Chief of Station | Official Trailer (HD) | Vertical
Vertical
Okay action thriller. Lots of fisticuffs, lots of gunfire. There is a story, but it's pretty thin. The only people we care about here are Aaron Eckhart as Ben Malloy and Olga Kurylenko as Krystyna Kowerski. There are also a bunch of villains to hate.
Directed by Tony Scott famous for any number of films but I'll just mention Top Gun. He is also the younger brother of Ridley Scott famous for Alien.
The story recounts Nathan (Robert Redford) and Tom's (Brad Pitt) history of working together as spooks for the CIA. Now Tom has tried to pull off a stunt to rescue his girlfriend and gotten himself in a terrible jam. The big-shots at the CIA aren't willing to try and save him because reasons, so Nathan uses his retirement fund to engineer an op to rescue him. It's probably going to land Nathan in hot water, but he's a spook, he'll elude his pursuers. And Tom and his girlfriend will owe him.
Can't tell who wrote it. It's a website with one review of this one movie. It uses the acronym MACV-SOG without defining it, so I asked Google:
MACV-SOG (Military Assistance Command, Vietnam – Studies and Observations Group)
Espionage is a dirty business. Assets in the spy trade are people who can get the information about the enemy that the agents want. However, to spooks, assets aren't people, they are just objects to use to get what you want and as soon as they are no longer useful or you have gotten what you want, they get dropped. If they fall into a burning pile of shit, well too bad. Good agents are not going to waste any tears for them. No wonder the CIA is so popular.
Somewhere around the 1:10:00 mark, the Sheik catches a ride from Cyprus to Beirut, a distance of maybe 120 miles, in speedboat equipped with hydrofoils. Never seen the like. Google thinks it might be a Volga, a Soviet boat.
GO-DEVIL is in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Their target market seems to hunters and fisherman who like to explore the Louisiana swamps. I can see how a longtail motor could have certain advantages there. They aren't building hot rod motors, mostly small motors. The largest is 40 HP. Did not find any pictures of boats with these motors. Big problem in the USA is that most small boats are trailered, and longtail motors could make that difficult.
Longtail Boat Drag Racing in Thailand is CRAZY!
CB Media
It's monsoon season in Thailand and the sky looks like it is threatening to rain. Don't want it to rain, can you imagine how terrible it would be if it rained and the track got wet? The boats would lose all their traction.
The Man With The Golden Gun (1974) - Bangkok boat scene
MI5MI6GCHQ
If you are old like me you may remember this scene from the James Bond movie The Man With The Golden Gun.
There is a new suspect in the Nord Stream pipeline bombing. This time the Germans have arrested a Ukrainian in Italy. They suspect that he and his buddies rented the yacht Andromeda (formerly Ulysses, video above) to sail out into the Baltic and plant bombs on the pipeline. This story on RT is skeptical as the yacht was only 15 meters long. I think they have the wrong yacht. Or maybe I do. This one is perfectly capable to carrying a crew of nefarious scuba divers and their explosives anywhere in the Baltic.
I still blame Joe Biden, even if the CIA didn't do it - he encouraged that rat Zelensky, who encouraged his rat friends to do this.
Nothing in the news was grabbing me this morning, my mind started wandering and Slo-Mo-Shun popped up, so I go looking for videos, and look what I found: an unlimited hydroplane race that happened last week just a stone's throw from where I live. (OK, it's 200 miles away, but compared to the world it's practically next door.)
I liked the original hydroplanes. They were wooden boats with massive V-12 engines and open cockpits. Times change and the cockpits are enclosed, the engines are gas turbines and the hulls are no doubt made of space-age plastic. But they are still faster than snot.
The race doesn't start until just after the six minute mark. There are videos of the old boats, but the ones I looked at were pretty grainy.
Lake Como is a lake of glacial origin situated in northern Italy. It is the third-largest lake in Italy, depth exceeds 1,300 feet and it is the deepest European lake outside of Norway. Lake Como's beauty has long attracted the affluent, serving as a favored summer retreat for aristocrats and wealthy individuals since Roman times. - extracted from Wikipedia
This boat uses the same power transmission gear as a diesel locomotive. They have diesel engines generating electrical power that is fed to two 350 kilowatt electric motors that turn the propellers. Similar to a hybrid car, but no giant battery pack. This has a couple of advantages over a conventional drivetrain. There is no mechanical gearbox, so the engine does not need to be aligned with the propeller shaft.
Odd feature of Google Maps - notice the light blue circle. It is not the Arctic circle, it is very much smaller. The Arctic circle is at 66° 34' N, this circle is about 20 degrees farther north. Clear the search box and the circle disappears.
The Russians have been digging for coal on Svalbard since the 1920s. I thought I put up a post about it before, but maybe not. Svalbard has appeared here before.
I'm reading The Madonna of the Sleeping Cars and round about Chapter 9 we are cruising the Black Sea in Griselda's personal yacht, North Star. This is back in the roaring 20's so there is a whole crew to operate the ship and cater to Griselda's whims.
Reading about this excursion from the Black Sea to Scotland prompted this little thought experiment. Imagine a world where all our problems have been solved and we have robots to build anything we want. In a world like that everyone could have their own fully automated nuclear powered yacht, capable of crossing the Pacific Ocean or even sailing around the entire world.
You wouldn't be able to get to the middle of continents cuz there's no navigable Rivers, so you would need an aircraft, a helicopter with a 2500 Mi range. And it would have to be a big helicopter so you can have a comfortable cabin and not be riding in a noisy plexiglass box.
If everyone's got one of these yachts that's would be 8 billion yachts and the question is: if they were evenly distributed over the world's oceans how far apart would they be?
Oceans cover 139 million square miles, so if each of the 8 billion people on Earth had their own yacht, then, on average, each yacht would have 11 acres of water to itself. Evenly spaced they would be 700 feet apart. Trying to go anywhere would be like navigating a parking lot or a harbor, not exactly smooth sailing.
Thanks to Anonymous for pointing out the error in my math. Well, not the math, but my interpretation of the math. This was my original description:
. . . there would be like 12 yachts per acre or 3 yachts per quarter acre. I picked a quarter acre because that is the size of a good sized suburban lot. In other words, it would be right crowded and you probably wouldn't be able to go anywhere on account of being hemmed in so tightly.
The Indian Navy’s warship INS Sumitra, which has been deployed in the Gulf of Aden on an anti-piracy operation, rescued a hijacked Iranian vessel on Monday and ensured the release of crew members and the boat itself, amid ongoing tensions in the Red Sea and the Arabian Sea.
The patrol vessel responded to a distress call from the Iranian fishing boat Iman, which had been boarded by pirates along the east coast of Somalia, a navy spokesperson said, adding that the crew were being held as hostages. Sumitra intercepted the fishing boat and “ensured the successful release of all 17 crew members along with the boat,” the Indian Navy said in a statement. The vessel was then sanitized and released for onward transit.
The vessel was sanitized? I'm afraid to ask what that means.
This place is a hundred miles south of the Arctic Circle. In brief:
The Solovetsky Monastery is a fortified monastery located on the Solovetsky Islands in the White Sea in northern Russia. It was one of the largest Christian citadels in northern Russia before it was converted into a Soviet prison and labor camp in 1926 to 1939, and served as a prototype for the camps of the Gulag system. The monastery has experienced several major changes and military sieges. Its most important structures date from the 16th century, when Filip Kolychev was its hegumen (comparable to an abbot). - Wikipedia
P. S. Just figured this out, so I thought I would 'share'. Gawd, I hates that word 'share'. What's wrong with tell? Whatever, I'm a gonna tell y'all 'bout it. Google Maps won't display grid lines, but Google Earth will. You just have to enable them on the layers menu.
You spend enough time watching YouTube Shorts and eventually something totally unexpected pops up. I see reports of new drones (land, sea and air), armored troop carriers, artillery and tanks everyday. I've seen reports of submarines carrying James Bond like mini-subs, but this is the first time I've seen this thing. It also has a baby brother:
That business of 'taking too long to pressurize' in the first video doesn't make much sense. Making a hull that would be able to withstand even a little pressure would be about ten times as difficult and would at least double the weight making it much more expensive and difficult to transport.
JFD is based in the UK, their headquarters are just outside of Glasgow, Scotland.
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.
