Polar Vortex

Stratospheric Polar Vortex
The stratospheric polar vortex splitting apart, bringing freezing weather to mid-latitudes in the northern hemisphere for the next month. That dates on the video cover the month of February of this year.

Sign of the Times

Say What?

Yes, indeedy, that's what it says.

Grecian Formula Leads to Gray Hair

Showed up in True Detective on the back of the WSJ.

Exercise Arctic Tiger

Aircraft painters are getting wild these days.

Crazy Italians

Ducati makes high performance motorcycles. They are to bikes like Ferrari is to cars. They do things no one else would dream of doing, like using a whole bunch of bevel gears to drive the valves in their engine (picture). Note that the pair of gears in the center are your normal 45 degree bevel, but the angle of the three gears around the upper and right sides are more like half that, and helical cut to boot. Not something you are going to make in your high school shop class, if your high school had a shop class.

Hat tip to Stu, who posted a story about Tornax motorcycles, which switched from English JAP engines to German ILO engines after the Nazi's came to power. JAP I had heard of, but not ILO, so I had to go look it up, whereupon I stumbled across an ad for Phil Aynseley Photography, which led to this photo of the timing gears of a 1973 Ducati 750 Sport.

Techron

I've been hearing about "Chevron with Techron" for like forever. I figured Techron was just a name they came up with for their own particular flavor of jungle joy juice. But today I'm driving down to Eugene and I see a billboard advertising "Texaco with Techron", which really surprised me. Why would Texaco use a Chevron brand name? Could it be that they are actually the same company? Oh. They are. That's why.

Boat Ride

While I was in Fort Madison (Iowa) Andy & I took his boat out for a cruise on the Mississippi. They have a really big pivot bridge there. Fortunately, if we take the antennae down we are low enough to slide under it without them having to open it up.

We went up the river about five or six miles and found a little inlet to hide out it. We turned off the motor and I took a nap. When I woke up we were up against the shore. Andy told me we had drifted up and down the river a couple of hundred yards in each direction. The current wasn't very strong where we were, and the breeze was blowing upstream, so the current would carry us down, and then the breeze would blow us back up.

Andy's New Boat

My brother Andy got himself a new boat. New to him anyway. Since he lives about 3 blocks from the Mississippi River, it kind of makes sense to have a boat. The boat is operational, but like all boats, there are a bunch of little things that need to be fixed. He's going to be busy. 1970 SeaGoing Houseboat. 32 feet long, Hardwood floors, stainless steel fridge, air conditioner/heater, sleeps 6, Chrysler Inline 6 engine, new plastic gas tank. The guy who was selling it put up a very fancy website using Adobe Flash and something called Slideshow Pro. I tried to extract the photos from this, but after a couple of hours wandering around on the net, downloading flash decompilers and playing with them, I gave up. Slideshow Pro added another layer of obfuscation that was just too much trouble, so I used my good old stand-bys, Print Screen and MS-Paint to capture the photos. It was a bit tedious cutting the images I wanted from the print screen image, but it got the job done in a predictable manner.

Preikestolen, Norway

Stolen from Marty North & Greenfield Park. Funny, I don't remember going to Norway. I swear the guy in the blue jacket sitting on the edge looks like me.