Veteran

Blue Oyster Cult - Veteran Of The Psychic Wars
BlueOysterWizard
Went to the lab this morning to get my blood drawn. The lab is part of the medical industrial complex, so you have to pay a visit to the registration desk first. 'Papers, please' or the equivalent, but not too many questions, no filling out of forms, and only two signatures required. Don't understand why they need my wife's birth date, nor why they need a signature acknowledging their privacy policy. I mean, it's their policy, not mine. They need proof that they have shown it to me? This is double no-good no-think. Whatever. But then she asks me if I am a veteran, and 'veteran of a thousand psychic wars' line pops into my head. I can remember the tune, sort of, but not where it came from, so I looked it up when I got home and here we are.

P.S. Great comment from the previous YouTube page: This is the kind of music that makes you wanna snort a big bag of plutonian nyborg. - karlbertiljohnsson

Update September 2019 replaced missing video.

Update July 2022 replaced missing video.

Cosmic

Near Occultation of Saturn - Pete Lawrence

Saturn crashed into the moon last Friday. Well, if you were looking, it would have looked like it, except no explosion, no dust cloud. Of course it could have happened somewhere on the dark side and we would never know about it, except of course, it didn't.

Saturn, I think, is visible to the naked eye, but just as a bright spot. This picture tells me you don't need a whole lot of magnification to see the planet well enough to make out the rings.



Moon Saturn Occultation
Via Starts With A Bang! My linking to this website should not be considered an endorsement of the totally ridiculous big bang theory of the origin of the universe. Everyone knows it's turtles all the way down.

Electronicam

Jackie Gleason's String Orchestra with Bobby Hackett trumpet - I'm Through with Love
I know Jackie Gleason as a comedian and actor, but evidently he was also a musical guy, popular enough that his tunes came to be known as 'Gleason make-out music'.

Reading a little more about Jackie, I came across the Eletronicam, which was used to record the The Honeymooners.

JACKIE GLEASONS'S "HONEYMOONERS" is filmed by Du Mont Electronicam System which incorporates an especially desined and adapted 35 mm Mitchell movie camera. Here are Jackie Gleason and Joyce Randolph, right, peering throught the camera lens at Audrey Meadows and Art Carney.

Some people went to a lot of work to put this machine together. I guess television advertising was really paying off. Here's a brief magazine story about this contraption. It's a scanned PDF, but you can enlarge it enough to make it legible. American_Cinematographer - March 1956 - Arthur_Miller Looks At Electronicam

Coincidentally, just a couple of days ago I posted Veritasium's History of Video.

Mitchell Movie Cameras have shown up here before.

Terence Cuneo

Steam Locomotive by Terence Cuneo

Terence was a prolific English painter.

Via Just A Car Guy

Wood

This Is What We Do
I buy lumber occasionally for small home repair projects. I have a chain saw that I use mostly for cutting the end off of the Christmas tree every year. There is a lumber mill near Hagg Lake, which is only about 15 miles away. I see log trucks hauling logs down the highway every now and then. But I can't recall ever seeing a logging operation in progress. Of course, you don't want to get too near this kind of thing. It's kind of like being in a gun battle in the Mideast: all kinds of dangerous shit flying through the air. You don't want to be there unless you know what you are doing and you're getting paid.

I suppose the reason you don't encounter actual in-progress logging operations is because they are very efficient. It doesn't take an army to harvest a hundred acres of trees.

Via Knuckledraggin My Life Away

The Devotion of Suspect X by Keigo Higashino

The Devotion of Suspect X by Keigo Higashino

A murder mystery, but the mystery isn't who dun it (we know that almost immediately). The mystery is which genius will outfox the other in concealing / revealing the culprits. It's not a bad book, but the way the cops keep coming back and poking into people's personal lives (on the pretext of trying to 'clear' them) is getting downright aggravating. I really want our suspects to tell them to ef off. Geez don't these detectives have anything better to do? But this is Japan, so maybe the murder rate is so low that they don't have anything better to do than go rooting around in people's lives. I'm better than halfway through, so there's a chance I will finish it.

Olympic Mills Commerce Center

107 SE Washington Street

Stopped by the architectect's office this afternoon. They had quite a view of the Fremont Bridge (above) until a new building went up next door. Now their view in that direction is blocked.

107 SE Washington St

Their office is in is an old industrial building that has been cleaned up and turned into 'creative spaces'. I suspect most of that is taken up with marketing or software outfits.

Google Streetview of the Olymic Mills Center from the Westside

I had never paid much attention to buildings on the east side of the river, but on our way out I noticed that it is distinctly visible from the west side of downtown.

P.S. Google's Streetview doesn't show the new building. And in between when I took the screenshot shown above (the last photo) and now when I went to get the link so you can see it for yourself, so to speak, the geese disappeared.

P.P.S. I also ran across a 'virtual tour' of the first floor, but once again, now that I want it I can't find it. I'm not too concerned, I mean these things are fairly common now, aren't they?