Stylin' with the Japanese Defense Force

Japanese F-15 with Mt. Tsukuba & Mt. Fuji painted on the wings

Marcel and Chesterton

Alekandr Vesnin’s sets for a stage adaptation of G. K. Chesterton’s novel The Man Who Was Thursday.*

Together again. A fine and timely post on Monday Evening. If you follow the links and read a bit you will encounter this line:

And it is a groove; perhaps there was never anything so groovy.

Are you kidding me? Groovy? A thousand years before Simon and Garfunkel's hit?

* Because I needed a picture for this post, and I wanted something besides a picture of Chesterton (that's Chester-ton, not Chester-son, which is what I have been calling him since forever). And because this is like the Nth time I have heard this book mentioned in the last couple of weeks. Probably have to read it now. Picture found on The Charnel-House.

Machine

2015 Mazda Miata Chassis. Click to embiggenate.

Just because it's a cool picture of the inner workings of a cool machine. The black tubes attached to the left side of the engine (this side) are not exhaust pipes, they are part of the tuned intake manifold. The throttle body is right above the alternator. That girder connecting the transmission to the differential will help make the chassis stiffer but it won't do anything for twisting forces. For that you will need to rely on the body. autoevolution has some more detail photos. I also found a bunch of photos of this chassis that were taken at auto shows that had a red and black background. While at first glance they looked cooler (more dramatic maybe?), closer inspection revealed that they were lacking in detail. Of course to really get a good look at this machine, this picture would need to be ten thousand pixels wide, and ain't nobody got time for that.

Funnies

I think this is from Australia. Via Sky watcher

• Russian army 3D rule: "Beware of military drivers, doctors and dynamite" (Military Photos dot net). 
• Greenpeace Steps Over The Line
• If I was sexist I'd say she's a bitch.

Family Life

Ah, family life! So warm and fuzzy, especially the parts when we have to go to DefCon 2. 
Via defiant daughter.

Study Confirms That Men Are Dumb

Photo: FOX

Every year, the British Medical Journal releases a Christmas edition with some offbeat and silly research. This year, there's a rather morbidly humorous study about which gender is more likely to die as a result of doing something really, really dumb. Spoiler alert: It's men. A team led by Ben Alexander Daniel, a student at the King Edward VI School in the U.K., simply looked at all of the Darwin Award winners between 1995 and 2014 — this, you may recall, is an award given to confirmed instances of people meeting untimely ends as a result of, to phrase it diplomatically, poor decision-making — and calculated the gender breakdown. Males apparently accounted for 88.7 percent of Darwin Award winners during this time span, a result the (all-male) authors wryly offer as evidence in support of "male idiot theory" — "the observation that men are idiots and idiots do stupid things." Pitch-black laughs aside, there's a kernel of an important point here: Researchers have known forever that men, particularly young ones, tend to be more impulsive and engage in more dangerous risk-seeking behavior than women, a fact that shows up in all sorts of public-health data — not to mention in emergency-room records.
Just something to keep in mind as we enter peak drinking-in-freezing-temperatures season. - By Jesse Singal in nymag dot com

Via Detroit Steve.

Sale on Vests!

Yes. Yes it does.

Muslim Terrorist Suicide Vest Shop Found in Mali

Don’t buy your suicide vests from inferior bomb tailors.  Why put up with premature explosions?  Or worse yet, a complete dud suicide vest.  Come on down to the best suicide vest shop in all of Africa, The Mali Maelstrom Mushroom Blast Warehouse!  All our vest bombs go off at precisely the right time.  Our designers and tailors conceal the explosives and fuses so well that you can walk around the house and the wife won’t even know you are wearing it.  Our vests come in camel hide, goat chin hair and Iranian carpet textile configurations.  Explode in STYLE!

Mali 'suicide-vest workshop found’

A workshop to make suicide bomber vests has been discovered in northern Mali, the French army has said. About 5,000kg of fertiliser intended to be used as explosive was also uncovered in Bourem, a town on the Niger River between Gao and Timbuktu.
A sample suicide vest and 18 sewing machines were found and it appears local women were employed there, a French army spokesman told the BBC.

 I don't understand why people who aren't required to go, go to war zones. Soldiers I understand, they have been committed, with or without their consent, but reporters? Does any of the 'news' coming out of these 3rd world hell holes do anyone any good? Yes, things are seriously eff-ed up, but what am I going to do about it? OK, I'll put up a blog post every once in a while, but it's the guys with a financial stake in the outcome who are calling the shots. Literally.

Anyway, I came up with another one of my big ideas: any Westerner who is going anywhere in the Middle East or Africa where they are liable to be kidnapped should wear a suicide bombers vest. Once you have been kidnapped, there is a very slim chance of surviving, so make your exit spectacular and take a few of the shitheads with you. Also might cause them to think twice about kidnapping another Westerner. Oops, that would assume they were even thinking to begin with. My bad.

Inspired by Tam.

P.S. Good story in the NY Times from 2012 about the FBI's pursuit of home grown terrorists. Via SyesWideShut.