One Week Wonder Time-Lapse

Watch an airplane being built in one week at EAA AirVenture Oshkosh 2014.

Via Iaman, who says "....and I thought it took 10 years to build your own airplane." It might take you ten years of elapsed time, but these guys probably invested as much time and energy in building this one. It looks like you've got at least 50 people working on this thing, 24 hours a day for 7 seven days. That comes to 8,400 man-hours. If you spend your weekends for ten years building an airplane that also comes to 8,400 hours. (8,320 actually. Close enough .)

Sally Forth

This is the first half of Sunday's strip. You might be able to find the whole thing here. I mean it's hard to tell with all these cookies and paywalls and security breaches running around loose.

Black Flag

There seems to be several flavors of black flags flying above the world's terrorists. Here's two.

ISIS?

Jihadists?

Reading about a hostage situation is Sydney (warning: it will eat your computer), I noticed this post script:

In August 2014, British Prime Minister David Cameron declared anyone carrying The Black Standard could be arrested.
It is also banned from public demonstration in the Netherlands
The use of the image the flag for non-educational purposes is forbidden in Germany.

I wonder how that might play in the USA. This might not be the time to quote H. L. Mencken.

Charles De Gaulle and the Algerian War

I watched this yesterday over on Military Photos dot net, but when I stopped by again today it was gone, the thread was closed and I have no idea why. I think it's a fine film. It explains a lot about the title subjects, stuff that I had never heard before. History isn't my strong suit, so maybe I'm missing something, but it will do for now.

David Bowie 'Fame' 1975

Caught this tune on the radio while I was waitin' for my drugs. Had me dancing in my seat. I wondered who it was so I looked it up when I got home. I was thinking it was some black group like the Isley brothers. David Bowie? Are you kidding me? 1975? Are you double kidding me? I would have placed it somewhere in the 90's. Well, I'm not Dustbury. He would have known all this. The great Wiki tells us: In 1975, Bowie achieved his first major American crossover success with the number-one single "Fame".

Joy to the World

I dunno, maybe I'm a racist, or maybe I'm just elitist, but Yaya's video is just pathetic. The card image is pretty good, I'll give him that.

I am having a wonderful phone conversation this morning with a charming young woman representing Frontier Communications about a past due notice on my internet / TV account. Most of the time I spent on hold listening to horribly distorted music. The sound quality when I was actually talking to the person was marginally better. You might want to blame it on the speakerphone, but no, that's disallowed. It's a brand new, AT & T cordless phone, and for every other phone call I've had with some faceless corporate drone, it has worked fine. After 25 minutes and having repeated the facts of the case three times I now have a fax number which I am to use to communicate evidence in support of my case. Color me happy, or is that harpy?
. . .
I logged onto my bank, found the payment record. It has a cryptic confirmation number. Press the print screen button, crop the image to the essentials using Picasa and then used FaxZero to send it. Faxzero says they accept doc, pdf and some other file types, but nothing about Jpeg's, which is what my cropped screen shot is. I wonder what will happen. Will Frontier get an image, or 25 pages of hex dump? Stay tuned for the further adventures of Milquetoast Man.

Our modern world runs on giant, soulless corporations that mostly work very well. They keep us supplied with food, water, power, transportation, entertainment and an endless variety of gadgets. A great many people have worked very hard to make these organizations productive and efficient. Problem is that in streamlining these operations they become more susceptible to grit in the gears. Their normal reaction is to just kick it out. That's when your high-tech new ride breaks down, you find yourself stranded by the side of the road with a dead cell phone that wouldn't work anyway because your account has been terminated for non-payment, because your credit card has been canceled because your number and 27 million others got stolen by the Romanian mafia who sold it to some grifters in Kansas city who tried to buy a boatload of Christmas presents over the internet.

Trying to unstick these kind of problems probably consumes more time than people spend on logical thought, which isn't saying much being as logical thought is an alien concept to most people. But hey, it makes for great entertainment, er, good entertainment maybe? How about Jerry Springer-esque level of noise generation?

Last week I got a weird number on my phone WHILE I WAS TRYING TO CONDUCT BUSINESS. Cursed interlopers, and how did call waiting get turned on? Gaaahhhh (or words to that effect)! Tried to figure out what it was. Finally tried the redial button, which formatted the number to look like a phone number with a leading 54. 54 is the country code for Argentina. Oh, it was probably Devil daughter calling. Or her phone thief. Argentina is full of phone thieves you know.

But why was the phone ringing in my ear when I am trying to have a conversation? Try going online with Verizon dot com, but evidently I don't know my user ID. It doesn't tell me that I've entered an invalid ID, it just says it can't process it right now. I fuss for a bit, but realize I probably will have a better chance by calling, so I go rooting around through Mom's stuff for the password. I find a card with some chicken scratchings that might be current, or might be from the last century. It's kind of hard to tell, it's yellow and brittle and there are bits flaking off of it. Oh, that's dried cheese.

I manage to get through the robo-cop gauntlet and talk to a real person and I find out that call waiting on my phone got turned on by mistake! Death to the infidels who would dare to make such error in our holy sacred communications system. The prophet, PBUH,  would be displeased.

The nice lady I talked to turned it off, PBUHer.

Okay, things are calm now. Callus Interruptus has been turned off, and I've figured out that it probably was Kathryn calling, so I tried to call her back. First I try the redial button: YOUR CALL CANNOT BE COMPLETED AS DIALED. OK, how do you get a long distance line? Zero Zero maybe? Punch buttons on the phone until I get the stored number edited and try again: YOUR CALL CANNOT BE COMPLETED AS DIALED. OK, not zero-zero. What's the prefix Google? How about 011? WE ARE UNABLE TO COMPLETE YOUR CALL. TO TALK TO A CUSTOMER SERVICE REPRESENTATIVE, PLEASE CALL CUSTOMER SERVICE AT goobley-goobley-star-gooble.

And to think I used to be in love with all this techo-gimickry. Well, I got a blog post out of this.

Tractor Girl

Dutch actress and adventurer Manon Ossevoort driving her tractor across Africa

A young woman from Holland has driven a tractor to the South Pole. She just arrived there this last week. It took her a few weeks or a few years, depending on where you want to start counting.
    She started out many moons ago on a 34 year old farm tractor which she may have driven across Europe and Africa. Or maybe the North Atlantic. The story seems to be more about story telling and dreams than about what actually happened. Maybe you need to read the book. Anyway, Iceland seems to be the last place she was before Johannesburg.

Massey Ferguson 35. Most of the ones on the net have red hoods. Ours was gray, though a bit more faded than this one.

     I was impressed with the age of this tractor, although I probably shouldn't have been. We had two old tractors on the farm (Highwater Orchard, the infamous). One was a compact Massey Ferguson which had an integrated hydraulic lift (also known as a 3 point hitch).

Not ours, but it could have been. Even the headlight is broken.

The other was an ancient Massey Harris 44 where you sat 6 feet off the ground. Old, old, old. At least that's how I remember it. Turns out it was probably no older than I was at the time, which was only about 15.

A little more reading and I find out that Manon started her expedition back in 2005 and got as far as Cape Town and then her luck ran out. Recently her luck improved and she resumed her journey, flying in a Russian cargo plane along with the shiny new tractor provided by Massey Ferguson , to Antarctica.

Once she got to Antarctica it only took her about three weeks to get to the South Pole. While she was pretty much on her own driving across Africa, for this leg of the trip there was a support crew with a couple of trucks. Good idea. I think you'd be pretty foolish to try this all by your lonesome. You might be wondering about driving tractors in Antarctica, but it seems that the first journey that crossed the whole continent used tractors, tractors very similar to the small one we had on the farm, so this trip was a return visit to former glory for the tractor company. All hail the mighty Massey Ferguson!


So now I'm reading about Antarctica and how it's all covered with snow and ice (well, duh), and how it's really thick. So how thick is it? A hundred feet? A couple of hundred feet? Thicker. Remember it's been snowing done there for billions of years and it NEVER melts. Are you ready for this? It's two MILES thick. If we had that much ice here Mt. Hood would be obliterated.

Laser measurement of elevation via Satellite. Vertical distance is exaggerated.

In some places the ice slopes down toward the edges of the continent. In other places there is an abrupt change in elevation. Notice the line of cliffs in the above image. I've only found one mention that climbing up on top of the ice caused any problem. If might be that the abrupt change of elevation occurs in a hundred miles instead of a thousand, so maybe it isn't a big problem.

Trying to put this story together was exceptionally difficult. It might be a gender thing. I thought the video of the cross Antarctic expedition was great. Direct, succinct and to the point. Everything about Tractor Girl was all touchy freely and scattered from here and gone. That's okay, she's done something very cool.

I'm wondering how much of my attraction to this story was because it was done by a woman. Men do crazy things all the time. I'm thinking it must be because there is something to the story. Top Gear is always doing something crazy, usually really stupid, but they manage to make an entertaining story out of it. I think the thing about this story is that Manon is really trying to make things better. Dreams ARE important.

Normally a story like this would be loaded with links, but today you are going to have to fend for yourselves. I've spent way too much time on this already.

P.S.#1 Re: the Massey Harris tractor. Back then I was just beginning my fascination with all things mechanical and the brakes on this tractor threw me for a loop. They were mounted in the side of the transmission, not even remotely close to the rear axle. The brake shoes were mounted to a panel that was bolted over a hole in the side of the transmission. Inside the hole was the brake drum. Weird, but if you consider the size and weight of the rear wheels (probably a ton, being as they were filled with antifreeze), it makes a certain amount of sense. Those wheels are probably the last thing you want to fool with, and we never did. Yes, I know I'm wondering a little, but man, I thought I was done with tractors, and yet here I am.

P.S.#2 Ever notice how there's an extra 'C' in antarctica? Does anyone ever say ant-ark-tik-uh? No, they don't, they say ant-ar-tik-uh. Or maybe that's just me pirate upbringing showing through. Arrrrggghhh!