Archive for March, 2021

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“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 365

Wednesday, March 31st, 2021

Man, one year of this. And I haven’t missed a day of being a lazy, shiftless blogger.

I thought today I’d do a sort of call back to the video that started it all, but from a different time – the 1980s – and a different source – the US Air Force. Even though it is an Air Force video, I consider it to be closer thematically to “Vehicle Ambush: Counterattacks”.

“Terrorism: A Survivable Threat”.

Bonus #1: “5 Police Cars Most Police Wish They Still Drove”.

Bonus #2: I’m not a huge fan of Jay Leno’s Garage, but since I’m doing cop stuff, and since I’ve written some in the past year about the California Highway Patrol, I thought I’d put this up: “Classic California Highway Patrol Cars”.

Posted in History, Law | Comments Closed

Obit watch: March 31, 2021.

Wednesday, March 31st, 2021

Most people don’t have a favorite Watergate conspirator.

G. Gordon Liddy was mine. WP in archive format so you can actually read it.

As a leader of a White House “plumbers” unit set up to plug information leaks, and then as a strategist for the president’s re-election campaign, Mr. Liddy helped devise plots to discredit Nixon “enemies” and to disrupt the 1972 Democratic National Convention. Most were far-fetched — bizarre kidnappings, acts of sabotage, traps using prostitutes, even an assassination — and were never carried out.
But Mr. Liddy, a former F.B.I. agent, and E. Howard Hunt, a former C.I.A. agent, engineered two break-ins at the Democratic National Committee offices in the Watergate complex in Washington. On May 28, 1972, as Mr. Liddy and Mr. Hunt stood by, six Cuban expatriates and James W. McCord Jr., a Nixon campaign security official, went in, planted bugs, photographed documents and got away cleanly.
A few weeks later, on June 17, four Cubans and Mr. McCord, wearing surgical gloves and carrying walkie-talkies, returned to the scene and were caught by the police. Mr. Liddy and Mr. Hunt, running the operation from a Watergate hotel room, fled but were soon arrested and indicted on charges of burglary, wiretapping and conspiracy.

…

Unlike the other Watergate defendants, Mr. Liddy refused to testify about his activities for the White House or the Committee to Re-elect the President, and drew the longest term among those who went to prison. He was sentenced by Judge John J. Sirica to 6 to 20 years, but served only 52 months. President Jimmy Carter commuted his term in 1977.

…

Disbarred from law practice and in debt for $300,000, mostly for legal fees, Mr. Liddy began a new career as a writer. His first book, “Out of Control,” (1979) was a spy thriller. He later wrote another novel, “The Monkey Handlers” (1990), and a nonfiction book, “When I Was a Kid, This Was a Free Country” (2002). He also co-wrote a guide to fighting terrorism, “Fight Back! Tackling Terrorism, Liddy Style” (2006), and produced many articles on politics, taxes, health and other matters.
In 1980, he broke his silence on Watergate with his autobiography, “Will.” The reviews were mixed, but it became a best seller. After years of revelations by other Watergate conspirators, there was little new in it about the scandal, but critics said his account of prison life was graphic. A television movie based on the book was aired in 1982 by NBC.

…

In the 1980s, Mr. Liddy dabbled in acting, appearing on “Miami Vice” and in other television and film roles.

His IMDB page. In addition to “Miami Vice”, he also did a guest shot on “Airwolf”.

On the old Nashville Network cable channel, he co-starred as a crime boss in the short-lived series “18 Wheels of Justice,” a program that he boasted had “no redeeming social value.”

…

But he was better known later as a syndicated talk-radio host with a right-wing agenda. “The G. Gordon Liddy Show,” begun in 1992, was carried on hundreds of stations by Viacom and later Radio America, with satellite hookups and internet streaming. It ran until his retirement in 2012. He lived in Fort Washington, Md.
Mr. Liddy, who promoted nutritional supplements and exercised, was still trim in his 70s. He made parachute jumps, took motorcycle trips, collected guns, played a piano and sang lieder. His website showed him craggy-faced with head held high, an American flag and the Capitol dome in the background.

Posted in Nixon, Obits, Radio, TV | Comments Closed

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 364

Tuesday, March 30th, 2021

One of the reasons this past weekend was so busy is that I got up brutally early Saturday morning and drove out to the KR Training facility (KR Training, official firearms trainer for WCD) to attend a “Stop the Bleed” class taught by Levi Nathan.

I know there are many gun bloggers who feel like: if you carry a gun, you should carry a tourniquet, too. I haven’t been doing that because:

  • I didn’t have the training.
  • I have heard a lot of horror stories about low quality knockoff tourniquets made of Chinesium. I wanted to make sure I knew what suppliers were reliable, and how to tell a counterfeit tourniquet from a real one, before I started spending money on putting together an emergency kit (or what people in the biz call an IFAK).
  • I also wanted to know what I should – and should not – put in my emergency kit.

Summarizing: I got exactly what I wanted out of Mr. Nathan and the course, and I heartily endorse this event and/or product.

And even though this was at KR Training, this isn’t just a gun thing, for all my foreign readers. People hurt themselves badly and suffer life threatening bleeding in all kinds of ways: car accidents, construction accidents, kitchen accidents…

I also heartily endorse the idea of taking an official “Stop the Bleed” course from someone, anyone. You’ll get hands-on practice with stuff, and hands-on practice is good.

That being said, today’s videos are all StB related. Some of this is for my own personal bookmarks, and some of this is for the benefit of my loyal readers who want the knowledge, but may not yet be able to step out and take a StB course.

Remember: Have gloves. Wear gloves. Nitrile is recommended.

This is a compressed (slightly over 15 minutes) version of the “Stop the Bleed” presentation.

Here’s a longer version (a little over an hour) with demos.

Again, these are not substitutes for taking a for real actual course from someone who knows what they are doing. But I know a lot of people still don’t feel like it is safe to go out and mingle in public, so this is better than a poke in the neck with a sharp stick.

And from North American Rescue, makers of the Combat Application Tourniquet (C-A-T), here’s how to apply one:

NAR has a content rich YouTube channel. Here’s another video on the use of the emergency trauma dressing.

And from ITS Tactical, here’s a video on using the Israeli bandage:

Finally, by way of SkinnyMedic, “How to use your IFAK”.

Note that some of these channels talk about stuff other than trauma dressing, gauze (for packing) and the C-A-T: for example, chest seals.

The advice we got in class for using chest seals (and even more emphatically, chest decompression needles) was: don’t. Chest seals seem to show up in a lot of pre-packaged IFAKs, but as Mr. Nathan put it, this is not within your scope having taken just a “Stop the Bleed” course. This is the kind of thing that EMTs with higher level certifications do, not random hobos such as myself.

Also, if you get someone else’s blood on you: tell the responding medical people. We all know about HIPAA, right? Well, there’s a limited exception in the law: if you get someone’s blood on you, and it is documented, and it turns out that person has a blood-borne pathogen, you have a right to be informed of that as long as it is documented. You don’t have a right to know how and where they got it, just that they had it.

Now all I need to do is get my (stuff) together. I’m actually kind of surprised at how many of the companies selling IFAK pouches don’t make them in red. Condor is the only one I’ve found: 5.11 doesn’t, for sure.

The pouch should be the cheapest part of your kit, as long as it holds everything in place. But in a high stress emergency situation, I’m personally thinking “red = first aid”, and I want to be able to tell people “grab the red pouch”, not “grab the black pouch, no, the small black pouch, no, the other small black pouch, no, that’s the dark purple one, grab the black one…” Know what I mean, Vern?

Posted in Bookmarks, Endorsements, Geek, Safety | Comments Closed

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 363

Monday, March 29th, 2021

Here’s a little something for Military History Monday that’s at the intersection of military history and film history.

I’ve written before about Five Came Back: A Story of Hollywood and the Second World War (affiliate link). Here’s another work from one of the five: Mister Wonderful Life himself, Frank Capra.

“Know Your Enemy: Japan”.

Bonus: “Prelude to War”, from the “Why We Fight” series, also directed by Capra.

The US National Archives has a “Why We Fight” playlist, if you’re interested.

Posted in Books, History, Movies | Comments Closed

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 362

Sunday, March 28th, 2021

Science Sunday!

I’ve got a few things for you today. First up: “ABCs of Radiation” with “Illinois EnergyProf“, which gives a nice explanation of alpha, beta, and gamma radiation for the uninitiated. You know, for kids.

Bonus #1: Some kind person appears to have uploaded all of Jonathan Miller‘s “The Body In Question” series to the ‘Tube. I wanted to see this when it was first run on PBS in America, but for some reason I don’t recall at the moment was unable to.

Here’s episode #1:

Here’s the playlist.

Bonus #2: Have you ever asked yourself, “How do atomic clocks work?”

Here’s how the The NIST-F2 Atomic Clock works:

And here’s a more general introduction:

Bonus #3: which, of course, was nicely set up by the previous videos. This guy’s voice is right on the ragged edge of annoying for me (he reminds me of Inspector Clouseau), but I thought the content was worthwhile for HP fans: the HP 5061A Cesium Clock.

Posted in Geek, History | Comments Closed

Obit watch: March 28, 2021.

Sunday, March 28th, 2021

It has been a busy weekend, so I’m only getting to this one now: Beverly Cleary. I’m not going to sneer at the description of her as “beloved children’s author”: everything I’ve seen about her points to her being a kind and gentle soul who had a long full life.

The children’s books she read at school disappointed, she recalled in an article for The Horn Book in 1982. The protagonists tended to be aristocratic English children who had nannies and pony carts, or poor children whose problems disappeared when a long-lost rich relative turned up in the last chapter.
“I wanted to read funny stories about the sort of children I knew,” she wrote, “and I decided that someday when I grew up I would write them.”

“Beverly Cleary Wrote About Real Life, and Her Readers Loved Her for It“.

Cleary didn’t start writing until she was in her early 30s. She’d talked about it for years and, in “My Own Two Feet,” describes an epiphany she had while working at Sather Gate Book Shop in Berkeley: “One morning during a lull, I picked up an easy-reading book and read, ‘Bow-wow. I like the green grass, said the puppy.’ How ridiculous, I thought. No puppy I had known talked like that.”

Posted in Books, Obits | 1 Comment »

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 361

Saturday, March 27th, 2021

When I win the lottery, one of the things I want to collect is a complete run of the “Notable British Trials” series. I have a few paperbacks which contain edited versions of some of the trials, but I don’t have any complete volumes, reprint or otherwise.

One of the paperbacks I do have contains the trial of William Joyce. Students of history may know him better as “Lord Haw Haw“.

“The Story of Lord Haw Haw and his Trial”, a 2015 BBC radio documentary. Since this is radio, you could put it on as background while you do something else.

Bonus: As long as we’re talking about trials, here’s a little something from the “Timeline” folks: “The Origins of Witch Trials”, part 1:

Part 2:

Posted in Books, History, Law | Comments Closed

Obit watch: March 26, 2021 (supplemental).

Friday, March 26th, 2021

Larry McMurtry, noted antiquarian book dealer.

In a 1976 profile of Mr. McMurtry in The New Yorker, Calvin Trillin observed his book-buying skills. “Larry knows which shade of blue cover on a copy of ‘Native Son’ indicates a first printing and which one doesn’t,” Mr. Trillin wrote. “He knows the precise value of poetry books by Robert Lowell that Robert Lowell may now have forgotten writing.”

…

Mr. McMurtry’s private library alone held some 30,000 books and was spread over three houses. He called compiling it a life’s work, “an achievement equal to if not better than my writings themselves.”

He also wrote books sometimes.

Over more than five decades, Mr. McMurtry wrote more than 30 novels and many books of essays, memoir and history. He also wrote more than 30 screenplays, including the one for “Brokeback Mountain” (written with Ms. Ossana, based on a short story by Annie Proulx), for which he won an Academy Award in 2006.
But he found his greatest commercial and critical success with “Lonesome Dove,” a sweeping 843-page novel about two retired Texas Rangers who drive a herd of stolen cattle from the Rio Grande to Montana in the 1870s. The book won a Pulitzer Prize in 1986 and was made into a popular television mini-series.

…

From the start of his career, Mr. McMurtry’s books were attractive to filmmakers. “Horseman, Pass By” was made into “Hud,” directed by Martin Ritt and starring Paul Newman. Mr. McMurtry’s funny, elegiac and sexually frank coming-of-age novel “The Last Picture Show” (1966) was made into a film of the same title in 1971 starring Jeff Bridges and Cybill Shepherd and directed by Peter Bogdanovich. The movie of his 1975 novel, “Terms of Endearment,” directed by James L. Brooks and starring Shirley MacLaine, Debra Winger and Jack Nicholson, won the Academy Award for best picture of 1983.

I haven’t read “Last Picture Show”, but the Saturday Night Movie Group watched the movie just a few weeks ago. It has a lot going for it (like a young Ms. Shepherd) but as Lawrence put it, it is a good movie that we never want to watch again. (A motion to obtain and watch “Texasville” was resoundingly defeated.)

….

Thanks to his friendship with Mr. Kesey, Mr. McMurtry made a memorable cameo appearance in Tom Wolfe’s classic of new journalism, “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test” (1968). The book details Mr. Kesey’s drug-fueled journey across America, along with a gang of friends collectively known as the Merry Pranksters, in a painted school bus.
In the scene, Mr. Kesey’s bus, driven by Neal Cassady, pulls up to Mr. McMurtry’s suburban Houston house, and a naked and wigged-out woman hops out and snatches his son. Mr. Wolfe describes Mr. McMurtry “reaching tentatively toward her stark-naked shoulder and saying, ‘Ma’am! Ma’am! Just a minute, ma’am!’”

Interestingly, he went on to marry Ken Kesey’s widow in 2011. But:

After completing “Terms of Endearment,” he entered what he described as “a literary gloom that lasted from 1975 until 1983,” a period when he came to dislike his own prose. He had a heart attack in 1991, followed by quadruple-bypass surgery. In the wake of that surgery he fell into a long depression during which, he told a reporter, he did little more than lie on a couch for more than a year.
That couch belonged to Ms. Ossana, whom Mr. McMurtry had met in the 1980s at an all-you-can-eat catfish restaurant in Tucson. They began living together, and collaborating shortly afterward — Mr. McMurtry writing on a typewriter, Ms. Ossana entering the work into a computer, often editing and rearranging.
“When I first met Larry, he was involved with about five or six different women,” Ms. Ossana told Grantland.com in 2014. “He was quite the ladies’ man. I was always really puzzled. One day I said to him, ‘So all of these women are your girlfriends?’ And he said, ‘Yes.’ And I said, ‘Well, do they know about one another?’ He said, ‘Nooo.’”

“an all-you-can=eat catfish restaurant”. I live for these telling details.

Mr. McMurtry sometimes felt the sting of critical neglect. “Should I be bitter about the literary establishment’s long disinterest in me?” he wrote in “Literary Life,” a 2009 memoir. “I shouldn’t, and mostly I’m not, though I do admit to the occasional moment of irritation.” In the late 1960s and early ’70s, he liked to tweak his critics by wearing a T-shirt that read “Minor Regional Novelist.”

THR. Variety. I would link to Publisher’s Weekly, but they don’t seem to have run an obit yet. WP.

“Some claim the three essential books in Texas history are the Bible, the Warren Commission report and Larry McMurtry’s ‘Lonesome Dove,’ ” historian Douglas Brinkley wrote in a 2017 New York Times essay.

Posted in Books, Movies, Obits | Comments Closed

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 360

Friday, March 26th, 2021

Here’s a two-parter for you. From 1966, and an old show for children called “Discovery“.

“The World Beneath the Sea”, part 1. This is mostly about marine animal life.

“The World Beneath the Sea”, part 2. This concentrates a lot on things like scuba diving, minisubs, and SeaLab II, which would have been right up my alley when I was a child (and is still right up my alley today).

Posted in Geek, History | Comments Closed

Obit watch: March 26, 2021.

Friday, March 26th, 2021

Bertrand Tavernier, noted French film director.

The Saturday Night Movie Group has watched “In the Electric Mist“, which is an interesting but flawed adaptation of James Lee Burke’s In the Electric Mist with Confederate Dead (affiliate links). And I’ve seen “Coup de Torchon“, which is likewise an interesting adaptation of Jim Thompson’s Pop. 1280 (ditto). It seems to me, just looking at his filmography, that he was one of the more interesting French directors.

Jessica Walter. Damn.

I have never seen an episode of “Arrested Development”, but the Saturday Night Movie Group has watched quite a bit of “Archer”. We’ve also watched “Play Misty For Me”, which I think is a swell Clint Eastwood directed film.

And she appeared in every damn thing at some point, too: “Quincy, M.E.”, the good “Hawaii Five-O”, “Banacek”, “McCloud”, “The F.B.I.”. “Cannon”, “Mission: Impossible”…

…and she did a guest shot on “Law and Order: Criminal Intent”, in the episode “Please Note We Are No Longer Accepting Letters of Recommendation from Henry Kissinger”. Really, that’s the title, and if it comes up in reruns, you should seek it out (assuming you have a taste for black comedy). She’s basically playing a live action Mallory Archer: a social climbing woman who’s obsessed with her grandson attending the right pre-school. (“If it wasn’t for me, he’d be eating yams and watching ‘Jerry Springer'”.)

…and, yes! She was a “Mannix” three-timer. (“The Danford File”, season 6, episode 24. “Moving Target”, season 5, episode 18. “Who Is Sylvia?”, season 3, episode 19.)

Posted in 1970s, Mannix, Movies, Obits, TV | 4 Comments »

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 359

Thursday, March 25th, 2021

Travel Thursday!

Today, we journey to the Outer Limit.

Well, actually, not that one, though these folks did manage to control the horizontal and the vertical.

This is a vintage (1969) promo film from Boeing, “The Outer Limit”, about the flight testing and introduction of the 747.

I’m fudging the definition of travel a bit with that one, but it is short. The next one is, admittedly, long, but it lets me cross another state off the list, and it is a place I enjoy visiting.

“The City of Las Vegas, the Early Years”. This covers the period from 1905 to 1920. See? Who says Vegas doesn’t have a sense of history?

Bonus: I’ve griped before about the hard hat tour of Hoover Dam (which I was lucky enough to go on) and how it was shut down after 9/11. Well, here’s a video (a little over 30 minutes long) of the hard hat tour from March 2001.

“If you’re going home by plane, wear the hard hat on the plane. It scares the heck out of the other passengers.” Man, wasn’t that a simpler time?

Posted in History, Planes, Travel | Comments Closed

Obit watch: March 24, 2021.

Wednesday, March 24th, 2021

George Segal. THR. Variety. I feel bad about not saying more, but he was an icon, and it seems like everyone is paying deserved tribute to him.

Houston Tumlin. If you saw “Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby”, he was Ricky Bobby’s son. That was his only acting role. He was 28 years old.

The number for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-TALK (8255). If you live outside of the United States or are looking for other help, TVTropes has a good page of additional resources.

By way of Lawrence, Elgin Baylor.

Baylor was voted to the all-N.B.A. team for the league’s first 50 years. He was a 10-time N.B.A. first-team All-Star selection and averaged more than 30 points a game for three consecutive seasons in the early 1960s.
He set a league record by scoring 64 points against the Boston Celtics in November 1959, then scored 71 against the Knicks in November 1960, only to see Chamberlain score 100 points for the Philadelphia Warriors against the Knicks in March 1962.
Baylor joined with West and later with Chamberlain to turn the Lakers into a glamour team. He played in eight N.B.A. final series, but the Lakers lost seven times to the Celtics in the Bill Russell era and then to the Knicks in a memorable Game 7 at Madison Square Garden in 1970.

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

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 358

Wednesday, March 24th, 2021

Let’s take a coffee break.

“The £299 Aldi Espresso Machine – How Bad Could It Be?”

Oddly enough, I don’t shop at Aldi either, and for the same reason: the nearest one to us is about 30 miles away.

Bonus #1: Since we’ve talked about an espresso machine, how about we talk about a can opener? A very specialized can opener, that is: this one opens powder cans for the 16″ guns on the Battleship New Jersey.

Bonus #2, and a little shout-out to the Saturday Night Movie Group. From the “Old Car Memories” channel, Jim Rockford’s Firebird.

Posted in Cars, Coffee, Food, Guns, History | 1 Comment »

“Do you like…pancakes?”

Tuesday, March 23rd, 2021

Pickup lines, automatically generated by GPT-3.

Posted in Bagatelle | Comments Closed

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 357

Tuesday, March 23rd, 2021

I was talking with my brother about calculator watches recently, which reminded me of this video from Techmoan: “Hewlett Packard HP-01 1977’s Smartest Watch”.

As a HP geek, I would kind of like to have one of these: however, examples in good condition are expensive.

Bonus #1: I also thought it might be interesting to do some startup videos. Not tech startups, but starting up things. For example, an Airbus A320:

Bonus #2: Or a railroad locomotive.

Bonus #3: Or a DC-3.

Bonus #4: Or a tractor, “with a 12 guage shotgun shell”. I believe this gives new meaning to the term “shotgun start“.

Posted in Geek, History, Planes, Trains | 4 Comments »

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 356

Monday, March 22nd, 2021

Yeah, I think we’re doing Military History Monday. Also, I have a doctor’s appointment today, and expect to be pretty much useless afterwards, so I’m queuing up a couple of longer ones.

This is an OSS training film from 1944, “Undercover”.

The film analyzes preparation, arrival, establishment, and “prevalent cover” for secret agents by presenting one movie within another, as introduced by Col. Robertson, chief of Schools and Training at Office of Strategic Services.

Bonus: “Evading Capture in Enemy Territory” from 1957.

Using dramatic reenactments, this Cold War-era U.S. Air Force training film teaches American airmen how to evade capture and make their way home out of hostile territory after being shot down from their aircraft. All the capture evasion skills learned during World War 2 are put to good use, along with lessons learned by the CIA on how to operate in Eastern Europe.

I have an idea that I’m still kicking around in my head for a post on a somewhat related topic: OPSEC, or operational security. You’d be surprised (unless you’re someone like Borepatch) how many people seem to have no concept of OPSEC and make basic stupid mistakes…

Posted in History | Comments Closed

Obit watch: March 22, 2021.

Monday, March 22nd, 2021

Kent Taylor. He founded and ran the Texas Roadhouse chain of restaurants.

According to the reports I’ve seen, he was suffering from serious post-COVID-19 symptoms, and committed suicide.

The number for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-TALK (8255). If you live outside of the United States or are looking for other help, TVTropes has a good page of additional resources.

Posted in Food, Obits | Comments Closed

You see the signs, but you can’t read…

Sunday, March 21st, 2021

Sometimes, the warning signs are lit up with neon and searchlights, and people still miss them.

A married pair of San Francisco entrepreneurs were indicted Thursday on multiple federal charges, the latest twist in the saga of a once trendy, now bankrupt fecal matter-testing startup.
Zachary Schulz Apte and Jessica Sunshine Richman, co-founders of defunct microbiome testing company uBiome, are accused of bilking their investors and health insurance providers, federal prosecutors said. They were indicted Thursday on multiple federal charges, including conspiracy to commit securities fraud, conspiracy to commit health care fraud and money laundering.

Now, I’m just a poor dumb white boy from Hampden, but I feel like there’s at least two big warning signs that were missed here.

1.

San Francisco-based uBiome was founded in 2012, and kicked off the company in an unusual way for a biotech startup: via a Kickstarter campaign. Its offering was an at-home test to sequence the DNA of its customers gut microbiome, which could then in turn purportedly be used to improve health.

I’m an absolute believer that you should avoid – indeed, run away from – any crowd funding campaign that is medical or health care related.

2.

In 2018, Richman was even named an “innovator” winner in Goop’s “The Greater goop Awards” and at its peak, uBiome was valued at $600 million.

Goop? Seriously? No s–t.. Again: anything that’s recieved an award from Goop, is promoted on Goop, or has any involvement with Goop: run like hell in the other direction.

Posted in Geek, Law, Stupid | Comments Closed

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 355

Sunday, March 21st, 2021

Science Sunday!

I’ve been fascinated by rocks and rock hunting and geology since I was a young child.

I’m just not very good at it. So instead, I enjoy reading the works of others, like John McPhee.

Mr. McPhee talks with Eldridge Moores, a University of California geologist (and collaborator with Mr. McPhee on Assembling California) and reads from Annals of the Former World (affiliate link).

Bonus #1: “A Brief History of Colorado Through Time”. I used to collect those “Roadside Geology of…” books. I should at least go out and replace my copy of Roadside Geology of Texas (affiliate link). Perhaps I will be able to use it soon.

Bonus #2: “Flood Basalts of the Pacific Northwest”. Or, giant lava flows!

Posted in Geek, History | Comments Closed

Obit watch: March 21, 2021.

Sunday, March 21st, 2021

George Bass. I think he may have been an obscure figure to most folks: Dr. Bass (a professor at Texas A&M) was one of the pioneers of underwater archeology.

After being honorably discharged in the late 1950s, he pursued a Ph.D. in classical archaeology at the University of Pennsylvania. At the time, an American photojournalist named Peter Throckmorton was researching Turkish sponge divers and learned that they knew of ancient artifacts on the ocean floor. Mr. Throckmorton wrote to the renowned archaeologist Rodney Young seeking sponsorship for a proper excavation. Professor Young turned to one of his graduate students who specialized in the Bronze Age and had enthusiastically read accounts of deep sea dives — George Bass.
Mr. Bass was less than fully prepared. He had time for only six weeks of a 10-week diving course at a Philadelphia Y.M.C.A. And before joining the expedition and diving 100 feet into the Mediterranean, he had tried on a tank just once and gone no deeper than 10 feet — in a pool. Yet that first trip became the foundation for the rest of his career.
“You have to be young and ignorant and naïve to get anywhere,” he reflected in a 2010 interview with the Penn Museum.

…

Early on, archaeologists who sought to take advantage of the aqualung remained aboveground, relying on reports from hired divers, who lacked archaeological expertise. Professor Bass took a more hands-on approach. He became the first archaeologist to do his own diving while supervising other divers. And he organized on-site training in underwater excavation methods for fellow archaeologists and students.
With help from scientists he recruited for his teams, he engineered new methods for removing artifacts from the seabed and for spending long periods underwater. One crucial early insight was that objects that look like rocks may actually be the corroded remnants of metal goods. Professor Bass X-rayed what he found interesting. If a rocklike object contained an inner cavity where a metal artifact used to be, he would pour epoxy inside and cast a replacement.
His excavations produced illuminating material about ancient shipbuilding. His first expedition, off Cape Gelidonya in Turkey, solved a puzzle about why Homer refers to brushwood on Odysseus’s ship. The remains of a sunken ship there revealed that brushwood had been used as a cushion for heavy cargo to protect the hull.
Deborah Carlson, the president of the Institute of Nautical Archaeology, which Professor Bass helped create and then ran for much of his life, ultimately in Texas, said he deserved to be considered the founder of the field.
“Under his direction, ancient shipwrecks were excavated underwater for the first time,” she said in a phone interview. “He did it by taking his archaeological training and putting on scuba gear and taking the excavation to a new dimension.”

Roger Baldwin. He and three of his Army buddies – Wilbert Cantey, Herbert Maisel and James McDermott, collectively known as the “Four Horsemen of Aberdeen” – were early pioneers of basic blackjack strategy.

It led Edward O. Thorp, a mathematics professor and blackjack expert, to validate their calculations on an IBM 704 computer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and to write the best-selling 1962 book, “Beat the Dealer: A Winning Strategy for the Game of Twenty-One,” which helped bring the Army group to public renown.
Mr. Thorp recalled the influence of the men’s strategy in his 2017 memoir, “A Man for All Markets: From Las Vegas to Wall Street, How I Beat the Dealer and the Market.” “The Baldwin group,” he wrote, showed that the advice of the reigning experts was poor, unnecessarily giving the casinos an extra two percent advantage.”
Arnold Snyder, a renowned author of blackjack books, said by phone: “No one actually knew what the right strategy was because it hadn’t been calculated. They figured out what to do if your hand totals 15 and the dealer has an 8 up: do you hit or do you stand?”

Dick Hoyt, marathon runner. He ran the Marine Corps Marathon in 1992 and finished in 2:40:47.

Oh, I forgot to mention, it should be “they”, not “he”. Dick Hoyt was was pushing his disabled son, Rick Hoyt, in a wheelchair the whole way.

Rick Hoyt was born in 1962, a quadriplegic with cerebral palsy, unable to control his limbs or speak. “We had long since learned how to interpret our son’s smiles and nods,” Dick Hoyt wrote in his 2010 book, “Devoted: The Story of a Father’s Love for His Son.” “But as good as everyone in the family was about figuring out what Rick needed, we were still only making educated guesses.”
But in 1972, engineers at Tufts University built a computer that allowed Rick to communicate by choosing letters with a tap of his head. His first words were “Go Bruins,” revealing a passionate love for sports.
In 1977, Rick asked to be involved in a five-mile benefit run. Though his father was not a competitive runner, he pushed Rick in his wheelchair the entire distance, finishing next to last.
“When my dad and I are out there on a run, a special bond forms between us,” Rick Hoyt told The New York Times in 2009 with the help of his computer voice program. “And it feels like there is nothing Dad and I cannot do.”

You might remember this from one of Rick Reilly’s SI essays.

Posted in Geek, Obits, Sports | Comments Closed

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 354

Saturday, March 20th, 2021

I’m a Marxist.

But talking about flywheels…”F–k Everything, We’re Doing Five Blades“. Or in this case, five flywheels.

A flywheel trebuchet? Why not!

Okay, one more, sort of related to things that spin fast: “The Story of Hoover Dam”. Some nice turbine footage in this one.

Posted in History | 1 Comment »

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 353

Friday, March 19th, 2021

I was thinking about insurance.

This is a short film from the 1980s about Lloyd’s of London and how it works.

Something that I find kind of interesting is the Lloyd’s Open Form (LOF). The basic idea is: if something comes up at sea that requires a salvage operation, the two parties (the one being salvaged and the one doing the salvaging) sign a LOF.

The LOF is called “open” because it specifies no particular sum for the salvage job. Indeed it may not specify a sum, as salvage is not a “contract for services”, but an agreement to provide a service in the hope of a “reward” to be determined later by an arbitration hearing in London, where several QCs practising at the Admiralty Bar specialise as maritime arbitrators.

One of the key aspects of the LOF is: “No Cure, No Pay.”

Traditionally, the salvage reward has been subject to the salvor successfully saving the ship or cargo, and if neither is saved, the salvor gets nothing, however much time and money has been spent on the project.

Back in 1978, an oil tanker, the Amoco Cadiz, ran into some problems: it encountered a storm that damaged the rudder and caused a hydraulic fluid leak. The captain called for assistance: the responding salvor wanted the captain to agree to a LOF.

One of the books I’ve read on the subject states that the captain was resistant to signing a LOF, as he felt he’d be signing an open-ended commitment, while the salvors were reluctant to proceed without a LOF. Ultimately, the captain agreed, but the situation had deteriorated…

…and the Amoco Cadiz ran aground off the coast of Brittany and dumped over 220,000 tons (metric) of oil into the sea.

Semi-related, because we’re talking about oil: “Fires of Kuwait”. For once, something in high-res.

Posted in History, Ships | Comments Closed

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 352

Thursday, March 18th, 2021

Travel Thursday!

I’ve been neglecting the United States. Technically, I still am, as today’s presentation is a place that isn’t a state: the place that my sister and her family refer to as “WashingtonDCOurNation’sCapital” (all one word).

From 1945, “The District of Columbia”, part of the “This Land Of Ours” series.

Bonus: and if you liked that one, here’s another one from 1954 and Esso (aka “Standard Oil Company of New Jersey”). “Welcome to Washington”.

Posted in History, Travel | Comments Closed

Obit watch: March 17, 2021.

Wednesday, March 17th, 2021

James Levine, “one of the world’s most influential and admired conductors”, according to the other paper of record.

Nicola Pagett, British actress. She was “Elizabeth Bellamy” on “Upstairs, Downstairs”.

Barbara Rickles, Don’s wife.

By many accounts, the Rickleses had one of the happiest marriages in show business. They socialized often with another enduring Hollywood couple, Bob and Ginny Newhart. Don Rickles died at 90 in 2017.
Barbara Rickles helped produce the Emmy-winning documentary “Mr. Warmth: The Don Rickles Project” (2007) and the 2020 release “Don Rickles Live in Concert.” Don Rickles, in serious moments, would note that he was nearly 40 on his wedding day and had struggled for years to find someone.
“I advise any young person that gets married, really, work at it. If you work at it, it’s delightful,” he said in 1986, during one of his many appearances on “The Tonight Show” with Johnny Carson, whom he would tease endlessly about his multiple marriages.

Burning in Hell watch: Ronald DeFeo.

Mr. DeFeo was convicted in 1975 on six counts of second-degree murder after he confessed to using a rifle to shoot and kill his father, Ronald DeFeo Sr.; his mother, Louise; his sisters, Dawn and Allison; and his brothers, Mark and John Matthew.
The victims were found in their beds with gunshot wounds on Nov. 13, 1974. Mr. DeFeo, the oldest of the siblings, was 23 at the time.

The historical significance of this is: the DeFeo’s old house in Amityville was sold to another couple a year later.

Yeah, that house.

That family, the Lutzes, stayed there for just 28 days and claimed that the house was haunted by poltergeists who slammed windows, banged walls and wrenched doors off their hinges.

Posted in Law, Music, Obits, TV | 2 Comments »

I haven’t laughed so hard since the hogs et my kid brother.

Wednesday, March 17th, 2021

Ja Rule is getting into the NFT space. The rapper plans to sell a piece of art that once hung at Fyre Media’s headquarters in New York City.

Ah, the Fyre Festival. Brings back memories.

Posted in Art, Stupid | Comments Closed

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