That Seattle rain…
TV and movies love to show a rainy Seattle, and that has only increased the perception that it rains all the time. That really is not the case. New York, Boston, Atlanta, and Houston all get more annual rainfall than Seattle.
Today’s picture was a bit of a hint. That is a picture of downtown Seattle at night, taken from a room on the 10th floor of the Warwick Hotel.
The cameras of Christmas past
It is that time of year, when regional theatres across the land break out their productions of A Christmas Carol. It’s a good time for a Scrooge trivia question, and the answer is, of course, Ebenezer. That’s not to be confused with the Nebuchadnezzar, which is the hovership captained by Morpheus in The Matrix. Although, if someone were to do a mashup of The Matrix and A Christmas Carol, I’d go see that…
Speaking of things from the past… It’s not ghosts visiting me in the night to make a point, but I have had a bit of a blast from the past experience recently. I have had a storage unit for several years, where things go to live a dark and quiet existence in a variety of boxes. Unfortunately, or possibly fortunately (tomato/potato), the whole lot where the storage unit is located has been sold and is scheduled to be developed. So everyone has to get out.
This means that I spent the weekend going through boxes of stuff from years ago deciding what sparked joy. 😀 One of those things is the 38 year old Canon AE-1 Program you see above. I have since moved on to a, by comparison, new EOS Elan 7E (it’s only 19 years old!) for shooting film. But there is something timeless about the look of the old Canon, Nikon, Pentax, and Minolta cameras.
Taking photos on the moon
The photos astronauts took on the surface of the moon are still amazing. I mean, I have been to some pretty cool locations and shot with all kinds of wonderful people. But how do you compete with “I was on the moon!” In photography, like real estate, location, location, location…
As you would expect, the astronauts weren’t rolling with Kodak Instamatics. The quick and dirty answer is that the Apollo 11 astronauts used Hasselblad 500ELs. And an interesting bit of trivia is that they left the cameras on the moon to save weight so they could bring back moon rocks.
The slightly more complicated answer is that there were other cameras on the mission. There were two 16mm Maurer motion picture cameras, a color television camera in the Columbia orbiter, and a black and white TV camera on the lunar module that captured Neil Armstrong’s famous first steps. There was also a newly commissioned Kodak stereo close-up camera used to capture details of the lunar soil.
In the spirit of this, our top image today is of some negatives from a roll of film I just had developed. And just for kicks, I dropped it in Photoshop and pushed some buttons so you can get an idea of what those turned out like.
If the knocker up’s willing and the creek don’t rise…
A little throwback Thursday trivia today, taking us all the way back to the industrial revolution in the UK with the question, “What is a knocker-up?” It makes so much sense, once you know.
A knocker up is a person that would come around in the morning and knock on your door, or your window, to make sure you were up on time. Now, today, we are spoiled with ways to be woken. We have alarm clocks, and phones, and TVs, and smart lights that will simulate a sunrise. We have even advanced it to the point that we can tell an imaginary knocker up to wake us. It’s a marketing possibility Amazon, Apple, and Google have foolishly failed to take advantage of!
But as you can imagine, those things were not true as the world rolled into the industrial revolution. So, you would check in with your local knocker-up and schedule your wake up call.
Who drinks the most wine?
The question of which two countries drink the most wine per capita is a bit of a tricky one. The big hint there is the ‘per capita’. That lets you know that we are probably talking about smaller countries. But there is small, and then there is small.
The answers are Andorra and Vatican City. Andorra is a tiny principality in the Pyrenees between France and Spain with an area of 181 square miles. So, tiny. But that is huge compared to Vatican City. It covers just over 100 acres. For perspective, that is about one-eighth of Central Park.
According to The Telegraph, both countries average over 56 liters of wine for every person. An odd quirk of numbers reveals that while the US drinks the most wine total at over 3 billion liters per year, averaging that over the population nets just 9.9 liters per capita.
And the country that drinks the least wine per capita is Pakistan, coming in at just 0/00019 liters, which is still more than me. 😀 Our photo today shows a bottle from the Tanjuli winery, which I am told is quite good.
HP 9000/K-Class trivia
Despite their age, there are still a lot of the HP9000 / K-Class servers deployed. The line was launched with the K100, K200, and K400 in 1995! The higher spec K380 and K580 were introduced in 1998. 21 years old and still working away. We still have a lot of customers running these workhorse systems.
If the 21 year old server isn’t a crazy enough revelation, look closely at the memory carrier from my test system. It’s loaded with an impressive 8 64MB DIMMs! Half a gig of memory! Who could ever need more?!
Fruity beverage trivia
As mentioned before, I never drink anything with alcohol in it, so I’m always a bit out of my depth with any of the liquor based trivia. So I had not even the slightest idea when asked what the flavor of Cointreau is.
It’s orange. Apparently it comes from blending orange peels and alcohol made from sugar beets. Orange flavored liqueur sounds much more intriguing than beet flavored liqueur. 🙂
Some interesting facts… The Cointreau distillery dates back to 1849 and the first bottles of the orange flavored Cointreau we know today were sold in 1875. It’s estimated that 13 million bottles are sold each year. Less fact, more opinion, they have an amazing logo.
Of course, our photo has nothing to do with any of that. But the instagram beast must be fed. So we have the beverage that is on hand and a RX3600 test machine.
National Violin Day
I love violins. To be sure, I couldn’t even begin to play one. But the sounds and the shapes and the old wood… They are wonders to behold. And, to get to the trivia question, they have been around about 500 years. The modern violin is said to have been designed by Andrea Amati in the 1500s.
The violin pictured here is almost new by comparison. It wasn’t crafted until the late 1700s. This is from a shoot I did in Central Park, and when she told me how old the violin was I suddenly got very nervous.
Going mostly off-topic… if you would like to visit Central Park, and I suppose the rest of NY is ok too, now is a great time to schedule flights. I just booked a round trip ticket for February from Seattle to NY for $216.60.
London Bridge moves to the US
This works as a pretty fun trivia question in the short form. To which US state was London Bridge relocated in the late 1960s? The answer is Arizona. That’s fun. But the story as to why this all happened is also interesting. It’s all about marketing and a failed land development plan.
You’ve likely heard of Lake Havasu City, but pre-bridge it was just an idea. An idea that nobody was much interested in being part of. In order to drum up interest in the area, the plan was hatched to buy London Bridge and reassemble it in Lake Havasu City. Amazingly enough, it worked.
The bridge is now the second most popular tourist attraction in Arizona. And will remain there. Because, let’s be honest, you’d have to pick up all of Buckingham Palace, including the queen, and drop it in Phoenix to begin to rival the Grand Canyon.
This photo has nothing to do with any of that, because I have never been to Arizona. But I did get this super cool shot* of the Great Wheel on Seattle’s waterfront while watching a dance show.
*If we’re being honest, I was actually taking a photograph of a dancer and wildly missed focus, but noticed this crazy shot of the wheel in the corner. 😀
Jacques Cousteau in the PNW
If you are of a certain age, you have seen a lot of Jacques Cousteau’s work. I’m guessing that kids growing up today are not familiar. There are so many other options available in our modern world. But most of that Cousteau stuff still holds up.
Including the award winning documentary series The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau, which visited Seattle to document the Giant Pacific Octopus. It is notable for a tentacle span that can reach 20 feet. The record for the the largest live Giant Pacific Octopus recorded is 156 pounds!
If you would like to see what Jacques was up to, and get a look at that 1972 Seattle skyline, the episode is currently on youtube.
I have not taken a photo of a Giant Pacific Octopus, but I did take this shot of a baby snow leopard, which is adorable. 🙂