Neanderpundit

So I thought I’d post one of mine.

This is a contaflex super. It was given me by a dear friend and it is a real cornerstone of my collection.

First, because of it’s pristine condition. The leather shows some scuffing but the camera itself is flawless.

Second, because of it’s design. There is one electronic component, and it is a Selenium light meter. You set your film speed with a dial, and outside of that dial is a knob. Match the needle with a notch on the camera, and this can be done from outside of the camera or through the viewfinder, and once you did that you could change your aperture and the shutter speed followed it, allowing you to tweak for depth of field or subject motion without modifying the original meter setting.

And it does this all with GEARS. Everything in this camera works mechanically, and it is a marvel. I am afraid to know what it looks like inside. I am told by people who know it is at least four times as complex, mechanically, as a good Swiss Chronograph, and the thing that kept them from costing a million dollars was the gears were penny sized instead of nonpareil size. As it was, the Contaflex Super was a great deal, costing only about $170. In an age when the median income was around $5k a year, when a really nice new car was $2k.

but people bought them, because they were compact and well made and easy to use. And they had one other feature that is the final reason I treasure mine.

That lovely bit of glass up front. The lens was made in Jena by the firm started by Cal Zeiss itself. The lens- that lovely 4 element Tessar, designed by Paul Rudolph, the man who invented the anastigmat. What’s an anastigmat? I’m glad you asked.

A single lens will distort at the edges. This means the bigger a lens is and the thicker it is in the midddle the more distortion there will be, and it will even distort different wavelengths of light differently. Rudolph was known for combining Crown glass and flint glass, which each have “Astigmatism” so to speak, but together, when combined properly, their deficits cancel one another out. They knew this because of the Abbe sine condition, a theoretical instrument developed by Ernst Abbe while he was working with Carl Zeis at Jena.

Using the groundwork laid by Zeiss and Abbe, Paul Rudolph developed the Tessar not just to be a great, distortion free lens, but the back three elements are common to several focal lengths. So the Contaflex series of cameras (Which had leaf shuttters in the lens like a Hasselblad) could simply have the front element replaced with a different one to acquire different focal lengths. So there were half a dozen lenses available (Including a stereo adapter!) that bayonetted into the front of the camera in place of the front element of the lens, giving you a distortion free 35mm lens (One of the best in the business, still is) or a 135mm telephoto, or a 75 mm portrait lens

You can take a picture of an 11 x 17 piece of graph paper with this camera, make an 11×17 print and lay them together and NOT TELL THE DIFFERENCE. I have done this myself. The glass is, for all practical purposes, flawless. And this is why even though other cameras are commanding almost no value at all, the better cameras with Zeiss lenses are still pulling down some scratch. Leicas. Hasselblads. Rolleis. Alpas.

I still have my rollei, though I never let anyone see me use it. I lust after blads, and one day I intend to stand on the plains of central Africa again. I will wake in the morning and dress from my Hartmann steamer wardrobe, put on my Stetson Moab, shoulder the double, and walk out onto the African Savanna carrying a 500 CM or at least a Super Wide C.

hey, a guy has to have dreams.

of Dutch Oven cookery- both in ovens and in open fires. Mostly because it’s so damned hard to screw things up too badly.

But I haven’t had a dutch oven for years.

I went to buy one specifically because I wanted to stew up some squirrels, and they sit in the freezer yet, awaiting that fate.

Deciding what to do with Christmas dinner was complex. We have turkey for easter and ham for new years (So we can have hopping john in January). We used to do prime rib but the Ogwife is not a fan. So, I thought, I have an untested dutch oven, why not?

So I went to Robs Meat Chop and Deli (Highly reccomended, trust me on this) and got about five pounds of chuck roast. The marbling and the connective tissue are what give it flavor. I salted and peppered the meat the night before, and then seared it in a tablespoon or so of oil to give it a nice crust. I fried potatoes, onions, garlic, carrots into the dutch oven until the onions became translucent, then put the meat back in on top, poured in a cup of cockburns fine ruby port, and slow cooked it at about 250 degrees for about four hours.

yeah, dammit. The meat could be thin sliced with a harsh word, and the taters were amazing., I usually don’t eat the onions because EVERYBODY DIES. I made a salad of sliced grape tomatoes and sliced black olives with chick peas and balsamic vinegar, and the Ogwife made a spinach salad with her secret recipe dressing and fresh farm raised eggs and BACON, and we had pie and ice cream for desert. I would have taken pictures for you, but none of it lasted that long.

went to visit with Gramma a while last night, and brought home a newspaper clipping from the local rag where I grew up.

The clipping relates the conviction of a priest for multiple molestation to a school in Cedar Lake. My school. The priest in question taught me 8th grade english and freshman/sophomore theology. He was an OK english teacher but not much of a theologian.

I often comment that I am a disagreeable adult because I was a disagreeable child. I was so disagreeable as to be unable to be molested by a Catholic Priest. Lots of people think I am joking; this is not a joke.

Maybe I was just more aware of things then than my classmates were, but in retrospect, it should have been fairly obvious to anyone. So for those people who have been living under rocks for all their life, here’s how you can spot the kiddy diddlers from miles off.

There is an urban legend about Fred Rogers- that he was a kiddy diddler serving a sentence- and that was why no children ever appeared on the show. Not only untrue, but here’s the thing: He was never just Fred. He was never any kid’s buddy. He was never Oscar, or Barney, he was Mr Rogers. He was an adult. You called him by his name and you used respect. And that was specifically the reason he did that. because adults can be friendly with children and civil and polite, but they must be adults. The moment you’re your kids “Best pal” you cross the line into creepy, and any teacher your kid says “Is everybody’s best friend” is automatically suspect.

I had a lot of really good teachers. They were professionals and took their jobs very seriously, and you called them by their honorific. Father Fred. Brother Ed. Doctor Steve. They expected your respect, and they expected no nonsense. They were right out there cheering during soccer games, and any one of them would spend time with any kid who needed help with homework or even personal problems. I know, because a lot of them really helped me through some very tough times. But I knew to avoid Father Dick, and I did. I never let us be in a room with a closed door, and I knew when he was hearing confessions and avoided that booth.

I also know the kid that he molested, I knew it was going on at the time, and I can tell you something you might not want to hear: That kid sought out his company, and was proud of being a part of a very elite group of kids who got to hang with the cool adult, and far from being damaged by it, used the relationship to his advantage every time he could.

Fishermen don’t fish in bathtubs. Hunters don’t seek bambi in shopping malls. And kiddy diddlers don’t hang out in old folks homes. Child molesters are drawn to situations like schools like moths to a flame. When I was a kid, Boys Town was full of them, the juvenile home was staffed by them, there were perverts wherever damaged kids were, making sure the kids couldn’t make it into the world without being completely fucked.

Because Catholics run a lot of these kinds of facilities, tending to the needs of society’s abandoned, they drew a lot of these jerks. Administrators for orphanages, usually underfunded and harried to begin with, were happy they got what help they could get- so two or three kids got abused, but thousands of others were saved, right? so blind eyes were turned everywhere. And statistically when the good one does dramatically outweighs any damage, well, you have to take what you can get.

But it doesn’t make it much fun for the kid who goes to sleep each night with his asshole bleeding or a nasty taste in his mouth that doesn’t seem to go away and seems to flavor every bite of food he eats.

Humans are predators. The very worst of them are the ones who publicly deny their predatory nature. We will be faced with this type of dirtbag for as long as humans exist, and we will bring this sickness into every nook and cranny of human existence. We will also see a certain percentage of the “Victims” who turn this situation to their own advantage and use it to blackmail or torment their abuser. Neither situation is right, but humans are assholes.

The Priest in question is doing time, and will be prosecuted for other cases soon. This is a good thing. I’m not as pleased about the little runt that got a mid-six figure payday for ingratiating himself to the point of gathering experiences he could use for blackmail and then breaking bad on the priest later on. In that case, and I have seen it happen many times with my own eyes, both parties are predators and both should be punished, not just one.

Anyway, watch your children’s teachers, especially when they think you’re not watching. Any of them that are too quick to be pals and not remain friendly-but-separate adults, those ones you keep both eyes on, and make sure you share your suspicions with everyone.