Kodak stopped making Kodachrome film and and Kodachrome-specific chemicals last year, and the last lab left developing it processed the last roll today.

I never used a lot of Kodachrome (I shot more negative film) but I always liked it. It wasn't just the color rendition and fine grain that endeared it to me, but also its unique technology among color films (that required a truly complicated process to develop). It was a relic with character and history.

Shooting 35mm film left you with a bunch of useful small containers. Some time around the 1960s, Kodak switched from metal to plastic containers in the USA. Dope smokers tended to prefer the metal ones for carrying weed because the tops of the plastic ones were more prone to falling off when carried in your pocket. Google has a fun newspaper archive. I'm admittedly easily amused, but ads from the nineteenth century are just too much. They make me wonder if people in the future will be equally amused by us.

And on the topic of news: a curiously-headlined article called to your attention here (that I almost didn't post because, well, the humor is on the juvenile side) was the most read item at reuters.com for 2010. California has had mad rain this month. Today was a clearing-storm day with clouds nestled in the Tehachapi mountains, everything everywhere is soaked, without which this pic wouldn't have that pastel look; I had a cup of hot chocolate in Tehachapi (it always seems like the thing to do at that point in that drive), had the I-love-the-desert feeling once I got to the eastern side of the pass where the Joshua trees begin, hit the wall a half hour later (where 'hit the wall' means felt burnt), pulled over to nap, napped good enough that I forgot where I was and had dreams and felt good afterwards, drove the rest of the way, got home and pulled the cover off the marimba and played some Bach and just am really happy to be here.

Eclipse of the moon tonight.

Aristotle cited the roundness of the shadow seen in lunar eclipses as evidence that the earth is spherical.

no walking upside-down.

I had a remembering-something-I-hadn't-thought-about-in-ages moment this afternoon. The thing remembered dated from my teenage years, when memories were recorded oh-so-indelibly. It is as if life plays a cruel joke on us that we have so many and so permanent memories of a time riddled with foolishness (at least, my teenage years were). But I digress.

What I thought about this afternoon, for who knows what reason, was that someone in my neighborhood had carved the (misspelled) name of a bass guitarist into a limb of a tree near the railroad tracks in my home town, close to where I used the third rail's electricity to blow up a beer-can-sized electrolytic capacitor some 14 years later--but again I digress.

I thought about the bass player, about a record he'd played on, and about his band's leader: Captain Beefheart. About an hour later, I heard that Captain Beefheart had died earlier today.

I blogged about a memory on the day of a musician's death a few years ago. My best guess remains that these are coïncidences, but they feel spooky nonetheless.

I don't listen to Captain Beefheart that much any more, but I liked him as a teenager and saw him perform in New York in 1978 and 1980. I remember hating his music the first time a friend played it for me. My friend told me it was an acquired taste; I said I didn't want to acquire it. But after a while, I did. Several devices I use emit a rising pair of tones upon commencing an action and a falling pair of tones upon completion. In the case of my cell phone (charging/finished), the tones are a major third apart. In the case of Windows (sigh; I use it for work) mounting and unmounting a flash drive, the interval is a fifth.

If the intervals were minor thirds--or better yet, tritones--customers' reactions might have been along the lines of, say, the uproar in response to the red-eyed blue horse at the Denver airport:  an uproar, that like many uproars, says more about those doing the roaring than it does about the matter being roared about.

I like the blue horse and I like minor thirds. What can I say. From a conversation initiated by a six-year-old* boy in a checkout line at a store last night:

boy:	I know you! You were in the Spiderman movie.
Tommy:	Was I a good guy or a bad guy?
boy:	You were a bad guy.
Tommy:	Figures.

---

*estimated

Fate (well, work) has me back in California for a few months. This is not a bad thing. Tower pics from yesterday's flight west.