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Buttons & Abby

 awesomeness, blather, cats  No Responses »
Jun 282025
 

Buttons is about 16. While nowhere near the oldest a cat can get, it is, sad to say, old for a cat. All my prior cats made it to 10 or at best 11, so Buttons has outlasted them all. And sadder to say, he has some medical issues that, left unchecked, will end him pretty quickly. So several times a day I have to force some meds into him, a process he *really* doesn’t like, but is tolerant of. Even with the meds he gets occasional relapses; but prior to the current meds  some months back he had incidents that came close to The End. So… he could have years left, or I can post bad news tomorrow. That’s just the way it is.

Abby, on the other hand, is only about 2. Young, vigorous and loves to fight, she’ll merrily throw down with Billy or Banshee, practicing the very best cat-judo moves. However, she is remarkably gentle with Buttons. Seems she knows he’s The Honored Elder and is to be treated with respect and restraint. She lets him sleep, and sleep he does… he could easily sleep 20+ hours a day.

Every now and then he feels particularly good, and engages in play. Here he is trying to bait Abby into some level of a fight. I was gratified to see that while she played with him, she did not play rough.

 

 Posted by at 10:55 am

Ebay is getting expensive

 AARRRGH, aircraft, blather, Crazy, Gah., projects  No Responses »
Jun 232025
 

For about 20 years I’ve been buying aerospace documentation on ebay. For a good chunk of those I’ve crowdfunded the purchases of really expensive stuff. And by “really expensive” I’ve meant something like “hundreds of dollars for a single report.” Split the purchase price between one or two dozen people, send all of them high-rez scans, and the price can be quite affordable and everybody is happy. Huzzah.

But recently a new trend has emerged: exorbitantly high opening bids. Normally that wouldn’t be an issue: if the opening bid is stupidly high, nobody buys. the item goes unsold and often the seller will come down in price. Woo. But the recent development is buyers who are willing and able to buy, repeatedly, extremely expensive stuff. For example, a seller apparently got hold of an estate with a bunch of Republic Aviation stuff. For aerospace projects fans, there have been some fantastic items… and I’ve utterly failed to obtain any of them because the opening bids aren’t hundred,s they’re thousands… and someone else out there has really deep pockets and has been snapping them up. I tried bidding on one early document; with crowdfunders I was able to bid over $1,600 in the last few seconds, thinking I was the only bidder… but I got sniped by someone who bid several times at higher amounts. Since then I’ve watched numerous items sell for even more in the last seconds, apparently to the same buyer. I’ve repeatedly contacted the seller about buying scans, photocopies or even just complete sets of photos of the documents, but such requests have gone unanswered. So these things are *poof* gone forever.

Now, these are documents that I was unaware existed before I saw the listing, and I’ve lost no money. So objectively I’m not worse off than before… but it’s incredibly frustrating to see such things, know that at least theoretically I could have had access to them, and now they’ve gone from one black hole to another black hole.

 

A couple examples, reports on the Republic AP-77 design from the mid-1950’s, a tactical bomber for the USAF with clear XF-103 heritage.

 

And…

 

What can I do about it? Not a damned thing, unless I finally win the Lotto.

 

If I *do* win the Lotto, I’m not telling anyone. But there will be signs.

 Posted by at 12:52 pm

200 K

 blather, Meh.  No Responses »
Jun 232025
 

Sadly not $200,000 or 200,000 followers willing to do my bidding, but 200,000 miles on my car a few days ago. Not much of a milestone I suppose, but it’s what I got.

 Posted by at 12:32 pm

Hello? Is this thing still on?

 blather  No Responses »
Jun 232025
 

Yeesh, it’s been months since I’ve blog posted much of anything. Of course all my yapping is now done at Twitter (@UnwantedBlog), where I post a handful of things a day. But even with that, I write a hell of a lot less than during my blogging days. It’s a lot easier to tweet. Question: anybody care?

 Posted by at 2:36 am

April 2025 APR rewards

 aircraft, Monthly Historical Documents Program, nukes, Patreon, projects, rockets  No Responses »
May 022025
 

Rewards for April, 2025 have been released. These include:

Document: “Performance Data Report for Class VF Convoy Fighter Airplane,” Convair report from 1950. 100 pages of data (no diagrams) on what would become the XFY-1 “Pogo.”

Document: “Hard Mobile Launcher” Martin Marietta brochure on the Midgetman launcher, with some bonus Martin Marietta HML info and art

Diagram: “Parallel Tanks Missile,” Convair diagram 7-26-54, apparently an alternate design for Atlas, much more like Soviet R-7 family. Reduced to 75% of original scanned size, which is immense and system-crashing.

CAD diagram: Lockheed B-2, a stealthier proposed follow-on to the U-2.

Subscribers/Patrons for the APR Monthly Historical Documents Program not only receive a monthly collection of aerospace goodies such as these, but can also pick up back issues all the way to 2014.

aerospaceprojectsreview.com/monthly.htm

 

 Posted by at 2:56 am

Norspiel

 history, Hmm..., Monthly Historical Documents Program, Patreon  No Responses »
Feb 222025
 

Now scanning: “Norspiel,” rules book for a wargame created at Northrop Aircraft in 1957. Not the usual sort of thing I go after, but it seems interesting. I wasn’t able to find anything online about it other than the ebay listing, so it may be new to the wargaming world. I’m not a wargamer (not since about 1987), so I’m no expert, but it seems a lot simpler than, say, Dungeons and Dragons or Warhammer 40K.

This will be added to the next APR Patreon/subscriber catalog to be voted on for a monthly reward. If this sort of thing is of interest, please check out: 

aerospaceprojectsreview.com/monthly.htm

 Posted by at 6:12 pm

The 80’s reign supreme

 AARRRGH, awesomeness, blather, history, Hmm..., wisdom, youtube  No Responses »
Feb 222025
 

Everyone is nostalgic for the days of their youth and think that “those years were the best.” But I really believe a good case can be made that the 80’s and well into the 90’s were in many ways the pinnacle of our culture. Pop culture was almost undeniably at it’s zenith. We still had optimism; our culture hadn’t been tainted with the post-9/11 malaise and the recognition that a demographic tsunami and cultural collapse were inevitable. Hollywood still made entertainment that entertained and wasn’t loaded to the gills with deviant insanity. Everything *wasn’t* a struggle session forced on us by people who hated us and our civilization. And pop culture was really in a sweet spot. TV, movies and music had learned how to make just exactly awesome stuff that people loved. Things were *fun.* And I suspect that entertainment tech was perfect, in a way. If you wanted “Star Wars,” you could get “Star Wars” on a VHS tape. It wasn’t especially easy and it certainly was nowhere near as good as on a movie screen, but it was okay. And that “available, good but not great” accessibility scratched the itch but made you want to go to the movies & get the Good Stuff. To chat about it you talked face to face with friends, as social media didn’t really exist. Now it’s too easy and we’re too separated. We didn’t know how good we had it.

 

Today if you want to watch something, chances are you just pull it up and stream it. Any episode, the whole series, available in 4K resolution on an 85-inch high-def screen the moment you want it. And that’s great and all… but there really is something special about things being a bit more challenging than that. When a show took 22 weeks to tell a seasons worth of stories, rather than dumping 8 hours on you all at once and not to be seen again for another year or two, it spread out the joy over time. You could absorb it and process it. And, in the case of shows like Star Trek, Babylon 5, X Files and the like, argue and debate it with your friends, one episode a week.

When things are too easy, they become cheap.

 Posted by at 9:07 am

Last day for eBay

 aircraft, eBay, models, nukes, science fiction, spacecraft  No Responses »
Feb 072025
 

Got some stuff on eBay that might be of interest, but the auctions end in less than 24 hours:

 

Hawk Beta I Atomic Powered Bomber XAB-1 model kit, complete

https://www.ebay.com/itm/256801825475

 

Diamond Select/Art Asylum NCC 1701 USS Enterprise HD Edition

https://www.ebay.com/itm/256801824805

 

Diamond Select/Art Asylum NCC 1701 USS Enterprise “Where No Man Has Gone Before”

https://www.ebay.com/itm/256801824768

 

 

Diamond Select/Art Asylum NCC 1701 USS Enterprises, “Mirror, Mirror” edition

https://www.ebay.com/itm/256801824704

 

 

Diamond Select/Art Asylum NCC 1701 USS Enterprise standard edition

https://www.ebay.com/itm/256801824661

 

 

None of the Enterprises currently have bids so they’ll probably go cheap to whoever wants them. A few other things on eBay as well.

 

 Posted by at 7:51 pm

January 2025 APR rewards

 aircraft, APR, CAD diagrams, Monthly Historical Documents Program, nukes, Patreon, projects, rockets  No Responses »
Feb 032025
 

Rewards for January 2025 have just been sent out. They include:

CAD: Lockheed-Martin RATTLRShypersonic missile

ART: Douglas Nike-Zeus advertising artwork

Doc: 1987 Martin-Marietta “Titan II Program Familiarization – Titan II Training & Certification.” Well illustrated guide to the Titan II launch system.

Doc: University of Michigan report: “The Radar Cross Section of B-70 Aircraft,” 1960. originally secret, declassified report prepared for NAA describing the RCS of the B-70, and how to reduce it.

Subscribers/Patrons for the APR Monthly Historical Documents Program not only receive a monthly collection of aerospace goodies such as these, but can also pick up back issues all the way to 2014.

aerospaceprojectsreview.com/monthly.htm

 Posted by at 11:36 pm
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