Middle of Nowhere

The BEST Place To Stop For Gas For Private Planes
Bill Allen

Dumas, Texas? Where's that? Middle of the Texas panhandle, 50 miles north of Amarillo:

Nashville to Las Vegas via Dumas, Texas

The Valero McKee Oil Refinery is seven miles northeast of Dumas. The land is so flat you can see the refinery from Dumas. The site looks about like you might expect:

Valero McKee Oil Refinery

The Center for Land Use Interpretation gives us a short summary:

This oil refinery, located on 5,000 acres near the Panhandle town of Sunray, is one of a few refineries in western Texas. It has a capacity of 200,000 barrels per day, making it medium-large relative to the others in the State. It employs around 450 people, and produces a wide range of petroleum products including gasoline, jet fuel, diesel, asphalt, sulfur, sulfuric acid, and liquefied petroleum gas (LPG). It is connected to a network of pipelines that bring crude oil from Kansas, Colorado, and Oklahoma, as well as from the Gulf, and the Permian Basin. Most of its products leave the plant via pipeline as well. It is likely the most widely connected of the dozen refineries owned by Valero in the USA. Valero, based in San Antonio, is one of the largest refiners in the country.

Looking for pictures of this place I found some cool images, so I uploaded them to Jigsaw Planet.

McKee Refinery 1

House of the Dragon

House of the Dragon | Official Trailer | Max
Max  

Only now that I am writing this did I realize the title of the show was not House of Dragons, but rather House of the Dragon. I don't suppose it makes any difference.

The show started off this evening with the narrator speaking in Valerian or Targaryen, some made up language live Elvish or Klingon. He's droning along and there is a translator speaking at the same time, but softly. Then we get to the court and a couple of words pop out: 'princess' and 'cousin'. Okay, those two bits of information might be important. I'm not too worried, eventually they will feel the mood has been set and they can switch to English. But then we get to people speaking and they are still speaking this made up language so maybe we need the subtitles. Pop up that menu and what do we see? Audio is set to Polish! Well, that would explain why it sounds like gibberish, so I set it to English and we restarted the show.

Right off the queen is pregnant and she reminds her daughter that her battlefield is bearing children. She dies giving birth. In spite of all our medical advances, childbearing is still a risky business. The risk might be low,  maybe one death out of several thousand pregnancies, but it is not zero. Kind of weird that no one ever talks about it. I guess it's kind of like bad car wrecks, everyone knows they are awful when they happen, but usually they happen to someone else so they are not worth discussing.

It looks like they might take a closer look at the whole dragon thing. They start with a dozen dragons and some eggs. Beyond being cool and awesome, postulating the existence of dragons raises some interesting questions, like:

• where would you keep them?
• how much do they eat?
• what kind of metabolism must they have in order to support flight?

Enquiring minds want to know.

My previous explanation of dragons:

I prefer to think the dragon legends come down to us from a previous civilization that had mechanized, flying war machines like the A-10 Warthog. After that civilization collapsed and the art of heavier-than-air aircraft was lost, how would you explain something like an A-10 to your kids? "There were fire breathing monsters that flew through the air and destroyed everything in their path". That's how.

A related show: Damsel

Dope Lemon - Hey You

DOPE LEMON - Hey You (Official Music Video)
Dope Lemon

The Billinudgel Hotel is about 80 miles south of Brisbane on Australia's east coast. I don't understand the urge to dress up in goofy costumes. Shoot, I don't understand the appeal of costume parties or even tattoos, but evidently it does appeal to a lot of folks. I do like the tune.

Toy Terminator

I Made Real-life Airsoft AIM-ASSIST: Aimbot V3
Excessive Overkill

Someone, somewhere, is busy working on building a Mark I Terminator in their basement.

A Man In Full

A MAN IN FULL Trailer (2024) Jeff Daniels, Lucy Liu
ONE Media

Jeff Daniels does a good job portraying Charlie Croker, an obnoxious, belligerent Atlanta real estate tycoon who has run to the limits of his credit. Now the bankers are coming for him. We also have:

• the mayor who is trying to ensure his victory in the upcoming election by digging up dirt on his opponent.
• his secretary's husband who has gotten arrested for fighting with a cop over a parking infraction.
• the weasley banker who is seeking revenge for past humiliations at the hands of Charlie.
• an assortment of lovely women: his wife, his ex-wife and Lucy Liu.

There is an old joke about if you owe the bank a hundred grand, you have a problem, but if you owe the bank a hundred million, the bank has a problem. That applies here.

Stu

Stu Savory and SWMBO

Stu posted A short history of photography. He has some curious pictures.

Scrappy

The Most Insane Bush Plane in the World
Missionary Bush Pilot

All that equipment makes the airplane heavy. That big prop surely needs a big engine. Sign on the side of the engine cowling says Lycoming 780. I've never even heard of such an engine. Basically he took a 8 cylinder Lycoming 720 and installed larger pistons. Post on Instagram explains:

This is the only 780 cubic inch Lycoming in the world. When I built this engine I made my own entire induction system and searched until I found a wide deck case. This was so I could machine and open up the case to allow larger pistons. I could then put the Lycoming piston kit that would convert a Lycoming 360 to a 390. These same pistons now bolt to what was a 720 wide deck Lycoming and made the only 780 cubic inch in the world.

Kudos to Mike Patey for building such an outrageous machine. With all that heavy equipment can it even get off the ground? Yes, yes it can:

Scrappy