The barrage of bad news just kept coming last week. The war between Israel and Hamas – if it can be called a war when one side is almost in total control, maybe a Hamas prison riot would be better description – war in Ukraine, Ebola in Nigeria. And ISIS, the worst Islamic scourge the earth has ever seen, if the newspapers are to be believed, is taking over the middle-east at a surreal rate. The week ended with the police, in St Louis, killing an unarmed black boy.

By comparison, the good news is pretty weak sauce, still, it is good news and even better because it was a surprise. My trusty Canon 5D broke while we were in Oregon. The little flippy mirror – that makes it a single-lens-reflex, SLR – came off of the mirror frame, leaving the camera without a way to focus or take a light meter reading. In my imagination, this is a $400.00, or so, problem and I began to think it was time to replace it. I went down to my local camera store, Keeble and Shuchat, which is one of the best camera stores on the West Coast to test drive a new 5D. While fondling the new camera, I told them what happen to my old one. The salesman said, Oh, they will fix that for free.

I’m not sure that I really believed that, even when I brought the camera into the K&S Service Department. However, I now have it back with a new mirror, cleaned and serviced, at no charge. I wonder how long the mirror warrenty would last. Forever I guess, I got the Camera in 2005 and nines years later – alot of them in the desert – they are still fixing it for free.It makes me think of how poorly General Motors has handled their ignition switch problems. And, in my opinion has continued to handle the problems, and how bad it looked when it came out that GM did a cost analysis and decided that it would be cheaper to ride out a couple of lawsuits rather than fix millions of cars. Now they still have to recall all those cars and they have the lawsuits.