Dr. William Aprill, noted trainer, has passed away. FotB Karl has a very nice tribute to him up at his blog. LawDog has another nice tribute up at his place.
Brent Scowcroft, national security advisor to President Ford and President Bush Sr.
Obit watch: August 7, 2020.
August 7th, 2020“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 129
August 6th, 2020Travel Thursday!
I was thinking about the Orient today. We’ve already done Japan. So how about the next best thing?
“New Horizons: Hong Kong and Singapore”. From Pan Am and 1960, back when Hong Kong was still under British rule.
And your bonus for today: “The Wonderful Jet World of Pan American”, from 1959 and the usual suspects, touting the virtues of Pan Am’s jet fleet.
Obit watch: August 6, 2020.
August 6th, 2020Pete Hamill, famous NYC journalist.
Mr. Hamill became a celebrated reporter, columnist and the top editor of The New York Post and The Daily News; a foreign correspondent for The Post and The Saturday Evening Post; and a writer for New York Newsday, The Village Voice, Esquire and other publications. He wrote a score of books, mostly novels but also biographies, collections of short stories and essays, and screenplays, some adapted from his books.
He was a quintessential New Yorker — savvy about its ways, empathetic with its masses and enthralled with its diversity — and wrote about it in a literature of journalism. Along with Jimmy Breslin, he popularized a spare, blunt style in columns of on-the-scene reporting in the authentic voice of the working classes: blustery, sardonic, often angry.
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Kathleen Duey, children’s book author. I was unfamiliar with her, but she sounds like an interesting person. The NYT obit describes her as not just an author, but a mentor to other authors as well.
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Ms. Duey gained a reputation within the organization as someone who lent her time and talent to aspiring writers, said Bruce Coville, a fellow author of children’s literature. He got to know Ms. Duey in the 1980s, when she was the one starting out and in need of a confidence boost.
“She didn’t yet understand how incredibly talented she was,” he said.
She was 69, and according to the obit, had been suffering from dementia.
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August 5th, 2020I’ve done a lot of plane stuff the past couple of days, so I wanted to break with that theme and do something different.
I haven’t run across any good car stuff yet. There are a lot of train videos coming up: many of them seem to be POV videos of guys hopping freight trains, and they all have the problem of being long.
Likewise, there are a lot of police video channels on the ‘Tube. It seems that various people have figured out that getting hold of body cam footage under local public records laws and posting it on YouTube is a good way to get views. Unfortunately, while I enjoy watching stupid people get theirs (especially stupid cop impersonators who are dumb enough to wear body cameras while impersonating a police officer) many of those also have the disadvantage of being long, long, long.
Here’s one that is about coffee break sized, though, that I’m putting up because it isn’t just Florida Man (“Florida Man, Florida Man…”) but also Florida Lunatic.
Bonus video: I’m being self-indulgent with this one, obviously. But when was the last time I was self-indulgent?
(That was a rhetorical question. Don’t answer that.)
Legendary shooter Jerry Miculek shows off his K-frame .22 revolvers, talks about his friendship with the equally legendary Roy Jinks, and takes some shots at 240 yards with an 85-year old K-22.
(By the way, you can still get Smith and Wesson history letters, but the current price is $100. It’s $90 if you belong to either the Smith and Wesson Historical Foundation or the Smith and Wesson Collector’s Association, or $75 if you belong to both organizations.)
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August 4th, 2020I thought it’d be fun to post something especially for RoadRich, and something that is plane related, but civilian rather than military.
“Flying Fun”. This a Cessna promo video from the 1960s, talking about (and demonstrating) aerobatics…in Cessna airplanes. It is also coffee break sized.
Bonus video #1: while this is a Navy training film, it fits into this theme: “Flight Training Wingovers and Chandelles”, from 1953, demonstrating how to perform those maneuvers.
Bonus video #2: from our friends at the National Film Board of Canada, “Bush Pilot: Reflections on a Canadian Myth”. This is a little longer than coffee break size, but not too much so.
Bonus video #3: okay, one more, for fun. By way of Sporty’s Pilot Shop, a virtual airshow with Patty Wagstaff. This is recent, high quality, and coffee break sized.
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August 3rd, 2020I’ve posted some B-58 videos previously, but not in a while, and this one is interesting: “Tall Man Five Five”.
I can’t tell if that record still stands: I suspect it was broken by the SR-71, but the NAA’s records site is a bit awkward to use, and they changed the way they classify speed records a while back.
Bonus video: “Twenty Years of Strategic Air Command”, from 1946 to 1966. Silent, but short.
Obit watch: August 2, 2020.
August 2nd, 2020Your Wilford Brimley obits: NYT. Variety. THR.
Thing I did not know #1: he was, at one point (and “briefly”) a bodyguard for Howard Hughes.
Thing I did not know #2:
The Brimley/Cocoon Line. (Lawrence told me about this last night.) Not to be confused with the Mendoza Line, or the Vicky Mendoza Diagonal.
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August 2nd, 2020Science Sunday!
I’ve said before that I consider space stuff to be science. And computer history is science. So how about we cross the streams with another area that I find fascinating?
From the MIT Science Reporter circa 1965, “Computer For Apollo”, about the Apollo Guidance Computer.
I know I’ve mentioned him many times before, but Ken Shirriff has written a lot about the Apollo computers. There’s also this (affiliate link) which is even available in a handy Kindle edition (though it isn’t much of a savings over the physical book). May have to order that next time I get some funny money to play with…
Bonus video: also by way of the MIT Science Reporter, this time around 1961. We were riffing on Insane Clown Posse at one of the recent SDCs, and this may be more clearly science than the AGC.
“Big Magnets”.
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August 1st, 2020Today’s installment is going to the dogs.
The Hound Dogs.
“Operation Blue Nose”, a co-production of our friends at the Strategic Air Command and the “Space and Information Systems Division” of North American Aviation. This documents a test of the Hound Dog (a fairly early cruise missile) in which a B-52 crew flew for 20+ hours over the North Pole and back…and then launched one of the missiles.
I’m amused by the banter among the crew (and the guy with the Confederate flag on his helmet – try that in today’s military), but I keep wondering how they got some of this footage.
Bonus video: what if we could launch an ICBM from an aircraft in flight, instead of a silo?
“Air Mobile Feasibility Demonstration” answers that question. Yes, the military actually tested shoving ICBMs out of the back of a C-5 and launching them.
“Coming up on a burn, coming up on a burn…” Do you get the feeling this guy went into sportscasting later on in life?
Obit watch: July 31, 2020.
July 31st, 2020Alan Parker, director. (“Midnight Express”, “Mississippi Burning”, “Fame”, “Birdy”, “Angel Heart”).
For the record: Herman Cain.
More things I did not know.
July 31st, 20201. Craig Thomas, the author of Firefox (full name David Craig Owen Thomas) died in 2011.
2. “Thomas wrote part-time, with his wife as editor, in two fields: philosophical thoughts in books of essays; and techno-thrillers, a genre whose invention is often attributed to the better-known Tom Clancy, though many fans feel that Thomas was its true originator.” (He was a teacher, but left teaching in 1977 after Wolfsbane was published.)
3. His last work before his death was a two-volume commentary on Friedrich Nietzsche.
You’re going down in flames, you tax-fattened hyena! (#65 in a series)
July 31st, 2020I missed this one until it was in this morning’s Linkswarm, and Mike the Musicologist messaged me about it.
Tennessee state senator Katrina Robinson has been making waves. And not the good kind. She was indicted yesterday Wednesday on 48 counts: 24 counts of wire fraud, and 24 counts of “theft and embezzlement from government programs”.
Some high points:
During a press conference Wednesday evening, neither Robinson nor her attorney Janika White directly denied the accusations outlined in the criminal complaint. Robinson implied her political convictions played a role in the investigation.
“It is believed that if I were not in the position that I’m in, that if I did not champion the voices, the views and the faces that I represent, that I would not be in this moment right now,” she said.
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Anybody got “bingo” on their card?
The investigation was opened after HHS received an anonymous complaint in December 2016 alleging Robinson used grant money to buy $550 Louis Vuitton handbag. HHS and the FBI jointly investigated the case.
Bank records for The Health Institute obtained by the FBI and HHS allegedly showed Robinson giving herself a $25,400 performance bonus in the 2017 fiscal year, transferring $54,000 into a brokerage account to set up an IRA for herself, and paying herself a base salary of almost $170,000 more than was approved by HHS during the period her business was receiving grant funding.
Among the personal purchases Robinson is accused of making with federal dollars are a 2016 Jeep Renegade, a more than $5,500 wrought-iron front door and expenses and equipment for Celebrity Body Studio, another business owned by Robinson, and a snow cone business operated by her children.
She also allegedly used more than $5,000 in grant funding on a trip to Jamaica and almost $9,000 on tickets to Grizzlies games, other events at FedExForum and a rental space for a concession stand.
“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 123
July 31st, 2020Last Friday, we had the DC-10. Today: the L-1011 TriStar.
We’ve already talked about the 747, of course.
From the early 1970s, “You Have To Get Up Pretty Damn Early To Beat The Tri-Star”, a vintage Lockheed promo film featuring Hank Dees, the L-1011 project pilot.
Frank Borman (who is still alive at 92) shows up as well. His Wikipedia entry is worth reading.
Bonus video #1: “Welcome Aboard”, another L-1011 promo, notable for references to Jules Verne, and for acknowledging that airline travel is cramped…in 1968. Sort of an antidote to all those other vintage videos showing people eating caviar off of fine china in the air…
Bonus video #2: “No Simple Thing”, another L-1011 promo, focusing mostly on the design of the aircraft.
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July 30th, 2020Travel Thursday!
As far as I can tell, we’ve done Bermuda, Brazil, Ireland, and Hawaii in our ongoing Pan Am travelogue series. But we haven’t done an obvious destination. A country much like ours (at least in 1962) but separated by an ocean and a common language.
“Wings to Britian”.
Bonus video: I thought I’d throw this in, since it is short. A discussion of Toby jugs by two gentlemen from Bonhams Auctioneers. I have to confess: I enjoy those accents. Both of these gentlemen seem like the kind of person I’d like to take down to the pub for a pint or two.
I can’t find anything online that addresses the WWII symbolism of the Toby jug: was that an invention of the “12 O’Clock High” scriptwriters, or was this an actual tradition for aircrews?
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July 29th, 2020I thought it might be fun to do two real (and kind of short) bits of history today.
This first one is all audio, with no real video, so you could put it on in the background while you work. This is an interview with Corporal Julius Franklin “General” Howell. He was born in 1846, enlisted in the Confederate Army at 16, and served in Company K of the 24th Virginia Calvary.
The interview is from 1947, when he was 101. He died in 1948.
Please do note that my posting this should not be construed as endorsement of any particular cause or idea; if I do endorse some cause or idea, I will say so here. I think it is interesting (as a half-baked frustrated wannabe historian) to hear people talk in their own words about events they lived through.
And in that vein: Mr. Samuel J. Seymour appears on “I’ve Got a Secret” on February 8, 1956. At the time, Mr. Seymour was 95.
Obit watch: July 29, 2020.
July 29th, 2020Lawrence sent me this story, which was also covered by Second City Cop: Dion Boyd, a Chicago PD officer (recently promoted to “deputy chief of criminal networks”) apparently committed suicide yesterday.
The number for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-TALK (8255). If you live outside of the United States or are looking for other help, TVTropes has a good page of additional resources.
Please don’t fucking kill yourself. Entirely aside from the fact that you’ll miss all the movies of the next few decades, that you’ll miss the chance to fake your own death and escape to a South American country and become the mysterious foreigner who lives in the jungle, that you’ll leave behind a body that somebody has to clean up… you have a pretty significant chance of ending up in a nursing home, just conscious enough to feel pain and humiliation, for the rest of your life.
Give it another year. Do something different. Talk to somebody about it. Don’t end up on my unit with ARDS from inhaling your own vomit when the pills kick in. If the Huntington’s is closing in and you really gotta go before you turn into a slack-lipped veggie on a vent, plan that shit out and have your family by your bed. If you don’t think you could convince someone to sit by your bedside while you die, it’s not time for you to die yet.
“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 120
July 28th, 2020I thought I’d take a break from nuclear war and the military and share a couple of mildly geeky videos.
First up: “Man and Computer: A Perspective”. This comes from IBM’s United Kingdom branch and dates to 1965.
Bonus video: I feel like I have to apologize for this one, but I’m posting it because I think certain people will get a kick out of it. It isn’t in English, and there are no subtitles. I’m not even sure what the title is. This is apparently from some point in the 1980s, and shows computing…in the Soviet Union. Including some shots of the Soviet version of the IBM PC.
“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 119
July 27th, 2020Trolling, trolling, trolling…
Remember the good old days of the Cold War? When folks were afraid that we’d be bombed any minute?
From 1957, “A Day Called ‘X'”, a “documentary” about civil defense evacuating Portland, Oregon after being warned of an impending Russian bomber attack. This was a co-production of CBS Public Affairs and the Federal Civil Defense Administration.
Glenn Ford, noted Canadian, is the presenter and narrator. But everyone else in this movie is an actual person playing their real-life role. That guy striding purposefully into the Emergency Operations Center? That was Terry Schrunk, the mayor at the time.
But what happens after the bomb drops?
Bonus video: from 1968, “Nuclear Attack Preparedness Procedures: Survive To Fight”, an Air Force training film about advance preparations for an attack, and post-attack procedures (dealing with fallout, casualties, damage, etc.)
Well, what do you know?
July 26th, 2020Separating this out:
It appears the full MST3K version of “Mitchell” (not the full movie, but the complete MST3K) is available on the MST3K channel on YouTube.
Obit watch: July 26, 2020.
July 26th, 2020Yesterday and today were big news days.
Olivia de Havilland. THR. Variety.
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.
Regis Philbin, for the record. THR. Variety.
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)”.
Peter Green, founder of Fleetwood Mac.
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.)
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July 26th, 2020Science Sunday!
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.
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July 25th, 2020We haven’t had any survival videos yet this week, so I think it is time for some choice cuts from the military’s archives.
“Mountain and Desert Survival – Desert Survival”, from the Air Force. I’m thinking 1963 for the date. It is in color.
Bonus: you can’t have one without the other. “Mountain and Desert Survival – Mountain Survival”. This is for sure from 1963, and also in color.
I was going to say something kind of snarky about the narrator, but on second thought, it would have been beneath me.
“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 116
July 24th, 2020I 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.
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July 23rd, 2020Travel Thursday!
Where to this week? We’re going to Greece!
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?
From TWA: “Superjet to Greece”. Speaking of food:
Now I’m hungry.
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.
“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 114
July 22nd, 2020I thought I’d do a little trolling today.
Remember the Tailhook scandal?
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.