Tam mentions .79-caliber Pontiac revolvers this morning, so I have to go check 'em out, whereupon I find they were used on the F-101 Voodoo, which I haven't heard mentioned in a coon's age. Being a witch doctor and all, I felt I probably should know something about this good looking airplane.
Supersonic - 1100 MPH
Active from 1954 to 1984
1500 mile range
Vietnam War before being replaced by the F-4 Phantom
I've come across some well done short videos. Some of them are music videos, but the tunes don't do much for me.
Biting Elbows - "Toothpick" Biting Elbows is a Russian Band. The video shows some kind of life-or-death game being played in a concrete basement. I was curious about the game, I mean there's no telling what the Rooskies are up these days, so I dug around a little and found it was just a figment of the film makers imagination.
Radio Control Model SR-71 Jet With Real Engines. Drones? I got a drone for ya. This video isn't anything special, but the fact that this guy went to the trouble to build this thing is pretty cool.
This is the 500 kV Eldorado Substation near Boulder City, Nevada. It shows a three-phase motorized air disconnect switcher attempting to open high voltage being supplied to a large three phase shunt line reactor. The line reactor is the huge gray transformer-like object behind the truck at the far right at the end of the clip. Line reactors are large iron core coils (inductors) which are used to counteract the effects of line capacitance on long Extra High Voltage (EHV) transmission lines. Internally, this line reactor has three coils, one for each phase in the three-phase system. Each coil within the reactor can provide 33.3 Million Volt Amperes of compensating inductive reactance (MVAR) at 290 kV between each phase to ground . The power company had previously encountered difficulty interrupting one of the three phases when trying to disconnect the line reactor. The substation maintenance crew set up a special test so that they could videotape the switching event, and they also made arrangements to "kill" the experiment, if necessary, by manually tripping upstream circuit breakers.
I don't understand everything in the above paragraph, but let me summarize the highlights:
500,000 Volts
I've heard that some places will keep a tank of compressed air on hand and use it to shoot a blast of air at the arc when they open the switch to "blow it out".
We started watching Arn: The Knight Templarthis evening. It looks like somebody took this movie and its sequel and cut them up into a mini-series. Anne thinks we've seen it before. I think we have just seen so many medieval epics that they all begin to look alike, not that this isn't a fine movie on its own.
In this story we have two sisters and their father can only afford a wedding/dowry for one of them, so the other will be doomed (DOOMED!) to life in a convent. The dowry has always been a bit of a mystery to me. Kind of sexist and unfair. Why should the father have to put up the money to marry off his daughters? What about his sons? And then it occurred to me that this is a capital investment. Back then it probably was much more difficult to raise the capital needed to start any kind of enterprise, and an enterprise is what you needed in order to maintain any kind of civilized lifestyle, like a roof over your head, a pot to cook in, clothes to keep you warm, and enough extra food to feed your growing brood of children.
You probably didn't pay the dowry to just any John Doe. The son of a wealthy man is going to require a larger dowry than the son of a poor man. For some reason this was never made clear to me in any of classes I took, or maybe I just wasn't paying attention. Probably day dreaming about rocket ships and ray guns.
sgcollins (S.G. Collins?) made this video. He also made one debunking the moon hoax conspiracy theory, which is how I got onto him. There isn't much to this video, just some people preparing dinner for a party. Well, there is a very sexy girl that we get to watch. And there's the drunk guy trying to explain the problem. And the scene with the two girls in the kitchen, but never mind that. Back to coriander:
Cilantro (sih-LAHN-troh) is the Spanish word for coriander leaves. It is also sometimes called Chinese or Mexican parsley. Technically, coriander refers to the entire plant. It is a member of the carrot family.
Most people either LOVE IT or HATE IT. Taste experts aren't sure why, but for some people the smell of fresh coriander is fetid and the taste soapy. In other words, while most people love coriander, for some people, coriander just doesn't taste good.
My friend Jack has this problem with celery. Some people seem to actually like it. I don't much care one way or the other. It doesn't taste like much of anything to me. As for coriander/cilantro, I'm not sure I even know what it tastes like. Some people I know rave about it. Guess I'll try and pay attention next time I run into it.
SE 3150-001 F-ZWVB in altitude record configuration with a mini fuel tank and aluminum door panel.
Aircraft are so weird. People go to a great deal of trouble to build them and then when the engines have run for a magic amount of time, they throw them away. Okay, not always. There are some old timers who keep rebuilding old engines and keep flying old planes, but these guys are mostly hobbyists. I suppose there might be a few jet aircraft that get re-engined, but often by the time the engines have run out of time, the rest of the aircraft is obsolete and they get set out to bake in the desert sun. On one hand I can understand that. I mean you have a perfectly good aircraft that could probably fly another zillion hours. On the other hand you could buy a whole new aircraft for what it would cost to install new engines in the old one. You might as well scrap it, no one is going to do anything with the old hulks. I think there must be some kind of accounting sleight-of-hand going on here, otherwise they would have been scrapped.
Jean Boulet (1920–2011)
A few days ago I put up a picture of some guys climbing up the last leg on the way to the peak of Mount Everest. I thought it was a cool picture, probably taken by someone in an airplane, because helicopters can't go that high. 20,000 feet is the practical limit for most helicopters. Then Stu makes a comment and I do some checking and I find that Jean Boulet flew a helicopter to the top of Mount Everest and landed there back in 1972. That was weird because a few years ago I saw a blurb from HAL (Hindustan Aeronautics Limited) that claimed they had flown over Mount Everest. I called bullshit because I had never heard of such a thing and checking on the internet revealed no such event ever occurring. I complained to the rep, and they never corrected me, so I assumed it was just typical Indian over-enthusiasm. (If you ever read any of the press from India you will know what I am talking about. Never say in one word what you can spend a paragraph on.)
Fred North on his record setting flight.
Now I do some more checking and I discover that a new altitude record was set by Fred North in 2002 in South Africa. In both M. Boulet's flight in 1972 and Mr. North's flight in 2002 the turbine engine flamed out on the way down. M. Boulet set a second world record for longest auto-rotation. He coasted all the way to the ground. Mr. North employed auto-rotation until he had dropped to 12,000 feet where he was able to restart his engine.
Update January 2019. There used to be a very cool video that went with this song, but it has disappeared. I found it on a German site a while back and posted it, but the embedded version doesn't work any more. I kept the link in case anyone wants to try and track down the original video.
WARNING: if you let this video play to the end, it will hijack your browser and take you to Germany. There is also an ad before the video starts. Because this band and this song are so great you should let it take you to Germany and buy some of whatever it is they are selling. Coffee or chocolate last time I played it.
The cool part: It starts (and ends) with a shot of the Continental Club, which is located on South Congress Avenue, on the South side of the river in Austin, Texas. That's the other side of the river from all the "important" stuff like the Capitol and UT (University of Texas). I know this because I used to frequent the joint 30 years ago. It was a dive back then, and it doesn't look like it has changed. One corner of the ceiling was falling in, and the carpet used to be some color other than black, but you couldn't tell what it was. If you wanted tunes it was the place to go. However, you wouldn't hear either of the kinds of music that are supposedly indigenous to Texas, Country or Western. I really, really, like this band.
I had to dig around to locate this video. I could not find it on YouTube. You can find the tune, and a truncated version of this video, but not the whole thing. It is available on the band's website.
