Travel Thursday!
I thought it might be fun to do something a little seasonal, so…
“A German Christmas market in Dresden” from the DW Documentary channel.
Bonus #1: “Tastiest treats at German Christmas markets”.
Bonus #2: Slightly less seasonal: “Street Food In Germany”.
Bonus #3: Just one more. “2018 Vienna Advent | Europe Christmas Market Tour”. This is a bit longer than the others (about 30 minutes).
I was going to try to make a Yakov Smirnoff reference here, but I decided to leave it as an exercise for the reader.
Guy in Peoria is hired to paint a “Soviet-style mural of Cookie Monster” on a building and gets paid (well, he claims) in cash. Guy paints mural.
Guy finds out after the fact that the person who hired him was not the property owner, but someone posing as the property owner. Hilarity ensues.
In a brief interview, Mr. Comte [the real one, the guy who owns the building – DB] expressed fury over the attention that the apparent prank had gotten from national and international news outlets.
“This isn’t news,” Mr. Comte said, then added an expletive. “I’ll give you a headline: Man paints his own building wall.”
“I don’t hate art,” he earlier told The Journal Star of Peoria. “But I don’t know what the hell that was.”
A handful of short and selfish videos today.
From the “Food Wishes” channel, a couple of things I’m bookmarking because I’d like to try them:
“Homemade Eggnog Recipe – How to Make Classic Christmas Eggnog”.
I just bought a bottle of 18 year old rum. But I’m lazy, so I may just purchase a good commercial eggnog (like the Promised Land Dairy one) and add rum to that.
Speaking of rum, “Hot Buttered Rum”.
Not food, just for grins: Mireille Mathieu sings “La Marseillaise” in 1989 at the foot of the Eiffel Tower for its centennial. And it has English subtitles. I am currently immersed in the French Revolution block of the “Revolutions” podcast, so this is relevant to my interests.
Last one: “No Regrets: The life and music of Edith Piaf”, a short (about 15 minutes) documentary from France 24 English.
Today:
“The CH-47A Chinook In Vietnam”. This is allegedly a corporate promo film for the Chinook, but I’m not sure it is complete.
Bonus #1: From the 1950s and those wonderful folks at Shell Oil, “The History of the Helicopter”.
Bonus #2: “Birth of the Bell Helicopter”, a Bell corporate promo/history film.
Promoted from a comment left by great and good FotB RoadRich, talking about bad public art:
All it evoked for me was ‘someone put up traffic signs and the dumbass forgot to add the letters.’ They have a DOT standard look to them.
…specifically Special Route Markers meant to be Guide signs (blue with white accents) in Chapter 7 of TxDOT’s Sign Guidelines and Applications Manual. Examples exist on page 7-14 (Special Route Marker), page 7-24 (indicating Emergency Services facilities), 7-46 (Historical Markers), and 7-51 to 7-52 (Rest Area).
If that hasn’t gotten you all excited about roadway signage you can also look up Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices (MUTCD), currently in revision 2 of the 2009 edition. Ooo, page 301 embodies the spirit of ‘All General Service signs and supplemental sign panels shall have white letters, symbols, arrows, and borders on a blue background.’
I’m such fun at parties.
You know where I’m going with this, don’t you?
From the “Kentucky LTAP and Technology Transfer Program”, a webinar on the Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices.
Bonus: Florida man, Florida man, flagging traffic when he can…
From the Florida DOT, “Flagging Procedures”.
NFL teams that still have a chance to go 0-16:
New York Jets
Next week, the Jets play the Rams in LA. The Rams are 9-4, so I kind of like their chances here. After that, the Browns play at the Jets: this would worry me in an ordinary year, but the Browns are actually kind of good this year. (9-3 currently, and the Browns play Baltimore tonight.)
So it pretty much comes down to week 17: the Jets play at the Patriots. New England is about average this year, and I’ve seen speculation that, if they’re not playoff eligible, the Patriots may bench their starters and write this game off. On the other hand, do they want to be the only team to lose to the Jets this year?
Oh, wow. I opened up a post so I could update some obits from the past couple of days, and the first thing I saw was: John le Carré. The current NYT obit is a preliminary one: they promise a longer one soon, and I may update with some personal thoughts when that posts.
In the meantime, Charley Pride.
A bridge-builder who broke into country music amid the racial unrest of the 1960s, Mr. Pride was one of the most successful singers ever to work in that largely white genre, placing 52 records in the country Top 10 from 1966 to 1987.
Singles like “Kiss an Angel Good Mornin’” and “Is Anybody Goin’ to San Antone” — among his 29 recordings to reach No. 1 on the country chart — featuried a countrypolitan mix of traditional instrumentation and more uptown arrangements.
At RCA, the label for which he recorded for three decades, Mr. Pride was second only to Elvis Presley in record sales. In the process he emerged as an inspiration to generations of performers, from the Black country hitmaker Darius Rucker, formerly of the rock band Hootie and the Blowfish, to white inheritors like Alan Jackson, who included a version of “Kiss an Angel” on his 1999 album, “Under the Influence.”
…
Nevertheless, the dignity and grace with which Mr. Pride and his wife of 63 years, Rozene Pride, navigated their way through the white world of country music became a beacon to his fans and fellow performers.
“No person of color had ever done what he has done,” Mr. Rucker said in “Charley Pride: I’m Just Me,” a 2019 “American Masters” documentary on PBS.
Mr. Pride himself was more self-effacing in assessing his impact but nevertheless expressed some satisfaction in having a role in furthering integration. “We’re not colorblind yet,” he wrote in his autobiography, “but we’ve advanced a few paces along the path, and I like to think I’ve contributed something to that process.”.
Tommy Lister. Apparently, he was most famous as “Deebo” in “Friday” (which we watched last night: while he’s good in it, the movie itself is not good), but he had a long list of other credits.
Norman Abramson. You may never have heard of him, but he was one of the developers of ALOHAnet.
The wireless network in Hawaii, which began operating in 1971, was called ALOHAnet, embracing the Hawaiian salutation for greeting or parting. It was a smaller, wireless version of the better known ARPAnet, the precursor to the internet, which allowed researchers at universities to share a network and send messages over landlines. The ARPAnet was led by the Pentagon’s Advanced Research Projects Agency, which also funded the ALOHAnet.
“The early wireless work in Hawaii is vastly underappreciated,” said Marc Weber, an internet historian at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif. “Every modern form of wireless data networking, from WiFi to your cellphone, goes back to the ALOHAnet.”
…
Some of the data-networking techniques developed by Professor Abramson and his Hawaii team proved valuable not only in wireless communications but also in wired networks. One heir to his work was Robert Metcalfe, who in 1973 was a young computer scientist working at Xerox PARC, a Silicon Valley research laboratory that had become a fount of personal computer innovations.
Mr. Metcalfe was working on how to enable personal computers to share data over wired office networks. He had read a 1970 paper, written by Professor Abramson, describing ALOHAnet’s method for transmitting and resending data over a network.
“Norm kindly invited me to spend a month with him at the University of Hawaii to study ALOHAnet,” Mr. Metcalfe recalled in an email.
Mr. Metcalfe and his colleagues at Xerox PARC adopted and tweaked the ALOHAnet technology in creating Ethernet office networking. Later, Mr. Metcalfe founded an Ethernet company, 3Com, which thrived as the personal computer industry grew.
I’ve been holding on to this one for a few days: William Aronwald. He was a prosecutor in the 1970s, working on organized crime cases around New York. He went into private practice later on. But that’s not the reason his obit is noteworthy.
On March 20, 1987, his father, George M. Aronwald, was shot and killed in a laundry in Queens. The senior Aronwald’s death was kind of a puzzle: he was 78, worked as a hearing officer for the Parking Violations Bureau, and shared an office listing with his son. Why would anyone want to kill him? Turns out…
…Mr. Cacace, acting on the orders of an imprisoned crime boss, Carmine Persico, had arranged to have William Aronwald killed, according to news accounts.
The reasons were vague — Mr. Persico was said to have thought Mr. Aronwald had “been disrespectful,” as one article put it. Mr. Aronwald later speculated that he had been targeted in retaliation for his testimony in one of the trials of the mobster John Gotti.
In any case, a prosecutor said later, the hit men, brothers named Vincent and Eddie Carini, were shown a piece of paper with only the name “Aronwald” on it. They killed the wrong Aronwald. And that wasn’t all, a 2003 article in The New York Times reported:
“After the botched assignment, Mr. Cacace had his hit men killed, prosecutors said. Then, they added, he had the hit men who had killed the hit men killed.”
“Those responsible for sacking the people who have just been sacked have been sacked.”
Gus Malzahn out at Auburn after a 6-4 season.
But they got stomped this season by Alabama, Texas A&M, and Georgia, and also lost to South Carolina.
Lovie Smith gone at Illinois. 17-39 over five years, and 2-5 this season.
Kevin Sumlin out at Arizona. The precipitating event seems to have been a 70-7 loss to Arizona State Friday night, but he was 9-20 overall (in a little more than two seasons) and Arizona has lost 12 straight games.
Science Sunday!
I had a little trouble picking out today’s videos. There’s some good stuff related to Gödel, Escher, Bach and cognition that I might use in the future, but I didn’t want to go back to the Gödel well so soon.
I was hesitant to go back to Chris Bishop again again, but science should be fun. Unfortunately, the video I wanted to use, i couldn’t: YouTube has it age restricted due to content.
So I thought I’d go metal.
We heard you out and eventually decided to push the boundaries of what's possible with 3D printing. It may have been a mistake…
Here's what we used:
🦷 Denture Teeth Resin
🧪 Soft Tissue Starter Pack
😱️Pure Nightmare FuelWe are very sorry. pic.twitter.com/QYP17PLkYK
— Formlabs (@formlabs) December 10, 2020
Okay, maybe that was a little too metal. Same org, “Metal Mayhem”, but with Andrew Szydlo. He’s got a neat sort of child-like enthusiasm, and he’s a little absent minded (or at least presents himself that way). This might captivate the kids, but might also annoy you.
Bonus: I know I’m using the same source twice, but this popped up as well, and I thought it was worth including: the presenter, Adam Kucharski, works at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and specializes in modelling infectious diseases.
“How Science is Taking the Luck out of Gambling.”
“…there are two large flaws with this lady’s strategy. The first is, it’s completely illegal. And the second is, it clearly doesn’t work.”
Today: go fast. Don’t turn.
I’m fascinated by the history of land (and water) speed records.
From the “Scarf and Googles” channel on the ‘Tube: “George Eyston’s Thunderbolt – Land Speed’s Missing Monster”.
Between 1937 and 1939, the competition for the Land Speed Record was between two Englishmen: Captain Eyston and John Cobb. Thunderbolt’s first record was set at 312.00 mph (502.12 km/h) on 19 November 1937 on the Bonneville Salt Flats. Within a year Thunderbolt returned with improved aerodynamics and raised its record to 345.50 mph (556.03 km/h) on 27 August 1938.
This record only stood for a matter of weeks before John Cobb’s Reid-Railton broke the 350 mph (560 km/h) barrier and raised it to 353.30 mph (568.58 km/h) on 15 September 1938, as Eyston watched. This inspired him to take Thunderbolt to a new record of 357.50 mph (575.34 km/h). Cobb had held the record for less than 24 hours.
Bonus #1, from the same channel: “Craig Breedlove and Art Arfons – The Land Speed Battle Of Bonneville”.
Bonus #2: It seems to me like a lot of folks talk about Breedlove and Arfons, and rightly so. But it doesn’t seem like folks remember Gary Gabelich and the “Blue Flame“. I actually do, because the American Gas Association took out full page ads in National Geographic promoting it. At the age of (mumble mumble) I thought a rocket car was incredibly cool.
“Break The Record”.
Bonus #3: Throwing in one more, because these are all short-ish: “The Budweiser Rocket”. Also, this is a little more contemporary than the others.
I haven’t done any true crime in a while, so why not fix that?
You’ve all heard about (and we’ve talked about) the Lufthansa heist, but have you ever heard of the Brink’s-Mat robbery?
Yes, there were murders (including, possibly, one of the Great Train robbers). No, the proceeds never turned up. The thing that boggles my mind is that they managed to make off with 3,000 kilos of gold bullion.
Bonus #1: Since I brought it up…here’s an episode of something called “Secret History” from Britain’s Channel 4 about the Great Train Robbery.
Bonus #2: I resisted posting this, because I have…questions…about the “Wonder” channel. But I have a fondness for tunnel heists, and for the Société Générale robbery in particular (as I’ve mentioned before) and this is only about 25 minutes long.
“Daring Capers: Plunder Under Nice”.
The holiday is only two weeks away, so here’s a little morning musical interlude to cheer you up and put you in the spirit.
(Been a while since I’ve done one of these, hasn’t it?)
The Austin City Council has decided (based on a recommendation from the city’s Arts Commission) to “deaccession” several pieces of public art.
The big news is: one of those pieces is “Moments”. If you live in Austin, you know “Moments” better as “those blue panels bolted to the overpass wall on North Lamar Boulevard”.
“Moments” caused a stir from the beginning. It was the city’s first art-in-public-places project to be installed along a road, and its installation caused traffic backups. The piece was meant to evoke impressions of the moments contained in an experience or environment, Jean Graham, a city of Austin art in public places coordinator, told the American-Statesman at the time.
“The designer was thinking, well, you could think of the moments going by as you are waiting under the bridge in traffic,” Graham told the paper in 2003.
In [Carl] Trominski’s [the artist – DB] submission for the piece’s creation, he wrote that the site “is visualized as a Threshold between the Urban Austin and the Natural Austin. The underpass marks a journey through the city’s self-image. … This proposal intends to strengthen the expression and experience of this moment.” The signs were to “make abstract reference to musical notes, the motion of a row on Town Lake, and acts (as) a shadow indicator of the day’s progression.”
For the record, the other artworks being taken off the list are…
Here’s a presentation with some photos of the art, if (like me) you were unfamiliar with these pieces.
Travel Thursday!
How would you like to go to Sweden this week? I feel like I’ve done Sweden in the past, but not with…the US Army?
From 1958, “Modern Land of the Vikings”.
Bonus: As far as I can tell, I haven’t done this one before. Certainly, it doesn’t show up in a search. So let’s fix that: “Wings to Scandinavia”. The YouTube notes date this to 1962, and it covers Norway and Finland as well as Sweden. (I have done “Wings to Suomi”, which is Finland specific, before, but I think this is different enough to qualify.)
Self-indulgent Wednesday!
“How to Order an M1 Garand from the Civilian Marksmanship Program”, by way of Black Flag Armory. Take advantage of this now: you never know what might happen in the future.
(As I understand it, the Texas State Rifle Association is a legit CMP affiliate.)
Bonus #1: Why would you want an M1 Garand? Because. “America’s Rifle”.
Bonus #2: Okay, I know everyone watches hickok45, but just for reference once you get your M1 from CMP: “How NOT to Load an M1 Garand!”.
Bonus #3: “How to load the M1 Garand the US Army way”.
I’m still a little behind schedule from yesterday. Also: recent events.
So today I thought I’d do a couple of videos on the X-1.
“Frontiers of Flight: The Sound Barrier”.
(Here’s a higher quality version, but it feels like some has been cut off of this.)
“Bell X-1: Breaking the Sound Barrier”, from Deep Space TV. This is a little shorter and better quality.
Bonus: this is long, but…a 1991 interview with Gen. Yeager.
World War II ace. Aviation pioneer. A giant within the Air Force.
Join us in celebrating the extraordinary life and mourning the loss of Brig. Gen. Chuck Yeager. May he rest in peace and his legacy live on forever. pic.twitter.com/gJ0113M5ge
— U.S. Air Force (@usairforce) December 8, 2020
Fr @VictoriaYeage11 It is w/ profound sorrow, I must tell you that my life love General Chuck Yeager passed just before 9pm ET. An incredible life well lived, America’s greatest Pilot, & a legacy of strength, adventure, & patriotism will be remembered forever.
— Chuck Yeager (@GenChuckYeager) December 8, 2020
(Edited: fixed link.)
NYT obit. I can’t do justice to the man. I’m not sure who can.
Natalie Desselle-Reid, actress. She was 53.
The man who Tuesday Morning Quarterback refers to as “the tastefully named” Gregg Williams is out as defensive coordinator for the New York Jets.
And speaking of TMQ, another recurring theme:
As previously noted, I got a little behind yesterday, so I’m playing catch-up.
David Lander, prominent TV actor perhaps best known as “Squiggy” on “Laverne and Shirley”.
Interesting connections:
…
Lenny and Squiggy were not the brainchild of the show’s creators. Mr. Lander and Mr. McKean invented them in college (Squiggy was called Ant’ny then) and had been performing as those characters with the Credibility Gap, a comedy performance ensemble that also included Harry Shearer.
The characters sometimes broke away from their own series. Mr. Lander and Mr. McKean appeared on the fictional talk show “America 2-Night,” hosted by Martin Mull.
Portraying two imaginary actors who supposedly played Lenny and Squiggy (but looked and talked just like them), they made small talk and sang “Creature Without a Head.” That song was also on the 1979 album recorded by Lenny and the Squigtones, their imaginary musical group (which included Christopher Guest on guitar). Principal Squiggy (Mr. Lander) appeared in “Scary Movie” (2000), and Squiggy himself turned up on a 2002 episode of “The Simpsons.”
Of course, Guest, McKean, and Shearer were all in Spinal Tap. I kind of wonder why Lander wasn’t involved. (According to Wikipedia, Guest was actually credited as “Nigel Tufnel” on the Lenny and the Squigtones album.)
Lawrence sent over an obit for Pamela Tiffin. She had what seems like an odd career: Billy Wilder’s “One, Two, Three”, “Harper” (a Ross MacDonald adaptation), “State Fair”. “The Hallelujah Trail”…and a bunch of Italian movies.
Paul Sarbanes, the man who put the “Sarbanes” in “Sarbanes-Oxley”.
Also by way of Lawrence, and this is breaking as I write it, so no links yet: Fred Akers. Links probably tomorrow.
For the historical record: NYT obits for Warren Berlinger and Walter E. Williams.
Today, December 7th, 2020, a date which will live in infamy…
…having reached a certain age, I have a doctor’s appointment this morning for a routine procedure, and expect to be out of it for a bit.
(I’ll take the 15 yard penalty for oversharing.)
So I’m scheduling this post in advance. Given the history of the day, the fact that I’ve only linked to him once, the fact that these are short-ish, and the fact that I’m a lazy shiftless blogger who is (I hope) lying around in pajamas and slippers right now, I thought I’d link to Drachinifel‘s series on the salvage of Pearl Harbor.
Part 1: “The Smoke Clears”.
Part 2: “Up She Rises!”
Part 3: “The First and the Last”.
NFL teams that still have a chance to go 0-16:
New York Jets
I was concerned about this game: as it turns out, probably rightfully so. It sounds like the Raiders pulled this one out at the last minute.
Next week: Seattle in Seattle. I’m feeling good about this one.
(Edited to add: Sorry about the weirdness with this. I started a draft of this in advance, published it this morning because I was distracted yesterday afternoon, but WordPress for some reason published this with a date of December 5th.)
When I was young, my paternal grandparents gave me a gift subscription to a magazine called “Science ’85” (later “Science ’86” and so on). As the linked Wikipedia entry discusses, this was a general interest science magazine published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). (AAAS also publishes “Science”, which is a highly prestigious and technical peer-reviewed journal.)
One of the articles I remember from that magazine was about Kurt Gödel. That was the first time I’d ever encountered the man, and I find him fascinating in general. I think one of the reasons I’m fascinated by Gödel is the relationship between his Incompleteness theorem and Turing’s “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem.”
This is a lecture: “Kurt Godel: The World’s Most Incredible Mind” by Mark Colyvan of the University of Sydney. (The title given in the video is “Kurt Gödel and the Limits of Mathematics”.) Each of these chunks is about 15 minutes long, so you can take some time to recover between parts.
Part 1:
Part 2:
Part 3:
I thought it might be fun today to go down to the sea in ships…
…which (because I am a jerk) promptly sink. Since today is Saturday, I feel like I can run a bit long, at least for this first one. The bonus videos are all shorter.
“The Shocking Truths Of King Henry VIII’s Ship The Mary Rose”.
The Mary Rose is a carrack-type warship of the English Tudor navy of King Henry VIII. She served for 33 years in several wars against France, Scotland, and Brittany. After being substantially rebuilt in 1536, she saw her last action on 19 July 1545. She led the attack on the galleys of a French invasion fleet, but sank in the Solent, the straits north of the Isle of Wight
The wreck of the Mary Rose was discovered in 1971 and was raised on 11 October 1982 by the Mary Rose Trust in one of the most complex and expensive maritime salvage projects in history. The surviving section of the ship and thousands of recovered artefacts are of great value as a Tudor-era time capsule. The excavation and raising of the Mary Rose was a milestone in the field of maritime archaeology, comparable in complexity and cost to the raising of the 17th-century Swedish warship Vasa in 1961. The Mary Rose site is designated under the Protection of Wrecks Act 1973 by statutory instrument 1974/55. The wreck is a Protected Wreck managed by Historic England. “Details from listed building database (1000075)”. National Heritage List for England.
Bonus #1: One of the things I’d like to do before I die is to see the Vasa.
Vasa or Wasa[a] (Swedish pronunciation: [²vɑːsa] is a Swedish warship built between 1626 and 1628. The ship foundered after sailing about 1,300 m (1,400 yd) into her maiden voyage on 10 August 1628. She fell into obscurity after most of her valuable bronze cannon were salvaged in the 17th century until she was located again in the late 1950s in a busy shipping area in Stockholm harbor. The ship was salvaged with a largely intact hull in 1961. She was housed in a temporary museum called Wasavarvet (“The Vasa Shipyard”) until 1988 and then moved permanently to the Vasa Museum in the Royal National City Park in Stockholm. The ship is one of Sweden’s most popular tourist attractions and has been seen by over 35 million visitors since 1961. Since her recovery, Vasa has become a widely recognised symbol of the “Swedish Empire”.
I’m putting this here only because I know one person who might like it: Bill Burr rants about the Vasa.
Bonus video #2: More seriously…a 4K video tour of the Vasa Museum from 2015.
Bonus video #3: “Who Sank the Vasa?”.
There’s a guy on the ‘Tube, “Missionary Bush Pilot“. For some reason, I find his videos oddly compelling. Also, this is RoadRich bait.
“Delivering the Kodiak Airplane for Maintenance in Papua New Guinea”. This one is just slightly over coffee break size.
Bonus, slightly longer: “Solo International Flight over the Ocean to Australia in a Single Engine Small Airplane”.
This reminds me a little of a semi-awful show that used to air on Quest. I’m blanking on the name of it at the moment, but it involved ferry pilots. The actual flying parts of that show were fine: what I hated about it was the manufactured “characters” and imposed drama. The nice thing about this channel is that Chris seems to be flying alone, so there’s no interpersonal drama.