Archive for January 29th, 2021

“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