Thursday

* Slept poorly -- been like that all week, so I've been exhausted.

* I'm very pleased to announce that Mary Robinette Kowal will be BayCon's writer guest of honor!

* You might have heard we've been busy at work. Imagine that. The elves will not stop turning!

* Our cat is becoming more social.

* I got a long-awaited package from Saudi Arabia, but my package from the Netherlands was received by the post office a week ago -- and no delivery attempt was made. Hmm.

* Heard some disturbing things about postal cuts. They're going to close 900 offices. Letter carriers can't be laid off due to laws about that, so instead they were given three options: 1) accept relocation to somewhere within 900 miles at their own expense; 2) quit; 3) accept a guarantee of only 2 hours of work every biweekly period. Outrageous. That's with a union.

* But I can't help be suspicious about why the post office couldn't find a package they received a week ago. If I don't have a better answer in the morning, I'm filing a police report.

And the real workers get applauded

Yay, Dior. Story here.

"At the end of the show, with no Galliano around to take one of his infamous extended two-minute bows dressed up in a themed costume, a large group of staff from the Dior atelier wearing white work overalls took a collective bow, as the audience rose to its feet to applaud them."

Image from style.com:


That is wonderful.

I'd totally missed that Natalie Portman, who is not only Jewish but Israeli-born, denounced Galliano's anti-Semitic sentiments right before he was fired.

Here's the collection. Love the metallic blue bubble skirt, actually. Second row, third from left. Not my kind of thing to wear, but I like it anyway.

Darling and Weird Camera

It uses 16mm movie film on a spool. It's about the size of a pack of cigarettes (or two iPhone 4s). Like all twin-lens reflex cameras, you look in the top and the taking lens is the bottom one. The eBay auction for this camera has more pictures. It dates to around 1951.

In the early days, most German lens makers expressed their focal lengths in centimeters. I'm not exactly sure when it changed, but by the 70s, everyone was using millimeters. (2,5cm can be mistaken for 25cm, so 25 vs. 250 is clearer.) Leica seems to have switched over between 1952 (date of my earlier lenses) and 1959 (date of the lens I received today). An interesting point: some expressed focal length in cm but focus distance only in feet. Weird, huh? I'm always fascinated by mixing of metric and imperial units -- like knitters measuring in yards but buying skeins in grams.