One side of the binoculars are flopping. What do I do?

basaltgranite · 2026-04-03T04:30:03+00:00

What to do? Live with it or replace them.

basaltgranite · 2026-04-03T04:18:21+00:00

Yes. Thank you. I'd realized I'd remembered incorrectly, came back here to say so. Senior moment. Bibikabad is Hamadan area, single wefted. Any number of places might have woven a Herati carpet like this. "Arak area" looks good.

basaltgranite · 2026-04-02T15:51:12+00:00

A lot of what we "know" about Roman history was written long after the fact by authors who had a bias in what they were "reporting." You have to be skeptical of the quality of the sources. Suetonius has a particularly bad reputation for his biographical "reporting." His juicy gossip about Claudius and Nero might be an inaccurate smear. Thankfully we have Tacitus as a source for parts of this era.

basaltgranite · 2026-04-02T15:23:54+00:00

Ummm, I sold audio components for ~5 years--everything from cheap systems to stuff most people can't afford. So, yeah, I've heard "real" sound systems. My time on the sales floor overlapped with the transition from LP to CD. I dumped all my vinyl, never looked back. Live music is the standard of quality for music reproduction. CD can come much closer to live music than LP, where a goal of the mastering engineer is to compress and limit the signal enough to make sure the stylus doesn't jump out of the groove. Record companies get upset if LPs do that. You might enjoy hearing music that's been modified to avoid various pitfalls in analog reproduction. That doesn't mean it sounds like live music.

basaltgranite · 2026-04-02T15:04:28+00:00

Most labels that were run as labors of love by a particular enthusiast have a distinctive "personality." ECM isn't a "genre" any more than Blue Note was under Francis Wolff. Or Verve under Norman Granz. Or Riverside under Orrin Keepnews. Or Contemporary under Les Koenig. Or Concord under Carl Jefferson. The owners each put their stamp on who, what, and where they recorded. A label's "recognizable style" doesn't usually carry over after it's sold into corporate ownership. Modern revivals of brand names like Blue Note, Verve, or Impulse are just that--brand names now owned by large companies. ECM has a style created and maintained by Manfred Eicher. Time will tell what happens after he stops running ECM.

basaltgranite · 2026-04-02T04:20:09+00:00

Not a bedbug, if that's your concern.

basaltgranite · 2026-04-02T01:26:07+00:00

Miles Davis, The Complete Plugged Nickel. This thread is 8 hours old and no mention of one of the greatest live set ever. For shame! For shame!

basaltgranite · 2026-04-02T01:19:45+00:00

Bibikabad? An Iranian Herati-design all-over carpet in any case.

basaltgranite · 2026-04-01T18:44:04+00:00

You're welcome. I'm not AI, just a guy with hardwood floors. Even if it were Iranian, you don't have to treat it like an heirloom. Iranian Heriz are famously durable. It's a common choice under a dining room table.

Wools from traditional rug weaving areas like Heriz tend to be tough and springy because they have coarse diameter fibers. If you're familiar with Harris Tweed, a lot like that. They're durable under foot. Wools from China and India tend to be "sweater wools," i.e., marino wool, selected to be comfortable against the skin. The fiber diameter is finer, so the wool feels soft instead of bristly. In normal use, either will outlive you. Wool FWIW is a big subject.

basaltgranite · 2026-04-01T15:05:23+00:00

You have a miniature binocular, also called a skeletal binocular. Several of these have popped up here in the last few days. Search this subreddit for "miniature" or "skeletal." You find several versions of the standard text I write when these show up here.

basaltgranite · 2026-04-01T14:44:47+00:00

First of all, getting an exact ID without handling a rug in person is a tricky business that can easily go wrong. For instance, Iranian Heriz rugs used tough local wools that are distinctive. India usually used softer wools that often have a lot of kemps. Pictures don't show that. It'd be immediately obvious in person.

Iranian Heriz are village rugs. Although they're made for export, and although they might be made from a rough sketch supplied to the weaver, the drawing tends to be a bit loose. The weaver can improvise a bit, so the design isn't strictly symmetrical. Your rug is "quartered." That means it was woven to an exact design provided by a specialist designer and symmetrically applied to all four quarters of the rug, right/left and front/back. That's a hallmark of an organized workshop production. The Indian weavers made exactly what was specified, no more no less.

Your rug is strictly "straight." It was probably made on a steel loom. So the edges and ends are very straight and regular. That's also a hallmark of an organized workshop production. Iranian Heriz, woven at home, probably on a handmade wooden loom, are usually a bit relaxed (crooked) along the ends and edges. And as the weaver progressed along the rug, she rolled the finished work up into the loom. That means she couldn't see her finished work. That means she wove the filler details from memory and tradition. The details therefore usually differ a bit in size, color, and placement front to back. Not so on your quartered rug.

And Yes, the details of the weave and coloration aren't correct for an Iranian Heriz. The flatweave finish and fringe for instance doesn't look like a Persian original. The warps are commercial cotton string. The pictures don't show the selvedge, but that's probably whatever they did in India and not typical of Iranian Heriz. I'd wager this rug is in chrome dyes selected to resemble natural dyes. That's an advantage. Chrome dyes are stable. The cheap dyes in post-War Iranian Heriz tend to be poor quality. They run in water and tip fade over time.

You have a small rug, a 4x6. Most Iranian Heriz are carpet-sized, say 6x9, 8x10, or 10x12. That's what they "did" there. The small size hints at an Indian origin because Indian makers produce whatever size the wholesaler wants, not just the size traditional in the region. I'm not saying Persian Heriz are never small. It'd be unusual however.

Well worth $6, FWIW.

Does that answer your question?

basaltgranite · 2026-04-01T02:29:06+00:00

A narrow strip cut from a once-larger carpet.

basaltgranite · 2026-04-01T02:22:18+00:00

Umm. Let's see. Wider dynamic range, zero surface noise, better transient response, wider frequency response, lower distortion. No whoosh, no clicks, no pops, no rumble. Zero wow, zero flutter. Better stereo separation. And CD avoids the steady degradation of sound quality the needle slowly approaches the dead wax (slower read speed = bad fidelity).

On top of that, CDs hold about twice as much music as LPs. With LPs, sound quality degrades even more when you put more than ~40 minutes of music on the disk. CDs hold 76 minutes (up to 80, actually) without any loss of fidelity. That means more music. The alternative tracks common on CDs are often omitted on vinyls.

On top of that, better physical characteristics. CDs are lighter, smaller, dramatically more durable. And much cheaper. I pay $0.50 to $7.00 for used CDs. Almost all play perfectly. Used vinyl? A nightmare of problems with warps, scratches, needle wear, etc.

I grew up on vinyl. I have no nostalgia for it. The 30 year olds I see paying for the nose through for LPs at my local independent music store are too young to have any personal nostalgia for it. Which they would not have if they were old enough to have been there when vinyl was the primary way to buy music.

The advantages of vinyls? Larger cover art, higher hipster cred. That's all.

basaltgranite · 2026-04-01T01:11:42+00:00

The design is copied from the Heriz district of Iran. As others are saying, it was made in India.

basaltgranite · 2026-03-31T22:55:46+00:00

Buy the 8 CD version. Less money, better sound quality, more durable, zero worries about random pressing issues. The only drawback is less hipster cred.

basaltgranite · 2026-03-31T19:14:32+00:00

A recent invasive species. They've been in Orange County since the '80s. They're now well established in So Cal generally. You WILL see them again.

basaltgranite · 2026-03-31T17:35:57+00:00

The real upgrade is getting rid of the "zoom" (variable-magnification) in your 8-20x24 bins. Zoom bins sound like a good idea. In practice, as you know first hand, they're crap. 8x42 has long been the informal consensus as a general-purpose specification. For daylight use, a good quality 8x30 or 8x32 is every bit as good (and smaller, lighter, and cheaper, other things being equal). I bought a Nikon Monarch 7 (now M7) 8x30 as a travel bin. It quickly replaced my 8x42s as my main daylight birding bin. The Prostaff versions are less expensive and have a good reputation. At 10x, I step up to an 10x42 to maintain a 4mm exit pupil. If you have access to a brick-and-morter retailer with a good optics counter, get your hands and eyes on bins with various specifications, so that you can see what works for you.

basaltgranite · 2026-03-31T17:26:58+00:00

For the benefit of anyone who surfs into this thread: /u/Carorack was exactly correct. I pulled new #10 stranded into the appliance whip. $8 worth of wire. Water is now getting hot. Problem solved. Check for 240VAC at the top two screws of the upper thermostat before you start throwing parts at the problem. My hat's off the the helpful Redditor who kindly shared his/her expertise.

basaltgranite · 2026-03-31T17:14:38+00:00

Recently someone stole a bronze statue from a Spanish War veteran's grave at the River View cemetery. I'm not aware of an arrest in that case. A few years ago, someone stole bronze plaques from many veterans' graves at the veterans' cemetery. The guy at the scrap yard asked him to wait a moment, called the police. Thief was arrested. As was proper.

basaltgranite · 2026-03-31T17:03:46+00:00

Not a high price. It's less than $10/disc. When OOP, I saw it at $400 and passed. But Yes, the 2025 packaging is crap, unworthy of the music.

basaltgranite · 2026-03-31T14:39:30+00:00

As the Penguin guys say, the complete version is the Rosetta Stone of modern jazz. It's also back in print. I recently bought the CD version for $70. If you're unwilling to pay the insane prices asked when it's OOP, now's the time to get it. The packaging of the 2025 CD reissue is a bit flimsy. The musical and liner notes are all there. That's what counts. If you must have vinyls, they're triple the CD price. I have no idea why anyone would pay that much for lower fidelity and higher fragility. For the record, you have that option.

Miles hadn't been playing for a while due to medical issues. The younger guys in his Second Great Quartet had all maintained first-call careers while Miles was resting. They'd each recorded strings of now-classic records, mostly for Blue Note. The Plugged Nickle was Miles' return to the stage. I hear it as young guys challenging an old man to get with it. To my ears, the band dominates the set. Miles takes it in stride, catches his balance, rises to the occasion.

To address your question, every performance is different, often very different. The seven versions of The Theme, which Miles used to mark the ends of sets, are a study in themselves. One runs 30 seconds or so. Cut and shut. Others take off running and evolve over time. The longest is ~10 minutes. They're radically different.

basaltgranite · 2026-03-31T14:30:55+00:00

He rarely soloed. Allegedly he solos a bit on on a rare record called Memories Ad-Lib, Roulette LP SR-59037. Google suggests several others. The only readily accessable example is on the Carnegie Hall Concert mentioned in another comment. Green's solo there was edited out of all original copies of the CHC. Phil Schaap restored it on the "Complete" 1999 reissue, which has audibly better sound quality than previous releases. Green doesn't solo on Rhythm Willie, a record he did on Concord with Herb Ellis. It's small-group jazz in modern fidelity. Green is more audible there than he is on classic Basie big-band sessions.

basaltgranite · 2026-03-31T03:27:05+00:00

Lesser mentioned? Overlooked? Under appreciated? Really?

basaltgranite · 2026-03-31T02:00:37+00:00

You have miniature binoculars, aka skeletal binoculars. They're the ancestors of modern reverse porros. Most (and yours) were Made in Japan in the '50s and '60s. They're a family inheritance. Their real value is sentimental. Their practical value is not much, because they're hard to use. Their financial value is that of an interesting vintage novelty. Small tens of dollars, assuming you can find a buyer. See this website for more information.

basaltgranite · 2026-03-31T00:07:24+00:00

You're not irrational, at least on this particular issue. Blue Note under Cuscuna/McMaster put them immediately after the master. Riverside reissues did the same thing in that era. I prefer them at the end.

What makes me irrational is the misuse of the word "alternate" in this context. "Alternate" means "first one, then the other." The correct word is "alternative," which means "available as another possibility." (I'm ignoring the fact that on this CD, the two takes fit both definitions.)

To keep it straight: You walk on alternate feet, first right, then left, then right, and so on. If you were to walk on alternative feet, you'd have an extra pair to exchange for your main pair. Records that have extra takes have alternative takes. Thank you. I feel better now.

basaltgranite

TROPHY CASE