A local animal shelter will sell you an adult cat for five whole dollars. A lot of these critters are *really* hard to pass up. But I already have four, and that’s enough.
The feller below had a bit of an issue, with the result you can see if you look closely enough.
And this last one: I tried several times to get a good photo of it but it was pretty mobile. It looked a *lot* like Raedthinn reborn.
On top of everything else, a couple weeks ago my phone started acting up in a “well, it’s about time to die” sort of way. I guess I should not have been too surprised… it was five years old, which is probably about four years past the expected replacement date. So, I had to plunk down yet more money to procure a replacement (a “mid-grade” version… I sure as hell wasn’t going to blow $900 on a phone). At least the new phone’s camera seems to work pretty well.
Examples: a few photos of Buttons taken at fairly extremely close range.
Bonus photo: Banshee saw a stargate and figured that that was her chance to return to her homeworld. Alas, it was merely Hollywood trickery.
Utah is a beautiful state, but it’s a bit lacking in the “critters” department. My cats have been dumbfounded and astonished by the change in environment. Here’s Buttons looking down on some fish, a thing he’s never seen before…
That there is a “ho-le-shee-it” look if there ever was one.
I walked into a “Field & Stream” store today just to see what sort of stuff they had. I expected it to be akin to the “Cabellas” that populate Utah… outdoor supplies, sporting goods, guns, that sort of thing. It seemed to be mostly much the same but there was a difference that made me shake my head.
I quickly made my way to the firearms. There in the case was the Sig Sauer “Spartan” pistol shown below:
This is a 1911 with some cosmetic details, which I don’t care much about, and a rail for a laser, which would be a handy addition to a standard 1911. I’ve little use for expensive cosmetics on firearms; I’m perfectly happy with my pistols being utterly unadorned. But as with all things, “Because I Wanted It” is a necessary and sufficient explanation for why any American should buy*anything,* from a Furby to a Pound Puppy to a Rose Tico inaction figure to a dressed-up pistol to an M-60 machine gun to an over-sized smoke-belching six-wheel-drive pickup truck to a “Hillary For President” shirt.
But this one was humorously ironic in my view. On the side of the slide in raised (and I believe quite inaccurate) letters is King Leonidas’ famed line, “Molon Labe.” This is the ur-text of the anti-gun-grabber movement; the Spartan kings response to the Persian demand that he give up his weapons was “Come And Take Them.” This is an appropriate sentiment for the side of the gun, but where it was problematic was the store itself. The “Field & Stream” store is part of “Dick’s Sporting Goods,” a company that *used* to sell all manner of conventional normal firearms, but a few years ago knuckled under to the civilian disarmament thugs and removed all modern sporting rifles from their stores. Not a single AR-15 or M-1A or AK-47 or AK-74 to be found. Dick’s responce to “give up your guns” was “here ya go.”
It was easy to leave the store without having spent a dime.
In the mad dash to collect what I needed for shipment (and for a time storage… there was, until a late development, the full expectation that I and my cats would spend a good long while as officially homeless), I looked through a great many things I had not examined in a long time, and wound up throwing a *lot*of it into the garbage. My college aerospace engineering homework? Garbage. The vast majority of the photos I took in my pre-digital days? Garbage. This was aided in the fact that the vast majority of those photos had found themselves under a leak in the shop roof and had been welded together into an undifferentiated brick of paper. But a few random, scattered photos were found more or less intact… and even then, most wound up in the garbage because, come on, they were little better than garbage when they were fresh from the developer.
A few that were deemed worthy of scanning were three taken when I was in Space Camp in 1983. The three, which are technically *really* *bad,* show a Grumman “beam builder” that we space tykes got to see at NASA-Marshall Space Flight Center. A device intended to by launched by the Shuttle, it would be fed rolls of aluminum “tape” and would bend, cut and weld them together into structural beams, sure just the thing that would be needed by the early 90’s at the latest to help build the solar power satellites, space station and early space habitats that would certainly be under construction by then.
As my damn near 40-year-gone memory suggests, we were told that the device on display was a *real* beam builder as opposed to a mockup. But I can’t be sure about that.
I’ve uploaded the three photos scanned at 600 dpi, including some modest “enhancements,” to the 2019-10 APR Extras folder at Dropbox available to all $4 and up APR Monthly Historical Document Program subscribers & Patrons. Is it great stuff? Nope. But what do you really expect from one of these kids?
The phrase “leaving money on the table” has, for reasons I can’t articulate, always set my teeth on edge. But it seems an apt comparison for this:
Here we see about *half* of the books that I couldn’t, for cost and space reasons, ship onwards… and that I proved unable to sell. Quite a number of used book stores and dealers were contacted, with shockingly (to me) little interest in them. So they are being left behind for the new homeowners to deal with. Which process will, I suspect, involve that giant dumpster in the driveway. Better them than me… the idea of tossing a 30-volume set from 1897 of “The World’s Great Literature” into a landfill fills me with a sense of ick. I suppose that it is truly no *real* loss; I got that set more than a quarter century ago when the library of the community college I was attending was themselves desperately trying to give it away. It’s virtually pristine, having spent more than a century going unread. And I imagine everything it it is available online; the set itself has quite possibly been scanned by some library or other and posted online in its entirety. Still… ick.
OK, the sale is over. Most items did *not* sell out, but I am now no longer in a position to package and mail stuff off. Perhaps sometime in the future I will try again with what I have left, but for now consider this an archive post.
Whoa. Not so long ago the DoD woulda *killed* to have the sort of capability now available to skilled amateurs.
Amazing the pictures you can take from your own backyard – like Alberto did in Italy. Just need skill & a telescope! pic.twitter.com/5o5R9Emvia
— Chris Hadfield (@Cmdr_Hadfield) October 10, 2019
As previously mentioned, I have a *lot* of National Geographics. I’d once hoped to have a complete collection, but now it is time for them to go. My collection is pretty complete back into the 1960’s, with scattered issues back to the 40’s. Since 2010 or so the collection is pretty scattered.
Rather than trying to sell the issues individually, I’m boxing them into lots by year. On ebay, issues from the seventies seem to be priced anywhere from a buck each to five or even more bucks each… so… call it a$12 for a years worth of Nat Geos, plus postage. A years worth of these magazines weighs about 10.5 pounds. Media mail would run $8, so $20 for a single year. Four years would fit in a larger box for $24 postage… call it $70 total for four years.
If interested in a year or more’s National Geographics, send me an email letting me know which. 
Homina.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light pic.twitter.com/aGRw4VowAQ
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 28, 2019
The Starship program will be updated during a livestream later today:
Forget about the design specifics; the thing that will impress me the most *if* the Starship prototypes work is the fact they were built not in a robotic factory in cleanroom conditions, but basically on a beach.
