freeform goodness

Sven-S. Porst has returned from his visit to the southwestern United States and has recorded his impressions on driving and riding, food, national parks and digital photography, geographic scale, San Diego and environs, the flight, airlines, and airports. Trackback isn’t a sufficently evolved mechanism, as of yet, to cope with small comments on a long series of posts, so I’ll throw my lot in with a slight ramble in a single post.

The issue of scale is one that frequently, I’d suspect, visitors are inclined to underestimate. The Los Angeles/New York City-centric movie and television exports give the rest of the world a hyper-compressed view of the USA. The scale factor turns affects not only the obvious sorts of things (driving time between major cities), but things like regional cuisine. For example, ssp mentions how overpriced and lousy the cheese selection was in most of the places he visited. It’s reasonable to suggest he’d have had an entirely different experience visiting Wisconsin. The fast food chain he mentions, In-N-Out, is almost nonexistent in Detroit, while midwestern favorite White Castle is, I suspect, absent in San Diego. Certain things are, of course, nationwide: cheap, delicious, but really fattening breakfasts, and monster SUVs.

• I am by no stretch of the imagination anything near an expert in photography, but I’ve been told by friends that the main problem with inexpensive digital cameras is that they tend to use cheap optics — the lenses are significantly worse than the ones you’d find in a decent 35mm camera. That’s the main reason that a print scanned from a film camera and compressed with a JPEG compressor at the same quality ratio as a low end digital camera can look so much better.
• I’m pretty sure that there have been lawsuits filed w.r.t. age discrimination against the airlines by flight attendants, so I’m not at all surprised that older attendants are present on international flights.
• California population : ~35,000,000
• HBO has the Sopranos. That’s all that needs to be said.

:: Dave Walker 12:08 (EST/EDT) [+] ::

:: [/personal/friends]
:: tags: friends

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