Archive for January, 2021

« Older Entries

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 306

Sunday, January 31st, 2021

Science Sunday!

I apologize for the crappy quality of this first video. But it is from 1967. I’m putting this here because it is something that I hope you will never ever see up close and personal, and this is the only video I know of.

“Burning and Extinguishing Characteristics of Plutonium Metal Fires”.

To steal a line from the late John Clark in Ignition! (affiliate link), “For dealing with this situation, I have always recommended a good pair of running shoes.”

Bonus #1: “Who Destroyed Three Mile Island?”. As I understand it, this is a presentation from the Lead Developer conference in Austin in 2018. “So like most things in Austin today, the problem with the microphone is South By’s fault.”

More to the point:

When something bad happens, it’s easy to just blame someone and move on. Taking the time to find the systemic causes, though, will not only help keep the problem from repeating, it will enable you to build the psychological safety necessary for your team to truly collaborate. Let’s let the story of Three Mile Island teach us how to make our teams stronger through systems thinking and just culture.

In addition to the science! part of it, I think there’s some good leadership stuff in here too.

(I have another video from Nickolas Means that I want to use in the near future: I didn’t use it today because it was closer to history than science. But sometime next week, probably…)

Bonus #2: Lasers! 8 o’clock! Day one!

“360 video tour of the world’s largest laser” from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Bonus #3: “The Riemann Hypothesis, Explained”.

Posted in Geek, History, Leadership | Comments Closed

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 305

Saturday, January 30th, 2021

I don’t want to keep going back to the AvE well, but this one grabbed me by the socks for reasons:

“Stone Age Radio Voice Based Interwebs for Frozen Third World Sit-Holes.”

Bonus #1: When guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have crossbows.

“960lbs crossbow vs 150lbs crossbow – TESTED!”

Bonus #2: “Sergeant Stan W Scott, No. 3 Army Commando, demonstrates the use of the Fairbairn-Sykes fighting knife.”

Bonus #3: This is actually one McThag turned me on to: I enjoyed it, and I don’t think everyone reads McThag’s blog (unfortunately). So:

“I bought The Cheapest Orange County Chopper in America for only 8k.”

Since I am unwilling to pay for television, I have never seen an episode of either one of the bike shows (though I am familiar with the meme). I know there’s a lot of manufactured drama on all of those shows, but I have to say: I was surprised by this guy’s comments on the OCC bike.

(Chopper style bikes aren’t really my style anyway. If I was going to ride, it would either be something in more of a cafe racer style, or else a full-up BMW touring bike.)

Posted in History, Knives, Radio | Comments Closed

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 304

Friday, January 29th, 2021

I get a lot of “How It’s Made” in my feed. I mostly avoid posting those: this one is an exception, because I’d never heard of this thing until recently, and it’s a fascinating concept.

The “Ghillie Kettle” (also known by other names such as “Kelly Kettle”) is basically a highly efficient water boiler, sort of a descendant of a samovar. You have a bottom part of the kettle in which you start a small fire, and a top part of the kettle which is a water jacket. When you put the top part on top of the fire in the bottom part, the hole in the center of the water jacket functions as a chimney, drawing smoke and hot air up through the jacket part and rapidly heating the water to a boil.

And “How to use a Ghillie Kettle in 3 minutes!”

Longer demo from The Kelly Kettle Company.

I don’t do a lot of camping these days, but I kind of want one of these: it seems like a good thing to add to your emergency prep gear.

And now for something completely different, but which I also think is kind of cool: “David’s Garage” talks about his 1968 Steyr Puch Haflinger.

I have no room and no use for one of these, but I like it. It strikes me as being a neat retro-cool alternative to those massively overbuilt 4-wheelers you see at Bass Pro Shop.

One more for today: “Group B: When Rallying Got TOO FAST”. This was yet another thing I had not heard about until recently, even though it was in the right time frame for me.

Group B was a FIA rally classification. It was sort of an “anything goes” classification.

…Group B had few restrictions on technology, design and the number of cars required for homologation to compete—200, less than other series. Weight was kept as low as possible, high-tech materials were permitted, and there were no restrictions on boost, resulting in the power output of the winning cars increasing from 250 hp in 1981, the year before Group B rules were introduced, to there being at least two cars producing in excess of 500 by 1986, the final year of Group B. In just five years, the power output of rally cars had more than doubled.

Apparently the cars were utterly insane. So what happened? Why did this only last from 1983 to 1986?

Answer: the cars were utterly insane.

Posted in History | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: January 29, 2021.

Friday, January 29th, 2021

Cicely Tyson. THR. Variety.

In a remarkable career of seven decades, Ms. Tyson broke ground for serious Black actors by refusing to take parts that demeaned Black people. She urged Black colleagues to do the same, and often went without work. She was critical of films and television programs that cast Black characters as criminal, servile or immoral, and insisted that African-Americans, even if poor or downtrodden, should be portrayed with dignity.
Her chiseled face and willowy frame, striking even in her 90s, became familiar to millions in more than 100 film, television and stage roles, including some that had traditionally been given only to white actors. She won three Emmys and many awards from civil rights and women’s groups, and at 88 became the oldest person to win a Tony, for her 2013 Broadway role in a revival of Horton Foote’s “The Trip to Bountiful.”
At 93, she won an honorary Oscar, and was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame in 2018 and into the Television Hall of Fame in 2020. She also won a career achievement Peabody Award in 2020.

So she was a “G” short of an EGOT, but picked up the “P” to make her a PEOT.

For many Americans, Ms. Tyson was an idol of the Black Is Beautiful movement, regal in an African turban and caftan, her face gracing the covers of Ebony, Essence and Jet magazines. She was a vegetarian, a teetotaler, a runner, a meditator and, from 1981 to 1989, the wife of the jazz trumpeter and composer Miles Davis. Since the ’60s she had inspired Black American women to embrace their own standards of beauty — including helping to popularize the Afro.
“She’s our Meryl Streep,” Vanessa Williams told Essence in 2013. “She was the person you wanted to be like in terms of an actress, in terms of the roles she got and how serious she took her craft. She still is.”

…

In January 2021, when she was 96, her memoir, “Just as I Am,” appeared, and in a pre-publication interview with The New York Times Magazine, she was asked if she had any advice for the young.
“It’s simple,” she said. “I try always to be true to myself. I learned from my mom: ‘Don’t lie ever, no matter how bad it is. Don’t lie to me ever, OK? You will be happier that you told the truth.’ That has stayed with me, and it will stay with me for as long as I’m lucky enough to be here.”

Posted in 1970s, Movies, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 303

Thursday, January 28th, 2021

Travel Thursday!

You know, when you travel, you have to stay somewhere. I guess you could sleep outdoors, but that’s a good way to get robbed or rousted by the po-lice.

So you need to sleep somewhere. Like a hotel or motel.

(I thought the movie was a little twee, but I do like that scene.)

From 1962, “The Great Tradition”, a promo film for the American Hotel Association.

Bonus: Another one I’m pretty sure I haven’t used (and I think I’d remember: it doesn’t turn up in a search): “Wings to Viking Land”. Really, “Viking Land”.

…a Pan Am travelogue about Scandinavia and specifically Norway, Denmark and Sweden. The flight is made aboard a Pan Am Clipper — a four engine Boeing Stratocruiser equipped with Sleeperette seats. The flight takes less than 24 hours and meals served aboard are from Maxim’s of Paris.

I kind of feel like the original Vikings were not served meals from Maxim’s of Paris, coming or going. But hey, what do I know?

Posted in History, Travel | Comments Closed

Obit watch: January 28, 2021.

Thursday, January 28th, 2021

Cloris Leachman.

…between 1972 and 2011 she was nominated for 22 Primetime Emmys and won eight.

(Of course, she won an Oscar as best supporting actress for “The Last Picture Show”. Interestingly, she beat Ellen Burstyn who was also nominated for the same film.)

A number of those Emmys were for dramatic work, including her performance as a woman who finds herself pregnant at 40 in the made-for-TV movie “A Brand New Life” (1973). But comedy was her forte.
She was nominated four times and won twice for her performance on the hit CBS sitcom “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” as Phyllis Lindstrom, the scatterbrained landlady of Mary Richards, the plucky TV news producer played by Ms. Moore. She went on to play the same role from 1975 to 1977 on the spinoff series “Phyllis,” for which she received another Emmy nomination and won a Golden Globe.

Although her focus for the rest of her career was on television, she also had some memorable movie roles, notably under Mel Brooks’s direction. In his beloved horror spoof “Young Frankenstein” (1974) she was the sinister Transylvanian housekeeper Frau Blücher, the very mention of whose name was enough to terrify any horse within earshot. She played similarly intimidating women in Mr. Brooks’s “High Anxiety” (1977) and “History of the World, Part I” (1981). She also co-starred with Harvey Korman in Mr. Brooks’s short-lived sitcom “The Nutt House” (1989).

And, yes! She did do a “Mannix”! (“The Need of a Friend“, season 2, episode 9.)

Posted in 1970s, Mannix, Movies, Obits, TV | 3 Comments »

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 302

Wednesday, January 27th, 2021

Today, planes. Specifically military aircraft. I thought I’d do some slightly shorter stuff as well.

To start with, from the Planes of Fame channel on the ‘Tube, a tour of their B-17.

Bonus #1: “The Ultimate Supersonic Interceptor – F-106 Delta Dart” from the Dark Skies channel.

Back in the day, when I worked for Four Letter Computer Company in Round Rock that has nothing to do with fruit, they tried to force a new case management system on us called “Delta”. Many of the techs felt they would have been better off converting the money spent to $100 bills, piling them in the parking lot and setting them on fire.

I had a photo of the F-106 hanging in my cube with the caption “The only good Delta”.

Bonus #2: Okay, this one is longer, but it is a bonus: “Wings” from the Discovery Channel on the XB-70 Valkyrie. Speaking of #TheFutureWeCouldHaveHad: yes, it was a Mach 3 bomber, but it also served as a testbed for a lot of the tech that was intended to go into the SST.

Is it just me, or does the Tu-144 remind folks a lot of the XB-70? Granted, it lacks the two vertical stabilizers, but other than that…

Speaking of the Tu-144:

The prototypes were also the only passenger jets ever fitted with ejection seats, albeit only for the crew and not the passengers.

Yeah, kind of a bad look there if you punch out and let your passengers get spread evenly over several acres of Siberian landscape. Sort of like the captain deserting a sinking ship ahead of the passengers and the rest of the crew.

Posted in History, Planes | Comments Closed

Obit watch: January 27, 2021.

Wednesday, January 27th, 2021

Bruce Kirby, another one of those knock-around actors who was in just about every 1970’s detective show except that one.

Most notably, he was Sgt. Kramer in “Columbo”. He also had several guest shots on “The Rockford Files”, and appeared on “Banacek” and “McCloud” among many other credits. (He was also the police captain on “Holmes and Yoyo”.) And his credits go all the way back to “Car 54, Where Are You?”

NYT obit for Gregory Sierra.

Posted in 1970s, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 301

Tuesday, January 26th, 2021

I would call this “True Crime Tuesday” but there’s some other jerkface out there who does that already.

I did think it might be fun to do some stuff at the intersection of crime and art.

“The Mystery Conman – The Murky Business of Counterfeit Antiques”.

Bonus: “Stealing the Mona Lisa”.

Posted in Art, History, Law | Comments Closed

Obit watch: January 26, 2021.

Tuesday, January 26th, 2021

Antonio Sabàto. He was most famous as one of the drivers in “Grand Prix”. He did a lot of Italian movies including “Escape from the Bronx” and “Ritornano quelli della calibro 38”.

Walter Bernstein, noted screenwriter.

Posted in Movies, Obits | Comments Closed

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 300

Monday, January 25th, 2021

I was thinking today we’d go for a ride.

“Operation of the Motorcycle” from Honda, apparently in 1966.

Bonus #1: “Welcome to the Murderdrome: A Brief History of Board Track Racing”.

Bonus #2: Okay, not related to motorcycles, but posted for the coolness factor: vintage video from the 1970 12 Hours of Sebring.

Mario Andretti finished first. The second place finisher? Steve McQueen.

Posted in Cars, History | Comments Closed

Obit watch: January 25, 2021.

Monday, January 25th, 2021

Jimmie Rodgers, crossover singer probably most famous for “Honeycomb”.

Mr. Rodgers was a regular presence on the pop, country, R&B and easy listening charts for a decade after “Honeycomb,” with records that included “Oh-Oh, I’m Falling in Love Again” (1958) and “Child of Clay” (1967), both of which were nominated for Grammy Awards.

Then something happened.

Mr. Rodgers said he was under consideration for a featured role in the 1968 movie musical “Finian’s Rainbow” when the encounter on the freeway derailed his career. In his telling, he was driving home late at night when the driver behind him flashed his lights. He thought it was his conductor, who was also driving to Mr. Rodgers’s house, and pulled over.
“I rolled the window down to ask what was the matter,” he told The Toronto Star in 1987. “That’s the last thing I remember.”
He ended up with a fractured skull and broken arm. He said the off-duty officer who had pulled him over called two on-duty officers to the scene, but all three scattered when his conductor, who went looking for Mr. Rodgers when he hadn’t arrived home, drove up.
The police told a different story: They said Mr. Rodgers had been drunk and had injured himself when he fell. Mr. Rodgers sued the Los Angeles Police Department, prompting a countersuit; the matter was settled out of court in his favor to the tune of $200,000.

…

Three brain surgeries followed, and he was left with a metal plate in his head. He eventually resumed performing, and even briefly had his own television show, but he faced constant difficulties. For a time he was sidelined because he started having seizures during concerts.
“Once word gets out that you’re having seizures onstage, you can’t work,” he told The News Sentinel of Knoxville, Tenn., in 1998. “People won’t hire you.”
Mr. Rodgers was found to have spasmodic dysphonia, a disorder characterized by spasms in the muscles of the voice box, a condition he attributed to his brain injury. Yet he later settled into a comfortable niche as a performer and producer in Branson, Mo., the country music mecca, where he had his own theater for several years before retiring to California in 2002.

Posted in California Über Alles, Cops, Law, Music, Obits | Comments Closed

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 299

Sunday, January 24th, 2021

Science Sunday!

Today’s video goes out to Gregg “Tuesday Morning Quarterback” Easterbrook. From 2014, a talk in the Theodore von Kármán lecture series at JPL, on NASA’s planned Asteroid Redirect Robotic Mission (ARRM).

Spoiler: the project was cancelled in 2017.

I have a great idea for a TV series, if there was a network out there that actually did science stuff: “Cool But Cancelled”, a series devoted to all the awesome proposed space age projects that ended up getting cancelled in favor of various government boondoggles.

#TheFutureWeCouldHaveHad

Unrelated bonus: this is an old documentary from Oak Ridge (produced for the Atomic Energy Commission) about their experimental molten-salt reactor. I’m putting this here mostly because I like the idea of “molten salt”, and y’all know I’m a nuclear geek.

Posted in Geek, History | Comments Closed

Obit watch: January 24, 2021.

Sunday, January 24th, 2021

Gregory Sierra, knock-around actor.

He did some theater work, but was mostly a TV and movie actor. He was “Julio”, Fred’s sidekick on “Sanford and Son”, Carlos “El Puerco” Valdez (the guy who kidnapped Jessica) on “Soap”, and “Chano”, one of the detectives in the early seasons of “Barney Miller”. He also did a lot of guest appearances, including nearly every major detective show of the 1970s (except that one): “Police Story”, “Banacek”, “Hawaii 5-0” (the good one), “Columbo”, “McCloud”, “Mission: Impossible”, and the list goes on. He was also Lieutenant Rodriguez in the early episodes of “Miami Vice” (that character got killed off and was replaced by Edward James Olmos’s “Martin Castillo”).

His movie credits include “Beneath the Planet of the Apes” and, interestingly, “The Other Side of the Wind“.

Posted in 1970s, Movies, Obits, Theatre, TV | 2 Comments »

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 298

Saturday, January 23rd, 2021

Happy birthday John Moses Browning!

“American Gunmaker: The John M. Browning Story”.

Bonus: “Tales of the Gun” from the History Channel, covering Mr. Browning and his work.

Posted in Guns, History | Comments Closed

Obit watch: January 23, 2021.

Saturday, January 23rd, 2021

Larry King. Or, as the old story goes, “Larry King Radio“.

He bragged that he almost never prepared for an interview. If his guest was an author promoting a book, he did not read it but asked simply, “What’s it about?” or “Why did you write this?”
Nor did he pose as an intellectual. He salted his talk with “ain’t,” and “the” sounded like “da.” To a public skeptical of experts, he seemed refreshingly average: just a curious guy asking questions impulsively.
“There are many broadcasters who’ll recite three minutes of facts before they ask a question,” he said in a memoir, “My Remarkable Journey” (2009, with Cal Fussman). “As if to say: Let me show you how much I know. I think the guest should be the expert.”

Posted in Obits, Radio, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: January 22, 2021.

Friday, January 22nd, 2021

Hank Aaron. NYT. ESPN. MLB.

Mira Furlan. She was Delenn in “Babylon 5” and “Danielle Rousseau” on “Lost”.

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

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 297

Friday, January 22nd, 2021

I haven’t put up any RoadRich bait recently, so today is his day.

“The Story Of Hong Kong’s Kai Tak Airport”.

I’m fairly sure this is a view from the ground of a 747 on final to Kai Tak.

And here’s a cockpit view of the Kai Tak approach.

Question for anyone who has the new Microsoft Flight Simulator: can you set up an approach and fly in to the virtual Kai Tak?

“Captain Joe” explains V1, Vr, and V2. If you watch movies (well, if you watch the kind of movies we watch) you’ll hear the pilots calling out those speeds. But what exactly are they?

“Crawl through a B-29 Superfortress IN FLIGHT!”

What is it like to punch out of an F-15 at 600 knots?

Spoiler: not fun.

Posted in History, Planes | 1 Comment »

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 296

Thursday, January 21st, 2021

Travel Thursday!

I’m 99 44/100ths percent sure I haven’t used this one before, and I feel like I’m reaching the end of the string of Pan Am videos. So…

“Wings To Europe: Grand Tour” from 1959.

… a tour of Europe in the grand style of the 20th century world. A day in each of the Grand Tour cities: Lisbon, Madrid, Rome, Florence, the French Riviera and Paris.

Bonus: ’tis the season. Let’s go skiing!

“Winter Olympic Playground 1960” is a vintage promo film for Squaw Valley, California, and the facilities there. Squaw Valley was the site of the 1960 Winter Olympics, and is about 40 miles from Reno. (The film was done by the Harrah’s Club casino in Reno: it looks like it was still there when I was there (with a slight name change), but it closed permanently in March of 2020.)

Posted in History, Travel | Comments Closed

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 295

Wednesday, January 20th, 2021

There’s a part of me that doesn’t want to post this because it feels like unpaid advertising for Blade HQ.

But there’s a larger part of me that likes the idea of going around asking people who know, and deal with knives, what they are carrying. It is sort of like asking a professional photographer “What’s in your camera bag?”. At least for me.

So this is a compromise: I’m posting the video, but I’m not linking to Blade HQ or any other online knife shop. If they want promotion, they can buy some advertising. My rates are surprisingly reasonable.

(What do I carry? The knife in my pocket right now is one of the smaller Victorinox Swiss Army knives. I prefer to carry a Swiss Champ, but I’ve set mine aside for the moment: I need to send it in and get it serviced.)

Here’s another one of those in the “what’s in your (x)?” vein: “Racing Team Tool Box Tour – With Specialty Tools”.

I found this mildly interesting: “Knives you don’t hand to people”.

For some reason, “Matt’s Off Road Recovery” has been popping up a lot in my recommendations. I’ve always had kind of a vague general curiosity about how you get your off-road vehicle back if you have a mechanical breakdown or some other problem, so I guess Matt’s answers that question. Although I’m not sure these people really want it back, but it seems like one of those “can’t leave it here, unless you want a major fine” situations.

Posted in Cars, History, Knives | Comments Closed

Obit watch: January 20, 2021.

Wednesday, January 20th, 2021

Don Sutton.

Sutton’s major league career began with the Dodgers in 1966. He went on to win 233 games during 16 seasons with the team, the most in franchise history.
“When you gave him the ball, you knew one thing,” the former Dodger manager Tommy Lasorda, who died this month, once said. “Your pitcher was going to give you everything he had.”
Sutton also pitched for the Houston Astros, Milwaukee Brewers, California Angels and Oakland A’s before retiring in 1988. He was elected to the Hall of Fame on his fifth attempt.

…

Sutton — whose major league career began as part of a Dodger pitching rotation that also included Sandy Koufax and Don Drysdale — won 20 games only once (he had a 21-10 record in 1976). But he is tied for 14th place in career wins with Nolan Ryan, and ranked seventh in both strikeouts, with 3,574, and innings, with 5,282.1.
He holds the Dodger team records not only for career wins but also for strikeouts (2,696), starts (533), shutouts (52), home runs surrendered (309) and losses (181).

Barbara Shelley, British actress. She did a lot of horror films: “Village of the Damned”, “Dracula: Prince of Darkness”, “Quatermass and the Pit”, etc. She also did a lot of non-horror TV, including “Eastenders” and two guest shots on “12 O’Clock High”.

Posted in Movies, Obits, Sports | Comments Closed

Happy National Buy an AK Day!

Wednesday, January 20th, 2021

I’ve been neglecting this holiday for the past few years, but: today is National Buy an AK Day.

Contrary to what some may believe, this holiday has nothing to do with any political events that take place on January 20th: rather, it is inspired by the classic Ice Cube song “It Was a Good Day” (“Today I didn’t even have to use my A.K./I got to say it was a good day“) and the hard work done by Donovan Strain who determined that the “good day” in the song was January 20, 1992.

If you have trouble finding an AK at your local gun shop, you might try Bud’s or Classic Firearms, though stocks at both are limited. If you already have an AK, I encourage you to pick up some 7.62×39 ammo, or whatever caliber your AK is chambered in. (Ammoseek.com is helpful if you can’t find your ammo locally.) You might also buy some normal capacity magazines, if you’re so inclined. (CDNN Sports seems to be well stocked.)

“Can I buy something that’s not an AK?” You certainly can: I’m not the boss of what you can and can’t purchase. But Ice Cube didn’t say “I didn’t even have to use my AR” or “I didn’t have to use my FN 5.7”, so this isn’t National Buy a Gun Day. (That’s April 15th.)

Posted in Guns, History, Music | Comments Closed

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 294

Tuesday, January 19th, 2021

Going a little long today. Also going back to the music history well, because it has been more than a week since I’ve done that, and I don’t want to get stuck on guns, food, Roman history, or military history. (I may do some more military history tomorrow.)

Short shameful confession: I have not had a chance to watch all of these two videos yet. I’m posting them here partially as bookmarks, because they involve two bands that I’m partial to.

“Rebel Truce – The History Of The Clash”

“Fresh Fruit For Rotting Eyeballs”, a documentary about the Dead Kennedys.

Posted in History, Music | Comments Closed

When you’re a Met…

Tuesday, January 19th, 2021

…you shouldn’t send “explicit texts” to a reporter. Actually, you probably shouldn’t send explicit texts to anybody, no matter who you are, and even if they are consensual (as they will come back to haunt you) but especially if you’re in a high ranking organizational position.

Jared Porter out as general manager of the Mets.

Porter, who was hired by Mets team president Sandy Alderson this offseason, sent the texts to a foreign female reporter in 2016 when he was running the Cubs scouting department.
The texts included a photo of a bulge in Porter’s pants while he was laying in bed and an erect penis. At one point Porter sent 62 consecutive texts to the reporter without a response.
“The more explicit ones are not of me. Those are like, kinda like joke-stock images,” Porter told ESPN after acknowledging sending the texts.

Posted in Firings, Sports | Comments Closed

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 293

Monday, January 18th, 2021

I observed the other day that I was reading Mike Duncan’s The Storm Before the Storm: The Beginning of the End of the Roman Republic (affiliate link). Great and good FotB Borepatch commented that he liked Duncan’s book.

So…from 2017 and Mike Duncan’s book tour, “The Storm Before the Storm” at Politics and Prose in DC. If you’re a “Revoutions” listener, you’ve heard the podcast version of this, but for those of you who are not (and for those of you who want to see what Mike Duncan looked like three years ago), here you go.

I get a particular kick out of his stories about his early writerly ambitions: wanting to write “Redwall” knockoffs, except the mice flew airplanes, and then later wanting to be the next Phil Dick.

Bonus: a more recent (July of 2020) interview with Mr. Duncan from “The Current” which is apparently something the Hatchette Book Group puts out.

Posted in Books, History | Comments Closed

« Older Entries