As a followup to the large-scale Tirpitz model, if you want a 1/20 scale X-15A-2, these folks can hook you up:
It looks nice, it’s certainly detailed (I haven’t rivet-counted to assure that it’s *accurately* detailed). It’s just… a little pricey.
If they sell out, I might reconsider my abandoned 1/24 X-20 Dyna Soar…
Those people are wrong. This 1/100 scale model of the German schlachtschiff Tirpitz is loaded to the gills with lights, smoke, sound and moving parts. It’s clearly a labor love, or at least of obsession. (Note: the video is over sixteen minutes long, but it seems to crap out just before 8 minutes)
Imagine if the pizza shop robber had decided to take up building model ships rather than robbing pizza shops. He might have avoided taking a bullet to the face and becoming a laughingstock for the whole human race. I hesitate to guess what this Tirpitz model might sell for if the builder was of a mind to sell it; certainly far more than robbing restaurants would ever net.
A news story came out a few days ago that had a robber at a Philadelphia pizza joint strangling the woman who owned the place… and the robber getting shot in the face by the womans 14-year-old son (who had retrieved a pistol from under the counter) as a result. Video footage has come out and…. that’s not what happened. There was a robber to be sure; he was digging into the till for money and *not* strangling anyone when the kid pulled the pistol from his waistband (possibly) and capped the thief. The other employees at the store signed off on the original story, as did the cops, and no charges were filed.
“The Amazing Lucas,” who sadly has been getting sucked into the social justice rabbithole and losing his amazingness in the process, discusses this in the video below… and includes the security camera footage of the incident. The incident is, to be blunt, a thing of beauty. A worthless human decides to rob a place, rather than get a job; he catches a bullet to the face for his troubles. And nothing of value was lost except, undoubtedly, a whole lot of taxpayer dollars since he *didn’t* actually die and will now be patched up on the public dime rather than yeeted across the border (*any* border) with a trebuchet. Reasonable people will look at the video and conclude that the kids actions are entirely justified; indeed, he should be rewarded by the city government for good citizenship and *reasonably* good aim, as well as remaining functionally calm under pressure. But Philadelphia seems unlikely to be a reasonable place. The fact that the pizza joint was brazenly robbed like this fully explains and justifies the kids decision to pack heat (the video is hard to parse just before the actual shooting; the kids hands flash about wildly and he *may* have grabbed the pistol from under the counter, and what looks like him pulling it from his waist is actually him futzing with the holster the gun was kept in), but doubtless the local DA would view that as an opportunity for a show trial of the *kid* rather than the actual criminal.
It seems the kid, his mom, the other employees and the cops all lied in order to protect someone who *should* have been lauded. This is where we are. Sigh.
A hoplophobic argument easily defeated with this video. I mean, how else are you going to get a Christmas tree?
Still waiting for my box of books to get here from the publisher in Britain. As repeatedly mentioned before, I will sell a limited number of signed & numbered copies with signed & numbered 18X24 prints. The prints are unfinished yet, but the image below shows what I’m working on: a B-47E (in 1/100 scale), a B-52G and a B-52H (in 1/144 scale), with some of the payloads they carried. I considered the NB-52B, but it had so many payloads that it would end up being a crowded mess.
Opinions?
PS: unrelated to anything, anybody know what plane this is?
Covering yourself in Stretch Armstrong toys seems unlikely, but a vest made of layers of pockets each filled with the Stretch Armstrong goop? Might work, at least for pistol calibers. 700 Nitro Express? Not so much.
You *know* there is someone in your life that you want to give a gift wrapped in this stuff:
Seems it would work for birthday presents. And Presidents Day presents.
Yeesh.
When they tell you they can’t give you an aisle seat https://t.co/LP5khxiUsq
— Libs of Tik Tok (@libsoftiktok) December 14, 2021
Back in the 80’s if you wanted some high-quality censorship, you had to look to the Right… at least, the Christian Fundamentalist part of it. Church and parent groups freaked out about Dungeons and Dragons, and heavy metal music, and video games, and just about anything else that might be seen as fun, and those groups tried to ban or restrict them. Starting in the 90’s, though, the censorship pendulum began to swing *hard* the other way and for decades we’ve been dealing with power-mad Leftists trying to scrape society clean of the things they don’t like.
The “progressives” have had their shot… and they pushed too hard. Now it appears that on local and some state levels, right-wingers are pushing, with some success, for censorship of their own. So far, these are efforts to ban schools from mandating or even having certain texts. In many cases, these make sense: the drive to get rid of fraudulent racist agitprop like CRT and 1619 Project stuff. For the same reason children aren’t allowed to wander into R-rated movies, children should be guided through controversial or difficult subjects, and schools should *not* be teaching factually flawed topics, never mind factually flawed topics designed to psychologically harm the kiddies.
And in many cases, the individual works being banned are only faintly relevant, but it is understandable why they’ve been targeted. For too long the progressives pushed too hard; I suspect history might well show that “Drag Queen Story Hour” was the point where a whole lot of parents said “ok, I’m done pretending, that’s too much perversion for me,” and decided to just sweep the decks of anything remotely resembling that sort of nonsense. And in some cases, the books being banned don’t make any sense whatsoever apart from someone having simply read the title or done a keyword search.
The pendulum has not of course fully swung. These right-wing efforts are aimed at keeping these books from the libraries of publicly-funded schools. Progressive censorship, on the other hand, is aimed at preventing their targeted books from being published *at* *all,* to maintain a grip on the entirety of permissible thought. “Yeah, but both sides” does not really apply here given the massive disparity in goals and reach; let’s not forget that it was BLM that burned book stores.
There are limited hours in the day, and in the school year. There are subjects that schools should teach, and skills and knowledge that they *need* to impart. And then there are things that would be *nice* to teach, time and resources permitting. And then there’s “what the hell is this nonsense” that there’s really no good place for in school.
Turns out, “get woke go broke” has some merit to it.
The Salvation Army is current soliciting donations for the Kentucky tornado victims. Thing is… there are other charity organizations you can donate to. Charities that didn’t sell their souls to the CRT ghouls. The Salvation Army needs to collapse and then be rebuilt sans all the morons who signed off on their racist ideological nonsense. Same for any other organization or business that has dabbled with CRT and related grifts.