Send the Marines!
The Perfecting Equilibrium Digest, July 24-30, 2024
We'll send them all we've got
John Wayne and Randolph Scott
Remember those exciting fighting scenes?
To the shores of Tripoli
But not to Mississippoli
What do we do? We send the Marines!
Comment of the Week
Lynn W Gardner on About that time I wandered into a riot and a revolution: Christopher you forgot to add a Postscript that between the end of the first Marcos regime and Bongbong being elected President that we lost Clark and Subic Bay and the 1,000’s of Philipinnos that worked at the two bases lost their source of income because the intervening governments were idols. And we won’t even mention that there is not even one Navy Federal Credit Union branch or ATM still in the Philippines for all the expats to utilize. Oh and please tell us someday about the time you told a group of Marines what to do, it is a story we would like to read…..
Perfecting Equilibrium Stories
An update on the Black & White Scanning Project
After my article on The New Golden Age of Black & White I started to wonder how much better black and white film would look scanned by a monochrome camera. So I’m working on a comparo, and included the very nice ClearClick film scanner I recently reviewed. I have decided to wait for the Pentax 17 film camera to arrive so I can include high-quality lab s…
About that time I wandered into a riot and a revolution
We were sitting talked out on the hood of a Philippine Army Jeep in the soft predawn dark smoking cigarettes. Or the colonel was smoking a cigarette and I was pretending, smoking the cigarette like a cigar, pulling the smoke into my mouth and puffing it out without ever ever inhaling. But the colonel had offered one of his own cigarettes from a case, and it seemed churlish to refuse, and also I wanted to sit and chat and understand exactly what was going on that night. We were parked in front of Olongapo City Hall, where the mayor’s mother and sisters had barricaded themselves in so no one could loot the office.
Easter Eggs
My brain is a peculiar place; it likes to play word association, and then play back songs with those words. Here are the songs playing in my mind as I wrote these articles.
Next on Perfecting Equilibrium
Thursday August 1st - The PE Vlog
Friday August 2nd - Foto.Feola.Friday
Sunday, August 4th — The long sad twilight of the craftsmen: No one is amazed by my sniper anymore. The photo drew accolades for the way I nailed the focus on his eye, peering through the rifle sight. No one notices anymore; everyone with a smartphone has eye focus. That’s always the fate for craft — focus for photographers, spelling for writers. Automation opens the craft to everyone while displacing the crafters whose jobs were based on those skills.