Tuesday, July 24, 2012

Justin Warner wins 'Food Network Star'

My cousin Justin Warner won the competition to become the newest Food Network Star, and will have his own program in the fall.


Sunday, July 22, 2012



Tanishq Abraham is a typical 8-year-old. He likes singing in boys' choir, toy helicopters and quantum physics. OK, maybe not so typical. This child prodigy takes college science classes.

Saturday, July 21, 2012

For Young Olympic Hopefuls, Table Tennis Is All Business


"In Friday’s editions of The New York Times, Somini Sengupta told the story of an unlikely incubator of Olympic talent: a nondescript warehouse in Milpitas, Calif., known as the India Community Center Table Tennis Center.

Built by Indian immigrants who found success in Silicon Valley, the center has become a powerhouse of amateur table tennis. This year, three of the four players who will represent the United States in the London Olympics train at the I.C.C.: Lily Zhang, 15; Timothy Wang, 20; and Ariel Hsing, 16.

In 2010, a video production company called California Is a Place profiled the center. The video, which features Hsing, offers an intimate glimpse into the training habits of the teenage and child athletes there — a place that is fun and games for some, and all business for others."


Is Honesty the best policy?

Maybe not, if you hold dear your privacy!

Monday, July 16, 2012

Exceptional Kodachrome photographs from 1940-43


June 1942. Lockheed Vega aircraft plant at Burbank, California. “Hollywood missed a good bet when they overlooked this attractive aircraft worker, who is shown checking electrical sub-assemblies.” 4×5 Kodachrome transparency by David Bransby for the Office of War Information.

From a friend's email I received tonight:

"This is a rare and fabulous series of pictures shot on Kodachrome sheet film (4x5 inches) and is of exceptional quality shot in 1942. It also captures a slice of life we will never see again...when an entire country was behind a war effort.

I also had no idea that Kodachrome was ever available in any size other than 35mm film due to the complex processing process it required. It makes this series all the more significant. Note that all the images are still-lifes where no motion was taking place due to the very slow speed of the film at that time. What made K-chrome so good was that the film itself had no color dyes embedded in it; the dyes (yellow, magenta & cyan) were added during film processing making for an exceptional fine grain film.

I never knew that Kodachrome was once available in 4" x 5" format, but Wikipedia did confirm this. WONDERFUL photos!  These were scanned from 4x5 Kodachrome."

See the photos here.