Truck on Pegu Road, Singapore

Imagine a micropile – highly ambitious and motivated, but alas, stuck in a dull, dead-end job.

As a blogpost category, Deliberate grammatical misinterpretations of signs painted on trucks is about as niche as it gets. Nevertheless, after posts in 2011 and 2012, here we are again in 2022.

(Un)subscription

This blog used to have a subscription option; I used Feedburner, a free service owned by Google. I currently have 16 subscribers, and if you're among them, you've probably been getting an email every time I publish a new post (which, unfortunately, is not as often as I would like).

As of 2022, Google no longer supports new email subscriptions via Feedburner. Ordinarily, existing subscribers would continue to receive emails, but I'm planning to deactivate my Feedburner altogether. So this is the last post for which you'll get the usual email notification (though I do of course plan to carry on blogging).

If you like, you can use Feedly or any other RSS reader of your choice to keep up with new posts (most readers also have an option whereby you get a weekly email round-up). Or just check back from time to time, in the old-school way. But if you forget, that's okay too :)

Thanks for reading, and I hope to see you around.

First Lines

I read an article yesterday about first sentences in books: How to be an Incipit by Paul Vacca. It's a bit annoying in places – quoting Camus in the original French (not so much as an English translation in brackets, as if we're all expected to know), and drawing, as far as I can tell, only on European and American authors as examples.

But it has a nice description of what makes certain first sentences special: "a particular vibration ... [a]s if they were uttered in an unconditionally confident voice, wholly sure of their facts: the quiet strength of the incipit."

Some music albums have that too. I'm thinking of David Bowie's Space Oddity (1969). "Ground control to major Tom." It has that air of quiet confidence; like he just knows he's writing a cult classic. But apparently his backing band later said Bowie was vague and gave little direction throughout the recording sessions; they found him "kind of nervous and unsure of himself." Oh well.

Vacca's article also talks about certain opening lines being like a "trap door", having "an inner force" that sucks us in, "a tipping effect".

For me, the mother of all tipping effects – although not referenced in Vacca's article – is found in One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez:

Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.

Or in the original Spanish:

Muchos años después, frente al pelotón de fusilamiento, el coronel Aureliano Buendía había de recordar aquella tarde remota en que su padre lo llevó a conocer el hielo.

This article by Claire Adam has a nice discussion of its peculiar magic: García Márquez bending the rules of fiction, and of time itself, to conjure one of the greatest opening lines in literature.

Huntsman Spider

I saw this spider on our bathroom windowpane in Kolkata last year. He (or she, I don't know) allowed me to take several photos from close range. In the first pic, the spider is backlit by window light. It's cool how the legs are kind of translucent.

In the second photo, I used flash to show more detail.

I believe this is a huntsman spider, but I don't know for sure. Growing up, we often saw them indoors; I always assumed they're harmless. More recently, i.e. after taking these photos, I looked them up. If it is indeed a huntsman, apparently it's not so harmless after all. Wikipedia says, "They have been known to inflict serious defensive bites on humans." Perhaps I shouldn't have gotten quite so close...

Travelling Light

I've written before about how I have few personal possessions. I recently moved to Singapore, and my luggage was within the airline's 30 kg limit.

The small suitcase (top right) is carry-on baggage; it fits all the clothes I brought with me. The big suitcase has my photography equipment: several cameras, film rolls, developing tanks and trays, and even my enlarger (a device for making darkroom prints). The rucksack has books, art supplies and miscellaneous stuff.

Some disclosures:

•	In reality my luggage wasn't so neatly segregated; I rearranged it a bit for the photo. For example, I originally packed some cameras in my carry-on, and while the big suitcase mainly had photography stuff, it also had some clothes to serve as padding.
•	I bought some clothes (a few shorts and t-shirts) and household items here in Singapore. But my wardrobe is still quite minimal.
•	It helps that I don't have an immediate need for warm clothing (Singapore rarely gets colder than 24°C) or formals. Some of my clothes, e.g. jumpers, winter jacket and formal suit, are in Kolkata or Copenhagen. I will need to have some of these shipped (or brought) to me, for when I travel to colder climes or attend conferences.
•	Most of my books are also in Kolkata or Copenhagen. I bought a couple of books here, but otherwise I am relying heavily on Kindle and libraries.

Flangamingo

My friend told me she was reading her 3-year-old niece a bedtime story involving a flamingo, and the niece – and I quote – "assumed the flangamingo was a girl. I told her that there are boy flamingos too. She didn't believe me because they are pink."

Cute but also a bit sad; stereotypes catch us early and catch us hard.

Flangamingo was a typo in my friend's text message. Flamingo is already a great word, but flangamingo is even better.

In March my friend (different friend) and I went to the Thane Creek Flamingo Sanctuary in Mumbai. These migratory birds breed in Great Rann of Kutch, a salt marsh in Gujarat, but their feeding grounds are the wetlands of Mumbai. This year the Thane Sanctuary is playing host to a record number of flamingos – apparently some 54,000 greater flamingos and 65,000 lesser flamingos. A river of pink amidst the blue waters of the creek.

This was an impromptu trip; had I known, I would have brought my DSLR which I generally use for bird photography. In the event, I only had a little underwater digicam whose zoom lens tops out at 120mm (35mm equivalent). All this to say: I don't have a good photo of these magnificent birds in flight; this is the best I could do:

But oh my, it was just glorious to see them in real life. The photo doesn't really capture their vivid colours, nor their gangly grace as they run through the water and take flight.

If you're in Mumbai between November and March, go see the flangamingos.

Shunbun no Hi: Stereo Kingfisher

Stereo kingfisher is not a species (this is in fact a white-throated kingfisher, which has appeared before on this blog). The image above is a stereo pair – two photos shot from slightly different perspectives, mimicking the binocular vision of the human eye. When viewed through a stereoscope, the pair merges into a single, three-dimensional image.

The same trick – merging into 3D – can also be done with the naked eye. Or at least, some people can do it. The technique is called free-viewing. If you'd like to try and learn, I wrote an article about it for Stereoscopy Blog.

There are special stereo cameras which take two instantaneous photos from different angles. I don't have one, so I use a normal camera. This means I'm limited to 'sequential stereo' – take a photo, move the camera a bit to one side, take another photo. If there is movement between frames, you get a stereo glitch (this post has nice examples; do a text search for 'goth').

Kingfisher with crab is a terrible subject for sequential stereo. The bird was repeatedly bashing the crab against the metal rail (I also took a video, which I will share if I can edit it to my satisfaction). I took at least 20 photos before I got a pair where there was no movement between frames. But what is life without challenges.

Happy equinox, everyone!