Archive for the ‘Bookmarks’ Category

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 219

Wednesday, November 4th, 2020

I had a long day and a late night yesterday. I had videos queued up for Tuesday and I have stuff queued up for the Thursday holiday, but I didn’t manage to get anything enqueued for today.

So here’s two longish things, one of which bends the rules a little bit:

“Tubular Bells: The Mike Oldfield Story” from the BBC in 2013.

Bonus video: this is my rule bending one, as it is actually a noir movie, not non-fiction. Lawrence mentioned this last night, and I thought I’d throw it up here since I don’t see that he’s blogged about it. This is also kind of a bookmark for me: I might watch this once I’ve caught up on sleep.

“Inner Sanctum”, from 1948. It’s only 62 minutes long.

A man fleeing the police after having committed a murder hides out in a boarding house in a small town.

In addition to this being a somewhat well-regarded noir film, it also features the great SF/fantasy writer Fritz Leiber as “Dr. Valonius”. If you don’t want to watch the whole thing, but are curious about Leiber, “Dr. Valonius” shows up almost immediately. (Edit: I was misinformed: the Fritz Leiber in “Inner Sanctum” is actually the writer’s father, not the writer.)

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 218

Tuesday, November 3rd, 2020

Thought I’d post some gun stuff today, for reasons.

Miami Police Department’s patrol rifle class:

Bonus #1, also a bookmark for me: Ryan Cleckner explains milliradians.

Bonus #2: this is kind of gun adjacent, but I’m posting this explicitly as Lawrence bait: “Greatest Tank Battles”, on “The Battle of 73 Easting”.

Bonus #3: “Japanese Guns of World War 2”, from LionHeart FilmWorks.

(See also. Affiliate link, but it delights me down to the bottom of my shriveled little coal black heart that a lot of this stuff is coming back in Kindle editions.)

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 166

Saturday, September 12th, 2020

My current boss is an amateur radio operator, and has far more experience and knowledge than I do. Since the lockdown started, my work group has been holding virtual “happy hours” outside of the work context (consumption of wine, beer, and spirituous liquors is allowed, but not required) and amateur radio is a frequent topic of discussion.

So I thought Saturday might be a good day for some radio related stuff.

First up, “What Happened to the Numbers Stations?”

(Numbers Stations Research and Information Center. Which is kind of a misnomer, because they cover things that aren’t numbers stations as well.)

Bonus #1: “HM01 – The Ultimate Radio Mystery”. HM01 is a numbers station broadcasting out of Cuba.

Bonus #2: “Tracking The Lincolnshire Poacher”. The first video above mentions the Lincolnshire Poacher early on, but if you didn’t watch it, LP is another famous numbers station.

Bonus #3: For something different, “Listening to Astronauts ON THE ISS with a Baofeng UV-5R”.

Baofeng UV-5R+ on Amazon. (Affiliate link.) It is a very slight exaggeration to say that you can get one of these with the change you dig out of your couch cushions.

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 152

Saturday, August 29th, 2020

I know I’ve been running long all week. I apologize for that: next week, I’m hoping I can keep things a little shorter. Also a confession: I’ve watched the second two videos, but I’m only about 50 minutes into the first one.

Since today is Saturday, and since this video sits at the intersection of two of this blog’s obsessions interests, here you go: “Hadrian’s World: Leadership Lessons from a Roman Emperor”. You know, Hadrian? The wall guy?

Bonus: We haven’t spent enough time in the UKOGBNI recently, so let us remedy that. “How To Make A Royal Marines Officer”.

Part 1:

Part 2:

Richard Van der Horst. More from the Telegram. I know this seems out of context, but it will make more sense if you watch all the way through to the graduation ceremony in part 2.

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 113

Tuesday, July 21st, 2020

Time for some more military geekery. And I think that’s appropriate in this case, because this covers two interesting areas of research.

“Holloman — Frontier of the Future”, a documentary about Holloman AFB in New Mexico and some of the work going on there at the time. In addition to missile testing and flight operations, Holloman has a long (35,000 feet at the time: it was upgraded to 50,917 feet in 2000) rocket sled track: this is where John Paul Stapp did his work, and he’s interviewed briefly in the film.

Holloman was also the home base for Project Manhigh (though the balloons were launched from other sites).

If you can find a copy of it at a more reasonable price, The Pre-Astronauts: Manned Ballooning on the Threshold of Space by Craig Ryan (affiliate link), which is mentioned in the notes, is a swell book that I enthusiastically recommend.

Bonus video: and now for something completely different (and longer). I have not watched this yet, but I’m bookmarking it here for reasons I’ll go into in a moment.

From the National Capital Area Skeptics video channel on YouTube: Dr. Eric Cline lecturing on “1177 BC: The Year Civilization Collapsed”.

I was totally unfamiliar with the Late Bronze Age Collapse until Paul Cooper covered it on the Fall of Civilizations podcast (which I enthusiastically endorse). Dr. Cline’s book (affiliate link) is on my Amazon wish list, and I’ll probably be ordering a copy soon-ish.

Random gun crankery, some filler.

Tuesday, June 9th, 2020

Here’s an interesting essay I’ve been meaning to bookmark for a while, and finally got around to.

Chesterton: Patron Saint of Handgunners” by Patrick Toner, from “Crisis” magazine.

The jumping off point is a Chesterton quote, talking about his preparations for his honeymoon:

It is alleged against me, and with perfect truth, that I stopped on the way to drink a glass of milk in one shop and to buy a revolver with cartridges in another. Some have seen these as singular wedding-presents for a bridegroom to give to himself, and if the bride had known less of him, I suppose she might have fancied that he was a suicide or a murderer or, worst of all, a teetotaller.

Mr. Toner uses this to discuss the idea that defense of one’s self or those one loves is an obligation. More to the point, it is an obligation one has to assume on their own, rather than delegating to other people.

If a thing is worth doing, Chesterton tells us, it’s worth doing badly. (What’s Wrong With the World, 175) Defending one’s wife is worth doing, and hence worth doing badly. But more, it must be done principally by oneself. “These things, we want a man to do for himself, even if he does them badly.” (Orthodoxy, 250) Chesterton’s examples are things like writing one’s own love letters or blowing one’s own nose, but the incident of the revolver shows that he would include the husband’s duty to protect his wife. It’s simply not a job that should be subcontracted out. Of course, we band together in communities that provide mutual support and defense, and the forces of law and order can do their best to provide the safest conditions possible, in general. Our laws and policies and so forth can and should serve to keep the pirates at bay to a great extent. (Whether they, in fact, accomplish this, or whether our policies create criminals like moisture creates mold is an extraneous question.) None of this runs contrary to my point. We ask for doctors, researchers and public health officials to try to create as high a general level of health as possible—but that doesn’t mean we ask them to wipe our noses for us.

He goes on to propose that Chesterton be named the patron saint of handgunners, though he doesn’t shy away from the two major problems with this idea:

  • Chesterton wasn’t a saint at the time. He was under consideration, but the latest information I’ve found indicates that the effort has been abandoned.
  • There already is a patron saint of handgunners. Sort of. It’s complicated.

Slightly more seriously, this month’s essay by Tiger McKee in “American Handgunner”, “3 Questions To Stay Alive“, is worthy of your consideration. I think this is especially relevant if you are a new gun owner, but I’d argue that even experienced ones could benefit from asking these three questions. I’ve asked some of those questions myself in the past. I particularly like his “kitchen fire/building fire” analogy.

What are you willing to risk your life for? Only you can answer this question. But, I recommend asking it in advance. Remember, fighting is problem-solving at high speed. The more questions you can answer in advance the more efficiently you arrive at a solution.

I think we’ve all heard the Creepy Joe quote about how police officers should be trained to just shoot people in the leg. Everyone who is a person of the gun (and a lot of people who are not) should realize this is obviously bolshie bushwa. (If you don’t understand why: try hitting a small target like a leg under extreme cognitive and physical stress. This is why police officers are trained to shoot “center of mass” aka “the biggest part of the body”.)

I’ve had this video in the back of my head for a while now, and I thought I’d post it as another reason why “shoot ’em in the leg” isn’t such a good idea. This is from Iran: the suspect in this video allegedly robbed a bank.

As best as I can tell, the police officer shoots the suspect in the leg at about the 30 second mark. Two points:

1. The suspect is still conscious and capable of putting up a fight for another 45 seconds or so after he was shot. How much damage do you think someone can do with a knife in 45 seconds?

2. The suspect bled out and died. Shooting someone in the leg does not mean “not lethal”. If you hit an artery, the person you shot can bleed to death before the ambulance gets there.

Not part of the main jail feed…

Saturday, May 2nd, 2020

A couple of things I wanted to make note of, but didn’t want to put in the main video feed:

Great and good FoTB (and official firearms trainer of WCD) Karl Rehn did a really cool short video targeted at newer shooters explaining ammunition (and the various types thereof):

This was done for the Polite Society Podcast, which does, of course, have a YouTube channel.

It’s also worth pointing out that Karl has his own channel as well.

Ryan Cleckner, author of the excellent Long Range Shooting Handbook: Complete Beginner’s Guide to Long Range Shooting, has a playlist on the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF) channel devoted to long range shooting. This is something I’ve wanted to work on for a while, and I’m hoping once things get back to normal I’ll be able to pursue that.

Also on the NSSF channel: Bryan Litz, author of Applied Ballistics For Long-Range Shooting 3rd Edition and other related works. I got my copy of Applied earlier this week, but haven’t had a chance to crack it yet.

(I should note that any Amazon links here are affiliate links, and I do get a small kickback if you purchase something through those links. I use those small kickbacks for good, not evil, though others might differ with that assessment.)

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 33

Saturday, May 2nd, 2020

There is a delightful book that came out in 2014, and which was adapted into a Netflix series. Five Came Back: A Story of Hollywood and the Second World War is about John Ford, George Stevens, John Huston, William Wyler, and Frank Capra, and their WWII experiences making films for the military. I enthusiastically recommend this book, which is available for a very reasonable price on Amazon in a Kindle edition and used.

I’ve wanted to watch pretty much all of the wartime films Mark Harris talks about in that book, and I’m happy to report that some of them are available on YouTube in very decent quality.

“Thunderbolt” was made in 1944, but wasn’t released until 1947. Harris goes into the reasons for this in detail, but it basically amounted to: the war ended before the film was edited. William Wyler was, shall we say, distracted during the post-production: he’d suffered a total loss of hearing during a B-25 flight (in an attempt to “film more ‘atmosphere shots.'” for the movie.) He did eventually recover part of his hearing, and continued working as a director until 1970 with the help of hearing aids.

I would be negligent if I didn’t mention that, before “Thunderbolt”, Wyler directed what may have been the most famous WWII propaganda film: “The Memphis Belle: A Story of a Flying Fortress“. Especially since tonight is “12 O’Clock High” night. (Hi, RoadRich! Miss seeing you!)

Tomorrow: Science Sunday!

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 27

Sunday, April 26th, 2020

To be fair, these are not random YouTube recommendations. This is something I ran across a few months ago, and that became part of a small project I’m working on. I want to bookmark these here for my own reference, but I also think some of my readers (especially those with children) may enjoy these. Admittedly, they are about an hour each, but that’s why this is Science Sunday. And how long are your children’s normal school classes?

Between 1956 and 1964, the Bell System (you remember the Bell System, don’t you?) produced nine specials about various aspects of science. These were broadcast on television in prime time, and the first couple got pretty good audience ratings.

Frank Capra (yes, that Frank Capra) produced and wrote the first four, and directed the first three.

Geoff Alexander and Rick Prelinger have described the films as “among the best known and remembered educational films ever made, and enthroning Dr. Frank Baxter, professor at the University of Southern California, as something of a legend as the omniscient king of academic science films hosts.”

Here are the first two: “Our Mr. Sun“.

And “Hemo the Magnificent“.

You can also download “Our Mr. Sun” from the Internet Archive.

Woo! Chugga! BOOM!

Friday, July 5th, 2019

Bookmark:

For 40 Years, Crashing Trains Was One of America’s Favorite Pastimes“.

I read a similar article some years ago in an Old Farmer’s Almanac, but haven’t been able to find it since, and people don’t believe me when I tell them about this.

Oh, they believe in the Great Crush Crash (which is given much love in this article), but people seem incredulous when you tell them staged locomotive crashes for crowds were a regular spectator event, and Crush wasn’t a one-off.

Connolly began to criss-cross the country putting on wrecks from Boston to Los Angeles, Tampa to Salt Lake City. According to Reisdorff, he also found ways to add to the spectacle, including strapping dynamite to the front of the locomotives and filling freight cars behind the engines with gasoline and hot coals so the vehicles would be engulfed in flames after they derailed. Connolly and other train wreckers also liked to paint names and phrases on the sides of the trains for different political candidates or causes so that spectators could cheer for their respective locomotive. One wreck in 1932 featured “Hoover” versus “Roosevelt.” Connolly got so proficient at putting on train wrecks that he allegedly even tried copyrighting it, although Reisdorff was unable to find proof that he ever actually filed the paperwork to do so.

The vault, the vault, the vault is on fire…

Tuesday, June 11th, 2019

I haven’t had a chance to go through all of this yet, but it looks link worthy:

The Day the Music Burned“, about the 2008 Universal Studios fire.

The scope of this calamity is laid out in litigation and company documents, thousands of pages of depositions and internal UMG files that I obtained while researching this article. UMG’s accounting of its losses, detailed in a March 2009 document marked “CONFIDENTIAL,” put the number of “assets destroyed” at 118,230. Randy Aronson considers that estimate low: The real number, he surmises, was “in the 175,000 range.” If you extrapolate from either figure, tallying songs on album and singles masters, the number of destroyed recordings stretches into the hundreds of thousands. In another confidential report, issued later in 2009, UMG asserted that “an estimated 500K song titles” were lost.

Among the incinerated Decca masters were recordings by titanic figures in American music: Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Al Jolson, Bing Crosby, Ella Fitzgerald, Judy Garland. The tape masters for Billie Holiday’s Decca catalog were most likely lost in total. The Decca masters also included recordings by such greats as Louis Jordan and His Tympany Five and Patsy Cline.

This is the kind of telling detail I look for:

There were at least a dozen fire engines ringing the vault, and as Aronson looked around he noticed one truck whose parking lights seemed to be melting.

(Hattip: Hacker News on the Twitters.)

Inverted Jenny watch.

Monday, September 10th, 2018

I’m a day or two behind on this, but: Inverted Jenny #49 is now accounted for.

As far as anyone was able to determine, the stamp went from William T. Robey (the guy who discovered the error and bought the sheet of 100 stamps) to Eugene Klein (who bought the sheet from Robey for $15,000) to Col. E.H.R. “Ned” Green (who bought the sheet from Klein for $20,000 and split it up). After Green, nobody knew where #49 was until recently.

Mr. Lyons said the Illinois man’s 91-year-old father had been a stamp collector, but the stamp had come from his mother’s side of the family. A great-uncle apparently bought it after the sheet of 100 was broken up, and after the great-uncle died, the great-aunt left it to the man’s mother in the 1930s.
“It spent all those years in bank vaults, which was a good thing for the stamp,” he said. Mr. Lyons said the man, who has asked not to be identified, could not explain why his father never put it in an album with his other stamps.

This is way cool. Because the stamp was never mounted and spent most of the time in safety deposit boxes, it is in very good shape. According to the article in Linn’s Stamp News, the stamp has been graded at 90 XF.

If it goes up for auction…an XF-SUP 95 graded Inverted Jenny went for $1.35 million in 2016. I can easily see this one going for over a million.

The only Inverted Jenny unaccounted for at the moment is #66: that one was part of a block of four that was stolen in 1955. The other three stamps eventually resurfaced.

Inverted Jenny website maintained by Siegal Auctions. This includes a very useful interactive reconstruction of the entire sheet.