Jackie Robinson In 3-D

With perhaps days/hours to go before the baby, I’m doing a big push on Jackie Robinson to see how far I can get before my life changes so much.  I had a big day in the shop yesterday and took these stereo photos.

Together, they can be viewed in 3-D.  If you were one of those who could left your eyes relax and see those old 3-D, computer-generated drawings, then you SHOULD be able to do this the same way.  I can do it.  But it takes a few moments to get it.

The trick, for me, is to get far enough away from the two photos, so that they are a little smaller than a postcard, held at arms length.  Then you stare, allowing your eyes to relax and not truly focus.  When your eyes are relaxed correctly, you should see double–that’s 4 images.  Keep trying different pressures on your focus until the two center photos become 1 photo and it will be 3-D.  It’s eerie.  When you get it, you will KNOW, so if you are wondering, then you don’t have it.  Remember: Try and make the middle two images merge into one, so that overall, there are 3 photos, and only concentrate on that middle photo–that’s the one that will become 3-dimensional.

How did I take this photo?  With a 3-D camera?  Nahh, with my own camera.  Since I’m working with a tripod, and nothing is in motion, the time lapse between photo1 and photo2 can be ignored.  You couldn’t do this trick with live action, because p1 and p2 would not match.  But in the studio, you just take one photo and then move the tripod 80mm to the right and take another one.  80mm is about the distance between people’s eyes.  The “interpupillary distance”.  Actually, in the population, it’s much smaller for most and is smaller for women and bigger for some ethnic groups.  It runs between 65 and 83 mm.  At 25.4 mm per inch, you do the inch-math.

With the two photos of EXATLY the same thing and yet from two slight different (80mm apart) vantage points, they are about what your brain takes in and processes into one, 3-D image.  The slightly different perspective means that the right eye sees a little further around Jackie’s left side, than the left eye can see.  That info is used by your wonderful brain to give you all sorts of depth and distance information.  Imagine trying to golf without it!  “How far to the pin?”  “Where’s the 150 yd marker?”

And for you Liberals out there, remember, the beauty of the eye and the brain and the depth is pure chance–we’re talking NO INTELLIGENT DESIGN, right?  Don’t even think those words in a public school.

Before you go thinking I’m some kind of techy person, realize that 3-D cameras and looking at “stereo-images” like we are here, originated at about the time of the Civil War.  Stereo view photos were all the rage from about 1870 to 1910.  They looked like this:

They were viewed in a viewer that looked like this:

The slides were available as canned, commercially produced photos of current events and famous places and landmarks.  Think GAF-viewmaster from the 1970’s:

I’m not sure why they fell out of favor.  Perhaps WWI, which destroyed so much of what good was happening in the world around 1914.

Anyway, they did commercially produce stereo cameras for the home-gamer and here is one:

All you need is the ability to take TWO images simultaneously, one interpupillary distance apart.  Now if you search for these things, you will only find, I believe, film cameras from yesteryear.  There doesn’t seem to be any digital stereo cameras available.  There are a couple of guys who have hacked together two digital cameras, but the hack is never simple and the mounting and alignment is never easy.  Both lenses have to point at the same focal point out in space, or the pictures will look hokey–like mine!

What I want to know is why doesn’t SOMEone produce a decent digital stereo camera?  WHY?  With PC’s bringing down photography prices and giving us all sorts of exotic ways to display them, it’s a perfect marriage!  I have searched, but not recently, so it’s possible that there is something out there now.  If anyone knows of a product, comment in please.

For Jackie fans, Jackie may be getting his first paint today on the lower legs and shoes and pants.  It’s always the single biggest, quickest change in the statue and for a medium that goes crawling by in the hundreds of hours, this is a welcome thing.

Putin Shaves his Chest

It’s fun to stay at the… 

June 6, 1944 D-Day

Click here to watch an actual high school video project on D-Day (who said video games are a waste of time?)

Today was the day that a lot of people got all shot up so that others could be free.  Amazingly, as time goes on, many young people today do not know much about it.  Is that an indictment of our current education system?  Perhaps.  

The guys who did this are the guys from my dad’s generation.  Every one of my uncles and my dad’s friends, it seemed, were in this fight.  Some Europe, either France or Italy.  Some the Pacific.  Some in India in the CBI theatre.  But they were all in it.  This generation is rapidly passing into history every day now and we owe it to them not to forget these deeds.

Oh, and the rumor is not true that CNN has demanded a posthumous apology from Dwight D. Eisenhower and an admission that, “mistakes were made” on D-Day.

To quote a popular song of 1944: “Praise the Lord and pass the amunition and we’ll all stay free…”

–fog 

Joe Morgan is a great entertainer

I have changed my tune on Joe Morgan. I no longer Mute him and curse the set out. Now, I view him as entertainment and I listen for just the sheer, breathtaking stupidity that has now really made the Sunday night game special for me.

And it’s apparently not only me. Check out this excerpt re Josh Hamilton. This kind of rockheadedness still exists out there in the wild.

From the Yahoo fantasy column By Jeff Erickson and Christopher Liss:

Both Joe Morgan and Steve Phillips talked about how Hamilton “needs to pay his dues” and “earn” the major league spot at the minor league level, and not leapfrog other guys who might not have the same talent but have put in their time. Putting aside the ignorance of the Rule 5 proviso (especially on Morgan’s part), this is unseemly from a couple of other angles. They’re suggesting that building baseball teams shouldn’t be a meritocracy, but rather like the tenure system, where one is promoted on the basis of time put in. I can’t imagine making a decision on a dumber basis. The other side is that while both pay lip service to wanting Hamilton to get his life together, they don’t “really” want that – they want Hamilton to be punished above and beyond the suspensions he already served.

***

Addendum: 

In the interest of journalistic integrity (unlike Rather), below is a photo of the man who managed the Boston Red Sox AND went by the name of “Joe Morgan” (Left).

If I recall correctly, his catchphrase was, “Six Two and Even…[blah, blah, blah]“

I always (well, not always) wondered just where in the heck that phrase came from.  I mean it was just so durned goofy.  I had never heard of it.  Not even from my parents, who’s speech is peppered with Depression-Era expressions.  Then one day I rented either “The Maltese Falcon” or “The Big Sleep” with Humphrey Bogart, and in it, Bogey says something like, “Six Two and Even they shoot this mug”… or something of that nature.  But that was it.  It came from that era, or from that film perhaps.  BTW, both of those films must be seen.  Amazing Film Noir.  Mega-classics.  I defy anyone to watch “The Big Sleep” all the way through with no stops or rewinds and explain the twists.  You can’t do it.  And there are some hilariously, over-the-top moments in them as well.  Pulling out the whiskey bottle to drink with the shopkeep in the bookstore is among the most silly scenes in any movie.

This Joe Morgan was a nice and guy and I suppose that our currently vexing Joe Morgan is too, but he won’t take a breath and let me find that out.  One game my wife and I play with Morgan is to pick up the “catchphrase” of the minute with him and then hold up fingers for each repetition of it in succession.  If you do it deftly, you can rack up 4 or even 5 fingers very quickly.  That’s like a Masters Degree in Joe Morgan. –fog 

Twinbrook-1, 0112, please…

As many may know, Mrs. Pinetar and I have moved into my grandparent’s home. My grandpa was a lifetime employee of “The Phone Company”, as it was known. He did allright, especially in the depression when they only cut him back a few days a week.

What Exit, Liberty?

 

Mrs. Pinetar and I went to Princeton, NJ today just to look around and shop and see what there was to see. It’s a unique and historic American town (and it’s in New Jersey–no “exit” jokes, please~) I liked this marker placed by the Daughters of the American Revolution.

GI Joe you can shave

The recent Six Million Dollar Man Squad 51, Station 51 post brought up the whole action figure thread and when you think about it, these things are a little strange. For the most outlandish, there’s no question for me. It’s this:

Dark Side of Oz

Click to see how it’s done

This may be old news to some. I had read of this at least 5 years ago but recently came across a site (linked above) devoted to it. I am almost proud to say that I have never done it or even thought about it but I want to throw it out to the readers, as we have a (ahem) “mix” of readers here at The Pinetar Rag and someone may know something. Has anyone done this? Results? Just random coincidences? It sounds like someone had a lot of time on their hands and it shouldn’t be a big deal but it just continues to have legs so I wonder. This website even offers presynched DVD’s (Copyright, anyone?) of Wizard set to Dark Side (if anyone has one, can you burn one for me?)

I once bought a 4 movie boxed set on ebay for the original, silent, Wizard of Oz. I never knew the original story was a long series (of books, I think) and so I picked them up for like 5 bucks. They were beyond bad. Unwatchable and didn’t even really make sense actually.

My favorite Wizard of Oz myths are that Buddy Ebsen got the part for the Tin Man but was allergic to the silver makeup. And I shudder to think of what that stuff was. Hey, in 1939, they’d have coated you in asbestos to get a shot, I’m pretty sure it was a good break for Buddy.

These and other myths, especially the ones that people embarrassingly forward out in mass emails, are all explained, verified and or debunked beautifully on the website snopes dot com, which is linked in the blogroll at right top. If you haven’t been to this site, you probably should hit it, especially if you’re an email forwarder of the “Microsoft will send you money for forwarding this to ten friends” variety.

The college myths are amazing too. I had personally heard several in my college days. The engineers didn’t figure the weight of the books and the library was sinking was heard all over University of Delaware (Snopes didn’t tackle the other UD library legend which was that the 3rd floor was a place George Michael would have frequented) .

I also recall hearing that the head janitor in our dorm complex was the head monkey in The Wizard of Oz and then was amazed to read that in the snopes college legend section. Yea, I bought that one and probably repeated it myself. Shame on me. –fog

Bullet Proof Man

For anyone who watched “The Prestige” and wondered if turn-of-the-century vaudeville magicians really died in tricks-gone-awry, the answer is yes. While reading the Houdini bio recently, I came across the story of “The Bullet Proof Man”. His act was wearing a suit filled with pockets of ground up glass and having a guy from the audience come up and shoot him with a gun and he’d “take” the bullet and not get hurt…er…until a wiseguy shot him in the groin (where the suit didn’t protect him) and he died. When Houdini went to London for the first time, he took the Bullet Man’s vacated spot on the bill. (And no, none of the tricks in The Illusionist ever went wrong, but I still liked it much more than The Prestige) — fog

Sacred Treasures: Russia’s Pink Floyd (it’s like I’m living in Dr. Zhivago)

Recently, in my boredom with everything I own musically, and with some fearless clicking, I turned up