What, me racist?

The Archangel Michael trampling Satan - Guido Reni, 1636

There is another tempest in a teapot brewing over St. Michael and the Black Rifle Coffee Company because of some rumor.

The only people this affects are those who have pushed their way onto the stage and are being supported by a wave of public adoration. Make one little slip and the trolls will be all over you. Live by the adoration of your fans, die by being ignored.

Soviet Ilyushin Il-28

North Korea's 1940s Bomber Still Serving 2022
Mark Felton Productions

The Il-28 first flew in 1948. And I thought the B-52 was old.

Nutcracker

Zinc Nut Cracker Set

We had Thanksgiving dinner yesterday instead of Thursday due to the scheduling demands of the medical-industrial complex. Andy brought a bag of unshelled nuts. I can't remember the last time I had an unshelled nut. These days if we want nuts we buy them already shelled. Now I know why.

When I was a kid we had a nutcracker set like the one shown above. I think ours was steel. I can't imagine zinc ones would last too long, but maybe they don't have to as people will quickly abandon them. I don't have one of those, but I have a pair of Channellock pliers, so I set to work. Dang, these nuts are tough and if you aren't careful you won't just crack the shell but you will crush the contents as well. Cracking the shell is just the first part of the job. Now you get to separate the bits of meat from the remnants of the shell. A pick like the ones in the above set would have been useful here. After maybe half an hour I had maybe a quarter cup of meat, and most of that was tiny pieces the size of a BB.

So now I'm wondering how commercial nut farms get the job done. Do they ship their nuts over to slave labor camps where impoverished peasants spend all day cracking nuts for their cup of gruel? No, this is America where everything is done by machine.

All In One Pecan Nut Buster
chris dailey

Near as I can tell, these machines are adjusted to the size of the nut and the nuts are squeezed between two wheels that just the right distance apart. This cracks the shell without smashing the innards. Then a fan separates the wheat from the chaff.

I probably cracked a couple of dozen nuts and I think I only got one half of one walnut out intact. All the rest were busted. I think I got a little better in cracking technique as I went on, but a hard limit on the crushing would probably have helped.

The nutcracker set included six picks. Why so many? Because it took six times as long to pick the bits of meat out of the broken shell as it took to crack. You could have six people sitting around a table with a bowl of nuts. One person takes a nut and cracks and then hands the nutcracker to the next person. Now they set to work picking out the bits of meat. By the time they are done, the nutcracker has made its way around the table and you are ready to crack the next nut. Not an efficient way of getting things done, more like keeping your hands busy while you are jabbering with your fellows. Kind of like wrapping coins or knitting.

P.S. I'm surprised no one has come up with a better manual nutcracker. Or maybe I just haven't seen one. A better nutcracker would need two things, 1) an adjustable stop to easily limit the amount of crush, and 2) a sliding action to roll the nut in between the two jaws. The sliding jaws would need to move a couple of inches to ensure at least one complete revolution of the nut. You may want to go for two revolutions, just to cover the off cases at the beginning and end of a crushing rotation.

Under the Queen's Umbrella - Netflix Series

Under the Queen's Umbrella | Official Trailer | Netflix
The Swoon

Here we go again with another Korean historical drama involving machinations in the royal court. It's mostly about the queen, the king's mother and the king's ten other wives and all the petty and not so petty intrigue going on. The king's mother seems to very pleasant on the surface, but it is slowly being revealed that underneath she is a murderous thug, just like everyone who has climbed to the top of the heap. The king's wives are all trying to promote their sons into positions of power, but like all teenage boys they just want to get out of the palace where they are confined and are constantly being watched. So far they haven't figured out that they are just pawns in this real life chess game and their lives may be forfeit if they are not played correctly.

Seems like we have seen a bunch of these kind of shows. I mean I'm starting to recognize some of the buildings and the costumes are all very similar. From the way they look they all seem to be set right around the same time. Shoot some of them may be about the same exact events, just told from a different point of view.

Grand Rapids

Pergiel Building
1036 Butterworth St SW
Grand Rapids, Michigan

Diligent daughter and I were looking at the Pergiel building (zoom in and you can read the name in the stone near the top) on Google Maps the other day. Today we want to look at it again, but we can't remember where it is or what led us to it last time. Went and rooted through my files and couldn't find anything. Finally pulled up Google Maps and searched for Sacred Heart church. Then I remember that the building was built at an angle, and there was a big dirt parking lot there. I noticed Butterworth runs at an angle, so I pulled up the satellite view and presto - there it is.

I writing this down so I will have some record of where it is. My grandfather built this building to house his bakery before WW2. Rumor has it that back then he was a competitor to Sunshine, but then the war and rationing and the draft came along and running a bakery got to be pretty thin. My dad worked there for a while before the army gobbled him up and shipped him off to Alaska and the Pacific.

Fun with Legos

20 Mechanical Principles combined in a Useless Lego Machine
Brick Experiment Channel
The Lego universe is constantly expanding. Seems like every time I take a peek into this world I find new  bits of Lego.

Via Ross

Soviet Spies

A huge poster, pasted on a corner site in Moscow, advertising the film Who Are You, Dr. Sorge? © Getty Images / Bettmann

RT has a story about Manfred Ramminger, a German businessman who stole a Sidewinder missile and shipped it to Moscow back in the 1960's. Not surprisingly he came to a bad end.

I found the above picture in that same story. The movie is about another Soviet spy who also came to a bad end. I find it a little curious that the film was shown in Moscow. Maybe I just can't quite grasp the version of double-no-good double-think that was en vogue in Moscow back in the 1960's.