This piqued my interest because my niece and nephew are in the fishing business. Those are some big halibut, but where's Iturup? It's an island northeast of Sapporo, Japan:
Google Maps failed me. Pull up Iturup on Google Maps and it shows you the island, but no cities towns or roads. If you ask it for one of the three airports, it will show it to you, but then it won't shut up about it and there doesn't seem to be any way to turn it off. New and improved for your viewing pleasure, and for most people, most of the time it probably works very well. Not for me. I might have to start using one of the other free, online, maps of the world.
Iwo Jima as a crucial emergency landing site for crippled bombers returning from missions over Japan. It is estimated that these emergency landing strips saved the lives of nearly 25,000 American airmen during the war. - Google
The Greatest Act of Political and Economic Spite in History
Today I Found Out
What happened to all the war material we shipped to the South Pacific during WW2 when the war was over? It got dumped in the ocean. Madness? Or logical? Very bizarre in any case.
I found the narrator speaking too fast for comfort, so I dialed down the sound and turned on the subtitles (CC in the options bar) and that worked pretty well.
Today at lunch Marc tells a story. About a month ago, a friend of his was flying a bush plane and attempted to land on an island in the Columbia River. Came in for a smooth landing on strip of sand and one of the landing gear legs broke off. The airplane turned and went into the water. The pilot got out okay, but the airplane is under water and the river current is trying to drag it away. It's not very deep there so he is able to grab hold of the tail and keep it from going anywhere. Not a tenable situation.
Fortunately, the crew of a passing tugboat saw him crash and came over to help. The tug positioned itself to block the flow of the river and gave the pilot a rope with which he was able to secure the aircraft. The tug has business elsewhere, so it leaves, but he calls a buddy tug who doesn't have any pressing business and he comes over to help out.
That evening Marc and a couple other guys took a duck boat out to the island. On the way there they were passed by a Columbia County police boat. They expected nothing but grief from the police, but surprisingly the police turned out to very helpful. Probably helped that our crew were not drunk and not behaving like assholes.
They pulled the plane out of the water and set about drying out the engine and getting ready to take off the wings. They came back the next two days with a work platform borrowed from a local marina and ferried the various parts of the airplane back to dry land.
What caused the problem? Did a wheel fall in a hole or hit a big rock? Near as we can tell, no. Apparently the landing gear leg just snapped off. A stress fracture, maybe? Very weird.
We've been watching Turn of the Tide which is set in the Azores. There is a big shootout at a lighthouse, and then this video pops up. So now I'm looking at lighthouses in the Azores and there are a bunch of them, so a plotting we go.
Turn of the tide | Official Trailer | Netflix
Netflix
Pretty great story. A couple of mafiosi from Sicily are trying to sail their sailboat loaded with cocaine from South America to Europe. They run into bad weather near the Azores and their boat is damaged. They eventually anchor near one of the islands. Not quite sure what they were thinking here, but they offload the drugs and stash them in a cave on the shore. Don't want the police to inspect the boat and find a bunch of cocaine on board, I suppose. The bad weather is not quite done and soon packages of cocaine are washing up on the beach, and boy howdy, do things change in town.
The story follows four friends as they attempt to capitalize on this windfall. The four are one smart guy, our hero Eduardo, Rafael, a local soccer star, his girlfriend, Sylvia, and Carlinhos, a flaming queen. As you might expect, the local police, the mainland police, the local thug and the mafia are all interested in recovering the drugs. Chaos ensues.
The Azores are a long way from anywhere and the dozen or so islands stretch over 400 miles of ocean.
I'm reading War with the Newts by Karel Capek. It tells the curious story of the discovery of a race of six foot Salamanders in the South Pacific and their exploitation by various 19th century organizations.
It's not a great story, but it is a curious one, and I am plugging along.
At the beginning of chapter 8 I find a list of islands, and me being me, I have see if they are real islands or just figments of the author's imagination. Turns out most of them are real, and the only three I didn't find (Hiau, Uap, Fukaofu) could well be because of the funny spelling of island names.
Chapter 8
Andrias Scheuchzeri
ENDLESS is human curiosity. It was not sufficient that J. W. Hupkins (Yale), the greatest authority alive at the time having anything to do with reptiles, declared that those mysterious creatures were unscientific humbug and sheer fantasy in the scientific journals and in the news-papers accounts began to increase of the discovery of so far unknown animals resembling huge salamanders in the most diverse parts of the Pacific Ocean. Relatively reliable statements claimed their discovery on the Solomon Islands, on Schouten Islands, on Kapingamarangi, Butaritari, and Tapeteuea, as well as on the whole group of smaller the islands: Nukufetau, Funafuti, Nukunono, and Fukaofu, then as far as Hiau, Ua Huka, Uap, and Pukapuka. There were legends quoted of the devils of Captain van Toch (mainly in the Melanesian zone) and of the Tritons of Miss Li (more in Polynesia) then the newspapers inferred that it was a matter of various kinds of submarine and antediluvian monsters mainly because the summer season had begun, and there was nothing to write about. Sub-marine monsters are usually well received by the reading public. In the United States especially Tritons became the fashion: in New York a showy revue ran for three hun-dred nights featuring Poseidon with three hundred most beautiful Triton girls, Nereids, and Sirens in Miami and on the beaches of California youth bathed in the costumes . . .
Another ruined castle on another tiny island. This one is in Scotland. Google tried to tell me that this is Castle Stalker, but it's not. The water and beach looks like the Caribbean, but the Inner Hebrides area off the west coast of Scotland also appears to have some white sandy beaches. Plus the title on the puzzle says Scotland.
The island's original castle was built in the thirteenth century; it became a stronghold of the Clan Mackenzie and their allies, the Clan MacRae. In response to the Mackenzies' involvement in the Jacobite rebellions against the newly United Kingdom, Royal Naval ships destroyed the castle in 1719. The present-day castle is Lieutenant-Colonel John Macrae-Gilstrap's 20th-century reconstruction of the old castle.
Bannerman started a military surplus business after the the American Civil War. He bought the island in 1900 to use as a place to store his growing inventory of munitions. He built the castle to use as a warehouse. Wikipedia has the story. Bannerman Castle Trust offers tours of the place.
There is an I-84 that runs north of the castle. It goes west as far as Scranton, New York. There is also an I-84 that runs east out of Portland, Oregon to Salt Lake City, Utah. The two are separated by 1900 miles.
As a master mariner with over 20 years exp at Sea, this is something I would never want to exp. in my life. There was some medical issue with some crew and the fight onboard led to damage to the engine/electrical controls while the vessel was on a SW course of Mauritius towards Atlantic Ocean. Resultant was thst all engine power was lost and vessel drifted towards the island and aground. 94 Miles off aftsr her salvage she sunk to 4400m to the bed of Indian Ocean. The Salvage Video is exceptional, the hard work that goes into this is remarkable esp removal of fuel oil fm Engine room and working machinery and bunker tanks. Kudos to the salvors.
This Is CRAZY! AI Reality Generation on Quest 3 IN REAL TIME!
DiscoVR Tetiana
A Meta Quest 3 Virtual Reality Headset came to me from a friend who didn't want it. Some things have happened and now it's time to put up a post, so I'm looking for a video that will demonstrate just what this thing can do. This is the shortest one I found.
I had no interest in it, so I decided to put it up for sale on Ebay. I've got a a bunch of stuff that I would like to get rid of, and if I could sell it on Ebay, that would be great, and I thought selling this headset would be a good way to get my feet wet in the Ebay world.
My post wasn't up for long before I started getting offers. One offer came in that looked pretty good, but by the time I got around to looking at it, it had already expired. Evidently timed offers are now a thing. Whatever. Eventually, like after a week, or so, the headset sold for $300. Cool!
Pago Pago
Now I have to ship it, so I print the labels, take it to UPS to get it boxed up. They take it and pass it to the post office. Somewhere along the way I look at the address. The buyer is in Pago Pago which is half a world away in the middle of the South Pacific Ocean. However, since Pago Pago is in American Samoa, you can mail packages there. Cost of shipping was like $13. I think the cost of boxing it up was like $20.
The idea that you could mail this box halfway around the world for a pittance struck me as miraculous. I was so blown away that I neglected to insure the package. But now it's packaged, labeled and on its way.
It's going take a week to get there, but that's okay. However, a month goes by and it still hasn't shown up, so I file a lost mail report with the Post Office. A week later I get a notice that the buyer wants their money back. So maybe it was all an illusion and you can't really send mail to Pago Pago.
I go around and around with Ebay trying to get this deal sorted out. A couple of day later I get a notice that Ebay has refunded the buyer of out of their own pocket. The next day I get a notice that the package has finally arrived and Ebay sends me my money. Kind of weird, but it seems to have worked out.
I hear all the noise being made about Trump imposing tariffs on an uninhabited island. I didn't understand why people were making such a fuss. I suppose they were hoping to embarrass President Trump. No, that's not right, he's not going to be embarrassed by this nonsense. They (the ubiquitous 'they') are just throwing mud on his image, hoping to further inflame 'their' supporters', not that they really need any more flammable fluids. They seem to have plenty on hand.
Reading Starship Troopers (a zillion years ago) and we've got soldiers dropping from orbit. I went looking for pictures of such, but bupkis. Well, how about HALO jumps? They're not from orbit, but they can be jumping from 8 miles up, which has so little air you might as well be in space, and I found this image.
Why am I thinking about Starship Troopers? Because the Air Force is building a new missile base on Johnston Island:
Remember back at the beginning, back before the first Starship prototype was even built, when Elon was talking about how the Starship was going to revolutionize international travel? It was kind of a hair-brained scheme, but evidently someone at the Air Force was paying attention, because they realized it could be used to transport cargo as well as people. Any kind of commercial shipping isn't going to use a rocket, they use cargo ships because pound for pound, they are much cheaper. But if you have an emergency somewhere and you need to get a bunch of stuff somewhere quickly, a rocket is just the ticket.
But the Starship is designed to carry people. It's going to be a little tougher on people than an airliner, but soldiers are pretty tough, so it shouldn't be a problem for them.
Landing in remote regions occupied by enemy forces might be a problem though, so we might want to drop our troops in, like paratroopers. We don't have a technique for doing that from orbit, at least not yet, but Starship can manage reentry, and at some point it's velocity will be low enough that troops could safely exit the vehicle, so we would have Starship paratroops, i.e. Starship Troopers.
It's going to be a few years before we get to this point, but it's undoubtedly coming.
Johnston Atoll is in the middle of the Pacific Ocean:
アマチュアとプロの違い [The difference between amateurs and professionals]
やくちゅ [Yakuchu]
What is this? Someone's daily commute? No, it's the Megavalanche, a giant downhill bicycle race held annually in France and half a world away on the island of Réunion in the Indian Ocean. I think this video was taken in France. Réunion has a mountain that reaches 10,000 feet, but it's in the tropics, so not much chance of snow.
Cool picture of a cool airplane on the beach in The Maldives. We've been there before. The flight log shows it operating out of Male Int'l, so let's take a look:
It's hard to get a handle on the scale of The Maldives. There's a zillion tiny islands spread over a zillion square miles of ocean. This political map gives an overview:
Bonus: I'm poking around looking at The Maldives and Tam turns me onto this BBC report about Diego Garcia. It explains why we don't hear much about the place. The report has several pictures, but nothing recent.
A post I started back in July 2014 but never published:
A Malaysian airliner got shot down in the Ukraine this morning, which reminds us that there is a new conspiracy theory circulating that the Malaysian airliner that disappeared a couple months ago was diverted to Diego Garcia by the CIA. Irba tells us that Diego Garcia is basically a ring of skinny islands around a big lagoon, and the lagoon is fresh water. That seems improbable, so I do a little checking. Diego Garcia gets a hundred inches of rain a year, which is a boat load. Oregon, the rainiest place in the USA onlty gets about thirty some inches. Diego Garcia is a coral atoll, and as such is very porous so rain water soaks right in. Since it is going into this porous rock, there isn't a lot of mixing going on, so it basically collects on top of the salt water that has soaked in from the ocean. This fresh water can be extracted via shallow wells and as long as you don't take too much out of any one spot you can get all the water you need. I mean a hundred inches of rain a year is a stink load of rain.
The flight across the northern end of the Adriatic Sea from Istria to Venice in a power boat with 200 gallons of fuel in 50 gallon drums held in a rack on the back.
P. S. The scenes of Bond and the girl in Venice were shot on a green screen. It's pretty obvious they weren't actually in Venice. Someday I need to find out how they did that.
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