Once I started using in-ear headphones, I couldn't go back to anything else. I had fairly high standards: they had to be portable enough to do triple-duty as a office/commute/home headset and feature sound quality at least an order of magnitude better than the lousy hiss coming from "ear-buds" (the term to me sounds like a euphemism for lobular nodules or a corn farmer's premature crop), the only other form factor matching the convenient size.
I procured my first pair in Tokyo a couple years ago (and was pleased as punch about my exotic purchase too, until I found I could buy the exact same model here without having to fly for 13 hours) and wore them until I wore them out. I ran out immediately and bought another pair, presently nestled snugly in my ear canals as I write this.
An unforeseen effect of in-ear headphones is paranoia. There's a little bit of general uneasiness as well, but that's to be expected as you are inserting little rubber mushrooms into a normally unobstructed orifice. No, the paranoia stems from the wax accruing on the interior, sound-emitting, portion of the speakers and its effect on their output. Every so often I will become convinced that my hearing is decaying as the songs or computer-generated Fibonacci tones I listen to daily become slowly muffled. What's worse, the effect is rarely symmetrical. While knowing since childhood that my right foot is very slightly larger than my left, it is only since using in-ear headphones that I've been forced to confront the possibility of lopsided hearing.
When I later pinpoint the muffling and reverse it by removing the wax build-up the paranoia is alleviated slightly, but not entirely. I am living in a body that produces ear wax asymmetrically.
Saturday night I found myself in a bar blanketed with the sounds of the Frat-tastic Sub-Canon of Greatest Hits. A subset of the broader Pop Music for Bars and Cars Canon of Greatest Hits, I've been trying to escape it ever since my roommate freshman year of college set his stereo alarm to a rotating triad of Steve Miller, Tom Petty, and The Allman Brothers Band, a triumvirate not unlike its Roman counterparts of yore in that, despite distributed and short-lived rule, its control was total, extensive, and brutal. Other Sub-Canons of Greatest Hits include Hip-Hop Embraced by White People, Artists Favoring Headset Microphones, and, more recently, My Grandparents Went to War and All I Got Was This Lousy Indie Rock.
Their evolution is glacial both in speed and strength, but it is important to note that change does occur. One can notice this by simply charting the frequency of Frank Sinatra songs played over the past few decades. There is a logic to this change.
I have linked to the uncanny valley before. Here it is in a nutshell:
The principle states that as a robot is made more humanlike in its appearance and motion the emotional response from a human being to robot will become increasingly positive and empathic, until a point is reached at which the response suddenly becomes strongly repulsive; as the appearance and motion are made to be indistinguishable to that of human being, the emotional response becomes positive once more and approaches human-human empathy levels.
One can describe the response to popular music in a very similar way, substituting time for degree of anthropomorphism. I've edited the Wikipedia's chart and included it herewith:
The process of inclusion in the Canon of Greatest Hits is much like a caterpillar's path to becoming a butterfly. Recent hits, once tired of, are placed in a chrysalis - a sort of escrow for collective cultural assets - and emerge years later glistening with nostalgia. Today's hits are tomorrow's untouchables and next week's golden oldies. Of course, some don't make it through the other side, but when they do it's a fairly secure position. Only time's mysterious interaction with whatever half-life the song is given can decay its presence.
Therefore in spite of begging, on bended knee and against the laws of all natural science, for it to be so, I have finally resigned myself to the futility of my strident plea for "Sweet Home Alabama" to be removed from the Frat-tastic Sub-Canon of Greatest Hits. I can fight Skynyrd's jukebox dominance no more, though I will not yet relinquish my dreams of outlasting it.
Here's an image taken at 55mm that shows the modest pincushion distortion (the shore line at the bottom has a bit of curve to it. At the wide end, there's slightly more distortion in the other direction (barrel).
Note that while I'm many miles away from the Alaska Range here (I'm actually sitting in a canoe in the middle of Wonder Lake), the lens is holding quite a bit of detail in the snowy slopes (pretty easy to see even at this small size). Indeed, the detail level that's being recorded is lost in the little bit of noise the D70 produces at ISO 200 (i.e., generally I'm camera limited by this lens, not optics limited). If anything, there's a tiny bit of diffraction softness in this image (taken at f/22), but you'd expect that with any lens at that aperture on a digital body.
What looks like light falloff at the top is actually a very gentle 1 stop soft edge graduated neutral density filter.
I've been studying Japanese in my spare time for the past year. I've also been reading up on digital SLR cameras since I bought one this past July. I'm not sure which language is more daunting.
There's a delicious, nondescript Chinese "Restaurant and Bakery" (heavy on the restaurant and light on the bakery) half a block from my office. It's plucked straight out of Chinatown, with ducks hanging in the window, dirt cheap lunchtime offerings (e.g. $3.75 for three ample dishes and rice), an almost entirely Chinese patron base, and chaotic service. You are alerted to your turn for ordering by a "HELLO" that is intoned somewhere between alarm and accusation. I believe it wound up in midtown through a diasporic wrong turn.
The 20 or so tins behind the shoulder-high glass vary in the difficulty of identifying their contents. The bok choi, tofu, and whole-fried shrimp are unmistakable. Some dishes are ambiguous in appearance, even enigmatic. This latter group can further be divided into dishes that one can identify upon eating (enlisting the senses of taste and smell from one's diagnostic arsenal), and those that obstinately refuse categorization. I'm pretty sure I ate some part of an intestinal tract once, though the animal whence it came will never be known.
As would be expected, the threshold for being fazed by one's food rises a bit when eating there on a constant basis. So today when I scooped a forkful of rice and a mystery vegetable into my mouth I thought nothing of the red sauce residue on the plastic afterwards. Communal serving tongs and ladles are used (note to vegans, vegetarians, picky eaters, and those with food allergies: stay away) and often some cross-pollination will leave a faint trace of pork in cabbage or a pea in some duck. Only when the normally pristine white rice at the bottom exhibited the same behavior did I realize that the whole time I'd been bleeding all over my lunch.
This past weekend, Sam and Kaysie got hitched. I can safely say this collection of photographs is "first among equals" of any wedding set I've so far taken when it comes to pictures of mid-air somersaults from pontoon boats.
I also discovered that a Holiday Inn is inferior to a Holiday Inn Express in the following ways:
