Oppy and the Speed Bump...

Today's trivia:

In July of 1942, Robert Oppenheimer left his meetings in California and headed via train for Michigan. There, on the shores of Lake Otsego dotted with holiday cabins, a fierce discussion and debate took place: Could the test of a nuclear weapon set fire to the atmosphere?

Oppenheimer's opposite was Arthur Holly Compton, a renowned Nobel Prize–winning physicist. You will not see him portrayed in Christopher Nolan's just-released Oppenheimer, but he was one of the scientist's closest friends. It was Compton who put Oppenheimer in charge of the Manhattan Project and who years later defended him against bogus charges of Communism. And if you're wondering what all of this has to do with cars, well, Arthur Holly Compton also invented the modern speed bump.

Click through to RTWT.

This watch hit a speed bump.

Did you know...?

From 1968 to 1998, the Holley Performance Products company, best known as a carburetor manufacturer but also the owner of a bunch of other automotive parts makers, was owned by Colt Industries?

Yeah, that Colt. They had a bunch of non-gun businesses in the '60s and '70s, like Pratt & Whitney Machine Tool (not to be confused with Pratt & Whitney the aircraft engine builder.)

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Unexpected.

Today in completely unexpected Wikipedia articles:

Fishing industry in Switzerland

Yesterday in its little "Did you know..." trivia panel, Wikipedia served up the apocryphal-sounding tidbit that the Swiss fishery boomed in the Fifties after a fisherman discovered an industrial potato peeler would make two perfect filets out of a perch. I don't know the veracity of this, but I want it to be true.

I hope the Swiss navy guards its fisheries zealously!

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"...against a plumber and an architect, both with a PhD."

Brownells has Trivia Tuesdays now, apparently, with a new question every hour. Correct answers enter you in both the hourly drawing and the day's prize drawing at 5PM CDT.
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This morning's trivia:

Speaking of American Staffordshire terriers: Sergeant Stubby, of whose existence I was completely unaware until yesterday afternoon.

Wikipedia is like crack for trivia addicts.

I'm THIS many!

VFTP turns four today. That's, like 80 in blog years.

Funny, it doesn't feel like I've been doing this for four years.

Go Team Me!

Matt pointed out that VFTP passed three quarters of a million hits sometime this morning.

Wheee!!

1 Million in '08!

But enough jumping up and down and squealing. I have a revolver to photograph, it being Sunday and all.

The Post of Christmas Past.

A few years ago, a good friend's daughter was going to be dancing in the Knoxville Ballet's production of "The Nutcracker" and so we went to see the first matinee performance. We sat in the darkened theater as the Master of Ceremonies rattled through the usual litany of thanking sponsors and introducing the conductor and...

...and...

...I swear, for you non-Knoxwegians, that I am not making this up...

...giving the current score of the UT football game going on at the stadium across the road.

You know you're in Knoxville, the city where the area code spells V-O-L on your touch-tone phone, when the ballet EmCee keeps you abreast of the college football score.

I'll take "Esoteric" for $500, Alex...

A website devoted to excruciatingly detailed 3D renderings of a World War One Austro-Hungarian dreadnought, the Viribus Unitis. It doesn't get much geekier.

(Incidentally, the bell of her sister ship, the Tegethoff, was presented by the Italians to the Jerries, who installed it on the heavy cruiser KMS Prinz Eugen. Demonstrating the toughness typical of the capital ships of that time, during WWII the Prinz Eugen was variously bombed by the RAF, had her stern shot away by a torpedo from HMS Trident, and survived a collision with an 8,400 ton light cruiser. Presumably the bell was irradiated along with the rest of the then-USS Prinz Eugen during the two atomic bomb tests she survived at Bikini Atoll. Too radioactive to be of further use, she was finally towed to Kwajalein and sunk.)

Curse Wikipedia...

You'd think I'd know better than to even start. And yet...

Somehow this morning started off with the International Space Station and wandered through space tourism, Biosphere 2, the godawful Pauly Shore movie Bio-Dome, and via intervening steps I don't seem to recall, I've wound up reading the rules for ice hockey, which I have never watched or cared for and which now confuses me even more than it did before, if such a thing is possible.

Oh, and on this day in 1947, Howard Hughes did his high-altitude taxiing with the Spruce Goose.

Today In Geek History: Boldly Went.

Space...the Final Frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before.

On September 8th, 1966, Star Trek aired its first episode, "The Man Trap".

Obscure humor, but maybe someone will get a chuckle...

Atlanta Braves third baseman Chipper Jones has had so much success against the New York Mets at their home ballpark that he named his son "Shea", after the Mets' home turf, Shea Stadium.

Last night, Atlanta catcher Brian McCann hit a home run in his third consecutive game against the Cincinnati Reds. The announcers flashed a graphic on the screen showing that McCann has a four-sixty-something lifetime average in the Cincinnati stadium, with a whole bunch of home runs to his credit.

I looked over at Gunsmith Bob and said "His kid is going to get the crap beat out of him at school with a name like 'Great American Ball Park McCann'."

Why I need to get into BPCR reloading.

BPCR, for those uninitiated, is "Black Powder Cartridge Rifle"; those quasi-modern pieces from the latter 19th Century that use metallic cartridges but still use good old fashioned black powder instead of modern smokeless for a propellant. I've got a few now, and I'm hoping for more (a Rolling-Block Remington or a Trapdoor Springfield would be oh so cool.) Reloading for these is borderline mandatory, though. It's not like you can't get commercially-loaded ammo, it's just that:

1) .43 Mauser (11mm Mauser): $53.00/20

2) 11x59R Gras: $68.00/20

3) .577-450 Martini-Henry: $105.00/20

So, yeah. Yikes. And you thought your .300 Win Mag was 'spensive to shoot...

Wikiwandering.

So, like I do every day, I went to Wikipedia to check on the date for any good "Today In History" post ideas. I noticed that today was the day that the treacherous Basques bushwhacked the army of Chuck the Main at Roncevaux Pass, killing one Roland. It turns out that "Roland" was just the nom de legend of one Hruodlandus, who had the job title of Brittannici limitis praefectus, or Guy In Charge Of The Border With Brittany.

One of the interesting bits of terrain in the area that the now-deceased Hruodlandus was in charge of was the island of Mont Tombe, or as it later came to be called, Mont Saint-Michel. Mont Saint-Michel has become distinctly less islandy as the surrounding bay has silted up, but French taxpayers are going to fix that by taking it in the shorts to the tune of a hojillion Francs or Euros or whatever the hell they're using for money over there this week.

Anyhow, Wikipedia notes that a movie, entitled Mindwalk, was filmed on this island. I remember my dad speaking pretty highly of this flick some years back and it looked to be right up my alley, since I loved What The Bleep Do We Know? and The Turning Point. Only it's not available in DVD and old VHS tapes are priced like imported sin. (I saw some going for over a C-note in my searching.) Le sigh. Hopefully it will have a DVD release before too long.

...and that was my Wikiwandering for the morning. :)

Heady company...

It must be a typo.

The odd thing is, I almost never go there directly from my own blogroll, but rather from the links at JShirley's or Xavier's place, depending on where I started my morning reading...

Prettiest airliner ever...

de Havilland D.H.89 Dragon Rapide.

Just so you know.

Today In History: Still waiting...

On this date in 1975, Jimmy Hoffa said "You guys wait here, I'll be right back..."

Trivial Pursuit

Did you know that, like, half the pizzas on the menu at Pizza Hut in Hong Kong use Thousand Island dressing for a base instead of tomato sauce?

Don't you feel better knowing that?

Boomsticks: k-BLAMMMM!

Back when I was working at the gun shop in Georgia, I had a cartridge collection prominently displayed on the shelf behind the counter. Folks were always bringing things in to add to it, and the star was a 4 Bore cartridge, which made even the mighty .50 BMG look a little spindly by comparison.

That is, it was the star, until a guy brought in what looked like a brass-based paper towel tube. It was labeled "0 Gauge", and was the shell from a breechloading punt gun from back in the days of market hunting. You could have dropped the 4 Bore and the .50 BMG down in there, added a .600 Nitro Express and a .458 Win Mag for good measure, and rattled them around like beans in a maraca.

Xavier has video of a sidehammer punt gun being fired.

Wow.

Well, it's no Lewis & Clark Expedition...

...but just some musings from the road between Nashville and Knoxville.

1) Driving to Nashville, I get 30-31mpg running the A/C most of the way. Coming back to Knoxville, I only get about 28 over the same route. This is because I-40 westbound takes a brief, steep climb up out of the Tennessee river valley west of Oak Ridge, and then generally trends downhill the rest of the way to Nashville. On the return leg, it's the reverse.

2) Temperature in Nashville: 91 degrees. Temperature in Knoxville, down in the valley: 91 degrees. Temperature up on the Cumberland Plateau between the two: 85 degrees.

3) It took me a bit to realize why it got dark earlier in Nashville. I'd be sitting on Oleg's back porch reading a book and suddenly look around bewildered, "Huh? It's barely 8 o'clock. Why's it dark already?" Nashville is towards the very eastern edge of the Central Time Zone, while Knoxville is at the far western edge of the Eastern Time Zone. This accounts for the sun setting 50 minutes later in Knoxville than it does in Nash Vegas.