Blowing Up a Truck Tire Just For Fun

Exploding GIANT Truck Tire with 4500 psi Compressor
Beyond the press

It's nice to see wives in videos with their husbands.

Nuclear Battery

This New Nuclear Battery Could Soon Go On the Market
Sabine Hossenfelder

I came across a story yesterday about how the US Department of Energy gave nuclear battery technology to China. Well, given how eff-ed up the Federal Government is, that's just par for the course. Today this video shows up. She talks about various technical aspects of nuclear battery, but she doesn't even touch the political swamp. Can't say as I blame her. So I go looking for the story I saw yesterday, it was probably on one of them that right-wing extremist websites where all us Biden haters hang out, but nada. So I asks the great and benevolent Google and I get this from NPR (National Public Radio), that bastion of left wing ideology. 

The U.S. made a breakthrough battery discovery — then gave the technology to China

Flat Tracker

Speedway Motorcycle

The caption on this jigsaw puzzle is 'Speedway Bike With Weslake Engine'. When I ask Google I get a bunch of pictures of very similar bikes, but none of the engines match. Most of the ones I saw looked like they were overhead cam, single cylinder engines and the cam was driven by a shaft, ala Ducati (here and buried way down in a long post from six years ago). Shades of MV Agusta. The side of this one looks like a chain case, which kind of implies that the cam is driven by a chain. Which is the choice of any sane person. Shaft drive for camshafts is for rich kids. It's art, basically. Basically it's a bigger version of a fancy watch.

All arrows seem to point to Wikipedia's article about Weslake & Co. The short opening is about the company, but after that it's all about Harry Weslake. His life story is intertwined with mechanical engineering and motor racing. There were a couple of instances that stood out, but when you look at these histories (they're both the same) those particular instances are buried in a story that contains a giant heap of similar incidents. I haven't read them, they are too long for me. Maybe tomorrow if I get some sleep tonight.

Previous Flat Tracker

Biden and Hamas, two of a kind

LNG tanker © Getty Images / nikkytok

Qatar is sheltering Hamas leadership. In my book that means they are supporting Hamas. Israel is currently engaged in destroying Hamas. Meanwhile the Houthis in Yemen are attacking shipping in the Red Sea, ostensibly in support of Hamas. Qatar is a big exporter of LNG (Liquified Natural Gas) and now they are worried that the Houthis are going to attack their ships. RT has the story. These guys have too much money and not enough brains.

Meanwhile fucking Joe Biden blows up the Nord Stream pipeline so now Europe needs another source of natural gas. They can buy it from the USA, which gets Joe some support, or they can buy it from other places, like Qatar, who is supporting terrorism. You can argue that blowing up the Nord Stream pipeline was an act of terrorism, so fucking Joe Biden has made the USA another terrorist organization, just like Hamas. What a piece of shit.

This and That

WICKED

I'm working the Sunday Jumble and one of the words, after it's been unscrambled, is WICKED. Now WICKED is a perfectly cromulant word. You might notice that the first four letters of WICKED is WICK. WICKED looks like a past tense of the verb WICK, but I don't think WICK is a verb unless you are referring to someone's violent actions, like 'he went all John WICK on the bad guys'. But WICK, as far as I know, is a noun, not a verb, so you can't have a world like WICKED unless you are making it out of some other kind of WICK. Maybe we should look up WICKED and see what we find:

wicked - evil or morally wrong.

Origin Middle English: probably from Old English wicca ‘witch’ + -ed1.

But there's something funny about tacking ED onto the end of WICK. If you tack ED onto the end of some verb like CALL you get CALLED, but you do not pronounce the ED like you do in WICKED, It's more like CALL'D, whereas with WICKED you get a distinctive ED sound at the end. Or maybe that's just me.

I looked around for some code to embed some audio clips, but I got nowhere. Probably wasn't holding my mouth right.

SUBTITLES

We're watching the Portland Trail Blazers basketball game this evening and I notice that the subtitles have gotten turned on. They don't seem to bother my wife and she's the devoted fan, but they bug me. They cover the top, I dunno, 20% maybe, of the screen and they don't really interfere with watching the game, being as they are usually giving us long shots so we can see the whole of the action. The court occupies the middle half of the screen, so the top and bottom quarters of the screen are just noise, you can fill them with whatever you want and it won't interfere with the game. Vital information goes in the bottom quarter and the top quarter is just the audience, so the subtitles can go up there. But they bug me, so I turned them off.

After the game we switched to True Detective on HOMAX or whatever it's called, and now I gotta turn the subtitles back on again.

So what's the diff? When we're watching the game, the announcer fills the sound track and it's like a pleasant hum of background noise. Nothing he says is of any import, but we've been listening to him for years and whenever the Blazers play in some foreign city we sometimes get foreign announcers, and those guys just grate on me.

When we are watching shows off the internet, be it Netflix, Prime or HOBOAX, we like to listen to the dialog, but sometimes we can't quite hear what they're saying, either because they talk so quietly, or background noise, or an accent, or, what's probably the worst, is when they make a quick out-of-character quip and you have nothing to grasp onto that will help your mind make sense of what they said. So we turn on the subtitles,

Yesterday I said that I don't listen to people unless they are right in front of me. That's not exactly true, I listen to TV dramatic shows, and I watch YouTube videos. I think the difference might be that they are like basketball games, I'm watching the action and the audio track is just warm background noise. I suspect that I keep going back to the same ones because I like the sound of their voice, or at least not repelled, which some voices do.

 

Trump, Not Trump

Donald Trump on the campaign trail in Las Vegas, Nevada June 18, 2016. REUTERS/David Becker/Files

The Scratching Post has a great post about Trump. I especially like his opening statement:

Donald Trump as a candidate is primal scream therapy for the right. He is the embodiment of our rage against the corrupt news media, the incompetent expert class and the neo-Nazi education industry.

Righteous anger is all good fun until you're hitting serious troubles and then it actively prevents working on solutions.

Good advice if you want to get serious.

But let me wander off the straight and narrow and out into the weeds where we can smell the car tires burning. The best thing about Trump is the way he is able to turn half of the country into deranged lunatics just by opening his mouth. I don't have that problem, I never listen to him. Shoot, the only people I listen to are actual people who are right in front of me. My politics are pretty much driven by the price of gold and gasoline, and since both parties are spending money like drunken sailors, I don't expect any improvement within the, well, ever, actually.

I suppose things could get better if we purged all the corrupt officials, but I'm a little afraid that might look like gang warfare. Now I'm wondering if any countries had any success in rooting out corruption, so I asked ChatGPT:

Yes, several countries have undertaken successful campaigns to root out corruption. It's important to note that the success of such campaigns can vary, and eradicating corruption is an ongoing challenge. Here are a few examples:

Singapore: Singapore is often cited as a success story in combating corruption. The country implemented strict anti-corruption measures and established institutions like the Corrupt Practices Investigation Bureau (CPIB). The government's commitment to transparency and accountability has contributed to Singapore's relatively low levels of corruption.

Hong Kong: Hong Kong has a strong anti-corruption framework, and the Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC) has been effective in investigating and prosecuting cases of corruption. The ICAC's success is often attributed to its independence and the support it receives from the public.

Rwanda: Rwanda has made significant progress in reducing corruption. The government implemented anti-corruption reforms, established an ombudsman office, and promoted a culture of accountability. Rwanda's efforts have been recognized internationally for their impact on reducing corruption levels.

Georgia: Georgia has been praised for its successful anti-corruption initiatives. The country implemented comprehensive reforms, including the digitization of public services to minimize opportunities for corruption. These efforts have contributed to improvements in Georgia's corruption perception rankings.

Denmark: Denmark consistently ranks high on global corruption perception indices. The country's success is attributed to a combination of factors, including a strong legal framework, transparent institutions, and a culture of integrity.

It's important to note that the effectiveness of anti-corruption campaigns often depends on a combination of legal reforms, institutional strength, public awareness, and international cooperation. Additionally, addressing corruption is an ongoing process, and countries may face new challenges over time.

Notice that all of these countries are small places. I'm wondering if there is a critical mass above which corruption is inevitable. 

If it's Trump vs. Biden in the next election, I'll be voting for Trump. I find it hard to imagine that the Democrats will put Biden up again, but nothing anybody in the top tier is doing makes any sense. The Democrats could put up a literal sock puppet and with their lock on the media, they could make it look like the answer to our prayers. God help us.

Monsieur Spade

Variety reviews movies and TV shows and some of those reviews are good reading, like this one. Unfortunately, Variety's website was evidently designed by some troglodyte because the page won't sit still long enough for me to read it. It keeps hopping about. Today I'm trying to read this review, which seems pretty good, but then the page jumps and it keeps jumping. I finally got irritated enough to copy the text and paste it here so I could read it in peace. Dang troglodytes.

Monsieur Spade Courtesy of AMC

‘Monsieur Spade’ Makes Clive Owen a Classic Noir Hero in the Best Kind of Fanfiction By Alison Herman

Clive OWEN in Monsieur Spade. Photo Credit: Jean-Claude Lother/AMC

All works of IP exploitation are, on some level, legitimized fanfiction. Once divorced from the original author, the line that separates a franchise’s sequel, prequel or reboot from the average post on Wattpad is a great deal of money and the blessing of an estate and/or corporation. But even with this baseline, the AMC limited series “Monsieur Spade” is an especially unabashed act of wish fulfillment through and for a beloved protagonist. The namesake of “Monsieur Spade” is none other than Sam Spade (Clive Owen), the private investigator who headlined the Dashiell Hammett novel turned John Huston film noir “The Maltese Falcon,” plus a handful of Hammett short stories published in the 1930s. For their spin on Spade, series creators Tom Fontana (“Oz”) and Scott Frank (“The Queen’s Gambit”) send the sleuth to the south of France, where he spends a few weeks of his not-so-peaceful retirement looking into a massacre at a local convent.

Most of “Monsieur Spade” is set in 1963, two years after the death of Spade’s real-life creator. In stepping out of Hammett’s shadow, Fontana, Frank and Owen — also an executive producer — allow themselves to embrace the fantasy of sending an acerbic American to an idyllic vacation spot. (“Monsieur Spade” filmed on location, so the trio were effectively sending themselves, too.) Sure enough, there are ample scenes of Owen luxuriating in a pool or enjoying an omelet al fresco. But while “Monsieur Spade” indulges in escapism, it’s also a compact crime yarn that does right by both its setting and its predecessors.

Spade arrives in the small commune of Bozouls in 1955, though he and his new neighbors still speak in the dry, quippy rat-a-tat of films from decades prior. (When a colleague tells Sam he’s watching his weight, Sam instantly volleys back: “Watching it do what?”) He’s been tasked with delivering a child named Teresa (Cara Bottom) to safety, leaving her with some local nuns when her grandmother refuses to help. What starts as a quick pit stop turns more permanent when Spade falls in love with a local woman named Gabrielle (Chiara Mastroianni), which means he’s still around — albeit widowed — eight years later when six of those nuns are brutally murdered for no apparent reason.

The immediate suspect is Teresa’s father, Philippe Saint-Andre (Jonathan Zaccai), a career thief who’s suddenly reappeared in Bozouls after a prolonged absence. From there, “Monsieur Spade” builds out a largely Francophone ensemble that makes Bozouls more than a scenic backdrop. Local police chief Patrice (Denis Ménochet) enlists Spade to help with the investigation, so the expat takes a break from his day job: co-owning a jazz club with the beautiful singer Marguerite (Louise Bourgoin). (What did I say about wish fulfillment?) Marguerite’s husband, Jean-Pierre (Stanley Weber), is a veteran of the Algerian War of Independence, a conflict and ensuing colonial hangover that starts to loom increasingly large over the mystery as Spade starts to unravel it.

Spade’s bumbling British neighbors, mother and son Cynthia (Rebecca Root) and George Fitzsimmons (Matthew Beard) provide some comic relief as “Monsieur Spade” drifts between lighthearted lark and life-or-death stakes. Anchoring it all is Owen, whose hangdog look and weathered handsomeness are both well-suited to playing an aging legend half a world from home. All of “Monsieur Spade” is a repurposing of the familiar with a slight twist; the sight of the once suit-and-fedora clad Spade in a turquoise polo is a sight gag in itself. So it’s unsurprising the show leans into tropes elsewhere, like the begrudging rapport between Sam and his quasi-ward Teresa. You can find the same dynamic on “The Last of Us,” and in countless stories before it.

Sometimes, you wish “Monsieur Spade” leaned a little harder into the subversion: as the mystery unfolds, the Arab community of Bozouls starts to play a larger role, but they’re still peripheral to a story that ultimately hinges on France’s ugly, still-unresolved past. But that’s not what the show is here to do. “Monsieur Spade” builds out Bozouls just enough to be as convincing a canvas for Sam’s skill set as a fog-swathed San Francisco. It exists to give Spade his own form of happily-ever-after — to reassure us that, even if Hammett never showed it, one of his leading men lived on, and still does.

The first episode of “Monsieur Spade” premieres on AMC, AMC+ and Acorn TV at 9pm on Jan. 14, with subsequent episodes airing weekly on Sundays.

I don't think we have access to AMC, so we probably won't watch it, but being long time fan of Sam Spade and his ilk, I still enjoyed the review.