Nov 302021
 

Looming threat from Commies? Check. Incompetent President? Check. Inflation? Check. Malaise? Check. NASA sans a space program? Check.

And then there’s this:

This 1977 Dodge Tradesman Sex Van Is The Greatest Vehicle For Sale On The Internet Right Now

It actually sold for $40,000.

While the van *screams* “70’s,” it has a shocking lack of airbrushed wizards, dragons, barbarians, dames in bikini armor. I do wonder just how insane a coke-sniffing dog would get if it came within a hundred yards of this thing.

 

 

 Posted by at 11:39 pm
Nov 302021
 

CNN suspends Chris Cuomo indefinitely

CNN is suspending prime time anchor Chris Cuomo “indefinitely, pending further evaluation,” after new documents revealed the cozy and improper nature of his relationship with aides to his brother, former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo.

It’s a fair reason to suspend Fredo. Of course, getting rid of him because he is a terrible journalist would have been a good reason too, but then, who would be left at CNN if they did that? Ironically the article is co-written by Brian Stelter.

 

 Posted by at 11:12 pm
Nov 302021
 

Elon Musk tells SpaceX employees that Starship engine crisis is creating a ‘risk of bankruptcy’

Ummm…

“The Raptor production crisis is much worse than it seemed a few weeks ago,” Musk wrote.

UMMM…

Raptor engines power the company’s Starship rocket, with Musk adding that SpaceX faces “genuine risk of bankruptcy if we cannot achieve a Starship flight rate of at least once every two weeks next year.”

UMMM…

A flight rate of once every two weeks within a year for a rocket that hasn’t flown yet? Ahhh… ummm…

 Posted by at 12:56 pm
Nov 292021
 

But not for lack of trying:

The Royal Navy tried to launch one of their kinda pricey F-35’s from the HMS Queen Elizabeth, but wound up sending it straight to the bottom of the Mediterranean where I assume a Tom Clancy-esque adventure is currently being played out between American, Russian, British and Chinese forces to recover the airframe from the sea floor a mile down. Perhaps shockingly, this was not a result of the F-35 being a hideously expensive disaster, but because apparently the deck crew didn’t remove a rain shield from an inlet, strangling the engine (it may also have ingested a cover than had been left on the deck).

Womp womp…

 

 Posted by at 11:11 pm
Nov 292021
 

The scan quality is terrible. The print quality was probably mediocre. But I get the feeling that the original piece of artwork, produced at Boeing in the early/mid 1960’s to illustrate the interior structure of the Saturn V S-IC stage (built by Boeing back when Boeing could be relied upon to build things like this), was a thing to behold. It was probably in all the colors that an artist working in paint or pen or even colored pencil could produce.

If anyone knows if the original still exists… let me know, and do what you can to make sure it survives. We should do everything possible to preserve the artifacts of our culture at its peak to preserve them against the dark age to come.

 Posted by at 3:58 pm
Nov 292021
 

An advertisement for Boeing from 1963, showing four very different products of Boeing’s inventiveness and ability to get things done: a jetliner, a hydrofoil, a rotating artificial gravity space station and a spaceplane. The spaceplane, the X-20 Dyna Soar, was cancelled the month after the ad was printed. The space station was never built. The hydrofoil was decommissioned in 1975 and never replaced with a more advanced version. The jetliner, the 727, took its last commercial passenger flight in 2019… 56 years after its first flight. The most advanced Boeing jetliner, the 787, is much more efficient than the 727, but is not a fundamentally different beast: it’s design would not have looked out of place in the design process for the 727, though the materials would have impressed the 727’s designers.

Sixty years ago, Boeing could bang out not only some amazing idea, but some amazing actual vehicles. and they could do so somewhere near the budget and somewhat resembling the schedule. Today? The SLS and the Starliner capsule are *how* many billions of dollars over budget and how many years behind schedule? How badly managed has the 737 max program been? Does anyone expect to see a “797” jetliner from Boeing anytime in the next twenty years?

 Posted by at 1:51 am
Nov 282021
 

One of the staples of Christmas-time television is the original 1947 movie “Miracle on 34th Street.” Since it was a successful and long-lasting classic, it was inevitable that Hollywood would get around to remaking it, which actually happened a few times before a big-budget remake was released in 1994. The remake featured Richard Attenborough playing the role originated by Edmund Gwynn as “Kris Kringle.”

In the original, there is a scene where Santa Claus is set up at Macy’s Department store receiving a line of children. they plop onto his knee, he asks them what they want for Christmas, and so on. But at one point a little girl is brought to him, her guardian telling Santa that she is a Dutch war orphan (this was 1947, after all) and that she doesn’t speak English; she just wanted to see him. Without missing a beat, Santa begins to speak to her in Dutch, eventually singing with her. It’s a nice scene, and sets up the possibility that Santa might not be just some slightly wacky nice old man, but might be the real Santa Claus. In the 1994 remake, a very similar scene ensues… but instead of a foreign war orphan, the little girl is said to be deaf. Santa, so says the mother, doesn’t need to talk to her; she just wanted to see him. Without missing a beat, Santa starts talking to her in American Sign Language. Like in the original, it’s a nice scene. But there is a detail that makes it nicer if you know it. The little girl was born deaf and was apparently treated like a celebrity on the set… but she was not given any rehearsal with Attenborough. She was told that her job was to just sit there and smile at him for a moment. But then Attenborough busts out the ASL, and the look of sheer joy on the little actresses face was genuine. When he asks her his name, she answers “Sami,” because that was the actresses actual name.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8dvqM5P6Fv4

 

(Hmmm… for some reason the above clip from 1994 won’t embed)

 

 Posted by at 8:30 pm
Nov 282021
 

A nearly universal good idea is to actively avoid wokeness at all times. However… I’m wondering about the value of flipping that from time to time. Consider:

And then:

And there are doubtless many more examples of corporations and educational institutions who made available “counselors” to deal with the self-important snowflakes who couldn’t handle the fact that the justice system actually recognized that being attacked by violent murderous criminals is a valid excuse for defending oneself. My first reaction would be to avoid these counselors like the plague that they are; a grift that has proven successful at extracting a pretty substantial pile of cash from companies either too woke or too cowardly to tell them to bugger off. But I wonder if a better approach would be for the rational, sane employees to, in fact, take full advantage of them. If your company offers you time off in any way to deal with the Rittenhouse verdict… *take* *it.* If they offer you counseling service with an actual human counselor (as opposed to an AI counselor), take advantage of it. And get as many of your co-workers to join in. Flood the lines. Clog up the works, slow down the assembly lines. Drown the company in the results of its own wokeness.

One can approach the counselor with a false face. Pretend to be woke and upset. But one can also approach them openly and honestly, mocking them and deriding their very reason for being. However, while that’s the more honest approach it’s also the one more likely to get them to simply shut you out. A third option: Abe Simpson the hell out of them. Start off with the fake wokeness, then ramble off into random irrelevant directions. Recite the full and accurate story of what happened in Kenosha, decrying the unfairness of killing a pedophile who only wanted to touch a minor, then diverge into a tale about how this one time, at band camp… Keep it up for as long as possible. Drown the counselor with unhinged tales of woe. Don’t just waste their – and your companies – time, but bore them to tears. If you can, lay upon them emotional distress. If you have any *actual* problems – alcoholism, drug addiction, terminal cancer, your dog just died, you’re in debt to the mob, whatever – lay that on them thick and hard. Make their job a nightmare.

This would serve two purposes. If done well, it will make life unpleasant for the grifters, and that’s morally praiseworthy. And if done on a large enough scale, it will make the whole thing incredibly costly for the company. And no matter how insanely woke a company or its board of directors are, they’re still in it to make money. If wokeness can be made to be seen as the drag on profit that it truly is, perhaps companies such as Best Buy and Levis will start to rethink this nonsense. instead of providing counseling services for insane, child molester-worshipping freaks, they can do the more appropriate thing and simply fire them.

 Posted by at 10:11 am