I haven’t done anything super geeky in a little while, so today’s the day.
“An Introduction to Digital Computers”, from the UNIVAC division of Sperry Rand sometime in the 1960s.
Bonus video #1: it seems only fair to give the other guys their turn. This is a compilation put together by the Computer History Archives Project of promotional videos for the IBM System/370.
Bonus video #2: and before that, System/360.
You try and tell the young people today that…and they won’t believe you.
Shirley Knight, actress.
She did a lot of theater work (and won a Tony), did some movie work, and a whole bunch of TV (winning three Emmy awards). No “Mannix”, but she did appear on a lot of Quinn Martin productions.
Remember the XB-70?
Okay, that’s kind of a trick question: very few people other than military aviation buffs remember the XB-70. It was an amazing concept: a plane capable of sustained flight at Mach 3 and 70,000 feet.
Sadly, the project was overtaken by events: they ended up building only two planes, and one was lost in a mid-air collision. The other one is in the Air Force Museum in Dayton.
I didn’t know that there was video of the XB-70 in flight. Until last night, that is.
Bonus video #1: since that one was a little short, I’m going to go a little long with this one. “Ejection Decison – A Second Too Late!”. Basically, the point of this training film is: decide before you start flying under what circumstances you’re going to eject. There’s some good video of actual ejections, as well as testimony from pilots who planned and followed through.
Bonus video #2: a short history of the ejection seat from Martin-Baker.
Tom Lester. He didn’t have an extensive list of credits, but is perhaps best known as “Eb Dawson”, the farmhand on “Green Acres”. He was apparently the last surviving member of the original cast.
Andrew J. Fenady, TV producer and writer.
I did finally make it down to Cabela’s on Monday. They were open, but with the standard measures in place: limiting the number of people allowed inside, social distancing (you had to take a number and wait behind a rope just to even approach the gun counter), etc.
They were pretty much cleaned out of handgun ammo. Some rifle ammo and what appeared to be plenty of shotgun ammo with smaller shot. (Think birds and skeet, not self-defense.) Some used pistols, but less than usual. Not a whole lot of used rifles: a fair number of Mosins and a bunch of Savage rifles that they seemed to be clearing out, but very few rifles beyond those. There were obvious holes in the new gun stock, but they weren’t totally sold out.
I saw two pre-Model 27 Smiths, one for $800 and one for $900. Of the two, I liked the $800 one better, and a pre-27 is high on the want list, but I couldn’t quite bring myself to pull the trigger on it. I have the money, but I also had planned a trip for mid-June and was holding on for hotel expenses and possible purchases there.
Then I came home and found out the event I was going to in June was cancelled. So much for that.
(This is kind of cool. It is SA/DA, which fits the criteria I’m looking for to shoot Karl’s “Historical Handgun” class eventually. But I already have one .40 S&W (a Glock 35) and can easily convert my M&P in .357 SIG to .40 S&W as well. I really want something in 10mm (like a S&W 1076/1006), not .40, so I can check that box on my gun hipster bingo card. Also, to be honest, that big “40 TACTICAL” on the slide is kind of a turn-off.)
(Also tempting. If I order now, I should have it in hand for archduke season.)
I’m still thinking accessories instead of new (to me) guns, though, unless I see something at a really compelling price. Also, if things get better, Mike the Musicologist and I are talking about hitting Wanenmacher’s in November…
Let’s talk about guns.
I think today’s featured video falls squarely into the “educational” category. It is also a little better quality than usual.
“Range Safety For Firearms Instructors”, from the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center (FLETC, because I’m not going to keep typing that out). I’m actually quite serious about the educational value of this one: if you’re an NRA certified instructor, all of this is probably covered in your training. But if you’re just a guy taking new or inexperienced shooters to the range, you might get some useful tips out of this.
(It is a little over 15 minutes, but if you’re pressed for time, you can probably skip over the part where they specifically talk about the Uzi. Unless you’re taking new shooters to the range to shoot your full-auto Uzi submachine gun, in which case I want to go with you. Please?)
Bonus video #1: if you’re more pressed for time, here’s a basic introduction to range safety from the National Shooting Sports Foundation that would be good to show to new and inexperienced shooters.
Bonus videos #2 and #3: more from the good folks at FLETC. “Rounds of Authority”, about various types of shotgun ammunition. If you ever wanted to see folks shoot various types of shotgun rounds (including some of the exotics) into various objects (ballistic gel, car doors, soft body armor, etc.) this is the video for you.
In a similar vein, “.40 Caliber Ammunition”, focusing specifically on the .40 S&W and the various tactical and training loads available at the time (1998). And yes, this features more video of stuff being shot.
Keep in mind that these last two are pretty old (23 and 22 years, respectively) and represent what was available at the time, and what the thinking at the time was. Don’t take this as revealed gospel truth today.
I’m fascinated by atomic energy.
Not just bombs – though what high explosives fan can resist the biggest booms of all – but atomic energy in general. The early power reactors. Atoms for peace. Project Plowshare.
I have personal reasons for this, but in my mind, it also ties in to something I call “The Future We Could Have Had”. A lot of folks have written about facets of that future, and someday I may do a longer blog post on the idea.
Today is not that day. But here are some vintage atomic videos to hold you.
First up, “First Reactor In Space…SNAP 10A”. SNAP 10A was an experimental reactor launched almost exactly 55 years ago (April 3, 1965) and was the first nuclear reactor in orbit.
Bonus video: “Power For Continent Seven”. Yes, there was a reactor at McMurdo Station (PM-3A) that operated for about 10 years.
Slight spoiler: if you read the Wikipedia entries, you’ll find that neither one of these projects was, shall we say, 100% successful.
Nobuhiko Obayashi, Japanese film director.
Mr. Obayashi’s startling feature debut, in 1977, was “House,” a demented horror movie that is more comic than scary. The Los Angeles Times called it “one of the most enduringly — and endearingly — weird cult movies of the last few decades.”
Reviewing it in The New York Times in 2010, when it had a theatrical run at the IFC Center in Manhattan in advance of a DVD release, Manohla Dargis described the goings-on.
“This might be about a haunted house,” she wrote, “but it’s the film that is more truly possessed: In one scene a piano bites off the fingers of a musician tickling its keys; in another a severed head tries to take a bite out of a girl’s rear, snapping at the derrière as if it were an apple. Later a roomful of futons goes on the attack.”
Peter Beard, wildlife photographer and wild man. I’d never heard of this guy before, but the obit is amazing.
Even by the dashing standards of wildlife photography, his résumé was the stuff of high drama, full of daring, danger, romance and tall tales, many of them actually true. Had Mr. Beard not already existed, he might well have been the result of a collaborative brain wave by Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Paul Bowles.
He was matinee-idol handsome and, as an heir to a fortune, wealthy long before his photographs began selling for hundreds of thousands of dollars apiece.
Besides documenting Africa’s vanishing fauna, he photographed some of the world’s most beautiful women in fashion shoots for Vogue, Elle and other magazines. He had well-documented romances with many of them, including Candice Bergen and Lee Radziwill, the sister of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.
…
There was the time, for example, as Vanity Fair reported in 1996, that Mr. Beard, after roistering until 5 a.m. at a Nairobi nightclub, emerged the next afternoon from a tent on his ranch in the Kenyan countryside followed by the “four or five” young Ethiopian women he had brought home with him.
“We were very cozy,” he noted.
There was the time in 2013, The New York Post reported, citing court documents, that Mr. Beard, then 75, returned home about 6 a.m. to the Midtown Manhattan apartment he shared with his wife, Nejma Beard, who was also his agent, after a night’s revels.
Ms. Beard did not take kindly to his return — not because of the hour, but because he happened to have two Russian prostitutes in tow. In response, she dialed 911, declared that her husband was attempting suicide and had him committed for a time to a local hospital.
He “discovered” the supermodel Iman, and was at one time married to Cheryl Tiegs.
…
Mr. Beard’s close studies of wildlife at Tsavo East National Park in Kenya had shown him that the elephant population there, having far outstripped the available food supply, was starving to death by the thousands. Deeming himself a “preservationist,” he argued for the controlled culling of elephant herds, a position that by the 1960s had made many conservationists cringe.
“Conservation,” Mr. Beard once said, “is for guilty people on Park Avenue with poodles and Pekingeses.”
Mr. Beard brought his thesis home even more starkly in subsequent editions of “The End of the Game,” which contained his later aerial photographs of the ravaged Kenyan landscape. In those images, elephant skeletons litter the parched earth like gleaming ghosts.
…
For Mr. Beard, the late 20th century was a notably dark time. In 1977, while he was in New York City, an oil furnace exploded at his Montauk home. The house was destroyed, along with paintings by Warhol, Bacon and Picasso and decades’ worth of Mr. Beard’s photographs and diaries.
In September 1996, while picnicking near the Kenya-Tanzania border, he was charged by an elephant, who came at him, he recalled, like “a freight train.”
The elephant ran a tusk through his leg, narrowly missing the femoral artery. Using its head as a battering ram, it crushed Mr. Beard, breaking ribs and fracturing his pelvis in at least a half-dozen places. By the time he arrived at the hospital in Nairobi, according to news reports, he had no pulse.
Doctors revived him, but damage to his optic nerve left him blind. He was told that he might never walk again. He eventually regained his sight, and the ability to walk. He underwent further surgery in New York and lived ever after with more than two-dozen pins in his pelvis.
Sadly, Mr. Beard had developed dementia: he wandered away from his home sometime around March 31st. His body was discovered yesterday.
Today is my birthday.
It may actually come as a surprise to some of you that I expect blogging to be light, at least for a little while. After all, what else am I going to do?
I’m thinking about making a run down to Cabela’s to scope out the situation for myself, and I’ll probably be putting up an obit and a jail post later on today.
In the meantime, please enjoy this vintage musical interlude:
Two of my favorite things written by Neal Stephenson:
I mention these things because this came across my YouTube recommendations, and I thought it was worth running on a Sunday: “The Voice Beneath The Sea”, about laying a trans-Atlantic cable to link the US, Canada, and the UK. Brought to you by “The American Telephone and Telegraph Company Long Lines Department”.
Man, I miss the days of organizations like the “Long Lines Department” and people with names like “Wildman Whitehouse” (even if the latter was grotesquely incompetent).
Bonus video #1: This seems oddly appropriate in these days of Zoom and Skype and WebEx: “Face to Face”, a 1970s promo film from AT&T for the Picturephone.
This is weird, but: I have a really vivid memory of seeing a Picturephone demonstration on TV when I was very young. Specifically…on “Captain Kangaroo”. I kid you not. I guess there were a lot of five to seven year old kids in the target market for AT&T’s service. Or perhaps it was really targeted at all the stay-at-home moms who were watching the show with their small children?
Bonus video #2: “Tools of Telephony”, produced by Western Electric.
I have another video or two along the long lines line (see what I did there?) that I want to put up, but I’m waiting for it to get hot again: I’m hopeful that at least one of those videos will cool you down a bit.
When I was young, I was a big fan of “Highway Patrol“. No, I didn’t watch it first run: I’m not that old. One of the Houston UHF stations aired it.
“Highway Patrol” started popping up in my YouTube recommendations, and I’ve been watching episodes occasionally. This episode came up yesterday, and I watched it last night. (I’d already seen the “Most Shocking”.)
What struck me when I was watching was: it is an interesting contrast to this Dragnet 1967 episode on a similar theme:
Note that in “Highway Patrol” it is the sweet innocent wife (who tries so hard to do the right thing) that gets the worst of it, while in “Dragnet” it ends up being the husband who gets some kind of rough justice for his careless drunken driving.
(Also, I get a kick out of “Dan Matthews” handing his gun to folks off the street. His lecture to poor stupid Harry is priceless.)
Back on the beat today, since it is Saturday: I have some lighter stuff to post, but I’m saving that for the Sabbath. These will be good to watch if you get tired of tonight’s “Most Shocking” marathon on the Justice Network (or if it is an episode you’ve already seen). They are also a bit longer (but it’s a weekend, so you don’t have to worry about fitting these into your coffee breaks). And I’ll warn everyone: the effects in these, especially the second one, are a little graphic.
First up: “Officer Survival: High Risk Patrol Tactics”. I think this title is a little misleading, as it deals less with patrol: the instructional point of this video is basically how to deal with armed, barricaded suspects.
Bonus video: “Vehicle Stop Tactics”. This one features a lot of the mistakes police officers made in “routine” stops. The latter part of this one (roughly the second half) also demonstrates how to do a high-risk felony stop correctly, so it kind of overlaps “Felony Vehicle Stop“.
I don’t want to make this part of the main video feed: I figure everyone who’s interested watches the “Forgotten Weapons” feed anyway.
But I did want to throw in a bonus link to this, since:
This one goes out to all the high explosives fans out there.
“Demolition: Electric Priming”, an Army training film from the 1950s giving you everything you need to know to prime and detonate explosives with electric blasting caps.
Bonus video #1: This is a little long, but I know there are several people who are going to want to watch this: a 1993 interview with Carlos Hathcock, Marine sniper.
Bonus video #2: for this one, I’m going to send you over to Lawrence. He’s put up a pilot for an unsold 1959 “Nero Wolfe” TV series…with William Shatner as Archie Goodwin. To which I can only say: ain’t that a kick in the head?
NYT obit for Brian Dennehy.
Brawny and gregarious, Mr. Dennehy was often called on to play an Everyman or an authority figure: athletes, sheriffs, bartenders, salesmen and fathers. He was in scores of movies — “First Blood” (1982), “Gorky Park” (1983), “F/X” (1986) and “Presumed Innocent” (1990) were among them — as well as an assortment of television series. But his first love was always the stage.
“He was a towering, fearless actor taking on the greatest dramatic roles of the 20th century,” Robert Falls, artistic director of the Goodman Theater in Chicago, where Mr. Dennehy did some of his finest work, said in a phone interview. “They were mountains that had to be climbed, and he had no problem throwing himself into climbing them.”
We watched “First Blood” recently. Yeah, yeah, Stallone is good. But so is Dennehy: he’s really convincing as the sheriff who isn’t necessarily cruel, but just simply out of his depth and doesn’t understand what he’s dealing with until it is too late. I think it was Lawrence who made the point that “First Blood” is really a story about managerial incompetence.
He was pretty good in “F/X” as well: I still say that’s a really underappreciated thriller.