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Strange days at WalMart

 blather, Crazy, dumbassery, Gah., Hmm..., photography, Utah  5 Responses »
Jun 292017
 

So yesterday I wandered down to the WalMart in Perry to get some groceries. As I approached the front doors, a guy dashed out at a dead run, with a WalMart employee hot on his heels… but the employee basically stopped at the door. Seemed likely to me that it was a shoplifter. I didn’t feel bad about not going to chase the criminal down my own self. I wasn’t all that close, and the guy was *fast.* I’d’ve had trouble chasing him down in my car.

So, that over, I went into the store and did my shopping.

About fifteen minutes later I’m on my way out. As I approach the doors, a car zipped past the doors at an unreasonable rate of speed; following close behind it was a police SUV, lights and sirens going. I figured it was a speeder getting pulled over by the cops. Seemed odd to be that far into the WalMart parking lot, but oh well.  A moment later when I stepped outside, I looked off to the left and the car had pulled into a parking spot; the police SUV had pulled in behind it, boxing it in. As I was parked nowhere near that ongoing incident, I gave it no further thought.

I had no more than crossed across the “road” right in front of the WalMart entrance when the same guy I saw earlier went dashing back into the WalMart entrance. With the cop right behind him. Both were moving at speeds that made me feel real, real old.

OK, sez I, this might be worth watching. So I turned around to go back into the WalMart to see what might be going on in there. When I saw through the open doors the same guy yet again, heading towards the exit at a high rate of speed. But this time, before he got to the door the same WalMart employee I saw earlier intercepted him. It was a collision between someone small and fast against someone slow and quite a lot bigger. Speedy McShoplifter hit the ground and the cop was on him like white on rice. As I stood like a damnfool slackjawed toooorist in the WalMart entrance, the police officer managed to get the guy cuffed. That seemed to bring the festivities to an end, took the zip right out of the feller.

After more police showed up and  things settled down, I briefly spoke to the WalMart employee. My first bit to confirm was if that was indeed the same guy I saw earlier; turns out, yup, it was. The short story related to me was that he was indeed shoplifting and was chased out, then led the police on a merry chase around town… and then went back to the very same WalMart, apparently “looking for his girlfriend.”

I have the sneaking suspicion that interesting chemistry might be involved.

Because that’s what all the cool kids do these days, rather than making myself useful I took a few photos with my cell phone. Only one was any good, so here it is. There is almost certainly some interesting video of the incident… when the police officer grabbed the runner, a bodycam hit the floor. The WalMart employee I mentioned picked it up and held it afterwards, pointing it at the cop & the perp. That it came unglued when things got interesting is perhaps not a spectacular sign.

Shoplifters do not have my sympathy. Shoplifters who run back into the very store they just got chased out of? Yeahhh… what’s the *opposite* of sympathy?

 Posted by at 8:10 pm

Mirror-blueprints

 art, awesomeness, blather, cyanotype blueprints, drawings, Hmm..., new products, photography  6 Responses »
Jun 292017
 

For years I’ve been trying to find a cost effective way to create a convincing “gold” surface finish on models… not “gold colored,” or “gold paint,” but something that actually looks like gold. Chrome can be adequately taken care of with Alclad and a few other high end paints, and there is a complex system available that seems to do a damn fine job of laying down an actual thin layer of silver, but gold remains elusive.

One substance I recently tried, and was unsurprised to find didn’t work, is the Rustoleum “Mirror effect” paint. If you spray either the gold or silver onto a surface, the sprayed surface just looks like gold or silver paint. but here’s the selling point: if you spray it onto glass, the *other* side should actually look like a mirror. Kind of a neat trick, but not something I generally have much use for… the *outside* of a model is what matters to me, and I hardly need to fill my house with mirrors.

But I did try it out on a few sheets of acetate (or maybe mylar), just to see what the result was… and I was surprised to see it’s actually pretty spiffy. The sheets in question are 12X18 transparencies, printed with black-line diagrams; these were intended for use in creating cyanotype blueprints. But these sheets were abandoned for various reasons… the cyanotypes looked unimpressive, or the subject didn’t seem all that great, whatever. And so they’ve been sitting forgotten over the years. And they were sitting where the cats could get on ’em and scratch ’em up, so they were of no particular use to me. But then I sprayed them with the silver (and the F-1 diagram with the gold) and the results are really quite impressive.

They look perhaps not so much like mirrored glass as really, really polished stainless steel. The scratches and scuff marks – some in the shape of cat paws, because I guess cat paws are rough enough to scratch acetate – actually add a little something to them. Take a look at let me know if this sort of thing seems appealing and worth $10-$20 each for. I honestly don’t know, but they do look pretty interesting to my eye.

These are just the sheets I had sitting around that I’d written off. Obviously I’d do other subjects… the ones on the cyanotype catalog, of course, along with others. The Apollo 11 plaque seems like it’d be pretty snazzy done this way. Seems maybe maps might be interesting done this way. Put into some sort of production, the sheets would of course be newly printed, pristine and printed in reverse, so that the mirroring paint would go on the same side as the black-line ink. This paint is pretty fragile (low-tack tape designed to not pull up paint pulls this stuff right up), so that might mean that large format prints which would have to be shipped rolled might be impossible.

 Posted by at 7:35 pm

It’s like an old 1960’s Star Trek episode

 Crazy, news, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Jun 292017
 

Athens teen’s shooting death linked to feud between transgender groups, police say

The weekend fatal shooting of a teen at an apartment complex near downtown Athens was the culmination of a feud between two transgender groups…

Rayquann Deonte Jernigan, (a Klingon name??) 17, who was known to friends by the chosen name of Ava Le’Ray Barrin, (Romulan??) was killed Sunday morning by a single gunshot fired by 21-year-old Jalen Breon Brown (Andorian perhaps??)…

So Kirk & co. show up, get caught in the middle of the situation, spend two acts extricating themselves and finally escape, shaking their heads in disbelief at a situation that simply makes no sense… and glad to be out of it. Only McCoy has the rank and courage to bring up the makeout session Kirk had with one of the locals, upon which mention Kirk turns green, tells him to shut up and promptly leaves the bridge. He breaks into Scottie’s quarters and downs half the whisky.

 Posted by at 12:54 pm

Darwin Approves

 Crazy, dumbassery, news, ಠ_ಠ  11 Responses »
Jun 292017
 

Teen YouTuber Shoots and Kills Boyfriend in Video Stunt, Police Say

The stunt? That old classic… hold a book up in front of your chest and have your girlfriend shoot you in the heart with a pistol. With the right book and the right pistol, this might be survivable. The book used? A volume of an encyclopedia. So… not necessarily the worst choice. I’ve seen some beefy encyclopedia volumes. The pistol? A .22 would probably be good. A .380 might be survivable. A 9mm… you’re starting to stretch your luck. So what’d they actually use?

A Desert Eagle chambered in .50 AE.

 Posted by at 2:19 am

Honestly, I’m torn

 news, politics, religion  38 Responses »
Jun 282017
 

On the one hand, destroying government property = bad. But on the other hand, if that property is manifestly unconstitutional… Hmmmm.  I guess I’d rate this about like someone plowing through an illegal barricade blocking them from getting around on their own property.

Arkansas’ Ten Commandments Monument Lasted Less Than 24 Hours

Interestingly… I bet that a whole lot of the people who are outraged by this act of destruction would celebrate the destruction of an atheist or Satanist monument plopped right next to the Ten Commandments.

 Posted by at 5:31 pm

Babylon 5: the complete set

 art, awesomeness, history, science fiction  6 Responses »
Jun 282017
 

I just noticed that the complete five year run of Babylon 5 along with Crusade and *most* of the movies (doesn’t include “Legend of the Rangers,” which… is just as well) is available on DVD for a fairly reasonable price on Amazon.

 

Sad to say, but DVD is probably as good as Babylon 5 is going to get. To do Blue ray they’d have to completely redo the CGI visual effects, and there are two problems with that:

1: It’d cost a whole lot of money

2: A whole lot of the original CAD models for the various spacecraft have been lost. Sounds nuts, but it’s apparently true.

One option might be for amateurs to redo the scenes as a labor of love. You *know* there are enough fans out there with the skills to do it, but it’d be wholly unofficial. And getting hold of the live action footage in high rez might be problematic.

 Posted by at 1:22 am

Convair “Big Stick” nuclear ramjet

 aircraft, art, awesomeness, Crazy, history, nukes, projects, rockets, weapons, youtube  13 Responses »
Jun 282017
 

This was Convairs idea for the Pluto project… a nuclear ramjet cruise missile. Capable of Mach 3 flight at an altitude of 500 feet, it would be virtually impossible to intercept, and would have virtually unlimited range. The YouTube video:

There is more on the Big Stick, including diagrams, in issue V2N1 of Aerospace Projects Review:

http://aerospaceprojectsreview.com/ev2n1.htm

Thanks to eBay, I hope to, within a few days, have information on a subject related to Pluto/Big Stick that makes them looks absolutely tame in comparison.

 Posted by at 12:55 am

Rocket-powered B-29

 aircraft, awesomeness, history, rockets, youtube  1 Response »
Jun 282017
 

A 1948 USAF film documenting JATO units – liquid propellant rocket packs – for use on the B-29. four such units, two under each wing, would give the B-29 some substantial additional get up and go, along with giving it a spectacularly firey takeoff roll.

 Posted by at 12:35 am
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