“One with dinosaurs and volcanoes in it!”
That was my tall order to our dad, who would usually, when he went out Friday nights, return with some comic books for my twin sister and I.
I was utterly blown away when, a few hours later, he produced this!
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| 'Turok, Son of Stone' Issue: 20 Jun-Aug 1960 |
'Turok, Son of Stone' created the year I was born (1954) was my favorite comic book series as a youth.
On the 7th of March with the help of my siblings, I was able to purchase a brand new Canon EOS R8 mirrorless camera body through Walmart's generous offer of $400,00 off the retail price. Due to my finances, and my never having issues with Canon's product reliability, I decided to hold off buying an extended warranty, which is something I otherwise customarily do. "Uh-oh," I hear you say, "I can see where this going!"
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| A cropped still frame from the 2025-03-10 unboxing video. |
Well, for the very first time in my 44 years of Canon photographic equipment ownership, something was awry with the performance of the camera body, although I did not know it at first. There was a stark white vertical line in both the viewfinder and LCD screens and a corresponding white crosshair in the playback. (See below.)
Initially, I thought they were deliberate, perhaps acting as a frame of reference of some sort. Eventually, I surmised, I would learn how to disable the unusual feature. However, after a week of pouring through the 937 page instruction manual, I could find no mention or depiction of the lines.
Then I discovered, the crosshair was ending up in my actual images. It wasn't confined to the camera screens!
Ugh.
Having alerted my sister, I proceeded to contact Canon Chat. When the technician had me do a factory reset - it failed - he postulated the likelihood of a sensor malfunction.
So now the R8 is on its way to Canon for a warranty repair.
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| The sensor anomaly with a lens attached. |
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| The sensor anomaly without. |
We shall see, as they say, and hopefully, it won't be the image artifact when the body is returned.
UPDATE: The repair was successful and the return effected in short order. I still have to test the other functions as time goes by.
From my neck of the woods, last night’s lunar eclipse was a washout due to cloudy weather. Fortunately, the Moon’s view of Earth has no such problem with overcast.
Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost Mission 1: Ghost Riders in the Sky, was able to relay the eclipse as seen from its lunar lander.
Oh, and about the lunar eclipse itself, I came about these interesting tidbits on NASA's Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD) website:
"On March 14 the Moon was Full. In an appropriate celebration of Pi day, that put the Moon 3.14 radians (180 degrees) in ecliptic longitude from the Sun in planet Earth's sky. As a bonus for fans of Pi and the night sky, on that date the Moon also passed directly through Earth's umbral shadow in a total lunar eclipse." [Again] "...the moon [was] Pi radians from the Sun at exactly 06:55 UTC. That's about three minutes before the midpoint of the March Full Moon's total lunar eclipse."
Neat!
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| During the eclipse. |
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| Just moments after totality. |
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| The Earth days before the lunar eclipse. |
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| The Earth and the "Diamond Ring" effect just after totality. |
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| ‘Claws for Alarm’ Warner Bros. (1954) |
With the previous post (see its addendum), I am reminded of an earlier coincidence that occurred some thirty years ago.
I once had a surprising coincidence alphabetically looking up a word in the dictionary, when I chance to happen on another I didn’t know. It caught my curious eye while I was also turning on the TV set, and waiting for it to warm up. As I was reading the definition of the second word, I could hear the voice of Porky Pig on the tele, reprimanding a terrified Sylvester the cat*. “You eb, eb, pol-troon of a chicken cat, you!’ “Poltroon” was the very entry before me!
Here is the line as delivered by Porky (voiced by Mel Blanc): "Th-Th... That's all, folks!"
*‘Claws for Alarm’ Warner Bros. (1954)
