Some Things May Be True Even If Donald Trump Said Them - Jon Karl, ABC News
That got a chuckle out me.
Monday, May 31, 2021
Sunday, May 30, 2021
When Heroes Fly
When Heroes Fly - Official Trailer
Menemsha Films
It could have been a really good movie, but they packed full of 'dramatic' moments that drug it out interminably. Not that there weren't some valid issues, but they keep covering the same ground over and over again. Yes, I understand that TV series are designed to be consumed one episode a week and they need to refresh people's memories about the all the issues currently at play, but they could have just dropped some hints instead of having a full replay every time.
Four Israeli soldiers see combat in Lebanon where their leader gets killed shortly before they are sent home. Himmler and Dubi adapt to civilian life, Aviv and Benda don't. Benda becomes a hippy, traveling the world and getting hooked on drugs. He eventually ends up in Bogota where he meets a nice girl and straightens out his life. Aviv, suffering from PTSD, rejects his girlfriend, Yaeli. She goes to Colombia, gets in a car wreck in the mountains and disappears. After two weeks of searching she is declared dead. Nine years later Benda spots a photo of her in the local paper and the four guys get together to find her. Seems she was rescued after the wreck by a cult run by another Israeli (Elisha) who has discovered a powerful hallucinogen. Eventually, word of this drug got out and an evil Drug Lord [tm] comes in and forces the cult to increase production.
Our brave band finds out about the cult and Benda goes to visit one of his old contacts in the drug business. Coincidentally, two thugs from a completely different organization show up and there is a fire fight wherein a couple of people are killed. Foolish Dubi calls the police to report the incident and our four guys are all arrested.
Meanwhile back in Israel, there have been a few suicides, all connected by a strange drug and recent trips to Colombia. Tough policewoman Noga is sent to Colombia to investigate. Her minion back in Israel discovers evidence on a laptop confiscated from a guy in the Israeli embassy in Colombia that the drug lord who has taken over the cult is also responsible for the death of Noga's husband and child who were killed by a bomb attached to her car, so she is now super motivated to get this criminal.
Now we have the climax where our band of brothers and the police are independently converging on the hippy commune and the drug lab. The drug lord's minions are out patrolling the area so we get a semi-realistic firefight, but after that the whole thing falls apart into a dramatic mess. Never fear, the good guys and girls all live happily ever after. Except Himmler, who's dying of cancer. Funny how jews would give one of their friends a Nazi nickname. I expect it was because of his harsh manner.
Really, not a bad show.
Saturday, May 29, 2021
Warning! Earworm!
Axel Thesleff - Bad Karma (Official Music Video)
Axel Thesleff
YouTube has a separate music page now, which is good. I've been hoping for something to separate music from all the other stuff. I tried it yesterday and ran into a sequence to tunes I did not like. Usually if I am just playing solitaire I can let things just go on, they are only a couple of minutes long after all. But these just turned me off. They weren't rap or junk, they were well produced music. I don't know what it was, but they just didn't do it for me. But this one did.
Doc Holiday & Johnny Ringo
Or my daughter and I.
TOMBSTONE Clip - Doc Holiday meets Johnny Ringo (1993) Val Kilmer
JoBlo Movie Clips
From Quora we have a translation and interpretation:
Latin [followed by literal translation (followed by more interpretive in brackets)]Doc : In vino veritas. [In wine there is truth. (Being drunk makes me tell the truth.)]Ringo : Age quod agis. [Do what you do. (Being drunk makes you a drunkard / it’s good to stick to what you know best.)]Doc : Credat Judaeus Apella, non ego. [This is a quote from the ancient poet Horace] Let the Jew Apella believe it, not me. (Go and tell someone who cares.)Ringo : Juventus stultorum magister. [Youth is the teacher of fools. (Fools need to learn by experience / Perhaps a fool like you needs someone experienced to teach him a lesson.)]Doc : In pace requiescat! [Rest in peace. (Do what you like, it’s your funeral.)]- Owen Williams
Also from Quora we have a little background:
“Rest in peace” This phrase is normally used to address a corpse. Holliday is threatening Ringo. The background is this; both Holliday and Ringo are Southern gentlemen whose lives were ruined by the Civil War. After losing everything they moved West to start over again. A Southern gentleman was well educated, usually able to speak Latin and French. These two recognize each other’s background but this doesn’t make them friends. - John P. Scallan
Spaced Aliens
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| Beyond Skyline Movie Poster |
Riders of Skaith reviews the Science Fiction movie Beyond Skyline. It's very entertaining. The movie, not so much.
Friday, May 28, 2021
F-105 Thunderchief
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| Republic F-105 Thunderchief |
Where are the air intakes? This is a jet powered aircraft, it's not rocket powered, so how does it breath?
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| Republic F-105 Thunderchief |
Oh, there they are. Just couldn't see them in the first photo because of the angle.
Another jet fighter I am not familiar with. This one made a name for itself by flying at over Mach 2 way back in 1957. Until the advent of the F-35 it was the largest and heaviest single seat fighter in the world.
Republic made a little over 800 of these airplanes and almost half were lost in combat in the Vietnam war. Funny, but no one mentions how many of those pilots survived. I suspect it wasn't many. Over 5,000 helicopter pilots were killed in Vietnam, and those guys were Army, not Air Force.
Like the B-52s, the Thunderchief was used to bomb North Vietnam, and like the B-52s they operated out of Thailand, though at different air bases.
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| Vietnam Air War including Thud Ridge |
Links to more F-105 stuff:
Pipeline Stupidity
Pipeline Explosion
Last week we had the Colonial Pipeline cock-up and it got me to thinking. This thing is delivering two and a half million gallons of gasoline a day to the east coast of the USA. 2.5 million gallons every day, day in, day out. I did some calculations. If the pipe is three feet in diameter, the gasoline in the pipe is moving at a rate of about one foot every two seconds. Not very fast. If we cut the hypothetical diameter of the pipe to two feet, the rate doubles to one foot every second. That should work okay, shouldn't it? Well, it there wasn't any drag, it might, but there is, and drag goes up by the square of the speed, so you might be able to get by with a smaller pipe, but the amount of power required for the pumps is going to go up. So we'll stick with a three foot diameter pipe.
A three foot diameter pipe is going to hold a heck of a lot of gasoline. Every mile of pipe is going to hold almost 300,000 gallons which is going to have a mass of 850 tons. It's not moving very fast (6 inches per second, or about one-tenth walking speed), but we have a whole lot of it. At the sending end we will have a pump sucking gasoline out of a tank and at the receiving end we will be dumping the gasoline into another tank. What happens when the receiving tank gets full? We are going to divert the flow to another tank, which means opening a valve to the new tank and closing the one to the full tank.
What happens if we get the order wrong and close the valve to full tank but don't open the valve to the next tank? We've got a zillion tons of gasoline coming down the pipe. I don't think there is pipe fitting in the world that can resist that kind of pressure. The pipe will burst and the area will be flooded with gasoline and with that kind of destruction I wouldn't be surprised if something hot and sparky appeared on the scene and ignited this mess and we got an inferno.
Now maybe that the guys who designed these systems took this into account and built the valves with a mechanical interlock so this couldn't happen. But it's just as likely that put the interlock in software because computers are more reliable than mechanical devices and cheaper as well.
We even have the villain telling us that he is 'doing America a favor' by hacking all the computer systems that control our infrastructure, but did the yahoos at Colonial listen? No, they did not. Flipping morons. We're lucky Darkside decided to just shut down the pipeline and not blow up ever pumping stations and tank farm along the way.
In any case we had this warning about how industrial computer systems are susceptible to being hacked fourteen years ago and the yahoos in charge didn't listen. Typical.
P.S. I believe the pipeline in the movie was a natural gas pipeline, not gasoline, but the situation is similar, if not worse. Natural gas may not be as dense as gasoline, even when compressed to a zillion PSI, but with that much pressure everything is going to much more stressed and just as susceptible to blowing up due to improper operation as a regular liquid pipeline.
Tuesday, May 25, 2021
The Kings - This Beat Goes On/Switchin' to Glide
The Kings - This Beat Goes On/Switchin' to Glide
thekingsarehere
Not that old, only 25 years. These guys have a lot of energy, especially the keyboard guy.
Word of the Day
It makes me so mad!
“Did you watch the news last night?”
“Yeah, I watched [Tucker Carlson/Rachel Maddow].”
Except that’s not the news. That’s an editorial program where a person gets performatively angry about their opinion of selected bits of news so that you get angry about it along with them...righteously angry enough to sit through an hour’s worth of commercials.
It’s not news, it’s irritainment.
Stolen entire from View From The Porch
Monday, May 24, 2021
Arabian Nights
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| Cassim (Ali Baba's brother) 1909 - Maxfield Parrish |
Astral Codex Ten has a wonderful review of the Arabian Nights. I don't think I've ever read any of it, though I am certainly familiar with some of the stories like Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves. It was years, maybe even decades, before I figured out that "open sesame" simply meant "open sez-a-me". (Who sez open? Sez a-me, that's who. Open sez a-me!). I believed them when they said is was the name of a seed, and yes it is, but that's not the way it's being used. Makes me wonder what the original Arabic version is like. I had the same problem with Fridgidaire, the brand name of our refrigerator when I was a kid. It was centuries before I realized that it wasn't just a name, it was also a compound word: Fridgid Air.
Just in case you haven't heard of any of this: One Thousand and One Nights (also known as Arabian Nights) is a collection of Middle Eastern folk tales compiled in Arabic during the Islamic Golden Age (8th century to the 14th century). The first English-language edition dates from the early 1700's.
The small scale copy of the painting above doesn't look too great. Click on it to get the bigger version. The bigger version looks better, but I think you really need a poster size version to really appreciate it. Also, I think your eyes need to be night adapted. Tam took a picture of a car the other day. In person, in the sunlight, the car looked great. The picture? It just looks like a car. I'm thinking that while computer screens are pretty amazing and can do great things, they are still no substitute for reality.
Table of Places
I noticed that my list of labels was getting out of hand so I am attempting to make some sense of it. Places seemed like a good place to start, so I have made a spreadsheet with all of the labels related to places and organized them according to their region. I am also making a page with this table and adding it to the sidebar for quick access. I don't know if anyone else every uses labels, but I do, mostly to refresh my memory.