Friday Ephemera
At last, a paper calculator. // Starring the computer. As seen in film and television. // Fun with grammar. // Flexils, like pencils but flexible. // Hippo table of note. // Hamster Mario. // The horsemen of Semonkong. (h/t, Coudal) // On the origins of Dick. // Arthur C Clarke reads extracts from 2001: A Space Odyssey. // Ruben really likes his job. // No, you fool. The other red one. // At last, your very own remote-controlled tugboat. // In 120 years, sprinters have gotten faster. (h/t, Things) // Tall and twisted buildings. // Well, it’s one way to do it, I suppose. // Umwelt. // Visiting cousin. // Shadow sculptures of note. // Sshh. Don’t tell them. (h/t, Ace) // Hornet turban. // Sliding doors of note. // Caterpillar excursion, Perth. // And finally, a near-perfect display of crashing very slowly.
Fred,
The sort of thing you witnessed at Moffett just isn’t happening at Toronto:
To get to Lake Ontario, they fly south east on the same departures and approaches as commercial aircraft. The area of the airshow is over by Billy Bishop TCA.
So all the sporty flying is out over the water, and the twit with his knickers in a knot is carrying on about something about which he is abjectly ignorant, and, to no one’s surprise, failed to research.
Not as noisy or panic-inducing as the T-birds or Blue Angels… Well, they are Canadians, so they are nicer…
Ruben really likes his job.
In 1965, I had a summer job operating non-self-leveling elevators. Somewhere in my vast archive is an Elevator Operator’s License.
More idiocy from Mizzou, unisex bathrooms renamed because the name isn’t inclusive enough.
Anyone “hurt” by the name on a bathroom needs a canvas camisole with wraparound sleeves, and to be made a ward of the state, for example one Stuart Waldman.
Of course he is.
Annnnnnnnnnnnd we come full circle. No doubt it took a committee, focus groups, and polls to come up with the same idea ever one hole gas station in the country has had since they invented indoor plumbing.
If only there was something that could have been learned from the prior episode.
I remarked to my girlfriend that I hoped there weren’t any Vietnamese watching in the area because of the flashback-inducing quality of the experience.
As it happens the other day I was attending a high school soccer game and sat next to the parents of two of my kid’s teammates, both of whom did the whole “boat people” thing. The father never ceases telling people what a great country the U.S.A. is. BTW, he took the family to California for a short vacation and visit relatives. Two stops: Disneyland and the Reagan Library.
Lovely people.
So once these scumbags have had a shit in someone’s garden will capitalism fall?
Of course it will, Joan. It’s always worked before.
>_<
So once these scumbags have had a shit in someone’s garden will capitalism fall?
It’s as good as any plan they’ve ever come up with. And curiously, their plans always seem to entail vandalism, squalor, thuggery and acts of colossal wankerdom. I can’t help feeling that tells us something.
Tells us something? Heh.
What it tells me is that they’re over-indulged overgrown adolescents behaving as toddlers throwing tantrums. They are doing so because, I’d wager, throwing tantrums has gotten them what they wanted all their lives.
Regarding our class “warriors,” its simply a fashion statement. If it were otherwise, they’d be booking one-way flights to Venezuela forthwith. Though I suppose someone should let them know that in Caracas, the hunger strikes aren’t ironic or voluntary.
R.Sherman: Hence my remarks about Good Things.
Farnsworth: I’m happy to hear about the ATC measures for the show. I watched a lot of airshows over the Silicon Valley and San Francisco areas, and I was always made a bit nervous by the flight paths. Bad things can happen – somewhere I’ve got a photo showing five long black scars in the Nevada desert, in perfect echelon formation, showing where the entire show team followed their leader into the ground (during practice, thank god).
My old man did a lot of aviation accident flight research, so I’ve been exposed to more than a fair share of this stuff. Also, there was a midair collision between a Navy P-3 and a NASA CV-990 on approach to Moffett in about ’72, both planes’ debris ending up on the 12th green of the Sunnyvale golf course. He usually commanded NASA missions in that CV-990, but that day was testing some noise-abatement procedures in a United DC-8 at SFO.
I guess I’m just a bit more nervous about aviation risks than most folks.
Fred,
My dad was an E.E. for McDonnell-Douglas and did internal navigation for the Mercury and Gemini missions. He also did a lot of work on A4s, F4s and F15s before he retired. As a kid, I always looked through his Aviation Week & Space Technology magazines before he got home.
throwing tantrums has gotten them what they wanted all their lives
If only they’d encountered Sheriff Taylor at some point.
So once these scumbags have had a shit in someone’s garden will capitalism fall?
I’ve only had one first-hand exchange with a professed member of Class War. It didn’t reveal evidence of a nimble mind. But then we’re talking about a self-styled “working class action group” that’s basically a few dozen borderline personalities looking for a pretext to wear balaclavas and indulge in a spot of thuggery – say, by waging a “decisive battle against gentrification” by smashing the windows of an estate agent.
Given their stated goals and revolutionary bluster, their actions have zero effect beyond disgusting the very people in whose name they claim to “struggle.” But if you think of it as a fig leaf for narcissism, psychodrama, and outright sociopathy, it makes a little more sense. There will always be some excuse to smash someone’s windows or shit in someone’s garden.
And it’s the kind of “movement” that attracts clowns like self-styled “rebel ethnographer” Dr Lisa Mckenzie, whose strange mental adventures have previously entertained us.
Bad things have happened at airshows:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=opzbgC_9z_8
Bad things have happened at airshows:
Bad thing have happened at auto races. In both instances that is why spectator control and safety measures, e.g., such things as carefully designated flight paths and crash fencing, keep improving.
Bad things have happened at airshows:
Bad thing have happened at auto races.
And at air races.
I met Jimmy Leeward back in 1991. At that time, the “VIP seating” where he crashed was off-limits when aircraft were under way. It was the “run-up” area where they warmed up their engines before taking off.
I’m certain this is a parody:
http://mascupathy.org/what-is-mascupathy/
I mean, it must be, right? Right?
Sonny: Apparently not.
Though it does, perhaps inadvertently, serve as a trove of comedy material, e.g. this description of news anchor Brian Williams:
He’s the smart-aleck kid, with a little of the bully in him, who gets the prettiest girl. He’s cool but probably thinks he’s cooler than he really is,
And:
Keillor and Stewart are like your ministers: for years you sat in the same pew, and time after time you listened with real attentiveness, sometimes laughing, other times jolted into self-examination. But, like holy men, these guys have been guides to your spiritual life: you, all of us, have been chastened and purified by their speaking the truth.
I think these Mascupathy guys live some place, some how, where they think these folks warrant this admiration. We need a term for it, right?
They are Bubble Boys.
The basic problem with the Mascupathy guys is simple. They do not have any relatives or close acquaintances who are
– plumbers
– construction workers
– urban cops
– sergeants
– bus drivers
– UPS drivers
– longshoremen
– power plant engineers
– Mike Rowe
etc.
In their world, all that dirty, heavy, dangerous stuff isn’t really there. All the nice stuff they depend on every day, like the 110 volts in the wall and the clean water at the tap, is just there, like air.
They live in fantasy land.
Virtually all men struggle to some degree with mascupathy — a pathology of masculinity…
If one wants to coin a pseudo-scientific neologism that is a mash-up of Latin and Greek, that should be “masculopathy”.
We need a term for it, right?
I think “Snake Oil Salesmen” might work. I doubt Donaldson got, “his two homes on Beaver Island and in Petoskey, Michigan both of which overlook the shores of Lake Michigan and provide ideal settings for reflection and writing,” from teaching English.
The march of the processionary caterpillars reminds me of the passage in Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, (my favorite book, since you asked, wherein:
I’m quoting the linked blog post, not Dillard herself.
It’s a great book. If you haven’t read it, go and do. It’s about the Wonder and Horror of the natural world, a brilliant offshoot of Thoreau’s Walden without the 19th-century certainty. I have run into few writers who can match Dillard’s gift for word choice and imagery.
If nothing else, read the chapter on “Intricacy.” It will blow your MIND.