I’m still a little behind schedule from yesterday. Also: recent events.
So today I thought I’d do a couple of videos on the X-1.
“Frontiers of Flight: The Sound Barrier”.
(Here’s a higher quality version, but it feels like some has been cut off of this.)
“Bell X-1: Breaking the Sound Barrier”, from Deep Space TV. This is a little shorter and better quality.
Bonus: this is long, but…a 1991 interview with Gen. Yeager.
World War II ace. Aviation pioneer. A giant within the Air Force.
Join us in celebrating the extraordinary life and mourning the loss of Brig. Gen. Chuck Yeager. May he rest in peace and his legacy live on forever. pic.twitter.com/gJ0113M5ge
— U.S. Air Force (@usairforce) December 8, 2020
Fr @VictoriaYeage11 It is w/ profound sorrow, I must tell you that my life love General Chuck Yeager passed just before 9pm ET. An incredible life well lived, America’s greatest Pilot, & a legacy of strength, adventure, & patriotism will be remembered forever.
— Chuck Yeager (@GenChuckYeager) December 8, 2020
(Edited: fixed link.)
NYT obit. I can’t do justice to the man. I’m not sure who can.
Natalie Desselle-Reid, actress. She was 53.
The man who Tuesday Morning Quarterback refers to as “the tastefully named” Gregg Williams is out as defensive coordinator for the New York Jets.
And speaking of TMQ, another recurring theme:
As previously noted, I got a little behind yesterday, so I’m playing catch-up.
David Lander, prominent TV actor perhaps best known as “Squiggy” on “Laverne and Shirley”.
Interesting connections:
…
Lenny and Squiggy were not the brainchild of the show’s creators. Mr. Lander and Mr. McKean invented them in college (Squiggy was called Ant’ny then) and had been performing as those characters with the Credibility Gap, a comedy performance ensemble that also included Harry Shearer.
The characters sometimes broke away from their own series. Mr. Lander and Mr. McKean appeared on the fictional talk show “America 2-Night,” hosted by Martin Mull.
Portraying two imaginary actors who supposedly played Lenny and Squiggy (but looked and talked just like them), they made small talk and sang “Creature Without a Head.” That song was also on the 1979 album recorded by Lenny and the Squigtones, their imaginary musical group (which included Christopher Guest on guitar). Principal Squiggy (Mr. Lander) appeared in “Scary Movie” (2000), and Squiggy himself turned up on a 2002 episode of “The Simpsons.”
Of course, Guest, McKean, and Shearer were all in Spinal Tap. I kind of wonder why Lander wasn’t involved. (According to Wikipedia, Guest was actually credited as “Nigel Tufnel” on the Lenny and the Squigtones album.)
Lawrence sent over an obit for Pamela Tiffin. She had what seems like an odd career: Billy Wilder’s “One, Two, Three”, “Harper” (a Ross MacDonald adaptation), “State Fair”. “The Hallelujah Trail”…and a bunch of Italian movies.
Paul Sarbanes, the man who put the “Sarbanes” in “Sarbanes-Oxley”.
Also by way of Lawrence, and this is breaking as I write it, so no links yet: Fred Akers. Links probably tomorrow.
For the historical record: NYT obits for Warren Berlinger and Walter E. Williams.
Today, December 7th, 2020, a date which will live in infamy…
…having reached a certain age, I have a doctor’s appointment this morning for a routine procedure, and expect to be out of it for a bit.
(I’ll take the 15 yard penalty for oversharing.)
So I’m scheduling this post in advance. Given the history of the day, the fact that I’ve only linked to him once, the fact that these are short-ish, and the fact that I’m a lazy shiftless blogger who is (I hope) lying around in pajamas and slippers right now, I thought I’d link to Drachinifel‘s series on the salvage of Pearl Harbor.
Part 1: “The Smoke Clears”.
Part 2: “Up She Rises!”
Part 3: “The First and the Last”.
NFL teams that still have a chance to go 0-16:
New York Jets
I was concerned about this game: as it turns out, probably rightfully so. It sounds like the Raiders pulled this one out at the last minute.
Next week: Seattle in Seattle. I’m feeling good about this one.
(Edited to add: Sorry about the weirdness with this. I started a draft of this in advance, published it this morning because I was distracted yesterday afternoon, but WordPress for some reason published this with a date of December 5th.)
When I was young, my paternal grandparents gave me a gift subscription to a magazine called “Science ’85” (later “Science ’86” and so on). As the linked Wikipedia entry discusses, this was a general interest science magazine published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). (AAAS also publishes “Science”, which is a highly prestigious and technical peer-reviewed journal.)
One of the articles I remember from that magazine was about Kurt Gödel. That was the first time I’d ever encountered the man, and I find him fascinating in general. I think one of the reasons I’m fascinated by Gödel is the relationship between his Incompleteness theorem and Turing’s “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem.”
This is a lecture: “Kurt Godel: The World’s Most Incredible Mind” by Mark Colyvan of the University of Sydney. (The title given in the video is “Kurt Gödel and the Limits of Mathematics”.) Each of these chunks is about 15 minutes long, so you can take some time to recover between parts.
Part 1:
Part 2:
Part 3:
I thought it might be fun today to go down to the sea in ships…
…which (because I am a jerk) promptly sink. Since today is Saturday, I feel like I can run a bit long, at least for this first one. The bonus videos are all shorter.
“The Shocking Truths Of King Henry VIII’s Ship The Mary Rose”.
The Mary Rose is a carrack-type warship of the English Tudor navy of King Henry VIII. She served for 33 years in several wars against France, Scotland, and Brittany. After being substantially rebuilt in 1536, she saw her last action on 19 July 1545. She led the attack on the galleys of a French invasion fleet, but sank in the Solent, the straits north of the Isle of Wight
The wreck of the Mary Rose was discovered in 1971 and was raised on 11 October 1982 by the Mary Rose Trust in one of the most complex and expensive maritime salvage projects in history. The surviving section of the ship and thousands of recovered artefacts are of great value as a Tudor-era time capsule. The excavation and raising of the Mary Rose was a milestone in the field of maritime archaeology, comparable in complexity and cost to the raising of the 17th-century Swedish warship Vasa in 1961. The Mary Rose site is designated under the Protection of Wrecks Act 1973 by statutory instrument 1974/55. The wreck is a Protected Wreck managed by Historic England. “Details from listed building database (1000075)”. National Heritage List for England.
Bonus #1: One of the things I’d like to do before I die is to see the Vasa.
Vasa or Wasa[a] (Swedish pronunciation: [²vɑːsa] is a Swedish warship built between 1626 and 1628. The ship foundered after sailing about 1,300 m (1,400 yd) into her maiden voyage on 10 August 1628. She fell into obscurity after most of her valuable bronze cannon were salvaged in the 17th century until she was located again in the late 1950s in a busy shipping area in Stockholm harbor. The ship was salvaged with a largely intact hull in 1961. She was housed in a temporary museum called Wasavarvet (“The Vasa Shipyard”) until 1988 and then moved permanently to the Vasa Museum in the Royal National City Park in Stockholm. The ship is one of Sweden’s most popular tourist attractions and has been seen by over 35 million visitors since 1961. Since her recovery, Vasa has become a widely recognised symbol of the “Swedish Empire”.
I’m putting this here only because I know one person who might like it: Bill Burr rants about the Vasa.
Bonus video #2: More seriously…a 4K video tour of the Vasa Museum from 2015.
Bonus video #3: “Who Sank the Vasa?”.
There’s a guy on the ‘Tube, “Missionary Bush Pilot“. For some reason, I find his videos oddly compelling. Also, this is RoadRich bait.
“Delivering the Kodiak Airplane for Maintenance in Papua New Guinea”. This one is just slightly over coffee break size.
Bonus, slightly longer: “Solo International Flight over the Ocean to Australia in a Single Engine Small Airplane”.
This reminds me a little of a semi-awful show that used to air on Quest. I’m blanking on the name of it at the moment, but it involved ferry pilots. The actual flying parts of that show were fine: what I hated about it was the manufactured “characters” and imposed drama. The nice thing about this channel is that Chris seems to be flying alone, so there’s no interpersonal drama.
Warren Berlinger, prolific TV and movie actor.
He was in a lot of stuff: “Cannonball Run”, multiple appearances on “Happy Days”, “The Shaggy D.A.”, “Operation Petticoat”, and the list goes on.
Hamish MacInnes, mountain climber. I note this for two reasons:
1) Not making fun of his name, but if “Hamish MacInnes” isn’t the most Scottish name imaginable, it’s in the top ten.
2) Not only was he a climber, he was also one of the pioneers of mountain rescue:
As inventive as he was adventurous, Mr. MacInnes built a car from scratch when he was 17. He later used radar to search for bodies in the snow and, in 1961, founded the Glencoe Mountain Rescue Team. He also trained dogs to help search for avalanche victims. His friends called him “the fox of Glencoe” for his cunning in finding lost climbers.
Perhaps his most famous invention was the first all-steel ice ax. It was a significant improvement on the wooden-handled ax, which snapped under pressure.
He also developed a foldable lightweight mountain rescue stretcher that is still in use today and an avalanche information service. His “International Mountain Rescue Handbook” (1972) became the go-to manual for rescue teams all over the world.
All told, his inventions and services saved countless lives.
“No one man has done more to help put in place the network of emergency response efforts designed to keep climbers from harm’s way,” The Scotsman newspaper wrote after Mr. MacInnes’s death.
Scary story:
When he was 84, he was found unconscious in front of his house. He was sent to a psychiatric hospital, where he was deemed demented and held against his will for 15 months. During that time, he was sedated and put in a straitjacket, his weight plummeted, and his memory vanished. He made several attempts to escape; at one point he scaled the outside wall of the hospital, only to end up on the roof with nowhere to go.
Doctors eventually discovered that he had been suffering from a chronic urinary tract infection that produced dementia-like symptoms.
Travel Thursday!
Here’s an exotic destination we haven’t done yet: from Pan Am sometime in the 1960s (possibly before the invention of reggae) “Wings to Jamaica”.
Bonus: “Pan Am Makes the Going Great”, a compilation of commercials from Pan Am’s 1969 ad campaign.
Valéry Giscard d’Estaing est mort.
I’ve seen very little reporting of this elsewhere, but Lawrence has posted a nice obit for economist Walter E. Williams.
I really enjoy Rachel By the Bay’s writing, but I specifically wanted to bookmark this: “My list of magic numbers for your turkey day enjoyment“.
A couple of personal additions (hey, if Rachel can add C-64 and VIC-20 magic numbers, I can add these):
POKE 65495,0: On the old Radio Shack Color Computer, this sped up the CPU. Specifically, according to the Intertubes: “POKE 65495,0 would cause the processor to run at double speed ( 1.795 MHz ) when accessing instructions in ROM and Normal Speed ( 0.895 MHz ) when accessing DRAM.” It also messed up the timing for tape input and output, so you had to disable it before saving or loading from tape. POKE 65494,0 would return the system to normal.
POKE 65497,0: This switched the processor fully to double speed for all memory access, including DRAM. It also disabled video: you basically just got snow on your monitor until you reset the system with POKE 65496,0.
Edited to add #1:
Worth keeping in mind. For OPSEC purposes, I set the EXIF location data in many of the photos I take (especially firearms photos around the house) to 0.000000 north and 0.000000 west.
I’m going to be a little self-indulgent today.
I know I’ve said in the past that I don’t want to post a lot of “Forgotten Weapons” stuff, because I figure if folks are interested, they already subscribe. I’m making an exception here because:
a) This is a pretty recent entry.
II) Smith and Wesson.
3) Australia, Australia, we love you, amen.
Specifically, a Smith and Wesson pistol-carbine made for the South Australian Police.
Bonus #1: I actually thought about posting this yesterday, but couldn’t find it in my recommendations. It popped up again today, and this is some real history: “Hannibal’s Elephant Army – The New Evidence”.
Bonus #2: For some reason, I’ve been getting a lot of car repair videos in my feed. Especially ones from “Precision Transmission”. I thought I’d post this one because I shared it with some other folks privately and it seems like they enjoyed it.
“Nitrous doesn’t play well with others! Especially when you have pretty much stock unit.”