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?
“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.)
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.
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”.
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.
“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.)
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.
…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.
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.
Edited to add: Mike the Musicologist sent over a report that outside linebackers coach Shelton Felton and inside linebackers coach Brian Niedermeyer have also been fired. An updated report from ESPN also indicates that unnamed others have been let go as well. And all of these firings (including Pruitt’s) are being reported as “for cause”, which means no contract buyout.
Phil Spector. This is another one of those where I don’t have much to say, really: everyone knows the story (and if you don’t, it is recapped in the obit).
Oh, yeah: it also decomposes into phosgene unless you stabilize it first. Which is a bit concerning…
Next: “I somehow convinced myself to order a full kilo instead.”
That’s a full kilo of…sodium cyanide.
“Does cyanide actually smell like almonds?”
This is right on the annoying border for me, so I won’t hold it against you if you skip the video and read the notes instead.
This one might be a little more interesting: the chemistry of arsenic, from the Periodic Videos folks.
As a side note to this, and because Lawrence and I have been talking about it, I went looking for videos on Shadows From the Walls of Death. I did find a few about the book (not death metal) but…they were all in foreign languages without subtitles.
Okay, just one more: “The Science Behind Shaped Charges”.
Igloo White was one of those interesting Vietnam War operations. The idea was: we’d airdrop sensors (frequently camouflaged to look like local vegetation) along the Ho Chi Minh trail to monitor enemy movements. The sensors would relay information to aircraft flying overhead, which would in turn relay that information to an operations center. The operations center was equipped with two “supercomputers” (according to Wikipedia, IBM 360/40 and later 360/65 systems) which would analyze the collected data and try to predict where the enemy was going to be, based on where they had been.
“Operation Igloo White” from Dark Docs.
Bonus: “Electronic Surveillance and Eavesdropping in the Vietnam War”, a 1969 DOD film.
Bonus #2, also by way of Dark Docs: “Operation Popeye”, the military’s weather modification program.
After WWII, a group of veterans returned to their homes in McMinn County, Tennessee. (Athens is the county seat.) The veterans found that McMinn County was run by a corrupt local machine, and assembled their own slate of reform candidates. However, the crooked local government decided that they were going to rig the elections in their favor. The machine, though, had not realized some facts of life:
You can figure that many (if not all) of those men were familiar with firearms, had combat experience, and at least some of them knew something about explosives.
So when the election took place on August 1, 1946, and the machine tried to rig the vote counting (even going as far as to beat and arrest GI poll watchers), the veterans took up arms and rebelled, in what is now known as “The Battle of Athens“.
Here are two short versions of the story:
A somewhat longer video, which is based in part on Mr. DeRose’s book:
This is a long video (about an hour) of a talk by Matt Green (a former judge in Alabama: as best as I can tell, he’s in private practice now specializing in DUI and constitutional law) about the Battle of Athens.
There’s a made for TV movie that you can find on the ‘Tube, but which I’m not embedding here for policy reasons.
Our friend Siegfried (of Siegfried & Roy) has died. Those guys opened Las Vegas to the possibility of a full-evening magic show. They lived large. They paved the way for @pennjillette and me. Here's an appropriately lavish obit in the New York Post. https://t.co/Meq4CrwL8vpic.twitter.com/wZskSwRJaK
Today, a couple of exotic destinations. “Wings Over The West Indies” from our good friends at Pan Am. What makes this interesting is that it is from the 1940s, and features the Sikorsky S-40 flying boat.
And, for a little dose of something slightly more recent and in color…”Wings to Yugoslavia”, also from Pan Am, but this time dating to the 1960s.
One more fun one: “Up and Over”, a promo film made by Sikorsky promoting Los Angeles Airways (LAA). LAA provided helicopter service from various points around LA to the airports and to Disneyland. They also carried mail.
The YouTube notes mention that they went out of business in 1971 after an acquisition with Golden West Airlines failed. What the notes don’t mention is that they had two bad crashes almost back to back (May 22, 1968 and August 14, 1968) that killed a total of 44 people. Which may have been a contributing factor…