as well as Waits’ life experience as a late night habitue of crummy diners.
Waits coulda been a comedian:
________________________________________
I was always—er—kinda wanted to like consider myself kind of a… pioneer of the palate
A restaurateur, if you will
I’ve wined, dined, sipped and supped in some of the most demonstrably beamer epitomable bistros in the Los Angeles metropolitan region
Yeah, I’ve had strange-looking patty melts at Norm’s
I’ve had dangerous veal cutlets at the Copper Penny
Well what you get is a breaded Salisbury steak in a Shake ‘n Bake
And topped with a provocative sauce of Velveeta and uh, half and half
Smothered with Campbell’s tomato soup, huhuhuhuh…
See I have kinda of a, well I order my veal cutlet
Christ, it left the plate and it walked down to the end of the counter and it—I just
Waitress named Irene, boy she’s wearing those rhinestone glasses with the little pearl thing clipped on the sweater and…
My veal cutlet come down, tried to beat the shit out of my cup of coffee but…
Coffee just wasn’t strong enough to defend itself, uhuhuhuh…
–Tom Waits, “Intro to ‘Eggs and Sausage'”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oHYQSh1-WCI
Rufus, Yeah, Tucker Carlson regularly shows John Kerry windsurfing. The elitist schmuck!
Zaphod, I know what you mean about wide angle lenses. But I scanned the comments on the Primbee video and found this.
Brent Weeks
How fast are you traveling? It’s very cool.
Paul van Bellen [videographer]
1 year ago
I think they hit max 42 knots.
42 knots = 48.3 mph
@TommyJay:
That’s plenty fast enough!
One fun thing about the Covid Travel Ban is that all the adventure sports types in Hong Kong can’t hop off on a plane and head to Thailand, Borneo, Bali, or Wherever to break their collective necks… so they’re attempting to do so right here.
Twice now, I’ve seen guys launch themselves off the smallish mountain out the back and paraglide down to the beach… and that’s just randomly when I’ve been out and about, so must be happening many times when I don’t see it. Technically it’s illegal in this location — so it’s like they hit the beach have gathered up chute and absented themselves in a New York Minute.
And kitesurfing has exploded in popularity. Plus every kid has a skateboard or two (one powered, one the old style).
If I had a lawn, I’d stop telling people to get off it and build an assault course and charge reasonable fees. Gotta move with the times.
Zaphod,
We have people who paraglide hover in the updraft from the onshore breezes hitting the sand dunes several miles from my house. That’s legal and relatively safe.
Then there are the folks that base jump from the Bixby bridge in the Big Sur, CA area. Very illegal.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kVIpt2l1onQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MkP4ajqIeN4
I don’ know of anyone who’s died doing that. On the other hand we kill about 4 people every year on average with tourists walking out on the rocks in the shoreline and getting swept off in a massive crashing wave.
Illegal jumping always makes me think of one of the 10 best rock free climbers, Dean Potter, who took up wing suit flying and killed himself with an illegal jump in Yosemite valley. So sad.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iqEkFBNiP3c&feature=emb_logo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0p0frLN8O54
@TommyJay:
You’ve jogged my memory. There seems to be a fashion for scrambling around rocky coastlines and hiking, scrambling, climbing up hilly watercourses. For sure there’s more of an annual death toll from these two activities in HK than from paragliding.
I know of a very successful professional gambler who grew bored with life, needed more challenges and took up free climbing. Survived and is now a major Democrat Donor. Even Gravity conspires against us!
There’s something magnificent about guys like Dean Potter. Tragic end, but he wouldn’t have wanted to end up on a syringe driver.
One small objection: your wing suit footage is a trifle staid 😀
How about this one?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTzwvyzzfjk
Climbing back up after a successful Bixby Bridge jump has to burn some calories.
The maxed out iPhone 12 Pro Max of 1941. From back when Rochester was worth a damn.
1941 Kodak Ektra:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yOzEBDId1GQ&t
Not as beautiful as a Contax II, but it did everything except slice bread. All with springs, levers, gears.
Jewel-like miniaturized status symbols.
For photographing real as opposed to Hopperian Nighthawks, you needed one of these:
https://www.icp.org/browse/archive/constituents/weegee?all/all/all/all/0
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weegee
No, the dog was the big feature my wingsuit video. Yours is very thrilling. Dean Potter tried to fly between twin rock spires when he died. Gotta get that nearby, high relative velocity rush.
RE: Your gambler friend. Maybe God and Einstein are socialists?
TommyJay:
Wow on the Bixby Canyon Bridge ‘tube!
I’ve driven over it several times on the way to Big Sur but never had the eye-in-the-sky perspective.
I’ve also listened to this hypnotic “Death Cab for Cutie” song many times and never made the connection.
–Death Cab for Cutie, “Bixby Canyon Bridge”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_mF7oq5HUw8
Greenhouse gas should cause an imbalance in the earth’s radiation budget. Why? Heat trapping gasses ought to keep more heat closer to the earth, instead of letting it seep out to space. Right?
But what do actual satellite measurements show? ERBe
“Faulty Hypothesis? NASA ERB Measurements Don’t Show Significant Radiative Budget Differences
By P Gosselin on 28. February 2021
“NASA earth radiation budget measurement from satellite data don’t support global warming claims.”
Oops? Tell us more? Analyst Zoe Phinn expands:
“According to the greenhouse gas theory, infrared absorbing gases are supposed to be preventing radiation from reaching space, thus causing warming at the surface.
“ ‘Well we clearly see that’s not case. If clouds (water vapor + aerosols) hardly changes outgoing surface radiation, then the whole hypothesis is in error,’ Zoe concludes.”
https://notrickszone.com/2021/02/28/faulty-hypothesis-nasa-erb-measurements-dont-show-significant-radiative-budget-differences/
This is not inconsistent with the findings of Lindzen and Choi (2009, 2011), using the same data stream. As well as at least four earlier studies.
See graph here
https://joannenova.com.au/2012/04/satellites-show-a-warmer-earth-is-releasing-extra-energy-to-space/
If God Played Dice with the Universe, fitting a Polynomial Logit Model to Happy Valley and Shatin Race Course outcomes wouldn’t have made this guy richer than Croesus. Or another formulation could be that God starts out with Fair Dice and Heaven helps those who load them up, tip the scales, finesse the wheel, etc… Now that could be consistent with self-made wealthy progressive noblesse oblige.
Aren’t boats supposed to be “on the water”. How do airplanes with misty bottoms qualify?
Any good links for applying this technology and/or wind power to really large shipping container type boats/ships? But I guess if you are that top heavy you need a keel that will almost reach the Marianas trench?
huxley,
If you ever make back out this way on a Saturday, there is an online scheduled docent’s tour of the Point Sur Lighthouse in the Big Sur area. I’ve done it twice. They take you up into the lighthouse and onto the outside walkway near the top. The top of the lighthouse isn’t much higher than the nearby cliffs, but for some reason it is very wind blasted and vertigo inducing and has great views.
Zaphod,
The 1941 Ektra was indeed a cool camera. The Cadillac of rangefinders. Some features anticipated the Leica M3 and Nikon SP of the 1950s. It was a chunky beast, though.
The M1 Garand rifle, the Mark 1A Fire Control Computer, the SIGABA cipher machine, and the Ektra–all from back in the days when we could still build things like that.
I used Nikon rangefinders and postwar Contaxes. My go-to camera was a 1958-vintage Nikon S2 black dial with a 50mm f/1.4 Nikkor lens or the very underrated 35mm f/2.5 Nikkor. Like this guy:
https://f22cameras.com/en/nikon-s2-silver-with-w-nikkorc-35mm-f25
Finding an example of the pre-war Contax II in good working condition is a challenge. (Also: unsightly Zeiss bumps.) I went with a postwar Contax IIa with the f/1.5 Sonnar or f/2.8 Biogon.
Many happy hours doing black-and-white street photography in Chicago and cities in other countries twenty-plus years ago. Paris was my favorite. Preferred film: Ilford FP4 Plus. Priced like Unobtanium now.
If you haven’t already got it, I can recommend “Collecting and Using Classic Cameras” by the late and much-lamented Ivor Matanle (he died in February 2019):
https://www.abebooks.co.uk/book-search/title/collecting-and-using-classic-cameras/author/matanle-ivor/
I’m convinced I saw him at work on the shingle at Brighton back in 1999. Didn’t have the guts to introduce myself as a fan. I wish I had. A lovely man, judging by his books.
@Hubert:
Thanks for the book recommendation. I don’t have it. I do have the 1973 15th Edition of the Leica Manual book and the late Roger Hicks’ Rangefinder Book.
I saw a guy in my local park last year sporting a Nikon S or SP — not sure whether it was an original or a Japan Market re-release from the early 2000s.
There’s something about precision mechanical artifacts. I know that if I lived in a jurisdiction where it was possible I’d collect firearms for this reason as much as for the practical ones.
In this fine Spring weather I’m seeing youngsters getting around with Olympus OM-1s and upwards. Some also sport 1970s fixed lens rangefinders. This in HK. Similar in Bangkok.
Oooh. Ilford FP4. I used to pull the development down to an ASA of 60 or 80. So nice.
R2L, Several years ago I read that people in the container ship business were looking at adding parafoils to their ships. These sails would be like the kitesurfing parafoils only much bigger of course. Also, instead flying at altitudes of 10’s of meters, they would fly at many 100’s of meters in altitude. Windspeed usually increases greatly with altitude. I think the idea was not to eliminate engines, but to cut fuel consumption way down.
I like to wander the city at night with my clunky obsolete CCD sensor Monochrom-M. Never going to be any good at it, but it’s enjoyable and no need to worry about (trigger warning) White Balance!
Later can sit down at leisure with Silver Efex Pro and decide which film emulsion I used to take the shot. 😛
Hopper did some other nocturnals in addition to “Nighthawks”: “Automat”, “Drugstore”, “Night Windows”, “Rooms for Tourists”. No nocturnal seascapes that I can think of, though.
One of his most powerful paintings–a crepuscular rather than a nocturnal–was “Dawn before Gettysburg” (1934):
https://edwardhopper.us/tuscaloosa-collection-remains/
One of only two Civil War paintings that he did.
“For every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it’s still not yet two o’clock on that July afternoon in 1863, the brigades are in position behind the rail fence, the guns are laid and ready in the woods and the furled flags are already loosened to break out and Pickett himself with his long oiled ringlets and his hat in one hand probably and his sword in the other looking up the hill waiting for Longstreet to give the word and it’s all in the balance, it hasn’t happened yet, it hasn’t even begun yet, it not only hasn’t begun yet but there is still time for it not to begin against that position and those circumstances which made more men than Garnett and Kemper and Armistead and Wilcox look grave yet it’s going to begin, we all know that, we have come too far with too much at stake and that moment doesn’t need even a fourteen-year-old boy to think This time. Maybe this time with all this much to lose than all this much to gain: Pennsylvania, Maryland, the world, the golden dome of Washington itself to crown with desperate and unbelievable victory the desperate gamble, the cast made two years ago.”
– William Faulkner
Not to derail your open thread but here are the organizations and individuals behind the “saving” of the 2020 election that was written about (confessed to) in the Molly Ball Time magazine article.
https://capitalresearch.org/article/the-groups-and-persons-mentioned-in-times-shadow-campaign-article/
Back to your regular scheduled programming ….
Zaphod,
A digital Leica. Never handled one of those. It must be great for shooting with at night. And digital darkroom work is a lot easier than the old way of doing it. Look Ma, no chemistry! I’ve got the 13th edition (1956) of the Leica Manual and Data Book (but no Leica). Have to check out Hicks’ book.
Firearms: move to our Perishing Republic, man (southern or mountain states). Failing that, check out this channel:
https://www.youtube.com/user/ForgottenWeapons
The proprietor, Arizona-based Ian McCollum, has a wealth of technical knowledge and a weakness for French firearms. Or, for that Commonwealth flavour, this Canadian dude in the Maritimes:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vB44DN_N5xk
“…when I get a chance to try some cast bullet loads oot in it”.
Or his foul-mouthed Nova Scotia confrere, “Gungeek”:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zB7mQH6DZio
Hoser!
Hubert, thank you for that link to Hopper’s “Dawn before Gettysburg”. That is a powerful painting. I had no idea that Hopper had ever done historical pictures.
John F. MacMichael,
Nor did I, until I came across it in a book of Hopper’s paintings published years ago by Abrams: https://bit.ly/3c0jFuV.
“Dawn before Gettysburg” was in the now-defunct Westervelt-Warner Museum of American Art in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. It “exited” the museum in 2011:
https://www.artfixdaily.com/news_feed/2011/05/05/2344-more-american-masterworks-exit-westervelt-warner-museum-of-art
Not sure where it is now–probably in a private collection. A friend who used to work at the University of Alabama and who visited the museum when old Jack Warner, the CEO of the Gulf States Paper Corporation, was still in charge told me that most of the collection was sold off over the years by Warner’s son, with many paintings going to Alice Walton (Walmart) and Bill Gates.
“In light of the sale of [Asher Durand’s] ‘Progress’, and the potential for as yet unknown additional paintings to leave the collection, the Tuscaloosa News asked Mr. Warner if he regretted passing control of the company to his son. ‘I damn sure regret it,’ he replied.” (https://www.artfixdaily.com/blogs/post/6777-two-american-treasures-sold)
Jack Warner died in 2017 at the age of 99. His museum is now a boutique hotel. Profile at http://thejackwarner.com/about-jack-warner/.
@Hubert:
I’ve been following ‘Exotic Firearms Jesus’ at Forgotten Weapons for a while now.
Am considering taking up the now fashionable sport of undocumented immigration should the situation become more fluid. Bad as the situation in the USA might be, I figure it’s going to be worse in much of the Rest of the West later on. And I’m a bit old to be taking up farming in the Crimea.
Remember the Winslow Homer painting vignette in the Gettysburg movie?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8dDpwZegm60
There could be a whole thread on painting and film quotations in films. The Lelouch / Belmondo re-telling of Les Miserables is packed with them.
Good eye. Winslow Homer’s “Prisoners from the Front”:
https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/11133
The Union officer on the right is Brig. Gen. Francis C. Barlow, division commander in Hancock’s II Corps. Harvard man and founder of the American Bar Association. Former Fox News military analyst, committed never-Trumper, and Russiagate nutcase Ralph Peters has a brilliant portrait of Barlow in his superb series of Civil War novels, starting with “Cain at Gettysburg”.
I binge-read his Gettysburg novels. And the Owen Parry Welsh Civil War detective ones. (I find it hard to take the Welsh seriously – got Fluellen in Henry V on my brain.) Must have done this pre 2016 as had never made the mental connection with *that* Ralph Peters. Wow. Well he writes masterfully about War even if he’s got a bad case of the Slavophobia.