Sunset

Outer Sunset, San Francisco California

From an email conversation.

California Bob - Counter-narrative: New York Times say I should feel better about where I live.

Uniberp - Downtowns everywhere in America are awful. Built for horses and converted for cars they never had good pedestrian accomodations.

Me - The New York Times is not to be trusted. They are part of the Democrat-Biden mafia.

California Bob - Chuck, it's dangerous to send these kinds of messages over unencrypted email. I've trained the gophers in my bunker to be couriers, and when I want to exchange ethnic jokes with my fellow militia members, I tie encoded messages to their necks and send them on their way. They are supplied with cyanide tablets, so if they encounter a soccer mom, they may die with dignity rather than listen to lectures about recycling.

The byline -- "The Outer Sunset’s success reflects how some cities have evolved during the pandemic" -- didn't really hit the mark with me. No, our part of the city doesn't have the problems of the Tenderloin or the biz district -- but it's a residential area not subject to those problems. I admit there has been some general improvement since I arrived -- fancy thriving shops, streets/sidewalks/public areas being upgraded -- but there's also been an increase in hobo campers. 

But I see it as slow general improvement, I don't really see any connection to the pandemic. So I agree: mafia-related or not, the Times has a somewhat forced narrative here.

Tracy

I had a dream last night and Tracy was in it. Is Tracy an odd name? It kind of feels like it is, but I don't know if it is that unusual. Maybe it's because I didn't know anybody named Tracy when I was a kid. Well, except for Dick Tracy, and his name wasn't Tracy, it was Dick. Anyway, thinking about it, I could only think of three Tracys in my life.

Dick Tracy

Dick Tracy was a staple of the newspaper funnies when I was a kid. It was never funny, and I don't recall any of the stories, if there even were any. There were a whole bunch of oddball characters.

Tracy the Runner

I knew a woman named Tracy when I lived in Austin. She was tall and thin as you might expect a runner to be. She came this close to being famous - she was supposed to go to the Olympics but then Jimmy Carter had a snit fit and canceled our participation in the Olympics which kind of pissed her off.  She was there for the night of the mushrooms. There were four of us and each of us was one of principle elements - Earth, Air, Fire and Water. She was Fire, I was Water. She eventually married a good friend of mine in Austin. 

Tracy the Computer Scientist

Intel SatisFAXtion Faxmodem

I met Tracy when I was working at Intel on the SatisFAXtion. After that he worked on a database project that crashed and burned. Not sure what happened there. I remember him telling me that they were trying to do something that the underlying database software didn't support and their attempt to work around its shortcomings made the whole project so complex that it collapsed under its own weight. Later on he went to England (Oxford, maybe?) and got a doctorate in Computer Science. Last I heard he was working on using Deep Learning software to identify cancer in X-ray images. He gave us a very coherent explanation of what he was doing at one of our Thursday lunch bunches. 

Dream

Last night I had a dream. I was riding in a Volvo and Tracy the Computer Scientist was driving. I was talking about how things had changed in the automotive world in the last 60 years. I should have said 50. I'm 71, so 60 years ago I would have been eleven and was barely aware that cars had engines. Whatever, it was a dream. I was talking about how when you turned the key to start your car 60 years ago, it was always a crap shoot as to whether it would start the first time. Sometimes the switch would glitch and just nothing would happen. Sometimes the starter would just start to turn the engine, but then hang. Sometimes it would start but only run for a few seconds. In those cases you would get to try it again. Sometimes you would have to crank the engine for a long time before it would catch. Nowadays if you turn the key and the engine doesn't start immediately you may just as well throw the car away. 

We're driving in the country and we come to little town. There is a small park and on the far side is a group of people, a wedding party perhaps. There is a lawn between us and them. It's a little brown. There are people right up against the edge on the far side, but there is nobody on it. It's like it's a prohibited area, but there doesn't seem to be any reason for it. We drive by a building with a porch recessed into one wall. The floor of the porch is concrete and looks to have a slope of about a foot in six feet, which means it's too steep for tables and chairs and so there is nothing there.

Modern Cars

With the computer diagnostics needed to diagnose the problem and with the exorbitant price of fancy little do-dads that are custom to that particular make and model, the repair bill on a car that won't start is liable to be a thousand dollars even if there is nothing mechanically wrong with it. And you know that once one thing fails, it is just the first of an endless cascade. Better just get rid of it now and save yourself the headache.

Squid with Headlights

Taningia danae

This deep sea monster is equipped a couple of unusual photophores:

The size and shape of lemons—each nestled within a retractable lid like an eyeball in a socket—they are by far the largest photophores known to science.

Via Schneier on Security

Why Is the Establishment So Scared of RFK Jr.?

RFK Jr. and samples of the smear campaign being directed at him

Marie Hawthorne explains on The Organic Prepper. RFK Jr. has appeared on my news feeds a couple of times and he sounds pretty rational until you hear that he's anti-vaxx. That makes him a little suspect, but Marie makes the case that maybe he knows what he's talking about.

Does he have a chance of unseating the godfather of the Democrat mafia? One can hope, but politics is funny. Being rotten to the core seems to be more important than being smart, rational and competent.

P-51C

P-51C Thunderbird First Flight (1949 Bendix Race Winner)
AirCorps Aviation

That sort of looks like a P-51 Mustang, but where's the bubble canopy? It is a P-51, but it's the C model. The P-51 didn't get the bubble canopy until the D model. Of the 15,000 P-51s built during WW2, 12,000 were the D model, so that's what you usually see.

This particular airplane was owned by Jimmy Stewart, famed actor and Brigadier General in the United States Air Force. In 1949 it was used by Joe De Bona to win the Bendix Trophy Race and by Jackie Cochran to set a speed record.

Aircorps Aviation is co-located with the Dakota Territory Air Museum in Minot, North Dakota. They have upwards of a dozen old warbirds in their collection, several of which are air worthy. The Minot Air Force Base is just down the road.

Via Brucexo

Schrödinger’s War – And Orwell’s

Thomas Cole The Course of Empire – The Arcadian or Pastoral State 1834

Raul Ilargi Meijer has a post on The Automatic Earth about the way the war in Ukraine is being reported. It's pretty entertaining and if he happens to agree with me, well, that's just a coincidence. He includes this quote about the recent dam destruction:

The best comment on Kakhovka I’ve seen perhaps comes from @CheburekiMan on Twitter: “Restoring water flow to the North Crimean Canal was top priority for Russia, the very first act of the SMO [Special Military Operation]. Before Kiev shut off the flow in 2014, the canal was supplying 85% of Crimea’s water. So much depended on it, from crops to industry to drinking water, that’s how important it is. Now the pro-Ukraine bleating sheep want people to believe that Russia would wreck the dam, empty the reservoir and cause serious harm to its own people by running the canal dry. It’s so bonkers that one has to seriously consider such ideas are the result of brain damage, or perhaps fetal alcohol syndrome.”

He also notes that Jacinda Ardern, a former Prime Minister of New Zealand, was made a dame. I'm not sure what to make of that. I seem to recall that New Zealand went off the deep end with COVID and gun control, but that's New Zealand, they're a tiny country in the middle of the ocean on the far side of the world. I'm not going to try and figure that out. 

Via Zerohedge

Hannah Duston

Statue of Hannah Duston - Haverhill, Mass

Bayou Renaissance Man has a post up about Hannah Duston:

Hannah Duston was the first American woman to have a statue built in her honor, in 1874. Today, what she did to deserve it might be called, by some, a monument to an atrocity. What did Hannah do? Hannah scalped the ten Indians who had attacked her farm, dragged her from her bed, and burned her house down before taking her captive and killing her six-day-old infant.

How was she able to scalp ten Indians? Well, they were dead. How did they die? Hannah killed 'em. You go, girl.