Calling Eli Gold

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Headline on Mercola dot com

General Mills Gets a Taste of the Backlash After it Spent Over $1.1 Million to Defeat GMO Labeling Initiative

Eli Gold is the Public Relations Wizard / Crisis Manager on The Good Wife. GMO stands for Genetically Modified Organism.

Update October 2025 replaced missing image with one from 2016.

WW2 British Aircraft

Walrus Flying Boat
Click me to go to the album

I'm still mucking about with pictures, trying to find some way to organize them, trying to figure which is the best tool for the job, which web site I like the best. Picasa is a little trying, but it does seem to do most of what I want. Like I said earlier, Stu sent me a link to a page full of pictures. I really don't like these kind of things, you constantly have to fiddle with the controls to get the next picture on the screen. I like slide shows. Press the go button, and then click once every time you want to see the next picture. No fuss, no muss. Well, mostly. Still haven't it gotten it completely sorted out, but it's still better having to scroll through one long page of pictures.

I spent a couple of hours trying to figure out how to organize this bunch, and I finally came up with a sequential order that makes a sort of sense.

Biplanes on the water
Walrus Flying Boat
  Swordfish on floats
Biplanes on aircraft carriers
  Swordfish over the Ark Royal
Swordfish on carrier deck
  Swordfish on grass
Fairey Albacore landing on carrier
Mono-planes on aircraft carriers
  Fairey Fulmar
Royal Navy Corsairs on hanger deck
  Royal Navy Corsairs on flight deck
Seafire & Pilot
Land based monoplanes. We start with a couple of American planes.
  Mustang, or so the label says, hard to tell just what it is, but the angle of the shot is cool.
  P-40 Warhawk in North Africa with a crewman directing the pilot from the wing tip.
    Oh, the Glorius Spitfire!
    Crew tinkering with a Spitfire on the tarmac
  Pilots talking while crew tinkers
  Crew tinkering with a Spitfire on the grass
  Crew tinkering with a Spitfire up on stands
  Spitfire being painted in D-Day stripes
  Spitfires on the flight line ready to go. I don't think they ever looked this good during the war.
  Loading a camera into a Spit for photographic reconnaisance
  Ready to go
  Really ready to go
  Photo reconn taking off
  Airborne
  Battle of Britain
  Squadron formation
  Landing craft on the beach in Italy, dead Spitfire in the water
Typhoon
  Arming
  Small formation in flight
Gliders
  100 Gliders on the ground in Operation Market Garden
  Hamilcar Glider
Twin Engine Bombers
  Baltimore nose
  Baltimore dropping a bomb
  Beaufort front end
  Group of Blenheims and Hurricanes over North Africa
  Blenheim on the ground
  Pair of Hampdens in flight
  Crew going aboard a Douglas A-20 Havoc
  Hudson on the tarmac
  B-25 Mitchell being serviced
    My favorite, the Mosquito
  5 Mosquitos on the grass
  Mosquito gun test
  Crew going aboard a Mosquito
  Mosquito in flight
Four Engine Bombers
  Halifax in flight
  A whole bunch of Sterlings on the tarmac, pre-D-day
  3 Sterlings in flight
  At least 5 Wellingtons on the ground
  Servicing a Whitley
    Oh, the Glorious Lancaster
  Nose turret
  Tail turret
  Big wigs walking under the nose
  Big crowd standing around
    Lancaster / Armament
  Bombs en train to loading
  All loaded
Armament
  Bomb menu
  Mucking with fuses in North Africa
  Preparing rockets
  Ammo belt assembly
Pilots
    Bomber crews
  Bomber crew
  Two stories
  Looking forward
    Fighter
  Pilot
  Brit pilot and mascot, North Africa
  Hurricane cockpit check in snow
  Earl Stanley Lock & Friend, Ace
  RAF Pilot
  Hurricane pilot Ginger Lacey, scored 18 kills in Battle of Britain
Hurricane pilots
  Hurricane pilots hanging out by their caravan
  RAF Trainees in Mesa Arizona
Home front
  Plotting room
  Making terrain models for RAF, UK 1943
  Assembling landing gear in the factory
  Short Sunderland flying boat factory
  RAF Brass
  Moral Boosting Poster
  Lancaster on display at War Rally, Trafalgar Square, London
  Wellington recovered from Loch Ness

Update March 2019. Picasa has died, but it appears that all of the my pictures have been moved to Google Drive, so the link under the picture at top should take you to the album.
Update May 2019. Fixed.

Catapult to Oblivion

    Stu sent me a link to some pictures of WW2 British aircraft. I'm looking through them and I come across this picture. From the shape of the light blue panel on the underside of the nose of the airplane I deduce that this is a Spitfire. But wait a minute, the Spitfire was a land based fighter and isn't that an aircraft carrier superstructure in the background? I don't recall ever hearing about Spitfires being operated from aircraft carriers. Filename of the picture provides a clue: Seafire. Reading about this plane I come across something called "catapult spools". Searching the web turns up several instances of the term, but no good explanations. I do come across something else that captures my attention: Cata-Fighters. These were land based fighter aircraft launched from catapults installed on Merchant Marine vessels for defense against German bomber attacks.

    How did they recover the aircraft? They didn't. The pilot bailed out, and was picked up out of the water by one of the ships in the convoy. The plane is lost. Since they quit losing ships after they implemented this system they considered it a good deal. Lose one airplane but save an entire shipload of war material.
    I still don't know what a "catapult spool" is, but that's okay. My brain is full.

Globalisation

Iowa Andy sent me this picture from the East Coast of the USA: a package of firewood imported from Estonia. I am not sure which is more surprising,  the fact that we are importing firewood from across the ocean, or that someone is going to the trouble to label them for sale in California.

At Safeway (national grocery chain) my daughter spied a Milka brand candy bar that is popular in Argentina. I've never noticed it here before. I just looked at their web site and discovered that Milka is now part of Kraft Foods. I wonder when that happened?

Ship of the Day

I'm not quite sure just what kind of ship this is. An ocean going ship? An airship? A spaceship? In any case I really like the picture. By Mozchops, found on Concept Ships.

The Joy of Auto Repair

Suburban Front Disk Brake

Jack asked me to give him a hand doing the brakes on his car today after lunch. It was a simple job, just replacing the front brake pads on his GMC Suburban, something he has done many times before. He only needed help because his shoulder is still recovering from surgery and he didn't want to strain it, and he predicted that he would only need help with getting the wheels back on because they are kind of heavy. He has a hydraulic floor jack and a pneumatic air wrench, so none of the other work should cause him any undo strain. Famous last words.
    The left side was a piece of cake, well, except we had to use the old fashioned lug wrench to break the lug nuts loose because some knucklehead at the garage used an air wrench to put them on. So it was a good thing I was there to break them loose. Finish up the driver's side and go around to the passenger side and it's the same situation. The Harbor Freight air wrench hasn't got enough oomph to break the lug nuts loose, so I have to do it manually again. Okay, no problem, the lug wrench is a good one and I break all six loose and turn it over to Jack to spin them off. Four come off no problem, but the last too are still a little snug, so I have another go at them with the lug wrench. Boy are they tight. And they don't loosen up, every little bit of motion requires full force.
    Eventually one comes off. The interior of the nut is almost completely stripped. The stud doesn't look too bad, not great, but possibly usable. The last one unscrews for a while but then it stops. It goes around easily, but it is not unscrewing. There is maybe only one thread left holding it on, but it will not let go. We attack with hammer and tongs, but no luck. Finally resort to using a Dremel tool with an abrasive cut-off wheel to try and cut through one side of the lug nut. Get maybe 75% of the way through. Attack the cut with a chisel, only succeed in making the cut wider. Nut still won't come off. Finally Jack digs up an old brake adjustment tool and uses it to pry on the lug nut while I turn it with the wrench and it finally comes off.
   So Jack got the new pads installed and the wheels are back on, although the right front one only has four lug nuts holding it. Getting that fixed could be a problem. It might be possible to clean up the threads on the studs and and just put some new lug nuts on. It might be better to replace the studs, but that could be a real pain because, you guessed it, it's four wheel drive, and there's no telling how much of that front wheel assembly will have to come apart in order to be able to get the hub out so you can replace the studs.

Update from Jack: Took the ‘burban to Les Schwab’s.  They replaced the studs without removing the hub.  $50 and 45 minutes!

Update February 2017 fixed broken link.

Norway

A true hero. Seeing the stick bit reminded me that Stu had something to say:

If we were playing tennis and I hit a ball over the net but away from you, then your brain can predict where the ball will be in the future and you will run over there. Dogs don't do that; they watch the ball and run towards its present position, effectively running in what is called a curve of pursuit.

I had never noticed this. Of course if the dog starts from the same point as where you are throwing the stick, or ball, or whatever, then a straight line to where the ball is now is no different than the path to where the ball will be. Another reason I may not have noticed this is that dogs are really fast. They are able to compensate for their lack of predictive ability just because their closure rate is so high that any change in trajectory is minuscule. Or maybe I just never thought of it this way.