“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 88

June 26th, 2020

This isn’t actually a random YouTube recommendation. I ran across this by way of a post from McThag – I thought it was a while back, but apparently it was earlier this year. Time flies when you’re locked down.

I’m not a big car guy, and I was never much of a “Motor Trend” fan. As I’ve written before, “Car and Driver” during that late 1970s – early 1980s period was my jam. “Motor Trend” seemed to be “Who Spent the Most Money On Advertising With Us”, and “Road and Track” was the magazine for 50ish guys who drove MGs painted British Racing Green while wearing tweed jackets and dapper little caps and looking down their nose at the rest of the car world.

But I digress. “Motor Trend” apparently had a YouTube channel. One of their features was “RoadKill”, where, as I understand, the two hosts bought crappy cars, fixed them up to the point where they were minimally driveable, and then went on road trips with them. Hilarity frequently ensued.

This particular video amuses me: in this case, they bought the world’s worst Corvette, with the intention of driving it from Florida to Bowling Green, Kentucky…

…and having the staff of the Corvette Museum drop it into the sinkhole.

I think even my non-car people readers should get some amusement out of this, as the Corvette in question is astonishingly bad. The fact that it doesn’t have a windshield is only the start of the troubles.

Bonus video: according to the person who re-uploaded this video, “Motor Trend” moved their content off of YouTube and on to “Motor Trend On Demand”. But other people have uploaded more “Roadkill” videos, if you find the idea of two guys patching up crappy cars and going on road trips oddly appealing. Here’s a playlist.

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Obit watch: June 26, 2020.

June 26th, 2020

Doris Brown.

She was one of my aunts on my father’s side of the family, and was married to my Uncle Dick (the one who rode the Whizzer to Florida).

Posted in Obits | 3 Comments »

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 87

June 25th, 2020

Who’s up for some travel on Pan Am? And what exotic destination sounds good today?

How about…Finland! It isn’t quite Paris in the the spring, but we can make do.

Bonus: Here’s something a little different. “Airline Pilot”, a 1970 documentary from BOAC, following a young pilot through his training and first flight.

According to the YouTube notes, Stephen Radcliffe (the subject) was BOAC’s youngest pilot ever.

BOAC was merged with British European Airways (BEC) in 1974 to form British Airways. According to various online sources, Mr. Radcliffe died in 1971: he fell off of a cliff while camping.

Posted in History, Planes | Comments Closed

Obit watch: June 25, 2020.

June 25th, 2020

Sergei Khrushchev, Nikita Khrushchev’s son.

Mr. Khrushchev had been a rocket scientist before he moved to Rhode Island in 1991, shortly after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, to lecture on the Cold War at Brown University in Providence. He remained a senior fellow there.
He and his wife became naturalized United States citizens in 1999 and held dual citizenships. Mr. Khrushchev said in 2001 that his becoming an American citizen would not have displeased his father, who, in 1956, in the depths of the Cold War, famously declared to Western officials, “We will bury you!”
By the time his son became an American citizen, the Cold War was long over.
“I’m not a defector,” Sergei Khrushchev told The Providence Journal in 2001. “I’m not a traitor. I did not commit any treason. I work here and I like this country.

Michael Hawley, noted computer guy.

Mr. Hawley began his career as a video game programmer at Lucasfilm, the company created by the “Star Wars” director George Lucas. He spent his last 15 years curating the Entertainment Gathering, or EG, a conference dedicated to new ideas.
In between, he worked at NeXT, the influential computer company founded by Steve Jobs after he left Apple in the mid-1980s, and spent nine years as a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab, a seminal effort to push science and technology into art and other disciplines. He was known as a scholar whose ideas, skills and friendships spanned an unusually wide range of fields, from mountain climbing to watchmaking.
Mr. Hawley lived with both Mr. Jobs and the artificial intelligence pioneer Marvin Minsky, published the world’s largest book, won first prize in an international competition of amateur pianists, played alongside the cellist Yo-Yo Ma at the wedding of the celebrity scientist Bill Nye, joined one of the first scientific expeditions to Mount Everest, and wrote commencement speeches for both Mr. Jobs and the Google co-founder Larry Page.

…

As the director of special projects at M.I.T., Mr. Hawley published “Bhutan: A Visual Odyssey Across the Himalayan Kingdom” in 2003, drawing on his experiences and photographs spanning four visits to Bhutan over a decade and a half. Measuring five by seven feet and weighing more than 130 pounds, it was certified by Guinness World Records at the time as the world’s largest book.

Posted in Books, Geek, Music, Obits | Comments Closed

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 86

June 24th, 2020

I thought it might be fun to post some more Convair promotional videos. Especially since these show some nice vintage livery from airlines back in the day.

First up: “Convair Metropolitan”. The “Metropolitan” was another name for the CV-440, which in turn was a descendant of the CV-240 and CV-340.

Bonus: “The Convair Liner”, another promo film. This one covers the 240, 340, 440, and even the military variants.

I really like seeing the old Braniff paint jobs. I never flew Braniff, but I have sort of a sentimental fondness for them after reading Splash of Colors, John Nance’s history of the airline.

There’s a story in Nance’s book that I like: Braniff’s mechanics were on strike, and marching the picket line when a thunderstorm hit. Tom Braniff saw that the mechanics were getting wet, so he told one of his people to get some rainsuits, coffee, and doughnuts and take them to the guys on the picket line.

“But Mr. Braniff, those guys out there are on strike! They’re trying to shut us down!”
“I understand that, Buford, but they’re still my boys, and I don’t want them to get sick. Look at them out there! You go get those things and go treat them like human beings out there and be nice to them.”

Posted in History, Leadership, Planes | Comments Closed

Quote of the day.

June 24th, 2020

I have a reputation for being a disturber of the peace. You have to take me as I am. If I’m a disturber of the peace, it’s for good reason. And, ladies and gentlemen, if someone wakes up a sleeping man so as to make him watch out, then the man who shakes him is no disturber of the peace. I wish to cry out, wake up! Watch out for the years to come.

—Konrad Adenauer, first chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany (taken from here)

Posted in History | Comments Closed

Quote of the day.

June 23rd, 2020

Apropos of nothing in particular:

Jeremiah said: “I hear the whisperings of many, “Terror on every side! Denounce! Let us denounce him!” All those who were my friends are on the watch for any misstep of mine. “Perhaps he will be trapped; then we can prevail and take our vengeance on him.” But the Lord is with me, like a mighty champion: my persecutors will stumble, they will not triumph. In their failure they will be put to utter shame, to lasting unforgettable confusion. O Lord of hosts, you who test the just, who probe mind and heart, let me witness the vengeance you take on them, for to you I have entrusted my cause. Sing to the Lord, praise the Lord, for he has rescued the life of the poor from the power of the wicked!

–Jeremiah 20:10-13

Posted in Religion | Comments Closed

More things I didn’t know.

June 23rd, 2020

Shari “Lamb Chop” Lewis and her husband co-wrote an episode of a minor 1960s SF TV series.

Posted in TV | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: June 22, 2020.

June 22nd, 2020

Joel Schumacher, director. Variety. THR.

Batman & Robin, however, was a critical disaster, and Schumacher admitted years later that he had made a mistake by listening to studio marketing executives, who wanted to target the film to kids.
“I want to apologize to every fan that was disappointed because I think I owe them that,” he said in a 2017 interview with Vice.
“A lot of it was my choice. No one is responsible for my mistakes but me. I think one curveball we got was at the eleventh hour; Val Kilmer quit due to a role he got in The Island of Dr. Moreau. There had been talks about it, but none of us were involved, not with Warner Bros. and certainly not with me. I talked to Val, and all he kept saying was, ‘But man, it’s Marlon Brando.’ It’s not like he was on a hook and chain here, so Val went. So it was [then Warners co-CEO] Bob Daly’s idea to acquire George Clooney. He was an obvious choice because he was a rising star on ER. I had a talk with him and he was like, ‘All right, if you do it, I’ll do it.’

Wait, wait: Kilmer skipped out on Batman because he wanted to do “The Island of Dr. Moreau“? I haven’t laughed this hard since the hogs ate my kid brother.

Jim Kiick, Miami Dolphins running back in the early 1970s.

Running behind a fearsome offensive line, Kiick, fullback Larry Csonka and halfback Mercury Morris propelled the Dolphins to three Super Bowls and back-to-back titles in the 1972 and 1973 seasons.
Kiick scored six touchdowns during those playoff runs, including one in Super Bowl VII, a 14-7 win over the Washington Redskins, that helped the team complete the N.F.L.’s only perfect season. Kiick scored another touchdown and Csonka added two more in Super Bowl VIII, a 24-7 victory over the Minnesota Vikings.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón. I had not heard of him, either, but he wrote The Shadow of the Wind, which is “…the second-most-successful Spanish novel after Miguel de Cervantes’s masterpiece “Don Quixote,” according to Planeta.”

A visit to a book warehouse in Los Angeles, where he moved in the 1990s, inspired Mr. Ruiz Zafón to write “The Shadow of the Wind,” but he set the action in his birthplace, Barcelona. Written as a story within a story, the novel crisscrosses the tumultuous decades before, during and after the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s.
It starts in 1945, when a boy named Daniel Sempere is taken by his father to a mysterious place known as the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, where Daniel selects a book called “The Shadow of the Wind.” Fascinated by its obscure author, Julián Carax, Daniel enlists the help of friends to investigate the writer’s past, which also brings up the disturbing story of a character who has been burning all the copies of the book he can find.

That sounds like something that’s in my wheelhouse.

Posted in Boats, Movies, NFL, Obits, Sports | Comments Closed

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 84

June 22nd, 2020

The theme for today is: “Things That I Found Oddly Compelling”.

Techmoan fixes an old dual cassette deck. But it’s not just any cassette deck: it was taken off a decommissioned British warship. And this one isn’t designed for disco parties: this is a highly specialized cassette deck designed for the aftermath of disco parties, when someone is interrogating you about how that dead body ended up in your bed surrounded by enough cocaine to fuel a sequel to “Popeye”.

Bonus video: by way of the Northwest New Jersey Beekeepers Association, a beekeeper shows how he investigates a very aggressive hive, makes the decision to destroy it, and then carries out that decision.

I don’t much like any insect that is capable of stinging me, including bees (though I acknowledge the need for bees, which is more than I’m willing to say about wasps, yellow jackets, or hornets – murder or otherwise). But when this guy – someone who knows about bees – says “This is an aggressive and dangerous hive” and “I can’t just take it out into a field somewhere and leave it”, and then backs that up with video of hot bee action…well.

Posted in Geek | Comments Closed

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 83

June 21st, 2020

Science Sunday!

No grand unifying theme today, just some things that popped up in my recommendations that I thought were interesting.

“The Penetrating Eye”. From 1970, a documentary about the scanning electron microscope produced by Eli Lilly.

Bonus: “Nuclear Propulsion In Space”, a 1968 joint production of NASA and the old Atomic Energy Commission about experimental nuclear reactors for space propulsion.

There’s a lot of “The Future We Could Have Had” in this video, including discussion of how a manned Mars mission would work. It also includes some nifty reactor test footage.

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Obit watch: June 21, 2020.

June 21st, 2020

Michael Drosnin, “Bible Code” guy.

“The Bible Code” opens with a stunning moment: The author, having discovered a biblical passage suggesting that Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin of Israel would be assassinated, hops on a plane in 1994 to deliver a letter of warning. The message doesn’t alter the course of events — Mr. Rabin was shot and killed a year later — but, as Mr. Drosnin writes, it was “dramatic confirmation” of the Bible code.
That may sound like an Indiana Jones plot, but “The Bible Code” had its roots in science. In the early 1990s, the Israeli mathematician Eliyahu Rips and his colleagues performed an experiment in which they laid out the 304,805 letters of the Torah like a giant crossword puzzle and then performed a “skip-code” computer search. They discovered uncanny combinations. “Kennedy” appeared near the word “Dallas.” Hitler’s name, written upside down, appeared 20 rows from “Nazi,” written backward. And so on.
The findings were published in 1994 in the journal Statistical Science. Mr. Drosnin based his book on that research, adding discoveries of his own.
Many critics found the book unscientific, arbitrary and curiously weighted toward people and events relevant to an American living in the 20th century. Skeptics demonstrated that “Moby-Dick,” or a phone book for that matter, would reveal intriguing word groupings if one went looking for them. Mr. Rips himself denounced Mr. Drosnin’s interpretation of his work.

…

Mr. Drosnin offered more revelations in “The Bible Code II” (2002), another best seller, in which he claimed the 2001 attack on the World Trade Center had been predicted and warned that the world might have only three years left to avoid Armageddon. Then came “The Bible Code III” (2010), but by that time the novelty had worn off; it did not make the best-seller list.
Still, Mr. Drosnin had a high batting average as an author. Of his four books, three were best sellers, including the first, “Citizen Hughes” (1985), a portrait of the reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes as revealed through stolen office memos.

Posted in Books, History, Obits, Stupid | 1 Comment »

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 82

June 20th, 2020

You know, the history of aviation wasn’t all Pan Am and Boeing. There were other companies involved.

Like Delta. And Convair, a division of General Dynamics (as of 1953).

“Introduction to a Champion”, a Delta/Convair promotional film for the then-new Convair 880 jet. The 880, in theory, was supposed to be a competitor to the 707 and DC-8 by being smaller and faster.

The film certainly makes the 880 look comfortable, in that sort of idealized vintage 1960s air travel kind of way. They even manage to make airline food look almost appetizing. It also places great emphasis on the alleged speed of the 880.

Unfortunately, it was not entirely successful. Convair made 65 of them from 1959 to 1962. Delta ran 17 of them between 1960 and 1974. As far as I can tell, there are no currently operational 880s, though there is one in storage somewhere in California. Most of the others have been chopped up and parts put on display (or, in one case, used in a lodge in South Africa).

There is one surviving intact (but not airworthy) example that I know of that is on display. You may even have seen it, which leads me to…

Bonus video: this is a little below my usual standards of quality, but short. “Lisa Marie: The History Tour 1960 – 2015”. You see, Elvis bought one of Delta’s retired Convair 880s in 1975 for $250,000. He then spent a truckload of money having it extensively customized:

…with plush sleeping quarters, a penthouse bedroom with a custom-made queen size bed, an executive bathroom with gold faucets and a gold washbasin, a videotape system linked to four TVs and a stereo system with fifty-two speakers, and a conference room finished in teak.

That source claims the total cost, after refurbishing, was over $600,000. In 1975 money. That’s almost $2.9 million today, according to the US Inflation Calculator, which actually seems kind of cheap for a business jet.

(Probably true story, at least according to a couple of sources: Elvis originally wanted to buy a 707, and had even put down a deposit on one. He probably would have been happier long term with that plane – or at least it would have been easier to find parts, I suspect – but the 707 he put money down on was Robert Vesco‘s, and when the fecal matter of Vesco’s empire impacted the rotating blades of the Federal impeller, that deal fell apart. I don’t know if Elvis got his money back or not: I suspect the IRS or the SEC immediately confiscated it from Vesco’s people, and they didn’t have it to give back. But I digress.)

There’s some good shots in here of the “Lisa Marie”‘s interior, which I guess is pretty much what you’d expect from a plane owned by Elvis.

Posted in History, Planes | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: June 20, 2020.

June 20th, 2020

Ian Holm.

A character actor who eventually played leading roles, Mr. Holm had a kind of magical malleability, with a range that went from the sweet-tempered to the psychotic. In the theater he ran the gamut of Shakespeare, from the high-spirited Prince Hal to the tormented King Lear, and he left his imprint on two roles in Mr. Pinter’s “The Homecoming”: the sleek, entrepreneurial Lenny and his autocratic father, Max.
In films, Mr. Holm incarnated characters of diverse geographic origin and nature, including a tough New York cop in “Night Falls on Manhattan” (1996), a big-city negligence lawyer in Atom Egoyan’s “The Sweet Hereafter” (1997) and a bohemian genius manqué in the title role in Stanley Tucci’s “Joe Gould’s Secret” (2000).
Exploring the world of fantasy, he was a malfunctioning robot in Ridley Scott’s “Alien” (1979) and the hobbit Bilbo Baggins in “The Fellowship of the Ring” (2001) and “The Return of the King” (2003), from Peter Jackson’s “Lord of the Rings” trilogy, and Mr. Jackson’s subsequent “Hobbit” films.

Posted in Movies, Obits, Theatre | Comments Closed

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 81

June 19th, 2020

The Tank Museum has a YouTube channel.

And they appear to update with some regularity.

This actually came up in my recommendations, and isn’t something I went searching for – but it is how I found out about the Tank Museum’s YouTube channel.

“Tiger 131: A Twist in the Tale”, a recent short documentary about some new evidence dealing with Tiger 131.

For those of you who are not professional WWII tank historians, Tiger 131 is the only operating Tiger I tank in the world.

This is of particular interest to me because, as Lawrence noted a while back, we recently watched “Fury”. Tiger 131 has a fairly large part in that movie.

I’m not including a bonus video today: instead, why don’t you just pick a random one from the Tank Museum channel and watch it? I’m kind of interested in Curator Q&A #9 myself, and might watch that before I turn in for the night. What’s not to like about armor and gin?

Posted in History | Comments Closed

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