UPDATE: ok, trying another video using the same song:
And some covers of the same song:
Sep 032020
Sep 022020
A while back I found two 8X10 glossies in an antique store. The owners had no information on the photos; they had come in a box of photos from an estate sale, the rest of the photos being completely unrelated. The store owners thought that the photos showed a test of a beam weapon of some kind. Not unreasonable for people not familiar with actual beam weapons or ballistic missiles. The photos are certainly evocative of death beams zapping targets in the sky. But what they actually show are missile warheads coming *down,* screaming towards the ground at incredible speed. When the photos were taken, I’ve no idea. *Where,* almost certainly somewhere in the South Pacific… most likely Kwajalein Atoll, a common target for ICBMs and SLBMs. *What* missile was tested, I’m also uncertain. One photo shows a single re-entry vehicle; the other shows three. The Minuteman III lobbed three warheads; the Peacekeeper, up to ten; the Trident, up to 14. This *probably* shows a Minuteman III… assuming that is actually a single test.
I’ve uploaded the full resolution scans of these photos to the 2020-09 APR Extras Dropbox folder for Patrons and Subscribers at the $4 level and above.
Sep 012020
I’d pay good money to see this. Maybe not in a theater right now, but, you know, Blu Ray or Netflix or something.
Enshortened version:
Sep 012020
Gee, when cops are actually allowed to do their jobs, those badasses in Antifa turn out to just be larping weenies.
Prepare yourself for the feel-good movie of the summer:
This whole summer of insanity could have been nipped in the bud if the mayors of Antifa-infested towns had simply allowed their police to police. Around here, the riots lasted… one night, maybe? The night it started, not only did the local cops show up to say “not just no, but hell no,” cops from nearby towns showed up. Cops from another state showed up. The police told the rioting morons that their nonsense would not be allowed and told them loudly enough and with sufficient backup. And what did the rioters do? Tucked tail and went home (after killing a few of their own, because of course they did). There have been threats and rumors since then, the odd door kicked in (one of the comic books shops near me got kicked in, as did the closest thing to a model kit-equipped hobby shop, because of course they did), but nothing like the nonsense in Portland or Chicago.
Watching this and other videos makes it clear that while Antifa and their ilk are certainly ready willing and able to carry out acts of violence and terrorism, they are themselves little more than cardboard cutouts. They truly are NPCs, programmed to make a loud noise and chuck the odd Molotov cocktail, but they largely seem ill prepared to stand up to even halfassed resistance from the good guys.
Sep 012020
When Jurassic Park was released lo those many years ago, one of the items in the *vast* checklist of merchandising that accompanied the flick was an animated TV series. Perhaps sadly, that never came to pass. A mid-90’s cartoon show set on Jurassic Park could have been awesome… or it could have been utter garbage.
So with that Schroedingers Raptor in mind, I present the trailer for Netflix’s “Camp Cretaceous,” a CG animated series that is meant to be set at the same moment as “Jurassic World,” just on the other side of the island. Unsurprisingly it will feature a group of Contractually Diverse children (including the standard “useless white guy”) as they try to reach safety after everything goes sideways with the release of the Indominus Rex.
This is a trailer for “Season 1.” My first question here is… “hey, didn’t ‘Jurassic World’ take place over a space of a few *hours*?” Hardly seems long enough for multiple seasons. My second question is “so just how rich are the lawyers for the families going to get suing the bejeebers out of whoever the hell is left of the company responsible for the dinosaur park?”
Sep 012020
It’s crazy enough to come off as something written by someone *pretending* to be a social justice warrior, but the website seems *kinda* legit.
Why White People Owning Dogs is Racist
The argument boils down to “since dogs were domesticated by Eurasians (evidence exists for both western Europe and southeast Asia being the point of domestication), it is cultural appropriation for white people to own dogs:
If you are white and own a canine, please consider donating them to a local POC family or non kill shelter so it can truly find the perfect home.
The website *looks* like a legit animal welfare organization website. No obvious signs that it’s satire. However, the website has only three articles, all written by the same “person.” It *looks* good, but it’s pretty devoid of actual information about the supposed organization. Google turns up almost nothing about the “United Wildlife Union” other than their website and some people talking about how bonkers the racist anti-white opinion piece is. This might be an exercise in web design wrapped around some ham-handed satire. But given how Cuckoo-For-Cthulhu-Puffs people are these days, it wouldn’t surprise me that someone is actually this bonkers. The more I look at it, the more it seems like satire… but these days I Just Don’t Know.
Sep 012020
Seems the tundra is exploding again:
Likeliest explanation is that global warming is causing the permafrost to be less frost and a whole lot less perma. Couples with subsurface methane pockets that have been trapped for millenia, every now and the the ground gets soft enough that the methane goes “pop.” I suspect a video of such an event would be interesting, to say the least. Unfortunately Siberia is kinda big, so being on the spot with a camera is an unlikely occurrence.
Well, there’s clearly only one country to blame: that’s right, the United States.
Aug 312020
This is certainly nice and generous of ’em: (in case it doesn’t embed properly, here’s the direct link)
For extra yuks, imagine that the actual password is “password.”
Aug 312020
Late 1970’s depictions of “realistic” starships as understood at the time. These include an Orion vehicle (which, despite claims to the contrary, would make a terrible starship, since the specific impulse of a reasonably conceivable Orion is an order of magnitude or two too low for practical interstellar craft), two Bussard ramjets, and a “golden globe” minimum weight starship proposed by Robert L. Forward, whose operating principles I am currently a bit fuzzy on.
Bussard ramjets would use magnetic fields to collect interstellar hydrogen. The hydrogen would be compressed in a fusion reactor, preferably a steady-state one, and used to provide thrust to the starship. For a number of years this concept promised great things, but in recent decades it has been pretty much discounted. On one hand, the magnetic fields are not very likely going to work well at a reasonable mass, and they tend to not form open-mouthed funnels, but rather closed-mouthed “cups,” thus preventing the hydrogen from getting into the engine. Whoops. Second, thrust is unlikely to exceed drag much above maybe a percent or two of lightspeed, meaning a Bussard ramjet might serve as a decent “anchor” or drag brake, but not as an accelerator to relativistic velocities.
Aug 312020
I honestly don’t know if this is silly or useful. Still… kinda cool:
‘Starfleet’ amendment puts Space Force in a political bind
In short, the amendment, put forward by former Navy SEAL Rep. Dan Crenshaw, would use Naval ranks rather than Air Force ranks. This may have been spurred on by an op-ed written by William Shatner.
Beyond changing names – Colonels would become Captains, for example, I’m not sure what *practical* difference there would be. There would doubtless be a change in the *feel* of the thing I suppose. And of course if Biden wins – especially if the Dems gain in the House and Senate as well – the whole Space Force will stand a good chance of vanishing like the Apollo Application Program, the Space Exploration initiative, the Nova booster and all the rest.