Meme Dump!

Hump Day Meme Dump!

When you negotiate with terrorists...

...all you do is teach the monkeys to steal.

They're going to advance to kidnapping for banana ransoms, mark my words.

.

Meme Dump!

Tab Clearing...

• Massive explosion at Valero refinery in Texas.


• How Israel hijacked Iran's surveillance camera network and turned it into a targeting tool.


• What if Germany had stayed on the defensive in the west in 1914?

.

Virtual Mystery Girl

With all the current talk about the downsides of people falling in love with their imaginary AI creations, it would be a great time to read (or re-read) William Gibson's novel Idoru, which is currently on sale in the Kindle version.

It's probably my favorite novel by my favorite sci-fi author. While Neuromancer was lightning in a bottle and hit like a bomb the first time around, Idoru strikes a lot of the same notes and themes in a slightly different way and was written by a more mature and experienced Gibson. I think the Bridge Trilogy is better overall than the Sprawl Trilogy for just that reason.

.

Monday Memes!

Wild to think that this blog is older than Twitter, and only slightly younger than the earliest incarnations of YouTube and Facebook...

Dire Straits

A large number of internet pundits have abandoned their earlier fields of expertise in virology, epidemiology, and deep sea submersible design, and become experts in global supply chains, seizing on the president's statements that we don't need the Strait of Hormuz opened. (Although he also issued a stern ultimatum that they'd better open it by today, or else!)

While it's possibly true that none of the gasoline in the tanks of my cars originated in the Persian Gulf, that's kinda immaterial, despite what the Very Serious Economy Understanders are telling me.

See, the Gulf States are sitting on a massive natural gas deposit. In order to utilize this gas, they sell some of it, but also put it to other uses.

For example, do you know why Alcoa built their smelting plants near hydroelectric dams? Because the Hall-Héroult process for smelting aluminum takes a tremendous amount of electricity. 

Bahrain and Qatar use natural gas electrical plants to do what Niagara Falls and the TVA did in the US; namely to drive massive aluminum smelters. Aluminium Bahrain (Alba) and Qatalum alone produce a significant percentage of the world's aluminum. Half of all aluminum used in the US is imported, mostly from Canada, but the second and third largest sources are the UAE and Bahrain. Further, since very little alumina and bauxite is actually mined in the Gulf States, most of the ore has to be shipped there in the first place... through the Strait of Hormuz, before the finished aluminum is shipped back out... through the Strait of Hormuz. The war has already seriously dinged aluminum production and shipping.

Another thing that the natural gas in the Gulf States gets used for is the Haber process. Before Fritz Haber figured out a way to produce ammonia by reacting atmospheric nitrogen with hydrogen, nations used to go to war for control of islands covered in fossilized seabird crap because it was needed to produce the nitrates necessary for things like gunpowder and fertilizer. You are alive today because of the revolution in farm productivity allowed by ammonium nitrate fertilizers. About a quarter of the nitrates for the fertilizer that the farmers in the US use is produced on the other side of the Strait of Hormuz.

Finally, even if every drop of petroleum that shipped out through the Strait of Hormuz went to China, Vietnam, South Korea, Japan, and Thailand, a very large amount of that does not get used to make fuel for Tokyo salarymen's Toyotas and PLA tanks. It gets used to make... plastic. And if you can't touch something plastic made in China/Japan/Korea/et cetera from where you're sitting right now, I'll eat my hat. 

Hell, you're probably sitting on a chair made with petroleum while reading this on a monitor made with petroleum and about to compose an angry email on a keyboard made with petroleum... all of which went through the Strait of Hormuz.

So, yeah, it's kinda important.

EDIT: Oh, I forgot, there's also about a third of the globe's helium supply stuck in there...

 

Meme Dump!

Automotif DCXVI...

Stumbled across this minty 1957 Mercedes-Benz 220S parked out in front of a local shop the other day. It has less than ten thousand miles on the odometer.

Meme Dump!

Automotif DCXV...

Here's a neat car you don't see every day, a 1960 Austin-Healey 3000 (referred to as a Mark I now, although that's a retronym because of the later Mark II and Mark III models.) You can see more deets here.

.

The Skies Catch Up

"Meteorological* spring" has been here for almost three weeks, but the equinox today marks the onset of real, actual spring. 

Boys and girls, we have officially survived another winter. Pat yourselves on the back for a job well done. We gotta take our W's where we find them.

*For simplicity and consistency, meteorologists divide the seasons by the calendar. Spring is Mar/Apr/May, summer is Jun/Jul/Aug, et cetera.

.

TGIMemeDay!

Tab Clearing...

• Some people have more of a right to privacy than others.


• Firefly animated series in development.


• Is Rationalism a religion?

.

Automotif DCXIV...

Here's a fairly early Porsche 914 getting some work done at a local shop. There was a guy in our neighborhood when I was a kid who had one of these and he would "wave" at us with the headlights if we were out playing in the yard when he drove past. I thought that was just the coolest thing ever.

.

Meme Dump!

Automotif DCXIII...

This lightly restomodded 1971 Chevelle SS is absolutely eye-catching. I crossed the street to get a bunch of photos, using a Canon EOS R and RF 24-105mm f/4-7.1 IS zoom lens.

.

Sir Not Appearing In This Film

The things you like best about the best Star Wars movie probably came from Leigh Brackett, the "Queen of Space Opera". The original forms of Lando, Bespin, and Yoda all originated (albeit under different names) in her original rough screenplay.

The Luke/Leia/Han love triangle was in there, too, and rather spicier than it was in the final form onscreen in The Empire Strikes Back.

What I love most about the first two movies is how much obvious retconning Lucas had to do to beat them into the eventual Skywalker canon. We all saw that kiss on the Death Star, George.

Remember, Han didn’t just shoot first, Han shot only.

Greedo got burned down without even getting a shot off.

Midweek Meme Day!

Automotif DCXII...

Here's an interesting sight. It's a Toyota Starlet GT Turbo. The second generation of the Starlet, which was still rear-wheel drive, was sold over here from '81-'84, when gas was expensive* and its 39 City/54 Highway MPG rating made it popular.

The one in the pics, as you may surmise from the location of the wheel, is a Japanese market Starlet. It's a fourth generation car, by which time the Starlet platform had become front-wheel drive. As a '90-'91 GT Turbo model, it has a 1.3L intercooled turbo inline 4-cylinder making 135hp, which must feel sporty in a car weighing only 1,962 pounds.

*In 1981 the average gas price in the US was $1.35/gal, which works out to $4.78/gal in current dollars.

Snap Me, Maybe

Back in 2014 I wrote about the niche that small, pocketable cameras filled for me:

While bigger cameras like my old hand-me-down Coolpix 990 from Oleg or the newer Shower Pot SX500 have been supplanted by the DSLR for when I am Going Someplace To Take Pictures, and the really quite decent camera in the Galaxy SII suffices for I'm Someplace And, Hey!, There's A Picture!, there's still a niche for something to slip into a jacket or shirt pocket for I'm Going Someplace Where I Might Take Pictures But Maybe Not.

Therefore it was interesting to me to see someone else writing about reasoning their way through the same thought process.

A Sony NEX-3 next to an Olympus PEN E-P5, both slightly too big for the document pocket in my gun burkha.

Meme Dump!

Ugh.

Imagine me showing you a photo snapped out the window just now showing snow blowing around after yesterday afternoon’s sunny seventy degrees and captioning it “What fresh hell is this?”

That’ll save me the effort of walking over to the window.

.

Memes for a Monday Morn!

Danger Avocado

Someone referred to this Level 1/2/3 severe weather warning graphic as a "Danger Avocado" and now I can't unsee it.

Commercialized Holidays

The Ides of March has gotten so commercialized lately.

Remember the real meaning of the holiday: It's not just about stabbing people, it's about getting together to stab people in groups.

.

Nostalgia Ain't What It Used To Be

Did you know you can get lots of TV for free? It's streaming through the air, all you need is one of these things. It's silly to pay a cable or satellite provider to get local network channels when antennas still work.

The cool thing is that in the age of digital broadcast television, every station gets a handful of additional channels, and they stock these with a host of channels very reminiscent of the old local UHF stations that played reruns and syndicated shows.

My favorite is MeTV and not just for their Saturday morning cartoons. They also have a great Saturday evening lineup* that kicks off with Svengoolie, a classic b-grade monster movie show with a cheesy host character.

Last night they showed the original Friday the 13th, which I hadn't seen since it was still fairly new.

I was in eighth grade, spending the weekend at a friend's house playing Dungeons & Dragons (Module B2, if you must know), and my friend had an older sister who was so cool because she was in college and drove a late '70s Firebird, and she asked us "Hey, do y'all wanna see a scary movie?" and of course we said yes, so we watched the camp counselors at Crystal Lake get massacreed on HBO.

Friends, it scared the pee out of younger me. Like, nightmares and stuff. Put me clean off horror movies... especially of the slasher genre ...for the next decade.

Looking back now, no wonder Stranger Things was right in my wheelhouse.

Funnily enough, that salaciously scary movie I watched in '81 or '82 took surprisingly little editing to be okay for broadcast TV in 2026. They blurred some boobies and might have cut some dialog, but it looked like most all of the gruesome stuff was still there.

Also, it really wasn't scary at all. I didn't jump at the jump scares and the slasher stuff wasn't very gross by modern standards. It was all kinda cheesy in fact. Ah, well.

*After Svengoolie, you get the Adam West Batman, Star Trek (TOS), and Adventures of Superman. If you're a night owl, those are followed up by Lost in Space and Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea.

Memes For Sunday!