TGIF! Hope everyone enjoyed their short week. (No offense, LowRatio) By the time you’re reading this, I’m melting in Palm Springs. Hope your weekend goes better.
Survival – Personal Edition
Speaking of great weather, let’s combine that with some work. That’s right, we’re going to join a professional video conference from the beach and not get it trouble.
- First thing is the same as any video conference. Dress shirt, necktie, and jacket. Or a sweater or blazer, something nice. Make sure your facial hair is properly trimmed or complete shaven. Comb and brush your actual hair if you still have some. Lastly, clean up the beach gear by setting the sunglasses aside and make sure your face isn’t gleaming with sunscreen.
- Check your camera before joining. You want to frame yourself properly with the lower edge at your rib cage. At the same time, make note of the top edge of the view.
- Employ proper office props. Have a pen and some papers with you and make sure they occasionally make it into view. Whatever drink you are enjoying, pour into a coffee cup.
- Now you need to setup your background. The first thing is use a a beach umbrella to provide shade over you and the laptop camera. Then pile up cushions from lounge chairs to make it appear you’re on a couch.
- You must use a microphone and attach it as close to your mouth as possible. That will prevent all the background beach noise from being heard.
- Alright, this is the toughest part, but it’s mandatory. Actually pay attention and be a part of the meeting. Make sure your beach chair is set to its upright position.
- When you’ve had enough, use your foot to turn off your computer. Pass some time by going for a swim. Come back, power up that computer, then send an email to your boss that your internet went down and ask for a recap of the entire meeting so you can catch up.
- Get out of those clothes, recline that beach chair, and go for another swim.
There you go, easy peasy. I’m sure DonT will have several additional tips below.
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Survival – Species Edition
Time to put the sexy in Friday!
Enjoy the long weekend, folks! Alright, now let’s get to the comments!
For all my work tonight, most of you are pretty skimpy with the “likes.”
I count ’em, and judge you by them. I’m a Hollywood guy; they’re like Neilson ratings.
I know you’re out there, so let’s get crackin’
https://vimeo.com/512736842
I was the only one awake
Heh heh. Don’t have any tips for videoconferencing on the beach YET, but:
1. There will come a time when I’ll work at the beach, ideally weekly. BUT
2. First I gotta get accustomed to working on an office again after four years of working from home. Oh yeah, signed a lease and got the keys today. 🎉
Damn man… You gonna have ta wear pants and everything?
Not if you’re only on a zoom meeting.
Ciao my friend.
Salute Buddy
Congrats Stagger Lee.
Boeing 747-SP, specially modified as a high altitude observatory platform by NASA called the “Stratospheric Observatory For Infrared Astronomy” (SOFIA), in service 2010-2022..
The 747-SP was a shortened version of the original 747-100. Its lower weight enabled it to be the highest flying subsonic passenger airline ever (only the Concorde flew higher). It was also considered a “hot rod” with a healthy maximum speed due to its better power-to-weight ratio. Only 45 were built, well short of the expected 200 deliveries.
https://ibb.co/5F59hTs
And on to June we go.
Hello friends.
T- minus two years four months and change to get to retirement.
It’s not the bright light yet but I think it’s there.
Fucking hell the freeways were unholy this week.
My New York Times All-Access subscription is about to expire, and increase from $1.25/week to $18/week. So I went into my NYT account and cancelled it. I’ve been doing this for five years, threatening to cancel and then they offer me the introductory rate for another year to keep me. “All-Access” includes the crossword puzzle, the only reason I still subscribe to the NYT.
It was all automated on-line, but I refused their first cheap renewal offer so they came back with “All-Access” for $1/week (previously $1.25). I said okay, four bucks a month until June 2025.
They call me The Wolf of Wall Street.
You always were a New York Times crossword kind of guy.
Champion NYT crossword guy
I know a place that prints if you need hard copy.
My late father-in-law was a printer.
So, as I mentioned, Senorita Weaselo and I are in the Boston area for a wedding (and said hi and grabbed a drink with both Sharky and Maestro).
So, her friend is Japanese, and the proper thing to do is give an odd number of money so it’s indivisible by 2. I went to Capital One yesterday for that very purpose.
And we left that money on her bedroom table, next to the fancy envelope. So, back to the bank we just went!
So, what’s in your wallet?
The spending money but not the wedding money.
The bartender did take the money for the record.
You left the money on her bedroom table? Does she think you think she’s a hooker?
Sorry, she’s still alive, call girl.
Housekeeping will keep that shit with a quickness.
Lady 8 has a pretty head ache. I could help with that. Thanks Ayo, I will bookmark this episode for future beach ops / work avoidance use. Monica thinks it is clever.
Oh my!
“Yellow Brick Road” set, MGM Studios Culver City CA, 1939.
The set designers used “foreshortening” techniques to make the space look larger on camera than it actually was. The road and fence are built smaller and narrower as they recede to give the illusion of greater depth, and any shrubbery is smaller as well.
Lighting set-up for the night scene outside the witch’s castle in The Wizard of Oz (1939).
The three-strip Technicolor process required extraordinary amounts of light for proper exposure. Fireproof hairsprays had to be developed for the make-up department. Every costume and set color had to be approved by Technicolor (who owned the cameras and proprietary printing process and were strict about it) to ensure only colors that would reproduce well with the system were used.
A Technicolor three-strip camera. There rolls of 35mm B&W negative ran through the camera synchronized, and through a complex system of prisms, filters, and bi-packing each strip recorded a different component of RGB color space. Later in the Technicolor lab, they were made into offset printing matrices and the color records were printed with ink onto clear 35mm backing stock which then became the release print. Many cinematographers believe the three strip Technicolor printing process produced the greatest color motion picture prints ever (they could later make prints from color negative film without the gigantic camera).
A Technicolor three-strip camera inside its “blimp” or sound-silencing enclosure. This was necessary when recording dialogue during shoots. The “un-blimped” camera (seen above) sounded like a bulldozer; if they weren’t recording production sound (dialogue was frequently recorded later in audio booths, a process called ADR) the camera noise didn’t matter.
Here’s a three-strip Technicolor camera in its blimp, with the access door removed, mounted on a dolly. This rig easily weighs over 500lbs.
Most of the cameras were destroyed in the 1960s, so the survivors are rare and valuable. This one belongs to the Smithsonian and used to be on display when I was a kid but not currently.
Can’t believe nobody made a Lowratio reference. I take the night off, and the standards go to hell.
Hollywood, 1948. Looking north on Vine from Sunset. The long-gone but beautiful art deco NBC radio studios are just out frame to the right. NBC moved everything to Burbank in the 1950s.
NBC Radio City Hollywood, 1939
Lobby, NBC Radio City Hollywood
The Broadway sign is still there.
Yep! If you can still see it due to all the new buildings in the last few years.
LAX (then called Mines Field”) in 1930. That original terminal building is still there, tucked in among the modern cargo facilities in the southeast section of the airport,
Featured in the foreground are Major Pappy Boyington and the rest of the Black Sheep Squadron. [wipes pretend dust off pretend shoulder epaulets] I know my history.
I have a AAA map/poster of what LA looked like in 1930. It shows Mines Field and everything.
There were a LOT of airports in LA back then!
Actually there still are a lot of airports, big medium and small, and only a few have disappeared since the 1930s. One of the lost was Grand Central Terminal in Glendale, which was the main L.A. passenger airport pre-WWII. The runways are now gone but the original terminal building is still there, and is owned by Disney Imagineering. It also was the Texas bus depot in Pee Wee’s Big Adventure.
LAX, Burbank, Santa Monica, Hawthorne, and Long Beach Airports were originally part of gigantic aircraft factories for North American, Lockheed, Douglas, Northrop, and Douglas respectively. North American Rockwell’s factory/runways in Downey are completely gone and redeveloped (they built the Space Shuttle, the B-1, the Apollo CSM, and loads of other stuff there). At their peaks each factory had 10,000 employee shifts, three shifts a day.
That’s a great map. I love maps.
I have an extra copy. Remind me next time I see you and I’ll give it to you.
I will! Which reminds me, we’re due for a SoCal confab. Maybe I should check Slack more often (however, I was out of town for all of May).
July might work.
I’ve got stuff later this year.
I can see my house!
If you go to the end of the western runway they have a bunch of cabin shells where they practice airplane disaster recovery. It’s right next to that one old neighborhood that was between the airport and Dockweiler beach.
They still have the slabs from the old houses.
That ghost neighborhood at the end of LAX was called “Rindge Beach” (or something to that effect) as the Rindge family originally owned all the land.
That ghost neighborhood was pricey oceanfront homes and the city squeezed the owners out using eminent domain, paying the first seller top dollar but reducing the offer price for each subsequent seller so that it started a panic. The last residents were kicked out with a minimal payment.
Every time I hear that whiney story about Chavez Ravine and how racist it was to poor Mexicans, I like to point out how they did the exact same thing to rich white people in an ocean-front neighborhood, let alone Bunker Hill where they fucked everybody, regardless of race, creed, or color. That’s how the City of Angels was built. Money talks, poor people walk. You may not like it, but it’s the truth.
Did you read Stealing Home about the building of Dodger Stadium?
It’s exactly that.
Yes, but they did it to everybody. Everyone was equally fucked, regardless of race, creed, or color. They were all merely in the way of progress; they weren’t selected.
(watching A Football Life – Jerome Bettis)
(shudders) Stupid Likable Steeler
Filth McNasty’s (1960s) later became The Viper Room. The whole block is scheduled for demolition to make way for another ugly & expensive condo.
MORE: “Filthy McNasty’s” was established in 1969, by owner Filthy McNasty. The location was originally a grocery store from 1921 into the 1940s. In the 1940s, it was converted into a nightclub called the “Cotton Club”, entirely unrelated to the Harlem original. This was soon replaced by “The Greenwich Village Inn”, the “Rue Angel” and finally “The Last Call” during the 1940s. From 1951 to 1969, the location was a bar called “The Melody Lounge”. In 1969, it became “Filthy McNasty’s”.[4] and in the 1980s, a jazz club called “The Central”. It became “The Viper Room” in 1993, which it remains today if it hasn’t closed already for demolition.
River Phoenix died on the sidewalk outside the Viper Room as a result of a heavy mix of coke and heroin. [snorts talcum powder off a toilet seat] I know my history.
Fun fact: There is a bar in Chinatown called The Melody Lounge (on Hill Street) that RTD and I have been to together. Good place!
Bulldog Cafe – 1153 W Washington Blvd, Los Angeles (opened 1928)
Around the corner from this location is a kick-ass Pupusas place.
I have no idea what a Pupusas is. Food?
Salvadoran meat pies.
They’re a good reason to be alive.
https://ibb.co/8mdYjW1
Look up the Well There’s Your Problem podcast. They cover engineering disasters and the like. I think you’d get a kick out of it.
Dallas Stars Colby Armstrong with the rare, “Did you know that hockey player played basketball?”
What are the “Jerome Bettis is from Detroit”/”Ryan Fitzpatrick went to Harvard” cliches of hockey?
I’m thinking:
— Matthew Tkachuk’s dad played hockey, too!
Elliot Friedman is part of the hockey broadcast up here. He’s always looked like the smirking kid that stands behind the bully. If things go south for the bully he’s the first to turn tail.
I actually always liked him, though I think he may be getting a little big for his britches these days. But he’s a UWO alum, so he must be good.
I applied to United World Order but the damn Admission Board was populated by Jews and they denied me. Bastards!
Evening, time for my weekly update:
Since I’m in new york again, that means it’s time to reintroduce everyone to my favorite of my brother’s many pets…
drumroll……
That’s right, it’s the return of Hairless Kitty!
Okay, one more picture I had to add
“I call it ‘Wrinkled Pussy on Crotch, 2024’. It’s among my best work.”
-Brocky
Listen, I like a shaved pussy as much as the next guy, but that’s a bit much…
#1, #3, and #7 for me this week.
Btw, what’s up with #8’s eyes? One blue and one brown? Interesting choice, if it’s a choice.
I have two different colored eyes, as well.
https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/symptoms/25112-heterochromia
That’s why you get to bang royalty!
Huh, didn’t notice