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Notes on money. And other things.

Thursday, December 23rd, 2021

Gift cards are, gloriously, privately issued bank notes backed by the full faith and credit of Chipotle.

I suspect that, politically, there’s a lot of stuff we’d disagree about. But Patrick McKenzie of Stripe has been writing a lot of smart stuff: both on his Twitter (for example, this thread on buying new glasses, or this one about tax filing) and his newsletter.

The quote above is from a recent issue of his newsletter about “The secondary market in gift cards“. There’s a lot of stuff in here that I didn’t know, or hadn’t thought about:

Consider the corner bodega, for example. If you go there for a routine purchase, ring up $16.29, and then discover that you only have $15, that might mean you have to return some items. But some bodega owners will ask you “OK, if you don’t have money, what do you have?” And if you have e.g. a $20 Fandango movie theatre gift card, the bodega owner might say “Good enough! See you later.”

…

It becomes known that you can text an unbanked relative money by walking into any retailer and buying a gift card in cash, and that they will be able to convert that back into cash in minutes without needing to e.g. show ID that they may not have.

Totally unrelated, but I don’t have another good place to stick this:

I am amused by this because: a while back (it may have been Christmas 2019) a group of Saturday Dining Conspirators got into a discussion of the Hallmark Christmas Movie Cinematic Universe (HCMCU). If any of us had drawing talent (and could get past the copyright issues) we’d start doing HCMCU graphic novels.

Speaking of bad ideas…

Posted in Geek, TV | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: December 1, 2021.

Wednesday, December 1st, 2021

This is a couple of days old, but I was waiting for an obit from a reliable source: Jim Warren, one of the early figures in personal computing.

In the 1970s, Mr. Warren was a leading figure in the community that sprung up in the San Francisco Bay Area around the emerging personal computer industry.
He was a regular at monthly meetings of the Homebrew Computer Club, a group of hobbyist who gathered to share ideas, design tips and gossip. He was the editor of Dr. Dobb’s Journal of Computer Calisthenics and Orthodontia, an irreverent yet influential publication in that nascent field.

…

Computer conferences, where these fledgling companies showed off their wares, were just beginning to emerge when, in 1977, Mr. Warren staged the West Coast Computer Faire (the spelling a playful nod to the medieval spectacles of Elizabethan England). He calculated that the event, a two-day affair at the San Francisco Civic Auditorium, might break even if it could attract 60 exhibitors and perhaps 7,000 people.
But to his surprise nearly 13,000 people showed up, and the lines of people waiting to get in circled the building.

…

His interest in the social and political impact of computer technology continued later in his life. In 1991, Mr. Warren founded and chaired the first Computers, Freedom and Privacy Conference, an annual academic gathering.
In 1993, he worked on a California law — a model for other states — that required most computerized public records to be freely available. He conferred with legislators, rallied public support and even drafted some of the law’s language.

Mark Roth, pro bowler. Noted here because:

Roth’s most famous spare — knocking down the remaining pins with the second bowl thrown in a frame — was during a tournament in 1980 in Alameda, Calif. He became the first bowler to convert the notoriously difficult 7-10 split — knocking down the two pins in the opposite corners of the back row — on national television.

Adolfo, Nancy Reagan’s designer.

Posted in Geek, History, Obits, Sports | Comments Closed

Obit watch: November 22, 2021.

Monday, November 22nd, 2021

Bob Bondurant, legendary racer and founder of The Bob Bondurant School of High Performance Driving.

Mr. Bondurant began attracting attention in the racing world in 1959, when he won 18 of the 20 races he entered behind the wheel of a Corvette.
“I am an original California hot rodder turned white hot when I started winning everything in my Corvettes,” he was quoted as saying by the National Corvette Museum, which inducted him into its Hall of Fame in 2016.
He continued to win races regularly in Corvettes in the 1960s, but he also began to race successfully in other sports cars and open-wheeled Formula 1 machines, including for the elite Ferrari team from 1965 to 1966.
“He was top of the line,” said Peter Brock, who designed the Shelby Daytona Cobra Coupe that Mr. Bondurant raced with Dan Gurney to first place in the GT, or Grand Touring, class at the 24 Hours of Le Mans endurance race in 1964.

…

Even before opening the school, Mr. Bondurant had some well-known students. He had coached James Garner and Yves Montand in driving Formula 1 cars for John Frankenheimer’s 1966 film, “Grand Prix.” Mr. Bondurant, who was a stunt man and technical adviser to the film, wore 16-millimeter cameras on the sides of his helmet to record racing action on the track while moving at 150 miles per hour.
Soon after Mr. Bondurant opened the school, Mr. Newman and Robert Wagner signed up as students. They had been cast as racecar drivers in the film “Winning” (1969), in which Mr. Newman’s character dreams of winning the Indianapolis 500.
“Paul has a knack of knowing how to learn,” Mr. Bondurant told The St. Louis Post-Dispatch in 1988. “He’s like most actors — they know how to listen. He would move at his own pace, and wouldn’t go too quick. He took it step by step, and it came naturally to him.”

One of my lifetime ambitions has been to attend the Bob Bondurant School of High Performance Driving, though apparently it went bankrupt in 2018 and is now known as the Radford Racing School.

Robert Bly, the Iron John guy. Anyone else remember when Iron John was a thing? I do, though I never actually read it: I just remember a time when people talked about books, instead of what the Kardasians were doing yesterday.

Carolyn Watjen, aka “Caroline Todd“. You wouldn’t know her under that name: she and her son, David Watjen, write (wrote?) mystery novels under the pseudonym “Charles Todd”. I haven’t read any of them yet, but the Ian Rutledge novels sound interesting.

Jay Last. He was an early semi-conductor pioneer: specifically, he was one of the “traitorous eight” who left William Shockley and founded Fairchild Semiconductor. His death leaves Gordon Moore (yes, that Moore) as the last surviving member of the group.

Lawrence sent over an obit for Mick Rock, photographer of musicians.

Peter Aykroyd, Dan’s brother and “Saturday Night Live” cast member.

Art LaFleur, actor. Other than “The Sandlot”, his credits include episodes of “The John Larroquette Show”, two different remakes of television series that should never have been remade and which failed miserably (not due to Mr. LaFleur, they were just bad ideas), “Matlock”, “Field of Dreams”, and “Wizards and Warriors”.

Posted in Books, Cars, Geek, Obits, Photography | Comments Closed

I shot an arrow into the air…

Friday, November 19th, 2021

…how far did it go?

This is something I hadn’t really thought about until this Smithsonian article came across Hacker News: how far can you shoot an arrow? The current record is apparently 2,028 yards.

“The Quest to Shoot an Arrow Farther Than Anyone Has Before“.

Case’s footbow is not only the hardest to shoot, but also the most unpredictable and dangerous. It requires an archer to place his feet in stirrups and push outward with his legs while straining to pull back on the bowstring with his hands, creating a draw weight of up to 325 pounds. That’s a tremendous amount of brute force to launch an arrow that weighs little more than a couple of pencils at up to 800 feet per second, roughly the same speed as a .45-caliber bullet.

Posted in Bagatelle, Geek | Comments Closed

Obit watch: October 29, 2021.

Friday, October 29th, 2021

Richard Hammer, author. He wrote two books on the My Lai massacre:

Mr. Hammer’s account of the My Lai slaughter in 1968, “One Morning in the War: The Tragedy of Son My” (1970), was frequently reviewed alongside one by Seymour M. Hersh, who had broken the story — “My Lai 4: A Report on the Massacre and Its Aftermath.” (The village of Son My included the hamlet of My Lai.)
“Richard Hammer — knowing perhaps that Hersh had the jump on him — tried to put the incident in perspective and thereby ended up writing the better book,” the book critic Christopher Lehmann-Haupt wrote in The New York Times.“He took the time,” he added, “to explain the gradual depersonalization of the Vietnamese in American soldiers’ eyes — to make us understand how even women and children begin to seem hated and dangerous.”
Mr. Hammer followed up that book with another centered on the massacre, “The Court-Martial of Lt. Calley,” which John Leonard of The Times numbered among “a handful of public-affairs books published in 1971 that people will be reading a generation from now.” William Styron, writing in The Times Book Review, called it “an honest, penetrating account of a crucially significant military trial.”

…

Mr. Hammer also wrote and narrated the film “Interviews With My-Lai Veterans” (1970), which won an Oscar for best documentary (short subject).

Additionally, he was a two-time winner of the Edgar award for “best fact crime” for books unrelated to My-Lai: The CBS Murders: A True Account of Greed and Violence in New York’s Diamond District and The Vatican Connection: The True Story of a Billion-Dollar Conspiracy Between the Catholic Church and the Mafia (affiliate links).

Viktor Bryukhanov, the guy who took the rap for Chernobyl.

After serving five years in prison, Mr. Bryukhanov returned to government service in Ukraine to head the technical department in its Economic Development and Trade Ministry.

It really was a different country, wasn’t it?

Sonny Osborne, of the Osborne Brothers.

Best known for their 1967 hit “Rocky Top,” the Osborne Brothers pioneered a style of three-part harmony singing in which Bobby Osborne sang tenor melodies pitched above the trio’s other two voices, instead of between them, as was the custom in bluegrass. Sonny Osborne sang the baritone harmonies, with various second tenors over the years adding a third layer of harmony to round out the bright, lyrical blend that became the group’s calling card.
The Osbornes broke further with bluegrass convention by augmenting Mr. Osborne’s driving yet richly melodic banjo playing — and his brother’s jazz-inspired mandolin work — with string sections, drums and pedal steel guitar. They were also the first bluegrass group to record with twin banjos and, more alarming to bluegrass purists, to add electric pickups to their instruments, abandoning the longstanding practice of huddling around a single microphone.

This is in the NYT article, and I’ve posted this before, but fark that: I’m in the mood right now for some insurrectionist music.

Eleonore von Trapp Campbell, of the von Trapp family.

Mrs. Campbell’s father, Capt. Georg von Trapp, and his first wife, Agathe Whitehead von Trapp, had the seven children who were the basis for the singing family. Maria Kutschera married the captain after Agathe von Trapp died.
Georg and Maria von Trapp had three children, who were not depicted in the movie; Mrs. Campbell was the second. Early on, she sang soprano as a member of the Trapp Family Singers, who performed in Europe before World War II and, after fleeing Nazi-occupied Austria in 1938, continued to do so in the United States and internationally.

Martha Henry. She was 83.

For the last role of her long career, Martha Henry, one of Canada’s finest stage actors, played the character in Edward Albee’s “Three Tall Women” known simply as A. Mr. Albee’s character description reads in part, “a very old woman; thin, autocratic, proud, as together as the ravages of time will allow.”
As Ms. Henry took to the stage at the Stratford Festival in Ontario in August to begin the play’s two-month run, the cancer she had been dealing with for more than a year was well along. She used a walker in the first shows. In September she performed the role from a wheelchair, soldiering on in the demanding part through the final performance, on Oct. 9.

David DePatie, co-creator (with Friz Freleng) of “The Pink Panther”.

George Butler, documentary filmmaker. Among his credits: “Pumping Iron”, aka “the movie that made Arnold Schwarzenegger a star”.

NYT obit for Val Bisoglio.

In an interview with The Daily News of New York in 1977, when he was early in his run on “Quincy” (he eventually appeared in the vast majority of the show’s 148 episodes), Mr. Bisoglio gave himself a nickname of sorts that was a reference to his “Quincy” role but could well have applied to much of a career in which he specialized in making a memorable impression in a brief amount of time.
“Whenever the writers find they’re a little short of time after they wrap up the case,” he explained, “they write in a little scene at the restaurant. It’s only one minute or two, at the most. So I’m the one- or two-minute man.”

Posted in Books, Geek, Law, Movies, Music, Obits, Theatre, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: July 26, 2021.

Monday, July 26th, 2021

Supplemental Steven Weinberg obits: NYT. Statesman.

Jackie Mason, comedian.

Mr. Mason regarded the world around him as a nonstop assault on common sense and an affront to his sense of dignity. Gesturing frantically, his forefinger jabbing the air, he would invite the audience to share his sense of disbelief and inhabit his very thin skin, if only for an hour.
“I used to be so self-conscious,” he once said, “that when I attended a football game, every time the players went into a huddle, I thought they were talking about me.” Recalling his early struggles as a comic, he said, “I had to sell furniture to make a living — my own.”
The idea of music in elevators sent him into a tirade: “I live on the first floor; how much music can I hear by the time I get there? The guy on the 28th floor, let him pay for it.”

…

After dozens of appearances on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” Mr. Mason encountered disaster on Oct. 18, 1964. A speech by President Lyndon B. Johnson pre-empted the program, which resumed as Mr. Mason was halfway through his act. Onstage but out of camera range, Sullivan indicated with two fingers, then one, how many minutes Mr. Mason had left, distracting the audience. Mr. Mason, annoyed, responded by holding up his own fingers to the audience, saying, “Here’s a finger for you, and a finger for you, and a finger for you.”
Sullivan, convinced that one of those fingers was an obscene gesture, canceled Mr. Mason’s six-show contract and refused to pay him for the performance. Mr. Mason sued, and won.
The two later reconciled, but the damage was done. Club owners and booking agents now regarded him, he said, as “crude and unpredictable.”
“People started to think I was some kind of sick maniac,” Mr. Mason told Look. “It took 20 years to overcome what happened in that one minute.”

…

A play he starred in and wrote (with Mike Mortman), “A Teaspoon Every Four Hours,” went through a record-breaking 97 preview performances on Broadway before opening on June 14, 1969, to terrible reviews. It closed after one night, taking with it his $100,000 investment.

For the record (and per Wikipedia), “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark” went through 182 preview performances.

He also invested in “The Stoolie” (1972), a film in which he played a con man and improbable Romeo. It also failed, taking even more of his money. Roles in sitcoms and films eluded him, although he did make the most of small parts in Mel Brooks’s “History of the World: Part I” (1981) — he was “Jew No. 1” in the Spanish Inquisition sequence — and “The Jerk” (1979), in which he played the gas-station owner who employs Steve Martin.

…

Appearances on the cartoon series “The Simpsons,” as the voice of Rabbi Hyman Krustofski, the father of Krusty the Clown, confirmed his newfound status, and earned him a second Emmy. Not even the 1988 bomb “Caddyshack II,” in which he was a last-minute replacement for Rodney Dangerfield, or the ill-fated “Chicken Soup,” a 1989 sitcom co-starring Lynn Redgrave that died quickly, could slow his improbable transformation from borscht belt relic into hot property.

Laura Foreman. She was a prominent and well-regarded reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer in the 1970s: so much so that she got hired by the NYT.

Her focus was Philadelphia’s 1975 mayoral race, in which the brash and cocky incumbent, Frank L. Rizzo, the city’s former police commissioner, was seeking a second term.
One of Mr. Rizzo’s close allies was Mr. Cianfrani, a longtime ward boss who became chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee and one of Pennsylvania’s most influential lawmakers. A streetwise power broker, he was a natural source and occasional subject for the new political writer.
Rumors began circulating that the two were involved romantically, but Ms. Foreman denied them, and the editors discounted them.

After she got hired by the NYT, it came out that the rumors were true: “…the politician had given her more than $20,000 worth of gifts, including jewelry, furniture and a fur coat, and helped her buy a 1964 Morgan sports car.”

The Times told her she had to resign, even though the conduct in question had occurred at another paper. The Times, in fact, said initially that her work had comported with the highest ethical standards. But according to an account that Ms. Foreman wrote in The Washington Monthly in 1978, A.M. Rosenthal, The Times’s executive editor, told her that because the paper was writing tough stories at the time about conflicts of interest involving Bert Lance, a close Carter adviser, it couldn’t very well harbor a conflict of its own.
To others, Mr. Rosenthal uttered an unforgettable comment that has been rendered several different ways but in essence said that he didn’t care if his reporters were having sex with elephants — as long as they weren’t covering the circus.
In Philadelphia, Mr. Roberts, the Inquirer editor, appointed the paper’s top investigative team of Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele to dig into the affair. They produced a 17,000-word article, published on Oct. 16, 1977, that exposed internal rivalries at the paper and found that editors had looked the other way to protect a favored reporter, Ms. Foreman. It was among the first instances of a newspaper turning its investigative artillery on itself.

She married Mr. Cianfrani, but never worked in journalism again. Ms. Foreman actually passed away over a year ago, but her death was only recently reported.

A burning in Hell watch, by way of Lawrence: Rodney Alcala, the “Dating Game” killer.

A longhaired photographer who lured women by offering to take their pictures, Mr. Alcala was convicted of killing a 12-year-old girl and four women in Orange County, Calif., and two women in New York, all between 1971 and 1979, the authorities said.
Investigators had also suspected him of, or had linked him to, other murders in Los Angeles, Seattle, Arizona, New Hampshire and Marin County, Calif., the department said.

…

In 1978, six years after he was convicted of molesting [removed – DB], Mr. Alcala appeared in a brown bell-bottom suit and a shirt with a butterfly collar as “Bachelor No. 1” on an episode of “The Dating Game.”
The host described him as “a successful photographer,” according to a YouTube video. “Between takes, you might find him sky-diving or motorcycling.”
Mr. Alcala won the contest, charming the bachelorette with sexual innuendo. The woman later decided not to go on a date with him because she found him disturbing, according to several news reports.

Posted in 1970s, California Über Alles, Geek, Law, Media, Obits, Theatre, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: July 24, 2021.

Saturday, July 24th, 2021

I am seeing reports that Steven Weinberg, one of the great physicists, has died.

The University of Texas has a tribute up, but I have not found a mainstream news source reporting this yet.

In 1967, Weinberg published a seminal paper laying out how two of the universe’s four fundamental forces — electromagnetism and the weak nuclear force — relate as part of a unified electroweak force. “A Model of Leptons,” at barely three pages, predicted properties of elementary particles that at that time had never before been observed (the W, Z and Higgs boson) and theorized that “neutral weak currents” dictated how elementary particles interact with one another. Later experiments, including the 2012 discovery of the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Switzerland, would bear out each of his predictions.

…

By showing the unifying links behind weak forces and electromagnetism, which were previously believed to be completely different, Weinberg delivered the first pillar of the Standard Model, the half-century-old theory that explains particles and three of the four fundamental forces in the universe (the fourth being gravity). As critical as the model is in helping physical scientists understand the order driving everything from the first minutes after the Big Bang to the world around us, Weinberg continued to pursue, alongside other scientists, dreams of a “final theory” that would concisely and effectively explain current unknowns about the forces and particles in the universe, including gravity.

…

“If there is no point in the universe that we discover by the methods of science, there is a point that we can give the universe by the way we live, by loving each other, by discovering things about nature, by creating works of art,” he once told PBS. “Although we are not the stars in a cosmic drama, if the only drama we’re starring in is one that we are making up as we go along, it is not entirely ignoble that faced with this unloving, impersonal universe we make a little island of warmth and love and science and art for ourselves.”

Posted in Geek, Obits | Comments Closed

Obit watch: July 20, 2021.

Tuesday, July 20th, 2021

Dr. Paul Auerbach, one of the pioneering figures in “wilderness medicine”.

A medical student at Duke University at the time, he went to work in 1975 with the Indian Health Service on a Native American reservation in Montana, and the experience was revelatory.
“We saw all kinds of cases that I would have never seen at Duke or frankly anywhere else except on the reservation,” Dr. Auerbach said in a recent interview given to Stanford University, where he worked for many years. “Snakebites. Drowning. Lightning strike.”
“And I just thoroughly enjoyed it,” he continued. “Taking care of people with very limited resources.”
Back at Duke he tried to learn more about outdoor medicine, but he struggled to find resource material.
“I kept going back to literature to read, but there was no literature,” he said. “If I wanted to read about snake bites, I was all over the place. If I wanted to read about heat illness, I was all over the place. So I thought, ‘Huh, maybe I’ll do a book on wilderness medicine.’”

…

The resulting book, “Management of Wilderness and Environmental Emergencies,” which he edited with a colleague, Edward Geehr, was published in 1983 and is widely considered the definitive textbook in the field, with sections like “Protection From Blood-Feeding Arthropods” and “Aerospace Medicine: The Vertical Frontier.” Updated by Dr. Auerbach over 30 years, it is in its seventh edition and now titled “Auerbach’s Wilderness Medicine.”
“Paul literally conceived of this subspecialty of medicine,” said Dr. Andra Blomkalns, chair of emergency medicine at Stanford. “At the time, there wasn’t a recognition that things happen when you’re out doing things. He developed this notion of, ‘Things happen to people all the time.’ Which is now a big part of our identity in emergency medicine.”

John P. McMeel, co-founder of Universal Press Syndicate (later Andrews McMeel Universal).

Indefatigably sunny, Mr. McMeel had the optimism — and the stamina — of a true salesman. Jim Davis, the creator of the misanthropic cat Garfield, first met Mr. McMeel at an American Booksellers Association convention in 1981. Mr. McMeel approached him for an autograph, brandishing a Garfield book with a contract tucked inside. But Mr. Davis had a long-term contract with United Media, which had been syndicating his strip.
“It became a running gag,” Mr. Davis said. “Every time we met he’d hand me a newspaper or something with a contract inside.” After 15 years, Mr. Davis was finally free to sign with Universal.
“The thing with John,” he said, “is it didn’t feel like business. I once did an interview and the reporter asked me why Gary Larson had retired and I was still going. I said: ‘Well, Gary works so hard and he puts so much pressure on himself. Me, if I feel that kind of pressure, I lower my standards.’ It was that kind of air that John encouraged.”

For the record: NYT obit for Kurt Westergaard.

Posted in Geek, Obits | Comments Closed

Real estate watch.

Thursday, July 8th, 2021

For those of you in the UK.

The asking price is £1,100,000 (which works out to about $1.5 million). But: five beds, three bathrooms, 2,954 square feet, a “utility room” and a cellar (that’d be great for your wine collection), plus “reception room”, “garden room”, and “dining room”.

And you can’t put a money value on the prestige of being able to say, “Yes, I live in the old Alan Turing place.”

Posted in Bagatelle, Geek, History | Comments Closed

Obit watch: June 24, 2021.

Thursday, June 24th, 2021

There’s an abundance of John McAfee obits out there on the web. Take your pick from Hacker News: for the hysterical record, I’m linking to the NYT obit.

Promoted from the comments, and by way of great and good FotB Joe D.:

Edited to add NYPost headline:

John McAfee hideout traced to Spanish ‘ghost hotel’ with a bitcoin farm

Biden administration cracking down on ghost hotels in 3, 2, 1…

Posted in Geek, Obits | Comments Closed

(Possible) obit watch.

Wednesday, June 23rd, 2021

I am seeing reports that John McAfee has committed suicide in a jail in Spain. I have not been able to confirm those reports: they currently trace back to one Spanish newspaper.

Edited to add: the NYPost has the story, but they are crediting it back to that same Spanish newspaper.

Posted in Geek, Law, Obits | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: June 21, 2021.

Monday, June 21st, 2021

George Stranahan, colorful figure.

His family owned the Champion Spark Plug company, so he had family money. He got a PhD in physics, and spent a lot of time doing physics in the late 1950s.

Staring at a blank page one afternoon in 1959, he made a discovery: You can’t do physics alone. You need someone to talk to. Mr. Stranahan dreamed of creating a physics think tank in the Rockies.

So he did:

The Aspen Center for Physics was born. It proved pivotal in the development of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, for a long time the world’s most powerful particle accelerator, and the formulation of string theory, regarded by many physicists as the most promising candidate for a “theory of everything” that would explain all the universe’s physical phenomena.
Sixty-six Nobel laureates have visited. “I’m convinced all the best physics gets done there,” Tony Leggett, one of those Nobelists, wrote on the center’s website. Another, Brian Schmidt, called the center “the place I have gone to expand my horizons for the entirety of my career.”

He cut back on his involvement in physics in 1972.

…in 1980, he opened a bar near Aspen, the Woody Creek Tavern, where he spent several years mixing drinks while also pitching in for humbler tasks like janitorial work. His daughter Molly Stranahan remembered him as a skilled cooker of soup for customers, including ranchers and cowboys.

He went on to found Stranahan’s Colorado Whiskey (which I have heard good things about, but never been able to find) and Flying Dog beer.

As of last year, Flying Dog was the 35th-biggest craft brewing company in the United States, according to the Brewers Association. In 2010, a “beer panel” convened by the New York Times food critics Eric Asimov and Florence Fabricant to rank pale ales declared Flying Dog’s Doggie Style Classic its “consensus favorite.”

He also did some ranching:

In 1990, Mr. Stranahan’s Limousin bull Turbo was declared grand champion at the 1990 National Western Stock Show, a highly regarded trade show. The price for a shot of Turbo’s semen rose to $15,000.
He quit the business not long after. Even with Turbo, Mr. Stranahan estimated that he lost $1 million during 18 years of ranching.

Going back for a minute, if the Woody Creek Tavern rings a bell with you, yes, that was Hunter S. Thompson’s hangout. Mr. Stranahan and Hunter were close friends.

Mr. Thompson either leased or bought the land he lived on from Mr. Stranahan. The details of the arrangement, intended to be easy on Mr. Thompson, appear to have been lost in a haze of friendship and misbehavior. The first time the two men met, Mr. Stranahan told Vanity Fair in 2003, they took mescaline that hit him “like a sledgehammer.”
“We talked a lot, drank a lot and dynamited a lot,” Mr. Stranahan said about their friendship in a 2008 interview with The Denver Post. “If you’re a rancher, you have access to dynamite.”

For the historical record: NYT obit for Frank Bonner.

Posted in 1970s, Explosives, Geek, History, Mixology, Obits, TV | 4 Comments »

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 418

Sunday, May 23rd, 2021

Science Sunday!

For the final Science Sunday, I thought I’d go back to one of my favorite topics – computing history and computer science – and cover two companies whose machines I find fascinating.

“Cray Research at Chippewa Falls – A Story of the Supercomputer”.

I apologize for the quality on this one: it is from 1976, but I think it is worthwhile because…Seymour Cray introduces the Cray-1.

Bonus: During this week’s episode of one of the podcasts I listen to, one of the hosts made a reference to the Connection Machine. The other two hosts had never heard of the Connection Machine, so they were part of that day’s lucky 10,000.

For those of you who fall into the same boat, this is a fairly recent (so higher quality) talk by a guy named Dan Bentley about the Connection Machine and the concept of “Data Parallel Algorithms”.

Posted in Geek, History | Comments Closed

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 411

Sunday, May 16th, 2021

Science Sunday!

I thought I’d do a sampler platter today. Roughly from short to long:

“The Creation and Behavior of Radio Waves”. This is a 1942 Army Signal Corps film: I guess technically this could be MilHisMonday, but it is more about the theory of radio than specific military radio usage, so I feel like it qualifies here.

“The Nuclear Look”, a pro-nuclear power propaganda film from Westinghouse.

And speaking of nukes, “Medical Aspects of Nuclear Radiation”.

In the light of more current science, the film seems woefully incomplete and misleading.

Finally: I know this was just posted recently, and I’m trying to avoid using anything that’s not older than at least a month. But I haven’t done any space science recently, I haven’t done anything from the Soviet perspective, and we’re moving towards closure here, so: “Conquerors Of the Universe”, a documentary about the Soviet space program. Don’t worry, it’s narrated in English.

Posted in Geek, History, Radio | Comments Closed

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 404

Sunday, May 9th, 2021

Science Sunday!

My paternal grandmother was a teacher. There were always books and magazines around the house, many of which were appropriate for the younger set.

One book that I vividly remember (and wish I could find today) was a book published by Scholastic about the coelacanth: specifically, about how it was thought to be extinct, until a museum curator found one in the daily catch of a local fisherman.

I was fascinated by this. Still am: I haven’t found the original Scholastic book, but Samantha Weinberg’s A Fish Caught in Time: The Search for the Coelacanth (affiliate link) is a pretty swell book, and is targeted more at the adult reader. And I think my grandmother would have endorsed this (ditto).

(I was hardly a “reluctant reader”, but I believe the kids she taught sometimes fell into that category.)

“Diving With Coelacanths”. Be warned: the people in this video are doing highly technical diving at great depth. Which means mixed gasses. Which means they sound like Donald Duck. There are subtitles: but as some of the comments point out, what’s in the subtitles doesn’t always match up with what’s actually being said.

Bonus: Another one of the Scholastic books she had lying around was a biography of Clyde Tombaugh and how he discovered Pluto.

“Reflections on Clyde Tombaugh” from NASA.

And here’s an approximately 30 minute interview with Dr. Tombaugh from 1997, shortly before his death.

Bonus #2: This is borderline science and/or technology, but I have a reason for posting this. A week ago Saturday, for some reason, we got into a discussion of auto racing and racing technology. I mentioned, but could not recall the details at the time, that there was a gas turbine powered car that competed in the Indianapolis 500, back when you could still do stuff like that. You know, before everything became standardized and homogenized and experimentation was limited…

“The Silent Screamer”, a short-ish (17 minutes) documentary about Andy Granatelli’s turbine powered car at the 1967 Indy 500.

Posted in Books, Cars, Fish, Geek, History, Sports | 2 Comments »

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