Robot Claw

It’s time for another milestone birthday! Jim Friedland is 70 today! Hooray!

Here’s his face when told he had joined the ranks of septuagenarians:

Don’t you think he resembles a certain beloved mascot in that shot:

Happy birthday Jim! Don’t eat too many Chicken McNuggets 😉

My Dad turned 80 today! That’s a milestone year, so please join with me in congratulating him 🙂

Here’s some shots through the years:

That’s in PNZ back in the 1960s. Or as Dad may call it “when I had all my hair”. Keen observers may note that dad was sporting the thick plastic frames about 50 years before they were (back) in fashion!

The ragged and tired face of someone who just realized he had me for a son! (This was about ’72)

This was in the late 1970s or very early 1980s. He’s got a twinkle in his eye here doesn’t he? I think he looks a little like Hugo Weaving in this shot.

This looks to be the mid 1980s, and is a school photo. The sweater is a nice touch. I wonder if that was his, or if the school provided it?

The day of my graduation, in December 1989. Looking through photos of dad as I did today, I can’t help but once again think of the fact that I have never owned a suit…

This was in 2000, and I believe it was the day I purchased him this gameboy that he would become fiercely addicted to. When dad was born transistors hadn’t even been invented, and in this photo he’s holding a device with more than 17,000 of them in it!

And there’s dad with his pet inflatable chicken, taken only a couple of months ago.

I’m 43, and I can barely remember what happened 5 years ago. Therefore I reckon dad has forgotten pretty much all these photos, so I hope this was a nice trip down memory lane 🙂

Happy Birthday Dad! We’ll celebrate together in a few months in Germany!

Today is my birthday. As usual, I continue to get wiser and more handsome, so I thought it would be appropriate to reflect on one aspect of that via a particular part of my fashion over the years: my glasses.

I first got glasses when I was 13 (in year 8). While it was an epiphany realizing that not everyone saw the world as blurry as I had, I strongly disliked glasses at first and often didn’t wear them. After a year or so though, I’m sure I got used to them. This was my first pair of glasses (in perhaps the earliest shot ever taken of me wearing them):

I was wearing the very same pair two years later when I graduated high school:

But then, in college, I seem to have changed them for a different pair. This period is hazy since very, very few photos were taken of me and in those that were, I very rarely had glasses on. I guess I was vain. Whenever it happened, I got a new pair and when I arrived in America in 1993 I wore these:

Woah! I suppose that was the fashion in ’93. They were plastic frames, and molded without the little nose supports so they kept clean. I remember liking them quite a bit, and that they eventually broke when our cat Ziggi attacked my face directly with his mighty paw! I actually wore them with tape on them for a few days until I replaced them with these:

That was in the mid-late 1990s. This period became known as my ‘Harry Potter years’ for obvious reasons. Here’s another shot from that era:

It is only due to my rugged beauty that such a pair of glasses looks good 😉

But time change as does fashions, and as always I’m usually on the bleeding edge. For my next pair, which I got in 2003, I dialed the lens size way, way down:

I liked them at the time, but they were very small to the point of not being practical. I only kept these tiny glasses for a couple of years, before replacing them with an almost-identical but slightly larger pair which I wore for about 5 years:

I wore these to death! When I finally replaced them (in 2010) the lenses had scratches and one even had crystallized a bit, causing internal defects! The new pair, that I got in late 2010, were these:

This was my first step into the word of half-rim glasses. I’ve never gone back.

After several months I had to replace the lenses of these ones due to a factory defect, but I kept the frames for about 4 years until mid last year. That was when – for boring ‘old person reasons’ – I attempted to move into progressive lenses. It was a failure and short lived, and there are precious few photos of the glasses I wore those two weeks:

I returned them and got a brand new set of frames (and lenses), which I wear to this day:

That’s seven frames in 28 years, not including the year or so I spent wearing contacts. One pair every 4 years is apparently longer than the average (which is one every 2-3 years in the US), so maybe I should pick things up a bit! More relevant is the fact that I seem to choose frames that are very similar in appearance to my last pair (and in fact mine haven’t changed that much in appearance since 2003).

Maybe it’s time for a radical change?