I kind of enjoy motor sports. I’m not an obsessive NASCAR fan, but I do kind of follow it from a distance. I’ve kind of lost track of IndyCar (though when I was younger, the Indy 500 was a big deal for me), and I never really got into F1 (but I do have a general passing familiarity with it).
As my regular readers know, I’m also a student of failure. So today’s videos…
“The Worst NASCAR Race Ever: The 1969 Talladega 500”.
“The Worst Formula 1 Race: The 2005 United States Grand Prix”.
There are a couple of others that I considered plugging into today’s slot, but either they were long and boring, or they involved people being killed in racing accidents. Nobody needs that (stuff).
I planned to post this last night, but we had multiple power outages through the day yesterday (as other people have noted, it is cold here: right now, my phone is calling for a low of 10 on Sunday and a low of 3 (yes, THREE) on Monday), the last one lasting until well into the evening.
The infamous Larry Flynt. As my mother said, “I thought he was dead already.”
S. Clay Wilson, underground cartoonist. I went back and forth on whether I wanted to include Mr. Flynt and Mr. Wilson, but I decided that Mr. Flynt’s celebrity was too great to ignore. As for Mr. Wilson, you have to like a guy who says:
Finally, also by way of Lawrence, British actor Harry Fielder, who was in pretty much every darn thing in Britain, passed away February 6th. Seriously, his IMDB entry has 279 credits as “actor” (though it looks like many of those were small roles).
Here’s something really vintage for you: “Coast to Coast in 48 Hours”, featuring travel by train and Ford TriMotor from New York to LA at a blistering pace.
Bonus video #1: One of my bucket list items is to visit the highest point in each state. Or at least as many as I can: I have my doubts I will be climbing Denali at my age.
Anyway, “What is the Highest Point in Each State of the USA?” a visual tour.
Bonus video #2: I’m not quite sure I agree with the title of this video, but it has 747s and music by Windham Hill, so why not? “The World’s Best Pan Am 747 Video”.
I thought I’d start out today with a vintage promo video from General Tire, “Car Tires, The Loaded Gun”.
You can skip over the last four or so minutes of this (it is only eight minutes long) but I wanted to highlight it here because…that first minute and 30 seconds. Wow. That was…unexpected.
For something completely different from “The 8-Bit Guy”, going out to the young folks in my audience: “How Telephone Phreaking Worked”. I’ve set the embed to start at about the 4:15 mark to skip over all the introductory material (videos of vintage computers, videos of the presenter signing things, etc.)
And for something else, also completely different: “How To Make Potato Vodka”. This is more for informational purposes than “how-to” purposes, though if you do happen to have a still just lying around in your garage…or, I guess, the skills to improvise one out of parts without poisoning yourself with lead…
Bonus #3: “How to Taste Whisky with Richard Paterson” part 1:
Since I ran really long yesterday, I thought I’d go mostly shorter today. I also thought I’d post some things totally unrelated to military aviation: while I have a bunch of new related stuff in the queue, I’m going to try to avoid going back to that well more than once a week.
(And, of course, Thursday and Sunday are already booked up with unrelated topics.)
From 1953, according to the YouTube notes: “The 225,000 Mile Proving Ground”, a short documentary about railroad research and development. Featuring Hugh Beaumont being a little hard on the Beaver.
Bonus #1: Did you know there was an Early Television Museum? There is. According to their website, it’s even open right now. Hillard is closer to Columbus than my usual stomping grounds of Cleveland, but not out of the realm of possibility for a day trip.
In the meantime, here’s a tour of the Early Television Museum. And I guess this does sort of tie back to yesterday’s Walleye video.
Bonus #2: I said “mostly shorter” because I did want to make one exception, on the grounds of timeliness: from the Jewish Community Center in San Francisco, October 31, 2013: “An Evening With Hal Holbrook”. About 77 minutes long.
I have a doctor’s appointment today. I would say I’m being a little lazy, since these videos are long, but I think there’s some stuff in them that might interest military history buffs. All of these come from the same source (BalticaBeer) and seem to be official productions of the Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake. I feel like there’s kind of unifying theme here: what a small motivated group of individuals can do if given liberty to work outside of the box.
In rough order of length: “To the Sea, a Sidewinder…50 Years of Snakes on the Wing”, a documentary history of the AIM-9 Sidewinder.
Next up: “The Origins of ARM: Defence Suppression and the Shrike Antiradar Missile”.
Finally: “The Pursuit of Precision: Walleye The TV-Guided Glide Bomb”
I know this last one is the length of a feature film. I’ve actually watched all of it, and personally found it weirdly fascinating. Also, there is a lot of footage of things blowing up or being blown up, so it isn’t just talking heads. Walleye itself is kind of a fascinating story. Today, it’s not uncommon to talk about putting a bomb through one window of a building: but what I don’t think most people realize is that we were actually doing that 55 years ago.
(Ålso, if you’re a television technology geek, there’s a lot of talk about TV tech and how Walleye helped advance the technology.)
Today’s dose of chicken soup for the you-know-what (because I’m pretty sure the actual term is trademarked, and I’ll hear about it from those people just like if I don’t refer to today’s game as the Superb Owl): Frank Shankwitz, former Arizona Highway Patrol motorcycle officer.
In 1980, he was introduced to a 7-year-old boy named Chris Greicius. Chris had terminal leukemia, and he desperately wanted to be a motorcycle officer when he grew up. He idolized Ponch and Jon from “CHiPs”.
It seems like it has been a while since I’ve done any space science, and I don’t think I’ve ever done any planetary astronomy, so let’s fix that today.
“Mercury: The Exploration of a Planet”, about Mariner 10.
Bonus #1: “Mars: Five Views on What Is Known”.
Bonus #2: “And Then There Was Voyager”.
Bonus #3: This breaks from the theme, but I wanted to put it here because: a short film about NASA’s Icing Research Tunnel at the Glenn Research Center.
As I have noted several times in the past, my father used to work at Glenn, back when it was still the Lewis Research Center. So I kind of have a sentimental attachment to the facility…
The US military had a clever idea back in the 1950s: let’s build missile launch sites under the ice in Greenland. That project was called “Project Iceworm” and was secret: as a cover story, and to test the feasibility of this idea, Camp Century was built.
You can imagine this was a massive logistical operation. Especially when you consider that everything had to be hauled across the ice from Thule AFB, 150 miles away.
Spoiler: it turns out that the ice sheet shifts. A lot. Which makes missile bases under the ice really not feasible.
Bonus: from the same source, the Charlie Dean Archives, “Faces of Rescue”, documenting a typical rescue mission for an Air Force pilot shot down over Vietnam.
As I’ve said before, I don’t like using TV shows here unless it is a short video to make a point, or a documentary series.
I’m fuzzing things a bit here, but I think it is justified. Also, it pushes some of my buttons.
Between 1962 and 1963, there was a television series called “GE True“. It was called “GE True” because it was sponsored by General Electric, and featured stories from True magazine that were adapted for television. Gene Roddenberry was one of the scriptwriters, and the series was produced and hosted by Jack Webb. Webb directed some of the episodes: some others were directed by William Conrad.
It was 25 minutes long (though some episodes were multi-part ones) and there were 33 total episodes. A small number of episodes have been uploaded to the ‘Tube.
I’ve written before about Earl Rogers, Clarence Darrow, and the LA Times jury bribery trial. From “GE True”, original airdate January 13, 1963, “Defendant: Clarence Darrow”. Robert Vaughn plays Earl Rogers, and Tol Avery (a prolific actor I was previously unfamiliar with: for the record, he appeared three times on “Mannix” before his death in 1973) plays Darrow.
Bonus #1: “V-Victor-5”, co-written by Gene Roddenberry. On a hot summer day in NYC in 1933, a lone off-duty NYPD officer in the days before radio cars, and surrounded by a hostile crowd, holds five armed and dangerous fugitives at gunpoint until backup arrives…two hours later.
(I know the YouTube title says “Commando”, but this one is really “V-Victor-5”. Also, there’s a punchline at the end that I won’t spoil for you.)
Bonus #2: “Commando”.
Oh, wait. Wrong “Commando”. Sorry. This is the right one.
This is maybe a little marginal on the travel side, but I feel like it is close enough to count: “Operation Jetliner”, a 1959 United “Breaks Guitars” Airlines promo film for their DC-8.
How can you even have a bad anvil? An anvil is just a big chunk of metal, right? It’s like saying “this is a bad chunk of metal”! How can a chunk of metal be bad?
Answer: “Harbor Freight 55lb Anvil: How Much Does it Suck?”
I guess it might be good for at least one thing: anvil shooting.
I like watching anvil shooting. On YouTube. My concern with watching it in person is that what goes up, must come down, and I really don’t want an anvil coming down on my head. I am not Wile E. Coyote.
Bonus #2, because I don’t have any other place to put this: a 1958 Navy propaganda film, “”Stay in School and Graduate”, featuring vintage footage of the USS Los Angeles.
Bonus #3, just for the heck of it. This goes out to RoadRich and Lawrence: “Why Aerial Refuelling Is Most Challenging Manoeuvre For A Pilot” with Richard Hammond.
There’s a channel called “Tech Ingredients” that features a variety of interesting stuff.
This is slightly on the long side, but I watched it last night and found it oddly compelling: “Distilling ALCOHOL With Our New Reflux Still!”
I also generally don’t like videos that focus on a specific product, but in this case, the video is less about the specific reflux still and more about the general workings of one, including things like the design of the bubble plates and the dephlegmator.
Bonus video #1: Previously from “Tech Ingredients”, “Banana Brandy – Making Ugandan Waragi (Moonshine)”.
Bonus video #2: This also appeals to my geek instincts, but doesn’t involve booze: “Jet Engine Thrust Test – Fuel Experiment (Jet-A vs Diesel vs BioDiesel vs HydroDiesel)”. The guy built his own dynamometer, and then tested these fuels to see which one produces the most thrust.
It seems like there are a lot of videos on the ‘Tube from folks trying to build their own liquid propellant engines, but I haven’t found one yet that goes from zero to complete working engine: it looks like many of them stalled out for one reason or another. If anybody knows of a good zero to finish liquid fueled rocket video (or series) please leave a comment here.
Bonus #3: One more, for Lawrence: Colin Furze demonstrates (with some help from his friends) “How to START a Pulse Jet”, like the old V-1 engine. The video doesn’t show how to actually build a pulse jet, but the comments link to some helpful resources on that subject.