Tag: TomD
Guest Contributor – TomD – 28NOV2023 – Photo – Coins
“Speaking of totem poles” As my mother used to say when faced with a comment from out of the blue.
“or worthless ducats that cannot be exchanged for anything meaningful” Some ducats can be exchanged for quite a lot. This is a 4 Ducat Franz Joseph gold coin from my collection
On the next post is my take on a silver proof version of the Florida State US quarter and a really amusing silver Mexican coin.
I’ve got several thousand shots of different coins like that.
Amusing, but about 15 years ago, APMEX, the largest online supplier of precious metal products tried to hire me as their product photographer but I was already employed as a Civil Engineer.
This photo was purchased by a Mexican Publisher for inclusion in a Mexican elementary school level arithmetic text book.
If you look around the perimeter it shows the Mayan counting system. Base 5 apparently but humorously, they assign minor deities to each number.
I’ve got a Mexican contact for trading interesting stuff back and forth.
Guest Contributor – TomD – 28NOV2023 – Disney Woes
Just read this in PJ Media (link)
Reports of Disney’s Death Are (Not?) an Exaggeration
Stephen Green | 5:11 PM on November 27, 2023
As Disney’s two-time CEO Bob Iger prepares to host the company’s annual town hall on Tuesday to provide “hints or guidance for what the next phase of ‘building’ will bring after the problem-solving phase,” it’s time to ask if Iger is able “to ‘quiet things down’ after years of culture wars.”
The first quote comes from a Hollywood Reporter item on Monday detailing the company’s Wall Street woes. Traders and managers will be watching Iger on Tuesday for “possible color, body language or even outright updates on various topics,” ranging from the company’s ongoing series of box office flops to troubles at their fabled theme parks.
The second quote is courtesy of Jonathan Turley. His Monday column — almost in time for Adam Smith’s 300th birthday — shows how Smith’s “invisible hand” has undone the company’s woke agenda. Disney is now “negatively associated with activism by a significant number of consumers,” Turley writes, and is “even reporting a decline in licensing revenue from products associated with Star Wars, Frozen, Toy Story and Mickey and Friends — iconic and once-unassailable corporate images.”
“Wish” is Disney’s latest animated effort that isn’t a sequel or reboot and it opened over the long Thanksgiving weekend to middling reviews and worse box office sales. Well, not entirely not a reboot — one of the characters is the glowy Star, as in Pinocchio’s “When You Wish Upon A Star.” “Wish” looks to be another big money-loser in a yearlong series of them, including “Indiana Jones and the Whatever McGuffin,” “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania,” the live-action Little Mermaid, and most recently, “The Marvels.”
The Disney+ streaming service is losing money and eyeballs. Impressions — the streaming measure of viewership — is down 14% from last year, the company says.
The worst news is that Disney’s intellectual properties — the company’s seed corn for future growth — are in terrible shape.
The good news is that $7.5 billion in cost-cutting measures have restored some sense to the company’s balance sheet. The bad news is that the maintenance-heavy Disney World and Disney Land are reportedly looking a little worse for wear. Or as Wall Street’s Jamie Lumley warned, “As the business looks to slash costs and make streaming profitable, there are sure to be concerns about cutting too deep and impacting the business going forward.”
But the company can’t cut its way to health. It needs to start selling tickets again to the kinds of movies and theme park experiences people expect when they see the Disney label.
Walt Disney and his brother Roy were jealous guardians of the Disney name and reputation. Given so many more recent changes, this seems like much longer ago than 1983, but I’m reminded of “Something Wicked This Way Comes.” It was considered a Very Big Deal at the time when Disney produced a Ray Bradbury film with such a dark mood and storyline. At the time — Walt had died and Roy was no longer involved in day-to-day operations — Disney was looking to branch out from family fare like the Herbie movies and “Pete’s Dragon.”
Results were mixed at best, and I’m being overly generous.
It took a 1984 hostile takeover attempt and a long-term recovery plan courtesy of incoming CEO Michael Eisner to restore Disney’s luster. Eisner understood Disney’s creative strength — and it wasn’t in jumping on the Star Wars bandwagon with “The Black Hole,” or another cheesy Love Bug movie.
It was in getting back to classic animation with “The Little Mermaid,” and in recognizing similar strength in the fledgling Pixar Animation Studios.
Iger can cut costs but, in the end, what he needs to do is remember what the Disney brand means — and work as furiously to restore it as Eisner did, and as Walt and Roy used to work to protect it.
Unless we see evidence of that in Tuesday’s town hall, Disney shares might be up a bit on Wall Street’s hopes but I ain’t buying.
Guest Contributor – TomD – 14OCT2023 – Photo
Down here in the not-so desert of the Gulf Coast
Guest Contributor – TomD – 29AUG2023 – Panhandle Pandemonium
I’m way out of the way this time on the Panhandle. But we get our share.
Ivan in 2004 was a class 5 as it was approaching but hit as a 4. Damn near destroyed the area. A 20 something foot storm surge, It destroyed the multi-mile long I-10 bridge over Pensacola Bay and around 70% of the remaining buildings had blue tarp roofs for years.
I had a fishing boat that I kept on base at NAS Pensacola. I was over a month later before anyone could get on base. Going over the bridge to the base, we saw 100’s of boats just everywhere, beached, capsized, holed, sunken, I was pretty sure it insurance time. Got to the marina, which was also an RV storage yard, all junked at this point. I found my boat in the RV area still sorta attached to the trailer. It hadn’t drifted off to join the boat graveyard in the bay because the lower unit on one of the motors had jammed through and wedged in the wall of a big RV that had somehow stayed in place.
Another big one hit the following year but there was nothing other than the odd tropical storm until 2020 when one came through and destroyed a good portion of the Pensacola to Gulf Breeze bay bridge. Believe me, that was a BIG deal cutting the metro area in half for 1-1/2 years until they got a couple of lanes. Every one had to do a almost 40 mile detour.
Down here, it doesn’t have to be a hurricane or tropical storm. Spring 2014, we had 25 inches of rain in an 8 hour period. It was the freaking apocalypse. Damage was still being repaired in 2020.
Guest Contributor – TomD – 18JUL2023 – Photo
I find myself gravitating to nature photography. My “long” lens used to be a Sony G 70-300, A mount that worked (via adapter) with all my previous E mount Sony cameras.A supurb lens. Until I got to the A7IV series, that is, same camera as yours.
I tried to replace it with a Tamron 70-300 but the image is missing something. The Tamron does workman like images, see image below, but it is missing the “pop”, I don’t know how to describe it, the something special that I got with the Sony. I go back through my photos and am really surprised at how many of my very best came from that lens.
I’m now lusting for the very new, now really released yet but heavily reviewed Sony 70-200 F4 GII lens. Apparently it also takes incredible images through a 2x converter or I could also shoot it through my ASP-C sensor A6400, which would change it to a 105-350 mm in case I need something taller. It seems to have the same, how do you say, ‘glow” as my 10-year-old lens does/did.
In the meantime, my Tamron is sitting dejected over in the corner saying, “What am I, chopped liver?” No, actually pretty damned good for the price but when you’re reaching for the stars—–
Tamron Shots below
Pretty good lenses don’t have to cost a lot. Here’s a 30mm f2.8 Sigma on my Sony A6400.
Another Tamron
Guest Contributor – TomD – 03JUL2023 – Sony Lens Options
We’ve both use the same camera body but your lens collection tends to the telephoto side compared to mine. I was left totally without anything longer that 105 mm when I moved to the A7IV and found that my old A mount 70-300 would become pure manual focus, even with the latest Sony adapter.
I grew up with manual focus but, back them, cameras had a split image focusing system to tell you when you were in focus. That consisted of twisting the focus ring while looking through the viewfinder until the upper and lower parts of the image perfectly aligned. Looking thorough the old Sony lens in the new body gave me no focusing information at all. So, bleah to that.
I thought about getting a new e mount version of the same lens but I thought $1300 a bit much for as little as I use long telephoto. But, I concluded, paying 40% of that figure for the Tamron version, which had good ratings, to be an acceptable bet.
Below is a shot of a female Cardinal that I photoed in my yard this AM at a range of around 70 feet. Even at 300 mm, this is a big crop.
Quick aside: The split image focus system is a spinoff originally derived from the Dreadnought era Naval gunnery optical rangefinders that prevailed in all the worlds navys in the until the advent of radar ranging during WWII.
Guest Contributor – TomD – 17JUN2023 – The Converged Corporation
To me it’s a mystery, the nature of the process by which a publicly traded corporation allows their prime directive to morph from creating and marketing the best products possible under whatever economic constraints and generating a profit for the owners to social justice, profit be damned. It doesn’t make sense from the corporation’s viewpoint.
The only analogy that I can think of is when a virus invade a host and, infecting the cells, co-opts the machinery of the cells to the purposes of the virus with no allowance for the continued health or, indeed, continued existence of the host.
Actually, an accurate analogy, I think. (One more word beginning with a and I could have had a straight.)
Guest Contributor – TomD – 27APR2023 – Comments on Feasibility of an “Electric” Navy
“This essay is in response to this post” Want to Know How Out of Touch With Reality the Greens Are?” where there was a congressional review of the idea of all military vehicles being electric.
photog”
It’s worse. Just heard some of the testimony and the idiot is talking about an all electric Navy by 2030.
Thar is so far beyond current technology as to be beyond fantasy. The current peak of battery tech resides in a Ford pickup and contains around 110 kW hours. This is approximately the equivalent of 140 HP hours or 14 HP x 10 hours or some equivalent multiple. The Ford pickups have proven worthless for towing any load more than a few miles.
The current US Destroyer, the Arliegh Burke class, is powered by 4 gas turbines with a combined out put of 78,000 kW, or about 105,000 HP. That’s just propulsion, in addition there are generators on board totaling 21,000kW for misc electric power. So we’re talking about right at 100,000 kW of power generation onboard.
If they get into wartime mode, I’d expect they would need the great bulk of that. A Ford PU battery would power that for around 3 seconds, 1000 Ford PU batteries would push it for an hour.
But a deep water war vessel has to be self reliant for weeks. Even just patrolling at cruise speed, the power requirements must be in the 20,000 kW range. Your hypothetical 1000 Ford batteries would power it for 5 hours then.
And you may think you’ve heard of what happens in a battery fire.
Lets say that battery tech has increased 50X, allowing an Arleigh Burke to do it’s normal 5100 mile cruise at 20 knots and you pull into some South American port on your last couple of kW and looking to recharge 4,400 megawatts hours. And that powered by windmills that aren’t working right now. Yeah, right.
Charging at sea? How’s that going to work? The replenishment boat is running on batteries too.
We are no longer a serious nation. We’ve collapsed into a silliness and stupidity forced on us by, what?
Guest Contributor – TomD – 30MAR2023 – It Never Ends
The problem for the Dims is they don’t know when to stop, anything.
Their first big win, in the 60’s, Civil Rights, was passed as “equal rights for everyone”. The nation was fine with that but it has evolved into permanent “affirmative action”, hard quotas, reverse racism and actual persecution of whites.
After several decades of gun “safety” laws, it has finally reached the point that we were promised would never be be reached: the current dominant political party proposing outright confiscation.
God knows where this “climate change” thing is going to end up.
I do believe that this current trans mania just beats anything that has ever happened before. The nation evolved to “don’t ask, don’t tell” in the 90’s (I think). Everyone was cool with that. Later, there was a bit of trepidation over gay marriage. Then it evolved further to the persecution of people refusing services to openly gay couples. But who could have anticipated the shrieking insanity it has become today, the 57 genders, gender change by the need statement of what you are today. Drag queens performing school sponsered sex shows for grammar school children. The government performing “sex change” butchery on per-pubescent children without the parents knowledge or consent. The domination of womens sports by men who self proclaimed themselves women, on this day anyway.
If this isn’t a present day recreation of Sodom and Gomorrah, I don’t know what else it could possibly be. A society this sick needs to heal itself or go down.