“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 172

September 18th, 2020

Someone on Hacker News posted a link to this website listing surviving examples of the Lockheed Constellation and Super Constellation. (I know, Comic Sans, I’m sorry.)

This inspired me, and I thought it might be fun to share some Connie videos. First up: “The Super Constellation”, a 1955 Lockheed promo film about the building of the Super Constellation.

Bonus #1: The EC-121 Air Force variant flies to Yanks Air Museum.

Bonus #2: Want to see one flying over the Black Forest?

Bonus #3: this is longer, and I have not watched all of it yet. An episode of the “Great Planes” documentary series focusing on the Constellation.

Bonus #4, since three out of four of these have been short: Super Constellation engine startup and takeoff.

Posted in History, Planes | 2 Comments »

When a drawbridge comes along, you must whippit…

September 17th, 2020

Seemingly taking his Dodge Stratus’s “cloud car” nickname literally, the unnamed 26-year-old went airborne and cleared the gap, but managed to burst all four tires and smash his windshield upon landing and crashing on the other side of the bridge.
“Over he went, blew out all four of his tires, and then he crashed into the other gate,” said Locke, who likened the jump to a similar flight by a Dodge Monaco in 1980’s The Blues Brothers. “That’s a first for me.”
Police immediately received a call reporting a car had “Dukes of Hazzard-ed across” the bridge, and on response, found the driver with a canister of nitrous oxide in his car. Known as “whippits” due to its common use as propellant in canned whipped cream, NO2 is a dissociative sometimes inhaled to experience a “floating” sensation, per Australia’s Alcohol and Drug Foundation.

Based on the story, I think the police did try to detect it, but they didn’t have to try very hard.

There is no word so far on the status of the cream.

Posted in Cars, Law, Stupid | Comments Closed

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 171

September 17th, 2020

I thought it might be fun to visit France. But this time, on Air France!

“Discovering France”, from the 1960s.

I apologize for the fact that this is in French, without English subtitles. I feel the virtues of the vintage French scenery outweigh this.

But as a bonus: an old TWA promo film, “World On Parade”. This has three things going for it:

  • It is short.
  • More Paris.
  • O.J. Simpson and Arnold Palmer.

Posted in History, Travel | Comments Closed

Obit watch: September 17, 2020.

September 17th, 2020

Lawrence sent over a pointer to the NYT obit for Stanley Crouch.

Mr. Crouch defied easy categorization. A former Black nationalist who had been seared by witnessing the 1965 Watts race riots in his native Los Angeles, he transformed himself into a widely read essayist, syndicated newspaper columnist, novelist and MacArthur Foundation “genius award” winner whose celebrity was built, in part, on his skewering — and even physical smackdowns — of his former intellectual comrades.
All the while he championed jazz, enlarging its presence in American culture by helping to found Jazz at Lincoln Center in New York, one of the country’s premier showcases for that most American of musical genres, and by promoting the career of the celebrated trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, who co-founded the jazz center in 1991 and remains its artistic director.

…

Espousing that pragmatism, he found ready adversaries among fellow Black Americans, whom he criticized as defining themselves in racial terms and as reducing the broader Black experience to one of victimization. He vilified gangsta rap as “‘Birth of a Nation’ with a backbeat,” the Rev. Al Sharpton as a “buffoon,” the Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan as “insane,” the Nobel laureate Toni Morrison “as American as P.T. Barnum” and Alex Haley, the author of “Roots,” as “opportunistic.”
By contrast, he venerated his intellectual mentors James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray, who, by his lights, saw beyond the conventions of race and ideology while viewing the contributions of Black people as integral to the American experience.

…

After transplanting himself to New York in 1975, Mr. Crouch wrote for The Village Voice, where he was hired as a staff writer in 1980 and fired in 1988 after a fistfight with a fellow writer.
“The two best things that have ever happened to me were being fired by The Voice and being hired by The Voice, in that order,” he told The New Yorker.

…

Mr. Crouch said in an interview with The Times in 1990 that too many discussions of race were “simple-minded and overly influenced by the ideas of determinism — if you’re poor, you’re going to act a certain way” — a self-perpetuating path that, he said, his public-school teachers had stopped him from taking.
“These people were on a mission,” he said of his teachers. “They had a perfect philosophy: You will learn this. If you came in there and said, ‘I’m from a dysfunctional family and a single-parent household,’ they would say, ‘Boy, I’m going to ask you again, What is 8 times 8?’
“When I was coming up,” he continued, “there were no excuses except your house burned down and there was a murder in the family. Eight times eight was going to be 64 whether your family was dysfunctional or not. It’s something you needed to know!”

Posted in Music, Obits | Comments Closed

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 170

September 16th, 2020

Today, I wanted to put up something that pushes a few of RoadRich’s hot buttons (and my own).

The California Highway Patrol has a YouTube channel. I thought it might be interesting to look at some aspects of operations that are common to both the Austin Police Department and the CHP. These are things that APD devotes presentations to in their Citizen’s Police Academy (which is on-hold at the moment), so why not take a look at how a department outside of the United States handles these things?

First up: “Air Operations”. This is a two-parter: Part 1.

(Can I note here that I hate “vlog”? I would say I hate the word, but it isn’t even a word.)

Part 2: this covers CHP’s fixed-wing (that is, not helicopter) operations.

You know what else CHP has? The mounted police.

You know I had to do that.

Anyway, the CHP mounted patrol.

Posted in 1970s, California Über Alles, Cops, Horses, Law, Planes, TV | Comments Closed

2020 is a target rich environment. (Part deux)

September 16th, 2020

It didn’t take long to find something even stupider than “Mean Girls” toaster pastry.

For a mere $1,500 you can have a custom built Wilkinson original that features influencer Bella Delphine. The case is plastered in Delphine’s face. Her alleged mugshot is on the front, LEDs with her glare from inside the case, and the system’s liquid cooling pipes run in and out of a little jar said to contain her bathwater.

In the interest of fairness, note the “said” above:

But it’s not an official jar of Bella Delphine bathwater. “I know it’s disappointing,” Josh Wilkinson, the case’s designer, told Motherboard on the phone. “It’s like 400 bucks on Ebay. The more official reason is that these cooling loops, if it was just normal water they wouldn’t hold up after a while.”
Liquid cooled PCs reduce temperatures of a machine with a liquid that’s a mix of distilled water and additives that prevent corrosion. Using Delphine’s dirty bathwater to cool down a machine is probably hazardous to the machine’s health.

Posted in Geek, Stupid | Comments Closed

Brief historical note, suitable for use in schools.

September 16th, 2020

I would completely have missed this if it were not for Hacker News, but: today is the 100th anniversary of the Wall Street bombing.

In 1919, a coordinated attack had bombs going off in seven cities, including Washington, DC, where an explosive was supposed to land on the porch of US Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer. But, said Gage, “it was set to a timer and went off prematurely. The guy carrying the bomb, an Italian anarchist, got killed. Pieces of his body were found all over Palmer’s neighborhood.”

…

It’s widely speculated that an Italian anarchist named Mario Buda did the deed in retaliation for the murder-robbery indictment of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti (better known as Sacco and Vanzetti). Buda, who was thought to be involved in the 1919 bombings, was never brought in for questioning and fled to Italy soon after the Wall Street attack.

There’s an interesting book by Mike Davis, Buda’s Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb (affiliate link). He views the Wall Street bombing as the first car bomb, even though it wasn’t really a “car” bomb.

FBI page. There’s an “American Experience” documentary that you can apparently stream for free if you’re a PBS station member or have Amazon Prime.

Posted in Explosives, History, Horses, Law | Comments Closed

My next million dollar idea.

September 16th, 2020

I think it is time to bring back chariot racing.

No politics, no political statements: just chariot racing. I’m sure we can get a TV deal, and not just on ESPN 8, “The Ocho”. Given a choice between televised chariot racing and televised cornhole, what do you think people are going to watch?

(Inspired by episode 157 of the History of Rome podcast.)

Posted in History, Sports | 8 Comments »

Your loser update: week 1, 2020.

September 15th, 2020

Apparently, the NFL started their regular season this weekend.

I just barely noticed.

It isn’t so much the politics, although McThag has a good post up on that. I’m just finding it really difficult to care.

Still, one of the motivations for starting this blog was the NFL loser update, and as a wise man once said…

NFL teams that still have a chance to go 0-16:

San Francisco
Carolina
Tampa Bay
Atlanta
Dallas
Philadelphia
New York Football Giants
Minnesota
Detroit
Cincinnati
Cleveland
Denver
Indianapolis
Houston
New York Jets
Miami

In other semi-related football news, I have been reading as much of Gregg Easterbrook’s Twitter as I can stomach, and there has been no mention of “Tuesday Morning Quarterback” at all. Not just a lack of pointers to the current column, but also a lack of “if you liked it, write our sponsor” messages. I have to assume that he’s not doing it this year, though his silence on the subject is a little strange.

Posted in Loser, Music, NFL, Sports, TMQ watch | 4 Comments »

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 169

September 15th, 2020

I feel like opening the liquor cabinet.

Anthony Bourdain makes a Negroni.

The Negroni has been a favorite cocktail of mine during my Wednesday night drinking bouts. One of the online sources I’ve been using suggests shaking rather than stirring.

Next up: of course, the Sidecar. With a diversion into why you should use quality ingredients.

I kind of like this guy. He doesn’t seem to be putting on a YouTube persona, unlike a lot of the other cocktail video makers. As a wrap-up, here’s another one of his: this time, on the Moscow Mule, another one of my go-to Wednesday night cocktails.

There seem to be people who think you should make your own ginger syrup. I’m just a simple home drinker who works 40 hours a week and doesn’t have time to mess with that, so I use a good quality bottled ginger beer. I’ve had good luck with Fever-Tree, but I’m out of that at the moment, and am thinking Fentimans might be worth trying if I can get my hands on some. (I’ve been using Tito’s vodka, not because it is local, but because it seems like a decent vodka that doesn’t break the bank or give you hangovers.)

Posted in Mixology | Comments Closed

Obit watch: September 15, 2020.

September 15th, 2020

Jack Murphy, aka “Murph the Surf”, the man who stole the Star of India. He was also a convicted murderer.

At the J.P. Morgan Hall of Gems and Minerals at the American Museum of Natural History, on Central Park West, they noted lax security and gawked at what they found there: the Star of India, a 563-carat, oval-shaped blue sapphire, 2.5-inches long (a golf ball is 1.68 inches in diameter); the DeLong Star Ruby, at 100.32 carats; and the 116-carat Midnight Star, one of the world’s largest black sapphires.
On the night of Oct. 29 [1964], a Thursday, with Mr. Clark on the street as lookout, Mr. Murphy and Mr. Kuhn, carrying a coil of rope, scaled a tall iron fence behind the museum, climbed a fire escape to the fifth floor and inched along a narrow ledge. Tying the rope to a pillar above an open fourth-floor window, Mr. Murphy swung down and used his foot to move the sash.
They were in.
The glass protecting the important gems was a third of an inch thick, too strong to break with a rubber mallet. Instead of risking noise with heavy blows, they used cutters to score circles of glass; duct tape to cover the circles, to prevent shattering and muffle the sound; and a rubber suction cup to pull the pieces out.
They opened three cases and bagged 22 prizes: emeralds, diamonds, rubies, sapphires and gem-laden bracelets, brooches and rings. Finally, they went out the window, climbed down and walked away, encountering several police officers on their beat.
“Good evening, officers,” Mr. Murphy said. They gave him a nod and kept walking.

They were caught within days and served time.

In 1967, he and a Miami thug, Jack Griffith, met Terry Rae Frank and Annelie Mohn, secretaries who had stolen $500,000 in securities from a California brokerage where they worked. Prosecutors later said Mr. Murphy had conspired with the women in the theft, and gave them a hide-out in Miami.
Mr. Murphy and Mr. Griffith took the women on their last ride: a midnight speedboat excursion to Hollywood, north of Miami, ostensibly to discuss disposing of the securities (worth $4 million in today’s dollars). But in a waterway called Whiskey Creek, the women were bludgeoned and hacked to death, and their bodies, anchored with concrete blocks, were dumped overboard.
Traced through the stolen securities, Mr. Murphy and Mr. Griffith were charged with the killings. In a 1969 trial in Fort Lauderdale, they blamed each other for the murders and were both convicted. Mr. Griffith was sentenced to 45 years and Mr. Murphy to life in prison.
After 17 years in Florida prisons, Mr. Murphy was released in 1986, vowing to spend his remaining years on “God’s business.” For three decades, supported by groups like the International Network of Prison Ministries, he traveled from his home in Crystal River to preach to inmates in a dozen countries.
He appeared on Christian broadcasts and at criminal rehabilitation conferences, sometimes with an entourage of major league athletes and popular singers. In 2000, the Florida Parole Board ended his lifetime parole.

Posted in Law, Obits | Comments Closed

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 168

September 14th, 2020

Today: the majestic moose!

From the Simple Living Alaska channel, “Butchering a Moose”.

278 pounds of moose meat!

Okay, that was a little long, so here’s a coffee break sized one for you. I’ve written before about the legendary Broadway flop “Moose Murders”. (Which, of course, I never saw, because I was just under 18 at the time, didn’t live in New York City, and it opened and closed on the same night.)

So this wonderful eccentric decided, as the final for a class he was taking, to direct the opening scene of “Moose Murders”. And now it is up on the ‘Tube.

Bonus bonus, also short: “B-roll” from the Beautiful Soup Theater Collective revival.

Posted in Food, Mammals, Theatre | Comments Closed

2020 is a target rich environment.

September 13th, 2020

For that reason, I don’t want to say this is the stupidest thing I’ve seen this year, as I’m sure that if I apply myself, I can come up with stupider things. Also, if I do say it is the stupidest thing I’ve seen this year, Lawrence, Mike the Musicologist, or both will provide me with at least 10 stupider things.

That said, I still think this is pretty stupid.

“Mean Girls” themed toaster strudel. Yes, I’ve never seen “Mean Girls”, yes, I do get the fact that it is a reference, but themed pastry for a 16 year old movie? Here’s an idea: an all-black toaster pastry with slightly off-white icing that you can use to draw Stonehenge.

Posted in Bagatelle, Stupid | Comments Closed

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 167

September 13th, 2020

Science Sunday!

Here’s something a little off the beaten path for you: “The Story of Dr. Lister”, a 1963 dramatization from Warner-Lambert Pharmaceuticals, about the life of Dr. Joseph Lister.

For those of you who aren’t big medical history buffs, Dr. Lister was one of the pioneers of antiseptic surgery.

Lister promoted the idea of sterile surgery while working at the Glasgow Royal Infirmary. Lister successfully introduced carbolic acid (now known as phenol) to sterilise surgical instruments and to clean wounds.
Applying Louis Pasteur’s advances in microbiology, Lister championed the use of carbolic acid as an antiseptic, so that it became the first widely used antiseptic in surgery. He first suspected it would prove an adequate disinfectant because it was used to ease the stench from fields irrigated with sewage waste. He presumed it was safe because fields treated with carbolic acid produced no apparent ill-effects on the livestock that later grazed upon them.

Bonus: I spent some time trying to find a decent video about Ignaz Semmelweis, but couldn’t. So for a change of pace, please enjoy an Army Air Corps video from 1944 on what is rapidly becoming a lost art: “Celestial Navigation”.

(Yes, even though this is a military training film, I do think understanding the relationship of celestial objects to one’s position on the Earth does count as science.)

Posted in Geek, History | Comments Closed

Obit watch: September 13, 2020.

September 13th, 2020

Toots Hibbert, of Toots and the Maytals.

Lawrence has a good tribute up.

Kevin Dobson. He never did a “Mannix”, but he did a fair number of other cop shows. His two most famous roles were as Kojak’s sidekick, and as a detective on “Knots Landing”.

Mr. Dobson was less active on the big screen than the small one, but he did appear in some notable films, including “Midway” (1976), as part of an all-star cast that also included Henry Fonda and Charlton Heston, and the 1981 romantic comedy “All Night Long,” in which his character was married to Barbra Streisand’s.
In 1981 he played Mike Hammer, the hard-boiled detective created by Mickey Spillane, in the CBS television movie “Margin for Murder.” “Mr. Dobson is given a valuable opportunity to step outside of his usual ‘nice guy’ image,” John J. O’Connor of The New York Times wrote in a review. “He makes the most of it, reinforcing Mike’s toughness with an impeccably accurate New York accent.”

Posted in 1970s, Music, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 166

September 12th, 2020

My current boss is an amateur radio operator, and has far more experience and knowledge than I do. Since the lockdown started, my work group has been holding virtual “happy hours” outside of the work context (consumption of wine, beer, and spirituous liquors is allowed, but not required) and amateur radio is a frequent topic of discussion.

So I thought Saturday might be a good day for some radio related stuff.

First up, “What Happened to the Numbers Stations?”

(Numbers Stations Research and Information Center. Which is kind of a misnomer, because they cover things that aren’t numbers stations as well.)

Bonus #1: “HM01 – The Ultimate Radio Mystery”. HM01 is a numbers station broadcasting out of Cuba.

Bonus #2: “Tracking The Lincolnshire Poacher”. The first video above mentions the Lincolnshire Poacher early on, but if you didn’t watch it, LP is another famous numbers station.

Bonus #3: For something different, “Listening to Astronauts ON THE ISS with a Baofeng UV-5R”.

Baofeng UV-5R+ on Amazon. (Affiliate link.) It is a very slight exaggeration to say that you can get one of these with the change you dig out of your couch cushions.

Posted in Bookmarks, History, Music, Radio | Comments Closed

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 165

September 11th, 2020

Here’s something kind of odd for everyone.

“Aerospace Communications: The Reins Of Command”. This is another one of those Cold War DEW Line/SAGE/BMEWS propaganda films. What makes it interesting as far as I’m concerned is: it features the late Brigadier General James M. Stewart (United States Air Force – ret).

Bonus: “Food Supply After The Bomb”.

Personally, I’m not a big apricot preserves fan, but I do like me some orange marmelade. Also, are those two of the most stilted performances you’ve ever seen in a propaganda film?

Posted in History | Comments Closed

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 164

September 10th, 2020

Travel Thursday!

Upstairs in my “to read” pile, underneath my three volumes of Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, I have both volumes of Pierre Berton’s books about the construction of Canada’s transcontinental railroad (The National Dream and The Last Spike). What can I say, they were cheap at Half-Price.

I thought it might be fun to put this up: “Great Canadian Railway Journeys ‘Kamloops to Banff'”. I’d like to visit both Kamloops and Banff one of these days: I’ve been to Vancouver, but Kamloops is about three and a half hours away. Also, I kind of like saying “Kamloops”.

Bonus: “Port Moody to Kamloops”.

Posted in History, Trains, Travel | Comments Closed

Obit watch: September 10, 2020.

September 10th, 2020

It is the stated policy of this blog that, if you were a Bond girl, you get an obit.

But that doesn’t matter, because Diana Rigg would have gotten one no matter what. THR. Variety. BBC.

Rigg was a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company from 1959-64, touring Europe and the U.S. as Cordelia in a RSC production of “King Lear” (she revisited the play in 1983, when she was Regan to Laurence Olivier’s Lear); she was also Viola in a 1966 RSC staging of “Twelfth Night.”
Rigg appeared on Broadway three times, starring in “Abelard and Heloise” in 1971 (her nude scene in the play and critic John Simon’s tart assessment of her body generated publicity); a revival of Moliere’s “The Misanthrope” in 1975; and a staging of “Medea” in 1994 — drawing a Tony nomination each time for best actress in a play and winning for “Medea.”

…

She continued working in theater well into her 70s, starring in “The Cherry Orchard” in 2008 and “Hay Fever” in 2009, both at the Chichester Festival Theater. One of her final stage roles was as Mrs. Higgins, the protagonist’s imperious but sensible mother, in a 2011 production of “Pygmalion” at the Garrick Theater in London. Thirty-seven years before, at what was then the Albery Theater, a few streets away, she had been the play’s ingénue, Eliza Doolittle. (She played Mrs. Higgins again in the 2018 Lincoln Center Theater revival of “My Fair Lady.”)

…

As the third of four female sidekicks to Patrick Macnee’s dapper John Steed on ITV’s The Avengers, Rigg’s Peel became an icon in England and the U.S. The show centered on the duo — Steed with a bowler hat and umbrella, Peel in cutting-edge mod fashions — working as partners for a secret British intelligence agency in an over-the-top, sometimes surrealist England.
“She was ahead of her time,” Rigg said at a 50-year anniversary tribute to her character hosted by the British Film Institute. “Quite by accident she became this avant-garde woman, and dear God, was I lucky to get the chance to play this woman. For years afterward, people came up to me and said, ‘You were my heroine’ — not me, Emma — ‘and encouraged me to do this and that.’ Without overembellishing her influence, I do think she was a very, very potent influence in women claiming their place in this world.”

…

The actress also starred with George C. Scott in the Arthur Hiller-directed, Paddy Chayefsky-penned satire “The Hospital” (1971); the classic Vincent Price horror film “Theatre of Blood” (1973); the 1982 Agatha Christie adaptation “Evil Under the Sun,” in which she played the despised and thus dispatched Arlena Marshall; and most recently 2006’s “The Painted Veil,” in which she played the Mother Superior.
Other film credits include “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” (1968), “The Assassination Bureau” (1969), “Julius Caesar,” starring Charlton Heston (1970), “A Little Night Music,” with Elizabeth Taylor (1977), “The Great Muppet Caper” (1981), “Snow White,” as the Evil Queen (1987), Bruce Beresford’s “A Good Man in Africa,” starring Sean Connery (1994), “Parting Shots” (1998) and “Heidi.”

What a life.

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

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 163

September 9th, 2020

I think this is the first time I’ve done an entire daily entry devoted to a single person.

“Leadership Lessons from Gen. James Mattis (Ret.)”.

Bonus #1: the general’s speech to the OSS Society on receiving the 2019 William J. Donovan Award.

Bonus #2: General Mattis speaking at commencement for Central Washington University in 2011.

Posted in Heroism, History, Leadership | Comments Closed

Obit watch: September 8, 2020.

September 8th, 2020

By way of Hacker News, I found this obituary for Verne Edquist on the Glenn Gould Foundation website.

Mr. Edquist was born with congenital cataracts and was nearly blind. He trained as a professional piano tuner.

Years later, Verne often took to quoting his tuning teacher, J. D. Ansell, whose favorite aphorism was “The only place where success comes before work is in the dictionary.” To give Verne experience, Ansell started taking his young protégé into town to tune pianos in private homes. Verne was allowed to keep the money – $2.50 per piano, and sometimes, when he got lucky, $3.00 – which he put toward some basic tools: a tuning wrench, a tuning fork, needle-nose pliers, gauges for measuring the diameter of piano wire, and rubber wedges for muting strings.

He moved around a lot, sometimes working for piano makers, sometimes working as a freelance tuner.

One afternoon about a year after Verne started at Eaton’s, Miss Mussen sent him across town to Glenn Gould’s apartment to tune Gould’s old Chickering. All Gould wanted, he told Verne, was for the tuner to do what had been done hundreds of times before: get the piano into playable condition, if only for the time being. But Verne refused, telling Gould that the tuning pins were so loose they needed to be replaced.
Verne’s stubborn insistence on doing things his way had endeared him to Gould, and the encounter galvanized what was to become a decades-long association between a pianist and his technician.
Verne tuned for many famous musicians over the years, including Duke Ellington, Arthur Rubinstein, Rudolf Serkin, Victor Borge, and Liberace. But it was the business he got from Gould that eventually enabled him to quit Eaton’s employ and sustain his family for two decades.
Each tolerated the other’s idiosyncracies, which were in ample evidence in both men. Gould’s quirks, of course, were legion and legendary. One of their earliest conversations was about Verne’s physical limitations. “I can’t see very well, but I get the job done,” Verne told Gould. And Gould replied that of this he had no doubt. Nothing further on the topic was ever said.

…

All his life, Verne heard music through his own particular synaesthesia – in colors. If you asked him how he knew that an F was an F, he would say, “oh that’s blue.” C was a slightly lime green. The key of D was a sandy hue, E was yellowy-pink, A was white, G orange and B dark green. For years he was ashamed of this rather oddball talent. When he finally told Glenn Gould about it, his boss reacted as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

…

When I interviewed Verne for my book, I was struck by what a kind and gentle man he was. It came as a surprise to hear him voice some reservations, even a little bitterness, about his most famous client. Although Gould had often gone out of his way to accommodate Verne’s schedule and never uttered an unkind word to him, nor did he, in the two decades they worked together, gone out of his way to praise Verne’s tuning. To have gone so many years without hearing so much as a “nice job” had clearly taken its toll.

I’m not a musician, or a piano tuner, but that Katie Hafner book (affiliate link) sounds fascinating to me for some reason.

Posted in Books, Music, Obits | Comments Closed

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 162

September 8th, 2020

I haven’t posted any vintage police training videos in a while, because I really haven’t been finding any. At least, none have been popping up in my YouTube feed.

However, I went looking for a specific FBI video that Bill Vanderpool mentioned in his book, Guns of the F.B.I. : A History of the Bureau’s Firearms and Training. (Longer write up about that book to come.) I couldn’t find it, but I did find this:

“Officer Down Code Three” from 1975. This is one of those Motorola videos, but the quality of the transfer seems to me to be a bit higher. It is also interesting for another reason: this video is adapted from Pierce R. Brooks’s book of the same name.

Officer Down Code Three is considered by some to be the first “officer survival” book. It precedes the somewhat more famous Street Survival by about five years.

Rather than going into more detail about the book and author, I will refer you to this excellent review from FotB (and official firearms trainer to WCD) Karl Rehn of KR Training.

Bonus: vintage LAPD recruiting film from the 1950s.

Posted in Books, Cops, FBI, History, Law | Comments Closed

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 161

September 7th, 2020

A pair of military history videos for Labor Day.

For RoadRich and the rest of my “12 O’Clock High” crew, “Flak”.

And as a bonus, “Our Crucial Deterrent”, a 1972 US Navy promo film about the importance of Polaris and Poseidon.

Posted in History | Comments Closed

Obit watch: September 6, 2020.

September 6th, 2020

Dennis C. Eberhart. He was one of my uncles from my mother’s side of the family.

Gerald Shur, one of the founders of WITSEC. Here’s the NYT obit, but I would encourage folks to go read the very nice blog post by Pete Earley first.

Posted in Law, Obits | Comments Closed

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 160

September 6th, 2020

Science Sunday!

An assortment today. Sort of like a box of chocolates. (I’ll let you decide which one is the “Spring Surprise“.)

A short one: vintage video of the flight of the Gossamer Albatross.

(“Albatross!“)

Somewhat longer: by way of the San Diego Air and Space Museum Archives, a lecture from the “Convair Lecture Series” by George Gamow on “Stellar Evolution”.

This is an interesting oral history from Marvin Stern, who worked at Convair at one time, which touches briefly on the Convair Lecture Series.

For instance, when Edward gave one —. By the way, he wouldn’t give one, I was told. But when I asked him, he did. During his lecture, he made a little mistake. A student asked him a question –- “Oh yes” — and he erased it and he fixed it. Afterwards Edward said, was it all right, do I want him to do it over? I said, “No. Making a little mistake — what have you—having a question — interrupt is almost a pedagogic technique. If I wanted to hire a Hollywood actor, I’d hire a Hollywood actor.”

Longest: “Nuclear Reactor Construction and Operation” from MIT “MIT 22.01 Introduction to Nuclear Engineering and Ionizing Radiation, Fall 2016”.

This is lecture number 16 in the course, but I feel like it is fairly stand-alone. Y’all know how I am about nukes and nuke stuff.

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