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“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 325

Friday, February 19th, 2021

Just a random assortment today. Think of this as like a Whitman’s Sampler that you picked up at the grocery store after Valentine’s Day for 50% off. At least, you would have IF YOU HAD BEEN ABLE TO GET OUT TO THE GROCERY STORE THROUGH THE SNOW AND ICE IN AUSTIN.

Not that I’m bitter or anything.

Anyway: The Pogues perform “London Calling”. Without Shane MacGowan, but with Joe Strummer.

This next one requires a bit of background: I’ve posted videos from “Captain Joe” before. If you’re the kind of person who sees videos of air traffic control conversations pop up in your feed, you’ve probably heard of “Kennedy Steve”. Steve was a controller at JFK (he retired a few years back) who became somewhat of a legend for his sharp (and often amusing) exchanges with pilots, ground crews, and others. Especially those who were keeping traffic from flowing in and out of JFK. Here’s a random example, which may not be the best: search “Kennedy Steve” on the ‘Tube.

ANYWAY: Captain Joe interviews Kennedy Steve. This is basically RoadRich bait.

“How to Poop in the Woods and NOT Die”. Do I really need to put a content warning on this? Well, maybe. Content warning.

I would like to note, for the hysterical record, that How to Shit in the Woods: An Environmentally Sound Approach to a Lost Art is still in print (in a 4th edition, no less) and is readily available from Amazon (affiliate link).

Bonus: this is short, but I did get enough of a kick out of it that I wanted to share. Two of the stars of a minor 1960s TV science fiction series in a promo for Western Airlines.

The airline merged with Delta in 1987.

I think just one more. I don’t really consider this military history, but more of a music video. Clips of German Luftwaffe F-104 Starfighters…set to Peter Schilling.

Posted in Books, History, Music, Planes | 2 Comments »

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 323

Wednesday, February 17th, 2021

I thought today I’d try some more random gun crankery.

There’s a company called Optics Warehouse. I find it surprising that they sell rifle scopes in the UK, but I digress.

Anyway, they have a series called “Master Sniper”. This is episode 4, “British Sniper Rifles Through The Ages”.

One reason I wanted to mention this: Swift and Bold Publishing, the folks behind The British Sniper, A Century of Evolution (which I have previously discussed) have a new book coming out at the end of the month, The Green Meanie L96A1. Swift and Bold has been a pleasure to deal with in the past, and I endorse this product and/or service. (Even though the price does give me the leaping fantods, but again, have you priced sniping books recently? With shipping from the UK?)

Short bonus video #1: I haven’t used anything from the US Army Marksmanship Unit recently, so here’s an interesting video on the concept of “maximum point blank”.

Bonus video #2, from the School of the American Rifle, “AR-15 Cleaning Equipment”.

Bonus video #3: from Brownells (so keep in mind that they are trying to sell you product, though in my experience they are honorable and honest people): “Quick Tip: Tools Every Gun Owner Needs”.

Posted in Books, Endorsements, Guns, History | Comments Closed

Obit watch: February 12, 2021.

Friday, February 12th, 2021

I planned to post this last night, but we had multiple power outages through the day yesterday (as other people have noted, it is cold here: right now, my phone is calling for a low of 10 on Sunday and a low of 3 (yes, THREE) on Monday), the last one lasting until well into the evening.

So I’m playing catch-up today.

The NYT got around to publishing a respectful obit for James Gunn yesterday.

Chick Corea, jazz guy.

In 2006 he was named a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master, the highest honor available to an American jazz musician.

In case you were wondering, I believe this is the complete list.

Lawrence sent over an obit for Leslie Robertson, structural engineer for the World Trade Center.

Mr. Robertson designed the structural systems of several notable skyscrapers, including the Shanghai World Financial Center, a 101-story tower with a vast trapezoidal opening at its peak, and I.M. Pei’s Bank of China Tower in Hong Kong, a cascade of interlocking pyramids. His projects included bridges, theaters and museums, and he helped install sculptures by Richard Serra, some weighing as much as 20 tons.
But the project that came to define his career was the World Trade Center. He was in his early 30s and something of an upstart when he and his partner, John Skilling, were chosen to design the structural system for what were to be the time, at 110 stories, the world’s tallest buildings. He was in his 70s when the towers were destroyed.

…

“The responsibility for the design ultimately rested with me,” Mr. Robertson told The New York Times Magazine after the towers were destroyed. He added: “I have to ask myself, Should I have made the project more stalwart? And in retrospect, the only answer you can come up with is, Yes, you should have.”
He conceded that he had not considered the possibility of fire raging through the buildings after a plane crash. But he also said that that was not part of the structural engineer’s job, which involves making sure that buildings resist forces like gravity and wind. “The fire safety systems in a building fall under the purview of the architect,” he said.
In an interview in 2009 in his Lower Manhattan office, Mr. Robertson wiped away tears as he recalled the victims of 9/11. He talked about the family members who had come to see him, hoping he could say something to help them with their grief. But he also said he was proud of the design of the twin towers.

…

According to Mr. Robertson, the buildings had been designed to withstand the impact of a Boeing 707, but the planes flown into the towers were heavier 767s. And his calculations had been based on the initial impact of the plane; they did not take into account the possibility of what he called a “second event,” like a fire.
When the planes struck the towers, they sliced through the steel frames, but the buildings remained standing. Many engineers concluded that conventionally framed buildings would have collapsed soon after impact. The twin towers stood long enough to allow thousands of people to escape.
But the fire from the burning jet fuel raged on. The floor trusses lost strength as they heated up, and they began to sag. The floors eventually began pulling away from the exterior columns before the buildings fell. A total of 2,753 people were killed, including 343 firefighters.
Mr. Robertson said he received hate mail after 9/11. But on a flight to Toronto one day, an airline employee gave him an unexpected upgrade to first class. When he asked for an explanation, he recalled in the 2009 interview, the employee said, “I was in Tower 2, and I walked out.”

The infamous Larry Flynt. As my mother said, “I thought he was dead already.”

S. Clay Wilson, underground cartoonist. I went back and forth on whether I wanted to include Mr. Flynt and Mr. Wilson, but I decided that Mr. Flynt’s celebrity was too great to ignore. As for Mr. Wilson, you have to like a guy who says:

“I’m just a big kid,” Mr. Wilson told him. “I like toys, firearms and hats.”

Finally, also by way of Lawrence, British actor Harry Fielder, who was in pretty much every darn thing in Britain, passed away February 6th. Seriously, his IMDB entry has 279 credits as “actor” (though it looks like many of those were small roles).

Posted in Books, History, Law, Music, Obits | Comments Closed

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 314

Monday, February 8th, 2021

I have a doctor’s appointment today. I would say I’m being a little lazy, since these videos are long, but I think there’s some stuff in them that might interest military history buffs. All of these come from the same source (BalticaBeer) and seem to be official productions of the Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake. I feel like there’s kind of unifying theme here: what a small motivated group of individuals can do if given liberty to work outside of the box.

In rough order of length: “To the Sea, a Sidewinder…50 Years of Snakes on the Wing”, a documentary history of the AIM-9 Sidewinder.

Next up: “The Origins of ARM: Defence Suppression and the Shrike Antiradar Missile”.

Finally: “The Pursuit of Precision: Walleye The TV-Guided Glide Bomb”

I know this last one is the length of a feature film. I’ve actually watched all of it, and personally found it weirdly fascinating. Also, there is a lot of footage of things blowing up or being blown up, so it isn’t just talking heads. Walleye itself is kind of a fascinating story. Today, it’s not uncommon to talk about putting a bomb through one window of a building: but what I don’t think most people realize is that we were actually doing that 55 years ago.

(Ålso, if you’re a television technology geek, there’s a lot of talk about TV tech and how Walleye helped advance the technology.)

Posted in Books, History, Planes | Comments Closed

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 293

Monday, January 18th, 2021

I observed the other day that I was reading Mike Duncan’s The Storm Before the Storm: The Beginning of the End of the Roman Republic (affiliate link). Great and good FotB Borepatch commented that he liked Duncan’s book.

So…from 2017 and Mike Duncan’s book tour, “The Storm Before the Storm” at Politics and Prose in DC. If you’re a “Revoutions” listener, you’ve heard the podcast version of this, but for those of you who are not (and for those of you who want to see what Mike Duncan looked like three years ago), here you go.

I get a particular kick out of his stories about his early writerly ambitions: wanting to write “Redwall” knockoffs, except the mice flew airplanes, and then later wanting to be the next Phil Dick.

Bonus: a more recent (July of 2020) interview with Mr. Duncan from “The Current” which is apparently something the Hatchette Book Group puts out.

Posted in Books, History | Comments Closed

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 290

Friday, January 15th, 2021

Christmas has come and gone. Y’all know what this means, right?

Right. I have a new stack of books to read.

One of them was a recent book that was a present from Mike the Musicologist, and one that I was not aware of before he sent it to me: The Fighting Bunch: The Battle of Athens and How World War II Veterans Won the Only Successful Armed Rebellion Since the Revolution by Chris DeRose (affiliate link). (I have not read it yet, though it is very high up on my stack: I would have started it already, but I got stuck into Mike Duncan‘s The Storm Before the Storm: The Beginning of the End of the Roman Republic right before it showed up.)

After WWII, a group of veterans returned to their homes in McMinn County, Tennessee. (Athens is the county seat.) The veterans found that McMinn County was run by a corrupt local machine, and assembled their own slate of reform candidates. However, the crooked local government decided that they were going to rig the elections in their favor. The machine, though, had not realized some facts of life:

McMinn County had around 3,000 returning military veterans, constituting almost 10 percent of the county’s population.

You can figure that many (if not all) of those men were familiar with firearms, had combat experience, and at least some of them knew something about explosives.

So when the election took place on August 1, 1946, and the machine tried to rig the vote counting (even going as far as to beat and arrest GI poll watchers), the veterans took up arms and rebelled, in what is now known as “The Battle of Athens“.

Here are two short versions of the story:

A somewhat longer video, which is based in part on Mr. DeRose’s book:

This is a long video (about an hour) of a talk by Matt Green (a former judge in Alabama: as best as I can tell, he’s in private practice now specializing in DUI and constitutional law) about the Battle of Athens.

There’s a made for TV movie that you can find on the ‘Tube, but which I’m not embedding here for policy reasons.

Posted in Books, History | 2 Comments »

Obit watch: January 8, 2021.

Friday, January 8th, 2021

I started working on this earlier this morning, but this is breaking just now: Tommy Lasorda. ESPN. No LAT, because you basically can’t read anything without a subscription and your ad-blocker disabled.

Neil Sheehan, author (A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam) and journalist.

“Now It Can Be Told: How Neil Sheehan Got the Pentagon Papers”.

It was a story he had chosen not to tell — until 2015, when he sat for a four-hour interview, promised that this account would not be published while he was alive.

NYT obit for William Link.

Eric Jerome Dickey, novelist.

Posted in Books, History, Media, Obits, Sports | Comments Closed

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 281

Wednesday, January 6th, 2021

This could possibly fall equally well under “travel”, but I decided to go the “food” route today.

This should not have surprised me, but yet it did: there is a Charles Dickens Museum. And yes, they do have a YouTube channel.

It is a little late for this year (although the Christmas season actually ends tonight), but maybe for next year: “The Original Victorian Christmas Pudding Recipe”.

Are you hungry yet? How about some Victorian gingerbread?

We can wash it down with “Charles Dickens’s Favourite Brandy Punch Recipe”.

And finally, “Toasted Cheese with the Dickenses”. Complete with Victorian cheese toaster. This is a real thing that exists, and I kind of want one now.

Posted in Books, Christmas, Food, History, Mixology, Museums | Comments Closed

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 274

Wednesday, December 30th, 2020

Another thing I’m trying to avoid using too much is the “Timeline – World History Documentaries” channel. But this popped up in the feed, and is relevant to my interests:

“How The Germanic Barbarians Annihilated Rome’s Legions”, a semi-short (49 minutes) documentary about the Battle of the Teutoberg Forest.

Episode 55 of “The History of Rome” podcast (which I can’t pull up right now, but you should be able to get it through the podcast app of your choice) covers the Teutoberg Forest. There’s also a book that I’ve read, and liked: The Battle That Stopped Rome: Emperor Augustus, Arminius, and the Slaughter of the Legions in the Teutoburg Forest by Peter S. Wells (affiliate link).

Bonus: To give folks a little variety, here’s a documentary about “The Black Ghost”, a 1970 Dodge Challenger R/T SE with a 426 Hemi that was a street racing legend in Detroit.

I’m not a huge gearhead, and definitely not a big Mopar guy, but I have to say: that is one nice car, with a great story behind it.

Posted in Books, Cars, Food, History | Comments Closed

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 273

Tuesday, December 29th, 2020

105 years ago today, Robert Ruark was born.

I wrote a long appreciation of him on his 100th birthday, which I won’t repeat here. But I thought it might be neat to feature him in today’s block of videos.

Short: a 15 minute documentary about Ruark from the Robert Ruark Society.

Long: “Safari Hunting”, a 1954 documentary about an African safari, featuring Robert Ruark (and Harry Selby) and narrated by Ruark.

It’s kind of cool, for someone as Ruark obsessed as I am, to see and hear the man himself, instead of just reading him. It’s also kind of cool to see what a safari was like in the 1950s.

And speaking of that, one of my Christmas presents from my beloved and indulgent sister and her family was a swell book: White Hunters: The Golden Age of African Safaris by Brian Herne (affiliate link). I’m about 3/4ths of the way through it, and I feel comfortable in recommending this book.

Posted in Books, Guns, History, Ruark | Comments Closed

Obit watch: December 28, 2020.

Monday, December 28th, 2020

Phil Niekro, noted knuckleballer.

A right-hander, like his brother, Phil Niekro (pronounced NEEK-row) threw a total of 5,404 innings, placing him No. 4 on the major league career list, without ever incurring a sore arm, allowing him to endure in Major League Baseball far longer than most other players.
He tied Andy Messersmith in the National League for the most victories in 1974, when he was 20-13, and he tied Joe for the most wins in 1979, when he went 21-20 (also losing the most games in the league). Joe was 21-11 that season with the Houston Astros.
Phil, who retired after the 1987 season, was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1997. But for all of his achievements, he never made it to a World Series, his Braves teams reaching only the National League Championship Series twice, losing both times. Phil pitched for four teams and Joe for seven. They were teammates with the Braves in 1973 and ’74 and briefly with the Yankees in 1985.

Barry Lopez, noted writer.

Reginald Foster, a former plumber’s apprentice from Wisconsin who, in four decades as an official Latinist of the Vatican, dreamed in Latin, cursed in Latin, banked in Latin and ultimately tweeted in Latin, died on Christmas Day at a nursing home in Milwaukee. He was LXXXI.

Finally, Michael Alig is burning in Hell. He was one of the late 80’s NYC “club kids”. But he’s burning in Hell because he killed Andre Melendez.

Mr. Melendez, who was also known as Angel, was missing for months before his dismembered corpse washed up on Staten Island, which is when people began to believe Mr. Alig’s frequent claims that he had killed Mr. Melendez.
They had argued about money one night and, prosecutors and investigators said at the time, Mr. Alig, while under the influence of heroin, had murdered Mr. Melendez and dumped his remains in the Hudson River.
Mr. Alig pleaded guilty to first-degree manslaughter in 1997, as did an accomplice, Robert Riggs. Mr. Alig served 17 years. He was released from prison in 2014 at the age of 48 and was met by friends and supporters.

Posted in Books, Law, Obits, Sports | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: December 24, 2020.

Thursday, December 24th, 2020

A couple of quick music related ones: Chad Stuart, of Chad and Jeremy.

Leslie West, of Mountain. (“Mississippi Queen”.)

Rebecca Luker, noted Broadway actress. She was only 59.

Ms. Luker’s Broadway career, fueled by her crystal-clear operatic soprano, brought her three Tony Award nominations. The first was for “Show Boat” (1994), in which she played Magnolia, the captain’s dewy-fresh teenage daughter, whose life is ruined by marriage to a riverboat gambler. The second was for “The Music Man” (2000), in which she was Marian, the prim River City librarian who enchants a traveling flimflam man who thinks — mistakenly — that he’s just passing through town.

…

When she earned her third Tony nomination, this one for best featured actress in a musical, it was for playing Winifred Banks, a married Englishwoman with two children and a gifted nanny, in “Mary Poppins” (2006).

Lawrence tipped me off to the death of James E. Gunn, one of the greats in SF.

Gunn launched his career writing short stories for pulp magazines in 1949 and went on to author dozens of books, starting with 1955’s Star Bridge. He saw his 1962 short story “The Immortals,” about a group who discovers the secret to immortality, made into an ABC movie of the week in 1969 and become a 1970-71 hourlong series.
In addition to fiction, Gunn was known as an editor of anthologies and an author of academic works. He earned a Hugo for 1983’s Isaac Asimov: The Foundations of Science Fiction, an exploration of famed author Isaac Asimov’s contributions to the science fiction genre.

…

In 1969, he taught one of the first classes at a major university on science fiction, becoming a pioneer for treating the genre as a serious academic subject. He created a $1.5 million endowment for the James E. and Jane F. Gunn Professorship in Science Fiction, named for himself and his late wife, in 2014.

That’s one part of his career that I’m afraid will get short shrift. As important as he was as a writer and critic, his most important contribution to the genre may have been as a teacher.

Posted in Books, Music, Obits, Theatre | Comments Closed

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