“The Orville” had been slated to premiere on Hulu in March, but it has been pushed back to June. if this promo is anything to go by, the production team has used their time well. I’m more excited about this than I am with all the current and future crop of “official” Trek cumulatively.
So, I had the opportunity to procure a box of vintage diagrams. This is not the sort of thing to be passed up. The shipper wanted me to pay the shipping cost, which is a wholly reasonable position to take; the most convenient shipping service for the sender was FedEx, so I got a FedEx account, created a shipping label through the FedEx website, emailed it as a PDF to the sender, he printed it out, stuck it to the box, dropped it off at FedEx on the 1st. It promptly appeared on the FedEx tracking site. Woo.
Delivery was scheduled for yesterday. It arrived in this state yesterday morning, with delivery scheduled by “end of day.” All plans for the day were put on hold to await the box; I have no desire for this thing to end up in the hands of porch pirates or drowned in rain. So 5 PM rolls around, no package. Perhaps “end of day” meant midnight. Sometime in the evening, the tracking info changed… now, “pending” and “no delivery date scheduled.”
Gah.
So I wake up this AM hoping that things will have changed. Nope. Noon rolls around, no change. So I called FedEx and spoke to a human. And here’s the problem. It got on a truck to be delivered to me, they scanned the label and found that the “to” address is the same as the “from” address on the account, and they got all confused, so they will sit on the package for a few *days* while they print up a new label and then ship it *back.* And since the “from” address is the same as where it was supposed to go in the first friggen’ place, “shipping it back” means sending it to me, where it was supposed to go anyway. Just delayed several days, because reasons.
Fricken’ bureaucrats.
There are two possibilities with a story like this:
1) Someone who *used* to be popular and successful, looking to gin up some controversy as a hail Mary pass at returning to the spotlight
2) She’d bugnuts.
Specifically:
— Susan Sarandon (@SusanSarandon) February 1, 2022
I can’t imagine that comparing police at a funeral for other officers who were assassinated is going to do a whole lot for Ms. Sarandon’s career.
Here’s a hint for Hollywood types who get the sudden urge to slander or libel good people:
So YouTube decided I needed to see a video from 2011, describing Whitney Houstons disastrous “comeback” tour in Europe. Like a lot of celebrities, her talent, such as it was, had turned to garbage due to drugs and ego, leading one critic to say (at the 37 second point) “she looked and sounded like a person who doesn’t have many years left to live.” Huh. I looked her up on Wikipedia: she died Feb 11, 2012 (in retrospect, that’s almost ten years ago, so maybe the YouTube algorithm is spooling up for the decade-festivities), about ten months after this piece originally aired. I hope the critic put in a bet at Lloyd’s of London about that…
With that headline, this could have gone *way* different. The difference between an entertaining YouTube video and a national news story? Nobody, neither The Guy nor The Cops, acted like a jackass.
Moral of the story? Listen to Chris Rock. And when you go out armed, go out Freakin’ ARMED.
I’m honestly a little uncertain about what the Canadian truckers are protesting. Something to do with mask mandates or some such.And while I might at one time have had a problem with people shutting down ,major highways in order to protest stuff that doesn’t make sense to me… 2020 pretty much burned me out: if I’m supposed to see racist morons burning and looting and murdering as “mostly peaceful protests for justice” then I can hardly get upset over truckers showing up somewhere in large numbers.
But the truckers don’t seem to be alone; Canadian farmers seem to be joining in. And the Canadian police, doubtless under orders from the feckless totalitarian “leaders” currently ordering the country about, seem to be trying to stop them. And farmers being farmers, they’re not overly concerned with such trifles…
I’ve heard people talking about a similar truck convoy that may head to D.C. I *really* don’t care what it might be that they’re protesting, but if enough tracks can get into that den of iniquity to shut the place down, and drown out anything Gropy Joe or Pelosi or any of those senile authoritarians might want to blather about, then I’m all for it. Too many of these politicians have used China’s viral gift to the world as a way to amass power; anything that stands up to them, I’m for.
Mandatory animation:
A brief summary of the realities of Social Security:
There have been a number of single-shot .50 BMG pistols over the years. None of ’em really seem like the sort of thing I’d want to shoot too often.
This is base don the same Serbu configuration that went kerblooey on Kentucky Ballistics some months back. Except in this case if it did that, it would shoot that endcap right directly into your face. So, ummm, watch out what you load this with.
Sitting at the L4 point, it is about a kilometer in diameter and should be relatively easy to access. It’d make a dandy base of some kind… load it up with radar, lidar and optical scopes and use it to help scan the solar system for asteroids and comets in need either of diverting from an Earth impact trajectory, diverting onto a Mars impact trajectory, or diverting into an asteroid miners bank account.
So a lot of “Shuttle II” stuff appeared on eBay for an exorbitant price. I’m becoming increasingly leery of plunking down excessive sums for this sort of thing… not only due to my own finances and the onrushing economic meltdown, but because doing so incentivizes sellers to slap even more exorbitant prices on things. But, I put this lot before my APR patrons/subscribers as a potential crowdfunding opportunity, and enough signed on that I went ahead and purchased the lot. It should arrive early next week.
As with all my APR crowdfunds, the cost of the item is split evenly among the funders; the more funders, the lower the price per person. Each funder will receive a complete set of high-rez (300 DPI, full color… higher rez if called for) scans of the items. Typically these crowdfunded items then get sent on to appropriate archive, library or museum, though this time I’m not quite sure where they should go.
If you would be interested in signing on, send me an email 
. There are currently enough funders that the per-funder price is ~$24 under $14; the more sign on, the lower it’ll get. If you have a price limit noticeably lower than $14, let me know in your email. This will remain open until the stuff arrives, presumably early next week. At that point it’ll be closed and the price set.
Additionally: the box shown below, loaded with blueprints/diagrams, is somewhere in the system headed my way. It was procured sight unseen; I have high hopes. This sort of thing is made possible by the APR Patrons/Monthly Historical Documents Program subscribers. If you want to help preserve aerospace history and get in on these goodies, please consider subscribing.
