Obit watch: February 7 , 2021.

February 7th, 2021

Leon Spinks, former heavyweight champion of the world.

Leon had fought professionally only seven times, with six victories and a draw, before facing Ali at the Las Vegas Hilton on Feb. 15, 1978, in a bout arranged by Bob Arum, one of boxing’s leading promoters.
Ali held the World Boxing Association and World Boxing Council titles. But at 36, though an overwhelming betting favorite, he was past his prime. He weighed in at 224 pounds to Spinks’s 197.
Spinks was a hard-charging brawler, but when he pressured Ali in the ring, the champion resorted to his rope-a-dope strategy, which was aimed at letting an opponent exhaust himself with punches that seldom did damage while Ali rested on the ropes.
The Spinks corner had a strategy of its own, aimed at weakening Ali.
“Jab, jab, jab, that was the plan,” Spinks’s trainer, George Benton, said in the dressing room afterward. “Hit him on the left shoulder all night with that jab.”Ali rallied in the 15th round, but Spinks warded him off and won a split decision.

He lost the WBA title to Ali in September of 1978: the WBC stripped him of the title because he wouldn’t fight Ken Norton.

Spinks’s last fight came in December 1995, when he lost a unanimous decision to Fred Houpe in an eight-round bout. Spinks was 42; Houpe was 45 and had not fought since November 1978.
Spinks retired with 26 victories (14 by knockouts), 17 losses and three draws.

George P. Shultz, Ronald Reagan’s secretary of state and Nixon cabinet official.

He carried a weighty résumé into the Reagan White House, with stints as secretary of labor, budget director and secretary of the Treasury under President Richard M. Nixon. He had emerged from the wars of Watergate with his reputation unscathed, having shown a respect for the rule of law all too rare in that era. At the helm of the Treasury, he had drawn Nixon’s wrath for resisting the president’s demands to use the Internal Revenue Service as a weapon against the president’s political enemies.

Today’s dose of chicken soup for the you-know-what (because I’m pretty sure the actual term is trademarked, and I’ll hear about it from those people just like if I don’t refer to today’s game as the Superb Owl): Frank Shankwitz, former Arizona Highway Patrol motorcycle officer.

In 1980, he was introduced to a 7-year-old boy named Chris Greicius. Chris had terminal leukemia, and he desperately wanted to be a motorcycle officer when he grew up. He idolized Ponch and Jon from “CHiPs”.

The department had decided to make Chris’s wish come true, if just for a few days. A police helicopter ferried him to police headquarters from the hospital where he was being treated. Mr. Shankwitz was to greet him out front, next to his motorcycle.
“Figuring he’d be brought out in a wheelchair, I was surprised when the door opened and a pair of sneakers emerged,” Mr. Shankwitz wrote in his memoir, “Wish Man” (2018). “Out stepped Chris, an excited 7-year-old boy who seemed so full of life it was hard to believe he was sick.”
Mr. Shankwitz showed Chris his motorcycle, and after he and the other officers gave him a badge, the head of the department made him an honorary officer. Chris was feeling well enough to go home that night, and the next day the officers brought him a custom-made uniform.
To become a motorcycle officer, though, Chris had to pass a driving test — which he did, in his front yard, on his small battery-powered motorcycle. Mr. Shankwitz promised to bring him a special badge worn by motorcycle cops; he also called NBC, the network that aired “CHiPs,” and asked for the show’s stars, Erik Estrada and Larry Wilcox, to autograph a photo.
The next day Chris was back in the hospital, and by the time Mr. Shankwitz arrived with the badge and the picture, he had fallen into a light coma. Chris had hung his uniform by the bed, and as Mr. Shankwitz pinned the badge on his shirt, the boy woke up.
“Am I an official motorcycle cop now?” Chris asked.
“You sure are,” Mr. Shankwitz replied.
Chris died later that day. Mr. Shankwitz and a colleague attended his funeral, in Southern Illinois, borrowing a pair of Illinois Highway Patrol motorcycles to accompany the hearse.

…

Mr. Shankwitz and five other people founded the Make-a-Wish Foundation in 1980, a few months after Chris’s funeral. It grew rapidly: Within a few years it had become a national organization, with state chapters opening almost monthly.

Posted in History, Nixon, Obits, Politics, Sports | Comments Closed

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 313

February 7th, 2021

Science Sunday!

It seems like it has been a while since I’ve done any space science, and I don’t think I’ve ever done any planetary astronomy, so let’s fix that today.

“Mercury: The Exploration of a Planet”, about Mariner 10.

Bonus #1: “Mars: Five Views on What Is Known”.

Bonus #2: “And Then There Was Voyager”.

Bonus #3: This breaks from the theme, but I wanted to put it here because: a short film about NASA’s Icing Research Tunnel at the Glenn Research Center.

As I have noted several times in the past, my father used to work at Glenn, back when it was still the Lewis Research Center. So I kind of have a sentimental attachment to the facility…

Posted in Geek, History | Comments Closed

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 312

February 6th, 2021

Ever hear of Camp Century?

The US military had a clever idea back in the 1950s: let’s build missile launch sites under the ice in Greenland. That project was called “Project Iceworm” and was secret: as a cover story, and to test the feasibility of this idea, Camp Century was built.

Powered by a nuclear reactor, the camp operated from 1959 until 1967. The base consisted of 21 tunnels with a total length of 9,800 feet (3.0 km).

You can imagine this was a massive logistical operation. Especially when you consider that everything had to be hauled across the ice from Thule AFB, 150 miles away.

“Camp Century, The City Under The Ice”.

The snow trimming required to maintain the trenches, and sewage disposal were both ongoing problems. The sewage sump was 150 feet from the nearest building and initially not vented. As a result, the odor of sewage became almost unbearable in the nearest quarters after the first year of operation. Subsequent venting of the sump reduced the odor but did not completely eliminate the condition. In 1962 core samples were taken in the areas near the sump and found that liquid wastes had horizontally permeated up to 170 feet (52 meters). Thus odor from the sump affected near by trenches with sleeping quarters and also accelerated trench deformation.

See also. See also.

Spoiler: it turns out that the ice sheet shifts. A lot. Which makes missile bases under the ice really not feasible.

Bonus: from the same source, the Charlie Dean Archives, “Faces of Rescue”, documenting a typical rescue mission for an Air Force pilot shot down over Vietnam.

Posted in Helicopters, History, Planes | Comments Closed

Obit watch: February 6, 2021.

February 6th, 2021

Christopher Plummer. THR. Variety.

He also had charm and arrogance in equal measure, and a streak both bibulous and promiscuous, all of which he acknowledged in later life as his manner softened and his habits waned. In one notorious incident in 1971, he was replaced by Anthony Hopkins in the lead role of “Coriolanus” at the National Theater in London; according to the critic Kenneth Tynan, who at the time was the literary manager of the National, Mr. Plummer was dismissed in a vote by the cast for crude and outrageous behavior.
For years, until he came to share the widely held opinion of his best-known film — the beloved 1965 musical “The Sound of Music,” in which he starred as the Austrian naval officer Georg von Trapp opposite Julie Andrews — as a pinnacle of warmhearted family entertainment, Mr. Plummer disparaged it as saccharine claptrap, famously referring to it as “S&M” or “The Sound of Mucus.”
“That sentimental stuff is the most difficult for me to play, especially because I’m trained vocally and physically for Shakespeare,” Mr. Plummer said in a People magazine interview in 1982. “To do a lousy part like von Trapp, you have to use every trick you know to fill the empty carcass of the role. That damn movie follows me around like an albatross.”

To be fair:

Despite all the recognition he received as an octogenarian, Plummer is probably most widely recognized for his performance as Captain Von Trapp opposite Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music (1965), the syrupy family classic that he once referred to as “The Sound of Mucous.”
“It was so awful and sentimental and gooey,” he told THR in 2011. “You had to work terribly hard to try to infuse some minuscule bit of humor into it.” He also said most of his singing parts in the movie were performed by someone else.
Plummer, however, had changed his tune when he appeared with Andrews before a screening of the musical at the 2015 TCM Classic Film Festival in Hollywood and added his hand- and footprints to the collection outside the TCL Chinese Theatre.
“The world has lost a consummate actor today and I have lost a cherished friend,” Andrews said Friday in a statement. “I treasure the memories of our work together and all the humor and fun we shared through the years.”

…

He played Hamlet, Macbeth, Richard III, Mark Antony and others of Shakespeare’s towering protagonists on prominent stages to consistent acclaim, and he starred in “Hamlet at Elsinore,” a critically praised 1964 television production, directed by Philip Saville and filmed at Kronborg Castle in Denmark, where (under the name Elsinore) the play is set.
But he also accepted roles in a fair share of clinkers, in which he made vivid sport of some hoary clichés — as the evil bigot hiding behind religiosity in “Skeletons” (1997), for example, one of his more than 40 television movies, or as the somber emperor of the galaxy who appears as a hologram in “Starcrash,” a 1978 rip-off of “Star Wars.”

…

In the movies, his performance in “The Sound of Music” as von Trapp, a severe widower and father whose heart is warmed and won by the woman he hires as a governess, propelled a parade of distinctive roles, more character turns than starring parts, across a formidable spectrum of genres. They included historical drama (“The Last Station,” about Tolstoy, and “The Day That Shook the World” about the onset of World War I); historical adventure (as Kipling in John Huston’s rollicking adaptation of “The Man Who Would Be King,” with Sean Connery and Michael Caine); romantic comedy (“Must Love Dogs,” with John Cusack and Diane Lane); political epic (“Syriana”); science fiction (as Chang, the Klingon general, in “Star Trek VI”); and crime farce (“The Return of the Pink Panther,” in which, opposite Peter Sellers’s inept Inspector Clouseau, he played a retiree version of the debonair jewel thief originally portrayed by David Niven).

I enthusiastically recommend “The Man Who Would Be King”. I have not seen “Star Trek VI”, but I know some other readers of this blog have and may be able to comment upon that film.

…

Mr. Plummer made notable Broadway appearances in works by Archibald MacLeish (the Devil-like Nickels in “J.B.” in 1958), Bertolt Brecht (the Hitler-like title role in “Arturo Ui” in 1963), Peter Shaffer (the Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro in “The Royal Hunt of the Sun” in 1965), Neil Simon (the Chekhov-like narrator in “The Good Doctor” in 1973) and Harold Pinter (“No Man’s Land,” opposite Jason Robards, in 1994).
He won a Tony in the title role of “Cyrano,” a 1973 musical version of Edmond Rostand’s “Cyrano de Bergerac,” and in 2007 he was nominated for a Tony for the Clarence Darrow-like role of Henry Drummond, opposite Brian Dennehy, in “Inherit the Wind,” his final Broadway appearance.

…

“The performance of a lifetime,” Ben Brantley wrote in The Times of Mr. Plummer’s “King Lear,” which arrived on Broadway in 2004 after first being produced at the festival. “He delivers a Lear both deeply personal and universal: a distinctly individual man whose face becomes a mirror for every man’s mortality.”
Ms. Taylor, his wife, said that at his death Mr. Plummer had been preparing to appear as Lear on film for the first time, under the direction of Des McAnuff.
But it was his portrayal of Iago in a 1981 Connecticut production of “Othello,” which starred James Earl Jones in the title role and came to Broadway in 1982, that defined his reputation as a Shakespearean of profound depth, worthy of comparison to the likes of Laurence Olivier, Michael Redgrave and John Gielgud.
“He gives us evil so pure — and so bottomless — that it can induce tears,” Frank Rich wrote in The Times. “Our tears are not for the dastardly Iago, of course — that would be wrong. No, what Mr. Plummer does is make us weep for a civilization that can produce such a man and allow him to flower.”
The praise was amplified by the senior Times critic of the day, Walter Kerr, who wrote, “It is quite possibly the best single Shakespearean performance to have originated on this continent in our time.”

Noted: THR claims he was a die-hard “Star Trek” fan, even before doing “Star Trek VI”. The THR story includes a clip from “The Captains” with Mr. Plummer and William Shatner talking.

Posted in Movies, Obits, Theatre | Comments Closed

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 311

February 5th, 2021

As I’ve said before, I don’t like using TV shows here unless it is a short video to make a point, or a documentary series.

I’m fuzzing things a bit here, but I think it is justified. Also, it pushes some of my buttons.

Between 1962 and 1963, there was a television series called “GE True“. It was called “GE True” because it was sponsored by General Electric, and featured stories from True magazine that were adapted for television. Gene Roddenberry was one of the scriptwriters, and the series was produced and hosted by Jack Webb. Webb directed some of the episodes: some others were directed by William Conrad.

It was 25 minutes long (though some episodes were multi-part ones) and there were 33 total episodes. A small number of episodes have been uploaded to the ‘Tube.

I’ve written before about Earl Rogers, Clarence Darrow, and the LA Times jury bribery trial. From “GE True”, original airdate January 13, 1963, “Defendant: Clarence Darrow”. Robert Vaughn plays Earl Rogers, and Tol Avery (a prolific actor I was previously unfamiliar with: for the record, he appeared three times on “Mannix” before his death in 1973) plays Darrow.

Bonus #1: “V-Victor-5”, co-written by Gene Roddenberry. On a hot summer day in NYC in 1933, a lone off-duty NYPD officer in the days before radio cars, and surrounded by a hostile crowd, holds five armed and dangerous fugitives at gunpoint until backup arrives…two hours later.

(I know the YouTube title says “Commando”, but this one is really “V-Victor-5”. Also, there’s a punchline at the end that I won’t spoil for you.)

Bonus #2: “Commando”.

Oh, wait. Wrong “Commando”. Sorry. This is the right one.

“In 2013 the Jack Webb Fan Club of Los Angeles started a campaign to get the series released on DVD.”

Yes, please!

Posted in Cops, History, Law, Mannix, NYPD, TV | Comments Closed

Obit quickie.

February 5th, 2021

The full obit for Christopher “Starcrash” Plummer will more than likely be tomorrow, to give the various papers of record a chance to react. The current NYT obit is a preliminary one, and I feel sure there will be corrections.

(And if ever Wikipedia needed a “[citation needed]” or [by whom?]” tag, it is for the statement “It is considered a cult classic.”)

Posted in Movies, Obits | 1 Comment »

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 310

February 4th, 2021

Travel Thursday!

This is maybe a little marginal on the travel side, but I feel like it is close enough to count: “Operation Jetliner”, a 1959 United “Breaks Guitars” Airlines promo film for their DC-8.

United’s first-ever jet service took place on September 18th, 1959 when the DC-8 performed a transcontinental flight between San Francisco International Airport and New York’s Idlewild.

Bonus: This is definitely travel, and should push a few buttons for at least one person in my audience. Another vintage Pan Am promo video…

…”USSR”. No kidding, this is a promo film for travel to the USSR in the late 1960s.

The film opens with footage of Moscow’s Red Square as the narrator recaps the famous rulers, writers, and musicians from the Russia’s past.

“Come see the cemetery where famous writers, artists, and musicians are buried every day except Thursday.”

There does not appear to be any footage of the gulags in that video.

Posted in History, Planes, Travel | Comments Closed

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 309

February 3rd, 2021

How bad can an anvil be?

How can you even have a bad anvil? An anvil is just a big chunk of metal, right? It’s like saying “this is a bad chunk of metal”! How can a chunk of metal be bad?

Answer: “Harbor Freight 55lb Anvil: How Much Does it Suck?”

I guess it might be good for at least one thing: anvil shooting.

I like watching anvil shooting. On YouTube. My concern with watching it in person is that what goes up, must come down, and I really don’t want an anvil coming down on my head. I am not Wile E. Coyote.

Bonus #2, because I don’t have any other place to put this: a 1958 Navy propaganda film, “”Stay in School and Graduate”, featuring vintage footage of the USS Los Angeles.

Bonus #3, just for the heck of it. This goes out to RoadRich and Lawrence: “Why Aerial Refuelling Is Most Challenging Manoeuvre For A Pilot” with Richard Hammond.

Posted in Geek, History, Planes | Comments Closed

Obit watch: February 3, 2021.

February 3rd, 2021

Eugenio Martinez has passed away at the age of 98.

His death, at his daughter’s home near Orlando, was announced by Brigade 2506, a veterans group of Mr. Martinez’s fellow anti-Communist Cuban exiles. Their abortive invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs in 1961 to overthrow the government headed by Fidel Castro was covertly supported by the Central Intelligence Agency.

Mr. Martinez was the last surviving Watergate burglar.

In January 1973 four of the five burglars — members of the so-called plumbers, an informal White House team assigned to plug information leaks — pleaded guilty so as to avoid revealing details of the bungled operation. They were convicted of conspiracy, theft and wiretapping.
The others, also Cuban-born, were Bernard L. Barker, a former Miami real estate agent and C.I.A. operative, who died in 2009; Virgilio González, a Miami locksmith, who died in 2014; and Frank A. Sturgis, a soldier of fortune, who died in 1993. (In 1971, the four had taken part in the break-in at the Los Angeles office of the psychiatrist of Daniel Ellsberg, the former Defense Department analyst who disclosed the Pentagon papers to the press.)

E. Howard Hunt, who allegedly recruited them, served 31 months in prison.

They were led by James W. McCord Jr., a security coordinator for the Nixon campaign whose confession to the judge just before his sentencing precipitated the revelations of White House crimes and cover-ups that culminated in Nixon’s resignation in 1974. For aiding prosecutors in pursuing senior presidential aides in the scandal, Mr. McCord had his one-to-five-year sentence cut to less than four months.

…

In 1983, after his requests for clemency had been rejected by Presidents Gerald R. Ford and Jimmy Carter, Mr. Martinez — who, it turned out, had still been on retainer to the C.I.A. at the time of the Watergate break-in — was pardoned by President Ronald Reagan.
The pardon, which was granted because Mr. Martinez had been regarded as the least culpable of the defendants, restored his right to vote. Despite the ordeal, he prided himself on one Watergate keepsake — a golden lucky clover inscribed, in Spanish, with the words “Good luck, Richard Nixon.”

Posted in History, Law, Nixon, Obits, Politics | Comments Closed

Obit watch: February 2, 2021.

February 2nd, 2021

Hal Holbrook. He was 95, but still, this stinks. THR. Variety.

Mr. Holbrook never claimed to be a Twain scholar; indeed, he said, he had read only a little of Twain’s work as a young man. He said the idea of doing a staged reading of Twain’s work came from Edward A. Wright, his mentor at Denison University in Granville, Ohio. And Mr. Wright would have been the first to acknowledge that the idea had actually originated with Twain himself — or rather Samuel Clemens, who had adopted Mark Twain as something of a stage name and who did readings of his work for years.
Mr. Holbrook was finishing his senior year as a drama major in 1947 when Mr. Wright talked him into adding Twain to a production that Mr. Holbrook and his wife, Ruby, were planning called “Great Personalities,” in which they would portray, among others, Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, John Alden and Priscilla Mullins, and Queen Victoria and Prince Albert.
Mr. Holbrook had doubts at first. “Ed, I think this Mark Twain thing is pretty corny,” he recalled telling Mr. Wright after the first rehearsals. “I don’t think it’s funny.”

…

Mr. Holbrook began developing his one-man show in 1952, the year Ms. Holbrook gave birth to their first child, Victoria. He soon looked the part, with a wig to match Twain’s unruly mop, a walrus mustache and a rumpled white linen suit, the kind Twain himself wore onstage. From his grandfather, Mr. Holbrook got an old penknife, which he used to cut the ends off the three cigars he smoked during a performance (though he was not sure whether Twain ever smoked onstage). He sought out people who claimed to have seen and heard Twain, who died in 1910, and listened to their recollections.
He had more or less perfected the role by 1954, the year he began a one-man show titled “Mark Twain Tonight!” at Lock Haven State Teachers College in Pennsylvania.
Two years later he took his Twain to television, performing on “The Ed Sullivan Show” and “The Tonight Show.” In the meantime he had landed a steady job in 1954 on the TV soap opera “The Brighter Day,” on which he played a recovering alcoholic.
The stint lasted until 1959, when, tiring of roles he no longer cared about, he opened in “Mark Twain Tonight!” at the Off Broadway 41st Street Theater.By then the metamorphosis was complete. With his shambling gait, Missouri drawl, sly glances and exquisite timing, Hal Holbrook had, for all intents and purposes, become Mark Twain.
“After watching and listening to him for five minutes,” Arthur Gelb wrote in The New York Times, “it is impossible to doubt that he is Mark Twain, or that Twain must have been one of the most enchanting men ever to go on a lecture tour.”

This is not intended as a shot at Mr. Holbrook, but I do wonder how much of our popular conception of Mark Twain is shaped by Holbrook’s performances.

Mr. Holbrook’s many film roles tended to be small ones, although there were exceptions. One was as the anonymous informant Deep Throat in “All the President’s Men,” the 1976 film adaptation of the book by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein about the Watergate cover-up. (Deep Throat was later revealed to have been W. Mark Felt, a top F.B.I. official.) Another big movie role was in “The Firm” (1993), based on John Grisham’s corporate whodunit, in which Mr. Holbrook played the stop-at-nothing head of a Memphis law firm.

Another film role that he doesn’t seem to be getting much credit for: “Lt. Briggs” in “Magnum Force”.

Mr. Holbrook had a long and fruitful run as an actor. He was the shadowy patriot Deep Throat in “All the President’s Men” (1976); an achingly grandfatherly character in “Into the Wild” (2007), for which he received an Oscar nomination; and the influential Republican Preston Blair in Steven Spielberg’s “Lincoln” (2012).
He played the 16th president himself, on television, in Carl Sandburg’s “Lincoln,” a 1974 mini-series. The performance earned him an Emmy Award, one of five he won for his acting in television movies and mini-series; the others included “The Bold Ones: The Senator” (1970), his protagonist resembling John F. Kennedy, and “Pueblo” (1973) in which he played the commander of a Navy intelligence boat seized by North Korea in 1968.

I caught a few episodes of “The Senator” back when RetroTV was airing in Austin, and I thought it held up well. The whole series is on DVD (affiliate link) and it looks like there are full episodes on the ‘Tube.

Harlan Ellison was particularly fond of these episodes (it was a two-parter).

He didn’t do a lot of ’70s detective shows, but, oddly, he did some in the 21st century: “NCIS”, “Bones”, and the bad “Hawaii 5-0”, among other credits.

In other news: Jamie Tarses, prominent TV executive.

Dustin “Screech” Diamond.

Finally, Jack Palladino, who the NYT calls a “hard-charging private investigator”.

Mr. Palladino was placed on life support after sustaining a severe head injury on Jan. 28 in what the San Francisco district attorney, Chesa Boudin, called “a brutal attack” in the city’s Haight-Ashbury neighborhood. Two people were arrested in the attack and booked at the San Francisco County Jail on charges that include attempted robbery, assault with a deadly weapon and elder abuse.

What makes this interesting is: he worked for the Clintons. Specifically, Bill:

During the 1992 presidential campaign, he was hired by the Clinton campaign after Gennifer Flowers released tapes of phone calls with Mr. Clinton to back up her claim that they had had an affair.
Mr. Palladino embarked on a mission, as he put it in a memo, to impugn Ms. Flowers’s “character and veracity until she is destroyed beyond all recognition.”
“Every acquaintance, employer and past lover should be located and interviewed,” Mr. Palladino wrote. “She is now a shining icon — telling lies that so far have proved all benefit and no cost — for any other opportunist who may be considering making Clinton a target.”

He also did work for R. Kelly and Harvey Weinstein.

In his work for the Clinton campaign, Mr. Palladino’s staff scoured Arkansas and beyond, collecting disparaging accounts from Ms. Flowers’s ex-boyfriends, employers and others who claimed to know her, accounts that the campaign then disseminated to the news media.
By the time Mr. Clinton finally admitted to “sexual relations” with Ms. Flowers, years later, Clinton aides had used stories collected by Mr. Palladino to brand her as a “bimbo” and a “pathological liar.”

Posted in 1970s, Movies, Obits, Theatre, TV | 3 Comments »

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 308

February 2nd, 2021

There’s a channel called “Tech Ingredients” that features a variety of interesting stuff.

This is slightly on the long side, but I watched it last night and found it oddly compelling: “Distilling ALCOHOL With Our New Reflux Still!”

I also generally don’t like videos that focus on a specific product, but in this case, the video is less about the specific reflux still and more about the general workings of one, including things like the design of the bubble plates and the dephlegmator.

Bonus video #1: Previously from “Tech Ingredients”, “Banana Brandy – Making Ugandan Waragi (Moonshine)”.

Bonus video #2: This also appeals to my geek instincts, but doesn’t involve booze: “Jet Engine Thrust Test – Fuel Experiment (Jet-A vs Diesel vs BioDiesel vs HydroDiesel)”. The guy built his own dynamometer, and then tested these fuels to see which one produces the most thrust.

I’m also a sucker for small jet engines.

Posted in Geek, History, Mixology | Comments Closed

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 307

February 1st, 2021

Would you like to swing on a star? Carry moonbeams home in a jar?

How about just some plain old model rockets.

“Estes model rockets: a brief history”.

Bonus #1: “60 Foot Ultimate Matchbox Rocket”.

Haven’t had a chance to try this yet, but I plan to.

Bonus #2: “How To Make Sugar Rockets”. Specifically:

How to make hobby rocket “sugar motors” using sugar and kitty litter, that shoot up over 2,300 feet high, and cost less than $0.50 to make.

It seems like there are a lot of videos on the ‘Tube from folks trying to build their own liquid propellant engines, but I haven’t found one yet that goes from zero to complete working engine: it looks like many of them stalled out for one reason or another. If anybody knows of a good zero to finish liquid fueled rocket video (or series) please leave a comment here.

Bonus #3: One more, for Lawrence: Colin Furze demonstrates (with some help from his friends) “How to START a Pulse Jet”, like the old V-1 engine. The video doesn’t show how to actually build a pulse jet, but the comments link to some helpful resources on that subject.

Posted in Geek, History | Comments Closed

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 306

January 31st, 2021

Science Sunday!

I apologize for the crappy quality of this first video. But it is from 1967. I’m putting this here because it is something that I hope you will never ever see up close and personal, and this is the only video I know of.

“Burning and Extinguishing Characteristics of Plutonium Metal Fires”.

To steal a line from the late John Clark in Ignition! (affiliate link), “For dealing with this situation, I have always recommended a good pair of running shoes.”

Bonus #1: “Who Destroyed Three Mile Island?”. As I understand it, this is a presentation from the Lead Developer conference in Austin in 2018. “So like most things in Austin today, the problem with the microphone is South By’s fault.”

More to the point:

When something bad happens, it’s easy to just blame someone and move on. Taking the time to find the systemic causes, though, will not only help keep the problem from repeating, it will enable you to build the psychological safety necessary for your team to truly collaborate. Let’s let the story of Three Mile Island teach us how to make our teams stronger through systems thinking and just culture.

In addition to the science! part of it, I think there’s some good leadership stuff in here too.

(I have another video from Nickolas Means that I want to use in the near future: I didn’t use it today because it was closer to history than science. But sometime next week, probably…)

Bonus #2: Lasers! 8 o’clock! Day one!

“360 video tour of the world’s largest laser” from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Bonus #3: “The Riemann Hypothesis, Explained”.

Posted in Geek, History, Leadership | Comments Closed

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 305

January 30th, 2021

I don’t want to keep going back to the AvE well, but this one grabbed me by the socks for reasons:

“Stone Age Radio Voice Based Interwebs for Frozen Third World Sit-Holes.”

Bonus #1: When guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have crossbows.

“960lbs crossbow vs 150lbs crossbow – TESTED!”

Bonus #2: “Sergeant Stan W Scott, No. 3 Army Commando, demonstrates the use of the Fairbairn-Sykes fighting knife.”

Bonus #3: This is actually one McThag turned me on to: I enjoyed it, and I don’t think everyone reads McThag’s blog (unfortunately). So:

“I bought The Cheapest Orange County Chopper in America for only 8k.”

Since I am unwilling to pay for television, I have never seen an episode of either one of the bike shows (though I am familiar with the meme). I know there’s a lot of manufactured drama on all of those shows, but I have to say: I was surprised by this guy’s comments on the OCC bike.

(Chopper style bikes aren’t really my style anyway. If I was going to ride, it would either be something in more of a cafe racer style, or else a full-up BMW touring bike.)

Posted in History, Knives, Radio | Comments Closed

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 304

January 29th, 2021

I get a lot of “How It’s Made” in my feed. I mostly avoid posting those: this one is an exception, because I’d never heard of this thing until recently, and it’s a fascinating concept.

The “Ghillie Kettle” (also known by other names such as “Kelly Kettle”) is basically a highly efficient water boiler, sort of a descendant of a samovar. You have a bottom part of the kettle in which you start a small fire, and a top part of the kettle which is a water jacket. When you put the top part on top of the fire in the bottom part, the hole in the center of the water jacket functions as a chimney, drawing smoke and hot air up through the jacket part and rapidly heating the water to a boil.

And “How to use a Ghillie Kettle in 3 minutes!”

Longer demo from The Kelly Kettle Company.

I don’t do a lot of camping these days, but I kind of want one of these: it seems like a good thing to add to your emergency prep gear.

And now for something completely different, but which I also think is kind of cool: “David’s Garage” talks about his 1968 Steyr Puch Haflinger.

I have no room and no use for one of these, but I like it. It strikes me as being a neat retro-cool alternative to those massively overbuilt 4-wheelers you see at Bass Pro Shop.

One more for today: “Group B: When Rallying Got TOO FAST”. This was yet another thing I had not heard about until recently, even though it was in the right time frame for me.

Group B was a FIA rally classification. It was sort of an “anything goes” classification.

…Group B had few restrictions on technology, design and the number of cars required for homologation to compete—200, less than other series. Weight was kept as low as possible, high-tech materials were permitted, and there were no restrictions on boost, resulting in the power output of the winning cars increasing from 250 hp in 1981, the year before Group B rules were introduced, to there being at least two cars producing in excess of 500 by 1986, the final year of Group B. In just five years, the power output of rally cars had more than doubled.

Apparently the cars were utterly insane. So what happened? Why did this only last from 1983 to 1986?

Answer: the cars were utterly insane.

Posted in History | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: January 29, 2021.

January 29th, 2021

Cicely Tyson. THR. Variety.

In a remarkable career of seven decades, Ms. Tyson broke ground for serious Black actors by refusing to take parts that demeaned Black people. She urged Black colleagues to do the same, and often went without work. She was critical of films and television programs that cast Black characters as criminal, servile or immoral, and insisted that African-Americans, even if poor or downtrodden, should be portrayed with dignity.
Her chiseled face and willowy frame, striking even in her 90s, became familiar to millions in more than 100 film, television and stage roles, including some that had traditionally been given only to white actors. She won three Emmys and many awards from civil rights and women’s groups, and at 88 became the oldest person to win a Tony, for her 2013 Broadway role in a revival of Horton Foote’s “The Trip to Bountiful.”
At 93, she won an honorary Oscar, and was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame in 2018 and into the Television Hall of Fame in 2020. She also won a career achievement Peabody Award in 2020.

So she was a “G” short of an EGOT, but picked up the “P” to make her a PEOT.

For many Americans, Ms. Tyson was an idol of the Black Is Beautiful movement, regal in an African turban and caftan, her face gracing the covers of Ebony, Essence and Jet magazines. She was a vegetarian, a teetotaler, a runner, a meditator and, from 1981 to 1989, the wife of the jazz trumpeter and composer Miles Davis. Since the ’60s she had inspired Black American women to embrace their own standards of beauty — including helping to popularize the Afro.
“She’s our Meryl Streep,” Vanessa Williams told Essence in 2013. “She was the person you wanted to be like in terms of an actress, in terms of the roles she got and how serious she took her craft. She still is.”

…

In January 2021, when she was 96, her memoir, “Just as I Am,” appeared, and in a pre-publication interview with The New York Times Magazine, she was asked if she had any advice for the young.
“It’s simple,” she said. “I try always to be true to myself. I learned from my mom: ‘Don’t lie ever, no matter how bad it is. Don’t lie to me ever, OK? You will be happier that you told the truth.’ That has stayed with me, and it will stay with me for as long as I’m lucky enough to be here.”

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

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 303

January 28th, 2021

Travel Thursday!

You know, when you travel, you have to stay somewhere. I guess you could sleep outdoors, but that’s a good way to get robbed or rousted by the po-lice.

So you need to sleep somewhere. Like a hotel or motel.

(I thought the movie was a little twee, but I do like that scene.)

From 1962, “The Great Tradition”, a promo film for the American Hotel Association.

Bonus: Another one I’m pretty sure I haven’t used (and I think I’d remember: it doesn’t turn up in a search): “Wings to Viking Land”. Really, “Viking Land”.

…a Pan Am travelogue about Scandinavia and specifically Norway, Denmark and Sweden. The flight is made aboard a Pan Am Clipper — a four engine Boeing Stratocruiser equipped with Sleeperette seats. The flight takes less than 24 hours and meals served aboard are from Maxim’s of Paris.

I kind of feel like the original Vikings were not served meals from Maxim’s of Paris, coming or going. But hey, what do I know?

Posted in History, Travel | Comments Closed

Obit watch: January 28, 2021.

January 28th, 2021

Cloris Leachman.

…between 1972 and 2011 she was nominated for 22 Primetime Emmys and won eight.

(Of course, she won an Oscar as best supporting actress for “The Last Picture Show”. Interestingly, she beat Ellen Burstyn who was also nominated for the same film.)

A number of those Emmys were for dramatic work, including her performance as a woman who finds herself pregnant at 40 in the made-for-TV movie “A Brand New Life” (1973). But comedy was her forte.
She was nominated four times and won twice for her performance on the hit CBS sitcom “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” as Phyllis Lindstrom, the scatterbrained landlady of Mary Richards, the plucky TV news producer played by Ms. Moore. She went on to play the same role from 1975 to 1977 on the spinoff series “Phyllis,” for which she received another Emmy nomination and won a Golden Globe.

Although her focus for the rest of her career was on television, she also had some memorable movie roles, notably under Mel Brooks’s direction. In his beloved horror spoof “Young Frankenstein” (1974) she was the sinister Transylvanian housekeeper Frau Blücher, the very mention of whose name was enough to terrify any horse within earshot. She played similarly intimidating women in Mr. Brooks’s “High Anxiety” (1977) and “History of the World, Part I” (1981). She also co-starred with Harvey Korman in Mr. Brooks’s short-lived sitcom “The Nutt House” (1989).

And, yes! She did do a “Mannix”! (“The Need of a Friend“, season 2, episode 9.)

Posted in 1970s, Mannix, Movies, Obits, TV | 3 Comments »

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 302

January 27th, 2021

Today, planes. Specifically military aircraft. I thought I’d do some slightly shorter stuff as well.

To start with, from the Planes of Fame channel on the ‘Tube, a tour of their B-17.

Bonus #1: “The Ultimate Supersonic Interceptor – F-106 Delta Dart” from the Dark Skies channel.

Back in the day, when I worked for Four Letter Computer Company in Round Rock that has nothing to do with fruit, they tried to force a new case management system on us called “Delta”. Many of the techs felt they would have been better off converting the money spent to $100 bills, piling them in the parking lot and setting them on fire.

I had a photo of the F-106 hanging in my cube with the caption “The only good Delta”.

Bonus #2: Okay, this one is longer, but it is a bonus: “Wings” from the Discovery Channel on the XB-70 Valkyrie. Speaking of #TheFutureWeCouldHaveHad: yes, it was a Mach 3 bomber, but it also served as a testbed for a lot of the tech that was intended to go into the SST.

Is it just me, or does the Tu-144 remind folks a lot of the XB-70? Granted, it lacks the two vertical stabilizers, but other than that…

Speaking of the Tu-144:

The prototypes were also the only passenger jets ever fitted with ejection seats, albeit only for the crew and not the passengers.

Yeah, kind of a bad look there if you punch out and let your passengers get spread evenly over several acres of Siberian landscape. Sort of like the captain deserting a sinking ship ahead of the passengers and the rest of the crew.

Posted in History, Planes | Comments Closed

Obit watch: January 27, 2021.

January 27th, 2021

Bruce Kirby, another one of those knock-around actors who was in just about every 1970’s detective show except that one.

Most notably, he was Sgt. Kramer in “Columbo”. He also had several guest shots on “The Rockford Files”, and appeared on “Banacek” and “McCloud” among many other credits. (He was also the police captain on “Holmes and Yoyo”.) And his credits go all the way back to “Car 54, Where Are You?”

NYT obit for Gregory Sierra.

Posted in 1970s, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 301

January 26th, 2021

I would call this “True Crime Tuesday” but there’s some other jerkface out there who does that already.

I did think it might be fun to do some stuff at the intersection of crime and art.

“The Mystery Conman – The Murky Business of Counterfeit Antiques”.

Bonus: “Stealing the Mona Lisa”.

Posted in Art, History, Law | Comments Closed

Obit watch: January 26, 2021.

January 26th, 2021

Antonio Sabàto. He was most famous as one of the drivers in “Grand Prix”. He did a lot of Italian movies including “Escape from the Bronx” and “Ritornano quelli della calibro 38”.

Walter Bernstein, noted screenwriter.

Posted in Movies, Obits | Comments Closed

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 300

January 25th, 2021

I was thinking today we’d go for a ride.

“Operation of the Motorcycle” from Honda, apparently in 1966.

Bonus #1: “Welcome to the Murderdrome: A Brief History of Board Track Racing”.

Bonus #2: Okay, not related to motorcycles, but posted for the coolness factor: vintage video from the 1970 12 Hours of Sebring.

Mario Andretti finished first. The second place finisher? Steve McQueen.

Posted in Cars, History | Comments Closed

Obit watch: January 25, 2021.

January 25th, 2021

Jimmie Rodgers, crossover singer probably most famous for “Honeycomb”.

Mr. Rodgers was a regular presence on the pop, country, R&B and easy listening charts for a decade after “Honeycomb,” with records that included “Oh-Oh, I’m Falling in Love Again” (1958) and “Child of Clay” (1967), both of which were nominated for Grammy Awards.

Then something happened.

Mr. Rodgers said he was under consideration for a featured role in the 1968 movie musical “Finian’s Rainbow” when the encounter on the freeway derailed his career. In his telling, he was driving home late at night when the driver behind him flashed his lights. He thought it was his conductor, who was also driving to Mr. Rodgers’s house, and pulled over.
“I rolled the window down to ask what was the matter,” he told The Toronto Star in 1987. “That’s the last thing I remember.”
He ended up with a fractured skull and broken arm. He said the off-duty officer who had pulled him over called two on-duty officers to the scene, but all three scattered when his conductor, who went looking for Mr. Rodgers when he hadn’t arrived home, drove up.
The police told a different story: They said Mr. Rodgers had been drunk and had injured himself when he fell. Mr. Rodgers sued the Los Angeles Police Department, prompting a countersuit; the matter was settled out of court in his favor to the tune of $200,000.

…

Three brain surgeries followed, and he was left with a metal plate in his head. He eventually resumed performing, and even briefly had his own television show, but he faced constant difficulties. For a time he was sidelined because he started having seizures during concerts.
“Once word gets out that you’re having seizures onstage, you can’t work,” he told The News Sentinel of Knoxville, Tenn., in 1998. “People won’t hire you.”
Mr. Rodgers was found to have spasmodic dysphonia, a disorder characterized by spasms in the muscles of the voice box, a condition he attributed to his brain injury. Yet he later settled into a comfortable niche as a performer and producer in Branson, Mo., the country music mecca, where he had his own theater for several years before retiring to California in 2002.

Posted in California Über Alles, Cops, Law, Music, Obits | Comments Closed

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 299

January 24th, 2021

Science Sunday!

Today’s video goes out to Gregg “Tuesday Morning Quarterback” Easterbrook. From 2014, a talk in the Theodore von Kármán lecture series at JPL, on NASA’s planned Asteroid Redirect Robotic Mission (ARRM).

Spoiler: the project was cancelled in 2017.

I have a great idea for a TV series, if there was a network out there that actually did science stuff: “Cool But Cancelled”, a series devoted to all the awesome proposed space age projects that ended up getting cancelled in favor of various government boondoggles.

#TheFutureWeCouldHaveHad

Unrelated bonus: this is an old documentary from Oak Ridge (produced for the Atomic Energy Commission) about their experimental molten-salt reactor. I’m putting this here mostly because I like the idea of “molten salt”, and y’all know I’m a nuclear geek.

Posted in Geek, History | Comments Closed

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