Some recent cat photos for those of y’all who like such things:
The above may look like I’ve grabbed Button’s paw, but what actually happened is that he jumped up on me, shoved his left paw into my hand then grabbed on with the right paw. He is… grabby. That’s cool and all until 3 in the morning when he decides he needs to grab my nose.
Banshee getting comfortable on my typing hand.
Speedbump sticking his tongue out.
One of a trio of orange cats that live up the road.
It writes itself:
Don’t say I never gave ya nuthin’:
And, yes, quite a number of photos of male Nazi soldiers dressed in wimin-skivvies are included. Warning: what has been seen cannot be unseen.
And on the off chance that this sort of thing is your thing, there’s a book.
For about a decade now I’ve wanted a really good telephoto lens for my camera. Unfortunately those things cost money. But a few days ago I came across a ten dollar Celestron refractor telescope in a thrift/used junk store, and it’s getting close to being serviceable. It did not come with a tripod, but I manged to fit it to a camera tripod.The balance is off when the camera is attached, so I duct taped some weights to the front end of it to balance it out until I get the fitting relocated. Tacky? You bet, but for the moment it works. The biggest problem is that it doesn’t focus worth a fart, but I seem to be slowly zeroing in on a fix for that by adding small bits of tape as spacers between the two lenses up front.
I don’t have a motorized equatorial mount (those things *really* cost money, and there’s no obvious cheap fix for that one), so astro-photos have definite limitations. Especially since the jury rigged connection with camera tripod is not rock solid, so some motion streaking and other weirdness occurs in some images. The first image below was an attempt to photograph Mars, the results of which are distinctly disappointing. But captured in that photo is a satellite passing by… I *assume* the wobbly pattern is due to the telescope shaking.
Two stabs at the Orion nebula.
A while back I stopped at the Brigham City airport. One of the hangars there is occupied by a warbird restoration company called “Forgotten Warbirds,” and on the day I stopped their doors were open. I took a number of photos. Nothing spectacular (cell phone camera… meh), but possibly of interest.
The full set of photos have been uploaded to the 2018-10 APR Extras folder on Dropbox for APR Patreon patrons at the $4 level and above. If this sort of thing is of interest, please consider signing up for the APR Patreon.
So there I was at somewhere around 5AM, wondering if sleep was ever going to be an option, when a distant but authoritative “WHAM” echoed through the house. “Huh,” I says, and go back to scribbling. A little while later the sound of approaching sirens, so, being male, I went to the front door to watch the emergency vehicles zip by in the dark. I noticed that they stopped not far up the road. So I wandered up that way to see what was doing.
D’oh.
What we got here: a 90-degree bend in the road (north-south to east-west) with an agricultural ditch running north-south, just east of the N-S leg of the road, passing underneath the E-W leg. Concrete barrier blocks *used* to wall off the ditch on the northern side of the road. Some of those barrier blocks are now at the bottom of the sea, along with a quarter of the truck.
This corner has been trouble before. But a new wrinkle was added this time. It has not rained in months; this is not exaggeration: September has seen *no* measurable precipitation. It was probably sometime in early June that the rain last fell and actually made it to the ground. As a consequence, the road has been covered with dust, dirt, tire rubber and leaked oil for months without any way to wash it off. And Tuesday the remnants of hurricane Rosa started to hit the area, dumping rain down with some seriousness. Wednesday was clear, but by evening it started raining again… not powerfully, but non-stop. So all that lubricant that had been deposited on the road all summer was *finally* getting slowly lifted off. But it’s a gradual process, and while it’s going on it’s almost like the road is covered in soap. So, here comes a truck. I don’t know the course of the event, but it can be guessed fairly clearly. So once again, exciting doin’s in downtown Thatcher, Utah.
I suspect the state environmental people are going to be thrilled that a truck went for a swim in a fast-flowing ag ditch, bringing all its oil and gasoline and radiator coolant with it…
Apparently the truck had one occupant, not seriously hurt.
Beyond a doubt, Raedthinn was the ladies man of the house. All the chicks dug him. With his passing, a hole has been left… many, in fact. But here’s Speedbump doing his part to fill the role of Feline Beefcake.
Does it work? Well, according to Fingers, the one female hereabouts… no, not really.
Turns out that the “Museum of Flying” has on display a large model of the Douglas Model 2229 supersonic transport. This design was studied for the FAA in the early 1960’s, and would have gone up against the likes of the Lockheed L-2000 and the Boeing 2707… had Douglas not determined that SSTs were economically infeasible and dropped out early. Consequently, the 2229 is one of the more difficult designs to get any good data on. I’d love to get a bunch of photos of this model from every conceivable angle (especially orthogonal views) and, it at all possible (very likely not), I’d also love to get measurements.
Someone visited back in 2015 and posted a few photos:
For all I know the museum may also have a nicely detailed engineering study document tucked away in their archive, but I have no “in” there to find out.
