Get thee to a nunnery

Reading this article on in the Times made remember something from high school.

Miss Kubic taught the top class in freshman geometry atmy high school. We figured that’s about as perfect name as you could get for a geometry teacher.

File:The Flying Nun.jpg

Toward the end of the year over lunch our classmate, Adam, said, “Hey don’t you think Miss Kubic looks like Sally Fields in the Flying Nun?”

“I suppose there’s a resemblance. You should ask her if she can fly.”

“I think I will,” Adam resolved.

We left the dining hall, laughing about that, and discussing how Adam would beat a sheepish retreat from the faculty.

Instead, Adam came bursting out of McCune Dining Hall, “She is the Flying Nun!”

“Huh? No way!”

“I asked her if she’s the Flying Nun and she said, ‘Yes.’” Adam explained.

I was gobsmacked.

We found out during class the next day, that Miss Kubic had decided next year to noviate to become a nun. As she was putting a drink on her tray in line, Adam had asked her, “Are you the Flying Nun.” and she had heard, “Are you going to be a nun?” and she replied honestly, “Yes.”

Whenever I think of that, I laugh out loud a little.

I was taught geometry by the Flying Nun.

Taibbi

“His description of the root causes of this financial crisis are about what you’d expect from a man who invoked The Great Gatsby to explain the mentality of the murderer of 4,000 people.”
— Matt Taibbi, on Newsweek’s Fareed Zakaria

You have to admire Taibbi for his liberal outrage. Even if you don’t agree with him, his turns of phrases is a mastery of the intellectual smackdown.Then again, maybe I should admire Zakaria for carrying the kool-aid for his corporate masters.

History, after all, will not be kind on the latter.

Mild dementia

Reading this article on the new Voigtländer 50mm f1.1 Nokton, I was surprised to find out that the English translation of the Japanese word bokeh is “mild dementia.”

Definitely a Backstroke of the West moment there.

Check out the “mild dementia” on these two:

Mark Trammel

Mark Trammel
Citizen Spaces, South of Market, San Francisco, California

Leica M8, Cosina-Voigtländer NOKTON 35mm F1.2 Aspherical
1/16 sec, iso 320, 35mm (47mm)

Creamy smooth mild dementia

Scolding Veronica

Scolding Veronica
Citizen Spaces, South of Market, San Francisco, California

Leica M8, Cosina-Voigtländer NOKTON 35mm F1.2 Aspherical
1/16 sec, iso 320, 35mm (47mm)

The mild dementia created by people in the background is busy but still manageable.

Amazon’s Kindle screen failure and warrantee woes

Kindle WTF

Not cool.

I finally got around to calling Amazon about this. They claim it’s “impact damage not a manufacturing defect” so I have to pay $200 to replace it. “Amazon trains us, we’ve seen a lot of reports of just this sort of thing, and they say when we see diagonal damage, this is caused by impact and we don’t replace it. If you had horizontal or vertical lines it’s a failure of the circuitry and that’s a manufacturing defect.”

Let me be the first one to call bullshit on this.

Continue reading about How the Kindle failed after the jump

Bag rack

A year and a half later:

Bag rack

Why is it that a notebook computer is designed completely differently from a dSLR camera? To torment me?

Any other photo/computer geeks and nerds out there way too many bags?

And yes, I recently gave away four bags before this photo was taken.