As disappointed as Banshee looks in these photos… she’s much, much more disappointed. She’s the most judgemental cat I’ve come across.
May 102020
May 042020
This is from more than a decade ago. But given how 2020 is shaping up, expect to see something not unlike this near you in the near future. Maybe a whole lot of somethings like this in November, if a Certain Someone wins re-election…
Apr 112020
I *believe* that this is Wally Schirra testing out the height of spaceplane test pilot fashion.
Apr 052020
She’s quite good at it. the other cats, not so much.
Mar 122020
Been a lot of rather doom- and’dumbassery-filled posts of late. Because, let’s face it, there’s been a whole lot of doom and dumbassery in the news.
So, here’s something a bit different… a few crappy photos of Speedbump discovering chicken jerky dog treats.
Mar 062020
When the temperature in the house is too low, cats have two options for being warm.
Option 1: for sociable cats, there is the “sharing bodily warmth” method.
Option2: For anti-social cats… “fark you, I got mine.”
Feb 282020
If you like the aircraft that applied atomic boot to Imperial Japanese ass – and who doesn’t – then the Smithsonian institution can hook you up. Not only do they have the famed Enola Gay on display, they also have a bunch of photos from 1945 up to more recent restorations available on their website in the form of a couple PDF collections. If you are building a B-29 model or are jsut interested in the B-29 in general or the Enola Gay in particular, this is a heck of a trove.
The first one is 419 pages (313 megabytes), with a lot of photos from what looks like the fifties to the nineties as the Enola Gay was trucked around and variously restored:
https://airandspace.si.edu/webimages/collections/full/A19500100000DOC20.pdf
The second is 318 pages (77 meg) and seems to be detail photos (mostly of pretty much individual components) from a restoration:
https://airandspace.si.edu/webimages/collections/full/A19500100000DOC06.pdf
A number of the photos can be viewed – thought not readily downloaded – here:
Support the APR Patreon to help bring more of this sort of thing to light! Alternatively, you can support through the APR Monthly Historical Documents Program.
Feb 222020
Fingers had surgery yesterday to deal with dental issues. This kinda came out of the blue (the last six months or so have seen a *LOT* of issues that just seem to arrive out of nowhere with little to no leadup, just… BAM). I should have seen it at least a few days earlier; starting about a week ago she became surprisingly friendly with me. She is typically pretty aloof; she was only ever really friendly with Raedthinn, while she sees me as, at best, a somewhat terrifying roommate. But it seems that the old girl was in pain and the only way she had to communicate it was through the appearance of affection.
Those who’ve been around this blog long enough might remember that 11 or so years ago she was badly wounded. It was the sort of damage that, had she been a human, said human would do little more than writhe on the floor and wail incessantly until pumped full of morphine. But Fingers… she just seemed to ignore it and get on with things. So either she’s grown soft in the years since, or she *really* hurt. In any event, I got her in to the vet as soon as I figured out there was a problem (I had about a 1/10 second glance inside her mouth, and had to struggle to get that; it was enough to tell me there was a problem) and they performed some dental work. Two teeth were to be extracted, but apparently they just sorta… fell out. This problem is not new; Koshka also had dental issues that resulted in two teeth just popping right out.
Fingers was unsurprisingly loopy when she came back from the vet. But once the anesthetic wore off, she went right back to ignoring me. Which would seem to be a good sign that the pain is gone.
Best way to pet Fingers is to catch her asleep.
The other cats have reacted to Fingers with complete nonchalance.
Feb 142020
Not only dimming, but it even *appears* to no longer be terribly spherical.
ESO Telescope Sees Surface of Dim Betelgeuse
Possibilities: the surface is asymmetrically cooling. Or it spat a fat blob of dust in our direction, blocking some light and not only making the star look asymmetrical, but dropping apparent brightness down to little more than a third of normal.
Jan 292020
Surprisingly, this has nothing to do with the space amoebas from Star Trek. That I am aware of, anyway…
NSF’s Newest Solar Telescope Produces First Images
This new solar telescope can see details as small as 30 kilometers on the surface of the sun. And while the still images are interesting, it’s the video that’s really interesting. What appears to be data dropout or some sort of glitch in the image are actually intensely bright little regions of high magnetic activity between the convection cells.
