A few days ago, a light plane crashed and promptly got run over by a train. The bodycam footage from one of the cops who yoinked the pilot out of the plane *just* before the train turned the plane into confetti is certainly worth watching.
New infections of Xi’s Disease are shooting upwards like a Falcon 9. This trend has been going on for right at about a month. It kinda-sorta looks like *maybe* the curve is starting to bend *slightly* in the direction of flattening, but unless it does so soon, the CDC will have to start digging up dead folks and importing foreigners to keep these numbers up. Soon there will be a million confirmed cases a day, and quite possibly more than that. At some point there won’t be more people to infect.
But actual deaths remain vaguely consistent, at ~1500 per day:
A few boxes of books finally showed up, shipped from Britain. Not as many as I’d planned on getting; with luck, one or two more boxes are simply working their way through the system slower than the others. UPDATE: the rest showed up. However, I can only make firm plans for the books I actually have on hand.
I plan on selling signed, numbered and dated copies for $55 each plus shipping (cheap in the US, but doubtless ridiculously expensive elsewhere… international postage is nuts these days). To sweeten the deal, these will all come with three 18X24 signed, numbered and dated prints of the B-47 and B-52.
To start off, I will auction off the first five copies. To sweeten *that* deal, numbers 3,4 and 5 will have a fourth 18X24 print… from the currently in-progress Book 3. Numbers 1 and 2 will have an additional 18X24, also from Book 3. The subject of Book 3 has not been made public yet, but I trust that it and the diagrams will be of considerable interest to anyone who has purchased “SR-71” and “B-47/B-52.”
The auction will be simple: send me your bid (in excess of $55) and the highest bid gets #1, second highest gets #2, and so on. Send your bid to scottlowther@up-ship.com before the end of the day Sunday.
After that I will sell off the other signed copies, starting with those who signed up. Hopefully more will arrive by that point, but for right now it looks like There will be a grand total of only 18 23 signed and numbered copies on the entire planet. So… who knows. Collectors items.
This is kinda remarkable… as much for the fact that it seems to have not been dealt with as for what it is. Maybe it’s untreatable, but you’d think that modern surgery and such could have at least kinda-sorta kept this in check. As it is, it looks like he will lose vision pretty soon unless something is done.
https://www.gofundme.com/f/1oj1rds26o
I don’t doubt that there are some massive medical bills here. But I also would bet a nickle that there are a lot of doctors who would fly across the planet to treat such problems among third worlders for free; you’d think that they’d be willing to do the same for an American in need. You’d think. But then… maybe there’s not much that can be done here. Shrug.
Yesterday some boxes from Britain showed up with some copies of my new book:
I will be selling these as signed copies for $55 plus postage. My plan at this time is to sell a very limited number (I currently have a grand total of 18 copies on hand; I have hopes for a *few* more to show up) with three 18X24 prints. all singed and numbered. However, fiver copies, #’s 1 through 5, will be auctioned: the idea is that the highest bid gets #1, second highest gets #2, etc. As a bonus, #’s 3,4,5 will get one extra 18X24, which will be a diagram from the currently in-progress Book 3. #’s 1 and 2 will get *two* prints from Book 3. Pretty sure that these extra diagrams will be of considerable interest to anyone who bought my SR-71 book and the B-47/B-52 book. I will contact the list of folks who signed on in a day or two.
If you want to just go ahead and buy a regular copy, it’s available from Mortons in Britain and, in a few days, from Amazon.
A few days ago a series of auctions for 1940’s (mostly Goodyear) blimp and barrage balloon diagrams ended on eBay. I tried to get them all, but got outbid on all but one. Nevertheless, the photos posted to eBay might be of interest to some folks.
When I lived in Utah I’d occasionally go on trips throughout the southwest. Far from civilization, radio stations would fade out and sometimes the only stations that came in were native American language stations… Navajo and such like. It was always interesting to listen to those for a bit; you could often figure out roughly what they were discussing because their conversations were so heavily laden with English loan-words. A lot of those folks half a limited grasp of English; this is a category of “person who lives within the confines of the United States” that I don’t have a problem with them not learning English or assimilating into American culture. It’s probably not *wise* for them to not assimilate; it leaves them on the outside. But in their case, I see no ethical or moral problem for them choosing to be on the outside, since the outside kinda came up and swallowed them.
A similar situation, I imagine, exists in Australia with the Aborigines. They have their own languages and a lot doubtless don’t understand English. So it makes sense for Important Government Messages to be translated for them. But *this* message from Western Australian Premier Mark McGowan about the importance of getting vaccinated… I have to question the utility of the translation.
Might be of some interest to some… a forthcoming 1/48 scale model of the 1962 Grumman take on the LEM. Lots of details to add, but these get the idea across.
UPDATE: Well, poop. looks like the video got yoinked. My guess is that it was removed for copyright reasons due to the use of the Jam Hammer music.
– – –
More specifically, the video of a seriously obese orangutan driving a golf cart set to Jan Hammer music from “Miami Vice.” Truly, the 80’s were a magical time.
PS: it would be my guess that the golf cart has secondary controls, especially as you can briefly glimpse a human in the passenger seat.
ST:TMP was a flawed movie, but it’s still quite good. It is often slower than dirt and some of the visual effects were pretty bad (a few of the matte paintings, especially closeups of the upper side of the saucer section near the end of the movie, were criminally incompetent). Fortunately, in 2001 the director was miraculously given the time and money to do a “Directors Special Edition” that recut things a bit and added all-new modern CG effects shots. The result was a movie that was quite a bit of an improvement over the theatrical cut. Over time, though, a serious problem arose: the special edition was shot only at DVD resolution.
Huzzah! They spent the money to create all those new scenes *again,* this time in 4K resolution, for release sometime in early 2022.
New images from the STAR TREK: MOTION PICTURE Director's Edition 4K remastering
Left: 2001 DVD
Right: 2022 4K Remaster(images via @startrek)#StarTrek pic.twitter.com/uGcKEM46Xm
— TrekCore 🖖 (@TrekCore) December 14, 2021
New images from the STAR TREK: MOTION PICTURE Director's Edition 4K remastering
Left: 2001 DVD
Right: 2022 4K Remaster(images via @StarTrek)#StarTrek pic.twitter.com/XxrQ3Gmwj4
— TrekCore 🖖 (@TrekCore) December 14, 2021
New images from the STAR TREK: MOTION PICTURE Director's Edition 4K remastering
Left: 2001 DVD
Right: 2022 4K Remaster(images via @StarTrek)#StarTrek pic.twitter.com/zSmjnU5mkB
— TrekCore 🖖 (@TrekCore) December 14, 2021