Why is it that nearly all the old photos I'm digging up these days seem to fall under the heading of Dangerous Waters?

Was reminded of Bar Harbor, more specifically its many restaurants serving local lobster, by the "Attack of the Cannibal Lobsters" video making the rounds these days, about some of the effects of the lobster population boom off the Maine Coast.

The report conflates the economic misfortune visited upon the Maine lobster industry by the population boom, resulting most likely from over-fishing of the young lobster's natural predators, with the more serious threat to the lobster population of shell diseases, suspected to be fostered by rising water temperatures.

Lobster cannibalism is a natural corrective to over-population, just as lobstermen driven out of business by low lobster prices is a market corrective to those very same low prices. In neither case will my appetite for lobster suffer.

Shell disease, though, that is worrying. Unfortunately, the video report has little to say about it.

Best lobster I ever had, I had in Bar Harbor, pulling in late evening from a misconceived late-October New England car camping trip. (A oil-leaking, gas-leaking VW station wagon, its frame "flexible" with rust.) As I remember it, eating that lobster in Bar Harbor, saturated in butter, was the only time I was warm on that trip.

Long ago and far far away....

Hasselblad SWC
With a Biogon 38mm lens, made its space debut on 3 June 1966, on a voyage in Gemini 9. The camera was largely standard: Only the lining had been removed and the viewfinder was specially designed. The camera was used on four voyages in 1966.

Hasselblad SWC on Gemini 9, June 1966

The first images of man on the moon and of earth from the moon captured by Neil Armstrong and Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin Jr., with a Hasselblad 500EL/70.

The terrestial version we grew up with looked more like this.

Hasselblad SWC

The first and this last image are ones I quickly snapped from the side of the road when last I had this camera in my hands, briefly, decades ago, looking north and west toward Point Reyes, CA. Long family story here, but not telling it right now....

Once upon a time, I was a morning, noon and night cafe habitué of the worst sort; that is, the kind who has to roll on afterwards to a bar to ease on down from the caffeine high. So the sequence, in San Francisco, was the Caffe Trieste then on down across Broadway to Specs after the Trieste closed. In Pacific Beach, the sequence was the Zanzibar Cafe followed by Stingers, both now sadly gone. Decades before, it was the Caffe Mediterraneum in Berkeley, my first cafe, but I did not drink in those days, so rolled on to other things. But tragically all habits of the past. I stick to coffee at home and never so much as I used to down.

It's a rare day that I actually get out to a cafe. When I do, it's either the local Peet's in Pt. Loma or the bigger one in Hillcrest.

Ella (above) thinks my hermit life a crime; not to mention that I came back out with only a latte and no pastry for her.

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Everyone has shots of the waves crashing into the panoramic dining room windows at The Marine Room in La Jolla, CA.

Happy and well fed, we thought we'd check out the alley view....

OK, OK! Here's the conventional view of an event at The Marine Room.

What could be more conventional than random camera pans between splashy waves, delicious food on a plate, and a big guy smiling & chewing.

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