January 20, 2009
Hurray!
Celebrating the Internet as the ultimate cat picture delivery system:
The Sparkster, deceptively sweet
Monte Alban, typically nervous
Wasn't there something else going on today?
Oh, yeah.
The Washington Monument and the Capitol, seen from the Lincoln Memorial, 11 January 2009
We're celebrating the inauguration of Barack Obama from the comfort of home down in Richmond. After the election, we started planning to attend in person, but as the reality sunk in (hours and hours and hours in the cold, a public transportation system overloaded by four times as many people as it was ever designed to handle), we changed our minds. So here we are in our reasonably cozy house, with coffee and doughnuts, and with media delivery devices turned on in every room so we can enjoy the vapid commentary and get all teary-eyed at the interviews with the civil rights activists. Best of all: No Frostbite! Places to sit down! Bathrooms for everyone!
Here's to the light at the end of the tunnel!
January 19, 2009
Caveat emptor, and all that
A while back I wrote about how we were going to try buying prescription eyeglasses online and saving big bucks. Now I can report: Success!
Oz, my mother, and I all ordered eyeglasses from the same online vendor, Zenni Optical, and we are all pretty pleased with the outcomes. Since the eyeglasses were so affordable, about a tenth of what it costs to buy eyeglasses from an optometrist or eyeglass store, Oz and I have each ordered a few pairs over the last nine months. My mother ordered one pair.
The quality is good for the price. (Though I wonder if some of this "titanium" is really titanium.) Oz and I ordered rimless frames, which are just more delicate than full frames, so we handle them carefully. Oz is hard on stuff, but even his have held up. Oz and my mother wear their glasses every day. I only wore mine in the mornings, and contact lenses for the rest of the day, until a month ago when I gave up the contacts.
The prescriptions seem to be accurate. We haven't had the glasses checked by an optometrist to make sure they're correct, but everything looks super sharp and clear to me.
The anti-reflective coatings are effective and haven't gone foggy.
The photochromic lenses, ordered by Oz and my mother, haven't gone yellow and stopped working. My mother doesn't think they get as dark as regular sunglasses, but she says that she's never felt like she needed them to get darker than they do.
The anti-scratch coatings are awesome. When I was out for a walk yesterday, my eyes started watering and I took off my glasses to wipe my eyes. The glasses slipped out of my fingers and bounced off the concrete sidewalk a couple times before coming to a rest, lenses down, on the sidewalk. Although the edges of the lenses are chipped from that initial bounce, the lenses are not scratched at all. The beauty of cheap eyeglasses: as they were bouncing around on the sidewalk, I wailed, "Wah! Those are my favorites!" as opposed to "Wah! There goes a mortgage payment." I went home, put on one of my back-up pairs, and ordered replacements for $53.
A few things to consider
The information I can give you is entirely anecdotal. Not statistically significant in any way. What are the odds you'll get good glasses? I have no idea.
Be an informed consumer
Research and compare vendors. Read customer reviews. Get all your information together (legible prescription, pupillary distance measurement). Understand the terms of sale (all sales will probably be final, unless the eyeglasses are defective). Understand the technical terms used by the vendor, so you will understand what you are ordering.
Think you have vision insurance?
Your vision insurance may not cover the cost of eyeglasses from an online vendor. Mine won't because I live within five miles of an in-network provider.
Know the styles of glasses that work for you
Get out your trusty ruler and measure any eyeglasses that you especially like or that at least fit well. Use those dimensions as a guideline when selecting frames. If you want to try a totally different style, see if you can try on something similar, somewhere, before you order, or accept the possibility that those frames might not work.
This did happen to me. The cute, narrow frames that are in fashion right now? Don't work for me at all. I have a tall nose and if the pads are adjusted so that the lenses are positioned correctly in front of my eyes, then the bridge rests on my nose and gives me a headache. Also, if you move your eyeballs rather than your whole head when you look down at something close, you will find yourself looking out under the lenses. If your near vision is good, then that might be fine, but if your near vision is terrible like mine, then it's extremely annoying. So I have a pair of very cute glasses that I can't wear. At least I'm only out $50. Not such an expensive lesson, but I'd rather have the $50.
Adjusting your eyeglasses
Be prepared to do this yourself. Use a pair of needlenose pliers or your fingers and be very careful and gentle. Take your time, don't rush the process. If the eyeglasses were a good match for your face, you might not need to make any adjustments at all. Some of the glasses we got, we didn't have to adjust.
Determining your pupillary distance
Pupillary distance is the distance in millimeters from the center of one pupil to the center of the other pupil. This information is used when fitting the lenses in the frames in order that the optical centers of the lenses will be positioned over your eyes properly.
Try to get this done by someone who knows what they're doing. See if you can get measured at your eye doctor's place, or if the last place you got glasses from has it in your file. If you have to do it yourself, google around to see what some different methods are. Any method that you try, take the measurement several times and see if you are at least getting consistent results.
What we did: I held a ruler across my face at about the level of my pupils and pointed a desk lamp at my face so that there would be enough light for the camera. As I looked over Oz's shoulder, he took a photograph (without flash) of me, ruler and all. Then I put the photo up on my monitor and zoomed in to take the reading off the ruler. We took a few such photos and got the same reading each time.
Is buying glasses online the right choice for you?
Only you can make that decision. (i.e., I am just some random blogger writing about a consumer experience, not an optometrist. How much is my information worth?)
January 02, 2009
The Kouhaku experience
Due to an extended interlude of drinking champagne and eating potato chips down in the kitchen, I missed a fair bit of the evening's rebroadcast too. Bad Kouhaku reporter. I am left to wonder about the Holstein-patterned ballgown I glimpsed at the end of the morning broadcast.
NHK introduced a few new features to the production this year.
Swoopy camera angles: The person operating the camera crane at stage left had that thing swooping in and out and, while the camera was never upside-down relative to the center of the earth, it was everything but.
Giant screen used to migraine-inducing effect: Instead of the usual draperies, gelled lights, and projected stars, the backdrop was a giant screen which appeared to be made of giant LEDS. It seemed to be a light emitter, rather than a projection screen, but it was difficult to tell because the strobing, abstract patterns, particularly during the more techno numbers, were sort of hard to look at. Seizures! They're not just for epileptics anymore.
Sky-cam: Ever wondered what a skinny Japanese guy looks like from above? Basically, a dot. I think sky-cam is more effective for sumo. At least there's more of a horizontal component to the subject.
Drag queen smackdown: No actual smacking due to admirable levels of restraint on the part of the wannabe smacker. The Chinese-opera-esque stylings of the enka number turning into the big samba dance number actually caught us by surprise, though, so points for that.
Other than those things, not a lot of new stuff this year. Not even new songs. While the enka singers are expected to turn up and sing their big hits from years gone by, the Kouhaku is nominally a showcase for performances of hit songs of the current year. Well, we saw a lot of stuff from 2007, 2006, 2005 … Come on! "A thousand winds" again? "Zun-doko" again? What have you people done lately?
One new thing: Jero's Kouhaku debut! Jero, short for Jerome, is the new enka sensation of the year: an American kid from Pittsburgh who grew up singing enka with his Japanese grandma. Sadly, grandma passed away a few years back, so she didn't live to see her grandson appear on the Kouhaku (her portrait is airbrushed onto Jero's shirt), but his mom is in the audience and is appropriately weepy.
I missed the best moments when I looked away to type up notes. Like the moment when the pheasant-feathered, leopard print ballgown was ripped away (tearaway ballgowns!) to reveal a shiny black vinyl corset, pants, and stiletto-heeled boot ensemble. Tearaway ballgowns are not new, but they are usually torn away to reveal yet another layer of ballgown.
This year, the panel of judges had some entertainment value. The Kouhaku is set up like a contest: red team (ladies) vs. white team (gentlemen). (Gender-blurring people get to pick which team they want. Some of them who appear regularly on the program switch back and forth from year to year.)
A contest must have judges, and the Kouhaku is no exception. The panel is made up of judges, usually celebrity actors and athletes, a few other notables of the year, like Olympians. They sit there stiffly in their evening clothes with rictus smiles, except for the actors who are better at faking smiles. One notable this year was a guy who had the misfortune to write a bestselling novel. You could see the thought bubble over his head: "I'm. In. Hell." During the children's number (an amazingly child-appropriate tribute to Miyazaki Hayao), he failed to wave a puppet doll in time to the music like all the other judges (Thought bubble: "I'm going to kill my agent."). He must have grown inured to the situation, however, because 90 minutes into the ordeal, he managed some pleasantries with the emcees after a production number in which a giant crab and giant animatronic snack sellers appeared on the giant screen behind the giant stage and giant round staircase which formed the shell of the giant crab, while the entire cast danced around waving fans with hearts on. A picture would definitely be worth a thousand words here, because that description sounds pretty incoherent. I tried to find a video clip, but all I turned up was somebody else's liveblogging of the Kouhaku.
All in all, a pretty good Kouhaku, and I missed enough to leave me wanting more.
And wondering: Why the chicken dance choreography in all the production numbers? Why the animal print ballgowns? How did Thelma Aoyama get down that staircase alive in her super high-heeled boots?