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.
Jimmie Rodgers, crossover singer probably most famous for “Honeycomb”.
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.
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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.
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.
Gregory Sierra, knock-around actor.
He did some theater work, but was mostly a TV and movie actor. He was “Julio”, Fred’s sidekick on “Sanford and Son”, Carlos “El Puerco” Valdez (the guy who kidnapped Jessica) on “Soap”, and “Chano”, one of the detectives in the early seasons of “Barney Miller”. He also did a lot of guest appearances, including nearly every major detective show of the 1970s (except that one): “Police Story”, “Banacek”, “Hawaii 5-0” (the good one), “Columbo”, “McCloud”, “Mission: Impossible”, and the list goes on. He was also Lieutenant Rodriguez in the early episodes of “Miami Vice” (that character got killed off and was replaced by Edward James Olmos’s “Martin Castillo”).
His movie credits include “Beneath the Planet of the Apes” and, interestingly, “The Other Side of the Wind“.
Happy birthday John Moses Browning!
“American Gunmaker: The John M. Browning Story”.
Bonus: “Tales of the Gun” from the History Channel, covering Mr. Browning and his work.
Larry King. Or, as the old story goes, “Larry King Radio“.
He bragged that he almost never prepared for an interview. If his guest was an author promoting a book, he did not read it but asked simply, “What’s it about?” or “Why did you write this?”
Nor did he pose as an intellectual. He salted his talk with “ain’t,” and “the” sounded like “da.” To a public skeptical of experts, he seemed refreshingly average: just a curious guy asking questions impulsively.
“There are many broadcasters who’ll recite three minutes of facts before they ask a question,” he said in a memoir, “My Remarkable Journey” (2009, with Cal Fussman). “As if to say: Let me show you how much I know. I think the guest should be the expert.”
Hank Aaron. NYT. ESPN. MLB.
Mira Furlan. She was Delenn in “Babylon 5” and “Danielle Rousseau” on “Lost”.
I haven’t put up any RoadRich bait recently, so today is his day.
“The Story Of Hong Kong’s Kai Tak Airport”.
I’m fairly sure this is a view from the ground of a 747 on final to Kai Tak.
And here’s a cockpit view of the Kai Tak approach.
Question for anyone who has the new Microsoft Flight Simulator: can you set up an approach and fly in to the virtual Kai Tak?
“Captain Joe” explains V1, Vr, and V2. If you watch movies (well, if you watch the kind of movies we watch) you’ll hear the pilots calling out those speeds. But what exactly are they?
“Crawl through a B-29 Superfortress IN FLIGHT!”
What is it like to punch out of an F-15 at 600 knots?
Spoiler: not fun.
Travel Thursday!
I’m 99 44/100ths percent sure I haven’t used this one before, and I feel like I’m reaching the end of the string of Pan Am videos. So…
“Wings To Europe: Grand Tour” from 1959.
Bonus: ’tis the season. Let’s go skiing!
“Winter Olympic Playground 1960” is a vintage promo film for Squaw Valley, California, and the facilities there. Squaw Valley was the site of the 1960 Winter Olympics, and is about 40 miles from Reno. (The film was done by the Harrah’s Club casino in Reno: it looks like it was still there when I was there (with a slight name change), but it closed permanently in March of 2020.)
There’s a part of me that doesn’t want to post this because it feels like unpaid advertising for Blade HQ.
But there’s a larger part of me that likes the idea of going around asking people who know, and deal with knives, what they are carrying. It is sort of like asking a professional photographer “What’s in your camera bag?”. At least for me.
So this is a compromise: I’m posting the video, but I’m not linking to Blade HQ or any other online knife shop. If they want promotion, they can buy some advertising. My rates are surprisingly reasonable.
(What do I carry? The knife in my pocket right now is one of the smaller Victorinox Swiss Army knives. I prefer to carry a Swiss Champ, but I’ve set mine aside for the moment: I need to send it in and get it serviced.)
Here’s another one of those in the “what’s in your (x)?” vein: “Racing Team Tool Box Tour – With Specialty Tools”.
I found this mildly interesting: “Knives you don’t hand to people”.
For some reason, “Matt’s Off Road Recovery” has been popping up a lot in my recommendations. I’ve always had kind of a vague general curiosity about how you get your off-road vehicle back if you have a mechanical breakdown or some other problem, so I guess Matt’s answers that question. Although I’m not sure these people really want it back, but it seems like one of those “can’t leave it here, unless you want a major fine” situations.
Sutton’s major league career began with the Dodgers in 1966. He went on to win 233 games during 16 seasons with the team, the most in franchise history.
“When you gave him the ball, you knew one thing,” the former Dodger manager Tommy Lasorda, who died this month, once said. “Your pitcher was going to give you everything he had.”
Sutton also pitched for the Houston Astros, Milwaukee Brewers, California Angels and Oakland A’s before retiring in 1988. He was elected to the Hall of Fame on his fifth attempt.
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Sutton — whose major league career began as part of a Dodger pitching rotation that also included Sandy Koufax and Don Drysdale — won 20 games only once (he had a 21-10 record in 1976). But he is tied for 14th place in career wins with Nolan Ryan, and ranked seventh in both strikeouts, with 3,574, and innings, with 5,282.1.
He holds the Dodger team records not only for career wins but also for strikeouts (2,696), starts (533), shutouts (52), home runs surrendered (309) and losses (181).
Barbara Shelley, British actress. She did a lot of horror films: “Village of the Damned”, “Dracula: Prince of Darkness”, “Quatermass and the Pit”, etc. She also did a lot of non-horror TV, including “Eastenders” and two guest shots on “12 O’Clock High”.
I’ve been neglecting this holiday for the past few years, but: today is National Buy an AK Day.
Contrary to what some may believe, this holiday has nothing to do with any political events that take place on January 20th: rather, it is inspired by the classic Ice Cube song “It Was a Good Day” (“Today I didn’t even have to use my A.K./I got to say it was a good day“) and the hard work done by Donovan Strain who determined that the “good day” in the song was January 20, 1992.
If you have trouble finding an AK at your local gun shop, you might try Bud’s or Classic Firearms, though stocks at both are limited. If you already have an AK, I encourage you to pick up some 7.62×39 ammo, or whatever caliber your AK is chambered in. (Ammoseek.com is helpful if you can’t find your ammo locally.) You might also buy some normal capacity magazines, if you’re so inclined. (CDNN Sports seems to be well stocked.)
“Can I buy something that’s not an AK?” You certainly can: I’m not the boss of what you can and can’t purchase. But Ice Cube didn’t say “I didn’t even have to use my AR” or “I didn’t have to use my FN 5.7”, so this isn’t National Buy a Gun Day. (That’s April 15th.)
Going a little long today. Also going back to the music history well, because it has been more than a week since I’ve done that, and I don’t want to get stuck on guns, food, Roman history, or military history. (I may do some more military history tomorrow.)
Short shameful confession: I have not had a chance to watch all of these two videos yet. I’m posting them here partially as bookmarks, because they involve two bands that I’m partial to.
“Rebel Truce – The History Of The Clash”
“Fresh Fruit For Rotting Eyeballs”, a documentary about the Dead Kennedys.
…you shouldn’t send “explicit texts” to a reporter. Actually, you probably shouldn’t send explicit texts to anybody, no matter who you are, and even if they are consensual (as they will come back to haunt you) but especially if you’re in a high ranking organizational position.
Jared Porter out as general manager of the Mets.
Porter, who was hired by Mets team president Sandy Alderson this offseason, sent the texts to a foreign female reporter in 2016 when he was running the Cubs scouting department.
The texts included a photo of a bulge in Porter’s pants while he was laying in bed and an erect penis. At one point Porter sent 62 consecutive texts to the reporter without a response.
“The more explicit ones are not of me. Those are like, kinda like joke-stock images,” Porter told ESPN after acknowledging sending the texts.
I observed the other day that I was reading Mike Duncan’s The Storm Before the Storm: The Beginning of the End of the Roman Republic (affiliate link). Great and good FotB Borepatch commented that he liked Duncan’s book.
So…from 2017 and Mike Duncan’s book tour, “The Storm Before the Storm” at Politics and Prose in DC. If you’re a “Revoutions” listener, you’ve heard the podcast version of this, but for those of you who are not (and for those of you who want to see what Mike Duncan looked like three years ago), here you go.
I get a particular kick out of his stories about his early writerly ambitions: wanting to write “Redwall” knockoffs, except the mice flew airplanes, and then later wanting to be the next Phil Dick.
Bonus: a more recent (July of 2020) interview with Mr. Duncan from “The Current” which is apparently something the Hatchette Book Group puts out.