For the historical record: Ruth Bader Ginsburg. NYT. The Washington Post has made their website basically unlinkable.
I don’t have much I can say: I am not a lawyer or a Supreme Court watcher, and the politics are best left to others better equipped to cover that.
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.
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.
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:
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!”
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.
It didn’t take long to find something even stupider than “Mean Girls” toaster pastry.
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.
I would completely have missed this if it were not for Hacker News, but: today is the 100th anniversary of the Wall Street bombing.
…
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.
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?
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.)
