Jan 282022
 

A trio of youngun’s react to The Smiths “How Soon Is Now,” and demonstrate a shocking lack of knowledge of basic 80’s culture. There’s a lot here where all I can do is shrug, kinda bug-eyed, and babble “uhhh…. but… ummm… how do you not… errrrrrrrrrr……”

That’s right: Get Off My Lawn.

 

 Posted by at 8:52 pm
Jan 282022
 

No boom today. Boom tomorrow. Always boom tomorrow. Or in this case, many, many booms from the Tonga eruption a few weeks back.

I do wonder if this is what a full nuclear exchange would sound like from a few dozen miles from a major cluster of targets. If you were on a boat forty miles out from, say, New York City and Putin and/or Xi started raining nukes onto it, would it sound like this?

 Posted by at 2:43 pm
Jan 272022
 

Whoopsie

 

“Three days before the Peacemaker premiere our [Scandinavian] booking agency [United Stage] dropped us from their roster because there was too little interest in the band,” singer Åge Sten Nilsen (aka “Glam”) said in a recent interview with Billboard. “I told them, maybe they should wait a couple of days … But they didn’t.”

 Posted by at 10:57 pm
Jan 272022
 

So, as Los Angeles and other localities allow criminality to skyrocket, new stories get crazier and crazier. Recently it was reported how trains are being robbed in broad daylight, with the thieves turning the region into a third world garbage pit. It got worse: the same spot saw a train derail, possibly because of all the garbage left on the tracks:

Freight train derails in Lincoln Heights

The local and state government have proven wholly unwilling to deal with the issue. But trains are almost definitionally inter-state commerce, so couldn’t the federal government swoop in? Granted, that would require that the FBI be able and willing to do its job, the Justice Department willing to prosecute *actual* criminals, the government as a whole being full of people willing to uphold the Constitution and their oaths of office. So… yeah, maybe not so likely to happen, or at least happen effectively. But at least theoretically, shouldn’t the FBI, ATF, IRS, DOT and just about every other Alphabet Agency be on the job here, ready to swoop in, snatch train robbers, and send them to some FPMITA Prison for a term of decades?

 Posted by at 3:59 pm
Jan 272022
 

So, remember how I was saying “Wu Flu infections are up, but actual deaths are stable, so it seems that things are kinda ok?”

Snerk.

First: Infections. It looks like the latest spike has peaked in the US (though obviously not in the EU).

So, huzzah. The latest version of “worst” is over, right?

Welllll…

 

A fairly straight upwards line for the past three weeks. Neato.

It has also been freakin’ cold in much of the US the last few weeks. Given how enthusiastic the US system is to report any death even remotely related to Pinko Pox as caused by it, it would be interesting – and rational – to try to correlate Commie Cough deaths with flu, pneumonia and other winter maladies. Further interestingness might be had by trying to discern how much of this might be caused by people not turning up their thermostats as high as they might due to the much higher energy costs. I know it’s often pretty frigid in *this* house, because my monthly gas and electric bills have doubled compared to a year ago. Interesting, that.

 Posted by at 10:39 am
Jan 262022
 

NASA has released a visualization of the Eta Carinae Homonculus nebula, creating a 3D simulation of it. One would imagine that with a decent 3D printer, access to the 3D model and some artistry, someone could make a decent-sized lamp based on this. Printed in transparent resin with appropriate thicknesses and areas of translucent dyes, filled with LEDs, such a lamp could sit on a desktop or hang from a ceiling like a chandelier.

 

 Posted by at 9:26 am
Jan 262022
 

Below is one of the diagrams that I used to help create “Lockheed SR-71: Origins and Evolution.” It is a Lockheed diagram taken from a CIA report showing the D-21 drone atop an M-21 mothership… basically a two-seat version of the A-12 spyplane. The D-21 program as a whole was a dismal failure, but launching it from the back of a manned Mach 3 aircraft proved to be fatal. Still, the D-21, for all the trouble it had, was an impressive piece of work; had there been more of a drive to make it work, doubtless Lockheed would have made it into a successful recon platform. But the time, effort and expense just didn’t compare well to results from spy satellites, and the program was ended. A number of airframes have been preserved, and there have been attempts to resurrect them for use as experimental platforms.

 

The full-rez diagram has been uploaded to the 2022-01 APR Extras folder on Dropbox. This is available to all $4 and up Patrons and Subscribers. If you would like to help fund the acquisition and preservation of such things, along with getting high quality scans for yourself, please consider signing on either for the APR Patreon or the APR Monthly Historical Documents Program.




 

I plan on uploading a number of the diagrams, art and whatnot that I used to create the CAD diagrams in “SR-71” the the APR extras Dropbox in the coming months.

 Posted by at 12:13 am