Gas Money

Oh come on.

First Date

Go Find Your Own Swamp

If She Plays Surfin' Bird One More Time

Origami crane, step by step.

Hyp-mo-tize!

Whatever you're doing right now, stop it at once and drink a mouthful of coffee, because in a few seconds, you're going to need to do a spit take. Unless you send away for this complete 25-lesson GUIDE TO HYPNOTISM, you will always be a loser. But don't take my word for it. Just assume that everything in this 1963 ad is completely true. Yes. Do that.

Why would you continue to fight your way through life influencing others with sound arguments and reasonable viewpoints, when you can simply EXERT YOUR POWER OVER OTHERS? This ad appeals to all the best facets of human nature: The desire for fame and popularity through power and control over others.

Imagine the life you could lead. See the man in this picture? Imagine how popular he is! This could be you! Look how popular! Why aren't you loved by others? Because you're not doing this!!!














You're probably wondering how this could possibly work. If you're still thinking like that, you haven't been properly hypnotized. Stop not being hypnotized. If you need proof that hypnotism works exactly like the ad says, just remember that this ad is from 1963, and because of the good work this ad has done, here in The Future, everyone is now completely hypnotized all the time and we no longer need doctors or medicine of any kind and everyone is popular and completely happy always. Duh. Oh yeah, except for you. You're the only one. You loser.

Just do what the ad says. You could be performing all sorts of life-saving surgeries (on yourself, because everyone else is already hypno-healed and stuff) by hypnotizing people into thinking they've had life-saving surgeries (actually, just you). ...If you weren't such a skeptic, that is.

Eventually, you yourself could learn to perform that greatest of medical procedures, the dollar-ninety-eight-ectomy. Imagine how much money you'd have then!

Still not convinced? Well, you're a jerk. Maybe you haven't noticed that there's a picture of a squinty, unnamed man pointing at you. Yes, RIGHT AT YOU!










Still not convinced? Then you're the worst person in the world. Maybe you need to take this 1000x1000 pixel version of the Squinty Pointy Man and make him your profile picture on whatever FaceTube social media thingy you use. That way, every time you log in, you'll be forced to think about the life you could be having, exerting your power over others.

Click for 1000 px avatar.

UPDATE: Alert Reader Sandy sent in this file photo of Hypnoguy before the surgery. (See below). Thanks, Sandy. We'll have an easier time spotting him, knowing his past!

This is what he REALLY looked like, before they made him look human. I found it in a reference book on Area 52 (where they REALLY did that alien autopsy stuff). 

UPDATE TO THE UPDATE: He's clearly from Metaluna, as was Brak, in This Island Earth (1955).

Ginn Basic Readers - Here Comes Whitey.

Carefree International Restaurant - Carefree, Arizona.

So where's lunch? How bout the Carefree?

Dining in Carefree, Arizona in The Sixties was pretty damn cool. Apparently there was this restaurant with six (or seven?) themed dining rooms arranged radially around a central kitchen, all in a mid-century modern purpose-built building that wasn't just a repurposed out-of-business hallmark store in a strip mall, which is mostly what we get, here in The Future.

This postcard scratches the surface, but the Ultranet is pretty much made of rabbit holes, and a simple search led the Phil Are GO! Research and Googling Team to the Carefree, Arizona Cave Creek Museum's site (...of course, and why wouldn't it?) which had an exterior shot of the restaurant and a floor plan. It looked like a groovy space station on the desolate moonscape of the moon, instead of the desolate Arizonascape of Arizona.

Oh yeah. That North America.

The post card boasts about seven distinctive yet interconnected dining areas, but we can only see six on the map. Nordic, Asian, African, South American, North American (you know: mac & cheese), and Mediterranian. Where' sthis phantom seventh dining room? The wine cellar? Hmm. They may have been on to something...

Naturally, any really cool looking restaurant doesn't want you to ask about the food. It was probably okay, or at least non-lethal. Or, it was probably better than trying all day to catch a road runner with your rocket skates.

If you're stranded in the desolate Chicagoscape of Chicago and you feel like having a similarly absurd dining experience, there are still places you can go for a heavily themed inoffensive meal served by a disinterested staff.

Shef Shangri-la! It's right near the Brookfield Zoo, so you can stagger out of the jungle just like a lost explorer and stagger up to a table and order a drink in a ridiculously-shaped glass, just like a lost suburbanite.

P.S. You will not live forever before or after eating at Chef Shangri-la, and that's probably best.

Tor Concrete Incinerators - The sweet smell of success.

Way back in Yore, and the days of it, society had a happy-go-lucky, it'll-sort-itself-out attitude toward pretty much everything. In order to find a period in history that was more deeply in denial, you'd probably have to go back to the Victorians, whose outward prudishness and conservatism was matched only by their depravity and their freaky-deakyness.

In 1963, lots of people had incinerators in their back yard, for burning leaves (okay, kinda bad), and for burning garbage (yikes).

YOU (Who? Me?) can cash in on a virtually untapped market with these almost universally needed "lifetime" concrete incinerators!

Yep. It used to be a common thing for people to have their own little Barad-dûr in their back yard that would spew stinking smoke into the neighborhood of a bright summer's morn. People would burn whatever they want in them. Leaves, sticks, rotten food, old televisions, newspapers, worn-out pets. But hey, it was The Sixties. Something that went up in smoke was real gone, baby. Like, gone forever and nothing to worry about gone. What was the big deal? It's just one of a rich tapestry of things that we were kidding ourselves about at the time.

Great. The neighbors are getting rid of their used diapers. Cancel the block party.

My grandma had an incinerator in her back yard. It was always just a curiosity to me. She never used it, so it was just this derelict monolith from a mysterious bygone age. My brothers and I would just sprinkle leaves into it through the rusty grate on top, because we didn't have video games yet. Once you watched the leaves hit the bottom, the show was pretty much over. Time to round up some more leaves! We really needed someone to invent video games.

We're much more "eco" and stuff now. We don't have incinerators any more because they're gross and bad for pretty much everybody. Now we have "fire pits". They're like a really big wok on little legs that you drag out of the garage when company is coming over. Sure, people (probably) don't burn garbage in them, but it's surprising that these are legal. I suppose the fires, when you consider the big picture, are pretty small and inconsequential.

Side note: Somebody needs to make a backyard fire pit that looks like a lidless, staring eye. I would find excuses to invite my friends over for a singalong around the fire if I had a Sauron fire pit in my back yard.

Yes, we're so eco now that people aren't allowed to get rid of certain things but once or twice a year. When we were clearing out my dad's basement, there were loads of cans of paint and varnish and stuff like that. Some of it was still good, and now sits in my garage on the Shelf Of Things That Are Useful But Are Probably Making Me Dumber By Permanently Damaging My Brain Every Time I Open The Can. Why, just last weekend, I used some of my dad's lacquer thinner to remove the sticker residue from a new lug wrench. "Fanks, dad! Dat racqer finner weally came in hrandy buh gruh wuh wuhwuh...."

Anyway, so there I was, stuck with a car's trunkload of what officially qualifies as "hazardous waste". Being all enlightened and responsible, I went onto my town's website to see what Enlightened and Responsible steps I should take to get rid of the stuff properly. My town collects stuff like this on a very special day that comes in the spring time. It was July. Great. Alternately, I could drive it several towns over and drop it off at a recycling center that wouldn't mind taking it off my hands. Fine.

So, load crap into car trunk. Drive an hour to the address using GPS. Drive up and down the road for fifteen minutes in the industrial park I found myself in, eventually pulling in to the parking lot that was at the exact address and street name as described on the website. It was a warehouse-looking place with forklifts and a couple of guys standing around at the loading door. Get out and ask them if this is the place. Guys look at each other and tell me they never heard of the place, and that they're sorry. Fuck. This.

So, after wasting three hours of a perfectly good Saturday morning trying to do The Right Thing, I wound up back in my garage, with a trunk full of original sin, having been screwed over by standard municipal buffoonery. That's what I get for trying to do the right thing.

So, apparently, every house needs to have a closet-sized corner of their garage piled high with old electronics and cans of semi-dried up paint, waiting for the one day a year when they can get rid of it. This is not a proper solution. Until cities make it practical and easy possible to get rid of evil stuff, I'll keep distributing cans of used paint to neighborhood children, which are roughly hobbit-sized, telling them to run off and cast them into the fires of Mount Doom. Kids are spoiled anyway, and they need quests. So, I'm helping.

Here's a couple of clip arts for your ever-growing stash of stupid images, courtesy of us. First, there's the awkward-viewing-angle pointing finger. You know, sometimes, people ask you to draw a a hand pointing right at the viewer, and fingers never look right when drawn foreshortened. As you can see, this hand has the index finger bending slightly downward, and it looks - you guessed it - weird. Enjoy!

You should always avoid trying to use the pointing-to-you finger as a graphical element. The only place it was ever gotten right was Uncle Sam. Hmm. That gives me an idea...

Now that even makes me laugh, and I'm a horrible person.

The other Graphic Gift is the elegant incinerator lady looking graceful and balletic as she dumps out her trash can. She makes it look fun and easy to burn filth in your own back yard. What's she dumping? Only you and Photoshop can decide! She's a PNG with an alpha channel background, and you're welcome!

Crate Squat Chalk Talk

Joke #1 - "Brad, there are some problems that just can't be solved using the old Tic-Tac-Toe-Tac-Toe-Tic-Tic-Toe-Tac model."

Joke #2 - "The first group will deliver the concrete around noon, and by three we should be able to... Hey, my eyes are up here, sunshine."

Joke #3 - Oh, god. The foreman was doing one of his site reviews, and he had brought his crate. Man, somebody needed to swap that thing out for a taller one. It would make it easier to pay attention to what the foreman was saying, and definitely reduce the "stare deep into my groin" factor. Why did he have to scootch so damn close? Man oh man...thank Sears for the robust stitching on their Toughskins khakis, though.

Joke #4 - "Ya see, Brad, when you're been foreman as long as I have, you learn a few little tricks of the trade. For example, mine is a long day, right? And I do a lot of squatting. Turns out this here milk crate is just high enough to help me out with some serious long-term squattage. Of course, it helps if you got a 'trick pelvis' like me. Funny thing about my trick pelvis. I got it back in Imjin. There I was doing some pilates in a tree top when this North Korean sniper get's the drop on me from about fifty clicks out. Now, I like my pubis as much as the next guy, but when I have to choose between it and my platoon, you know what I had to do...."

[Commenter jokes will be added to the post.    -Mgmt.]

Sceptron! - 1963' newest electronic brain!

Shudder in fear, pathetic humans! As of 1963, The Machines have the power to understand your voice! Behold! Sceptron can understand a word! Woe unto all who wish to say the word "five" in secret without illuminating the lamp!

Sceptron! So, in 1963, this was voice recognition. It barely qualifies as electronic, but it was an "electronic brain", as all machines capable of even the crudest logic were called back then. In a nutshell, it relied on a little bushel of quartz fibers of varying length that vibrated in response to different frequencies. Think of the harp inside a piano... or just a regular harp, if you want to be that way about it. Use the light disturbances produced by the vibrated quartz fibers (which are like little light pipes) to record a specific pattern on a photo negative, effectively recording a pattern of frequencies onto film. Then, have a picnic while Fotomat works on your slide, and use the resulting slide to only allow light to register on a light sensor when the exact same sound pattern is heard again.

Simple, right? No way. One can easily imagine how flawless your diction must have needed to be in order to get a match. Presumably the accuracy required could possibly have been adjusted with some kind of sensitivity potentiometer (knob or slider) attached to the photocell triggering the "result" switch, but that's just conjecture. Then there's the fact that the machine needed a photo slide of every sound it wanted to understand. Cleverness and clunkiness, 1963 style!

Did it catch on? Well, the P.A.G! Research and Googling Team only found other news articles from 1963 about the new curiosity of the Sceptron. No recently declassified writeups about how the Sceptron was being used to listen in on spies or anything. If the Sceptron found widespread use protecting our shores from invasion from the number five, those historical events must be better kept secrets than Watergate's Deep Throat and Monica Lewinsky's mouth combined.

I will prefer to think that the Sceptron failed to take the world by storm due to the machine's bogus name the creators' promiscuous understanding of how acronyms work. An acronym should be the first letter of every (or nearly every) word in a name. National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Light Amplified via Stimulated Emission of Radiation. Industrial Light and Makingshittyprequels.

Here is Sperry's explanation of how acronyms exactly don't work:

WRONG! The acronym for Spectral Comparative Pattern Recognizer is SCPR. So, it's the "Skippertron"! You can't just think up a cool sounding word and cherry pick letters arbitrarily from anywhere in the description of your invention as an excuse to use your cool word!

Using Sperry's sultty acronym theory, here are some names for their invention that are every bit as valid as Sceptron:

• Pooptron
• Spaaaztron
• Crapptron
• Smegtron
• Pitztron
• Rapetron

Interetsingly, when the demonstrator's haircut was used in place of the tufted quartz fibers to create a photomask and inserted into the Sceptron, the machine only responded to the word "virgin".

Astronaut Training - The roationater.

Click for big.

Joke #1 - The mono-axis rotational trainer prepares astronauts for work in the unforgiving depths of Grammar School Version of Outer Space.

Joke #2 - Always in favor of over-preparation, NASA astronaut candidates are trained for the inevitable difficulties involved in turning on the hose in orbit.

Joke #3 - "Nope. Listen, Don. We're not getting any thrust at all from your current shape. Try to make yourself more twisty, like a propeller.     ...and I don't want to hear any more remarks about there being 'no air in space so propellers don't work'. Which one of us is an astronaut and which one of us is an astronaut trainee, mister?   ...Right. I thought so."

Joke #4 - "Sir, I believe the space capsule is a little out of scale relative to the planet. Oh, perspective? Aah, got it."

Joke #5 - There are fringe groups that believe the moon landing was staged, but their arguments lack any credible evidence.

Joke #6 - "Sorry, sir. I just poked a hole in Indonesia with my wrench. Shall I try and patch it? Over."

Joke #7 - Astronaut training for the delicate procedure to get free Cinemax in orbit.

Joke #8 - (Fig. 12) Once the clutch cable and input shaft are disconnected, carefully lift the astronaut form the capsule's engine bay. You are now ready to swap in a super sweet Chevy crate motor of your choice.

Joke #9 - "Oh, no, children! I've begun an uncontrolled rotation! Which of my thrusters shall I use to correct it? Shall I use my starboard lateral thruster????? Shall I??? Or should I use my port lateral thruster????? You'd better think quickly! I'm becoming ever so disoriented!" (Insert sound of children shouting advice.)

Joke # 10 - Astronauts in orbit on the International Space Station train to someday work in the harsh environment of fake space on Earth.

Jim D. Wasted no time in sending us this "reference obscura". Those who grew up watching Ray Raynor may get it. "Pow! . . . . . . Pow! . . . . . powpowpowpowpowpowpowpowpow!"
Mr. Fancy ICantSeeAThingInThisHelmetPants_2 was first runner up in the Get It in Quick Olympics with this combined Star Wars / PBS themed joke #12 - Early PBS trial broadcast of Bob Ross' "Painting Space, Man" was doomed to failure, as Bob found he could not paint "Happy Little Stars" while his signature "fro" was sandwiched under his helmet and he was "high as fuck".

[Commenter jokes will be added to the post.    -Mgmt.]

DIY tips from pro self it-doers!

Stabilize your telephoto lens with this DIY rifle-stock-shaped camera mount. Inventor says he enjoys taking pictures of political appearances, human rights protests, parades, birthday parties, or just random schoolyards.

Mirror with convenient reference ornament helps observers understand they are not eagles. Also available: model for eagles with human-shaped carving in "spread person" pose.

New product "Gunk" claims to remove grease scourfully. Can be used for many hardful cleaning jobs around the house. Easefully gettable in cheaptive smallish or largesome sizeitudes. Not for usement on eating stuffs. Prolongey exposement may make have prain broplem of hard talk good. Care have of kid use gruh. Mbuff risk fluh neurolgimal  bz muffbbbuuuuhhhh California ffffuuuuuuhhhhhh.

Photo hobbyists can prevent loss of chemical jug corks by tying a string to a screw eye in stopper. Improper DK-50 ventilation of darkroom may result in obvious things seeming like incredibly clever ideas.

Vintage Lens Test - Three fast fifties (and a wee bit of radiation).

Waaaay back in 2011, we did a lens test featuring three goofy old lenses, which give you fun or "arty" effects when stuck on your otherwise perfect modern camera. Since then, I've leveled up my photography skills (I now get a special attack) and have expanded my old lens collection, by sort of dragging a fishing net through Ebay.

UPDATE: The Fotodiox adapter on the Nikor has been found to be a blurry piece of junk, and definitely let down the Nikon in this test. For a re-test of the Nikor without the horrible Fotodiox adapter, please go here and more sample images here.

The Lure of Vintage Glass.

It's hard to say "no" to really old lenses. They really don't build them like they used to, and modern lenses that DO approach the tank-like build quality of old lenses come at a premium. For example, there's a famous German company called Voigtlander that makes really good modern manual-focus lenses that go for at-or-beyond the one kilobuck price point. If you're interested in an all-manual control (no auto-anything) lens, I definitely suggest buying an adapter and investigating vintage equipment. One thing I can tell you is that, in the couple of years I've spent messing around with old lenses, the fact that you have to work the lens manually has accelerated my understanding of F-stop, depth of field, and angle of view in a way that modern automatic lenses failed to do. One man's opinion. Your mileage may vary.

Adapt Adopt, and Improve.

On the subject of adapters: The camera I shot this test on is an Olympus E-M5, which uses what they call the "micro four-thirds" lens mount. One of the cool things about the M43 standard is the fact that, with the proper adapter, you can use just about any lens ever made on your camera. Now, one of the bad things about micro four-thirds is the fact that the smaller sensor size means that any lens you put on it is more "zoomed in" than it should be. This is called the "crop factor". Without getting too far into the geekdom of it, basically a 50mm lens becomes a 100mm one when you stick it on a M43 camera.

That is, unless you use one of a new breed of lens adapters that has corrective optics in it, that basically "focuses down" the image onto the smaller sensor,  so that things look the size they were meant to. A happy side effect of funneling the light in this way is that the image is brighter, too. Less wasted light gives you a brighter image. More light means lower ISO means faster shutter speeds means less blurry pictures. Generally, these kinds of adapters give you an extra F-stop's worth of brightness. Yes, please. These new adapters are called "speed boosters" (because you can use faster shutter speeds) or "focal reducers", which sounds to my ear like a more descriptive term.

Yes, these are pricier than a regular adapter, which is about twenty dollars. Some of the Metabones adapters go for up to five hundred. Oof. However, if you're planning on buying heavily into a particular family of lenses, it can be really, really worth it to have a really good focal reducer/speed booster to make them all work better on your camera. Each of the three lenses tested here are from different "families" - Canon, Nikon, and Pentax. So, I have a speed booster of different quality for each. My Canon adapter is from Metabones, who I'm pretty sure came up with the first speed booster.  They're the best in the biz. The Nikon adapter is made by Fotodiox, and costs about 1/4 what the Metabones costs. The Pentax lens is an "M42" threaded lens mount, and the adapter I'm using for that one is also a cheapo model. Hey, I'm not made of adapters! The disparity in quality of the corrective optics in these adapters will doubtlessly have a small effect on the sharpness of the images, but I can't see any appreciable drop in image quality from the cheapo adapters. Build quality? Oh, you absolutely get what you pay for, there. The Fotodiox adapter (with the red ring around it) was not machined precisely, an I had to carefully sand it down to get it to fit on my E-M5. The Metabones has never given me trouble. Oddly, the no-name M42 speed booster fits perfectly, too.

Sheesh. Sorry about all the tech babble. On to some testing.

Prime Targets.

All three lenses in this test are 50mm primes with big, fast f/1.4 apertures. "Prime" means "no zoom". What I've found out is that, if you're going digging for some vintage lens gold, prime lenses are good candidate. There are some brilliantly made prime lenses from past decades that rival the best of the best examples from current product lines... if you don't mind manually focusing, that is. As far as the aperture goes, you have to adjust that by hand as well, but I usually shoot with the aperture wide open to grab as much light as possible, because I hate flash. Lenses like these can be found on Ebay for $30 - $120.

Zoom lenses? You can definitely find those at Chez eBay, but here's a secret: the magic mojo of making a zoom lens that looks good throughout it's full zoom range is something they figured out how to do relatively recently. Zoom lenses built before 1990 or so are not very desirable. I have several, and they're fun to tinker around with, but even a cheap modern zoom lens will be sharper, smaller, and faster than a vintage zoom.


Meet the contenders. This is an exhibition, not a competition. Don't make me choose. I love them all.

On the left is a circa 1972 Canon FD-mount 50mm f/1.4.

In the middle is a Nikkor F-mount 50mm f/1.4 from about 1966.

On the right is a 1963(?) Eight-Element Pentax Asahi Super-Takumar 50mm f/1.4 with an M42 screw-type mount.

There's something about Asahi

Here's a funny thing about the Asahi lens. It's kind of radioactive. Many lenses in the 60s and 70s had lens elements made with thorium, which gave the glass desirable refractive properties. You can search for yourself on the topic of "radioactive thoriated lenses". The radiation given off by these lenses is only alpha waves. It only travels an inch or so from the glass, and is easily shielded by almost anything. Gamma rays are the ones that go through steel, make your sperm go funny, and turn you into Spider-Man. You might develop health problems if you slept with this lens under your pillow for about ten years. Apart from something like that, there's no real risk.

A side effect of thorium lenses is that, over the years, many of them have developed a yellow tint in the glass. There's some debate as to why, but it seems as though the radiation given off by the thorium in the glass stains the glass yellow. However, this is curable. Exposing the rear element of the Supertak (as the kids call it) to strong ultra-violet light for a few days will clear it right up. I used a GE CFL blacklight bulb to cure mine. I put it in a box lined with foil, with the back of the lens pointing at the bulb. Worked like a charm. It took about two days.

Incidentally, this Saturday on UHF, they'll be showing "Asahi-Super-Takumar vs. Mecha-Asahi-Super-Takumar". I love that movie.

Sample Set #1: Fiestabot

Here's Fiestabot all dressed up for Cinco de Octobero. Oh, Fiestabot. You're always getting up too late! Please disregard the framing discrepancies in these shots. I was leaning a little closer sometimes.  They're all 50mm lenses, so things should frame up identically with each. Also, all of these were shot with the aperture wide open at f/1.4, with no post processing. These are straight out of the camera.

The Super-Takumar has good contrast and nice soft bokeh in the background. Maybe there's a reason this lens has such a cult following. The depth of field is nicely shallow, but not absurdly so.

The Nikkor, with wide open aperture, is really really soft. Also, it loses contrast wide open. Believe it or not, I focused on his "face lens". Some lenses just get soft at wide apertures. In fairness to the Nikkor, there's a picture down below shot at f/2. It sharpers up and looks normal. However, I like being able to open up this lens and get the dreamy Barbara Walters effect. This would be great for portraits. The look is a bit like an old Diana lens, actually.

The Canon looks a lot like the Super-Takumar. I'm having a hard time telling the difference. Both are really good fast fifties. Nice contrast and shallow depth of field. The blurry background outside the window seems a little darker than with the Super-Takumar.

 Sample Set #2 : Done the dishes.

Really nice colors. Really sharp where you focus, and DOF is shallow, but not too. I focused on the orange glass, and the blue dish towel is still in focus an inch or two in front of it.

No surprises from the Nikkor. Soft and glowy. Next.

I think the Canon has a slightly shallower depth of field. Again, I focused on the orange glass. Notice how only a little bit of the blue towel in front of it is in focus.

Sample Set #3: Drums from Doumbekistan. These are Egyptian drums called Doumbeks. Similiarly-shaped drums are found all over the world. In Africa they're Djembes. In Turkey they're called Darbukas. They all work the same.

Sample Set #4: Xanthophyl and chromatic aberration. 

Chromatic Aberration or "CA" is that blue or purple fringe around the black tree branch in front of the white sky. It's present in most lenses to some degree, and shows up in areas of very high contrast where dark meets light in a hard edge. The Super-Takumar has some nice fuzz at the edge of the picture, where you can see the leaves going out of focus. Great saturation.

In this picture, I stopped the aperture down to f/2, or else the sunlight would have been a fuzzy mess. F/2 is still a pretty wide aperture, and the Nikkor has the "swirly bokeh" that some lenses do. Look around the edges of the picture where the blurs form concentric circles around the center of the image. Technically, it's a flaw, but lots of people love it. I do.

The Canon just looks nice and normal here. Yes, there's the CA, but most lenses would do that in this situation. Even wide open at f/1.4, it's still pretty sharp.

Sample Set #5: Atomic Clock.

This image shows the lenses' vignetting (darkened corners). Again, all lenses do this to some degree. Purists dream of a lens that is infinitely sharp and has no dark corners - and, if you ask me, no personality. The Super-Takumar shows us its good contrast and slightly warm color. Very nice.

The warm color of the Nikkor wasn't apparent in the other samples, but here, it's obvious. The green wall has lots of yellow in it. I'll have to remember that one. If you were to narrow the aperture to sharpen it up a little, you'd still have nice warm color, since adjusting aperture shouldn't effect the saturation.

The Canon has slightly cooler colors than the other two. It still has some vignetting that I like very much, and is still super sharp.

Summary:

Asahi Super-Takumar 1963 - Sharp and with warm color and smooth bokeh. Depth of field is nice and thin, but not crazy-thin. The radiation won't hurt you. A physically small lens, if that's important to you. Mine is a slightly rarer eight-element model produced some time before 1966. The seven-element version appeared in 1966, and should be a bit cheaper, and most people say they can't tell the difference in the images they produce.

Nikkor F 1966 - Way soft and dreamy wide open, but sharpens up if you close it up a little. If you use it in low light, you'll miss being able to open it up all the way without the glow. A great special effect portrait lens that acts normal if you stop it down to f/2 or f/2.8, which makes it an exciting rare find. Build quality is beautiful. It's a heavy lens with a retro design clearly of The Sixties.

Canon FD 1972 - Similar to the Super-Takumar, but with cooler colors. It acts like you want a fast fifty to be. Sharp and accurate with super-thin depth of field if you want it. Also has beautiful build quality and heft.

This is not a competition, so I'm not going to choose a winner. The winner is (gasp!) you!... if you know what to look for on eBay or in resale shops. The seller should mention three things.

-Scratches. Some? None? At the center or near the edge? Edge scratches aren't the end of the world. Near the center, and it's gut-check time. Can you find another copy of the lens without scratches?

-Fungus. Yep. Lenses grow fungus in them, over the years. Little black dots, usually on the inner elements where you can't reach it, where moisture get trapped if the lens was stored improperly. Fungus is a deal-killer. Cleaning a lens costs more than you're likely to pay for the lens.

-Aperture blades action. The words you're looking for are "snappy" or "quick" and "dry". A sluggish aperture may get stuck open or closed. Also, visible oil on the aperture blades tells you that someone had the lens open, trying to remedy sticky blades at some point in history. Oil on the blades doesn't scare me too much, personally, so long as the blades are snappy and quick.

Thanks for reading. Maybe we need to do a test on vintage zooms? That should be an adventure.