ACLU - American Consulting Lawyers are Useless

211 Robbery in Progress

Marcel put up a post this morning about civil-asset-forfeiture, which got my blood up enough to follow the links, which almost got my blood up enough to write a post, but then I checked my blog and found I've written more about the ACLU than I remembered. Okay, that's not hard. I write stuff down so I don't have to remember it, I can just check my blog.

Now I'm wondering why the ACLU continues to be such a weak sister. Let's see who's in charge. Oof. Big group. Susan Herman is the President and her most recent blog post is titled

Here's How You Can Make Constitution Day a Federal Holiday

Well, now, that's some strong leadership for you.

Sky Writing

AD - Chevrolet Motor Company - Sky Billboards (1935)
Yes, I know, NASA's Orion spacecraft went on a test flight yesterday, and here I am still stuck in the past. It's all IAman's fault, that and radial aircraft engines, like they used in the Corsair and the B-17.

I like that the pilot's audience is wearing heels to climb on the wing. Very important to look your best when climbing around on machinery. The plane might be a Waco or a New Standard D-25. Found on Vintage Aeroplane Writer.

Update January 2022 replaced wrong video. Somehow the original got replaced something entirely different.

Whistling Death

60 Seconds Of Awesome: WW2 FG-1D Corsair FighterHistorical Machines TV

The high pitched whistling sound comes from the air inlets in the wings.

Just because the audio track is so fine, but since we're talking about the Corsair, here's a cool pic I found.

Marine Flyers of the Black Sheep Squadron Will Trade Zeros For Ball Caps

Update: It's Saturday night and I'm still wondering why there are air inlets in the wings, so I did a little digging and found this on Conneticut Corsair:

Rectangular openings mounted in the wing leading edge at the fuselage junction supplied cooling air to twin oil coolers, one in each leading edge. Induction air was also taken from the leading edge air intakes, ducted to the first stage of the supercharger. Featuring an intercooler for the two-stage supercharger, cooling air was routed from the leading edge air intakes to the air-to-air intercooler. Flow splitters were an integral part of the air intakes due to the requirement of ducting the air 90 degrees as soon as it entered the air intake plenum. At high speed these flow splitters (six per side) emitted a loud whistling noise, which prompted the Japanese to call the F4U "Whistling Death."

 Update January 2021 replaced missing video.

Bob Hoover

Via Posthip Scott. This is the second time I have seen a Twin Mustang.
    I saw Bob performing at the local air show with his Aero Commander once. I wasn't particularly impressed. I mean it didn't have nine zillion horsepower, or roar like a freight train, or break the sound barrier. On the other hand he was doing stuff you wouldn't expect out of a midget airliner. This preview prompted to me to look him up on the net, where I found this amusing little clip.

Bob Hoover Barrel Roll

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Update January 2021 replaced missing 2nd video.

Skyhook

James Bond and Claudine 'boob-a-licious' Auger in Thunderball

All airports have airport codes. Anyone who has traveled by air in the USA is probably familiar with some of the big ones like Atlanta (ATL), Chicago (ORD), LA (does anyone even say Los Angeles anymore?) (LAX), Dallas Fort Worth (DFW) and Portland (PDX). Okay, not everyone knows PDX, I just threw that in there because I go there ten times a year. Even no account little podunk airports like Hillsboro (HIO, my neighborhood airport) and Pinal Airpark (MJZ), just North of Tuscon, have codes.

Pinal Airpark, Marana Arizona. Notice that you can see the entire 6,000 foot long runway AND you can count the airliners. Flippin' airliners are big.

    Iaman paid a visit to MJZ this week and saw a bunch of airliners parked there. Last year when Boeing's Dreamliner was grounded a bunch of them ended up here. Seems that since Boeing went to so much trouble to set up their international assembly line to build these planes, they were loath to shut it down just because the FAA says they weren't allowed to fly them. Well, they could fly them, they just weren't allowed to carry any passengers. I mean how else were they going to get them from their final assembly plant in Everett (just north of Seattle), Washington to Tuscon, which is where MJZ is?
    MJZ is currently the largest boneyard for civilian aircraft. Davis-Monthan Air Force Base is just down the road and it dwarfs Pinal by a factor of, oh, I dunno, a zillion to one or so. Typical Americans. Whine about having to pay an extra $50 for airfare but willingly fork over thousands of dollars every year so the Air Force's flyboys can go for joyrides anytime they want in their supersonic hotrods. That's democracy in action for you, although I fail to see how this aspect is any different than communism. Never mind, that's all beside the point. I'll try to stay on track here.
    There is another civilian boneyard in Roswell, New Mexico. They store old airlines, but they are also strong in the scrap metal business.

Pinal Airpark got it's start in WW2 training pilots for the military as part of the "50,000 pilot training program". During the Vietnam war it was home to the CIA's Intermountain Airlines. Intermountain eventually became part of Evergreen Aviation, based in McMinnville, Oregon (just down the road from here), which is where the Spruce Goose ended up.

     Robert Fulton started development of his skyhook there. Hard to tell how often it was used for real, I mean it was basically a clandestine activity. We do have videos from some of the tests and the ones in the movies. The Air Force kept it in their back pocket until 1996 when they finally decided to let it go.

There is also an automobile racetrack here. The local Porsche club seems to be only ones who use it.

Update July 2021 replaced missing video.

Adrenochrome

The first time I ever heard of adrenochrome is when Hunter S. Thompson mentioned it in Rolling Stone's serialization of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas some forty years ago. It didn't have a lot to recommend it: four hours of hallucinations while staring at the wall while sitting in bathtub full of water that is gradually losing all its heat. Not to mention it's was a little hard to come by: it comes from the human pituitary gland*. God only knows how he got hold of it.
     The second time I heard of it was yesterday when I got an e-mail from one of my correspondents telling me about her son's struggle with his demons, and she mentions Dr. Abram Hoffer, who became convinced that schizophrenia was caused by people being unable to properly metabolize adrenochrome. Well.
    Dr. Hoffer and my father were contemporaries, they were both born around the time of World War 1, and they both died about ten years ago. In an amazing coincidence they both took a left turn in the middle of their careers. After that the comparison breaks down pretty quickly. My father threw over his career as an aerospace engineer to become a farmer. Dr. Hoffer stayed in the medical field, but started developing his theories about how bad nutrition was the root of all evil and good nutrition could cure what ails you. The American Medical Association, predictably, viewed Dr. Hoffer's pronouncements as heresy, and treated the good doctor accordingly.
    That's all just so you know that we are not standing on solid ground here. The situation is just a tad flakey.
    There are some things that are known, established facts, accepted by the scientific community, like adrenochrome is a metabolite of adrenaline. Normally the body breaks down adrenochrome further into innocuous substances. If for some reason, that doesn't happen, it can produce some truly bizarre hallucinations.
   If I have this right (which is debatable) Dr. Hoffer claimed that massive does of niacin can act as a drug and facilitate the breakdown of adrenochrome and so get rid of the nasty hallucinations that are the hallmark of schizophrenia.

   Where Dr. Herbert got into trouble is when other people failed to replicate the results of his trials. This doesn't mean he was wrong, it just means he wasn't completely right.
   Human biology is so complex that we have just begun to figure out how it works. People get sick for no discernable reason and sometimes they likewise get better. Sometimes a quack cure works. Sometimes it's a coincidence.
    It could easily be the case that there are some treatments that have not been proven to work, but do in fact work on some patients. The problem could simply be that no one has yet figured out what the criteria are for determining if a particular patient is a good candidate for a particular treatment. It could be that one doctor has success with his regimen because he subconsciously selects patients that would be good candidates. It doesn't mean his treatment is bogus, it just means he hasn't developed criteria that other people can use to tell if a particular patient is likely to respond to this treatment.
    All you can do in a case like this is try it and see if it works for you. You do need to be careful that you don't A. kill the patient with the treatment, or B. spend your way into the poorhouse without effecting a cure.

*my recollection does not jibe with Wikipedia's version. "My memory is good on matters like these", to quote the malfunctioning Thermostellar Bomb #20 from Darkstar.

fleetwood mac - oh well (1969)

I was thinking about a new byline for my blog, something along the lines of 'thinking about current events', and how I think most of the crap that passes for news is just that, which caused

don't ask me what i think of you i might not give the answer that you want me to

to pop into my head. YouTube served up this Fleetwood Mac video, which sounds absolutely correct, but I sure didn't think it was a Fleetwood Mac tune, and even if it is/was, where's Stevie? Seems Stevie wasn't part of the band until version 2.0 came along in 1974.