Sunrise, Sunset

It's a bit of a puff piece, but this WaPo bit on the solar shenanigans in American's northernmost decent-sized town, Utqiagvik (née Barrow) in Alaska, is full of interesting bits of triviata. 

Meanwhile here in Hoosieropolis, sunset tonight will be at 5:27. Fortunately, though, it will rise again about 7:30 tomorrow morning, rather than in frickin' 2025.

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Important Safety Tip...

Don't piss off a crow. They hold grudges.

Renowned for their intelligence, crows can mimic human speech, use tools and gather for what seem to be funeral rites when a member of their murder, as groups of crows are known, dies or is killed. They can identify and remember faces, even among large crowds.

They also tenaciously hold grudges. When a murder of crows singles out a person as dangerous, its wrath can be alarming, and can be passed along beyond an individual crow’s life span of up to a dozen or so years, creating multigenerational grudges.

On the other hand, get on a crow's good side and they will express gratitude.

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Robot Pot

Things I didn't know I needed until just now: A robotic self-propelled flowerpot.

Think of it as a prosthetic for a brown thumb.

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Torn...

Some dude has put together a book of a bunch of Army uniform photos from Natick Soldier Systems Center dating from the early Seventies to about the Gulf War, and the nerd in me wants to buy it, but I'm not sure I want to buy it this badly...

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Unicorn Sighting

Here's a thing you don't see every day: A genuine, honest-to-Rollie Vincent Black Shadow just tooling down your street.

These things were legends. The mystique surrounding them means that, depending on the particular year model or variation, prices can easily exceed a hundred grand for a nice one... and that one sure looks nice.

That dude has got to have a regular Garage-Mahal of glorious scooters.

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Future stuff...

I just can't get over how the price on tech stuff has just plummeted. It wasn't that long ago that a 4K 55" TV was a science fiction movie prop. Now BezosMart is blowing the things out for $299 on Prime Day...

You can spend a ton on tablets or smartphones if you want, but you can get a pretty decent one for very reasonable dough if you don't have to have the most memory or megapixels.

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Okay, this is cool...

The original cast of The Avengers assembled again... to dub their lines in the Lakota language.

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Mystery Flesh Pit National Park

I was today years old the first time I heard about this website. Someone went and dropped a reference to this wonderfully off-kilter web page and I've been stuck in the mystery flesh pit all morning.

Careful! It's deep!

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Muck Raker

I've seen a lot of things in the canal up in Broad Ripple Village proper since I first moved here years ago: bicycles, lawn furniture, a picnic table, ducks, electric scooters, drunk fratbros, Indianapolis Colts punters (but I repeat myself), but this was a first...

The big tracked excavator in the background, the one atop the pile of rock, was scooping up loads of rock and dumping it into this tracked dump truck. (Googling around says this is technically a "crawler carrier" with a "dump chute", I guess?)

The dump truck would then trundle its load along the canal to the other tracked excavator, which would scoop it out and use it to reline the banks. It'd drop a couple scoops and then use its bucket to... WHAM! WHAM! WHAM! ...smoosh the rocks it had just dropped into the bank of the canal.

Jerkwater

I was today years old when I learned the source of the term "jerkwater town".

Original steam locomotives could only go a fairly short distance before needing to replenish their water supply. The solution was to add a "tender car" behind the locomotive that carried additional fuel and water (there was a water tank under the wood or coal you see piled in the car behind the locomotive in old western movies.)

Even so, that only stretched the range to maybe a hundred and fifty miles or so between top-ups. Out in the west, this might not be far enough to get you to the next station, so the railroads built fuel and water stops at regular intervals along their routes where the locomotive could top up its tender. You've seen those water towers with the long spout that the engineer could jerk out over the tender to dump water into its tank, right?

Little hamlets would often spring up around these fuel & water stops, even though they didn't have an actual train station...

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Nonsense Etymology

In case you were wondering what a "pompatus" was, now you can know the rest of the story.

That's the sort of deep-dive nerdery I dig.

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Pew, Improved

The ability to swap mags from subsonics to supers and have, essentially, an MP5SD in the sheets and a Krink in the streets is a big improvement in utility.

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I was today years old...

...when I learned the word "mondegreen", and I already love it madly.

Per Benjamin Dreyer:

"Perhaps you’ve run across the term “mondegreen”? I’ve long known it to mean a misheard lyric or bit of poetry, but its full meaning I learned only minutes ago — because I finally deigned to investigate. “Mondegreen” was coined in 1954 by writer Sylvia Wright to commemorate her having misapprehended the phrase “laid him on the green,” in this line from a Scottish ballad: “They have slain the Earl of Moray / An’ laid him on the green.” Wright heard wrong, thinking there were two slaying victims, the earl and “Lady Mondegreen.”"

Bobbi's been pushing me to read Dreyer's English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style, and I think the linked column has pushed it to the top of my to-read pile.

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The Music of the Gears

What you're hearing there is sixteen very angry little cylinders arranged in a vee, each one displacing just under a hundred cc's, being force-fed air from a supercharger drawing through a pair of SU carburetors. The result was six hundred frantic horsepower at twelve thousand ear-piercing RPM.

It was basically a pair of 750cc V-8s end-to-end with the thicket of shrieking straight-cut gears driving the dual overhead cams smooshed between them.

And it sounds glorious.

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A Hotter Way to Strip

I can't remember where I first read about carrying just four rounds in a speed strip. I was thinking it was something Massad Ayoob wrote, since that's the first place I first heard about a lot of stuff, especially back in the day, but Mas is a fan of five rounds in a six round strip. 

I think the four-round strip idea originated with Michael De Bethencourt, but I probably learned about it secondhand from Chuck Haggard, Gorillafritz, or Claude Werner. The theory behind it is that it's a lot faster to get rounds into the chambers two at a time, and it's sometimes better to get the gun up and shooting quickly than it is to fumble that fifth round into the cylinder.

Anyhow, for quite a while, I always saw that as a sort of secret sign. If I saw a picture of someone's carry revolver and they had a speed strip with two pairs of rounds separated by a gap in the middle, I'd think "There's a dude who knows what time it is."

The first time I saw Caleb Giddings post a pic of a strip loaded with two rounds and a space, and two more rounds and a space, and then two more rounds, I was gobsmacked. What kind of voodoo, cool guy, go-fast esoterica was this? What revolver accessory manufacturing company was so switched on that they were offering such a clever  gadget, which would let you load quickly in pairs anything from just two rounds to a whole cylinder full, (assuming you had the time.)

I PM'ed Caleb.

He wrote back "They're just eight-round Tuff Strips. Duh."

D'OH!

They come in 8-shot .32 size, as well!

Incidentally, you'll note that the reloads in these things are Hornady Critical Defense. I'm not a huge fan of Critical Defense, especially in .32 Mag, since it's light-for-caliber and will underpenetrate if it does expand (never a given out of a snubbie).

But that conical bullet shape makes it a breeze to reload in a revolver. You can practically chuck those things into the charge holes from across the room.

Tab Clearing...

• Down the Road has photos from the Feast of the Hunter's Moon up in Tippecanoe County.


• Ever wonder why the stereotypical haunted house in the US is in the Second Empire style? Here's why.


• Big Tech's "attention rents".

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Game Changer?

Holy cow, Garmin has released a highly-portable radar chronograph with a $599 MSRP.

That would be such a game changer for me. I've had articles run right against the ragged edge of a deadline due to needing to wait for a break in the weather so I could set up my old Shooting Chrony Beta in one of the pistol bays at Marion County Fish & Game. 

When the pistol bays were down for maintenance earlier this summer, I had to set up my chrono on a tripod on the main firing line...and hope nobody else got there that early in the morning to turn the process of shooting and recording three ten-round strings into an all-morning festival of tedium of calling the range cold, scuttling down with my notebook, scuttling back, calling the range hot again, et bloody cetera.

With a radar-based chrono, I could use the indoor range at Indy Arms Co. right down the street, weather be damned.

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Heavy Mettle

Even in a city where pretty much anything goes, the sight and sound of knights in shining armor swinging swords at each other still draws a crowd.

“Are you ready for a medieval rumble?” shouts an announcer in a black kilt and leather boots. Spectators scream back, and play begins, steel striking steel hard, combatants hitting the ground with loud thuds.

[snip]

“It’s like full-contact MMA with steel weapons,” says 42-year-old Damion DiGrazia, who runs the team known as Gladiators NYC. “It’s also this sport that is surprisingly transformative for a lot of people.”

This sounds a lot more metal than the plastic-armor-and-wooden-sword SCA stuff I remember from my misspent youth.

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If the earth is flat and space is fake...

...then this guy's got some weird looking dust flecks in his lens.

Oops, I did it again! This time from Netherlands, during Steve Bowen & Woody Hoburg spacewalk. The full solar transit lasted 0.75 second 😎

Each frame is a single shot at 1/32000s with the OM-1 on the CFF200 apo: I never make ISS transits from stackings or assemblies! pic.twitter.com/94y644q4bI

— Thierry Legault (@ThierryLegault) June 10, 2023

Orbitville, Pop.17

China sent another three astronauts into space — including the first civilian — on Tuesday morning, a day after announcing plans to land astronauts on the moon before 2030 and setting up a new sphere of rivalry with the United States.

China lofted another capsule to its Tiangong space station yesterday, which had three crew aboard already.

At the time, the four Axiom Space Ax-2 astronauts were still aboard the ISS, along with the seven crew of ISS Expedition 69.

That's enough humans in space at one time that you'd need to pull off both socks to count them. There are only two fewer people in orbit right now than there are permanent residents of Mentone, Texas.

With China having moved their planned lunar landing ahead to 2030 and NASA still aiming for 2025, the new space race is heating up pretty good.

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