journal features

"new" lens

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-seven years and one million words

Toronto, 2011.07.30

An old incident has been resolved at last.

I keep mentioning this, but it's been bothering me. The first time I took toddler Kenny to the park by myself, I took along my old Minolta X-700 and a "Celtic" line lens that was pretty cheap. There came a moment when Kenny was going to fall and I scrambled to stuff my camera into the bag and then catch him, all in one moment. I caught Kenny but the camera didn't sit properly (due to the wrist strap I was then using) and it fell. And landed lens-down on a steel railing and then on the edge of the camera back into the gravel.

I've since spent ~$200 trying to get the camera repaired but since the lens was a cheapo and they wanted $100 just to look at it, I never got it fixed. Today I replaced it.

For all of $46 and $15 shipping and possibly some duty at the border. 8)

rand()m quote

I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness... The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.

—Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World (1995)