A Rain of Frogs

I was playing with Adobe Ideas on an iPad this morning. Very simple, but fun, app.

I have read it before, but today I came across Robert Heinlein’s All You Zombies, and the amazingly twisty time machine paradox he crafted in that story.

It’s a twist on the generic Grandfather Paradox, in which someone goes back in time and kills their grandfather before he can have any kids, meaning the first person could never be born to go back in time to kill their grandfather, meaning they could…

Anyway, Heinlein is a master:

A baby girl is mysteriously dropped off at an orphanage in Cleveland in 1945. “Jane” grows up lonely and dejected, not knowing who her parents are, until one day in 1963 she is strangely attracted to a drifter. She falls in love with him. But just when things are finally looking up for Jane, a series of disasters strike. First, she becomes pregnant by the drifter, who then disappears. Second, during the complicated delivery, doctors find that Jane has both sets of sex organs, and to save her life, they are forced to surgically convert “her” to a “him.” Finally, a mysterious stranger kidnaps her baby from the delivery room.

Reeling from these disasters, rejected by society, scorned by fate, “he” becomes a drunkard and drifter. Not only has Jane lost her parents and her lover, but he has lost his only child as well. Years later, in 1970, he stumbles into a lonely bar, called Pop’s Place, and spills out his pathetic story to an elderly bartender. The sympathetic bartender offers the drifter the chance to avenge the stranger who left her pregnant and abandoned, on the condition that he join the “time travelers corps.” Both of them enter a time machine, and the bartender drops off the drifter in 1963. The drifter is strangely attracted to a young orphan woman, who subsequently becomes pregnant.

The bartender then goes forward 9 months, kidnaps the baby girl from the hospital, and drops off the baby in an orphanage back in 1945. Then the bartender drops off the thoroughly confused drifter in 1985, to enlist in the time travelers corps. The drifter eventually gets his life together, becomes a respected and elderly member of the time travelers corps, and then disguises himself as a bartender and has his most difficult mission: a date with destiny, meeting a certain drifter at Pop’s Place in 1970.

What staggering genius is capable of twisting their mind into the contortions required to write that?

I am in awe.

A childhood friend of Sarah’s has recently moved to Toronto. She’s never before been to North America, and Toronto has so far been her only experience with the continent. She might only be here for 6 months, though she is hoping to stay for longer.

Sarah and I had Miranda over for dinner a couple weeks ago, and we decided we would all go down to Niagara Falls this past weekend. Late autumn is not the best time of year to visit the Falls, but it’s better than not visiting them at all. Yesterday’s forecast was for sun and partly cloudy skies, so we hopped in the Jetta and scooted down the QEW.

Miranda and Sarah overlooking the American Falls:

And overlooking the Canadian Falls:

Pointing at the rainbows in the mist:

Sarah contemplates a (double!) rainbow:

I come from a large extended family. This sort of thing happens to east-europeans. My Dad is one of twelve kids, and twice a year, our extended family tries to get together to meet, greet, and generally spend time with a fantastic group of people. Gossip figures highly, as does really REALLY good food. New babies are particularly popular.

Riding over these get-togethers like surfers on an ocean swell are a series of overarching macro-stories – tales that are too long to have their beginning and end in a single event. These macro stories often manifest as friendly rivalries between my father and uncles.

Since I was little, the great sibling rivalry has been an arms-race in cameras. The Russians and Americans had nukes, but the Lebar family has cameras. Lots and lots of cameras.

My uncles and my father all fancy themselves to be pretty good photographers. I think that photography appeals to them because they are so two-brained: creative and technical, though not in equal amounts, and not identically across siblings. Photography can be a very a very technical art form, and I think that’s the appeal to them.

One year an uncle would show up with a rangefinder, so the next get-together would find another brother showing up with an SLR, and maybe the next reunion would (and did) find my father bringing his SLR (with integrated metering right in the viewfinder!) and TWO lenses, one of which might be an incredibly long zoom. Then a long and frequently heated group debate would ensue about features and quality.

It was a game of one-upmanship, and the winner every year was usually guy with the biggest camera bag. The prize was bragging rights.

Sometime in the last ten years this changed. One year my Dad brought his little Sony digital camera. 5 megapixels! he told his brothers, and watch this: 3x zoom! They looked suspiciously at his dinky little plastic camera, and then down at camera bags full of glass. Then he told them the price, and they all looked down at camera bags full of expensive glass, and needed a stiff drink. The battlefield had changed: bigger was out, and smaller was in.

Predictably the next event had them all vying for the smallest-camera award. This one was the size of a deck of cards, had 5x zoom AND 8 megapixels. That one was barely thicker than 3 credit cards, and admittedly only had 3x zoom, but it was still 8 megapixels and cost half of what he’d spent on his least-expensive lens for his Nikon FM-2. A third had a camera a bit larger than the rest, but it was 12 megapixels. Can you imagine? 12 million succulent picture elements inside this package, he told them, and 12x zoom.

The whole thing is really funny.

Every year I wonder what they’ll show up with. I also casually look around at what my cousins are shooting with, just out of curiosity. Other than myself and Sarah none of my generation seems to be that much into photography, so they tend to show up with pretty simple point-and-shoots, which totally do the job for them but leave me feeling like there’s a lot of image quality going wanting. We tend to buck the small-camera trend and show up with our Canon Rebel XT. Inevitably it gets borrowed by one uncle after another, and many pictures are taken. We email them around afterward.

Some time soon, we’ll replace the Canon with something a little more modern and a lot smaller. The dSLR is great, and takes great photos, but it’s a major pain to carry around, and I miss a LOT of great shots because I don’t have the camera with me. The fallback is my iPhone, but it hardly counts because of it’s terrible image quality and size.

Thankfully the world has finally produced cameras I’ve been looking for: small enough to carry around, with compact interchangeable lenses and fantastic image quality. The press is calling them “EVIL” cameras. Electronic Viewfinder, Interchangeable Lens cameras. I like it. My current favourite, both for size and for the awesome retro look that reminds me so much of my Dad’s Pentax Spotmatic F, is the Olympus PEN E-P2:

I wonder if we’re about to have another shift in the Lebar family camera cold-war.