From cameras to male enhancement products......

This is the unmagnified view toward Vancouver Island from my balcony here on the 16th floor.

This is looking at part of that same scene, but using the full 24x of optical zoom on the Pentax X70, advertised as a 'superzoom' camera. It does provide a lot of zoom, but at higher levels it is very grainy, with a lot of noise in it which isn't easily removed even by the best available noise-reduction software. The problem with noise-reduction software, of course, is that most of it works by deleting the worst patches of noise, and filling in those missing pixels by a process of averaging colours from surrounding pixels around the removed ones. So the result is a rather bland and indistinct patchwork where the original noisy pixels were, and the more areas of noisy pixels, the more of the overall image is a bland and indistinct patchwork. You get a choice: sharp, noisy images, or smooth, hazy ones. There's no free lunch.

I wish Google The Magnificent would wave his magic wand over these code-carvers who are presumably working like beavers to finish this experimental version of these Blogger pages, and specifically, fix the word-wrap features, which never have worked worth a shit, and also fix in this latest incarnation the tendency for the cursor to ignore instructions from the mouse and keyboard while those are frantically trying to get it to move down one line, instead of having it decide to take a leap up to the top of the last image inserted into the text, or go the other way and leap down two or three lines instead of just the one requested - or sometimes it just sits there, where the last word was typed, and dares you to make it move any way you can. I have a few choice and magical phrases of my own for times like this, but there may be innocent children and faint-hearted women among my several readers, and I wouldn't want to cause anyone any grief.  I await the finished version of this new format with great anticipation!

Anticipation being something the drug companies are taking advantage of with all these many ads and TV commercials for male enhancement products. I have a few thoughts on all that too. For starters, we've already tripled the total global population in my own lifetime, from about 2,480,000,000 in 1932 to about 7,000,000,000 now, without increasing the useful land areas by so much as one square foot. Just the opposite - we've trashed a lot of what once was productive land, and more of it has been paved over, 'to seal in the nutrients' as some wit said.

Secondly, and here's the kicker, Lovers - it doesn't matter a damn how 'enhanced' you can get if whatever it's attached to still looks and smells like shit, and there's no enhancement product made that can subtract one minute from your bent and wrinkled and toothless and hairless and shrivelled old carcass! You're being played like a violin, you nitwits!! Are we this stupid?

While you ponder that, enjoy your day!