Missile Dream

Ask Google for Missile Battery and Google delivers.

I'm working in an office. It's a large room with desks and similar office furniture. There are not too many people around. It's all fairly typical except for the two flat panels mounted in the walls. They are about two feet tall and eight feet wide. There are four small holes equally spaced across the width through which miniature missiles are launched. Each of the four ports is for a different flavor of missile: high explosive, armor piercing, anti-personnel, what have you. The missiles are small, maybe one-eighth of an inch in diameter (3 mm for un-Americans) and about 12 inches long. It may not seem like a good idea to have these launchers pointed into the office, but ours is not to reason why.
      I presume we get an order to launch one missile because we have a designated target which we dutifully communicate to the missile. We launch it and it flies across the room and out the open window. Cool. So far everything in this dream is holding together.
      Now we launch another missile, but somehow no one told this one where to go so it flies across the room and hits the other missile launching panel right below the third port. I see it hit and I watch it burn it's way through the front panel. It takes it a small fraction of a second, but time has definitely slowed down here.
    Shit, this is bad, and it's gonna get worse, because now the entire magazine of missiles stored behind that panel start to detonate. They must be going off one at a time. None of them are escaping, but we can see glowing hot spots in the metal panel every time one of them detonates. The spots are marching their way across the panel in an approximation of the missile's stored locations.
    As soon as the errant missile strikes its target I'm trying to figure out how to shut down the power to the missile launchers. (No, I don't have any idea why that should help.) A Mr. Spock like character (ala Star Trek), that is, higher up the food chain than me, but not in my chain of command, happens by and inquires as to the reason for my frantic scrambling. He is unperturbed by the disastrous situation of the missile launcher. When I inform him of my intent he tells me that I will need to contact San Diego, and no, not to get permission, but because they control the power to the missile launchers. There is no local control. Then he wanders off. Okay, right, contact San Diego.

Back to the Future

1956 General Motors Motorama
I caught part of this on Construir TV (Channel 23.3) here in B.A. It is the most bizarre thing I have seen in a long time. The lady dancing her way through dreamland is Thelma 'Tad' Tadlock. She is also in this video, which rates a special mention because it features a self-loading dishwasher (at the 8:28 mark), or as automatic as special effects in 1956 could make it.
    Tork110 has collected some videos that include Thelma. I tend to take dancers for granted - of course they are talented, they wouldn't be in the show if they weren't. I forget how much talent and work it requires to make these things look good.

Pea Shooter

A forgotten profession: In the days before alarm clocks were widely affordable, people like Mary Smith of Brenton Street were employed to rouse sleeping people in the early hours of the morning. They were commonly known as ‘knocker-ups’ or ‘knocker-uppers’. Mrs. Smith was paid sixpence a week to shoot dried peas at market workers’ windows in Limehouse Fields, London. Photograph from Philip Davies’ Lost London: 1870-1945.
Previously posted here.

I was lying bed this morning and I got to thinking that a long distance pea shooter could come in very handy right about now. I can see daring daughter's apartment from mine. We are maybe 200 or 300 yards apart and there are no intervening buildings, so if I was up to it, I could toss a pebble at her window to get her attention. Yes, I could call her, if I could figure out how to make the phone work, but ringers are so annoying, don't you think? A pea striking your window doesn't make much noise, but it's a time tested method of getting someone's attention.
   300 yards is a fur piece to throw something, and anything solid enough to make the trip might be solid enough to break the window when it got there, and we don't want to do that.
    It's beginning to sound like a ballistics problem for a firearm, but with the added constraint that the terminal velocity has to be rather low. Now I wonder if it could be even be done. Wondering led to Google which turned up:

Laser Guided Peas

Seems there is regular world championship held in the UK every year. They're only going for 12 yards though, so I don't think lasers are going to help me.

Pájaro Mierda, Tercera Parte (Bird Shit, Part Three)

Some random street in downtown Buenos Aires. I don't recall exactly where this was, but it doesn't matter, all the streets look like this.

Yesterday I put on my brand new, light weight, light green sport shirt to go shopping with my daughter in downtown Buenos Aires. The streets here are lined with great big, beautiful trees, many as tall as a ten story building. Bear this in mind as you read the rest of this story.
    Determined daughter wanted to buy an air conditioner for her apartment. We didn't have to go far, maybe a mile or two, just from one part of downtown to another, where all the streets are lined with great big, beautiful trees (just in case you forgot). It took a while to complete the sale, but the eventually the three of us ended up on the sidewalk in front of the store with the two box set that contains the air conditioner. The air conditioner comes in two pieces, one smaller, light weight unit that goes inside the building, and a larger, heavy one that contains the compressor and goes outside.
    Osmany is trying to flag down a cab, but we aren't having much luck. Cantankerous stinky pants blames the taxi drivers for being lazy. Can't say as I blame them. Who wants to get out of their air conditioned car into this 90 and 90 weather and help load this great big, heavy box into the trunk?
    Eventually a kid stops and he and Osmany have a wrestling contest with the big box trying to stuff it into the cab, but it's not going to fit and leave room for the rest of us. So they abandon the effort and we go back for looking for a station-wagon-type taxi cab. I've been standing around for what seems like hours, so I suggest I take the lighter box and just walk back to their apartment. It's only ten blocks, I should be able to do that.
    We have a bit of discussion over this but eventually I start to pick up the medium size box and that is when some foul bird drops a king sized bird turd on my head. It splatters all over me, the air conditioner box, and worst of all, miss stinky pants.
    Christ on a crutch. We wiped up as best we could (a gentleman always carries a clean, or least semi-clean, handkerchief for just these sort of events), and packed stinky pants and the boxes off in the next taxi that came along. Osmany and I took another. Naturally, the taxi O-man and I caught was a station wagon and could have carried all of us.

Paris

Paris attack: The West’s time for choosing

This is the best essay I've read about how to we should deal with jihadists. 

The only problem I have with it is the call for military action in Syria and Iraq. Don't get me wrong, I think military action of some sort might be just the thing, but we just got done spending a couple of trillion dollars on military action in that neighborhood and I don't see that it has bought us a god damn thing.

    Maybe it's the politics, or maybe it's just the will of the people, and most of the people are lily-livered cowards, or pacifists, or turn-the-other-cheek kind of Christians, or those most reprehensible creatures, modern day progressive-liberal-democrats. I probably could be lumped in five or six of those categories.

    The big problem with military action is that it is done by governments, and given our recent experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan, I wouldn't trust our government to go to the store for a jug of milk. Okay, they might be able to get the jug of milk, but they would have to borrow a billion dollars to equip their security forces to ensure that no one tampered with the jug on the way back.

Via Monday Evening

Merde Part Duex

Using pictures of staring eyes on signs warning people to clear up is another possibility, says Workman. 

Studies have shown such techniques can be effective. At Newcastle University bike thefts were reduced 62% by putting pictures of staring eyes above cycle racks. A 2010 study found similar techniques made it more likely that trays would be cleared away.  

"There's something about human eyes and the feeling you're being watched," says Workman. - Eight radical solutions to the problem of dog mess By Duncan Walker, BBC News Magazine

Whack-A-Doodle

Talking to diligent daughter last night and she tells me that we are going shopping today. 'How can that be?' I wonder, what with her having a job and all. Are we going on your lunch hour? No, silly it's Saturday. Saturday? How can that be. Today is only Wednesday. You just started your job three days ago on Monday. No, pops, that was five days ago.

I can only attribute it to trying to absorb too much new information all at once, like learning to find my way around my neighborhood, acquiring dog poop avoidance skills, and figuring out how to operate my Chromebook with it's different keyboard and its slightly different way of doing everything. We aren't even going to mention Spanish since I don't seem to have made any progress in that direction.