I did not know she was in “Airport ’77”. Not that that was a highlight of her career. Or Joseph Cotton’s. Or anybody else’s. But the “Airport” movies are on our list.
I’m probably giving him short shrift, but everyone has covered his death. And I never watched a single episode of “Who Wants To Be a Millionaire?” or “Regis and (x)”.
John Saxon, working actor. THR. No obit from the Times yet. 198 credits in IMDB. I guess he might be most famous for his roles in “Enter the Dragon” and “Nightmare on Elm Street”, and possibly “Mitchell”. I also remember him from “The New Doctors” segment of “The Bold Ones” wheel.
And he had guest shots in every damn thing in the 1970s: the good “Hawaii 5-0”, “Quincy, M.E.”, “The Rockford Files” (we watched “A Portrait of Elizabeth” last night: it’s a fun episode), “Banacek”, “Banyon”, “The Streets of San Francisco”, “The Six Million Dollar Man”…
…oddly, though, he’s another one of those guys who seem to have done everything except “Mannix”.
The paper of record did finally get around to publishing an obit for Ronald Graham. (Previously.)
Back in the day (approximately 1952-1964) gleeful eccentrics walked the Earth. And I mean that in the best possible way: I would have enjoyed having a few beers with these guys if I had been around back then.
Some of them were interested in earth science. So they formed a group called the American Miscellaneous Society (AMSOC, because I’m not going to keep writing that out).
AMSOC’s biggest and most famous venture was Project Mohole.
Now, when you were a kid, you probably wanted to dig a hole to China. Or at least thought about it. Project Mohole was kind of that on a larger scale. Specifically, AMSOC’s idea with Mohole was to drill a hole through the earth’s crust and into the mantle to bring back samples.
Not that kind of samples. They were especially interested in the Mohorovičić discontinuity, the boundary between crust and mantle. (Hence the project name.)
But there was a problem. No, they were not looking for audiophiles who needed high quality cassette tapes. The problem was that the earth’s crust is really thick on dry land, and you have to drill down a long way to reach the mantle.
But! If you drill at sea, the crust is a lot thinner there, and you don’t have to drill as deep a hole!
But! This was the late 1950s – early 1960s. Drilling technology, especially deep sea drilling technology, wasn’t as advanced back then.
But! This was the late 1950s – early 1960s. Sputnik! Space race! We can do anything!
And so, with funding from the National Science Foundation, Project Mohole began in 1961.
Phase 1 was kind of cool: they used a drillship called CUSS 1, and developed “dynamic positioning”. That allowed the ship to hold a position within a radius of 600 feet, which, in turn, allowed them to drill in deep water. Their deepest hole went down to 601 feet under the sea floor, in a depth of 11,700 feet.
Unfortunately, stuff happened. AMSOC really wasn’t set up to manage big projects like this, so they turned the management over to the NSF. The various institutions involved didn’t completely see eye to eye on the project goals, and there was some infighting over where to drill the next hole, and whether to drill shallow holes first or go for the gusto and try to hit the Moho.
The NSF took bids on who the primary project contractor would be, and they ended up selecting Brown and Root. Now, I have a sentimental attachment to Brown and Root (my dad worked for them) but it seems like they were not the best choice to run the project. B&R apparently wasn’t highly skilled in sea drilling. Costs went up and up and up.
Then Congress got involved. Technically, Congress was already involved: one of the big supporters of Project Moho was Albert Thomas, a congressman from Houston. (Thomas was also key in getting NASA to locate the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston. His involvement may explain why B&R was chosen as the primary contractor. The fact that B&R was also a big donor to Lyndon Johnson might have something to do with it as well.) Thomas died in February of 1966, and the project was cancelled later that year.
And somewhere, I have a copy of Willard Bascom’s A Hole in the Bottom of the Sea.
Short bonus video: this claims to be footage of a nuclear weapon being used to put out a massive gas well fire in the Soviet Union.
I’ve had this in my queue for a while because I’m not sure if it is real or fake. If it is fake, it is well done, and certainly suckered me in. I guess this is one of those “I report, you decide” moments.
I know yesterday was Travel Thursday, but I think it’s time for some more planes. Specifically, some big jet airliners.
(If you haven’t seen it, “Genghis Blues” is a swell documentary, and is available on Amazon Prime.)
Where were we? Oh, yes, planes. Specifically, the DC-10. I think, like the Electra, this is another example of a good plane ruined by bad publicity. Though to be fair, the cargo door problem is one that should have been caught and fixed before people died: it wasn’t a little known phenomena, like whirl mode on the Electra.
But I suspect what really killed the DC-10 was American Flight 191, and that seems unfair. It wasn’t that the plane was bad: it was that the airline decided they were going to experiment with maintenance shortcuts on a passenger aircraft, and that came back to bite them good and hard.
Today’s feature video: “The Making of a DC-10”, from our friends at McDonnell Douglas.
Bonus: “The Ten Takes Flight”, a slightly longer video about the design and construction also from McDonnell Douglas.
Why Greece? I’ve been enjoying a relatively new podcast, “The Delicious Legacy”, about the history of food in the ancient world. (If you want to give it a try, I recommend the episode “The Orthodox Easter Food Traditions“.) So why not?
Bonus video: since I don’t really have any place else to put this, “Across the World in 3 Seconds”, a short film about Pan Am’s communications and computer systems.
Well, we have video of the reunion of the Tailhook Association…
…from 1968. I guess at some point it stopped being a “reunion” and started being a “symposium”. Or maybe it’s always been both a reunion and a symposium. I’m not clear.
There’s some interesting “a wink and a nod” stuff in here: “bold men with a zest for life”, un-orthodox use of “No Step” decals, a reference to supplies of tomato juice in Vegas being seriously depleted (because of aviators consuming Bloody Marys as a hangover cure). Then again, “…single men in barricks don’t grow into plaster saints“.
There’s also some nice vintage video of Vegas in the late 1960s, if that’s your pleasure.
(I kind of wonder how the admiral got his award home. But he was an admiral: that was probably a problem for his subordinates.)
(The Tailhook Association is still active, though the 2020 symposium has been cancelled due to the Wuhan flu.)
Bonus video: these are supposedly home movies of U-2 flight tests at Edwards AFB in 1972.
The allegation is that Householder et al took “more than $60 million” in bribe money from FirstEnergy Corp. In return, the company supposedly got a $1.3 billion dollar bailout.
Time for some more military geekery. And I think that’s appropriate in this case, because this covers two interesting areas of research.
“Holloman — Frontier of the Future”, a documentary about Holloman AFB in New Mexico and some of the work going on there at the time. In addition to missile testing and flight operations, Holloman has a long (35,000 feet at the time: it was upgraded to 50,917 feet in 2000) rocket sled track: this is where John Paul Stapp did his work, and he’s interviewed briefly in the film.
Holloman was also the home base for Project Manhigh (though the balloons were launched from other sites).
Bonus video: and now for something completely different (and longer). I have not watched this yet, but I’m bookmarking it here for reasons I’ll go into in a moment.
From time to time, more so recently, I find myself thinking about trying to make some of my own holsters. I did some leatherwork in school “shop” classes (for values of “leatherwork” that include “putting together a purchased kit from Tandy”). And you can still get severalbooks on making holsters through Amazon.
Part of it is the appeal of carrying and using something that you made yourself, that’s customized to your needs and wants. I wouldn’t plan on going into competition with anyone: I’d be doing these as projects for myself. I figure it’d take me five to ten years (depending on how many holsters I made) to get to the point where I’d be happy with someone else using something I made, and probably another five to ten years after that before I became comfortable asking for money.
And it doesn’t seem like leatherwork takes a lot of space. Except maybe when you start purchasing machinery for stitching.
All I need to do is find the time. As the late John D. MacDonald once said, “A man will think a lot of stupid things when he can’t sleep at night.”
From Adams Leatherworks (a good Texas company), making a pancake holster with thumb break for a Commander sized 1911. Interestingly, they also sell patterns. I love the origin story on their “about” page: these sound like interesting people who maybe deserve some of my money the next time I want a custom holster.
Bonus video #1: “Making a Leather Cowboy Action Fast Draw Holster and Belt”. This guy actually sort of vaguely reminds me of one of my cow-orkers. (Not because he makes holsters: the two just bear a general resemblance.)
Bonus video #2: from Agar France, making a 1880’s Mexican Loop holster.
This was part of Project Plowshare, the government’s attempt to use nuclear weapons for “peaceful purposes”: digging harbors, building canals, and other massive excavation
Bonus video #1: here’s another point of view on Gasbuggy, which contains more actual test footage.
Bonus video #2: “A Force to Move the Earth”, a documentary from the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory focusing on the work of mechanical engineers. There’s also some interesting footage of LRL’s early computer time-sharing system.
A lot of work has been put in to rediscovering how they were made. Among the people involved were Al Pendray, a knifemaker and farrier from Florida, and John Verhoeven, a metallurgist and emeritus engineering professor from Iowa State.
This is a documentary about Mr. Pendray and Mr. Verhoven and two swordsmiths from Jordan working to make Wootz steel from ore mined in Jordan: “a mine that is known to have produced weapons for Saladin himself.” I know this is longer than usual, but the next two are coffee break size.
Bonus video: Al Pendray passed away in 2017. This is a 15 minute tribute to him from The Craftsmanship Initiative.
Bonus video #2: Holy cow! I did not know this, but apparently the late Anthony Bourdain was doing some sort of tie-in with The Balvenie called “Raw Craft”. In this one (only about 12 minutes) he went up to Washington state “to see firsthand how master bladesmith, Bob Kramer crafts the perfect kitchen knife from melted meteorite”.
We have Science Sunday. I think I need to declare either “Travel Tuesday” or “Travel Thursday”, for the alliterative value.
We could sort of have a two-fer today, since it isn’t just Travel Thursday, but TWA Thursday. Sit back, relax, perhaps have a cup of TWA coffee, or some TWA tea.
(Somewhere, I hear Pat Cadigan yelling “DWIGHT!” the way she used to yell “GARDNER!”)
I’m a little surprised they didn’t stop over in Hawaii. And speaking of Hawaii…
Bonus video #1: according to the YouTube notes, this is a Coast Guard video (composed of actual 8mm footage and some re-enactments) about Pan Am Flight 6.
This sounds very similar to the plot of “The High and the Mighty”, but the movie came out in 1954 (and the book in 1953).
I’ve seen that once, on TV, and I’d like to see it again. Lawrence has the DVD, but we have to wait until RoadRich can join us. (This isn’t ‘Nam, this is movie night. There are rules.)
(It’s also interesting to me that Robert Stack plays the pilot on the verge of cracking up. Compare to “Airplane!” Was this a deliberate choice? Wikipedia talks about the choice to cast Stack, but is silent on this specific point.)
Bonus video #2: inside the Eero Saarinen designed TWA Flight Center in 2014.
This is partially a continuation of the survival theme, but I also see it as a slice of life from a culture that I’m honestly not all that familiar with. (Except for the jokes about everything outdoors being lethal, and “Fosters: Australian for Budweiser”.)
