Beautiful game? How about this?

Now it can be told. When I wrote job application letters in the sixties to forty US magazine editors I lied about why I wanted to work in the USA. Fact is I wanted to watch live baseball. Not that I even knew the rules.

I arrived in Pittsburgh in winter and couldn’t wait until the season started. I dragged a friend to the freezingly cold Pirates’ opener in Forbes Field and had him explain the game. Thereafter I watched a huge amount of telly.

What’s this got to do with technology? Well, that’s my baseball glove in the inset. Because I’m right-handed I wear it on my left hand and, with luck, it helps me gobble up grounders and snag fly hits (even fungos!). After which I use my right hand to hurl the ball wherever it should go.

What a glove does for a baseball pro is something else again. Batting and pitching are easy to understand. What makes baseball special is that gloves transform fielders into figures of grace and efficiency. They reach balls that would elude even the most determined cricketer. What’s more they’re often expected to do this. If they don’t an error is charged against them.

Grace and efficiency – what do I mean? The shortstop is an infield player, lurking somewhere between second and third base. The batter, 40 m away, cracks a hard low drive to the shortstop’s right. But he doesn’t try to catch it with his right hand (“the meat hand”). He swings his gloved left hand down across his body turning the palm towards the ball. With practised elegance he makes the catch and tosses the ball insouciantly to the second-baseman. It’s quite routine but it makes me swoon.

A ton up - but not on a motorbike

My hundredth post so let’s celebrate the metric system. Inevitably the French were the first to adopt it (as an exercise of pure reason) though I thought they’d designated the metre as something like one ten-millionth of the distance of the equator. Not so. A French abbot and scientist proposed the milliare as a minute of arc along the meridian. Which conceivably might be the same thing.

Benefit 1. Arithmetic. Remember the longwindedness of performing calculations in fractions (eg, 7/16 x 14/57). The decimal point blew all that into the weeds.

Benefit 2. Technology. Nuts and bolts in the GB were designated like this: 3/8 in. BSW (standing for British Standard Whitworth) and there were other systems. Now – as far as I know – they’re all metric and it’s so much simpler. “Give me a 5 mm bolt, 2 cm long please.”

Benefit 3. Science. To the unitiated it may not seem simpler but expressing 0.000,000,0008 mm as 8x10-9 mm (Sorry. Need to work out HTML superscript here) obviously does save paper.

Benefit 4. Peace of mind. Got a long journey ahead of you on the Continong? Change the settings on the satnav from miles to kilometres and be encouraged (Yes, I know it’s illusory, but illusions have their uses) as they whistle away behind you.

Disadvantages. The USA remains agnostic. Metrics does away with a useful height benchmark for homo sapiens and, at 6 ft 1½ in. (“just a little over 6 ft”) I find myself lacking a familiar definition.

Marja-Leena plays a straight bat

Denied any ability in the graphic arts, I am forced to look at the subject technologically. A wide viewpoint. Take the media: there are oils, acrylics, watercolours, ink, crayons, frottage (I love that one), bits of glued newspaper and no doubt much more. Surfaces embrace canvas, paper, board, wood and the sides of buildings. In the service of which are tools which range from sable hair brushes to small – perhaps big – trowels. Where do you start?

Having encouraged Marja-Leena to write the definitive post on 3D scanning I emailed her a deceptively simple question: A subject for a painting occurs to you. How do you go about deciding on the appropriate technology for rendering that subject?

Needless to say M-L was far too fly to fall for that one. A Canadian might have, but not a Finnish-Canadian. For one thing she regards herself as a printmaker. She used to paint “years ago” (visit her blog archives) but these days she finds painting “comparatively boring”.

However, in the best tradition of people born in a cold country who go to live in another cold country she offers:

“One starts with some kind of an image then chooses the best way to present it, to fit it to one’s own sensibility" she says adding, as if she'd never heard of Jane Austen, " if that's the correct word."

There are no shortcuts in Finland or Canada. "That comes with some years of practice with different materials. I've been a printmaker for over 25 years, and I'm always learning new ways of image-making, which keeps me on my toes and interested.”

Memo: Must find out more about printmaking.

Deficient ears can save you money

As I loll on my couch I am grateful I am off the hi-fi treadmill.

Thirty years ago, for a modest expenditure, you could verifiably improve the performance of your LP-playing equipment (pick-up, amplifier, twin speakers). You then stepped on to a ladder whose length was dictated only by the depth of your pocket.

Then CDs replaced LPs. I for one was unable to detect improvements from more expensive CD players and it was only when I needed twin-drives that I bought a new unit. By then, an amplifier upgrade appeared futile and the reviews proved it. Performance graphs for quite inexpensive amps showed virtually flat curves. Distortion was only detectable by bats.

That left loudspeakers. My friend owned Quad electrostatics which were easily the best. But they resembled central heating radiators and cost £1000 a pair. I made do with rather less. Later in life and comfortably off I decided to relegate my speakers to the kitchen (Cooks find Mozart encouraging - see pic) and buy something better for the salon. I spent an embarrassing hour at a specialist hi-fi shop. The owner patiently switched between speaker pairs widely differing in price. To no audible avail.

I had of course reached a defining hi-fi moment: ears inadequate through age. Comparatively cheap speakers would do. Sad, but at least I’m off the treadmill.

This was how I saw it

WORLD WAR TWO: A child’s view of
technology

Metal shortage. To build more battleships the railings round the school were removed with oxy-acetylene torches. Sparks and glare for fascinated (totally unprotected) kids. Afterwards the remaining stumps of metal were removed from wall tops, allowing us to walk along them unhindered. Rumour had it the collected metal was never used.

In the sky. This was the West Riding so no baddies during the day. From time to time the big names (Spitfire, Lancaster) appeared, but mostly it was the twin-engine Avro Anson (presumably a bomber trainer) and the single droning-engine Harvard.

Camouflage. Close to the present Leeds/Bradford airport was an operative factory making goodness knows what. Earthworks were built round the single-storey structure and the top was then disguised with fake trees and a simulated duck pond. Even at ground level this was quite effective.

Health scare. Housewives were urged to hand in their aluminium pans to make more planes. Few did. Then came a story – almost certainly promulgated by The Daily Mail – that cooking vegetables in aluminium pans caused cancer. Could these two themes have been related?

Re-editing the editor

Strolling round my blog, making sure all was made fast and battened down, I came unexpectedly upon my profile hit-counter. At 167 the total was modest enough for this 3½-month enterprise, but nevertheless salutary.

The profile was rushed off heedless of the fact that people might eventually pick among its entrails for clues about my qualifications (minimal), my age (advanced) and my sanity (the jury is out). Assuming the mantle of a new reader I re-examined it and found myself increasingly at odds with the pompous individual gradually revealed.

Prétentieux? Moi? Well, actually, yes. Oh sure, Proust gets a mention but not Ed McBain many of whose 87th Precinct quickies I must confess to re-reading. And those French films unleavened by any reference to gangster movies starring Charles McGraw and Adele Jergens.

Here’s a test. Imagine compiling a profile to be carved on one’s tombstone so that future generations might deconstruct it for signs of lily-gilding. Would that stay one’s hand?

Trouble is I’m committed to comparative brevity. Given my chosen subject I limit my posts to less than 300 words in order not to bore. Same with the profile. I have tinkered with the latter and will do more as I’m visited with bursts of honesty. Let’s call it work in progress, a phrase which can be applied to all our lives I suppose.

Browsing lifted to a new level

Given the high standards of literacy and articulacy commentators to this blog have shown, a post about ABE Books is probably unnecessary. But just in case…

ABE is an example of where the web has not just altered the scope of an activity, it has changed its nature. What’s more it helps a deserving and generally under-funded stratum of the retail world.

ABE is an umbrella under which shelter 13,000 second-hand-book shops (Gosh, that’s hard to hyphenate.) round the world, providing them with exposure and a reference service way beyond individual resources. And using ABE has unexpected charms.

There’s a British author called John Lodwick, killed in a car crash in the sixties, whom I read with enthusiasm. His books are long out of print but I decided to push out the ABE boat. My trawl brought in seven or eight titles. But the charm came from where the Jiffy-bags were filled. One was in Tennessee, another in Pennsylvania. Hard to see how those shops would otherwise have got my custom.

There is a tiny catch. Some of the books cost a mere 50 cents but, not surprisingly, packing and postage is several multiples of that. I for one don’t object.

The Lady Vanishes

Imbued with foolish pride, I devoted my August 11 post to a photograph of a bookshelf I made for the French house. I apologised for not having a usable photograph of the adjacent spiral staircase which I admitted to be the main reason why we bought the house in the first place. Unimpressed by my DIY carpentry Plutarch offered this stern comment: “With hindsight perhaps you would have applied the Pentax to the handrail. We are the poorer for the omission.”

I did have a photograph of the staircase taken when we first inspected the house. Unfortunately my wife, in the last stages of hypothermia, stood in the foreground and wouldn’t have thanked me for publicising her in this state.

Whether she will thank me for the solution of this problem is another matter. But here is the staircase without my wife, thanks to Adobe Photoshop Elements – the software that rolls back time. It isn’t the best of photographs but it wasn’t the best of March days.

Plutarch, will this do?