Today is my birthday.
It may actually come as a surprise to some of you that I expect blogging to be light, at least for a little while. After all, what else am I going to do?
I’m thinking about making a run down to Cabela’s to scope out the situation for myself, and I’ll probably be putting up an obit and a jail post later on today.
In the meantime, please enjoy this vintage musical interlude:
Two of my favorite things written by Neal Stephenson:
I mention these things because this came across my YouTube recommendations, and I thought it was worth running on a Sunday: “The Voice Beneath The Sea”, about laying a trans-Atlantic cable to link the US, Canada, and the UK. Brought to you by “The American Telephone and Telegraph Company Long Lines Department”.
Man, I miss the days of organizations like the “Long Lines Department” and people with names like “Wildman Whitehouse” (even if the latter was grotesquely incompetent).
Bonus video #1: This seems oddly appropriate in these days of Zoom and Skype and WebEx: “Face to Face”, a 1970s promo film from AT&T for the Picturephone.
This is weird, but: I have a really vivid memory of seeing a Picturephone demonstration on TV when I was very young. Specifically…on “Captain Kangaroo”. I kid you not. I guess there were a lot of five to seven year old kids in the target market for AT&T’s service. Or perhaps it was really targeted at all the stay-at-home moms who were watching the show with their small children?
Bonus video #2: “Tools of Telephony”, produced by Western Electric.
I have another video or two along the long lines line (see what I did there?) that I want to put up, but I’m waiting for it to get hot again: I’m hopeful that at least one of those videos will cool you down a bit.
When I was young, I was a big fan of “Highway Patrol“. No, I didn’t watch it first run: I’m not that old. One of the Houston UHF stations aired it.
“Highway Patrol” started popping up in my YouTube recommendations, and I’ve been watching episodes occasionally. This episode came up yesterday, and I watched it last night. (I’d already seen the “Most Shocking”.)
What struck me when I was watching was: it is an interesting contrast to this Dragnet 1967 episode on a similar theme:
Note that in “Highway Patrol” it is the sweet innocent wife (who tries so hard to do the right thing) that gets the worst of it, while in “Dragnet” it ends up being the husband who gets some kind of rough justice for his careless drunken driving.
(Also, I get a kick out of “Dan Matthews” handing his gun to folks off the street. His lecture to poor stupid Harry is priceless.)
Back on the beat today, since it is Saturday: I have some lighter stuff to post, but I’m saving that for the Sabbath. These will be good to watch if you get tired of tonight’s “Most Shocking” marathon on the Justice Network (or if it is an episode you’ve already seen). They are also a bit longer (but it’s a weekend, so you don’t have to worry about fitting these into your coffee breaks). And I’ll warn everyone: the effects in these, especially the second one, are a little graphic.
First up: “Officer Survival: High Risk Patrol Tactics”. I think this title is a little misleading, as it deals less with patrol: the instructional point of this video is basically how to deal with armed, barricaded suspects.
Bonus video: “Vehicle Stop Tactics”. This one features a lot of the mistakes police officers made in “routine” stops. The latter part of this one (roughly the second half) also demonstrates how to do a high-risk felony stop correctly, so it kind of overlaps “Felony Vehicle Stop“.
I don’t want to make this part of the main video feed: I figure everyone who’s interested watches the “Forgotten Weapons” feed anyway.
But I did want to throw in a bonus link to this, since:
This one goes out to all the high explosives fans out there.
“Demolition: Electric Priming”, an Army training film from the 1950s giving you everything you need to know to prime and detonate explosives with electric blasting caps.
Bonus video #1: This is a little long, but I know there are several people who are going to want to watch this: a 1993 interview with Carlos Hathcock, Marine sniper.
Bonus video #2: for this one, I’m going to send you over to Lawrence. He’s put up a pilot for an unsold 1959 “Nero Wolfe” TV series…with William Shatner as Archie Goodwin. To which I can only say: ain’t that a kick in the head?
NYT obit for Brian Dennehy.
Brawny and gregarious, Mr. Dennehy was often called on to play an Everyman or an authority figure: athletes, sheriffs, bartenders, salesmen and fathers. He was in scores of movies — “First Blood” (1982), “Gorky Park” (1983), “F/X” (1986) and “Presumed Innocent” (1990) were among them — as well as an assortment of television series. But his first love was always the stage.
“He was a towering, fearless actor taking on the greatest dramatic roles of the 20th century,” Robert Falls, artistic director of the Goodman Theater in Chicago, where Mr. Dennehy did some of his finest work, said in a phone interview. “They were mountains that had to be climbed, and he had no problem throwing himself into climbing them.”
We watched “First Blood” recently. Yeah, yeah, Stallone is good. But so is Dennehy: he’s really convincing as the sheriff who isn’t necessarily cruel, but just simply out of his depth and doesn’t understand what he’s dealing with until it is too late. I think it was Lawrence who made the point that “First Blood” is really a story about managerial incompetence.
He was pretty good in “F/X” as well: I still say that’s a really underappreciated thriller.
All of these are just a little outside my target run length, but that’s okay. I hope everyone can deal with that.
First up: this might be just a little too much, even for my readers who are people of the gun. But I wanted to put it up because it is a nice slice of history from around the time I was born.
“Target Vs.”, a 1965 film from the Williams Gun Sight company about the 1965 National Matches at Camp Perry, Ohio.
I don’t think I’ll ever be good enough to compete at Camp Perry, but I’d like to visit there one of these days while the matches are going on. Just to take in the scene.
Bonus video #1: “No Points For Second Place”. This is apparently a Grumman produced tribute to the F-14. With some handy tips on dogfighting thrown in.
Bonus video #2: “Police Pursuit Driving Part 2”. I guess this is a sequel (at least thematically) to “Police Pursuit“, but it lacks Jack Webb. I think it also lacks Smith and Wessons, though there is one ridiculous bit in here (you’ll know it when you see it).
I cannot tell a lie: “Some guys stay rookies forever.” gets a rise out of me.
I received a report from a usually reliable source that Brian Dennehy has passed, but I don’t have any independent or linkable confirmation of that at the moment.
Edited to add: THR has an obit up now. Variety does as well.
NYT obit for John Horton Conway.
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Willie Davis, one of the Green Bay Packers greats.
Davis’s Packer teams captured N.F.L. championships following the 1961, ’62 and ’65 seasons and won the first two Super Bowls, defeating the Kansas City Chiefs in 1967 and the Oakland Raiders in 1968.
Davis was an all-N.F.L. player five times and chosen for the Pro Bowl five times as well. He was elected to the Hall of Fame in 1981 and named to its all-N.F.L. team for the 1960s.
His Packers defeated the Giants in the 1961 and 1962 championship games, and he impressed New York’s star quarterback, Y.A. Tittle. “Davis is a great pass rusher,” Tittle was quoted as saying. “He’s strong and aggressive. He’s always towering over you, coming, coming, all the time.”
As long as we’re talking about NRA videos and books, I thought I’d mention once again: today is National Buy a Gun Day.
I usually cut folks some slack if BAG Day falls on a Sunday or Monday. This year, I’m going to continue with the slack cutting, given the current circumstances: if you place an order for something today, or purchase something before the end of the day on Sunday, it counts.
I still haven’t found anything I really want: Classic Firearms is selling Beretta M9 pistols for $450. This kind of appeals to me, as someone who has a half-baked desire to accumulate a collection of every US military sidearm, but I don’t know that $450 is all that great a price.
CDNN is offering Radical Firearms AR pattern rifles in .224 Valkyrie for $500. I’m intrigued by .224 Valkyrie as a caliber, but I know nothing about Radical Firearms: I think I’d prefer to either buy a complete rifle from a manufacturer I know something about, or buy a finished upper (again, from someone I’m familiar with) and build up my own .224 rifle.
There’s a nice 4″ S&W in .45 Colt on GunBroker, but it’s up close to $800 right now, which is right on the edge of what I want to pay. I’m pretty confident it will break $1,000 by the time the auction ends tomorrow. Somebody else has another one for sale with a starting bid of $500, but it isn’t as nice.
I still haven’t been able to get out and do any gun photos yet, but I’m hoping to have that done by the weekend.
In the meantime, feel free to post comments with your BAG Day purchase, or send photos, or both.
Our first video today is a little longer than usual, and also not exactly a random YouTube find. This one was recommended to us by great and good FOTB (and official firearms trainer of WCD) Karl Rehn. (Speaking of stuff rescued from obscurity, that NRA pistol manual is pretty spiffy, too.)
“It Could Happen to You!”, a NRA film from the 1970s for women. The archive.org notes say it doesn’t have any guns in it: “Women are shown rather defending themselves with hairpins, their nails, and by locking themselves in their cars with handkerchiefs as SOS flags.”
Bonus video #1: This one should fit a little more comfortably into the coffee break time slot. “The Blackbirds Are Flying”.
No, this isn’t a nature video. This one is from Lockheed Advanced Development Projects, and shows off all three of the Blackbirds.
Bonus video #2: “The Petrified River: The Story of Uranium”. This is a Department of Interior – Bureau of Mines product, but was apparently filmed with the cooperation of the old Union Carbide Corporation. There’s some really nice plane video at the start, RoadRich…
Back on the beat, but this time something a little different: “Play It Cool: A Question of Attitudes”, a police training film from the 1960s about civility.
I’m just going to make a suggestion here that perhaps this is still relevant.
Bonus video #1: this is relevant to my interests. “Basic Principles Of Power Reactors”, put together long enough ago that it was done by the Atomic Energy Commission.
Bonus video #2: “Viet Cong Mines and Booby Traps”, a 1967 Marine Corps training film.
I’ve been waiting on John Horton Conway: while I’ve seen tributes on Twitter and elsewhere (this one from XKCD is nice), there wasn’t anything I considered reliable until Princeton published their obit this morning.
“John Conway was an amazing mathematician, game wizard, polymath and storyteller who left an indelible mark on everyone he encountered — colleagues, students and beyond — inspiring the popular imagination just as he unraveled some of the deepest mathematical mysteries,” said Igor Rodnianski, professor of mathematics and chair of the Department of Mathematics. “His childlike curiosity was perfectly complemented by his scientific originality and the depth of his thinking. It is a great loss for us and for the entire mathematical world.”
Over his long career, Conway made significant contributions to mathematics in the fields of group theory, number theory, algebra, geometric topology, theoretical physics, combinatorial game theory and geometry.
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One of Conway’s most well-known accomplishments was the Game of Life, which he conceived in the 1970s to describe how life can evolve from an initial state. The concept builds on ideas that trace back to John von Neumann, a pioneer of early computing, in the 1940s. Conway’s game involves a two-dimensional grid in which each square cell interacts with its neighbors according to a set of rules. Over time, these simple interactions give rise to complexity.
The game was introduced in an October 1970 issue of Scientific American’s mathematical games column, whose creator, the late Martin Gardner, was friends with Conway. Conway continued his interest in “recreational mathematics” by inventing numerous games and puzzles. At Princeton, he often carried in his pockets props such as ropes, pennies, cards, dice, models and sometimes a Slinky to intrigue and entertain students and others.
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Hank Steinbrenner, one of the heirs to the New York Yankees.
By way of Lawrence: Keith Ferrell, writer, former editor in chief of Omni, and another one of those people who sounds like a really good guy.
Things have been kind of slow on the sports firings front. With no real sports being played, who’s firing people?
Answer: the Chicago Bulls, who just fired Gar Forman as their general manager.
Taking a break from planes today. Let’s go back in history. Way back. To the beginning.
First, the dinosaurs came. Then they died off and turned into oil. Then the Arabs got all the oil and started driving around in Mercedes-Benzes.
Bonus video #1: “Birth of an Oilfield”. Once again, not to be confused with “Birth of a Nation”.
This was produced by George Pal.
Bonus video #2: a promo film for the 1964 World’s Fair, with Lowell Thomas. Thing that pushes my button: he talks with Robert Moses.