Book Recommendo - We Are Legion / Bobiverse Book 1

Science fiction often lives or dies on the strength of the ideas laid out in the story. It would be easy to assume that any narrative that takes place in the future with spaceships and robots is therefore science fiction. I insist that this isn't true. Star Wars is an action movie. Alien is a horror movie. What determines a story's genre is the nature of the story, not the time period in which it takes place.

Anyway, interesting ideas are the bread and butter of sci-fi, and quite often, interesting characters are few and far between. Science fiction fans generally accept this as standard. Hey, if there's enough compelling stuff taking place, you can overlook the fact that the people they're happening to are a bit flat. Maybe?

There are, of course notable exceptions to this. In recent years, Andy Weir's The Martian presented the reader with an interesting situation (guy stranded on Mars), and a protagonist with, oddly enough, a little personality (supersmart and resourceful astronaut with a cheeky sense of humor and lots of grit) that you actually root for. Let's hope there's more where this came from.


We Are Legion is book one of the newly-launched Bobiverse trilogy, and one could be forgiven for thinking is was also written by Andy Weir, for all the right reasons.

The reader is introduced to Bob Johansson just as he sells his tech startup for a gigantic profit, effectively cashing out after a career of innovation and self-won achievement. He's a scientist and entrepreneur who's earned every penny, and now he wants to relax for a few decades. He also has a tank of liquid nitrogen with his name on it, having bought himself a spot with a cryonics company, because with a strong belief in science and all the money he could ever want, why wouldn't he? That same afternoon, he's hit by a truck while crossing the street, and wakes up a century or so in the future.

A lot changes in a century. The United States is run by a totalitarian theocracy that has declared "corpsicles" to be immoral and an abomination. Also, all rejuvenated human minds have no rights and are the property of the State. Bob wakes up as a disembodied mind installed in a computer, and finds out he's been selected to be the operating system on a space probe designed to find new habitable worlds, because apparently war and destruction continue, even if the U.S. is run by Superchristians (Crazy. I know.). If Bob chooses to decline this opportunity, he'll just be deleted and they'll find someone else. That right there is the interesting "what if?" premise for the story.

It's also interesting and compelling in the same way that The Martian is: A really smart and resourceful protagonist presented with a shit sandwich of a situation. Fortunately, like The Martian's Mark Watney, Bob Johansson determines to think himself out of any problem. He spends nearly zero time freaking out, throwing a tantrum. He's pragmatic, with a good bit of humor to keep himself sane.

It's also helpful that, as the AI on a spacehsip in the year twenty one something-or-other, he can 3D print anything he needs, and can make copies of himself to cooperate with. (Talk about your team building exercises. Woooo!) Also, he can speed up or slow down his perception of time by adjusting the clock speed of his CPU, which is handy in those long, boring stretches of space exploration. There's still the bickering nations of Earth to deal with, as they continue having wars, ruin what's left of the habitable regions of the planet, and generally behave like schoolchildren. So it's not all a simple milk run for Bob.

One might wonder why Bob would feel any loyalty at all to the dillholes of Earth who put him in this situation and who bitch constantly that he's not finding habitable planets fast enough, or giving special treatment to one nation or another. But, maybe that's just me. It may also be why I'm not an immortal artificial intelligence expected to save humanity.

Music Recommendo! - Vince Guaraldi's Greatest Hits

Today is the final day of Music Week, and we present to you a person that probably nobody hates. When his songs come on the air, is there anyone who says "Oh god. This frikkin guy. I'm leaving the room an an angry fashion immediately."?

You may recognize his name. We're entering the Vince Guaraldi time of year, when you'll be hearing his music in all the Charlie Brown holiday specials. But, you can assign your self some musical street cred bonus points by getting his Greatest Hits album, which features a lot of music from his career before he ever got the Peanuts gig. Yes, that's right! He had a life before Charlie Brown!

Guaraldi's recording career started in the early Fifties, on an album with the fantastic jazz vibraphonist (No, I'm not being sarcastic) Cal Tjader. He eventually started his solo career in 1959, and did a lot of great stuff before being knighted the Charlie Brown Minstrel in 1965 with the release of A Charlie Brown Christmas.

His style, like a lot of 60's era jazz, was heavily influenced by sambas and other Brazilian rhythms, which were brought back to America by soldiers returning from World War II. See? War. Ughhh. Good gawd yaww. That's what it's good for!

Dig the Ginza Samba...


Cast Your Fate to the Wind was Guaralid's big grammy winning hit from 1963, and basically won him the Charlie brown gig when the animation producer Bill Melendez heard the song and asked Guaraldi if he would do some music for a little project he had coming up.



The rest is seasonal TV history. But, do yourself a favor and hip yourself to the samba jive by making the scene on his earlier career. It's just as charming, but you can still feel like a sophisticated grownup and stuff when you put it on.

Music recommendo! - The Planets, by Gustav Holst

Have you always wanted to get a little classical music in your collection, but just something a little more substantial than frilly, flopsy Mozart (not that there's anything wrong with that)? Today's musical recommendo may have the cure for your classically curious blues: Gustav Holst's The Planets.

Gustav! How's it hangin, baby? You're looking a little intense there. Let you music take care of that instead. Give us a little smile, my man.

The Planets has one "song" written for each of the seven planets known to exist at the time. Each has a distinct character, borrowing from mythology to assign personality to each planet. Each planet has a job. Neat!

Mars, the Bringer of War
Venus, the Bringer of Peace
Mercury, the Winged Messenger
Jupiter, the Bringer of Jollity
Saturn, the Bringer of Old Age
Uranus, the Magician
Neptune, the Mystic

Gustav Holst (1874 - 1934) was an English composer whose influences include Vagner, of Ride of the Valkyries fame, and Ravel, of Bolero fame. This makes complete sense once you get through The Planets for the first time.

Vagner's ridiculously large opera The Rings of the Nibelung is so long it has to be broken up into several days of opera-ing. Lots of apocalyptic imagery and screaming choirs - good! Fifteen hours of turgid epic drama - possibly bad. The Planets has that, but in a less forbidding size. Just drop the needle on Mars, Bringer of War. Perfect soundtrack for your standard issue category three tornado or D&D gaming session. Mars is a thundering planetary death knell in 5/4 time. Because of this, it's a pretty useful and popular piece of music. So, you've probably heard it before: It's found its way into lots of commercials and movies. It's the heavy metal of orchestral music. Skip to one minute in this video for the start of the music. Or, just jump to 8:26 to hear the end of the world.

Another Holst influence, Ravel's Bolero starts quiet and gets louder as it repeats its main theme, sounding mysterious and exotic the whole way. The Planets has this too. Look up Uranus, the Magician, or Neptune, the Mystic. The dissonant (notes that intentionally don't match) chords sung by the choir in Neptune still give me the creeping heebie jeebies every time. Skip to 5:07 in this video to make all of your hairs stand up.

Unlike your tea-and-cakes kind of chamber music, The Planets offers those with orchestral curiosity something to sink their teeth into, without needing a doctorate in history. It's a good gateway drug into classical music, if you don't want your CD shelf (if you still use those) to look like you inherited your collection from your grandma... even though mine totally does.

Here comes Jupiter, Bringer of "Jollity". Good old Jupiter, with his abundtive jollity. So jovious and whimsitive! Sometimes it's hard to tell if history actually used to use words like "jollity" or if it's just making shit up to screw with our grammar. Let's play it safe. Just go around ramming different suffixes onto words that don't have matching plugs, and tell anyone who complains to "look it up, you troglodyte. I'm listening to classical music!" Get your music-holes ready to have jollity crammed into them. Jolly up, you!

So there's The Planets. It's got some happy stuff, some light warfare, some spooky crap going on, and various other emotions, like going really fast (Mercury, the Winged Messenger). You could do worse.

Homewrecker, or just your sexy muse?

Be careful, though, just like suddenly going to the gym on a regular basis, starting a little classical music habit may have your husband, wife, or wifeband suspecting you're cheating with a college professor... or Arthur Fiedler.

Music Recommendo! - The Seatbelts - Cowboy Bebop O.S.T.1

Music Week continues today. It's time for some foreign jazz imitating American jazz.

I know, I know. You don't get anime. That's fine. Even though Cowboy Bebop is the only anime show that seems to be made for grownups and carefully avoids all the weirdnesses that would turn off the casual viewer, you completely don't have to watch the series to understand how good the music is. Also, the English dub is so well-performed you could forget it was ever in a different language in the first place, which is a rare, rare thing among anime dubs.

Yoko Kanno, as she would be called in the States. In Japan, you

would call her Kanno Yoko - Family name first, and then your

own name. Kind of a nice idea. This is how it is in most of Asia.

The show is set in 2071, on Mars and Earth, starring a couple of bounty hunters that don't really like each other. So, of course the natural fit, when it comes to the music, is Sixties-sounding American jazz, right? All the music for the show was written by Yoko Kanno. She also conducted the band she assembled to record all the tracks, calling themselves The Seatbelts. She's kind of a musical genius. How good was the music? A couple of years after the show ended, The Seatbelts went on a tour of Japan doing concerts of the soundtrack to sold-out audiences. Who could say no to a twenty-whatever piece big band playing music to have fight scenes by?



Enough talk! Stare with your ears. Here is the opening title sequence to the TV show. The theme song is called Tank!

More. This is Rush, also on the O.S.T. 1 album (which stands for Original Sound Track, by the way).

The recordings have a retro sound to them that is definitely not accidental. Ever since roughly The Sixties, audio engineers will tend to record a band by "close mic'ing" them, with each horn getting its own microphone, sometimes shoved deep into the bell of the instrument. This reached its height of popularity in The Seventies. This is how you get that sound that each instrument is sitting right inside your head. A good example of close mic'ed horns can be heard in pretty much any studio album by Steely Dan, but here's My Old School. Notice how the horns sound like you're sitting right in front of them. This is the sound of The Seventies. Tight and dry, with little or no reverb.

With these Cowboy Bebop recordings, you can hear a lot of "room ambience". The musicians were very likely recorded by two microphones (gotta have stereo separation!) positioned overhead, covering the whole group. This has the effect of letting you hear the whole band, as they sounded in a large room. This is how things were done up until the early Sixties and for the whole of recording history before then. By using this recording technique, Kanno further positions her musical sound in the past, giving it a retro feel that you definitely perceive, maybe without realizing it. This method is sometimes used today, whenever the engineer wants to get a more natural sounding recording, or "that retro sound".

Oof. A quick check of Amazon shows us that pretty much any Seatbelts CD is going for thirty to fifty dollars, apparently because they're only available on an import basis. Shit. This is not a reasonable first-time purchase for the casual listener. Maybe if you're resourceful you can find it some other way, or maybe one one of your new-to-medium-fangled streaming services?

As long as we're through the looking glass of outrageous music prices here, let's watch just about the coolest chase scene ever committed to film and the accompanying song, What Planet is This. The song is on a different and similarly outrageously overpriced album, the soundtrack to the Cowboy Bebop Movie, released in 2003, Cowboy Bebop O.S.T. Knockin' on Heaven's Door /  Future Blues. Skip to 1:13 when the scene kicks into high gear as the music starts, or watch from the start to see all the hand-drawn tracer fire and smoke trails you can possibly see. Sorry we couldn't find this clip on FaceTube with the English dub.

I've read before that the Japanese regard American culture the same way we do French. They think it's cool, and like to borrow it from time to time to add some style to their own. Cowboy Bebop makes a strong case for this notion. Cowboy Bebop uses ultra-hip music to make sure you understand that violence and mayhem make brilliant entertainment. Mission accomplished, The Japanese.

As music recommendos go, this one is getting depressing. No one should be asked to pay forty-ish dollars for a frikkin CD. Maybe this year's Surprise Pointy Tree Day Card CD Gift needs to have a few of these easy-to-find-but-expensive-to-buy tracks on it? Food for thought.

Music Recommendo! - Raymond Scott - Reckless Nights and Turkish Twilights.

Music Week continues today, with something for those with a stomach for quirk. No? No quirk stomach? How's your idiosyncratic stomach? "No" on that as well? Umm, you may want to come back tomorrow.

If you stayed... so, maybe you're pretty weird, and you like (small) big band type music but also something old timey, and you want a dose of cartoons in there as well. You're in luck, you musical sociopath, because Raymond Scott has you covered!

If you were a child at one point, and also lived in or near a house with a television set between the years of 1940 and 1990, you will instantly recognize several of Scott's songs. Try this on for size. It's called Powerhouse, and you know it, but not because of the reason you think you do. You may have to wait till 1:28 to get to the familiar part, though.

"Oh yeah! you say. That's the song that what-his-face wrote for the Bugs Bunny cartoons! What's the guy? Carl Stalling! Yeah!" WRONG! You're WRONG! And please sit down!

Carl Stalling sort of "borrowed" Powerhouse along with the rest of Scott's catalog for use in cartoons, due to Scott's sale of his publishing rights to Warner Bros in 1943. You'd be forgiven for thinking Stalling wrote Powerhouse, but Raymond Scott (actual name Harry Warnow) wrote it about ten years earlier. Forget Carl Stalling.

Scott began his career as the pianist in the CBS orchestra in The Thirties. All the while, he wrote music on the side that was altogether crazier and more dense than anything his professional life required of him. He assembled a band out of a few CBS orchestra colleagues and started his six-piece band, the Raymond Scott Quintet.

He called his music "descriptive jazz", which is why the songs have titles like "Dinner Music for a Pack of Hungry Cannibals." His brilliant craziness meant that his music found a home in one cartoon after another for decades to come. Scott's music found its way into cartoons like Looney Tunes, Ren & Stimpy, The Simpsons, Animaniacs, Duckman, and others. He wasn't writing music for cartoons. He was just writing music that suited himself,  but cartoon makers have embraced his stuff ever since. The music in his head turned out to be perfect for cartoons. How's that for a weirdness pedigree?

Scott took some heat from musical purists at the time for sometimes incorporating classical melodies into his music. They saw it as a debasement of their musical culture. However, if you, like me, owe your early classical music exposure to cartoons, this is no bad thing. It turns out there are lots of people who first became interested in orchestral music because of its use in cartoons. So, as usual, those people losing their shit were freaking out over nothing.

In 1992, a number of unreleased recordings were discovered and subsequently released on the Columbia label as the album Reckless Nights and Turkish Twilights.

Here's an link to Amazon's page for the album, which you can buy on CD for five bucks, or download compressed MP3's for... ten dollars? I say get the disc and you can re-rip it again and again down the road at higher and higher bitrates as storage becomes cheaper and cheaper, but that's just my musical consumption philosophy in general. Physical media, all the way, baby, and don't tell me what I can and can't do with my own files. Okay, editorial complete.




Here are some songs you din't know you knew:

In an Eighteenth-Century Drawing Room, which rankled the snobs because Scott grabbed the melody from Mozart's Piano Sonata in C Major...

The Toy Trumpet, which you may recall from the Ren & Stimpy episode "In the Army" and probably some other places. Don't ask me what's with the people on the train in the picture.

But the big hit everyone recognizes is still Powerhouse. How big? Rush used a little bit of it in their nearly-impossible-to-play-in-one-take song "La Villa Strangiato". In this embedded video, skip to 6:05 to hear the little nod to Powerhouse.

...or just use this handy link that's indexed to the right part of the song at FaceTube.

You can find other compilations of Raymond Scott's music, including the re-recordings by the Dutch jazz group The Beau Hunks, playing faithful versions of Scott's hits on period-correct instruments (jeez!). But Reckless Nights and Turkish Twilights is the album that brought Scott back to the record store shelves, and is probably the best place to start.

That can be your good dose of vitamin Crazy for the day.

Music recommendo - Mississippi John hurt. Today!

Guess what, guessers! Wrong! This week is Music Week here at GO! Tower! That means we've pulled five albums from the P.A.G! Twelfth Floor Employee Lounge Close-N-Play Jukebox, and we will present reviews of these albums all week long.

Today we begin Music Week with Mississippi John Hurt, the blues man for the blues-intolerant listener.

I know what you're saying. "I want me some blues in my collection, but as a musical form, the blues are too repetitive and simplistic. I get bored listening to the blues! Surely there must be some kind of blues that doesn't follow the predictable chord progressions and stereotypical forms of the genre."

Good thing you're saying that, because Mississippi John Hurt is here to salve the soul.

Mississippi John Hurt has all the blues pedigree you could ask for. Born during the age of the steam engine, check. Self-taught guitarist, check. Sharecropper, check. Played around the deep south throughout the Great Depression, playing dances while working as a farmhand, oh, big check there!

His career would have ended around 1940 or so, except that his music enjoyed a bit of a rediscovery in The Fifties, with the rise of coffee house culture. The album pictured to the left, "Today!", was recorded in 1966, shortly before his death. It's a clean studio recording of Hurt at the end of a long and varied career. So, you won't have the scratchiness of old wax cylinders or anything like that... although there are other Mississippi John albums recorded live, and on questionable equipment, if that's the sound you're after. On "Today!", the only scratchiness will come from Hurt's voice.

Amazon link to Today!, by Mississippi John Hurt where you can preview all the songs on the album.

"Today!" is a tight thirty minutes or so of Hurt playing pretty much his best songs. The songs are usually a tidy two minutes thirty seconds or so: no longer than they need to be. His playing style was developed kind of in a vacuum, with few outside influences. As a result, he sounds only like himself. His playing is a quiet and intricate picking style that is a departure from any other blues you will find. Also, the structure of his songs bears no resemblance to the predictable and repetitive twelve bar progression that, in my opinion, smothers the interestingness out of almost all other blues.

Here's "Pallet on your Floor", which demonstrates his signature picking style:



Another big favorite of mine is Pay Day. Guess what it's about?



Candy Man is pretty dirty, with the lyrics only thinly veiled in metaphor. Fun enough for you. Safe enough that your kids won't catch on.




You can put on Mississippi John really early in the morning without jarring yourself into waking up too fast, or annoying whoever hasn't gotten out of bed yet. Having a drink before your guests arrive? Mississippi John's your guy. Driving home after a super loud concert? Mississippi John.
Doing some two-beer carpentry in the garage? Oh, you bet Mississippi John.

On other Mississippi John albums, there are some funny songs like "Funky Butt Blues" ("Funky butt, stinky butt, take it away"), but "Today!" is the definitive Hurt album, and may be the only one you really need.

Mississippi John helps you think. It's ten dollars. Buy "Today!", and here's what you'll never say: "God dammit! I wish I hadn't bought that Mississippi John album! What was I thinking?"

Another music tomorrow. See you then!

Video Review! Danger 5!

Short version:
If you have eyeballs and ears, use them to watch Danger 5, or go to hell.

Long version:
Danger 5 is an Australian television series. Two seasons are available, with a third on the way. It takes place during World War II, looks like it was made in the Sixties, and was actually made over the last few years by the Sydney Broadcast System (SBS). Currently available on Netflix. It's brilliant.

Dario Russo, with intensity.

The creator / director is Dario Russo, an Australian writer, producer, director, and composer who seems to really really like old film parody. His first project was a serialized internet series called Italian Spiderman, now viewable on FaceTube as a complete movie here.  The Sixties / Seventies look of the film is even more accurate than Grindhouse. From watching it, you can see how the SBS gave him money to make Danger 5.

Italian Spiderman starred David Ashby, who, after substantial weight loss, now fills the role of Jackson, the American member of the Danger 5 team. He hates "nazzis". The other actor who appears in both projects is Carmine Russo, who plays Hitler. Maybe he's related to the director?

"...and for God's sake, kill Hitler!"

Danger 5 are a team of spies on a mission to kill Hitler, as directed by their commander, an Eagle-headed human, Colonel Chestbridge, who seems to be American also. Duh.

If you're the type who always has to have backstory filled in, and always demands "why this?" and "why that?", you're going to have a hard time getting through Danger 5. Some people have animal heads. The Sixties took place in The Forties. Shut up and enjoy it.

Jackson and Claire battle a shark, obviously. Claire spends most of Season 2 as a severed head, carried around by her heartbroken husband, Tucker. Wups! Spoiler!

Production values fall somewhere between Batman and Doctor Who. All buildings are models. All vehicles are toys. All strings are proudly unhidden. Shut up again.

Oh, Ilsa. We're from two different worlds...

All dialogue is dubbed, even if the characters speak English. This captures the zero budget exploitation film aesthetic. Also, everyone can understand every language, even if they can't speak it. This keeps it feeling very international, without  any tedious interpretation needing to be done. Ilsa, for example, who only speaks Russian, can be perfectly understood by anyone, though her dialogue is subtitled for the viewers at home. Also, I love her, although we can never be together.

That's pretty much everything you need to know. Oh yeah: any ally who gets killed recites, with their dying breath, their perfect drink recipe into the ear of a weeping Pierre, who is the team's bartender.

In one episode, there's a Nazi triceratops with machine guns on his head. Goddammit, would you just go and watch it already? Jeez. I need to get back to clicking the "refresh" button on my Netflix queue until season three comes out. Here's a trailer.

Object Review - Nixie clock.

My bedroom clock failed a few weeks ago. It was a new-old-stock 1973-ish Westclox of Japanese manufacture, and had run for me, without fail, for maybe two years. I may make some attempt to revive it some time, but not having the electronics kung-fu of my dad, I'm not optimistic about the effort. So. New clock time.

I'd managed to find out the name of the super old digital displays that are beloved of Steampunk hipsters - Nixie tubes. Those are the glowy orange numbers that live inside a glass tube about the size of a man's finger. Steampunk guys, by definition, have a certain disregard for chronological continuity, and so have no problem mixing in Nixies, which are a 1950s technology, with their victorian stovepipe hats and clockwork brassieres.

A Nixie tube from my dad's collection of bits. Note 

the wires connecting to the post inside the tube.

These correspond to the numbers cathodes in

the stack.

A notable pop culture occurence of Nixies can be found in the Anime epic, Wings of Honneamise, if I recall. I can't be bothered to watch the whole thing again to make sure, but I seem to recall one of the control panels in a spacecraft having a Nixie digital readout. Since they were the first type of digital electronic display to be invented, they are the go-to technology for retrologists and weirdos who like their equipment to look unbelievably complicated and fragile.

"Nixie" = "Numeric Indicator eXperimental No. 1", trademarked by the Burroughs coproration. It's become the "Band-Aid" / "Kleenex" name for any tube-based display of this type.

A nixie tube is basically a sealed glass bubble filled with some mixture of neon gas, one anode (electrically charged wire thingy) and several cathodes (other wire thingies), made in the shape of digits. Pins protruding from the back / bottom of the Nixie correspond to the various numbers inside. When current is supplied to a combination of pins, that digit lights up. Because the numbers are stacked on top of each other, there is a distinctive visual depth to the function of a Nixie as the numbers change.

Turns out I had a handful of Nixies, inherited from my dad in a huge chest of electronic components in my garage. They come in various shapes and sizes. The ones pictured here were my dad's. They're not part of the clock, but they're handy for examination without manhandling the delicate innards of the clock.

Nixies became widely used in scientific and aerospace applications in the 50s and 60s, but were being developed as early as the 1930s. After being supplanted by simpler, cheaper, more durable LED technology in the seventies, they fell out of use and sat on warehouse shelves until a bit of a retro revival in the 1990s. Prices have risen sharply because of this, and you can now buy Nixie clocks (in either kit or completed form) on the web.

A Google search brought me to Peter Jensen's site, where he sells Nixie clocks and kits. They can be pretty expensive, depending on whether you want to build it yourself, or have it in a super cool machined case or what have you. Not being able to justify the price of a CNC'd aluminum case, I opted for the "prorotypey" look of the bare electronics, assembled for me by Peter himself (I think). As per his recommendation, I then ordered an acrylic case from a separate specialty supplier.

Despite the fact that Nxies run very cool to the touch, I drilled some 1-inch vent holes in the back of the case, because I just happened to have some press-fit mesh grilles - also courtesy of dad's parts chest - to go back there. The vents help it to look over-engineered and complicated.

The clock has two buttons on the circuit board that function pretty much like the ones on a digital watch, setting the time and brightness, etc. Peter has added a few surprising features, like a dimmer timer, which basically lets you set a schedule to dim the Nixies, presumably prolonging the life of the tubes, which can be had from Peter for about $20 each. Alternately, if a tube fails, you can just send the clock back to him and he'll do whatever it takes to get it going again. Nixie tube service life is generally in the thousands-of-hours range. Peter unofficially predicts the life of his clocks to be about five years before servicing is necessary. Being a little pessimistic about whether or not Jensen is still in the biz in five years, I kind of want to order a few replacement tubes from him while I still can. Additionally, there is a clock speed adjustment function that I haven't had the need to mess with, but it's there. The clock seems to keep pace with my cell phone, a week after setting it.

If you get the "naked" version of the clock like me, you can possibly look forward to powering it up for the first time with your finger absent mindedly touching the pins on the bottom of one of the Nixies, protruding from the underside of the circuit board. The voltage is enough to get your attention.

So what's with the dark square over the seconds display? I found that, staring at the clock while falling asleep, the seconds ticking by could be a little distracting, even with the clock set to the lowest brightness, as shown here. Watching seconds go by while you're trying to fall asleep can have a bit of a "hurry up and sleep!" effect on the brain. This is not restful. That's two pieces of transparent acrylic held together with a nut and bolt, leaning against the two rightmost tubes. I combined a piece of red and purple plastic from a set of color filters. They're intended to be used as gels, over the flash or lens of your pocket camera. A set of about eight filters costs an extortionate $15 or so from a photography site, but here's a tip... Go to a plastics site like Delvie's Plastics and order a "sample kit". It will be pretty much the same thing for about five dollars. Anyway, with the seconds dimmed down to a deep purplish-red, the ticking away of the numbers no longer changes the ambient glow of the room sixty times a minute, which doesn't interfere with sleep, but you can still watch them do their thing if you want to, the numbers moving forward and back in their wire cathode stack, in time with the pulsations of your brain.

The case is recommended by Jensen himself, and comes from Cases for Collectibles.com, which doesn't seem to be affiliated with Jensen at all. It's a 4"x4"x8" case and fits the clock perfectly. The little stick-on feet that came with it seemed a little underwhelming, so I went back to dad's parts chest and found four rubber feet about an inch in diameter, some screws and brass cap nuts (or "acorn nuts" as dad used to call them) to hold them on. Some more drilling and before long, the feet not only made it look more "finished", but also contribute mightily to the retro appeal.

Pro tip: Acrylic scratches only slightly less than butter. When drilling or working with it, cover the surface with masking tape. It doesn't make it indestructible, but you can mark on it with a sharpie and you're way less likely to ding the surface with an errant drill bit or utility knife. The tape should leave no residue when you peel it off.

Even in the economical caseless form, the cost of a clock like this is non-trivial. However, they are ex-Soviet tubes not mass produced, soldered by hand onto a custom circuit board by an independent businessman not in China. Tell yourself you're helping the economy.

FULL DISCLOSURE: There is nothing to fully disclose. I paid for this clock with my own money and Peter Jensen doesn't even know I'm doing this write-up. However, if he sees this post and wants to shower me with free stuff or something, I welcome the opportunity to totally sell out in this way.

Holga, Diana, CCTV - Cheesy lens test.

Today, we have a special feature from the P.A.G. Photo-graphy team. We bought three intentionally crappy lenses for an Olympus Pen E-P3 to show you the different results from each. I spent literally minutes searching the web and couldn't find a side-by-side comparison of three low-fidelity lenses. If it doesn't show up on the first three pages of a carefully-worded Google search, it doesn't exist, baby. So, let's fill that void.

What kind of lenses? For those who don't know but are interested, what follows is a brief summary. For those who don't know or care, come back tomorrow, when we'll probably say some mean things about a defenseless old picture.

If you have an iPhone or Android smarty-pants phone, you've probably heard of or downloaded a program called Hipstamatic (iPhone) or Vignette (Android). These are camera apps that simulate the look of old obsolete cameras in your nice, modern, advanced phone camera. In the same way that some people like the crackle of vinyl, lots of people like the old faded look of Polaroid photos or the light leaks, streaks, and blurs of a Holga or Diana camera.

The Holga was an inexpensive plastic camera produced in China in the Eighties. Even the lens was plastic. It leaked light onto the film and build quality was questionable. This all contributed to the randomness of the photographic results. You can still buy Holgas at hipster stores like Urban Outfitters, but it'll be a film camera. You still have the cost of buying and developing film, and of course you can't see how your photos turn out until you spend the money to have them developed.

The Diana was also an inexpensive plastic-bodied, plastic-lensed camera made in Hong Kong in the Sixties. Pictures taken with the Diana were similarly wonky and unpredictable as with the Holga.

Both of these cameras have been enjoying a kind of renaissance in the last few years, in addition to their softwarey dopplegangers for various camera phones.

Well, you can also just buy their lenses and stick them onto your digital camera. This is what I did. In addition to the Holga and Diana lens, I bought Photojojo's "Lo-fi" lens. So what are the differences? Well, the Holga and Diana lenses can be bought for about $20 - $30 on Amazon (which is where mine came from) and Ebay, plus maybe fifteen dollars for an adapter which I needed to get the Diana lens onto my Micro four-thirds camera. If you really want to, you can buy the same Diana lens from Photojojo for sixty dollars, if that's what you're into. In exchange for simply dtriple the price, you do get their cutesy "Yay! Your goodies have shipped" emails. The Photojojo "Lo-fi" lens costs $90, and is clearly marked as a CCTV (closed-circuit television / security camera) lens with a specially made adapter for your camera. Turns out you can get the exact same lens for $30 on Ebay. It even comes with a micro four thirds adapter to pop right on a non-CCTV camera. Of course, Photojojo does not mention that the lens has the words "TV Lens" inked right on it, or that the box it comes in also obviously designates it as a repurposed security camera lens. If a customer knew that, a customer might go and look elsewhere for the exact same product at one-third the price. "Yay! I'm a sucker! Wheeee!"

Left: Ebay, $34.99   Right: Pjotojojo: $90, plus shipping. Wow.

"I'm worth every penny, Tee-hee!"

Lesson learned: see something nice on PJJ? Check Ebay before ordering, unless you find it's worth a 200%-300% premium to have things sold to you by a company that talks like an Anime schoolgirl. "Aw, shucks! We lost your business!"

The Diana and Holga lenses are totally plastic and are very light. They feel as flimsy and junky as you'd expect, but that's what you sign up for when you buy these. They each have a focus ring.

 The CCTV PJJ lens is all metal, is much heavier, and even has a little iris in it, which you can adjust via a ring on the lens. There is also a focus ring. Note that the aperture created by the iris is not exactly round. Again, build quality is not what you should be hoping for when you buy things like this. You want some wonkiness in your retro pictures. This lens is pretty cool. I just wish I'd done more homework before I ordered.

Anyway, here are some sample pictures. Generally, the Holga requires much more light, due to the tiny pinhole aperture on the back. Pictures have a lot of vignetting (dark edges). The Diana has the "dreamy" look everyone talks about, due to the soft-focus quality of the cheap plastic lens. Pictures are brighter than the Holga. Also, the Diana is more likely to have random light blurs coming in from the side of the frame, as in the bird picture below. The Photojojo lens is the most adjustable, thanks to the built-in iris. Pictures tend to have lots of concentric smearing at the edges, like you see in the tree picture.