Into the sunset

Further to the demise of Kodachrome, the WSJ waxes elegiac about everything that made this slide film such a sensuous medium.

As I was putting away the not-so-critical stuff (meaning: you don’t need it to eat or sleep), I came upon my bag o’ film, which includes two 36-exposure rolls of Kodachrome 64, a roll of TMAX 100 and one of TMAX 3200 black & white, and a mass of Fujicolor color negative film. That stopped me in my tracks—even more than finding the lead pouch I used to put this stuff in to go through airport checked luggage X-raying.

What a blast from the past. Makes me think about all the years of photographs I’ve taken (my theory was that—especially with slide film—I’d just shoot everything that appealed to me, and then pick out the few keepers from each roll; it worked out pretty well, generally), all the places I’ve hauled all those cameras. It’s like my life is wrapped up in that more than in anything else.

And I wonder why I seemed to have no trouble learning to shoot with the Nikon rangefinder, with having to read the external light meter and calculate the f-stop & shutter speed; or the various Minolta SLRs I went through; but this bloody Nikon DSLR just makes me want to drop-kick it across the Puget Sound?

Well—death, change and taxes are the only constants, I guess.

Emerald City Blues

Life in the Third World continues.

I finally have a refrigerator in place, although it took four weeks and two vendors to manage it. Now to get the builder to touch up the delivery scuffs & gouges in the stairwells, which were clearly designed without imagining that someone would want to move anything into the house.

Next in line: get the Sears charges for appliances removed from my AmEx account. They shouldn't have been applied to begin with because Sears received the money from the builder on 10 June, but six emails and three phone calls still haven't resulted in any, you know, action. I've finally sicced AmEx on them by disputing the charges.

Also, despite four calls to Seattle City Light (including one from the builder), I still don't have my garbage/recycling bins, so I continue to make early morning runs to dumpsters. (And, BTW, yes--the light company also provides water, sewer and trash; although apparently not in a timely manner.) I'm not going to be happy about them when they finally arrive anyhow: seems the trash bin isn't a bin at all, but a box, which I'll have to carry to the pick-up point. Which is more than 100 meters from my actual house.

Seriously--when people assured me I'd love the PNW because "people are so laid back", they had to have been referring to service providers.

Don't have approved trash receptacles? Just hang on to the trash until we get around to it.

One more indignity (I was going to say "final", but I've no doubt that Seattle has many, many more in store): my final water bill ($172 for 60 days; in Virginia it was $25/quarter) from the City of Bellevue contains a $10 "additional charge".

It's for "final bill".

Pity I didn't bring the gelignite with me.

Remembering the first day of the Somme

Ninety-three years ago today the British Army impaled itself upon the idea that if you only throw more men at entrenched machine gun emplacements, you’ll achieve a breakthrough in a war of stagnation.

The first day of the Battle of the Somme cost the Brits 58,000 casualties (almost 20,000 of them dead), but won no breakthrough. Neither did it break through the dense crania of the British generals. The new commander, Sir Douglas Haig, remained boneheaded to his death, which unfortunately came long after the Armistice in 1918.

(Generals typically were not in danger of injuries, unless they fell off their polo ponies or slipped on the floor of the officers’ mess.)

No, wave after wave of Tommies went over the top from 1 July to 18 November without enough land to grow a crop of wheat changing hands. The ground was churned to sludge by unbelievable numbers of artillery bombardments; farmers are still turning up unexploded shells as they tend their fields. In the end the butcher’s bill ran to 420,000 British, 200,000 French and 500,000 Germans dead, missing and; wounded.

So pause a moment and think of the day when the sun truly began to set on the British Empire, and consider the tens of thousands of men who’ve rested along the battle line for the past 93 years.

Another one bites the dust

Well, well, well—seems that, while justice is still a dream, the law still has some edge on her sword.

US District Court Judge Denny Chin sentenced Bernie Madoff to 150 years in prison for running the largest (so far) Ponzi scheme in US history. This is the full sentence demanded by the prosecution & 12.5 times what Madoff’s attorneys had suggested as a “reasonable” term.

Still not enough for the hundreds of victims of Madoff’s scheme, but I guess it’s a start. & because Madoff pleaded guilty there’s no way that death can vacate the verdict, as it did with Kenny Lay, of Enron fame. (I still want them to dig him up to make sure the bastard’s actually dead.)

Let’s hope the rest of the greed-a-rama set on Wall Street pays attention.

Summer wines

Although I’m suffering from withdrawal symptoms over Eric Felten throwing over his drinks column in the Wall Street Journal, that publication’s wine writers are taking up some of the slack.

This week they give recommendations on jug wines (not jugs, really, but 1.5 litre bottles), just in time for the holiday weekend.

I have to say that I’ve not got much hope of finding the selection here in Washington state; & certainly not at the prices quoted, since the state government jacks up prices for some unknown reason. (Unless it’s just the old revenue wheeze.)

But you may be able to find some. If so—salud!