Friday, May 10, 2024

Good morning. Here's the newsletter:

Item 1: a link

This is the Leica APO-Telyt-R 1600mm lens, which is very large and quite expensive. I wasn't overly impressed with the writing (or the focus on how much it costs) in either of the main sources I found for this information, so here's my summary. But Feel free to click through here and here if you want to see the bad writing of which I speak.

In 2006, Sheikh Saud Bin Mohammed Al-Thani, former Minister of Culture of Qatar, commissioned the lens for some reason (possibly to photograph fast-moving wildlife from a long distance, but no one seems to really know). It weighs 132 pounds and is almost 4 feet long. It has handles and that thing you see on top of it is a massive sight with crosshairs.

It seems like there weren't any examples of photos that have been taken with it, but these goofballs recently used it to take someone's LinkedIn profile pic.

Item 2: a list

Bean Genera, ranked:

1. Phaseolus (your classic bog-standard beans)
2. Arachis (peanuts)
3. Pisum (peas)
4. Cicer (chickpeas)
5. Lens (lentils)
6. Melilotus (sweet clover)
7. Glycine (soybeans)
8. Vigna (black-eyed peas and family)
9. Tamarindus (tamarind)
10. Cajanus (pigeon peas)
11. Medicago (alfalfa)
12. Vicia (fava beans)
13. Macrotyloma (horsegram(?))
14. Ceratonia (carob beans)

Note: there are a bunch of other genuses but I hadn’t heard of the species and at a certain point it becomes a very silly exercise. I gave you horsegram.

Item 3: a media recommendation

Item 4: word of the week

Subaltern

General, while I appreciate your subaltern's bringing our food to the War Room, please let her know that if my Cantina Chicken Crispy Taco Meal with extra Avocado Verde Salsa is ever lukewarm again I will initiate an immediate court martial.

Item 5: a photograph

See ya!

Thanks for reading. See you next week, loyal subscriber.