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| Mr. No Legs |
He [Ricou Browning] was also intimately involved with “Flipper” and “Gentle Ben”. He directed two movies, “Salty” and “Mr. No Legs“, the latter of which sent me down a rabbit hole based on the description (from an obit Lawrence sent me): “centered on a man with shotguns built into his wheelchair”.
The man in the wheelchair was Ted Vollrath.
I dunno, I guess I just get a kick out of people building guns into everyday things.
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| '56 Ford Victoria |
Twenty odd years ago, when Osmany was still living in Cuba, he was doing very well, making money hand over fist from several, probably-not-totally legal, enterprises, things like dealing in computer parts, modifying cars to go racing and gambling on those races. Today I asked him if things were going so well for him, why did he leave? He tells me that as long as you don't get too big, the government won't bother you, but if you become too big or too successful, the government will smack you down. One guy he knew was making and selling plastic flowers and became too successful, so the government arrested him, charged him as enemy of the state and confiscated everything he owned, his house, his car, his business and all the equipment. He saw too many instances of this and decided to get out.
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| A Lego brick representing a carbon atom and models of 11 simple compounds containing carbon, nitrogen, or oxygen. |
Atom color assignments:The 8 studs on a 2 × 4 Lego brick conveniently represent the outer shell of electrons for carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen atoms. We used Lego bricks to model these atoms, which are then joined together to form molecules by following the Lewis octet rule. A variety of small biological molecules can be modeled in this way, such as most amino acids, fatty acids, glucose, and various intermediate metabolites. Model building with these familiar toys can be a helpful, hands-on exercise for learning—or re-learning—biochemical pathways. © 2017 by The International Union of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, 46(1):54–57, 2018.
From Fillyjonk's progress
Only a small fraction of the population read anything longer than a tweet, and only a fraction of those people understand what they read. Most people operate using speech and social cues to get along and go along. The people who are organizing violent attacks might have a brain, but the people who actually commit the attacks haven't read diddly, much less understood it. The powerful are only interested in eliminating anyone who threatens their power, and the only people who are capable of doing that are the ones with brains, the ones who read. So the government's plan to eliminate all badthink makes perfect sense. Keep your head down.
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| South Route Up Mt. Everest - Zeb Blais |
I'm reading Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer, a story about the 1996 Mount Everest climbing disaster and I come across this bit on page 81:
So it came to pass that at 4:45 A.M. on Saturday, April 13, I found myself at the foot of the fabled Icefall [first label above Basecamp in the above image], strapping on my crampons if the frigid predawn gloom.
Crusty old alpinists who've survived a lifetime of close scrapes like to counsel young protégés that staying alive hinges on listening carefully to one's "inner voice." Tales abound of one or another climber who decided to remain in his or her sleeping bag after detecting some inauspicious vibe in the ether and thereby survived a catastrophe that wiped out others who failed to heed the portents.
I didn't doubt the potential value of paying attention to subconscious cues. As I waited for Rob to lead the way, the ice underfoot emitted a series of loud cracking noises, like small trees being snapped in two, and I felt myself wince with each pop and rumble from the glacier's shifting depths. Problem was, my inner voice resembled Chicken Little: it was screaming that I was about to die but it did that almost every time I laced up my climbing boots.
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| #Manhole |
It was either Nietzsche or Tex Avery — but one of our great philosophers — who asserted that there are two types of people in this world: those who walk through life blithely unbothered by manholes, and those who are destined to fall into them.
The whole review is pretty great. Maybe someday I'll write a review that great, but I ain't holding my breath.
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