"You're drunk; & you missed the bowl"

For my Friday frivolity today, I offer you the latest in Singapore’s comprehensive, erm, comprehensiveness: the Pee Analyzer.

In an attempt to stem the tide of drunk driving, a posh nightclub has installed devices in the men’s room urinals that detect the alcohol level in a user’s pee. The devices are keyed to RFID cards that patrons get when they valet park their car, and the level is recorded on the card. If it’s over the legal limit, a sign lights up advising him he should consider alternative transport home.

(Not, you’ll notice, that he should stop drinking. It is in a bar, after all.)

The RFID card gets swiped again at the parking valet station, and the patron gets another chance to decide not to get behind the wheel.

This video ‘splains it all, although you have to wade through a lot of annoying music to get to it.

They claim that in a two-week period the pee analyzers ratted out 573 sloshed patrons, of whom 342 used the drive-home service or called a cab. I find those numbers not massively impressive—fewer than 40 per night? Although I suppose a lot of men’s room users could have been walk-in patrons.

As for women—they have to determine their level of consumption the old-fashioned way: waking up with a massive hangover, possibly in a bed not their own.

Google 1, National Geographic 0

Google’s doodle for today honors Rosalind Franklin, the Cambridge-trained scientist and photographer whose photos of DNA strands enabled other researchers to nail down the structure of the basic building block of genetics.

If you click on the doodle, it takes you to a search result page that includes this story from National Geographic. I couldn’t believe that publication refers to Franklin as a “Legendary Female Scientist”.

What the hell? She was a meticulous and dedicated researcher, who died much too young and was subsequently denied Nobel recognition that other DNA explorers (notably Watson and Crick)—who actually used her photos to advance their studies without her knowledge—were granted.

(The Nobel committee doesn’t award prizes posthumously, and Franklin died in 1958, four years before Crick and Watson received theirs.)

I find it nothing short of bizarre that National G would qualify their commentary on Google’s honor by designating her a “female scientist”.

You’d have expected that in the 1950s; not in 2013. Grow the hell up, National Geographic.

Box of the past

I’ve begun sorting through a carton of photos, slides and negatives dating back to my first camera—a Nikon S3 rangefinder that was older than I.

(That camera accounts for the name of this blog, BTW—because before single lens reflex (SLR) cameras you looked through the viewfinder to compose your shot, but the lens took a slightly different picture than what you saw. That delta between viewfinder and picture is called the parallax view. Cute, no?)

I’m doing this exercise because I’m about to ship off the pictures I really want to maintain to a digitizing service, and it’s a lot of work. Back in the day of film, children, I would shoot a roll of film in hopes that I’d produce maybe six or seven interesting photos, and those would be the ones I’d print. But I’ve still got all the positives, negatives and slides.

Meaning photos from four continents, associated with a multitude of events and experiences, so it’s taking some time to go through it all.

(Plus, I need to find a light table to scope out the negs. I recall why I used to shoot slide film—including Kodachrome of beloved memory: there are people who can look at negatives and tell what’s a good shot and what isn’t. I’m not one of them. And for damn sure, without a light table I’m hosed.)

Well, you don’t care about all that. What I also do is take snaps of things I find interesting, or a commentary on my surroundings. (I’ve shared some of the scenery of the Silicon Valley right here in these blog pages.)

So here’s one I shot when I was living in LA, in the 80s. For some reason which now escapes me I’d gone to Glendale and was wandering around. I saw this store and immediately snapped off the shot. It’s not going to make the shades of Dorothea Lange or Lee Miller twitch in the least, but it tells you a lot about the great state of California.

As we say here—America, gonif!

New kid on the block

You might have heard that the line of succession to the British crown has been extended; the Duchess of Cambridge gave birth to a boy on Monday & the world press has behaved like it’s nothing short of the Second Coming.

Well, maybe a teeny bit short. But they've really been making complete plonkers of themselves, no doubt about it.

So I’m not going to rehash all of that. I’m just going to tell you how I’m connected to the event.

You’ll recall that my friend Marcia is a change-ringer, & that a while ago she rang at Windsor Castle on the occasion of a state visit from Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan of Abu Dhabi, the president of the United Arab Emirates.

Yesterday Marcia was expecting to devote the day to supervising the installation of a shed in her garden, but at 2200 on Monday she got a call From The Castle (or, you know, someone repping the Castle) asking if she’d come ring in the afternoon to officially mark the Royal Birth. (Which is a hashtag that has been trending on all the social media. In case you’ve been in a cave without even dial-up connectivity.)

So, despite the nasty heatwave Britain has been experiencing (elsewhere in the world that would be known as “summer”, but the Brits are unused to that sort of thing), she showed up in that grody little ringing chamber & rang for 30 minutes.

(There was a full peal in the tower of Westminster Abbey, which went on for three hours. Well, maybe not a “full” peal—some of those suckers can go on for nine hours. But it was still long enough to wear out some of the listeners outside the Abbey. The ringers in the hot, badly-ventilated ringing chamber must have been wrung out.)

Dunno whether she & her comrades got paid the same cheap £4 they received the last time they were there. HM certainly does not understand the concept of laborers being worthy of their hire.

You’d have thought that at least she’d splash out on a bit of bubbly. She must have a large enough collection of the stuff down in the Castle’s cellar.

Ciao, Dennis

It’s very sad news indeed to learn of the death of actor Dennis Farina, who died yesterday at age 69.

Farina was a character actor, but he had such an innate force to him that he filled the screen whenever he appeared. Between that lived-in looking face, the heavy-lidded brown eyes and his whisky-filtered voice, he struck me from the beginning as a guy you really didn’t want to mess with.

If you were another guy.

If you were a woman, you were willing to take a risk on him because, well, what the hell—it might end badly, but you’d have a really good time while it lasted. That was the vibe he gave off.

He definitely had that mad, bad and dangerous to know look about him.

Farina often played the two sides of the law—either a cop or a mobster. He carried both off with authenticity. Perhaps it was the 18 years he spent as a cop in Chicago that lent such credibility to his performances.

I first saw him in an episode of China Beach back in the 90s. He wiped the floor with everyone on screen with him. Then he was on Law & Order for a couple of years after Jerry Orbach left the series. As Detective Joe Fontana he absolutely conveyed the kind of authority mixed with menace that you expect from a NYC detective.

He never looked like he was acting; he just inhabited the role.

Fontana wore hand-made shirts and bespoke suits, and he carried a roll of bills—all of which made you wonder where he got it all. The L&O producers wisely never speculated. They just let him get on with solving the crimes, and he wasn’t above tossing out some misinformation to do that.

Whenever he and Detective Ed Green’s actions were questioned by a citizen, Fontana would say with absolute assurance, “It’s okay—we’re authorized.”

Well, I believe I’m authorized to dredge out some grappa and lift a glass to the memory of a class act.

Gratitude Monday: French toast & friendship

My Gratitude Monday for today entry may seem a little, oh, petty to you. 

Too bad.

I’m grateful for hole-in-the-wall diners only open for breakfast & lunch, where the waitress remembers someone who hasn’t been in for three years, greets her & asks after her mother.

I’m grateful for teeny tables not even big enough for one, even before they put on the salt & pepper shakers, the sugar/sweetener holder, the dish of little cream jobbers, the ketchup, jelly & jam packet container, the hot sauce & about five other things. & I’m grateful for the waitress just picking up most of that crap & lining the window sill with it to make room for our plates.

I’m grateful for really eggy French toast, with extra butter & maple syrup. I’m grateful for bacon cooked so it’s still wiggly (I do not like crisp bacon), which you can use to push around some of the melted butter & syrup on the French toast plate.

I’m grateful for two-and-a-half-hour breakfasts that don’t involve laptops (although, to be fair, there was a bit of smart-phone Internet searching to settle a couple of questions); just conversations, problem sharing (with a smattering of solving) & general friendship.

I’m grateful for leaving a diner feeling much, much better than I did when I arrived. & that is not petty at all.