“Dont think about all those things you fear,
Just be glad to be here.”— From “Hayling” by FC Kahuna
And with that tripsonic tonic flowing out of my iPod and into my ears I rolled on The Phoenix over to the post office to mail a couple things and pick up a bunch of two-cent stamps that will keep our now-obsolete store of 37-cent’ers company as they venture out toward extinction in this brave new 39-cent world.
Leaving the post office, an interesting thing happened. I petite little Asian gal walked up to me holding a spiff Canon camera. At first I thought she was heading past, but she stopped right in front of me as I was boarding The Phoenix and started telling me how she’s in a photo class and she has an assignment to snap something orange and when she drove by on Alvarado and saw the bike she had to stop and ask would I mind if she took some of The Phoenix, which is decidedly that very same color. So I said go right ahead and she was totally thrilled. Then as she’s snapping away another postal customer comes out, a very Steve McQueen-looking dude (he’d been a few behind me in the ridiculously long line inside the P.O.), and he smiles and said something not unsarcastically like “Yeah, that bike’s a chick magnet, man.” And I replied with a laugh, “Nah, it’s just the color. The ladies go crazy for it.” To which he replied way loud enough for the lass to hear(but I don’t think she did because she was focused on focusing), “Dang, wouldn’t ya know I picked today to leave the house without my orange condoms.”
Insert awkward silence as he moves on chuckling with the gal still busy composing her shots and me just thinking “whatever dude.”
Anyway, once the very thankful young lady got the shot she wanted it was over Sunset to Philippe’s for an early lunch (double-dipped lamb with blue cheese; side of potato salad and dill pickles) and dang if a cool picture opp didn’t come up (but nothing to do with the color orange) and double dang if I didn’t curse the fact that I don’t have a truly portable digicam at hand. Sure, we have the Digital Rebel, which is great; and the Canon G3 is a great little cam as well. But neither are very pocketable. As a result I’m forced to resort to my mobile phone’s near-worthless cam’s alleged 1.3 megapixel resolution or the next to near-worthless (but still working) 7-year-old Casio QV-11, which takes 320×240 pics and that’s it.
The opp I’m digressing from had to do with this wonderful elderly Asian gent who was occupying the same upstairs section at Philippe’s as I was. We had the place to ourselves. Me at one table reading the Times and chowing down on one end of the room and him at another. He was doing something odd, going through pages of some Chinese-language newspaper and tearing sections into long strips and then keeping the strip and folding the rest of the page up and putting it in a pile to his right. At one point he got up and left, but soon he was back and doing the same thing again. The opp came at one point where he was just sitting quietly reading something with the light streaming in through the southern windows and I was left so wishing I had a cam with some resolution and zoom capability. Alas I had to resort to the QV-11, and this is what I got (pffft):
This could’ve been such a cool shot if I could have closed in a bit on his face or had the megapixels to blow it up. So I did what any megapixel-deficient geek would do, throw the low-resolution image into Photoshop and have some Fun With Filters. The psuedo photo-illustrative results can be found here.
Shortly thereafter, I got myself over to the downtown library and got busy the rest of the afternoon doing some real work.