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A Bad Guide 
For how long did you let Alma suffocate while you were taking a picture of her with (your?) glasses on?
Probably about a minute while I went to get the camera. But before that she had been practising in the kitchen. Those are Dyveke’s glasses, they are proper ones except that one of the dogs chewed the ears. Mine are cheapo, they come from the dime store and fall apart after two months. The costs equal out over time, probably.
I suppose most human beings could (easily ?) hold their breath for about a minute. But not for much longer.
Yes. I don’t feel like trying it, but one minute is what a friend of mine was telling me the other day. He had done a lot of free diving. I can’t think of a better reason to hold your breath.
Maybe if you were being chased by a lion in a supermarket, or the ruins of a farm?
I wonder how easy it is to just pick glasses on display in a shop, buy them and use them. (I have to say that I don’t wear glasses, yet.) Can’t it damage your eyesight to use “improper” glasses?
It’s easy: reading glasses are labelled +1, +1.5, all the way to +3 for strength, so you just choose the weakest pair that allows you to read a book. I don’t think using the wrong reading glasses can damage your eyesight – but that’s not based on knowledge, it’s just recklessness, probably.
If I was being chased by a lion in a supermarket, I’d be running. I’d save the experiments to find out how long I could hold my breath until I was in bed, probably. Does this happen to you often, lions in the supermarket? There’s nothing about that in the travel brochures.
Does this happen to you often, lions in the supermarket? — It never happened, but we take all necessary precautions so that it doesn’t happen.
I must try that one day, go to a lion-free supermarket selling glasses and try them on, say, À la recherche du temps perdu and see if I manage to read it better or not.
When I was in school I played drums in the band, so during rehearsals I would be standing up and in the back, far from the teacher and out of sight of the other kids. Sometimes during long boring stretches I would entertain myself by holding my breath and timing myself with the clock on the wall. I rarely achieved 2 minutes, but 1.5 was not difficult with some practice.
I gave up and got my first pairs of glasses last summer. I had noticed that reading grew more and more tiresome, but I didn’t take action until after I hit a motorcycle in a roundabout. Apparently one of my eyes gives so garbled signals when unassisted that there’s more than enough job for my brain to sort out the changing background.
Trond, that’s not age-related, is it? Does it mean you’re required to wear glasses when you drive now?
Ø, welcome back from Guatemala. ‘Rarely achieved 2 minutes’ is a lot better than ‘never likely to achieve more than 1 min.’, which is my status.
Sig, when you are called to wear glasses (I think it’s usually when you’re 45-ish) there will be enough time to read Proust, Shakespeare, Dante and all the small print at the bottom of contracts. Enjoy your glasses-free years while you can. Putting glasses on and then having to take them off again to see things that are further away is a complete pain in the ass.
Whenever I am being chased by a lion in a supermarket, or a farm, or the ruins of a farm, or the ruins of a supermarket, I breathe deeply. I find that it helps me to run faster.
I used to have perfect scores for sight when I was tested at school and in the military. My eyes have always been different, though, with one eye better at close range and one better at long range. Or that was what the optician said when I had them checked 20 years ago while doing my final thesis at NTH and noticing that I got tired reading boring stuff. In the years since, both eyes have changed, as eyes do, and the one that was perfect at close range needs an extra lens, and the one that used to be good at long range needs a stronger lens.
I’m not required to wear glasses while driving, but I do. Unless I forget, that is. I don’t really know if my sight was the reason for the crash either, but that was what finally prompted me to have my eyes checked again, and the explanation above was what my optician said he believed could be the case.
Luckily the young girl on the motorcycle was OK, by the way. Beaten and bruised but essentially healthy.
And, yes, it happened a few days after my 45th. In my early middle age vanity I’d been thinking that I might hold to 50. Last winter I finally admitted to myself that I wouldn’t, so I redefined success to 45. But I hadn’t got around to make the appointment yet.
Some people have difficulty clearly seeing things that are far away. This is called myopia, and if you are going to get it you usually get it as a child. The usual remedy is prescription glasses (or contact lenses).
Most people as they get older develop difficulty seeing things that are close at hand. This is called presbyopia. (I like that word a lot.) The usual remedy is the kind of reading glasses that AJP is talking about.
I always had excellent vision until some time in my 40s. Since then I have been increasingly dependent on cheap glasses.
Last year I went to the eye doctor, because it had been years since I had had my vision examined. There were three main outcomes:
1. The examination detected no problems except the presbyopia that I already knew about.
2. They told me they could sell me prescription reading glasses, precisely designed for the state of my eyes. It seemed like a silly idea, but for some reason I said yes. Now I have these expensive glasses, and they are just one of several pairs in my life. I am a little afraid I will break them.
3. The reading test that they administered used a card filled with interesting statements of fact. When I got home I did a little research and found that some of the more surprising statements were false.
Myopia is also called near-sightedness, and presbyopia is also called called far-sightedness. I suppose this means that if you have difficulty seeing near things and you also have difficulty seeing faraway things then you are both far-sighted and near-sighted, while if you have no difficulty seeing things anywhere then you are neither near-sighted nor far-sighted.
My wife buys cheap glasses, but she says I won’t find any with the right combination of lenses.
This made me look up presbyter “elder”. The ending is believed to be the comparative suffix, as I thought, but what goes before is said to have developed its meaning “old (man)” from “in front of the cattle”. I don’t know.
Here’s something rather interesting about Amish cow tipping in Lancaster PA. that I found when I was looking up presbyter + cattle.
I’m glad to know the term “presbyopia”. I wonder if you can use “presbyopic” to mean metaphorically farsighted. If I’m ever required to write my religion on a form again (I think the last time may have been at school), I’m going to write Presbyopic.
That’s exactly what happened when Dyveke got the Chanel (or whatever) glasses in the photograph at the top. At first, I wasn’t allowed to touch them, but then one of the dogs chewed the earpiece and she relaxed a bit.
Trond, I’m sure your wife is right that 100 kr. specs from Rema 1000 aren’t going to work for you. They do sell them for shortsightedness, though. There’s a much smaller selection and they’re marked with minus numbers (-3.0 rather than +3.0).