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To reduce clutter, we’ve been selling a few old items on eBay recently. To perk up the auction listings, I’ve engaged in some minor product photography. Here are some of Grace’s old shoes:

Links from that page go to all the other auctions.

I think my pictures are a lot better than those found on other eBay shoe auctions. For the amateurs, the pictures look like they were taken by a point-and-shoot with the shoes propped up on the bed or floor. Interestingly, the professional sellers, or at least those with ridiculously high eBay ratings, are mounted a bit better, but still often have the look of an undiffused built-in flash. Arguably, if you’re selling hundreds of shoes a week, you’re not going to spend that much time shooting each one, but you’d have thought there’d be a lightbox set up for the items as well as a well-defined workflow to reduce the unit costs of the listing. You want your product to look good, not like they’ve just been dumped out of the box.

The photos I have were taken with a cheap “studio” setup consisting of a large sheet of plain white poster paper from Wal-Mart (about $2 for a 3-pack) and a sheet of tri-folded paper with a hole cut in the middle and placed around the lens to diffuse the on-camera flash. The side light was provided by the afternoon sun shining on venetian blinds. I think I needed light to the left, probably from a reflector, but didn’t think of it at the time. Arguably, this would have been a sheet of aluminum foil propped up on a chair. But I got decent results from what I had! I suppose having an SB-800 would still have been better, though what I used basically cost about $1. (In any case, I think I’m going to buy the flash unit before getting any other lens, as I have my focal lengths covered, but lighting not so much.) In terms of the camera, I used the 50mm f/1.8D lens, with aperture set at f/22 and EV adjusted to compensate for the diffused i-TTL flash. (Does the SB-800 have a switch to tell it the diffuser is on? Or does it do a pre-flash to register how the light from the flash is affecting the exposure?) A tripod was necessary, of course.

There’s also an interesting technique using “painting with light” and digital image stacking on this DPReview thread. Basically, in a dark room, remotely release the camera, while shining a flashlight on the subject from a variety of angles. Move around enough, and you effectively have omnidirectional lighting, as if you took the photo in a large light box with multiple flashes. The image stacking software is derived from astronomy applications, to shoot star photos without incurring as much light pollution or CCD heat noise by taking a number of (relatively) short shutterspeed shots and blending them in post processing.

This past Saturday, we went to Blossom again, using our last two upgrades where we traded in lawn tickets for pavillion seats. Blossom was relatively empty that evening: it had been raining all day, though the sun had come out a couple of hours before nightfall. At the beginning of the concert, the conductor thanked us all for braving the weather. From our reckoning, this actually was a perfect time to use the upgrades, as there would be less competition for pavillion seats and the grass would have been wet. As it was, our seats were more central than what we got the first time, though perhaps a bit further back. No photos, though.

The evening’s program was “Bernstein’s America”: a few famous works by Bernstein, mixed in with some by his contemporaries as they were creating “serious” music for America. “Serious” music, in this case, is a bit hard to pin down, as the conductor noted: Bernstein moved between genres and media, and the evening featured his songs from movies and Broadway, Wonderful Town, On the Town and West Side Story in particular.

Here’s the Plain Dealer’s review of the concert: “Delicate touches highlight ‘Bernstein’s America’ night“. It was a very participatory time, starting off with the Star Spangled Banner and later featuring rythmic clapping for various other songs. (Coincidentally, I had just started Gaddis’s Surprise, Security, and the American Experience, which briefly touches on our long-forgotten moment of national humilation in the War of 1812 by noting that the anthem’s third stanza recalling the event is almost never sung. Arguably, Americans only know the first stanza, anyway, which ends with the words, “Play ball!”) In one moment, the conductor turned to face the audience and gave timing directions to his with his baton. To round out a festive night, in a moment that recalls rock concerts more than classical music performances, the orchestra followed up the printed program with a number of encores, and finished with an unfurled flag behind the stage and a burst of colored confetti that resembled fireworks, but without the danger.

There were frequent diversions from the printed program, and an elderly man in a tuxedo would wander in from stage left holding up a placard in his spotlight with the title and composer printed on it, like the girls in between rounds at a boxing match but without the high heels and pirouette, before placing the placard on an easel. This actually was useful, as they played a number of familiar tunes that I didn’t know the names of. “Semper Fidelis” by Sousa (which I’m, bizarrely, most familiar with as something used on an old Jetsons episode, words provided by Space Scouts Troop 54), “Field Artillery” also by Sousa, and “Teddy Bear’s Picnic” by John Bratton. William Schuman’s “Chester” oveture was supposed to have been familiar, but I didn’t recognize it at all.

As a last note, this actually wasn’t the Cleveland Orchestra, who are on a European tour right now, but the Cleveland Pops. I noticed that the Pops were heavy with wind and brass instruments, and apparently had a lone cello as its string section. Is that the definition of a “Pops” compared to a “Symphony” or “Orchestra”? Or is the mix of instruments geared to what they typically play.

For Labor Day weekend, the Cincinatti Pops will be at Blossom, for a Star Wars extravaganza, hosted by Anthony Daniels. We have our last two lawn tickets from the ten pack, and the weather should be wonderful with the remnants of hurricane Katrina passing through mid-week. Can’t wait.

This is derived from AllRecipes.com’s Fig and Lemon Chicken, which used dried figs and chicken thighs, so we have to do things with the greater amount of liquid from fresh figs.

Ingredients:

• 1 lemon, juiced
• 1/4 cup brown sugar
• 2 tbsp balsamic vinegar
• 1/4 cup water
• 6 figs, trimmed and quartered
• 1 lemon, sliced
• 2 chicken breasts, about 1.5 lbs
• 1 handful cillantro, chopped

1. Preheat oven to 400F
2. Combine in small bowl lemon juice, brown sugar, balsamic vinegar and water
3. Place figs and lemon slices on the bottom of a 8″ square baking pan. Arrange chicken brests on top, then pour liquid over chicken.
4. Roast until chicken reaches internal temp of 180F, basting frequently.
5. Use tongs to remove chicken to serving dish. Mix roasted figs with chicken, discard lemon slices.
6. Put the liquid on non-stick frying pan and reduce until liquid is syrupy. Pour over chicken and figs. Serve with rice.

We picked up Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild after seeing it in one of the Alaska bookstores, in the large “local interest” section. I had actually heard of the story before, around the time it happened. As Krakauer noted, it made national news for a little while, and he wrote an Outside magazine article about it, after a few weeks of research (I haven’t read the article). This book is an expansion of what he found for the article, and also a years-later apology/revision/explorartion of that article.

The book is basically about the death by starvation of Christopher McCandless in the Alaskan wilderness in 1992. He had given himself the pseudonym “Alex Supertramp” for his cross-country wanderings after graduating from Emory in 1990 as he sought to escape mainstream society and find some truth about himself in the vast empty places of America. Krakauer attempts to find why he did this, and how McCandless’s quest fits into other stories of lonely, ascetic truthseekers, including Krakauer himself.

From the author’s point of view, McCandless was not unique: there are always young men leaving the confines of society to into the wild by themselves. Krakauer relates the story of medieval monks crossing the North Sea to find solitary islands, perishing in droves. And he tells us of an Everett Ruess, who, sixty years before McCandless, wandered into the Arizona desert and disappeared. Wallace Stegner had compared Ruess to the great naturalist John Muir, noting that they were very similar, differing only in their age. McCandless was not unique, though he was unlike most of the other oddballs and misfits that find their way to Alaska and stay to test theories on human development or embark on ill-prepared tests of manhood. (Krakauer notes that McCandless survived for more than 100 days without human contact in Alaska, so he wasn’t completely incompetent though that does not excuse terrible, fatal errors and blindspots, primarily the lack of a map of the area he decided to make his camp. There were also mistakes in the original Outside article suggesting foolhardy ignorance on the part of McCandless that Krakauer attempts to correct in this longer book.) McCandless attempted to find some sort of truth in the wildernesses of America, something Krakauer identifies with through his own story of his foolhardy, ill-prepared climb of the Devil’s Thumb mountain: a great feat, whether living alone in Alaska for a season or scaling a daunting mountain, would provide the doer with transcedence, perhaps enough to set his world aright. In this, the only thing separating McCandless from Krakauer, the dead from the living, is mere luck.

(A friend of mine from college spent the summer before grad school at a salmon cannery in Cordova, Alaska, perhaps because of a milder form of McCandless’s post-college wanderings. But at least my friend knew he was coming back, and what he was doing once he got back.)

Coincidentally, there’s a recent Slate review of the new Werner Herzog documentary Grizzly Man, about someone else who ventured into the Alaska wilderness to find something in nature and wound up dead. In the case of Grizzly Man, Timothy Treadwell apparently attempted to bond with nature by living in close proximity to grizzly bears. After years of extolling the gentle nature of grizzlies and their harmlessness, a bear ate him and his girlfriend. (Eskimos, who have lived in proximity to these bears for millennia, respect grizzlies by being clear that there is a line separating bears from humans, a line not to be lightly crossed.) This review caught my eye when I was thinking about writing this post because the reviewer talks about Melville’s rebuke of the Transcendentalist movement of Thoreau, Emerson, and the rest (writers McCandless was very fond of):

You might sit astride a mast and feel your oneness with nature, Melville wrote, but fall into the sea and you’re going to get eaten. For all his attention to his bears, for all his boasts that he was “on the precipice of death” and could be attacked at any moment, Treadwell didn’t fully see nature.

From Melville’s point of view, the Wild wasn’t someplace one goes to find the transcedental truth about oneself: it is a wonder, but indifferent and unforgiving and unreasoning: Ahab will not find answers about his lost leg from Moby Dick, as there aren’t any. (I started Moby Dick but never finished it. I have some new incentive to finish it now.)

Whether from misguided antimaterialism, youthful arrogance or finding out that our fathers are flawed human after all, some young people will seek out transcedental truths that they believe to lie outside society’s boundaries. It happens all the time: witness John Walker Lindh of recent memory, who “wanted something pure” and found himself fighting with the Taliban. Arguably, if Lindh had lived in an earlier age, he would have found this purity in Leninism, or, perhaps further back, turn-of-the-century nihilism. Perhaps the 7/7 bombers were the same way, finding the Islamist death cult instead of Marxist materialism because of the vagaries of history. In McCandless case, the quest for purity took the form of solitary sojourns into the wild that proved ultimately fatal.

Here’s a table of (apparently all) Nikon lens serial numbers. I found it when trying to identify old lenses to sell on EBay. I don’t know ho w complete it is, but it certainly includes a lot of the old AI and AIS types and accompanying pictures for many of the lenses. The serial number ranges are also helpful.

I read it a couple of weeks ago, shortly after finishing The Dark Tower. It was an interesting contrast, if only because both Potter and The Dark Tower are seven-book series that are long in the making. As noted, King didn’t really have a plan on how his books were going to turn out, at least not until he was closer to the end, whereas Rowling has an outline of what will happen, with innocuous subjects in earlier books purposefully taking on greater weight later: she’s clearly using Chekhov’s gun. And Potter’s universe is far more clearly a children’s universe, after being on the road to the Tower for the month prior to starting The Half-Blood Prince: this was the darkest book by far but is a ray of sunshine compared to, say, the tragedy of Susan Delgado, and there is nothing of the texture of the fairy-tale redemptive joy of Susannah when she finds her clearing at the end of her path. This is my second-favorite Potter book (my first favorite is probably The Prisoner of Azkaban, when all this was newer and fresher), but I think, in a few years after Book 7 comes out, I will finish the series with appropriate excitement, and then tuck it away without much further thought. Rowling will have wrapped out the important questions, and there will no longer be any more mysteries.

But, anyway, speculations on this future book. Spoilers ahoy!

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In New York, it’s relatively hard to pick up tickets for Yankee games. In Cleveland, I stopped by the team store at Jacobs Field the week before Tuesday’s game and got two behind home plate, albeit towards the back of the upper deck. Much easier, and the ballpark is only a leisurely 20-minute walk away. Yes, it was past our bedtimes, but not that far past, and the following day was an easy one. It’s a pity the Yankees are in town only for this three game set, Tuesday through Thursday.

Here are the pictures:

The Yankees got an early lead with Tino Martinez’s home run, but Leiter didn’t last three innings. The Yankees were able to make a game of it with their big bats, but the Indians had too big a lead to squander at the end. The game turned on the 7th inning, when the Indians were able to keep the Yankee rally from overwhelming them.

Grace had the camera for a while, and there were a large number of Derek Jeter photographs.

On our way to our seats, we stopped by the Johnny Applestix concession in the middle of the field level concourse. One of its founders does aikido at Cleveland Aikikai and had been talking about his new business. Basically, apple slices in a cinnamon-flavored coating, fried, and served with some sweet dip (caramel or key lime). Tasty, and lighter than your standard issue French fry.

There were a large number of Yankee fans all over the place. Most of them were apparently in the upper decks, presumably because the field level seats were taken by local season ticket holders. To our left were a father and son in Yankee travel grays. Behind us were Spanish-speakers chatting about how Leiter was getting bombed. To our right, on the far side of the Indians fan tracking the game in his scorebook, were another cluster. Our seats, in fact, had been taken by Yankee fans confused about the section layout of Jacobs Field. After the game, walking back through Downtown, the various groups of Yankee fans — and they were always in decent sized groups — veered into the various hotels on our route home. Yankee tickets are easier to get out here, so you might as well make a trip out of it, eat out, see the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and maybe take a daytrip south to see the Amish.

The mascot is of an unidentified species with bright green fur and Day-Glo yellow spots. This is the PC era mascot, and I suppose that the franchise would have used someone with warpaint and feather headress in more benighted times. He spent various moments shooting t-shirts into the crowd, or Super Soaking an uncouth and ill-dressed incarnation of the visiting team, finishing off this little Passion Play by smashing a Yankee-logo batting helmet. If there is a little voodoo in that smashed helmet, it must be working: the Yankees haven’t been able to hold a lead and have lost two so far, with the last game tonight. But Yankee starting pitching has sucked all season.

Unlike most Stephen King fans, my road to the Dark Tower only began a couple of months ago, when I packed The Gunslinger and The Drawing of the Three into our bags to go to Alaska: airplane reading. I had had all the books at home for months, but hadn’t gotten around to starting them, and our long trip seemed like the perfect time. But the days on the ship were busy, and I didn’t finish the second book until we were almost at Anchorage. With long hours on buses and trains ahead, one quotidian highlight of the trip was finding a used bookstore in Anchorage and picking up The Wastelands for a buck. A week later, I finished that book just in time to return it for some credit at the same bookstore and pick up Wizard and Glass for the plane rides home.

I started with the revised edition of The Gunslinger, which has the forward by King explaining what it was like to write this book at the age of 19, and to come back to it decades later. The long gestation of this series shows: ideas, minor characters and plot points disappear or make annoying little cameos that have little point. Other devices appear out of nowhere. Walter, for example, makes cameos somewhat in the fashion that Lucas inserted Grand Moff Tarkin at the end of Episode III and meets an abrupt and unexpected end by Mordred. The Tick Tock Man seemed to loom as a major villain when the ka tet leaves Lud, but is vanquished pitifully a mere few hundred pages later. The idea of nineteen appears from nowhere (though King inserted “nineteen” in the revised Gunslinger apparently), though it plays such an important part in the final books. Other things, like factual mistakes King made about the location of Coop City in New York, were retrofitted into the plot to illustrate the differences between Keystone New York and its shadows. I suppose one contrast is to the Harry Potter series, where Rowling has mapped out the plot elements from beginning to end. But the Dark Tower is more ambitious, as it tries to bind together many of Kings works into one metaphysical framework, even though it only seemed to begin as some sort of youthful post-apocalyptic Western.

The series seems to pivot and change after Wizard and Glass. The last three books were written in a creative rush shortly after King’s accident (which, in a metafiction fashion is a major turning point in the last book), and their better coherence shows. Wolves of the Calla introduces many of the key points for the rest of the series, and leads without pause into Song of Susannah, and its cliffhanger makes more sense and works far better than when we left the ka tet with Blaine at the end of The Wastelands. And Song brings us naturally into The Dark Tower, where the Breakers are stopped and the writer saved, and the Dark Tower in its field of roses reached. In some sense, the Dark Tower is more like two series, with the introduction of characters and the drawing of the three, an interlude in Meijis-that-was, and the trilogy that happens after the ka tet receives its gifts from the Wizard of Oz. True, you can’t begin the final trilogy without first introducing the characters in a fashion that makes Constant Reader care about them, but the disjointed feeling still remains: King created Roland and his ka tet, put the story down for a while, and was eager to find out what happens to them in the end.

All the same, this was a wonderful set of books, no matter how disjointed, and it drew me in deeply. It’s an ambitious effort, though it perhaps falls short of its full ambitions simply because it took decades to write, and people who are 19 are not the same as when they are 39. King’s writing, though perhaps not high art, has a way of seeping into your consciousness, perhaps because it’s woven to make books rather than to be admired in its own right. Calla idioms, for example, started to almost make it into the way I talk for a while: “it’ll do ya fine” and “thankee sai” were the main culprits. And the concept of Callahan’s inadvertent years-long travels through todash America was well married to the phrase “highways in hiding.” And there are haunting plot points that make this series memorable: the death of Susan Delgado, for example, and Susannah’s reunion with Eddie and Jake at a clearing at the end of her path through Roland’s world.

Of course, something has to be said about the ending. I would have been happy if the series had ended with clang of the Tower’s door after Roland enters it, and with Susannah in New York. King was right to be hesitant about writing about what happens after Roland begins to climb the Tower, because something built up so long over the years and the thousands of pages could only be anticlimatic, and King didn’t have an ending like “It’s full of stars” available. And so we have the metaphor that “ka is a wheel” made literal. It’s unfortunate.

One has to point out the great Stephen King/Dark Tower wiki at The Dark Tower.net, which maps out the books and provides a rough concordance of the characters and places. I think I’ll pick up Hearts In Atlantis next. Since I already had a copy of Wizard and Glass, I sold the copy from Anchorage in a local used bookstore for a couple dollars credit. I’ll swing by there on Friday and see if they have it.

Here’s a neat Google Maps hack that lets you figure out the length of route, given a set of waypoints.

Finally, I know (about a year after when it may have mattered) that the route we always took walking back from Fairway along Broadway to turn at W. 77th Street is the optimal route, beating the “turn at W. 74th to Riverside Drive” by half a block. Similarly, the optimal way to get from the Wall Street 7th Avenue IRT station to my old office is around 160 feet shorter by going down Warren Street and across on Beaver, compared walking along Wall Street before going down on Broadway.

For Cleveland, my walking route to the gym in Cleveland is about 0.7 miles, and that we walked about 2.5 miles to and back from Jacobs Field for last night’s baseball game, not counting whatever distance is involved with getting around the stadium’s interior.

Update: There’s also a Google Maps hack that measures area. Here’s a blog devoted to Google Maps hacks.

I finally made bread that wasn’t dense. Previous attempts have tended to result in dense (though sufficiently tasty) bread because I screwed up something in either the kneading or by not allowing enough time for the dough to rise after forming. They weren’t hockey pucks, but had relatively small bubbles in the, um, bread foam. The dough has also perhaps been either too dry or a little too wet and tacky.

I was using a variation of this portuguese bread recipe, which, I suppose, differs from what I’d been doing before by using shortening as the oil, rather than olive oil or butter:

• 2 tablespoons sugar
• 3 teaspoons salt
• 6 tablespoons vegetable shortening
• 1 cup boiling water
• 1 package dry yeast
• 1 cup warm water
• 6 cups flour
• Olive oil

1. Mix sugar, salt, shortening and boiling water to dissolve shortening. Cool to lukewarm.
2. Dissolve yeast in 1 cup lukewarm water in mixing bowl and add mixture from step 1.
3. Add 3 cups of the flour and mix until smooth with paddle attachment. Switch to dough hook and gradually add remaining flour until dough comes cleanly off the sides and bottom of bowl. Rest the dough for 5 minutes, then knead the dough in the mixer for 5 more minutes. The dough should be silky smooth.
4. Grease a bowl with olive oil. Place the dough in the bowl, cover with clean towel and put in a warm spot until dough is doubled in size. An unheated oven with a pan of lukewarm water is a good spot.
5. Punch down the dough and divide in half. Half the dough can be kept in the fridge for a week before use. Divide each half into thirds and shape into hockey puck shapes and put on an oiled cookie sheet. Cover and let rise until doubled. Bake at 400 degrees F until golden, about 20 minutes. Internal temperature should be around 195F.

Most of the variations are gleaned from, say, Alton Brown’s More Food book. “Punch down” should be read as “tri-folding deflated dough a few times to redistribute yeast clusters”.

One general problem is that I don’t come from a household tradition of bread making, so I’m not sure what good dough is supposed to look and feel like: Chinese people don’t bake. I have no examples to go by (which makes me think that taking cooking/baking classes would be a good thing, so that someone can say, yes, this is the texture you’re trying to achieve). I think some of the drier breads in the past have been because I’ve added too much flour, because I didn’t want to work with messy dough. There have been times the pendulum swung the other way, and I worked with dough that was too sticky. I think I got it right this time, adding the flour more slowly until it just went past the point of stickiness. I was also much more patient about letting the dough rise (though some of the rise time was inadvertent, as I had wandered off to watch the Tivo’ed Battlestar Galactica episode from the past weekend).

Interesting, I did this in our new toaster oven, the old toaster being a casualty of crumbly/gooey Trader Joe vegi-patties that disintergrated in a non-cleanable way. I figure the dinky, cheap toaster oven, while perhaps only half as efficient as the big oven, is still only a fifth the volume, so will still save energy for relatively small baking jobs. (I can always add in better insulation by stacking a block of asbestos on top of it). The problem is that it is a bit small, so the heat isn’t uniformly distributed through its volume: you can get too near the top and bottom heating elements with well-risen dough. In fact, the bottom of the rolls were a little burnt. But the results were still good.