Ooo-kaaayyy....
I quit watching broadcast TV in 1986. Max Headroom didn't debut until 1987. I had heard of it, and I vaguely remembered bits of a few weird Coca-Cola ads that used Max Headroom, but that was all I knew.
The first two episodes were very much different than I had expected. The series came from a British short film from 1985; watching it, it's hard to believe the series ran for only half of 1987. Whoever put it together, at least the first two episodes, was a hardcore science fiction fan. Imagine "Lou Grant" meets "Bladerunner", with liberal dashes of "Scanners" and "Videodrome, and maybe "Search."
It's very dark stuff; a future society basically gone to hell, surveillance cameras everywhere, a fully networked society that spies on everyone, something like GPS, two way televisions that can't be turned off, hugely powerful broadcast media, and a handful of megacorps. Frighteningly similar to, say, the USA in 2006, though we don't have organleggers prowling the streets. Yet.
The sets and props are interesting, the storylines have been good, characters are believable, and the technology... for 1987 it was almost all fantasy, but like Max Smart's shoe phone, it's already here, other than Max himself. And if you've watched Ananova.com, it's probably not that far off.
I like it a *lot*, so far. Interestingly, everyone I've mentioned it to, from AB to SF-reading/watching friends, hated it. AB watched the first episode with me, and said it didn't match what she remembered; apparently she mostly remembered the Coke ads. Why Coca-Cola would have chosen Max Headroom as a mascot is hard to explain, other than that Logitech was running ads showing pissing babies about that time. Maybe it was avant-garde, but considering the deep noir ambience of the series, it would be like Pepsi building an ad campaign around DeNiro's character in "Taxi Driver."
I can understand why the series was canceled; it would probably be hugely popular now, but I think the general populace of 1987, not being nearly as SF-aware as nowadays, would have had a hard time following it.
Summary: Bad. Bad-bad-bad-baaaaad.
Two "episodes" in the movie. Wooden acting. Peurile plots. AB fell asleep during the first one, and I opened another window on the other monitor and read mail while listening to the movie.
The thing looked like something put together by a first-year drama class, perhaps as a play. The thing fairly screamed "LOW BUDGET!"; we had one (1) B5 cast member in each "episode", Tracy Scoggins in the first, Bruce Boxleitner in the second. There were two supporting actors in the first episode, three in the second, and the two guys who walked by in the corridor in the first episode were probably the two Minbari who walked down a corridor in the second. Five or six people, two or three high-school-grade sets, some really cheesy CGI graphics, some crappy music, and too much camera wiggle for me to put up with, which is one reason I went to work on the other monitor and just glanced over every now and then. Mostly, it was people standing around lecturing each other, which gave the thing the feeling of a stage play. Oh, and other than the couple of Minbari, which were just skullcaps as far as makeup, there were no aliens. B5 with no aliens? Well, it didn't seem to have a crew either...
What made Babylon 5 "Babylon 5" was that there was never just one thing going on; there were multiple plots and subplots running through every episode, at least until the beginning of Season 4. The last two seasons and the movies lost that, which is one reason they lost my interest. But this... this was pathetic.
The thing that made me both sad and angry is that Michael Straczynski has NO EXCUSE for this abortion. He not only produced the original series, he wrote most of the episodes too. As far as budget... if a single Finn could do "Star Wreck: In The Pirkinning" in his living room with some PCs, Strac should have been able to do something reasonable, if not state of the art.
Let's put it this way - the second half of "In The Pirkinning" takes place on Babylon 5, and Samuli Torssonen's B5 parody, done by Finnish SF fans, blows "the real thing" away.
The only good thing to come out of all this is that I couldn't remember how to spell Samuli's last name, so I bopped over to www.starwreck.com and found out he's working on another movie called "Iron Sky." "In 1945, the Nazis went to the Moon. In 2018, they came back."
Paramount and Warner Brothers should be shitting their shorts - once Torssonen and his friends get some backing, they're going to hand Hollywood their collective asses.
Download the movie from starwreck.com. Then go to http://www.starwreck.com/tech.php and see how they made it.
I fought the erratic cursor a while longer, then picked it up and examined it closely. There was... a hair across the window. I removed it, and now the mouse works just fine.
On the way out I noticed a pallet full of Lexmark Z-515 cheapo printers, marked down to $25. I went back and checked the cartridge display; yep, they take a $31 ink cartridge. But I can buy a brand new USB printer and *throw it away* when empty, for less than the price of a new cartridge for my HP.
A couple of years ago I bought a new desk calculator for less than the price to put new batteries in my old one.
Markup on sundries and maintenance bits is crazy.
Then over to the DMV office, where it was very crowded - four people waiting. They had recently installed one of those pull-a-ticket boxes to handle the customer load. Just about everyone who walked in stared at the box in amazement.
Except for computers and air conditioning, it could just as easily have been 1945. Everything moves just a little bit slower and friendlier outside the capitol...
Unfortunately, we watched them.
Um. Yes. Even AB groaned at it. The plot holes, stupid-for-plot-development, inconsistency, and general "oh, come on now" factors were just too much to ignore. It was about as silly as, say, "Charlie's Angels In Space", if such a show existed.
There were some drippy luuuuv scenes, and some of the weirdly macho male-bonding(?) scenes that make no sense to any heterosexual male; shows with that kind of stuff usually have female producers, directors, and writers. These didn't, at least that you could identify by name. With girls named Taylor and Ridley and so forth, it's hard to tell by a name any more.
There were lots of scenes with Deep Meaning, apparently. In the last scene, one of the Marines, who is a gung-ho type who has just helped save the Earth from alien invasion and has just been decorated with a giant medal from the head of the UN, walks out of the reception, yanks the medal from around his neck, and throws it away. Then the credits roll. Ri-ight. What's waiting in the third thrilling episode? Frankly, I'm not sure I care...
The #2 rod throw was badly boogered, and someone had welded on it already, which made it really awkward to index the throws. It was bent .005" across the #2 main, where the nose of the crank had been tweaked. No problem. It took an hour or so of fiddling in the machine to figure out the stroke was 2.75". Normally you know what the stroke is, set the machine to that, and indicate it true. The machine isn't really set up to go the other way.
So, I spend the next seven hours or so offset-grinding the thing. Six setups, nice fat radii. I stroked it 1/8", down to large journal Chevy, for 2.895". The journals are all +.020 to +.030; you turn a stroker crank fat, straighten if necessary, and then come back and finish-grind.
There were some spots where the weld hadn't covered enough, so I assembled Kenney's Miller MIG welder, which had been sitting in a box for a year or so, and welded. By then it was late evening, and I went home.
Yesterday I went back, set it up on the crank straightener, and worked on straightening it. You set the crank on some used bearing shells to protect the journals, pull the overarm hook over, put some load on it with a 12-ton jack until you deflect it .020" or so, and then you beat on the journals with an aluminum corking tool and a hand sledge. It's a very low tech operation, reminescent of tightening the slide on a Colt .45. All the beating and jacking is why you finish-turn *after* straightening.
A couple of hours later, the crank is still bent .005". I'd reached the limit of the 12-ton jack and the Big Hammer. I got the 30-ton jack and the Even Bigger Hammer. So I'm watching the dial indicator as I deflect the crank about .030"... and then I notice the whole machine is bowed up, and the hook is starting to look like a pretzel. I utilized the Even Bigger Hammer, checked the crank, and it was still .004" out on the indicator.
The rest of the day I spent taking the machine apart and using the axle press and bits of shop junk to press the bits back straight. Kenney was a good sport about it, though.
The only other place around here that had a crank straightener burned to the ground a few years ago, so I guess I'll just put the crank back in the box and send it back to Florida.
I don't know what the alloy and heat treat are, but the load I was putting on it would break an ordinary 454 or 460 crank right in half. It'll take some place that can handle big Diesel bits to straighten this one, I think. If they can get a tiny little V6 crank in the machine...
"DaveWorld. Where things are... different."
> > OVERLAND PARK, Kansas -- Nathan Bales represents a troubling trend for > > cellular phone carriers. The Kansas City-area countertop installer > > recently traded in a number of feature-laden phones for a stripped-down > > model. He said he didn't like using them to surf the internet, rarely > > took pictures with them and couldn't stand scrolling through seemingly > > endless menus to get the functions to work.I'd like a phone with a camera, but that function is crippled and expensive from all the local cellular providers. (for Sprint, it's $20/month for the phone feature; the phone automatically uploads the shots to their web site, which means it takes a while between shots, and then you have to download the pictures manually from the site to your computer. Fark that!)
I do *not* want call waiting; the damned XCingular phones AB got last time have that, and they go through the whole car-alarm sequence of beeps, boops, barks, and bongs. I can't turn it off. I don't want voice mail. People would tell me they left me voice mail. I can't turn that off either. Fortunately it filled up after a year or so. XCingular can't even tell me if they can turn those features off at the store, but if I'm willing to pay for a "service encounter" with one of their trained representatives at their store, two towns over, I *might* be able to turn it off... but it's not worth $30 to find out.
I *do* want a phone that works as well as my old analog Motorola "brick" phone. Fat chance. I wind up talking to dead air often enough on the new "wireless" phone. There's no feedback whatsoever; after a few "Hello? Hello?"s I'll move the phone down to where I can see it, and it says "MENU", which is phone-speak for "I'm not doing anything any more."
I'd like a phone that had some feedback into the earpiece, so I don't wind up shouting at it when talking. It annoys me when other people do it, and I try not to do it myself, but it's damned hard not to.
I'd like I phone that didn't require half an hour to program a number into. Even a Windblows applet that'd let me download a contact list via USB. Last time I looked they were available, but they cost about $200 more. Screw that, for $200 I'll leave the card full of numbers in my wallet. Yeah, if I had eight hours or so I could put a dozen-odd numbers in the damned thing, one multifunction digit in the time... but it's just not worth the hassle.
Finally, I'd like the phone to have a security lock like my antique Motorola did. I can enable that in the current phone, but it requires going through several levels of menus *each* time I want to unlock the phone, and it takes *only* a five-digit number. I just flipped the old Motorola open and punched three digits; it defaulted to "unlock." So I don't even bother to lock it, and I just hope that I never forget it somewhere and wind up with $900 in long distance to some foreign country.
Oddly, the manual is fairly well-written, as such things go. Most new ones don't seem to cover anything other than seat belt usage and GVWR.
I guess it was nothing important, because the van kept on going. But it sent me off on another rage against the graphics assholes and their "universal language" crap, like the "flying birds" sign that the city put up that are supposed to mean "library", or the "insert rectal thermometer" icon my old Yamaha used for "low brake fluid." And the ISO standard symbol "sailing ship" to mean "water temperature", or the gravy bowl that's supposed to mean something about oil.
Fuck it, if they can't put even a few letters of English near the icon to let me know what it is supposed to mean, I'm perfectly happy to keep driving until something terminal occurs.
Gunther was, judging from his book, very pro-Soviet. He did mention many of the problems of the USSR, but every time with "but that can't happen nowadays" or "it's getting better." Every now and then he drops in a few factoids, but one of them riveted my attention.
In 1958, the gulags accounted for over 10% of the Soviet economy. And the gulags were managed by the KGB.
This is *after* the death of Stalin, when Khruschev had "rehabilitated" legions of prisoners and sent them back home.
Sakharov had managed a good portion of the Soviet H-bomb project from a gulag, and Korolev did the same with rockets. Now a lot of it makes sense. With the gulags being run by the KGB, they had much higher security than in urban areas.
However... if the KGB accounted for 10% of the economy in 1958, it likely had a much bigger percentage under Stalin. From the Terror all the way until Stalin's death, people would be hauled out of their homes, their offices, or off the street, never to be seen again, or to return just as mysteriously five, ten, or twenty years later, for no apparent reason. Every book I've read, including Gunther's, attributes this to a systematic program of terror by the KGB ("the sword of the Communist Party") against the populace... who were probably at least as enthusiastically loyal as any other populace, and there was certainly no obvious benefit to the Soviet government waging a war of terror against its own citizenry.
"Follow the money."
The Soviet economy was always fragile, and the gulags were too big of a chunk of it. Conditions were bad, and replacements were always in demand. So the Black Marias would roll, and the cattle cars would be filled, and the trains would roll east.
Making this kind of connection is what makes history so much fun. Now I have to re-evaluate all I've read about the Soviet economy in light of this. Yes, Czar Alexander outlawed slavery in the 1800s, but the gulag population were technically prisoners, not that it made much difference.
And the Party adopted the whole idea and kept it rolling.
This all depended on the labor pool always being in excess of potential employment. Other than the trade guilds, labor was pretty much labor; they didn't differentiate things like we do today.
Marx lived and wrote in the early days of the Industrial Revolution; this was true then. But he died right about the time demand for skilled labor exceeded ready supply. Employers didn't want to hire people out of the breadlines for pennies; they wanted pipefitters and machine operators and welders and a whole host of skills and professions that barely existed as definite trades back in Marx' heyday.
By a bizarre twist, the only sizeable classes of undifferentiated labor today are migrant farm workers and "management," which are both simply pools of unskilled and interchangeable labor. These managers, mostly with no particular skills, are what's left of the "capital" Marx railed against... and now they're about the closest to the undifferentiated "workers" of his day.
>> Do you think that girls who go out and get drunk while wearing short >> skirts deserve to be raped?"Do you think that men who get drunk and wander into a bad part of town deserve to be mugged?"
The answer to both is, "yes." If you're stupid enough to get drunk in public, *you* are liable for what happens, from rape to wandering in front of a moving train.
Of course, if you're an American you don't have to take any blame, you just have to hire a lawyer and get your just compensation.
We both quite liked it. The acting was good, the plot was good. Good enough to overlook a couple of major continuity problems and an appalling ignorance of low gravity, vacuum, and other things you're likely to encounter in space. It reminded me of "The Fast and the Furious", how Hollywood can make a decent story and then blow chunks on anything remotely technical. "Armageddon" was a decent movie, but a few technical consults would have made it a *major* movie, ranked up there with "2001" and "Aliens." And to put an even sharper point on it, many of the problems were due to too *many* special effects, done by absolutely clueless drooling idiots. No, we don't have "wind" on an airless asteroid, for example. It only took them a few hours to make it to the Moon, and as for being bombarded with meteors, it's rather stupid to have your helmet off... a lesson they repeatedly failed to learn, doubtless for artistic reasons. I won't even bring up the spacebuggy-jumping sequence... still, even with all the technical problems, it wasn't a bad movie. But like so many I've seen, it *could have been* a much *better* movie with just a teeny, tiny, itty-bitty amount of effort.
> I just don't understand why my parents-in-law, who make $100k+ a year > > got a refund cheque because of the tax cut and the wife and I who made > > 1/5th of that did not.Depends on their withholding. I know people who pay *extra* tax, just to get a fat "blow-it money" refund check. They'd be better off putting the money in the bank and drawing interest on it, instead of giving the Fed free use of it, but it makes them happy...
Of course since the last tax revision, you can be fined for paying too *much* tax too...
Heinlein had a scene in one of his books... ah, heck, I'll type it in: "Have Space Suit, Will Travel," from 1958. One of the last of his "juveniles", which were by far the best novel-length stuff he wrote. Kip Russell is describing his family's finances; Dr. Russell is a retired economist:
"Dad was like that. The time I told him I wanted to buy a bicycle he said, "Go right ahead" without even glancing up - so I had gone to the money basket in the dining room, intending to take out enough for a bicycle. But there had been only eleven dollars and forty-three cents in it, so about a thousand miles of mowed lawns later I bought a bicycle. I hadn't said any more to Dad because if money wasn't in the basket, it wasn't anywhere; Dad didn't bother with banks - just the money basket and the one next to it marked "UNCLE SAM," the contents of which he bundled up and mailed to the government once a year, This caused the Internal Revenue Service considerable headache and once they sent a man to remonstrate with him.
First the man demanded, then he pleaded. "But, Dr. Russell, we know your background. You have no excuse for not keeping proper records."
"But I do," Dad told him. "Up here." He tapped his forehead.
"The law requires written records."
"Look again," Dad advised him. "The law can't even require a man to read and write. More coffee?"
The man tried to get Dad to pay by check or money order. Dad read him the fine print on a dollar bill, the part about "legal tender for all debts, public and private."
In a despairing effort to get *somthing* out of the trip he asked Dad to please not fill in the space marked "occupation" with "spy."
"Why not?"
"What? Why, because you aren't - and it upsets people."
"Have you checked with the F.B.I.?"
"Eh? No."
"They probably wouldn't answer. But you've been very polite. I'll
mark it 'Unemployed Spy.' Okay?"
Now, of course, the IRS guy would just declare you in default of
payment and have you hauled off to jail while confiscating all your
property. But he couldn't put something like that in a book; there were
limits to what even science fiction readers would believe, back in
1958...
Yeah, I understand about rodeo practice and all... but why don't they put wheels on the mechanical calf?
This morning's fortune from console 1, virtual 4:
Well, my terminal's locked up, and I ain't got any Mail,
And I can't recall the last time that my program didn't fail;
I've got stacks in my structs, I've got arrays in my queues,
I've got the : Segmentation violation -- Core dumped blues.
If you think that it's nice that you get what you C,
Then go : illogical statement with your whole family,
'Cause the Supreme Court ain't the only place with : Bus error views.
I've got the : Segmentation violation -- Core dumped blues.
On a PDP-11, life should be a breeze,
But with VAXen in the house even magnetic tapes would freeze.
Now you might think that unlike VAXen I'd know who I abuse,
I've got the : Segmentation violation -- Core dumped blues.
-- Core Dumped Blues
> It amazes me that the federal electoral system is still using an > antiquated punch-card voting system where a court can determine the > intention of a voter by using burr marks made on the holes in the > voting card as a spike is passed through! ... > 'national security', I just cannot get to grips with a system of > government which does not require it's own citizens to produce ID at > elections.I can't really blame you for thinking of the United States as a single country. Most Americans think so; it's presented that way in their schools. But it's not one country, other than for purposes of defense and foreign policy. By the Constitution, it's a union of independent countries.
At the moment, that's 50 states, the District of Columbia, and the various Posessions. Each of those is a theoretically independent government, like the members of the EU, with their own governor, legislature, laws, police, military forces, etc. And each of those can, and do, make their own laws concerning who, what, and how to vote.
Here in Arkansas, in the specific county I live in (it varys by county, of course), you get a big cardboard ballot and a fat felt tip pen, and you mark the box for the candidate you vote for. As a long-time computer professional and former security geek, I enthusiastically approve of this method. One ballot, one vote. Once you start using voting machines, the results can, and are, questioned. And once you go electronic... it just makes it easier to fiddle elections.
"I don't care who you vote for, as long as I'm the one who gets to do the counting..."
There are occasional proposals to allow voting by telephone or internet. As far as I'm concerned, if someone can't be bothered to go to the polling place in person or buy a stamp, I don't give a damn about their opinion.
In most areas, you can just call your local party office (it doesn't matter which one!) and they'll send a bus or van to pick you up right at your doorstep; if you're disabled and housebound, they'll bring you an absentee ballot. It doesn't get much easier than that.
In the former Soviet Union, election day was a national holiday.
In the United States, I have had to arrange to take off work, which cost me money, and I've worked at places where this was entered against me in my personnel file as "left early" or "missed time". Then I spent half a day standing in line in the rain, due to the way the local election board had gerrymandered their precincts. And no, I couldn't go outside working hours; I was working 7 to 7, and the polls were open 9 to 3. This is, of course, a way of influencing elections, since the people who are able to vote during those hours are a substantially different group from those who have a day job. The hours-long lines are another way of diddling elections; distinct demographic groups were coming in by bus, zipped through a special line, and gone in minutes. When I inquired, I was told they were "pre-registered." When I asked how that worked, and why there was nothing about it in my registration packet I'd got in the mail, I got ignored.
People think election diddling died with Mayor Daley and the Chicago Machine, but remnants live on.
> In advanced societies (sic) a voter must prove at the very least that > he's a citizen and of voting age before he can cast a vote. Hell, in > Iran the voters' finger prints are placed on the voting paper to > verify they exist :-)The Democratic Party's main platforms are "entitlements", "free services", Welfare, aid to minorities, women with illegitimate children, and so forth. They figure illegals comprise a sizeable portion of their potential voter base, so they don't want anyone looking too closely at the polls. Even when the Democratic Party screams for voting reform in public - 1960 and the last two elections, for example - they block any attempt at change.
"There's a lot of money in poverty."
> An you know what might fix it? .... no need for 'comprehensive immigration > reform'... just enforce the fsckin laws we've long had! Like bustin employers.Don't be silly, Tom. There's no political capital to be made in enforcing old laws; that's peon work. As a politician, you need to be seen drafting new legislation, which gets you publicity and political credit. And if you're good, the new legislation requires new, different funding, which you have a better opportunity to divert than old funding, which is already being used.
About one in ten copy about half the files, the rest are unreadable. I'll put those in the freezer and try them in the laptop, later.
There are still about 300 1.2Mb 5-1/4 floppies that I need to do; I'll have to blow the dust out of the old 1.2 drive and hang it outside the computer by the floppy cable.
That's six linear feet of floppies, which should fit on *one* CD-ROM disc. I'll burn one for the computer room and two verified copies for the steel storage box out in the shop.
My cleanup continues...
[sigh] It's not like I haven't heard the same song and dance on other things, from spark plugs to motor oil. It's like some giant cargo cult; the Magic Truck comes in, and they put the stuff on the shelves. Arrgh.
> > http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,192694,00.html > > > > "BAGHDAD, Iraq â After months of political deadlock, Iraq's parliament > > convened Saturday to select top leadership posts, launching the process of > > putting together a new government aimed at pulling the country out of its > > sectarian strife."I recently finished a book with the jawbreaker title of, "Man's Rise to Civilization As Shown by the Indians of North America from Primeval Times to the Coming of the Industrial State," by Peter Farb.
Much of it concerns the social structure of the various Indian tribes, the simplest structure being the family, which was the basic social unit of groups like the Diggers, who were in such barren areas that they could not assemble larger groups without running out of food. Where sheer survival didn't limit things, the tribe was the next largest, and seldom exceeded a few hundred people, and then the clan (gens, moeity, totem), that could span tribes.
Farb showed how the Indians had never developed past the clan, and how that severely limited their ability to work together, and used as an example the Aztecs, who had taken the clan about as far as it would go, until it was so fragile a few hundred Spaniards (and a zillion or so tribes who hated the Aztecs) knocked them over.
I thought a lot about the Middle East when I was reading this book (which was printed in 1968). The early House of Sa'ud was close imitation of the Aztecs. Now the Sa'ud are Westernized, while their country still remains tribal. Iraq and Afghanistan, even though they have urban areas, are still mostly tribal.
Farb mentioned that the British colonials in the New World had strict laws against "going native", and that a good chunk (more than a third) or several colonies had simply wandered off and joined various Indian tribes. On the flip side, he said there was no known case of any Indian abandoning his tribe and joining the Europeans; the tribe was a socially complex structure in which they had a place; their "self" was dependent on their status in the tribe.
Yeah, I can see how there would be problems setting up a constitution in Iraq. Those people *look* civilized, but by the standards of the industrialized world, they're no different than Jivaro headhunters. It's not so much a matter of adopting a democratic government - which goes contrary to their entire social structure and history - but to do so involves abandoning most of the culture that binds them together. And that's a damned hard thing to do.
This was an odd movie. I'm not a Seagal fan; so far, the handful of Seagal movies I've seen, he played such an asshole I rooted for the bad guys. In this one, he's playing a cop who's hunting down a cop-killer.
The movie has every genre cliche since Clint Eastwood played Dirty Harry - the lone cop outside the rules, senseless violence and intimidation, stupidity, gunplay that made me cringe, including the usual "hold the gun up in the air crosswise and shoot down at people" silliness. Miscellaneous heavy metal and crap soundtrack.
Elvira used to show really bad horror movies on her late-night show; if she did cop movies, this would be on her list.
But... the camera work was wide angle, rock solid, and razor focused. As in, really, *really* nice, particularly by comparison to the usual basketball-camera work so common now. It's worth watching part of it, just to see what good camera work looks like. Too bad the movie sucked decomposing road kill...
http://www.bigheadpress.com/TPBPreview001.htm
Now, this is I book I first read in 1982 or 1983, and I've probably read it a dozen times since then. The artist did an excellent job (meaning: his ideas of splitting things up to scenes, and rendering them, approximately matched my own), but...
After thinking about it for a few days, it occurred to me what the difference was. You read a book in a linear fashion, sentence by sentence, as the author tells his tale.
The comic, on the other hand, is broken into frames, each one a little vignette of its own, strung together in sequence. While the book moves smoothly, the comic, by the nature of the medium, has to move in jumps.
A comic is more like a very-low-frame-rate movie than a book. And once I realized that, I thought of things like "Heavy Metal" and "Akira," or for that matter, the first couple of Blade movies. Even normal movies are assembled from individual scenes.
There's nothing *wrong* with breaking a story down into frames, but it does tend to present one thing at a time.
Basically, a tablet PC and the World Wide Web.
Moore's Law is a bitch.
I don't know if it's simple laziness or some cultural thing, but I'll be driving about at 3 in the morning and see dozens of businesses that are completely dark except for their glowing "OPEN" sign. Ri-ight.
The book describes the (literally) dozens of overlapping intelligence agencies, which is quite a trick some they merged and reshuffled regularly. According to Kahn, the Nazis were pretty good at tactical intelligence on the battlefield, but not only were they almost completely incompetent at strategic intelligence, the little they did get didn't do them any good. For example, they had a spy who reported everything the Americans were doing in Africa, but there are damn-all Rommel could do about it. The Brits managed to catch every spy in England, and turned most of them with their Double Cross program; these doubles fed the OKW all kinds of tasty, but incorrect, information.
Most of the book is fairly tedious; it's a scholarly tome, and in its struggle for completeness it describes many German intelligence agencies nobody ever heard of and nobody cared about anyway.
The final chapter is a discussion of intelligence in general, and how bad intelligence can be much worse than no intelligence at all. This is something many political and military planners have to rediscover for themselves, over and again. It's the way the system works - the intelligence services tend to oversell their information to boost their importance, and the people who use that intelligence are often not aware of its limits.
Sometimes, even perfect intelligence can be of little use. Or perhaps like the plot of some old Greek tragedy. The British were lucky enough to break the major German encryption system right at the beginning of the war; Churchill bragged that he read Goering's messages before Goering did. But the continued flow of such information depended on secrecy; if it became apparent that the British had broken the codes, the Germans would switch to something else and the British would be in the dark again. So when the intercepts revealed the Germans were getting ready to bomb the city of Coventry, a major industrial area, Churchill's nuts were in a cleft stick. He made the correct decision - there was no way they could do anything about it without revealing that they were reading the Luftwaffe's coded messages, so Churchill ordered his staff to say nothing, and he let the city be bombed. They continued reading German messages through the end of the war, and this was probably the single largest factor in the Allied victory in the European theater. But a lot of people were outraged by Churchill's decision, and Coventry was one reason the electorate voted him out in 1945.
Since it would be water cooled, no bank offset would be necessary. And with three throws on the crank arranged the same as as the original Geo, the cams and firing order on each bank would be unchanged.
It might sound radical, but it's nowhere near as difficult as the things Alan Millyard builds in his garden shed. (5 cylinder Kawasaki two strokes, or V12s out of two KZ1300 engines)
Why do I sketch stuff like this? Hell, I don't know. The squirrels keep coming up with weird ideas...
Same with vinyl records, magnetic tape, or newer media, but it first struck me when looking at CDs, trying to tell if they'd been recorded on or were virgin. Most of the time, I can't tell, occasionally it's visible.
The splash/flames were strange.
Going past, I saw the driver was lighting a cigarette, in the "cup the end with both hands and light" fashion. Since the windows were up it looked pretty silly. Not as silly as it would have, since the driver was wearing a hat.
A cowboy hat.
A BRIGHT BLUE cowboy hat.
With gold conches.
"You ain't from around here, are you, boy?"
We were the only motorcycles in the parking lot. Admission wasn't too bad, but they had a steepish surcharge to be allowed to bring a camera inside. I declined, though Jay paid and brought his fancy 35mm rig. They had a metal detector, but for some reason it only scanned above the beltline, so I wasn't hassled about the steel rod in my leg like last time. I guess if I'd stuffed the .45 or a machete down the front of my pants I could have waltzed right in. I'm not sure what their point was, other than annoying patrons.
The exhibit wasn't quite what I expected. The only "art" was in the fancy displays; otherwise it was an bike show. But they did have a Ner-A-Car, a Yamaha GTS, and a Bimota Tesi on display. And off in a corner out of the traffic flow - I wouldn't have bothered to walk over except I'd sat down on one of the benches briefly to rest my feet - a Guzzi with a dustbin fairing. Rested, I walked over there anyway, expecting to see one of their horizontal one-lungers, and was surprised to find that it was a V8! I had to call Jay back to look at it - like almost everyone else, he'd bypassed it too - and we spent several minutes admiring what we could see. The fairing hid most of the motor, unfortunately.
The exhibit had way too many antique Indians, Harleys, and such, in my opinion. They all look the same to me; one or two would have been representative of the type. And there were three machines supposedly owned by Elvis Presley, which, along with some of the wall displays, makes me think the exhibit got tweaked somewhat when it moved from New York to Memphis. They did have a J.A.P.-engined Brough Superior, a Vincent Black Shadow, and a Vincent Black Prince, which looks pretty much like the Black Knight. I was hoping to see something like that.
For an exhibit dedicated to "art" or styling, I would have expected to see a full-house Aspencade, and maybe a Pacific Coast, and a Yamaha Turbo, and a Suzuki RE-5, and an early six-pipe Benelli Sei... frankly, despite all the acclaim, it looked like they put it togther out of whatever was available, since I couldn't find any common theme.
It's sort of funny, I remember reading articles when the exhibit opened in New York; critics who were defensive of Robert Mapplethorpe's "Piss Christ" thought the motorcycles were "edgy" and inappropriate. Evil death-machine technology as art? Surely you jest!
Today I got the floor roughed in back in the bathroom, removed some more rotted wall, and started reframing around the large window on the left side.
Before I bought this camper I had seriously thought about buying a farm or car trailer, which is the same length, framing it up, and then covering it with sheet metal. It wouldn't have been as pretty... but it would have been a hell of a lot less work.
Remember: Remodeling Sucks.