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Sigh. The Confederates just keep sucking me back in…

 AARRRGH, Crazy, dumbassery, Forward!, Gah., history, news, politics, ಠ_ಠ  12 Responses »
Aug 232017
 

I had much to do today. Picking up the F7F diagram and a roll of new large transparencies to make a few short cyanotype runs was the least of it. And while out and about I caught random snippets of this and that on the radio,  some of it I simply didn’t understand. Something or other about ESPN and the Confederates, which didn’t make a whole lot of sense at the time since it was my understanding that the Confederates had their asses handed to them by Sherman and Grant somewhere north of a century before ESPN came on the scene. I assumed that I was simply hearing things out of context, and when I had a chance to look into later I’d find that the story would make sense.

Nope.

UNREAL: ESPN Pulls Asian-American Announcer From Virginia Football Game Because His Name Is Robert Lee

ESPN pulled Asian-American sports announcer Robert Lee from this weekend’s University of Virginia vs. William & Mary football game because they were afraid he might offend people. Why? His name is too similar to Confederate General Robert E. Lee. For the record, Robert E. Lee is white and has been dead for over 100 years.

We are *DEEP* into the Stupid Ages.

 Posted by at 11:21 pm

F7F Diagram

 aircraft, APR, art, awesomeness, drawings, history, Patreon  No Responses »
Aug 232017
 

Thanks to some APR Patreon crowdfunders, I was able to procure a *giant* blueprint of the Grumman F7F Tigercat from ebay. Today I got it back from the print shop where it was scanned at 300 dpi, resulting in an image more than 29,000 pixels wide. The image was processed a little bit to reduce the file size from 900+ megabytes down to 100, and a half-size version and a B&W version. These files have been provided to the funders. The blueprint itself will now be sent on to a relevant and worthy museum or archive.

If you are interested in getting in on and helping with this sort of thing, consider signing up for the APR Patreon.

 

patreon-200

 Posted by at 10:56 pm

The I-15 Parking Lot

 AARRRGH, Crazy, Hmm..., news, Utah, ಠ_ಠ  4 Responses »
Aug 222017
 

Looks like for once I made the right choice: yesterday after the eclipse I launched directly out of Mackay, Idaho, and headed south on 26/84. The traffic was heavy, but not so much so that it stopped things from moving at highway speeds and I managed to get home in about 4 hours. I didn’t take the shorter I-15 route because I figured it’d be swamped. I later heard that other folks who *did* take I-15 made decent time; it wasn’t too busy.

It looks like what happened was that everyone in eastern Idaho also assumed that I-15 yesterday would be a nightmare and decided to wait till today to head south. With the result that I-15 became the parking lot the media had promised, just a day late.

Note that the northbound lane is *empty.*

 Posted by at 7:36 pm

Sure. I believe this story. Who wouldn’t?

 AARRRGH, Crazy, dumbassery, Gah., news, ಠ_ಠ  1 Response »
Aug 222017
 

Danish Submarine Inventor Says He Buried Swedish Journalist at Sea

Dane Peter Madsen now claims that journalist Kim Wall was killed on board his sub during a “mishap,” so, of course, he buried her at sea.

Uh-huh.

Guys. GUYS. Totally unrelated news story:

Unidentified torso ‘deliberately mutilated‘

Honestly, WTF is wrong with people? Dude had his own rocket company *and* submarines, and hestill apparently felt the need to chop a woman up into fish food?

 Posted by at 5:16 pm

Now the commies are going after Columbus

 AARRRGH, Crazy, dumbassery, Forward!, Gah., history, news, politics, THIS is why Trump won, youtube, ಠ_ಠ  15 Responses »
Aug 222017
 

First they went after the confederates. Then the Founding Fathers. Now Columbus.

What they are trying to do is erase western civilization, to replace it with some utopian socialist system based on some fraudulent idea of “justice” that has as much reality as Atlantis. What they’ll end up doing it getting more people like Trump elected, and very likely getting a whole lot of people injured and killed as they try to bring about their little revolution.

You want to take down monuments to Confederates? I’m right there with you. Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee were villains who took up arms not in the cause of freedom but to perpetuate and spread slavery. But when you go after Washington and Lincoln and Columbus? Screw you, buddy. You’re moving people like me into the “very definitely against *you*” category. How do you think it’s going to turn out when you’ve set the majority of the country at your throats? When you’ve done such a fantastic job of dividing politics into Us vs. Them and then made sure to alienate the majority into the Them category?

It’s one thing to tear down statues of Stalin and Saddam when their regimes come down. It’s quite another to tear down historic monuments to your nations heroes. And what these little pissants don’t seem to recognize is that if they normalize the destruction of historical artifacts, then *their* favorite things become fair play.

 Posted by at 11:08 am

Eclipse: Well that was a hell of a thing

 awesomeness, Hmm..., news, photography  4 Responses »
Aug 212017
 

So I crawled out of bed at 3 AM and wandered on up to Mackay, Idaho and parked myself next to the Mackay Reservoir, just a few miles from the centerline of the path of totality. The hour or so it took for the moon to crawl across the sun was interesting; but the actual period of totality was really quite remarkable. Perhaps most remarkable of all was that while it was getting perceptibly dimmer as more and more of the sun was covered up, the sunlight wasn’t really qualitatively different until that last tiniest sliver of sunlight was *gone.* If I’d been just a few dozen yards outside the path of totality, the experience would have been *wholly* different.

Unsurprisingly I took a bunch of photos. They are… ehhh. I think the best was actually taken with the old camera, showing both the foreground and the eclipsed sun in the sky. The sky really does go night-time dark; the sun itself is black (there being a moon in front of it) and the corona is obvious. The end result is that it looks like a friggen’ hole in the sky.

Below are some of the better photos. You can see some sunspots… and you can see that with the telephoto lens, I just can’t dial in a precise focus. I suspect it might be a bug in the lens.

Continue reading »

 Posted by at 5:45 pm

Sportsball

 AARRRGH, Crazy, Hmm..., Meh.  8 Responses »
Aug 212017
 

As well all know, the war crime known as “soccer” is just about the dullest thing in the known universe (“it’s worse than watching paint dry, it’s like watching paint play soccer”). However, it’s hardly the only crashingly dull sport to watch. I’ve never been any sort of fan of football (“American,” not “weeny”); it doesn’t interest me at the best of times, but it seems like every time I’ve turned on a football game, they weren’t actually playing football. Turns out there’s a reason why I have that impression:

An average NFL game: more than 100 commercials and just 11 minutes of play

The 11 minutes of action was famously calculated a few years ago by the Wall Street Journal. Its analysis found that an average NFL broadcast spent more time on replays (17 minutes) than live play. The plurality of time (75 minutes) was spent watching players, coaches, and referees essentially loiter on the field.

An average play in the NFL lasts just four seconds.

Feh.

 Posted by at 2:57 pm

WANT: STOL Edition

 aircraft, awesomeness, youtube  4 Responses »
Aug 202017
 

Back when I was young and filled with hope and excitement for the future, I wanted me an airplane. Granted, lots of people want airplanes. Some want luxurious corporate jets. Some want flashing helicopters. some want jet fighters. Me? I wanted something like this:

Sigh…

Now, this is just plain showing off:

 

(“Plain?” “Plane?” Get it? Bah.)

 Posted by at 3:09 pm
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