The Trial of Ural Bey

Kürsat Alniaçik as Ural Bey

We've been watching Season 3 of Diriliş: Ertuğrul (English: "Resurrection: Ertugrul") on Netflix. We're up around episode 30 or so and Ural Bey, the scheming, low down, lying dog is finally going to get his comeuppance. Or is he? His father dies just about as he is about to lose his head and due to -something-, the execution is postponed. Of course it is. If Ural dies now we will lose our favorite villain (boo! hiss!).

The trial is pretty decent for the 13th century in a Muslim country. We have a judge, evidence is presented and people on both sides of the dispute are allowed to have their say. From what we see in the trial, there is not enough to convict anybody, at least according to current crime show standards, but Ural is convicted anyway, which is a relief because we, who have been privy to all his clandestine meetings and nefarious scheming, know he is as guilty as sin.

The whole show, trial and all, reminds me of nothing so much as the clown show going on in in the U.S. Congress, i.e. the persecution of Trump by the Democrats.

The difference is we know Ural is guilty, because our hero, Ertuğrul, is on the side of truth, beauty and justice. That's why I watch Netflix instead of the news: the stories are one sided, clear as a bell and the truth is obvious.

Quote of the Day

Pixels

“never pick a fight with a woman who buys pixels by the bushel.” - Sarah A. Hoyt

The Last Camel Died at Noon

Roberta X put up a post with this title. It seems it is also the title of a book, a murder mystery. You can buy a copy for a reasonable price from Amazon here. Or you can buy a copy for an insanely ludicrous price.

The Last Camel Died at Noon

I've run into this kind of weirdness a couple of other times. I suspect someone is running a scam where they are in a position to order things and no one is checking up on them.

Nobody Never Tells Me Nothin'

Take It From The Tinkersons

Sounds a lot like my house.

The Sri Lanka Church Bombings: The Saudi Pestilence Spreads

St. Sebastian's Church after the bombing

The history of Sri Lanka through the Fifties to the present time is a sobering reminder to those who fail to see that unrestrained democracy can lead to the tyranny of the majority and that robust diversity is as often a cause of friction and strife as it is a strength to be celebrated. -  The Imaginative Conservative

A fine story by Joseph A. Mussomeli

Party

2019 NFL Draft, Broadway in Nashville, Tennessee, April 25, 2019. (Perry Knots/NFL)

200,000 people attended. I thought the NFL Draft was something you read about in the newspaper. I didn't realize it was a party. This is what our modern world hath wrought. A zillion people can take off and fly to wherever to party whenever they want. I guess some people enjoy that kind of thing. I am not one of them. Probably why I hadn't heard of this before.

Anti-Freedom-ists

Retired Mustang has something to say:

Neither communism, nor socialism, nor fascism, nor progressivism, nor liberalism, nor conservatism, nor any of a thousand different “isms” are the real threat to liberty. The people who adhere to one or more of those are threats to liberty, and yet, the communist is not a threat to liberty because he is a communist. The fascist is not a threat because she is a fascist. Certainly, those and other systems can give power to the ones who adhere to those political and/or economic philosophies. But they are not where the real threat, the most basic and fundamental threat, lies.
The threat to liberty is not determined by where a person or philosophy falls upon some modern version of a left-to-right political spectrum. The fundamental threat to liberty comes from neither the modern leftist nor the modern rightist. Instead, the threat to liberty comes from where it has always come. It comes from the authoritarian and the busybody. It comes from those with a fundamental need to tell others what to do. It comes from those with an unhealthy interest in the lives and activities of others. These are the people who threaten liberty. Regardless of party, regardless of political philosophy, regardless of ideology, these folks have always been and always will be threats to liberty.

Me thinks he has a valid point.

Ertuğrul

Voyage of frigate Ertuğrul to Japan, by Major general Osman Nuri Pasha (1839-1906).

We're watching Season 3 of Ertuğrul on Netflix and it's pretty great. The series has been around for while, so when I started thinking about doing a post, I checked my pile of files, and this shipwreck popped up.

Ertuğrul, launched in 1863, was a sailing frigate of the Ottoman Navy. While returning from a goodwill voyage to Japan in 1890, she encountered a typhoon off the coast of Wakayama Prefecture, subsequently drifted into a reef and sank. The shipwreck resulted in the loss of 533 sailors and officers, including Rear Admiral Ali Osman Pasha. Only 69 sailors and officers survived and returned home later aboard two Japanese corvettes. The event is still commemorated as a foundation stone of Japanese-Turkish friendship. - Wikipedia

Looks like the captain and the artist may have been related, but this makes it seem unlikely:

In this Ottoman Turkish style name, Osman is the given name, the title is Pasha, and there is no family name. - Wikipedia

Sing Sing

Bebo Best & The Super Lounge Orchestra - Sing Sing Sing (Dance Video) | Choreography | MihranTV
You can sing a song, or you can 'sing' to the coppers about a crime which is liable to result in someone getting sent to Sing Sing Prison in the village of Ossining, New York. That's all just a little background for this line pulled from the Paul Manafort trial:

“This vernacular to ‘sing’ is what prosecutors use. What you’ve got to be careful of is that they may not only sing, they may compose.” - Judge Ellis

Via Brian Micklethwait

P.S. This video is the only version I found of this tune that actually has anyone singing. All the rest are just instrumentals.

Blazers versus Thunder

Damian Lillard DESTROYS the Thunder with EPIC GAME-WINNER - Game 5 | April 23, 2019
This was game five of the first round of the NBA playoffs. The Portland Trail Blazers had won three games while the Oklahoma City Thunder had only won one. It was a great game at times the Blazers were ahead by ten or more points, and then the Thunder would rebound and pull ahead by a like number. The outcome was always in doubt. Nearing the end, the score was tied and then with only a couple of seconds left, Damian Lillard shoots the ball from way beyond the three point line and it goes in just as the final buzzer sounds! It was a spectacular way to end this series against the Thunder.

Caption of the Day

U.S. Soldiers using the Enhanced Portable Inductive Artillery Fuze Setter on an XM1156

And that's after I cut it down to the bare essentials. A giant corporation developed a 'smart' fuze for conventional artillery shells that greatly improves their accuracy. It is not as accurate as purpose designed 'smart' shells, but it doesn't cost as much either. The big advantage is that it can be used with existing 'dumb' artillery shells, and we have a gazillion of those stored away in secret warehouses. Probably next door to the Sinaloa cartel's cocaine warehouses.

Other posts about smart weapons here.

Via Bayou Renaissance Man

Links

• What Assange was indicted for. Good explanation of password cracking. Via Borepatch
• Berlin Wall Escape that was financed by an American News Agency. 1962. My Daily Kona
• How a Few Lucky Civil War Soldiers Started Glowing and Healed Faster. Bio-luminescent bacteria. Knuckle Draggin My Life Away

Blue Oyster Cult - Take Me Away

Blue Oyster Cult - Take Me Away
I pulled up one song by Blue Oyster Cult, and now this shows up. The video is a little clunky, but it is 36 years old, so pretty good for its time. The tune is glorious. A couple of items:

• We've got Men In Black here. I was thinking of the film, but this tune predates the film by more than a decade. Turns out the term goes all the way back to 1947.
• They use propeller driven airplane to abduct the girl. Kind of clunky for a space faring civilization, but then Spielberg started his UFO epic Close Encounters of Third Kind with propeller driven airplanes.
• The pilot's forehead is painted like the characters on the cover of their album Fire of Unknown Origin
• Aldo Nova, of Fantasy fame, wrote the tune and played much of music.

Outrage Industrial Complex

Bogus Time Magazine Cover

It just occurred to me that much of the outrage we see and hear in our digital information world is fueled by advertising. I suspect outrageous headlines get more clicks than clear ones, which means the ads on those pages are going to get more clicks, which means more ad revenue and maybe even more sales. Advertisers want clicks, so they are going to pay more for sites that post outrageous shit. Of course, the more outrageous the claims, the more people are going to be outraged and respond in a similarly outrageous manner, so it becomes a cyclone of outrageousness.

So most of what is being talked about is not what's important, but whatever will generate the most outrage, and that is totally determined by advertising dollars.

Pic of the Day

Locomotive by Bill Peet

Bill Peet was a Disney artist that worked on everything between Snow White and Dumbo. He also made some kid's books. I don't know where this picture fits in all that, but it's pretty great.

Via Just A Car Guy

Pharaoh-noid

ApologetiX "Paranoid - Black Sabbath" PARODY
The world is full of strange and wonderful things.

Via MetaFilter

Quote of the Day

Rashomon Movie Poster

They opened the box on Schrodinger's Probe to reveal the Rashomon Report: It says exactly what everybody thought it was going to say. - View From The Porch

737 Max

IEEE Spectrum has an article that looks at how the design of the Boeing 737 Max may have contributed to the recent crashes. One of the key elements of the story is the size and position of the engines. I thought their drawing, while adequate, was weak, so I went looking for some pictures. Take a look at the size and position of the engines in these pictures and I think you will see what Gregory is talking about.

Original Boeing 737

Later Boeing 737

Boeing 737 Max

Via Wild Man

Mapping Gothic France

Durham Cathedral, UK
(Rendering of a digital model)

Notre Dame isn't the only cathedral in Europe. Here we have a map of Gothic cathedrals in France, except some are in England, like Durham (above), which is almost in Scotland.

Mapping Gothic France

Building a cathedral was a massive project, similar in scale to our program to put a man on the moon. But it took 200 years to build a cathedral, now our time lines are much shorter. Might that be because we are traveling so much faster and we cannot see that far ahead?

Via Detroit Steve

Megopolis

50 Million People Live Here

Via American Digest

Musical Fight

Bach, Ricercar a 6 (from The Musical Offering)
I'm reading Gnomon by Nick Harkaway and somewhere past the halfway mark he starts talking about a musical 'fight' between Johann S. Bach & Frederick the Great. A quick search turns up this story on The Guardian that gives us a good synopsis of the situation. The Musical Offering (excerpt above) was Johann's response to Frederick's challenge.

I am not a big fan of classical music, Rock & Roll is more my style. Lately though I have been listening to classical music when I am driving, mostly because the classical station doesn't have as much blather (people talking) as other stations. Also, occasionally, depending on the tune playing, I get the feeling of being in a scene from a movie. Scenes where we have someone driving down the road and the soundtrack is playing some classical music are fairly common.

The video embedded above gives a nice illustration of the notes being played.

Frederick has appeared here once before.

Barbie-Q

Barbie-Q

I can't believe this is real, but if it's not, it's a wonderful fake.

Via Knuckle Draggin My Life Away

The Good Old Days

Bertha Benz: The Journey That Changed Everything
Take a peak into everyday life 130 years ago: every farmer had a team of a dozen women to pull his plow.

Drinking & Singing

Jordan B Peterson's DRINKING SONG 🍺 ( ＪＢＰＷＡＶＥ )
Entertaining and enlightening. Sometimes you have to venture out into the fringes to get a clear picture of a situation.

Via The Shekel

Russian Lux-mobile

2019 Rolls Royce Phantom vs 2019 Aurus SenatAutomotive Tv
The video is pleasant enough, fancy cars showing off. I don't anticipate buying one, ever. Just keeping it clean and polished would take more effort and/or expense than I am willing to expend. But that's not the point.

The point is that the Aurus is a Russian car. The Russians have always had cars, well as long as anyone else has had them. In the beginning they were imported from the West, but eventually they got around to building their own, sort of. But now it looks like they may have gained enough expertise to actually build a decent automobile all on their own.

I am glad to see that Russia continues to make what looks like capitalist progress. Yes, Putin apparently murders journalists, and he's building his own totalitarian network of like minded despots (Venezuela, Cuba, Syria to name a few), but that may be the only form of government that works in Asia. American democracy is an anomaly. I am not quite sure what is needed for it to continue to succeed. Thick skinned politicians, maybe, who don't care about the derogatory comments that people make about them. A foundation of widespread support and belief in Christianity. And replacing our fearless leaders on a regular basis.

Anyway, if Russia continues to make progress, and we continue our horribly convoluted (and confusing) political infighting, we might end up being more alike than different. Doesn't mean we can't still hate them.

Via RT (formerly Russia Today)

P.S. Just realized that the video is another iteration of Red vs. Blue.

Update March 2022 replaced missing video

Update November 2022 replaced missing video

Pic of the Day

Saturn F1 Rocket Engines on the Factory Floor

Heroic Relics is all about the Saturn moon rocket, the Apollo mission and the 1960's space race. The above image is from a page that shows just what went into building the F1 engine.

Some of the photos come from the Marshall Space Flight Center, which was named for George Marshall, who also came up with the Marshall Plan for rebuilding Europe after WW2.

Via Detroit Steve

Notre Dame Cathedral

Notre Dame Cathedral burning
Warning: obnoxious autoplay video

I heard about the fire, and I got to wondering if I had posted anything about this cathedral before. I did:

The Wolves of Paris were a man-eating wolf pack that killed forty people in Paris in 1450. The animals entered the city during the winter through breaches in its walls. A wolf named Courtaud, or "Bobtail", was the leader of the pack. Reports of the animal suggested it was reddish in color. Eventually, the wolves were killed when Parisians, furious at the deaths, lured Courtaud and his pack into the heart of the city. There the Parisians stoned and speared the wolves to death in front of the Notre Dame Cathedral. 

This was 200 years after the cathedral was finished. Those were different times.

P.S. I originally got the quote from Wikipedia, but that article has vanished. The new link is not quite so sure that this is a true tale.

The Puckle Gun: Repeating Firepower in 1718

The Puckle Gun: Repeating Firepower in 1718
The Puckle gun was not a big success. It's mostly a curiosity for being an early machine gun, of a sort.

I'm looking at this thing and I'm thinking there was a great deal of machining involved in making this thing, which leads me to wonder when the first metal working lathes appeared. Lathes have been around since the 13th Century BC, but they didn't perform precision cutting of metal. Mostly they turned wood into spindles or columns.

But then we have this:

The first fully documented, all-metal slide rest lathe was invented by Jacques de Vaucanson around 1751. - Wikipedia

That's 33 years after the Puckle Gun was introduced. So maybe the most interesting thing about this gun was the advanced machining techniques that were used to make it.

LOX

How Israel's Lander Crashed Into The Moon, And How Falcon Heavy Flew  Except I've skipped over the Lunar Lander story to get to the LOX.
Just the coolest thing I've seen in a while. Bonus: starting around 17:30 we have an animation of a large space telescope being loaded on the BFR, now known as Starship.

The Eyes Have It

Pretty Woman

There's more here than meets the eye.

redclay7 comments:

Fashion photographers for some decades now have used the ring light flash that medical folks developed for the detailed closeup recording of their medical specimens – The ring light surrounds the camera lens itself at its front end giving a soft even, light, very flattering to skin and clothing. That is what I believe are the circular catchlights in her pupils.

Okay, her pupils are a little odd.

Ring Light

But wait a minute, what are catchlights? Wikipedia knows:

Catch light or catchlight is a light source that causes a specular highlight in a subject's eye in an image. They are also referred to as eye lights or Obies, the latter a reference to Merle Oberon, for whom the light was invented by then husband and cinematographer, Lucien Ballard.

 And then we have this:

Trump Eye

Where we have an entire phalanx of reporters caught in Donald Trump's eye.

Crossed Up

Part of a cross-written letter from Samuel Randell written in 1854

Reading The Ramada Inn at Shiloh by Allan Gurganus and I come across this:

"I have their letters, cross-written to save paper."

Cross-written? Never heard of it, but I'll bet Google knows, and sure enough it was a real thing. I find it curious that I can actually read it. Well, sort of. I can pick out some words, it's a little difficult, this image is a low rez copy of a 150 year old hand written letter. But just looking at the page the lines of writing going across the page stand out, and the vertical lines almost disappear.

I like cursive. Can't say why. Perhaps because I spent so much time learning it, or because it was so difficult to master. That was the fourth grade I think. Or maybe it's just because it's a nice change of pace from all the printed text I run into every freaking day, most of which is just garbage (the message, not the printed characters). I mean if someone takes the time to write anything out long hand, I am going to take the time to read it because it sure as hell isn't going to be some Search Engine Optimized piece of spamula.

"Cursive" has shown up in this blog a couple of times.

Via Posthip Scott.

Local Sunrise

UTAH TRAIN DERAIL
A freight train derailed in Utah recently.

state and federal agencies, including the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, decided to blow up a dozen Union Pacific propane tankers that had derailed, as the safest way to deal with them, and clear the railroad, so it can get repaired and back in business

That is a heck of a lot of propane going up in smoke. Talk about a blaze of glory.

Yes, I know, everyone is talking about the Black Hole [tm]. That they were able to make an image out of all the random radio noise in the universe is pretty cool, but until we get get established in the space faring business, I don't care about no stinking black holes.

The Best

#1471; The Hidden, Oil-Slick Gem

Pile it up, higher and deeper until you collapse in a fit of laughter. That's what happened to me anyway.

Operation Gladio

Excerpt from Antony C. Black's review of Operation Gladio: The Unholy Alliance by Paul L. Williams:

The primal author of the ‘stay-behind-armies’, Williams informs us, was General Reinhard Gehlen, the head of German military intelligence during the Second World War. Having foreseen early on that the Reich was doomed to defeat, Gehlen had “concocted the idea of forming clandestine guerilla squads composed of Hitler youth and die-hard fascist fanatics” ostensibly to fend off the inevitable Soviet invasion. These guerilla units he referred to as ‘werewolves’.
Not ones to miss a fascist opportunity when they saw it, the US Office of Strategic Services (the OSS, and the forerunner of the CIA), under the leadership of William ‘Wild Bill’ Donovan, quickly enlisted both Gehlen and SS General Karl Wolff (in 1945) in forming the Gehlen Organization (later to transform into the present-day German BND) and which received its initial funding from US Army G-2 intelligence resources.
The American point-man on this was Allen Dulles, the first president (in 1927) of the Council on Foreign Relations, and later the first head of the CIA. Duly incorporated into the American fold, the ‘werewolves’ were, given that their initial meddling took place in Italy, rebranded as ‘gladiators’. Operation Gladio was born.
In 1947 the CIA (having, that year, superseded the OSS) was faced with its first daunting task, i.e. how to prevent the Italian Communist Party (PCI) from forming the next government. Elections were scheduled for 1948 and the PCI was a virtual shoe-in not just in Italy proper, but in Sicily as well. Fortunately, ‘Gladio’ was ready and waiting. The gladiators had been training in a special camp set up in Sardinia under the local command of the former WW2 Italian fascist leader, Prince Junio Valerio Borghese.
In addition, hundreds of American mafioso began to arrive on the shores of Italy to lend a hand with the communist ‘problem’. The arrival of the ‘made men’ was the result of Donovan’s efforts from 1943 onward in working with American mobsters Charles ‘Lucky’ Luciano and Vito Genovese to conger new (drug) funding for the OSS’s off-books’ operations, and to reinstall the Sicilian mafia on the island in the leadup to Operation Husky (the Allied invasion of Sicily). These forces were now unleashed on the Italian electorate, and through 1948 an average of five people a week were murdered by the CIA-backed terrorist units. The results were grimly predictable. Hallelujah, the PCI were defeated and the Christian Democrats returned to power.

This sounds fantastical enough that it could either be a complete fabrication or the unvarnished truth, so I looked up the names to see if they really existed. I found links for them all and added them to the above text.

From this you could conjure a theory that the War On Drugs exists only to keep drug prices high so the CIA can make enough money to keep funding their counter-communist efforts. Since the so-called communists are not really communists, they are freedom hating, tyrannical dictatorships, you might think that the prosecution and imprisonment of drug dealers and smugglers is all being done in the name of freedom (!?!). Golly, this sounds like Ollie North and the Contras.

The news media makes a lot of noise about addiction, but I wonder how much of a problem it really is. If you look at the estimates of how much heroin and cocaine are being imported, it looks like either everyone is getting stoned every day -or- some people are using a heck of a lot, like a gram a day. I don't think everyone is getting stoned, so there must be large population of heavy drug users.

As for busts (arrests), I wouldn't be surprised if it was just the newcomers who are getting busted. The old established outfits don't want any competition, so they are happy to tip off the cops whenever they get wind of an upstart trying to horn in on their racket.

P.S. I remember seeing a movie or a series that was set during the end of WW2 in Germany, and werewolves, as in "die-hard fascist fanatics", were a bit of a problem. I think there was a train involved, but I cannot remember much more than that.

Via Knuckledraggin My Life Away

Quote of the Day

In 1970, President Nixon was told by the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs: “You don’t have a drug problem in Vietnam; you have a condition. Problems are things we can get right on and solve.” - My Daily Kona

Stairs

Building with external staircase in London, UK

Brian Micklethwait posted a picture of this building along with its location, so for an early morning exercise I thought I would see if I could find it using Google Maps, and I did. His picture is more interesting. It's also not cluttered up with a bunch of construction barriers.

Venezuela, Oil & Politics

Despina Andrianna
Blacklisted oil tanker

Reading Google's translation of Crimenes sin Castigo (Crimes without Punishment), I come across this little bit:

On Friday, March 5, the US Treasury Department added to the list of OFAC (Office of Foreign Assets Control) two companies related to the maritime business, registered respectively in Greece and Liberia. and 35 oil tankers.

Okay, so we are trying to put the squeeze on Maduro. That's consistent with what I've heard. But when I Google OFAC, the first news story that mentions Venezuela is from Tass, the official news agency of the evil Russian empire. I guess Venezuela has fallen so far in importance that Americans can't be bothered with it. Or maybe Google has decided I like Russian news better.

The Tass story seems pretty even handed. There's none of the bombast that I normally expect to see from a despotic regime's state run media. Could they be attempting to lull us into a false sense of complacency so that sometime in the future they will be able to lead us to the dark side?

Old Dan Tucker

Old Dan Tucker
Mama was trying to explain what 'supper' meant to El Cubano, and this tune popped into my head. I mean, "supper's over and dinner's cooking" just about says it all, don't it? No it don't. In my wife's family, supper was the evening meal. To me, the terms 'supper' and 'dinner' are interchangeable, except when you are talking about formal events, like Sunday dinner, or Thanksgiving dinner. You might have supper on Thanksgiving, but that wouldn't be the big meal with turkey, dressing and all the fixin's. What's weirder is my wife claims to have never heard of this American folk song, but everybody in Verona, Italy seems to know it.

Highwaymen

The Highwaymen | Official Trailer [HD] | Netflix
In 1934, Bonnie & Clyde were depression era heroes, except for the bit about killing a dozen folks, mostly lawmen. They have been robbing and shooting their way around the central USA for a couple of years when the governor of Texas, Ma Ferguson (Kathy Bates), finally gets fed up and agrees to let Lee Simmons (John Carroll Lynch) call in a couple of old, retired Texas Rangers, Frank Hamer (Kevin Costner) & Maney Gault (Woody Harrelson) to track down these killers.

The movie follows these two grizzled law enforcement veterans driving all over Texas and Oklahoma and eventually Louisiana, hunting Bonnie & Clyde. We see lots of depression era poverty. Some of the scenes look like the homeless campgrounds we have now, but back then they were outside of town, not camped out right downtown. Of course, back then there was a lot less town and a lot more open country. Ma Ferguson gets a bad rap for disbanding the Texas Rangers. They were reconstituted after she left office.

The thing that gets me is that we have these bright young men with their modern equipment, methods and bureaucracy and they haven't been able to catch these two outlaws. It takes these two old timers, using old time methods to put a stop to their rampage.

I enjoyed the heck out of it. It felt totally real. The visit to the gun shop was a bonus.


Highwaymen - Gun Shop
I hadn't heard of the Colt Monitor before.


Colt monitor
It's basically a B.A.R. (Browning Automatic Rifle). I remember hearing about the B.A.R. when I was a kid, probably on shows like Combat, where it was spoken of reverently. It's a serious weapon.

Update September 2019 replaced missing gun shop video.

Crocodile

The most effective weapon of World War Two
Just read about those idiot Hindus exercising their anti-satellite weapon. Pissed me off so much I had to go look for something else to capture my attention until I calmed down. This Lindybeige video took  45 minutes and I am a little calmer now, plus I learned a bunch of stuff, not all of it about the Crocodile.

A Churchill Crocodile at Fort Montbarey

Flame throwers are terrifying, much more so than guns or bombs, at least to my mind. I suppose it has to do with the amount of pain any kind of burn generates. Everyone gets burned sooner or later, and that pretty much ensures that you will have a very strong aversion to getting burned again. I suppose it's because of the large number of nerve endings in your skin, and that's where burns happen. A burn may not incapacitate you in any physical way, but even a little burn will sure as heck get your attention.

Churchill Crocodile tank, flamethrower fuel pipe
If you are going to push 400 gallons of napalm out the nozzle in a minute and a half,
you will need a pretty big pipe.

I suspect this also makes people reluctant to use fire as a weapon, but when you have an implacable enemy who is causing damage to your people, I can see where you could lose any feelings of fair play and just not care anymore about being 'civilized'. Plus getting shot by a gun will either kill you outright, in which case your suffering will be minimal, or you will fully recover. At least that's what happens in the movies. We won't talk about those people who survived getting shot but are still suffering.

ProBuilt Tamiya 1/35 Churchill Crocodile Flamethrowing Tank +Fuel Trailer

Lot's of pictures out there of Churchill Crocodiles, but not many that show the fuel trailer.

Bureaucrat-ese

[Eugene Volokh] sent in some comments on a particular proposal, a day before the deadline, and got the message:

The Committee will consider all comments received after the comment period closes.

Um, okay, that's about as clear as mud. I think they mean that they will wait until the comment period closes before they look at the comments, or that they will accept comments as long as the comment period is open. But, you know, they could mean that will only look at the comments that they receive after the comment period closes. Any comments received while the comment period was open will simply be ignored. Could save them a lot of work.

Veteran

Blue Oyster Cult - Veteran Of The Psychic Wars
BlueOysterWizard
Went to the lab this morning to get my blood drawn. The lab is part of the medical industrial complex, so you have to pay a visit to the registration desk first. 'Papers, please' or the equivalent, but not too many questions, no filling out of forms, and only two signatures required. Don't understand why they need my wife's birth date, nor why they need a signature acknowledging their privacy policy. I mean, it's their policy, not mine. They need proof that they have shown it to me? This is double no-good no-think. Whatever. But then she asks me if I am a veteran, and 'veteran of a thousand psychic wars' line pops into my head. I can remember the tune, sort of, but not where it came from, so I looked it up when I got home and here we are.

P.S. Great comment from the previous YouTube page: This is the kind of music that makes you wanna snort a big bag of plutonian nyborg. - karlbertiljohnsson

Update September 2019 replaced missing video.

Update July 2022 replaced missing video.

Cosmic

Near Occultation of Saturn - Pete Lawrence

Saturn crashed into the moon last Friday. Well, if you were looking, it would have looked like it, except no explosion, no dust cloud. Of course it could have happened somewhere on the dark side and we would never know about it, except of course, it didn't.

Saturn, I think, is visible to the naked eye, but just as a bright spot. This picture tells me you don't need a whole lot of magnification to see the planet well enough to make out the rings.



Moon Saturn Occultation
Via Starts With A Bang! My linking to this website should not be considered an endorsement of the totally ridiculous big bang theory of the origin of the universe. Everyone knows it's turtles all the way down.

Electronicam

Jackie Gleason's String Orchestra with Bobby Hackett trumpet - I'm Through with Love
I know Jackie Gleason as a comedian and actor, but evidently he was also a musical guy, popular enough that his tunes came to be known as 'Gleason make-out music'.

Reading a little more about Jackie, I came across the Eletronicam, which was used to record the The Honeymooners.

JACKIE GLEASONS'S "HONEYMOONERS" is filmed by Du Mont Electronicam System which incorporates an especially desined and adapted 35 mm Mitchell movie camera. Here are Jackie Gleason and Joyce Randolph, right, peering throught the camera lens at Audrey Meadows and Art Carney.

Some people went to a lot of work to put this machine together. I guess television advertising was really paying off. Here's a brief magazine story about this contraption. It's a scanned PDF, but you can enlarge it enough to make it legible. American_Cinematographer - March 1956 - Arthur_Miller Looks At Electronicam

Coincidentally, just a couple of days ago I posted Veritasium's History of Video.

Mitchell Movie Cameras have shown up here before.

Terence Cuneo

Steam Locomotive by Terence Cuneo

Terence was a prolific English painter.

Via Just A Car Guy

Wood

This Is What We Do
I buy lumber occasionally for small home repair projects. I have a chain saw that I use mostly for cutting the end off of the Christmas tree every year. There is a lumber mill near Hagg Lake, which is only about 15 miles away. I see log trucks hauling logs down the highway every now and then. But I can't recall ever seeing a logging operation in progress. Of course, you don't want to get too near this kind of thing. It's kind of like being in a gun battle in the Mideast: all kinds of dangerous shit flying through the air. You don't want to be there unless you know what you are doing and you're getting paid.

I suppose the reason you don't encounter actual in-progress logging operations is because they are very efficient. It doesn't take an army to harvest a hundred acres of trees.

Via Knuckledraggin My Life Away

The Devotion of Suspect X by Keigo Higashino

The Devotion of Suspect X by Keigo Higashino

A murder mystery, but the mystery isn't who dun it (we know that almost immediately). The mystery is which genius will outfox the other in concealing / revealing the culprits. It's not a bad book, but the way the cops keep coming back and poking into people's personal lives (on the pretext of trying to 'clear' them) is getting downright aggravating. I really want our suspects to tell them to ef off. Geez don't these detectives have anything better to do? But this is Japan, so maybe the murder rate is so low that they don't have anything better to do than go rooting around in people's lives. I'm better than halfway through, so there's a chance I will finish it.

Olympic Mills Commerce Center

107 SE Washington Street

Stopped by the architectect's office this afternoon. They had quite a view of the Fremont Bridge (above) until a new building went up next door. Now their view in that direction is blocked.

107 SE Washington St

Their office is in is an old industrial building that has been cleaned up and turned into 'creative spaces'. I suspect most of that is taken up with marketing or software outfits.

Google Streetview of the Olymic Mills Center from the Westside

I had never paid much attention to buildings on the east side of the river, but on our way out I noticed that it is distinctly visible from the west side of downtown.

P.S. Google's Streetview doesn't show the new building. And in between when I took the screenshot shown above (the last photo) and now when I went to get the link so you can see it for yourself, so to speak, the geese disappeared.

P.P.S. I also ran across a 'virtual tour' of the first floor, but once again, now that I want it I can't find it. I'm not too concerned, I mean these things are fairly common now, aren't they?