We Make Our Money The Old Fashioned Way

We print it. This popped up as an ad on YouTube, but it doesn't sound like an ad. Just what is he selling? He's selling GQ, or rather GQ is using him to 'sell' subscriptions to their YouTube channel. It doesn't cost you anything except your time, but that's all advertisers want, just a little of your time.

It seems he's telling the truth. ABC News and Wikipedia have stories about him. In any case, he's only the latest in a long line of super counterfeiters.

China Marches On

Taiyuan, China, Nov. 14, 2014. A Long March-2C carrier rocket carrying the Yaogan-23 remote sensing satellite blasts off from the launch pad at the Taiyuan Satellite Launch Center. The launch marks the 198th flight of the Long March rocket series.(Xinhua/Yan Yan)

Flight Deck Fashion

ATLANTIC OCEAN (Nov. 14, 2014) An F/A-18C Hornet from the Valions of Strike Fighter Squadron launches from the flight deck of the aircraft carrier USS George H. W. Bush. U.S. Navy photo by Brian Stephens

Making Jet Engines is Hard

IL-76 Flying Test Bed (FTB) in Russia

India has been trying to make their own jet engines for the Tejas jet fighter since 1986. In 1977 they did successfully design and build a jet engine. The GTRE GTX-35V Kaveri project isn't going so well. They have only gotten it to run for 73 hours on the flying test bed.

Escape From East Germany

After WW2, the West was subsidizing West Germany and West Berlin, while the Soviet Union was extracting reparations. At least they were trying to. It was kind of like trying to squeeze blood from a turnip. Consequently the standard of living was plummeting in the East and people were fleeing in droves to the West, which didn't sit well with their new overlords and so the Berlin Wall was built to stop this white flight. People still kept trying to emigrate. Some of them succeeded. Some of them didn't. Failure usually meant prison or death. Here are some clever guys who made it. The linked stories make some interesting reading.


I hired Ivo to do some plumbing work on my house. He escaped from the Czechoslovakia with his girlfriend in 1986. They were both from the same small town. They went on vacation to Albania (now Slovenia), at the North end of the Adriatic, right next to Italy. They took their papers and cash, put them in a waterproof container, and swam across the bay to Trieste. It took them two years to get to the United States. Ivo's younger brother was opposed to him leaving, but his older sister was very in much in favor of it.

Zdenek Pohl and Robert Ospald

These two hippies built a couple of chairs to hang from the neutral wires on high tension towers. They climbed a 180 foot tower in the middle of the night and pulled themselves, hand over hand, across the border. Took them five hours to travel 300 yards.

Bernd Boettger's and his Diver Propulsion Vehicle (DPV)

Bernd Boettger tried swimming across the border via the Baltic sea, but was caught and spent a year in jail. For his next attempt he built a gasoline powered tractor to tow him. Took him 15 miles when he was picked up by a Danish lightship.

Here are a couple who didn't.

Daniela Walther with her grandparents

 Daniela's father tried to walk his family across the border on August 13, 1961, the same day construction started on the wall. Her mother's nerve failed her and they were caught. Her father spent eight years in jail. Daniela was sent to live with her grandparents. Her family eventually got to West Germany when they were ransomed.

Dr. Gerhard Wagner, Kaiserslautern, designed and built this aircraft to enable his family of five to escape from East to West Germany in 1981. It was never flown. The family were arrested the day before their planned escape and imprisoned for one year. They were then deported to the Federal Republic of Germany, i.e. West Germany. Wait a minute, he's sent to prison for trying to go, and when he gets out he's sent there? He may have been ransomed by West Germany.  Photo by Cplakidas. The airplane is at Deutsches Museum.

Cherry Tree

Google Street View shows the house is still there.

Stu lost a cherry tree. More accurately, it died and he had it converted into a telescope stand. Reading his post for the second time today I was reminded of a tree in our backyard when I was a lad in Seattle. I think something similar must have happened because Dad cut off the upper branches leaving four stout branches projecting from the top of the trunk. He then built a skeleton platform out of two-by-two's for me and my friends to climb on. I vaguely remember it being a cherry tree, or rather the bark on the remaining sticks was very cherry-tree like. I wonder if Dad applied salt to the cut ends of the branches.

The Positive Way

I am not quite sure how I feel about this. On one hand it looks like we might be working our way around to a serious fight. I mean, Madison Avenue Versus the DEA? Would you want to bet on the outcome of this fight? On the other hand this might be the best thing that has happened to this country in a long time. From a story on The Guardian, via Posthip Scott.

I wonder how long they agonized over the accent. There is just a slight touch of the Rastafarian accent, so slight you might not even notice it, and certainly nothing like what you get in this tune:


Snow - Informer (Official Music Video)
RHINO

Update August 2022 replaced missing Snow video.