Basketball History

The Greatest Basketball Team You’ve Never Heard Of | The Goodyear Akron Wingfoots
This ad, or something like it, played during the game last night between the Portland Trail Blazers and the Denver Nuggets. The winged foot comes from the Roman god Mercury and was the trademark of the Goodyear tire & rubber company before their basketball team got started. It's a sure fit for the basketball team. The Akron Wingfoots disbanded during WW2 due to the shortage of men.

The Blazers won last nights game, though it took FOUR overtime periods to get there, something that hasn't happened in the NBA since 1953. The game started at 7:40 and didn't end till 11:10, which means it lasted three and a half hours. Both teams are getting pretty beat up with falls and collisions resulting in bruises, strains and sprains. Several players clocked a full hour of playing time which has got to be exhausting given that the average time on the floor is more like 20 or 30 minutes.

The power of internet people

1927 Chrysler

In the Middle of the Right is working on an old car and chronicling as he goes:

So I commented below that I needed a distributor drive gear for the '27 Chrysler.
And someone commented and pointed to a gear set that was available at, believe it or not, JC Whitney.
and, while that ISN'T the correct gear, I called the listed manufacturer, who didn't have the right gear, but suggested a third party, who pointed me to a fourth, who gave me the number of a FIFTH party, who ACTUALLY HAD THE GEAR.
It'll be here Monday or Tuesday.
Many thanks to commenter "Knucklehead" for the help.

I've never heard of a distributor gear wearing out, but then I've never worked on anything that was older than dirt.

I remember we used to get JC Whitney catalogs, actual printed on paper catalogs. They had everything you could possibly need for your car, and a lot of stuff that nobody needed. I bought a couple of things from them, but it didn't work out.

Italy 1948 Part 2

Ninotchka (1/10) Movie CLIP - Don't Make An Issue of My Womanhood (1939) HD
A couple of weeks ago I posted a bit about werewolves and the defeat of the Communist Party in the 1948 elections in Italy. Today we have a post by Scott Grønmark about Greta Garbo and James Angleton and the same event.

The Ghost: The Secret Life of CIA Spymaster James Jesus Angleton

"Angleton... interrupted one embassy meeting in Rome in early 1948 to ask Ambassador James Dunn if he might offer an idea...
"I thought," he began mischievously, "we might take advantage of one of America's greatest natural resources: Greta Garbo...I realise she once belonged to another country," Angleton said, "but I believe by now we're justified in claiming her as our own. So I suggest we import one of her best pictures. " he paused. "I'd like to expose the Italians to Ninotchka."...
Ninotchka... was a comedy in which Garbo spoofed Stalinist Russia. The ambassador ratified Angleton's proposal on the spot. Actually,  Angleton wasn't the only wise guy with this idea. The Hollywood studios had printed extra copies of Ninotchka and made special arrangements to show the film in Italy as a way of contrasting golden America with ravaged Russia. At the end of the meeting, Agleton supposedly quipped , "Miss Garbo will prove a most lethal secret weapon."
And so she did. The Christian Democrats emerged from the election of April 1948 with 48% of the vote and an absolute majority in parliament."

So was it Greta's light touch, or the CIA's heavy hand that tipped the election? Hard to tell at this distance which one had a larger effect.

High Precision

High precision air bearing CNC lathe and grinder
Verily, the mind doth boggle. Previous post about high precision.

CRM

Core Rope Memory Necklace

I'm am nearing the end of Gnomon by Nick Harkaway. It's a pretty amazing book. It seems that on every page there is a new-to-me word and an obscure historical reference. CRM, or Core Rope Memory, is the last one I encountered. In the story they are using it as a key to gain entrance to a computer program, the idea being that the technology is so obsolete no one will recognize it for what it is, which is essentially a sequence of bits. Security through obfuscation.

Apollo spacecraft CRM Module

The computer in the Apollo spacecraft used this type of memory to store its program, it is essentially ROM (Read Only Memory), not to be confused with Magnetic Core Memory which was used as RAM. Both types used small ferrite rings, but the wiring and control circuits were completely different.

C.R.M. 114 from Dr. Stranglove

I mention this to older son and he tells me that there was a CRM114 secure radio system in Stanley Kubrick's movie Dr. Strangelove.

Turns out this same designation has been used in a number of places, including Back To The Future.

CRM114 from Back To The Future

Here, the CRM114 also makes an appearance in the opening scene where Marty walks into Doc's house and turns on the guitar amplifier (the 25 second mark in this video).

Car of the Day

Jaguar Race Car from New Zealand

What kind of maniac would take a vintage Jaguar sports car and turn it into a Frankenstein monster? Must be some kind of nuts. Turns out the whole thing is custom built, the body is fiberglass and the frame is tubular steel. How they got to this point must be a tortured story. I'm not sure I want to know.

New Zealand seems to have more than its share of racing extremists.

Via Just A Car Guy

Living the Dream

Dig To Build The Best Secret Swimming Pool Underground House
This is strangest thing I've seen today. I'll leave off talking about stagnant water and no drain, but maybe the water seeps out through the dirt, and maybe they only use it for a few days before they go build another one. It looks like they know what they are doing, which means they might have done this before, like a couple of dozen times, or maybe even hundreds. Or maybe they were just working up to this so they could make a video and no one is even going to use it because it's out in the jungle. I wonder how long it took them to build this. They are very fast, and the dirt is soft, but that's still a chunk of dirt to move.