Kylog

1. Tundra Swan
2. Kestrel
3. Red-tailed Hawk
4. Song Sparrow
5. Golden-crowned sparrow
6. Canada Goose
7. Mallard
8. Pintail
9. Robin
10. Great Blue Heron

I got the most wonderful Christmas present: a map of Jesuit missionary travels in upper Peru (now Bolivia).  This is fun for me because I’ve been to that area and I love old maps.

So apparently this maps comes from Stocklein’s 5 volume collection (1726) of letters from Jesuit missionaries from around the world.   Googling a bit, Stocklein’s collection amounted to travelog’s for the early eighteenth century for a Europe fascinated with faraway lands, from Jesuits who were off exploring.

It’s amazing that Jesuits were traipsing up the Beni river 300 years ago, because to this day there are not detailed maps of the area.  Holy moly!

I’m intrigued by the different Jesuit accounts that were coming in and collated.  Apparently, in addition to Stocklein’s anthology, or perhaps some of the sources of same were: the Jesuit Relations, which were produced by the French Jesuits.

But I’m assuming it was Spanish Jesuits in Upper Peru.  More info needed.  Meanwhile, this article looks interesting:

1. Bald Eagle
2. Tundra Swan
3. Snow Goose
4. Kestrel
5. Western Scrub Jay
6. Northern Flicker
7. Fox Sparrow
8. Golden-crowned sparrow
9. Canada Goose
10. Mallard
11. Robin
12. Great Blue Heron
13. Ring-necked Pheasant

But no Emperor Goose, dammit!

Really enjoying reading through Raymond Chandler’s letters.  Here are some odd excerpts:

… my feeling is that somebody might come along who wrote a great deal better than Hammett and still not have anything like Hammett’s success.  But of course these things are quite unpredictable.  In my opinion Thieves Like Us by Edward Anderson was an infinitely better and honester book than Of Mice and Men.  Did it get anywhere? I doubt it. (17)

The effort to keep my mind off the war has reduced me to the mental age of seven.  The things by which we live are the distant flashes of insect wings in a clouded sunlight. (21)

[Re Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None:] But as an honest crime story, honest in the sense that the reader is given a square deal and the motivation and mechanisms of the murder are sound — it is bunk. … But I’m very glad I read the book because it finally and for all time settled a question in my mind that had at least some lingering doubt attached to it.  Whether it is possible to write a strictly honest mystery of the classic type.  It isn’t. (27)
Funny thing civilization.  It promises so much and all it delivers is mass production of shoddy merchandise and shoddy people. (29)

From now on, if I make mistakes, as no doubt I shall, they will not be made in a futile attempt to avoid making mistakes. (31)

But James Cain — faugh! Everything he touches smells like a billygoat.  He is every kind of writer I detest, a faux naif, a Proust in greasy overalls, a dirty little boy with a piece of chalk and a board fence and nobody looking. (33)

I got a ticket on 11/27/2006 for speeding on Highway 26 near the Cedar Hills exit. It was about 10:30 am and I was driving to work. I was cited for 77 in a 55, which is probably true although conditions were excellent (dry, light traffic) and I wasn’t gaining on the car ahead of me, which was probably 200 yards ahead.  Not to mention that Highway 26 is entirely people speeding.
Beaverton couldn’t make it clearer that traffic tickets are pure and simple revenue generators (as opposed to a nominal concern for citizen safety, etc):

• they don’t offer traffic school (note that more law-abiding drivers are not in the interest of preserving the revenue stream)
• the base ticket price (for this ticket) is $336, it can be reduced to either $303 or $252 (roughly 10% or 25%) based on tickets on your record — honestly, this is an exorbitant amount and the reductions are nominal
• you can wait in line for several hours to plead No Contest before a judge, but the Clerk told me the judges rarely go below the lowest figure above

Given the above setup, there’s little incentive to contest, and no opportunity to demonstrate a concerned response. In short, they’ve done everything in their power to make this a pure revenue stream. Not even instituting traffic school (which they could charge for) is a clear indication of how little they care about traffic safety.
Grrrr.

I recently sidegraded from a 30″ widescreen Sony CRT HDTV (KV-30HS420) to a 32″ widescreen Norcent LCD HDTV (LT-3250). Here are some impressions:

They have roughly comparable inputs:

• each has 2 component inputs
• the Sony has 3 composite/S-Video shared, while the Norcent has 2 composite/S-Video shared
• each has an NTSC tuner, the Norcent also has an ATSC tuner, but I haven’t tried any tuners (I’m in the antenna shadow of Portland’s West Hills and have awful reception)
• each has 1 HDMI input, the Sony fortunately has analog audio for the HDMI which is very handy if you have a DVI-only source as I do (the top-notch Oppo OPDV971H); unfortunately Norcent shaved a couple pennies and lacks analog audio for the HDMI input.  This means I haven’t yet tested the HDMI input on the Norcent (but I will soon using the HDMI output from my Comcast HD box; cable is in the mail)
• Norcent has a VGA input which I haven’t tried, although I can’t see using it with a computer for practical reasons of size vs. resolution

Quality for HD material:

As you’d expect for a multi-scan CRT versus an LCD, the Sony has better quality across the board, but the Norcent is quite good with HD material. The noticeable deficiencies with the Norcent are:

• good color saturation (ESPN looks great) but blacks and whites are noticeably poor; I haven’t compared with other LCD’s but coming from the CRT, the contrast is a downer
• with the slow response time, lots of motion artifacts during high-speed sequences (and I’m a sports fan)

Quality for SD material:

Wow, the Norcent really sucks for 480i material; I can’t blame this on the LCD technology per se as with the HD issues above. Rather, I think the resampling algorithms for SD are just crap. My wife would rather watch SD material on the 20″ CRT connected to analog cable than on the Norcent connected to digital cable. Ouch.

User Interface:

Sony has Norcent licked here:

• Norcent OSD takes up most of the screen and can’t be move, so adjusting picture quality is almost impossible.
• Sony setup allows renaming inputs and eliminating unused inputs from the rotating source sequence. Norcent eases the pain of rotating through 8 sources by having 5 different source buttons: 1 rotates through all 8, each of the other 4 toggles between two. This is better than nothing, but the Sony solution is much nicer.
• When changing channels on the cable input, the Norcent loses sync and thus goes blue screen. Kind of an irritation, whereas Sony has added a flywheel to cover the transition and thus offers a more pleasant transition.
• The Norcent I/O panel on the rear is oriented down (rather than out as on the vast majority of electronics), so you have to reach into a shallow recess and plug things up rather than in. Since there are two banks, this can get awkward. I guess this is so that you can wall-mount it and keep all cables flush, but their solution is physically awkward.

Hard numbers:

• Cost: the Sony cost me $800 in November of 2005. I sold it in December 2006 for $350 and got the Norcent for $580.
• Weight: the Sony CRT weighs 150 pounds, the Norcent LCD weighs 45 pounds. This (plus the depth of the CRT) is why we switched.

Summary:

• The Norcent is an inferior product in all ways except form factor, but for HD many viewers may find the differences completely tolerable (or they may not even notice).
• If you plan on watching a lot of 480i inputs, I’d seriously reconsider the Norcent. (Although this review actually praises it for its SD quality. Go figure.)
• General observation: the Norcent has cut some corners on usability and quality. You get HD improvements pretty easily from an LCD, but Sony’s video expertise really shines with their handling of SD.

Reading further into Against the Day, we get Pynchon’s amalgam of 1893 history: Franz Ferdinand, the Archduke of Austria 20 years away from assassination, visits Chicago and gets drunk in the poorer district, while the fictional Professor vanderJuice chats about his friend Freddie Turner and the decline of the West. Pynch is having fun with history as always.

He also whips off some lovely prose:

But if the Frontier was gone now, did that mean Lew was about to be disconnected, too, from himself? sent off into exile, into some silence beyond silence as retribution for a remote and ancient vice always just about to be remembered, half stunned, in a half dream like a surgeon’s knot taken swiftly in the tissue of time and pulled snug, delivered into the control of potent operative who did not wish him well? (54)

They began to imagine, jointly and severally, some rescuer entering the crew spaces, moving among them, weighing, choosing, a creature of fantasy to bring them back each to his innocence, to lead him out of his unreliable body and his unique loss of courage, so many years in the making …. (55)

Presently, as the Inconvenience began to acquire its own sources of internal power, there would be other global streamings to be taken into account — electromagnetic lines of force, Aether-storm warnings, movements of population and capital. Not the ballooning profession as the boys had learned it. (55)

The closing paragraph of this section has some great stuff:

Later, after closing day, as the autumn deepened over the corrupted prairie, … the abandoned structures of the fair would come to house the jobless and hungry … hell-raisers hired for the run of the Fair, now, their market value having vanished returned to the consolations of drink …. All moving in closer to the fires of Fair debris, once the substance of wonder, as the temperature headed down. (56)

Ah, just starting to read Pynchon’s latest, enjoyable as always. The opening is some “aeronauts” piloting a balloon toward the Chicago world fair, the World’s Columbian Exposition, in 1893. The style is a Pynchonian twist on a late 19th serial novelist a la Horatio Alger. Evidently we are reading the latest in a series of tales of the Chums of Chance, as the narrator frequently reminds us of their past adventures like The Chums of Chance in Krakatoa, etc. He has fun with a set of various post-Civil War characters, including the bumpkin crew of the airship Inconvenience and the stiffly formal Kentucky gentleman St Cosmo, captain of the ship.

Typical Pynchon, though, with kookiness and references pointing in many directions, viz. the dog Pugnax, who is reading Henry James’s The Princess Casamassima, about a failed terrorist. I\’m going to throw one other reference in though, and invoke Henry Adams from his Education: