I’m not a fan of sportsball, so I don’t watch it on TV. I *certainly* don’t take the time to go to a stadium to watch it, and obviously don’t spend the exorbitant sums required to do so. But those who have the interest… fine, great, go for it. but what I just don’t get: spending the money to go see sportsball, but not actually watching sportsball once you get there. Seems to kinda miss the point. But maybe I’m old fashioned.
Box art of Fantastic Plastic’s 1/144 Rocinante model has been released. The kit will be released soon, I gather. Sign up and get in on the list before the only ones that are available are on eBay…
“Rosanne” was the biggest success of the last broadcast TV season… and ABC has decided that they don’t want any more of it.
Early Tuesday, star, head writer and exec producer Barr attacked Valerie Jarrett, a senior adviser to former President Barack Obama, in a since-deleted tweet in which she said “Muslim brotherhood & planet of the apes had a baby=vj.” Barr subsequently apologized: “I apologize to Valerie Jarrett and to all Americans. I am truly sorry for making a bad joke about her politics and her looks. I should have known better. Forgive me — my joke was in bad taste.”
And due to that bad joke, everyone who works on the show is now unemployed again.
But wait! There’s more!
Stuffing the *previous* seasons of the show down the memory hole because of a bad joke.
A piece of 1960’s aerospace concept art depicting a sizable (50 to 100 crew) space station equipped with three modules at the ends of arms, intended for artificial gravity via centrifugal force. Presumably the conical structural at the left would contain the nuclear reactor, shielding and radiations; presumably the modules on the hub at the far left would be non-rotating to aid spacecraft docking. Unclear what the source is… but I’d bet on either North American Aviation or Lockheed.
I have uploaded righ-rez scans of both sides of this B&W photo glossy to the 2018-05 APR Extras folder on Dropbox for APR Patrons at the $4 level and up. If you are interested in these images and a great many other “extras” and monthly aerospace history rewards, please sign up for the APR Patreon. What else are you going to spend $4 a month on?
This is less-than-spectacular news…
There is some structural damage. This doesn’t seem to be the result of any one accident or incident, but the result of simply being a nearly 60-year-old floating structure. As such, it seems to me that if need be an all-new one, built to the same design but using more advanced materials, could be manufactured and simply swapped for the old one with relatively minimal headache. But then what to do with the old one? I think that a good case can be made for stripping it of Useful And Important Stuff, plaques and whatnot, and moving them to the replacement memorial, and then moving the old memorial out to sea, calmly sink it and turn it into the basis of a new coral reef for the critters.
A few news items of interest:
Russia is opposed to a US military base in Poland for reasons that are at best unclear. Off the top of my head, only two reasons would exist:
One of those ideas seems more likely to me than the other.
If Russia neither fears Poland nor plans on conquering Poland, then their best course of action would be to shrug off the US military presence and spend not a single ruble on countering it.
And…
Far as I know, the only parties who dispute that the South China Sea is international waters is China.
It’s strange when you hear an offhand reference to a news item from a day or two back, finally get a chance to look it up online, find references to news items… then find that those links lead to black holes because the press has been ordered not to report on something clearly newsworthy.
For example, here’s a headline from Fox News:
There are a few bits of that headline that might be unfamiliar to Americans, or at least non-Brits. “Tommy Robinson” is an English guy who has been a vocal supporter of England staying English. In other words, he’s not a big fan of the mass immigration that Britain has seen in recent years. “Child grooming” has little to nothing to do with, say, barber shops or nail salons for kids, but is instead a reference to the rise in organized sex trafficking of children that has been brought on by Britains recent experiment in Cultural Enrichment. So, y’know, the two concepts are kinda related.
Since this is a British news story, it seemed to make sense to take a look at British news reports. So Google News pulls these two up first:
EDL Founder Tommy Robinson ‘arrested’ while filming outside court
And:
EDL Founder Tommy Robinson ‘arrested filming outside grooming trial’
Both of them go to 404 errors. *One* such would be odd, but *two* indicates something screwy going on. And the Fox article provides some clarity:
The judge in the case on Friday slapped a reporting ban on the case. The order bans reporters from reporting on a case if there is reason to believe the reporting could prejudice a trial. The order prevents reporting until the conclusion of the trial Robinson was reporting on.
“Freedom of the press” to report on things that are publicly known does not exist in Britain. This seems to be a bigger issue than just the newspapers not being able to report on Robinson’s arrest… the fact that he was arrested in the first place – for “breaching the peace” while apparently doing nothing more than reporting on an ongoing criminal trial – would seem to indicate that the press serves at the pleasure of the British government. And if the timeline presented by the Fox article is accurate – Robinson was arrested on Friday, May 25, and by that afternoon was already sentenced to 13 months in prison (quite possibly a death sentence given that British prisons are filled with just exactly the people that Robinson doesn’t like, and they don’t like him), then it hardly seems like Robinson would have had time to call a lawyer much less put up any sort of defense.
There are many in the US who want the US to adopt the ways of the UK with regards to gun control, healthcare, overall government control. I wonder if they’d also like the US government to be as cavalier about the rights of Americans to report the news.
The ironic thing: how well the main theme of “The Expanse” works with footage from Jeff Bezos’ main rival…
Thunderf00t takes down yet another “WaterSeer,” a device that claims to extract useful quantities of drinkable water from the air. This time it’s called “Zero Mass Water” and is simply a solar panel attached to a dehumidifier. It’s unclear to me why it has a *huge* panel (48×96 inches) with only a dinky PV array in the middle, rather than covering the whole thing. The problem, as with the “WaterSeer,” is simple: if you live in the desert, where water from the air would be *fantastic,* there’s virtually no humidity for the dehumidified to actually work with. if you live somewhere that’s humid, then you probably get a lot of rain… which is *already* free water from the air.
Thunderf00t also shows how it would be cheaper to simply truck water a thousand miles than to use these “ZeroMass Water” panels.
Now all someone needs to do it figure out how to integrate these solar panels & dehumidifiers into roadways… hmmm…
Some years ago, the news was filled with reports of Bad Cops doing Bad Things to innocent civilians. The cops f course claimed that they were Good Cops and that the innocent civilians were actually Violent Criminals…but the public mob wasn’t in the mood to listen to such nonsense. Only the stories of the poor innocents were be believed. Because if you didn’t automatically believe them, you were a (fill-in-the-blank… racist, sexist, transphobist, fascist, whatever). So more and more cops started wearing body cameras and recording their interactions with their “customers.” And so far a lot of the results are pretty interesting. Such as:
And…
And…
And…
And…
And… … … …
There will always be claims of “racist cop” or “police brutality.” Some will be true. Some will be false. But before the advent of the body cams, *all* such claims were essentially believed automatically by a very large number of people. Now, there is video evidence that at least *some* of the claims are not just wrong, they are slanderously wrong, to the point of being criminally actionable.
Before, the viewpoint expressed by many activists was “all cops are bad, just look at all these examples of police brutality.” Now, these claims are in many instances *provably* false. Will that change the viewpoint of the extremists? Nope. Will it shift the viewpoint of the great mass of folks in the middle? Just might.