Wheelie Yellow

Fixing the van
Wheelie Yellow

Great goofball video, but who is Natalie Imbruglia? Google knows:

Natalie Imbruglia - Torn (Official Video)
Natalie Imbruglia

Oh, that's who. Cute girl, but kind of whinny for my taste.

Bandana

The Hidden History of Bandanas
Virginia Postrel

I bought some bandanas to wear when back when the COVID panic was in full swing and you had to wear a mask to go anywhere. They didn't work very well, they tended to slip down so I was constantly having to adjust them. Of course, it might have been that the cheap ones I bought off Amazon were some kind of synthetic fabric instead of cotton.

Army of One

ARMY OF ONE (2020) Trailer | Ellen Hollman Action Thriller
FilmIsNow Action Movies

Silly revenge film. Cute girl executes a gang of backwoods hoodlums. Starts with a cute couple on vacation wandering around out in the woods when they stumble upon the gang's hideout. The gang shoots both, killing the husband, but through some miracle of scriptwriting the wife is not dead but only stunned. She recovers and sets about killing all of mama's boys, at least six, maybe a dozen. In spite of having plenty of weapons she winds up going hand to hand with half of them. But she's an ex-US Army Ranger, so they don't stand a chance.

You know, if Butch and his cronies hadn't screwed up her execution, we would never have heard anymore about it, and there certainly wouldn't have been a movie.

That's the nice thing about civilization, when people act like they are civilized it usually means you don't have to worry about them sticking a literal knife in you. You do still to watch out for those scum-bags who put on a show of being civilized but are actually sticking a figurative knife into you, usually aiming for your purse to drain it of all its coins.

As for mama, you have to watch to the very end to find out what happens to her.

Hercules Explosives

This abandoned shed may yet help end the world
CGP Grey

Slick little video that gives us a brief history of the Hercules company and their solid rocket motor test facility in Utah.

Air Hammer versus Rivet Gun

Called to ACTION! How Women Manufactured Victory in WW2
The Doubtful Technician

Very enjoyable video about a WW2 era rivet gun and the people who used them.

Witness to the end of Civilization

IAman reports from the eastside of Portland. A neighbor pushes a lightweight, two drawer Craftsman tool chest out in the hall. He snags it and advertises it on Facebook:

June 27,2024

Amazingly it received 235 clicks & 10 messages, within a couple hours.

Guy came right over, his wife wants it as a base for a flower planter

The guy retired after 25 years driving city bus.

So I asked him about this neighborhood.

He said it is getting better. It is certainly better than the "nums" street slang for the streets 122nd through 188th (or thereabouts), that area houses poor people displaced by gentrification. More crime there.

My building super says all of Portland was so nice, back 1992. He attributes the shitty streets to the homeless (bums) drawn in by $1000 a month they get & lack of cops.

Speaking of Cops, Joe, tonight's security guard has an app for his work with a magic-cop button, pressed, guarantees a cruiser within minutes. Only used once in 2 years for some recalcitrant homeless female that refused to leave a property. Joe trained as a boxer for a couple years and has an electric zapper on his flashlight. His company is going to upgrade their defense weapons soon.

I went to mail a letter tonight, riding on the KPX.

No lobby, no mail slots, drive-up boxes removed. WTF! Angry as I pull out of the USPS parking lot I am faced with one of those littered nasty looking homeless sites, a couple of greaseballs standing around. I pull up & call out "Heh, you know why the post office removed the mail boxes?" "Yeah" the head tweaker reponds "because of people like you!" Whoa... Haha he beat me to the punch.

Greaseballs 2 IAman 0

I watched a bum rifle through our dumpster without leaving a mess, then he pulled his two wagons next door and cleaned up & picked up trash before looking for cans. Takes all kinds I suppose.

Later the same day:

Worried about my KPX250cc security, from face book I buy:

• Heavy chain & lock
• Brake rotor lock
• Cover (perimeter) alarm 

The nice fella I bought them from said the cover alarm served him well alerting 3 times to thieves. Says he lives in Vancouver because “yeah where you live is a jungle of crime”

Driving back to PDX I stopped by the scene of the crime (ebike theft) at Winco. Couple greaseballs scoping out the parking lot. I take their pictures and they leave. I go to the front desk and tell the head clerk my tale of whoa, she responds “crime is bad here, that's why I moved”, I tell her that Winco has been offering platitudes but otherwise is unresponsive, she takes my info and promises to give it to the manager. Outside I talk to the security guard and he says they typically have 10-12 thefts per day in the parking lot while they are on patrol.

I did everything corporate Winco told me to do, just to ignore me. Winco had 3 nice emails to me says their 3rd party was CSC and they would help me. They ignore me is what they do. (Using AI to write emails of empty platitudes to customer inquiries)

I ask the apartment manager if I was robbed could I see their video. “No.” Is there any circumstance I can see it. “No, cops only.”

So this video surveillance is a crock of poop…..until someone with $money$ or a gun needs to see it.  And then the video has looped or the camera lens was on, or other horse hockey.

Returning back to the Apartment, I see the building construction manager, a no nonsense sort of guy, Bill. I said I am getting spooked about the neighborhood, he conveys “good”. Talking he relates a couple anecdotes.

The construction site were losing tools and materials to greaseballs. Then a greaseball tent compound is built next to their parking lot. Cops don't do anything. Once the greaseballs were out of their tents, Bill had his boys throw the entire compound into a 20 ton trash bin and covered it with broken concrete. Greaseballs haven't been back since. Yay!

Several of his crew were mugged. A couple at knife point. A couple beat the shit out of one set of greaseballs. And then 3 teens held up a crew at gunpoint and tried to steal their tool trailer. The victims call the cops, the teens scatter. Cops leave, teens come back immediately, guns drawn. Victims call the cops bus. card number cops come back immediately and at gunpoint detain the teens and haul them off.

Then there was that evening, cops serving a warrant across the street, the respondent came out guns blazing, the cops shot him dead.

Bill’s solution? Move to a small town in idaho. “This is not going to get any better here.”

Once the construction security leaves, there will be a feeding frenzy of the greaseballs on every aspect of the apartment securities weak points.

BTW don't feed the street people. Bleeding hearts here drop boxes of food or feed them out of the car trunk. After they leave, piles of trash is thrown to the wind.

I'm called to the lobby, Fedex has a delivery for me and the property managers are not allowed to accept packages. The little black gap toothed driver responds to my question “how is the neighborhood here?” “not as bad as east of 122nd, there they follow my truck around waiting for an opening.”

I cannot depend on the cops, stores, nor my apartment management. My neighbors look helpless.

Life has gotten very interesting, like how war is interesting. 

 My Bike is “secure”. I am less enthusiastic about tracking down greaseballs who thieve from me. I’ll need to find another use for my Appletags.

Maybe a quick draw handgun is in my future. I may just stay castled up here, only leave by Tundra for destinations deemed safe.

PS As I finished this I called my cousin, while talking I spy out the window a greaseball walking to a neighboring dumpster, thinking the worst that he will dump trash everywhere, just looking for bottles/cans…….but wait he holds up in a corner of the lot , a buddy comes over they exchange packets, light up something in foil, puffs of smoke, the bottle boy doubles overs for a few minutes, a “fentanyl pose” me thinks, while his buddy walks in circles. After 5 minutes the bottle boy straightens up, then leaves while leaving trash behind him. I yell “Pickup your trash” he does so without complaint. His buddy tries to backtalk, I ask him to just wait there, I have somebody he wants to meet. He leaves. It's funny they cannot see me, just a big Borg like structure talking to them.

Related news:

In major decision, Supreme Court allows cities to ban homeless camps

Counting in Base 60

Stolen entire from Essays in Idleness by David Warren

The joy of sexagesimals

For a person who loathes statistics, and in particular social (including financial) statistics, one of my more eccentric interests is in weights and measures. This has relaxed over the years of my maturity: at age sixteen it was an incurable obsession. For, as with others who have obsessions (baseball statistics; alcohol), I have never entirely escaped from it, and even the slightest indulgence will lead me back into slavery, as it were.

An example occurred yesterday, while consulting an older edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. (The eleventh, 1911 — always more reliable than the Wicked Paedia.) As everyone should know, the roundness of the world was known even to ancient man, especially the seafarers. The philosophers in Alexandria-by-Egypt even measured its circumference. They calculated by comparing the sun shadows at different locations. Mediaeval man of course inherited this information through Ptolemy; only in XIXth-century America was it lost (by Washington Irving, father of the Flat Earth).

Now, put this together with our archaeological record of Egyptian rulers. Not, their heads-of-state, but rather the marked strips of wood or metal used (e.g.) in schools. We have found plenty of rulers among the ruins, and the older (pre-Muslim and even pre-Christian) show that the Egyptian “cubit” was slightly over 20 British inches. So were the cubits in ancient Sumer, and elsewhere, apparently. Trade, after all, has been global for quite a few millennia. The Sumerians taught the Babylonians, who taught the Egyptians, and everyone else, the Joy of Sexagesimals.

Sexagesimals are written (invisibly) all over our planet, in for instance the lines of latitude and longitude. Indeed, the earth’s known circumference is precisely 21,160 nautical miles, which is sixty times 360 degrees. Only clowns, to my mind, would use the viciously decimalical metric system (invented in Revolutionary France) when we had a universal system of mensuration at the ready, all along. This was, and is, the nautical mile, its multiples and parts — in Babylonian, sexagesimal terms — not yet retired from shipping and aviation.

My realization yesterday is that the cubit is not merely the approximate distance from a man’s fingertip to his elbow, as the dictionaries insist. This ancient cubit is also, nearly precisely, the 60th part, of the 60th part, of the nautical mile. Break it down further into (hexidecimal) sixteenths — as the classical Greeks, classical Chinese, and our modern computer nerds would do — and we have the “digit” or “dactyl” units to replace the “inches” or (God help us) “centimetres” on the rulers of our time.

William Blake: “Bring out number, weight & measure in a year of dearth.”

Interest Rates

Interest Rates

Stopped by CarMax the other day to see what they would give me for my truck. They needed half an hour to inspect it and come up with an estimate, so IAman and I wandered around their lot just to see what the automotive market looks like. I'm see this window sticker and notice the little box (above) that shows the range of interest rates that are out there. They range from 9% to 23%. 9% sounds marginal with the way inflation is running, but maybe the lenders have a connection to the supply of funny money coming out of Washington D. C. and they don't care if they are making a real profit or not.

Anyway, they offered me $13,000 for my truck that I bought for $25K two and a half years ago. I think I'm going to try and sell it myself, it's not like I'm in a hurry or anything.

A Tour of the Most Expensive Screw in the WORLD

A Tour of the Most Expensive Screw in the WORLD
The Doubtful Technician

Watching this I was reminded of IAman's old landlord who worked for a shop that made all kinds of implant pieces. Sounds like it ought to be a pretty good job. He hated it. Of course, it might not have had anything to do with the work, it may have been the people. You just never know how anyone will react to a given situation.

Thursday Lunch

US26 Eastbound inside Vista Ridge Tunnel
Notice the center lane is relatively clear

I drove into Portland today for lunch. It takes about half an hour to get there, 20 minutes of highway cruising and ten minutes of crawling across the parking lot that is downtown Portland. The freeway is smooth sailing from Hillsboro until we get to the top of the West Hills at Sylvan and then everything comes to a stop for a moment before we begin crawling down the hill into downtown. Highway 26 at this point is three lanes. The leftmost lane is destined for I-405 Northbound and the right lane is headed for I-405 South. These two lanes are packed and they will crawl all the way down the hill. The center lane goes into downtown proper and it would flow smoothly except, one, it's scary flying by all these cars that are just sitting there knowing that any one of them could, at any time, get fed up with crawling and pull into the center lane, and two, there are always a couple of yahoos who think they can cheat and wait until the last minute to cut into line. Of course, they may not always be yahoos, this might be their first time on this road and aren't aware of the protocol. Usually there is a point to these stories, but if there is one I've forgotten it, or maybe I just wanted to share a bit my life.

Leaky Roof Gastro Pub

We had lunch at the Leaky Roof Gastro Pub, nice quiet corner bar with free on-street parking. Nothing fancy, cheeseburgers and fries, though the standard cheeseburger comes with two beefy patties.

Porsche Rally Car - Note the winch on the front

Across the street we saw this bright yellow race car so after lunch we wandered over to take a look. Looks very serious with big mud / snow tires. 

Grand Prix Motors

It was parked in front of Grand Prix Motors. We went in and looked around, there were acres of painted and polished sheet metal on maybe two dozen of the shiniest cars in the world. It was just mind boggling. 

Ford Pickup with Tremor Package

Looking on their website they seem to specialize in used Porsches, but what's this? They have a Ford? What kind of Ford? A pickup? Oh, it's got the Tremor Package, whatever that it is. I'm afraid to ask.

Calculating Empires - A Genealogy of Technology and Power Since 1500

Snapshot of Calculating Empires

Calculating Empires - A Genealogy of Technology and Power Since 1500 is a ginormous diagram of science and technology. The screen shot is like 0.3% of the whole image.

I'm panning over this drawing and most of it is drawings of devices along with descriptions, but then I come across this section with a whole bunch of vertical lines and no pictures, so I investigate and find these little tidbits:

• In 1925, when the British Empire was at its peak, they controlled 24% of the land on Earth.
• In 1960, when the USSR was at its peak, they controlled 17% of the land on Earth.

Via Indiana Thomas

Sheep Herding

I've probably been down this rathole before, but I think I've got a new twist on it. Or it maybe it's an old twist and I've just forgotten about it. 

Propaganda is used to herd the sheep through the right door when they go to the poles. Most people are sheep, they have actual lives they are living, they aren't wasting their time on idle keyboard wars about shit they have no control over. Okay, I try to break free daily but the lure of thrill of a new bit of knowledge keeps sucking me back in.

The Clash playing Should I Stay or Should I Go?

Influencing a vast group of people who have almost no real interest in what you are saying is a problem well understood by Madison Avenue. The zillions spent on advertising result in messages being blared on the radio, television, smartphones, radio and social media. If you want to herd the sheep, you need an enormous media campaign to get the message out over as many channels as possible.

Ray Orbison singing Pretty Woman

One characteristic of people is their degree of socialization, that is, how strong is their desire to conform, and how much do they value their own thoughts? Reminds me of the old joke about the first robin of spring. The first robin shows up too early and it snows. He is sitting in the barnyard freezing his tuchus off. A cow wanders by and takes a dump right on top of the robin. The manure thaws out the robin. He starts feeling so good he pops his head up out the cow pie and starts singing. The cat (all barnyards have cats) hears the robin, jumps on him and bites his little head off. The moral of the story is that if you warm and comfy in a pile of shit, keep your mouth closed.

Nancy Sinatra singing These Boots are Made for Walking

Some people are seduced by logical thinking. We have always studied the ancient Greeks, the Bible, the law and now we even study math, logic and engineering. But not all of us, and even among those who do, not all would be willing to put their heretical thoughts up against society.

I want to blame the Republicans for allowing the Democrats to gain control of all the big media, but then I remember that while we have two different names for politicians they are really all members of the same party, the uniparty, the party of making fortunes by any means what-so-ever.

Reef Break by The Atlantics

Make no mistake, big business has done some great things for the people in this country. The problem is we are systematically pushing the fringe farther from the center. You get rejected enough and some people will just give up. Why bother trying if nothing you have tried has ever worked? Much of this is that we outsourced manufacturing to east Asia, notably China. Has all that manufacturing benefited the Chinese sheep? One would hope that some good came out of the ritual suicide of our manufacturing industry.

For a Few Dollars More (Main Title) by Solist de Orchestre del Cinema Italiano

At this point I hope the campaigns of perversion have overextended themselves and the pendulum might be beginning to swing back, maybe even to old Victorian standards. There was a reason those muthers were so strait laced - no one wanted to hear about your perversions, or your lack of perversion. You start talking about that shit and someone, no matter what you are talking about, will take offense and may even be repulsed by it. Do what you like in private but when you are out in public, keep your clothes on and your mouth shut.

I was listening to music while I wrote this so each time I finished a paragraph I wrote down the name of the tune that was currently playing. Probably took two or three songs to write each section, so what we have here is just a random sample.

Dream

I am walking across town and I come to a park or a college campus, lots of green grass not too many buildings. It looks like it occupies an entire city block. I am at one corner and I want to get to the opposite corner. I could walk down either of the streets but they do not appeal, lack of sidewalks maybe, so I decide to go cross country. This works for maybe fifty yards but then I am confronted with a large stream or a small river. It's about 20 feet wide and looks to be maybe five feet deep. Not crossing that without getting wet, or a bridge, but look! there is a building that crosses the stream. I go inside and it seems to be some kind of water park. Several people lounging around a wading pool that occupies the center. There are several objects in the water, so it might be possible to use them as stepping stones and get to the other side. The first couple of steps are easy, but now we have a guy sitting in a leather recliner watching TV. Yes, the TV is sitting on a table sitting in the water as well. I go to step on the top back of the chair and he tells me not to rock the chair. I say something to the effect that I'll only be a moment, step from the top to an arm of the chair and then off to a small table. Now I have to make big leap to a pile of colorful concrete and ceramic blocks. It's a big leap, but it's a dream, so I make it. I have crossed the water, but now I am confronted with the far wall. It is solid concrete up to about head high. On top of the concrete wall is floor that protrudes over the wall by a foot or two. Sitting on the edge of the floor is a steel framed wall filled with industrial safety glass. About eight to ten feet to my left are a couple of doors in this glass wall. They open into the water park and there is no handle on this side. I see a couple on the other side of doors. I gesture for them to open the door and they push it open a little bit, enough to see that it isn't locked. Now all I have to do is get there. There appears to be some grill work attached to the concrete wall underneath the door, but it only goes about half way up. It should be possible to get to the grill work, but then it's going to be a near impossible stretch to reach the door and it would depend on someone opening the door and then holding it open so it doesn't close on my fingers. Then I woke up.

Ghostwriter - RJD2

Ghostwriter
RJD2

The horns, they blowin' that sound . . .

Technicolor

The Biggest Lie in Hollywood | Technicolor
NationSquid

Crazy movie making technology. There is an ad for Bespoke Post that starts at the three minute mark and runs until 5:25.

He's right about the cameras.

Technicolor Motion Picture Camera

Same camera mounted on a dolly in sound proof box

Another view of the camera showing the very large film magazines

P. S. For another monster movie camera see Jackie Gleanson's Electronicam

Hot Water Pot

Peach Street Electric Kettle

I bought this hot pot right around a year ago for $20. We used the heck out of it for a year and then one day last week it just quit working. Not bad for $20. Still, I thought I would take a look and see if it could be fixed. It did quit working shortly after I got it, but there was a screw loose in the base, I tightened it up and it worked fine, until last week.

Anyway, I attempt to open it up, but it doesn't want to cooperate. I end up having to rip the handle off in order to expose the heating element. I don't see anything wrong, other than the rat trap that shuts it off won't stay set. That's okay, it has served us well, and it was only $20.

But I'm looking at the pile of parts and I realize there must be over a hundred individual pieces that go into this thing, which leads me to wonder how in the world could somebody make this thing and make a profit doing so? Individually they are $20 from Amazon which means the factory in China can't be getting more than $10. They must have some finely tuned assembly lines along with workers who are getting paid a quarter for every pot they assemble. Probably takes them two minutes, so they might be making $50 a day, which might be good wages in China, I dunno.

P. S. Chinese assembly line workers make about $3.85 an hour (CNY 28), so working 13 hour days they could make $50 a day, and if the company pays overtime then 11 hours would be enough.

Killdozer Returns

An Israeli military vehicle waits as armoured bulldozers clear path in Gaza (Handout/Reuters)

From a story on Aljazeera about some idiots in Norway.

Misirlou

I was watching some YouTube Shorts and this video pops up and the guys are playing Pump It by the Black Eyed Peas and I'm thinking - wait a minute - I know that tune and it's not Pump It. I heard it in a Quentin Tarantino film, but which one? Found a couple of playlists of tunes from his movies and scanning down the list I see Miserlou. Bang, that's it, so here we are. Here's the one Quentin used in Pulp Fiction:


Pulp Fiction • Misirlou • Dick Dale
HD Film Tributes

I put up another post about this tune a while back.

Assange

Stolen entire from Aljazeera, mouthpiece of Qatar Islamists.

Julian Assange enroute from London to Australia

Iraq to NSA spying: The biggest revelations by Julian Assange’s WikiLeaks

WikiLeaks unearthed documents ranging from conflicts within the US Democrats to toxic waste dumping in West Africa. 

By Al Jazeera Staff 25 June 2024

On Monday, Julian Assange, founder of WikiLeaks, was released from prison after fighting a legal battle spanning more than 14 years.

In 2006, Assange launched the whistleblower website WikiLeaks, a platform that allows users to anonymously submit secret, classified documents and videos. The most recent publication by the platform was in 2021.

The New York-based Nation magazine reported in January 2024 that Assange said WikiLeaks was no longer able to publish documents since potential whistleblowers were thwarted following his imprisonment, United States government surveillance and funding cuts.

During the years it functioned, the whistleblower platform published classified documents that had been never seen before – embarrassing governments, causing diplomatic standoffs and forcing policy changes.

Here is a look at 10 such leaks by the platform:

Report about toxic waste in the Ivory Coast

In 2009, WikiLeaks released the Minton Report that exposed how an internal report commissioned by Singapore-headquartered multinational company Trafigura concluded that its dumping of 540,000 litres of toxic waste, including harmful chemicals, in the Ivory Coast potentially led to “burns to the skin, eyes and lungs, vomiting, diarrhoea, loss of consciousness and death”.

The United Nations reported that 108,000 people were affected by this dumping of waste.

Cablegate

In 2010, WikiLeaks started building out its Public Library of US Diplomacy (PLUSD), which is a growing collection of 3,326,538 US diplomatic cables between American diplomats posted to 274 consulates and embassies from 1966 to 2010, and their colleagues and bosses, including back home at the State Department.

In the first round of these leaks, 250,000 cables were released to the public – arguably the single largest such dump of confidential documents ever released.

The leaks included embarrassing details of how US diplomats perceived some of their foreign counterparts and nuggets of conversations where foreign officials, including many in high positions today, expressed frustrations with their own governments.

Afghanistan war files

In October 2010, the whistleblower site released 90,000 classified documents on the US war in Afghanistan.

The United States launched the Afghanistan war in 2001, following the September 11 attacks that year, finally withdrawing its forces from the country in 2021.

The documents painted a picture of the war – and the US struggle against the Taliban – that was very different from the public posture of confidence adopted by Washington.

Iraq war files

Also in October 2010, WikiLeaks made public almost 400,000 secret US files on the Iraq war.

In 2003, the US government under President George W Bush invaded Iraq.

The documents, from 2004 to 2009, showed that the civilian deaths in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars were much higher than the numbers being reported. The leaks represented the largest security breaches of their kind in US military history.

Collateral murder – Iraq helicopter video

Among the most prominent of WikiLeaks revelations, in April 2010, was the release of video footage showing a US Apache helicopter attack which killed a dozen unarmed people, including two Reuters journalists, Namir Noor Eldeen and Saeed Chmagh, in the Iraqi capital, Baghdad.

The video, filmed from the chopper’s cockpit shows a US missile strike and shooting on a square in a Baghdad neighbourhood in July 2007, according to WikiLeaks.

The Guantanamo files

In April 2011, WikiLeaks released secret documents spanning thousands of pages to select US and European media outlets.

These documents unearthed how the Geneva Conventions were being violated routinely in the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba. The documents, dating from 2002 to 2008 showed the abuse of 800 prisoners, some of them as young as 14.

At least 150 of these prisoners were found to be innocent Afghans or Pakistanis who were rounded up as part of frantic intelligence gathering and then imprisoned for years, in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks and the so-called “war on terror”.

The Syria files

In July 2012, WikiLeaks began making public two million emails from 680 Syrian political figures and ministries working with the Bashar al-Assad regime between August 2006 to March 2012.

The emails unearthed the involvement of European companies in the surveillance and crackdown on Syrian civilians. One such company was Italian-government-owned Selex, which continued to expand its contract with the Syrian police, despite sanctions.

The emails also exposed how PR company Brown Lloyd James (BLJ) was paid to engineer a now-deleted Vogue article about al-Assad’s wife Asma, according to WikiLeaks.

NSA spying

In 2015, the whistleblower website released details of illegal intercepts from the US electronic spy organisation, National Security Agency (NSA).

In a series of publications released from 2015 to 2017, WikiLeaks said the US, using the NSA, was also routinely spying on foreign officials from Japan, the European Union, Israel, Germany and Brazil.

Additionally, the whistleblower said the NSA intercepted communications between former United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

WikiLeaks said that the NSA was not only spying on international politicians but also civilians. In 2017, it tweeted that the NSA could hack Pakistan’s mobile networks.

Sony Pictures hack

In 2015, WikiLeaks released at least 170,000 emails and more than 20,000 documents from a 2014 cyberattack on Sony Pictures Entertainment.

The leak was around the same time Sony was set to release the film about a fictional American plot to kill North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

The emails also revealed that female celebrities such as Amy Adams and Jennifer Lawrence were paid less than their male counterparts in the 2013 crime comedy film American Hustle.

US Democratic Party emails leaked

In 2016, WikiLeaks exposed 19,252 emails and 8,034 attachments from the US Democratic Party national leadership.

The emails exposed that even though the Democratic National Committee (DNC), the party’s principal committee, pledged impartiality in the 2016 presidential race, it appeared to act against Bernie Sanders in favour of Hillary Clinton.

The leaks resulted in the resignations of five top DNC officials including the chair, CFO, CEO, communications director and finance director. Clinton accused WikiLeaks and Assange of colluding with Russia to raise questions about the credibility of the US election process. She lost the 2016 presidential race to Donald Trump.

I am glad Julian was released. I always thought the charges were bullshit and I still think so. The US Federal Government seems to be in the hands of idiotic maniacs, or maybe it's maniacal idiots. Somebody needs to bring the smack down on those useless fools.

Cool Water

How small does water get?
The Slow Mo Guys

Get a Move On

Get a Move On
Mr Scruff

This tune just came over the ether and I said Man! haven't heard that tune in a long time. Why has it been so long? Was it part of some previous musical environment that somehow didn't manage to follow me around? I mean it was all digital, I have, I dunno, maybe a hundred CD's but I don't think I have played a single one in years. Well, okay, there was a time when I was playing the same tune over and over again while I was doing a few minutes of exercise, probably going up and down the stairs. But I was just playing whatever was already loaded, which I believe was an album by America, possibly Ventura Highway. 

1967 Buick LeSabre dashboard

At some point I went over to digital. I had those cheap computer speakers which were probably not very good, but for somebody raised on single 6 x 9 speakers mounted under the steel dashboard and playing through a steel grill, they were just fine, as long you didn't need a lot of volume.

Not too long ago I splurged on a Blue Tooth speaker and it does very well for me. One of these days I might look for something better, though how can you tell until you hear it? I went looking for loud speakers once when I lived in Austin. There was a store not too far from me that had a large selection of loudspeakers, all hooked up, in a separate room, for you to listen to as you desired. Acoustic suspension speakers were all the rage then, but they all sounded a little dull, not crisp and clear like the giant V2 speakers that didn't use acoustic suspension. They wanted $600 back then which was not undoable, but it was a big chunk of change so I did not buy them.

Just went looking for the post about the Blue Tooth speaker and I was surprised how many posts I have made about speakers. I ain't even an audiophile.

Noisemakers

Low riders cruise in California (Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)

California has surrendered its streets to assholes
Too much tolerance is destroying the peace
by Matthew Crawford

Fine story about how the old lady syndrome is ruining Western Civilization.

Wagner PMC (Private Military Company)

Servicemen of Russia's private military company Wagner Group ride a tank along a street in Rostov-on-Don, Russia. © Sputnik / Sergey Pivovarov

On the anniversary of the Wagner PMC mutiny, RT has a brief history of the company and its leader. It's a very good story.

The Prigozhin paradox: What was Russia’s Wagner PMC and how did its June 23 mutiny happen?

Dragons

How The 'Game Of Thrones' Dragons Were Designed | Movies Insider
Insider

I am very much enjoying the dragons on House of the Dragon, so today we just have some dragon stuff.

WINNING THE DRAGON by Sarah A. Hoyt is a fine little story.

And this comic:

Dragon Breath

Lugnuts

Missing Bolt

IAman's motorcycle has been getting some hard use.

100 YEARS U.S. MILITARY HANDGUNS

100 YEARS U.S. MILITARY HANDGUNS

IAman snapped this photo at a historical gun collectors exhibition at the National Guard Armory near PDX. There's a picture of another batch of Colt revolvers in this post.

More Dirty Commies

Some crazy Chinese nationalists at the piano today insisting on their image rights.

Pretty great piece on what's wrong with the world:

The Left can’t understand why normal people are angry…

 

Commies

Oil derricks in the Baku oil field in Azerbaijan in 1912. ETH-Bibliothek Zürich

Reading The Madonna of the Sleeping Cars by Maurice DeKobra. It's 1927 and our man, Prince Séliman, has gone to meet with the Soviet leader in Berlin, one Leonid Vladimirovitch Varichkine, in an attempt to rescue Lady Diana's fortune in the form of 15,000 acres of oil fields from the Bosheviks. These two are in conversation and Varichkine lets loose with this:

"Really and truly, my friend, you are naive. Living is high since the War - but human life is cheap. When 20 million men have been the victims of inimical capitalists, what difference does it make if a few thousand Russians are incarcerated for the sake of severe principles? When hatred, violence, envy, an abject egotism have circulated at their own free will among civilized people, who has any right to reproach us for not having conducted our Revolution with a shepherd's staff in our hand and Pan's pipes to our lips? Believe me the world is always kind to successful tyrants and moral mud is only thrown at the heads of political failures. Take, for example, your dear Kerensky, the White Hope of the Western Liberals - he missed his mark, and you all reproached him bitterly for having been hypersensitive. All he would have had to do would have been to hang every one of us - Lenin and his following. With about 50 pretty little executions without trial, he might have been able to smash the egg of Communism under his heel; the constituency would then not have been overthrown by the sailor Jelesniakof, and you would have looked up to Kerensky as the greatest Statesman in the world. Revolutions are not made with mittens. A social Revolution conducted along legal lines is a toy constructed for the use of dyspeptic socialists nourished on noodles and black bread."

Add in the political infighting, treachery and murder going on in House of the Dragon and it is no wonder I am of a cynical frame of mind. 

Notes:

• Kerensky has a page in Wikipedia.
• Jelesniakof is mentioned in the book Lenin by Mark Aleksandrovich Aldanov.
• Nikolay Krestinsky was the Soviet Ambassador to Germany from 1923 to 1930.
• Prince Séliman and Leonid Vladimirovitch Varichkine both seem to be entirely fictitious.

The oil fields in question are near Tbilisi, Georgia:

Georgia, Armenia & Azerbaijan between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea

P. S. Totally unrelated to this post, but I just came across a story about a priest murdered in Derbent which is on the above map, in Russia, on the Caspian Sea just above the border with Azerbaijan.

The Madonna of the Sleeping Cars

Edvard Grieg - Morning Mood (Au Matin)
Hawaii ASMR Nature Relaxation

I've started reading The Madonna of the Sleeping Cars by Maurice Dekobra. I picked up on it a year ago when I was reading The Foreign Correspontant by Alan Furst and I just now got a copy.

Early on in the book Lady Diana is performing a dance for a tubercular society fundraiser and the orchestra is playing this tune. I had never heard of it, so I thought to give it a listen and, oh, I recognize it now. If I recall correctly it often accompanies scenes of springtime in old Disney movies.

The book is a hoot. The language is extravagant, possibly even ridiculous. The characters occupy the upper reaches of society where the gossip is most vicious and possibly dangerous.

From Google Books:

One of the biggest bestsellers of all time, and one of the first and most influential spy novels of the twentieth century, is back in print for the first time since 1948

Alan Furst fans will note that train passengers in his bestselling thrillers are often observed reading The Madonna of the Sleeping Cars. It’s a smart detail: First published in 1927, the book was one of the twentieth century’s first massive bestsellers, selling over 15 million copies worldwide.

It’s the story of two tremendously charming characters who embark on a glamorous adventure on the Orient Express—and find themselves on a thrilling ride across Europe and into the just-barely unveiled territories of psychoanalysis and revolutionary socialism.

Gerard Seliman—technically, a Prince—is so discouraged by the demise of his marriage that he flees to London to become the personal assistant of a glamorous member of the British peerage, Lady Diana Wyndham. But he soon finds himself involved in a wild scheme by Lady Diana to save herself from looming financial ruin while simultaneously fending off rich lotharios. At the center of it all: a plan to rescue her rights to a Russian oil field now under the control of revolutionaries who don’t like capitalists.

The book that set the standard for intellectual thrillers of political and social intrigue, The Madonna of the Sleeping Cars, with its jetsetting and witty protagonists, is still as fresh a page-turner as ever—and as fun.

B-25 & B-26

North American TB-25 Mitchell

This image showed up in last week's FlightAware newsletter.

B-26 Jezabelle

This one showed up in yesterday's Friday Femme Fatale Farrago (NSFW). There was no identification so I asked Google and it turned up this image of the same airplane:

Martin B-26 Marauder Jezabelle bomber crew, their mascot "Salvo" and visitors
31 August 1943

The two airplanes were very similar - medium range twin engine bombers. The B-25 had a slightly higher top speed than the B-26 (230 MPH versus 215) and a slightly longer range (1350 miles versus 1150).

Furiosa

FURIOSA : A MAD MAX SAGA | OFFICIAL TRAILER #1
Warner Bros. Pictures

The original Mad Max came out in, what? 1910? No, silly, it wasn't that long ago, it was 1979, which, now that you mention it, is kind of a long time ago. I watched the first three back when they came out and I watched the first half of #4, Fury Road, last week to get ready for Furiosa. We saw it at the OMSI Empirical theater. Tickets for the two of us were $15 total, pretty good deal for theater tickets.

How was it? Well, take Mad Max and turn it up to eleven. Wasn't Mad Max already turned up to eleven? Isn't that what made it so great? Okay, but it's been 40 odd years and someone has been letting their imagination run wild. Let's call it turned up to eleven squared.

In this fantasy wasteland we have three armed camps: Gas Town, Bullet Town and The Citadel. All three are ruled by strong men who are supported by legions of followers. There are also peasants living in caves and underground some of whom might be cannibals.

I was going to speculate on how the economy of the wasteland might work, but I'm going to leave that to somebody else.

Girl From the North Country - Musical

Show Clips: GIRL FROM THE NORTH COUNTRY
Broadwaycom

Went to see Girl From the North Country at Keller Auditorium last night. My wife was ready to leave at the intermission so we did. I don't quite understand why. Most of these shows, I'm ready to leave after five minutes, but I stick it out because. There have been a couple of shows that I enjoyed but they are the exception. The sound might be part of the problem. I thought the sound at several shows was downright awful, it sounded like the speakers were being overdriven, somebody was asking them to deliver more volume than they could and they end up sounding like crap. That was not the case with this show, the sound was pretty clear and I could hear the dialog pretty well. I could even make out some of the words in the songs.

Supposedly all the songs were Bob Dylan tunes, though they didn't sound anything like Bob Dylan. The story was kind of a downer. We've got one old white man trying to hold things together for his family but he's not getting a lot of help. We've got a couple of kinds of crazy, one unmarried, pregnant, teenage black girl, and a couple-three flavors of flim-flam men. The show is set in November in Duluth Minnesota in the midst of the Great Depression. I wouldn't be surprised if everyone froze to death in the second half of the show. Maybe my wife saw what was coming and didn't want to be around when it happened.

Giant Snake Geography

When You Think Tectonic Plates are Giant Snakes
SciManDan

I don't care what Science Man Dan says, it looks like a giant dead snake to me. All you perverts who think it looks like something else, just be quiet.

Gap between South America and Antarctica made by Giant Snake

The gap between South America and Antarctica is like 500 miles. Since snakes usually have a circular cross section, and since the ocean is only a couple of miles deep, if this was a snake then we are only seeing the very top of it and the bulk of it would be thoroughly embedded in the crust of the Earth. Actually, I think it looks like a giant mud flow, but that would imply an uphill source for the mud and there just isn't any. So maybe Science Man Dan is right after all.

Pleasure in a toothache

Stolen entire from Essays in Idleness

Pleasure in a toothache by David Warren

As there are people who take pleasure in murder, there are those who will find pleasure in toothache. I did not see this at first, although I should have, for you know, I have read Dostoevsky right through (though only in the fine English translation of Mrs Edward Garnett). But happening myself upon a most exquisite, indeed excruciating, toothache, developing at the back of my lower left jaw, I turned immediately to Dostoevsky’s “Notes from Underground.”

My strategy with toothache has long been more material than contemplative. After having ignored it for as long as possible, I would counter-attack with the salt-water swish, with almond extract, or topical clove oil, or even an aspirin, inserted against the labial frenulum. This had always worked before, letting me do things like sleep. But this time I had a “wisdom toothache,” which would not be confined, for it had invaded not only the mandible but the maxillary sinus, and was enhancing the dizziness from my stroke. After a few days of escalation, I decided that something had to be done; for it is difficult to carry on with other human activities when distracted by such a toothache.

Of course, this is Canada, and as I did not have a “dental plan” with any employer, or the equivalent bureaucratic papers, I had to try my luck with the dentists of the neighbourhood, and find service à la carte. I spent a morning in this useless wander, during which I found each of the dentists had been privately isolated in a “family practice,” and couldn’t just see someone with a toothache, even if he had cash. But everywhere there is an exception, and I found him in the afternoon.

Thanks to modernity, in the form of 500mg amoxicillin capsules and 600mg tablets of ibuprofen — which I could have ordered for myself, but only if I’d first obtained a medical degree — I am now beginning to relax.

The pleasure in a toothache is, of course, the pleasure of moaning, when you can command an audience to endure you. To the nasty person, lacking respect for himself, so that he will make a spectacle of his degradation, it can be a voluptuous pleasure. But whereas the pleasure in a murder does not require an audience, the malignant pleasure of moaning by day and by night is pointless when it is performed solo.

I was thus unlucky, I could get no pleasure from my toothache.

That is why the eco-warriors and Hamasniks (&c) cannot allow themselves to be left alone. Not only have they not the capacity for the contemplative life, but they need someone who can be forced to listen to their despicable moaning.

Spindle

Desmos Spindle Graph

The red arc describes the upper side of the hull, the blue follows the lower side. The straight green, red and black straight lines are radii for the upper arc. The length of the spindle is 70 meters and the diameter at the center is 8 meters.

I was reading about the Nautilus submarine from Jules Verne's 20,000 leagues under the sea. Seems the submarine in the novel was shaped like a spindle, not at all like the one in the movie. My question is: how do you compute the volume of a spindle? There might be a formula out there somewhere, but I have not found it. So I thought I would try calculating it on my own. Last week I made up a spreadsheet to sum the volume of sequential slices.

I used the Pythagorean formula to generate a formula to compute the radius of the hull from the distance from the bow. That seemed to work fine. The next day I tried to check my work, but being short on sleep my head was full of cotton and I could not make sense of it. Now I think I understand what it's like for people who have a hard time with math. It was like part of my brain was not working. Anyway, I'm doing better today so I took another look at it.

I decided the spread sheet was too cumbersome, so I wrote a little computer program to compute the volume by cutting the spindle into slices, computing the volume of each slice and then adding them all together. The volume is in cubic meters. Ten slices gets you to the nearest meter and a thousand slices will get you to the nearest cubic centimeter. Beyond that any differences that show up might be due to the limits of double precision arithmetic.

  CPU ticks      Slices        Volume
           4             1  3,518.583,772
           4            10  1,883.743,261
          17           100  1,883.565,830
         133         1,000  1,883.565,812
       1,339        10,000  1,883.565,812
      12,929       100,000  1,883.565,812
     131,847     1,000,000  1,883.565,812
   1,110,081    10,000,000  1,883.565,813

  10,897,789   100,000,000  1,883.565,810

The volume is in cubic meters. At one hundred slices we already have the volume to the nearest liter (one one-thousandth of a cubic meter). At one thousand slices we have the volume to down to one cubic centimeter (one milliliter). At ten million slices the last digit starts changing. I suspect we have reached the limit of what can be done with floating point math without taking a closer look at the equations. I'm not going to do that. The nearest cc is close enough for me.

Comma-fication

Big numbers without commas are hard to read, so I spent most of a day working out how to automatically place commas in the output. It made the program four times as long. In some versions of C you can use an apostrophe to tell printf to insert commas, but it wasn't available with the online compiler I used, so I wrote my own routines. And because I wasn't sure if it was working correctly, I wrote another one to verify the first.

I also added some rudimentary command line parsing so you can change the length, beam and number of slices without having to modify the code.

Blog post: Jules Verne - Nautilus

Desmos Calculator Graph

C program source code on github

OnlineGDB IDE (Interactive Development Environment) C compiler

The length of the Nautilus is given as 70 meters and the beam is 8 meters.

Drone Wars

Vortex Cannon vs Drone
Mark Rober

This video has three parts:

1.  0:00 Survey of current serious antidrone techniques
2.  6:20 Advertisement for Hack Pack, robot kits by mail
3. 11:30 Mark and his friends go out to the field to test their own anti-drone devices.

I think I know what I want for my birthday.

Budos Rising

Budos Band - Budos Rising Live in Austin
naggerbear

Recorded at the Mohawk in Austin, Texas. Usually I will listen to a tune several times before I post it, but this one hit me so hard I said it's going up now.

Mohawk in Austin, Texas

It looks like a dive, which means the music has got to be good. Tickets are cheap, too.

Dragons

Some of the biggest—and most iconic—flying animals in all of history. And non-history. From
How Dragons Fly: When Biology Trumps Physics - Naturalist

House of the Dragon got me wondering about whether you could actually have a dragon. What would it take? I'm going to assume they are carnivorous being as they've got a reputation for eating people and large animals. You also get more energy from eating meat than from eating grass, and if you are going to be flying you are going to need a lot of energy. Like other large predators, they probably spend a lot of time lazing around and sleeping and only go hunting when they are hungry. Given their large size, they probably wouldn't have any difficulty finding something to eat, so they would not need to be airborne for long. Pop up in the air, take a quick look around, spy a fat cow, swoop down and chomp it up, pop back up into the air and head back to the cave for a week long nap.

If you have a tame dragon, as long as you gave it a cow every week or so, it would probably be very happy just hanging out in its cave, dreaming ferocious dragon dreams. You need it to go on a mission, you give it a couple of pounds of amphetamines and a barrel of sugar water or alcohol and he'd probably  be good for an hour. If you can't complete your mission in an hour with a dragon you probably need to rethink your strategy. You can probably only ask them to fly a mission maybe once a week, and for a large, old dragon, maybe only once a month.

As for the fire breathing, digestion produces methane, so dragons might have a special bladder where they can store methane. All you need is to belch out that methane and a little spark and you've got a natural flame thrower. Striking a couple of rocks together should be enough to get you a spark to ignite the methane. Or maybe dragons grow special teeth that spark when struck together.

Dragon bones are going to need to be very light, like bird bones. And that armored skin is going to need to be something light weight, not thick and heavy like a crocodile. I dunno, maybe make the armor out of same thing as space shuttle tiles, but grow it organically. I don't know how you could grow such tiles, but I don't know how we grow teeth either. In any case, dragons are totally possible. Nobody is going to create one any time soon, but maybe in a thousand years we will have learned enough biology that we would be able to. Then we could have the nine zillionth season of Game of Thrones, but for real.

Update - Stu did some math on this.