There’s a British gent named Guy Martin who has a YouTube channel. He used to race motorcycles, but more recently he’s become a television personality who seems to specialize in engineering and technical stuff.
I thought I’d do two videos today, one short, one longer. The short one: Mr. Martin goes to Japan and forges a sword with a master sword maker. As you know, Bob, I love hot metal and knives, so this is right in my wheelhouse.
The long: this is the first part of a series, “How Britain Worked”.
I had a long day and a late night yesterday. I had videos queued up for Tuesday and I have stuff queued up for the Thursday holiday, but I didn’t manage to get anything enqueued for today.
So here’s two longish things, one of which bends the rules a little bit:
“Tubular Bells: The Mike Oldfield Story” from the BBC in 2013.
Bonus video: this is my rule bending one, as it is actually a noir movie, not non-fiction. Lawrence mentioned this last night, and I thought I’d throw it up here since I don’t see that he’s blogged about it. This is also kind of a bookmark for me: I might watch this once I’ve caught up on sleep.
“Inner Sanctum”, from 1948. It’s only 62 minutes long.
In addition to this being a somewhat well-regarded noir film, it also features the great SF/fantasy writer Fritz Leiber as “Dr. Valonius”. If you don’t want to watch the whole thing, but are curious about Leiber, “Dr. Valonius” shows up almost immediately. (Edit: I was misinformed: the Fritz Leiber in “Inner Sanctum” is actually the writer’s father, not the writer.)
(See also. Affiliate link, but it delights me down to the bottom of my shriveled little coal black heart that a lot of this stuff is coming back in Kindle editions.)
My current boss is an amateur radio operator, and has far more experience and knowledge than I do. Since the lockdown started, my work group has been holding virtual “happy hours” outside of the work context (consumption of wine, beer, and spirituous liquors is allowed, but not required) and amateur radio is a frequent topic of discussion.
So I thought Saturday might be a good day for some radio related stuff.
First up, “What Happened to the Numbers Stations?”
Bonus #1: “HM01 – The Ultimate Radio Mystery”. HM01 is a numbers station broadcasting out of Cuba.
Bonus #2: “Tracking The Lincolnshire Poacher”. The first video above mentions the Lincolnshire Poacher early on, but if you didn’t watch it, LP is another famous numbers station.
Bonus #3: For something different, “Listening to Astronauts ON THE ISS with a Baofeng UV-5R”.
Baofeng UV-5R+ on Amazon. (Affiliate link.) It is a very slight exaggeration to say that you can get one of these with the change you dig out of your couch cushions.
I know I’ve been running long all week. I apologize for that: next week, I’m hoping I can keep things a little shorter. Also a confession: I’ve watched the second two videos, but I’m only about 50 minutes into the first one.
Since today is Saturday, and since this video sits at the intersection of two of this blog’s obsessions interests, here you go: “Hadrian’s World: Leadership Lessons from a Roman Emperor”. You know, Hadrian? The wall guy?
Bonus: We haven’t spent enough time in the UKOGBNI recently, so let us remedy that. “How To Make A Royal Marines Officer”.
Part 1:
Part 2:
Richard Van der Horst. More from the Telegram. I know this seems out of context, but it will make more sense if you watch all the way through to the graduation ceremony in part 2.
Time for some more military geekery. And I think that’s appropriate in this case, because this covers two interesting areas of research.
“Holloman — Frontier of the Future”, a documentary about Holloman AFB in New Mexico and some of the work going on there at the time. In addition to missile testing and flight operations, Holloman has a long (35,000 feet at the time: it was upgraded to 50,917 feet in 2000) rocket sled track: this is where John Paul Stapp did his work, and he’s interviewed briefly in the film.
Holloman was also the home base for Project Manhigh (though the balloons were launched from other sites).
Bonus video: and now for something completely different (and longer). I have not watched this yet, but I’m bookmarking it here for reasons I’ll go into in a moment.
Mr. Toner uses this to discuss the idea that defense of one’s self or those one loves is an obligation. More to the point, it is an obligation one has to assume on their own, rather than delegating to other people.
He goes on to propose that Chesterton be named the patron saint of handgunners, though he doesn’t shy away from the two major problems with this idea:
Chesterton wasn’t a saint at the time. He was under consideration, but the latest information I’ve found indicates that the effort has been abandoned.
There already is a patron saint of handgunners. Sort of. It’s complicated.
Slightly more seriously, this month’s essay by Tiger McKee in “American Handgunner”, “3 Questions To Stay Alive“, is worthy of your consideration. I think this is especially relevant if you are a new gun owner, but I’d argue that even experienced ones could benefit from asking these three questions. I’ve asked some of those questions myself in the past. I particularly like his “kitchen fire/building fire” analogy.
I think we’ve all heard the Creepy Joe quote about how police officers should be trained to just shoot people in the leg. Everyone who is a person of the gun (and a lot of people who are not) should realize this is obviously bolshie bushwa. (If you don’t understand why: try hitting a small target like a leg under extreme cognitive and physical stress. This is why police officers are trained to shoot “center of mass” aka “the biggest part of the body”.)
I’ve had this video in the back of my head for a while now, and I thought I’d post it as another reason why “shoot ’em in the leg” isn’t such a good idea. This is from Iran: the suspect in this video allegedly robbed a bank.
As best as I can tell, the police officer shoots the suspect in the leg at about the 30 second mark. Two points:
1. The suspect is still conscious and capable of putting up a fight for another 45 seconds or so after he was shot. How much damage do you think someone can do with a knife in 45 seconds?
2. The suspect bled out and died. Shooting someone in the leg does not mean “not lethal”. If you hit an artery, the person you shot can bleed to death before the ambulance gets there.
A couple of things I wanted to make note of, but didn’t want to put in the main video feed:
Great and good FoTB (and official firearms trainer of WCD) Karl Rehn did a really cool short video targeted at newer shooters explaining ammunition (and the various types thereof):
This was done for the Polite Society Podcast, which does, of course, have a YouTube channel.
(I should note that any Amazon links here are affiliate links, and I do get a small kickback if you purchase something through those links. I use those small kickbacks for good, not evil, though others might differ with that assessment.)
There is a delightful book that came out in 2014, and which was adapted into a Netflix series. Five Came Back: A Story of Hollywood and the Second World War is about John Ford, George Stevens, John Huston, William Wyler, and Frank Capra, and their WWII experiences making films for the military. I enthusiastically recommend this book, which is available for a very reasonable price on Amazon in a Kindle edition and used.
I’ve wanted to watch pretty much all of the wartime films Mark Harris talks about in that book, and I’m happy to report that some of them are available on YouTube in very decent quality.
“Thunderbolt” was made in 1944, but wasn’t released until 1947. Harris goes into the reasons for this in detail, but it basically amounted to: the war ended before the film was edited. William Wyler was, shall we say, distracted during the post-production: he’d suffered a total loss of hearing during a B-25 flight (in an attempt to “film more ‘atmosphere shots.'” for the movie.) He did eventually recover part of his hearing, and continued working as a director until 1970 with the help of hearing aids.
To be fair, these are not random YouTube recommendations. This is something I ran across a few months ago, and that became part of a small project I’m working on. I want to bookmark these here for my own reference, but I also think some of my readers (especially those with children) may enjoy these. Admittedly, they are about an hour each, but that’s why this is Science Sunday. And how long are your children’s normal school classes?
Between 1956 and 1964, the Bell System (you remember the Bell System, don’t you?) produced nine specials about various aspects of science. These were broadcast on television in prime time, and the first couple got pretty good audience ratings.
Frank Capra (yes, thatFrank Capra) produced and wrote the first four, and directed the first three.
I read a similar article some years ago in an Old Farmer’s Almanac, but haven’t been able to find it since, and people don’t believe me when I tell them about this.
Oh, they believe in the Great Crush Crash (which is given much love in this article), but people seem incredulous when you tell them staged locomotive crashes for crowds were a regular spectator event, and Crush wasn’t a one-off.