Automotif CCXVIII...

It's not just another rat rod with a Small Block Chevy. Instead, it's a rat rod with three quarters* of a Small Block Chevy.

(*Ish. I'm fairly certain that's a Buick V6. The Buick V6 isn't actually an SBC missing a quarter of its pistons, but it's close enough for government work.)

.

Range day yesterday...

I took the .38/32 Terrier to Indy Arms Co yesterday. It was my first time shooting indoors there since probably April of last year. Bobbi had spotted me a couple boxes of .38 S&W out of her stash of Enfield fodder (one Magtech and one PPU) and Chris at Lucky Gunner found a box of Fiocchi that had, I don't know, fallen down in the sofa cushions or been used to prop up a wobbly table leg. I also had eight rounds of Winchester LRN left in a box in the attic.

I'd already done some chrono testing, and that'll go up at the Patreon site today or tomorrow. Yesterday I wound up limiting myself to using up the last of the Winchester and the PPU, all in double-action work at five yards.

This may have been the first time anyone's ever shot a Modern Samurai Project target with a .38/32 Terrier. (I'd just got the targets in from an order the other day, so it's what was handy.)

With the original "splinter" stocks and nothing filling in the sinus behind the trigger guard*, fast double-action work is hard and will challenge your skills. You can see that I'm tending to shade to the left and a bit low even at only five yards. 

I could put a more modern set of stocks on this, but I think I'll go with a grip adaptor. If I can't scare up a Tyler T-grip in the attic, I'll have to be off to the internet.

*Chris has a good explanation in this piece.

.

Bobbi and the Bat

Our neighbor requested aid from Bobbi in evicting another bat...

When I arrived, she told me one of her cats had carried it up from the basement and set it down on the floor at her feet, whereupon it had scrambled to the nearest vertical surface, attained some height and launched itself to skitter about. It had found the kitchen clock and scrambled behind it.

"I'm pretty sure it's still there," she said.

I set the small cardboard box down on the counter, open, and asked if she had a sturdy chair.

She was ahead of me. "I have stepladder right here."

We set up the ladder and I gloved up and climbed up. Lifting the clock from its hook revealed a small brown bat, huddled tightly into the hollow body of the clock, giving a strong impression of a creature who is hoping this is all a terrible dream.

Negative Outcomes

Claude Werner, the Tactical Professor, has a couple more unfortunate lessons for his collection of serious mistakes gun owners make:

Deadly Conduct and Attempted Murder
Those are the charges in two incidents where Negative Outcomes resulted from gunfire. Both situations occurred when people thought they were making good decisions about employing a firearm for Personal Protection but the legal system doesn’t agree.

In one case, we have a person whose sole and only plan for trouble seems to have been going to guns, without a serious assessment of its appropriateness or her own personal abilities. In the other, an off duty LEO seems to forget that his duty is to break contact, not teach someone a lesson in manners. Carrying a gun in public is serious business, and screwing up with it can wreck or end your life or the lives of others. Use your head for something other than a hat rack.

In the first situation, a little canister of POM in the pocket or waistband might have been a more appropriate solution, assuming one was needed. In the latter one, if the agent had resisted the urge to make a parting remark, he might still have a career and his interlocutor might still be alive.

The "TPH" in "Walther TPH" does not stand for Tactical Professor Handgun

Spinning Discs and Submarines

This was Kodak's top-of-the-line Disc camera in 1982. The 8000 added a few features over its cheaper stablemates...

Yes, I know it's an Akula. I didn't have a tiny Typhoon.

The cheaper Disc cameras could shoot pretty quickly, at least in a world where motor drive was kind of a novelty. A quick shooter could probably get two shutter presses a second just by poking the button. The 8000 added a selector switch on the front. Leave it in semiauto "●" mode and it worked like a regular shutter button. Slide it into burst "●●●" mode and it'd shoot three frames a second for as long as you held the button down... or at least for the five seconds it took to use up a 15-frame disc.

It has a sliding switch that moves a converter in front of the fixed-focus 12.5mm f/2.8 lens, for head-and-shoulders portraits & closeups. I don't know what that does to the focal length, but given that the basic lens had a field of view roughly equivalent to a 40mm lens on a 35mm camera, it was probably something in the 80mm range. The distance info on the inside of the camera's folding cover says it's to be used for shooting anything from one-and-a-half to four feet; anything farther uses the regular lens. It's spring loaded and poking a little button will retract it. If you close the cover, a little nubbin on the inside of the cover will trip the button and retract the lens automatically. On this old camera, deploying the closeup lens sounded like opening a creaky screen door.

The Disc 8000 also had a very modern looking digital display in the lid. That's an LCD travel alarm clock. That's right, the LCD display does not involve any camera functions. It's not a a frame counter or anything; it's not even connected to the camera proper. It's just an LCD travel alarm clock in the folding plastic cover. LCD clocks were very modern in 1982.

Normally in the camera world, the more money you spend, the more "professional" features you get and the more manual control you have over camera functions, but not with the Disc line. The 8000 retailed for $142.95... nearly four hundred bucks in today's money ...but you had zero manual control over the camera. The camera decided whether or not you needed flash, picked an aperture, and chose between 1/100th or 1/200th shutter speeds, and it did this on the el-cheapo Disc 4000 the same as the top of the line 8000. All you got for better than double the MSRP was a full-auto button, a sliding plastic closeup lens, a travel alarm clock, and a brushed gold tone finish.

The film discs dropped in the back. Close the camera back, lock the latch down, and it whirred to the first frame, ready to go.

While the thicker Disc film was more likely to lie flat in the focal plane than the film in contemporary 110-format, and could theoretically deliver sharper photos than the 110, getting good prints out of it depended on your local minilab having bought new, more expensive printers, and most of them didn't. Printed with existing equipment, Disc photos looked like grainy ass, even at 3"x5" size. Printing bigger from the tiny negatives was hopeless.

All that above makes this passage from The Hunt for Red October especially lulzy.

Spy writers were briefly enamored with the Discs, because the cameras were so flat, plus the negatives were almost exactly the same size as the 16mm ones used in the classic Minox spy cameras.

Still, the passage as described by Clancy above is kinda implausible. For starters, there's no easy way for MI6 to have processed just part of a disc and leave a couple negatives for the CIA to process. I mean, you could cut the disc apart in a dark bag, but how do you know what's on what frame at that point? Hoping for a lot of detail from these images, especially blown up to 10"x10" (?) prints as described later in the book is bordering on wishful thinking.

The LCD travel alarm clock is how you know it's high-tech. The brushed gold-tone finish is how you know it's high-end.

The Disc cameras were only in production for some six years at Kodak. Disc's role in the photo ecosystem was largely usurped by the almost equally short-lived APS format, which was in turn replaced by digital photography.

As a final indignity for loyal disc shooters, the Kodak cameras as sold on the US market, even the expensive 8000, do not have user-replaceable batteries. These days they're mostly just curiosities, an excuse to order one as a photo prop when you find yourself chortling over a passage in a Clancy novel you hadn't read in a long time...

.

Get to the choppah!

Here comes the IU LifeLine helicopter!

Starting back in 2013, something of an event has been made of the delivery of the green flag by helicopter.

It's been done by local professional athletes on the LifeLine helicopter as well as by fast-roping troops.

This year it was Hoosier health care heroes.

Following the little ceremony, the helicopter lifted right back off...

But it didn't fly far, setting down maybe a couple hundred yards away.

N195LL has a job to do at the track, being ready should someone need transport to the hospital. As a matter of fact, according to AviationDB, the 2008 MBB-BK 117 is registered at 109 Gasoline Alley.

Of course, the IMS is only a couple miles down the road from a Level One trauma center, so unless the helicopter's already on station it can be quicker to just throw a badly-injured driver in an ambulance and gun it for the ER, as happened to James Hinchcliffe when he took a piece of the car's suspension through his femoral artery during practice in 2015...

"What’s so fortunate about the whole situation was Indy is the closest track to a Level 1 trauma center of anywhere we that we run. Its four miles down the road on the same street. So they put me in the ambulance, they skip the infield medical center and just bee-lined it straight for the trauma center. In about five minutes I was there. Police escort, they shut the roads down in front and ambulance driver just gunned it. At this point they’re trying to get fluids through, because I’m bleeding profusely. They get me into the ER. They thought they kind of had the bleeding under control but my surgeon tells this story where he takes a step back from the bed and realizes that, he looks down, and under the bed was a pool of blood. I had bled through the gurney. So they bee-line me into one of the ORs and got in there and that’s when they found the artery and were able to stitch it up."

That was difficult.

I did most of my shooting with the 5D Mark II wearing the EF 70-200mm f/2.8L, with the 2X extender...

...giving me, effectively, a 140-400mm f/5.6 lens. I opted to use the older 5D Mark II instead of my 5DS because the 50MP sensor on the newer camera was going to expose every wobble. As it was, I was shooting at ISO 250 and fairly wide open, in order to keep shutter speeds as high as possible. I'm a total rookie at this kind of shooting.

The camera body weighs about 28.5 ounces, the lens about 46.25, and the extender adds about another half pound, for an all-up weight of nearly five and a quarter pounds. I felt the after-effects of swinging it around all day. Panning was hard and pretty hit-or-miss.

Palou, in the blue and white #10 car, and Castroneves in the black and pink #06, swapped the lead seemingly every other lap over the last few dozen, making an exciting first Indy 500 experience. With an average speed of 190.69mph, it was the fastest ever, too.

.

Hostile Takeover

So yesterday morning I was chilling out and watching the morning news when a commercial I had not seen before came on the televisor.

Everybody's sitting around with these snorkel masks on at the CPAP support group except this one dude who's just waving his remote control for... well, for what is not exactly made clear.

Now, I have a fair number of friends whose lives have been improved by CPAP machines, so I was curious as to what this new gizmo was, exactly. I pulled my iPad out and hit the Googles...

What the hell? Seriously?

Look if there's anything I don't want connected to the Internet of Things, it's my body's internal organs. Just keep my innards off the web, okay? I don't need my chitlins to be Bluetooth-enabled. There's a line, and that's on the wrong side of it. The last thing I need is some hacker in Kiev pwning my tongue and holding it ransom for a grand in Bitcoin.

While having a remote control for the tongue muscle does have, er, interesting boudoir implications beyond those of a mere peaceful snore-less night, the downsides are just... ick.

"Hey, why are you walking around with your tongue stuck out?"

"Got hacked. Thtupid thcript kiddieth."

.

Faster than a speeding...

Rinus VeeKay, in the Bitcoin-sponsored car, qualified third and started on the front row. He surged ahead and led the race for thirty-some laps before mysteriously collapsing and finishing weaker than he expected, although he's expected to come back strongly later in the season... like some kind of giant 700 horsepower metaphor.

.

Virtuality

So, it all started with a beautiful photo essay in the NYT on the coconut crab trade on Makatea in French Polynesia. With the phosphate mine closed, it said the population on the atoll has dwindled from over a thousand to about eighty permanent residents. Though there's hope for tourism, a major export right now is coconut crabs.

The crab hunters have to traverse a moonscape of extraction pits, most of them seven and a half feet across and fifty to seventy-five feet deep, at night, to go check the crab traps in the best hunting grounds. You can see this wild terrain from space.

That looks like a pretty sporty walk in the woods.

Anyway, that led me to the Wikipedia article on coconut crabs, which led me to the one on Christmas Island, which led me to virtually browsing the shelves at the Christmas Island Supermarket.

They've got a pretty good selection of Pantene, Oreos, and Knob Creek, if that's your thing. America turns up in the weirdest places.

Wandering around far-flung corners of the world via Googlesat and Street View is a pretty interesting time killer, actually.

One of the more engrossing streetscapes I've found is Iquitos in Peru. It's not connected to the rest of Peru by road or rail and can only be reached by air or by freighter up the Amazon. Because of that, cars and trucks are relatively uncommon, and the city swarms with motorcycles and motorized trikes.

I remember scanning around it by satellite and Street View and chatting with Bobbi...

Me: "Man, the better parts of town I've found all have extensive bars on doors and porches and have a sort of run down look like the scruffier parts of New Orleans. I guess the war against mildew is tough when your city has the climate of a shower stall. The bad parts of town look like Mogadishu without the bullet holes. It's like there's not a nice neighborhood."

RX: "Keep looking. The mayor has to live somewhere."

Memorial Day 2021

 

Remember.

How my day went...

The initial charge into turn one. Pardon the potato photo. I have something like a thousand images to sort through hoping something turned out.

South Vista upper deck with a beautiful view of turn one. I have a ton of pics to process and a report on the day to write, so stay tuned!

Automotif CCXVII...

As I was exiting Fresh Market with a sack full of dinner fixings, something there in the traffic on College Avenue caught my eye...

Fortunately I had the D5000 wearing the 18-200mm superzoom on it.

It's a McLaren 720S Spider!

It's Holden!

I couldn't help it. 

Holden was laying there with the light from the window on him, and my Nikon D3000 with the 35mm f/1.8 was right there in arm's reach...

.

More of this, please.

The internet could use a lot less political bullshit and a lot more of whatever the hell this is. https://t.co/9O77tCJ9zL

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) May 26, 2021

Zoom Hate

I think some of the residual hate toward zoom lenses comes from the fact that some early ones were truly awful, and even the good modern ones are usually slower than their fixed focal length equivalents. An f/2.8 zoom is pretty fast, after all.

But sometimes you need one to get the shot.

zOoM wItH yOuR fEeT https://t.co/qcnfx0sg3X

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) May 26, 2021

It's not like you can hop in the cage with the tiger, after all...

...and nobody wants to schlep a half-dozen different prime lenses around the zoo and swap them out constantly.

Although shooting the zoo with a lone prime lens would be a fun project...

.

It makes me so mad!

“Did you watch the news last night?”

“Yeah, I watched [Tucker Carlson/Rachel Maddow].”

Except that’s not the news. That’s an editorial program where a person gets performatively angry about their opinion of selected bits of news so that you get angry about it along with them...righteously angry enough to sit through an hour’s worth of commercials. 

It’s not news, it’s irritainment.

.

“Why is movie blurry?”

I'm seeing lots of chatter about the cinematography of Zack Snyder's latest effort. Some people seem confused by the blurry backgrounds...

First and foremost, some scenes have a blurry, dreamlike quality to them because of Zack Snyder’s use of the Canon 50mm f/.0.95 lens, nicknamed the Canon Dream Lens, a relatively obscure piece of equipment developed in Japan in the 1960s and 1970s.

Snyder, who also acted as cinematographer on Army of the Dead, specifically utilized the full-frame Rangefinder lenses...

Here's a little more on the Canon "dream lens".

Army of the Dead is a two and a half hour orgy of violence, dark humor, and acre after acre of dreamy gorgeous ethereal bokeh. Not only was it mostly shot with those old Canon f/0.95 lenses, but he had them jammed WFO the whole time.

If you’re looking for a technical instruction documentary on proper firearms handling and helicopter maintenance in a zombie epidemic, you’ll be disappointed. If you’re looking for a popcorn munching action zombie darkly comedic heist flick with FRICKING GORGEOUS CINEMATOGRAPHY as well as all the bokeh? Your movie is here.

.

That's a bold move.

"Belarusian authorities scrambled a fighter jet and flagged what turned out to be a false bomb alert to force a Ryanair plane to land on Sunday and then detained an opposition-minded journalist who was on board, drawing condemnation from Europe and the United States.

In what was described by some EU leaders as a hijacking, the passenger plane flying from Athens to Lithuania was suddenly diverted to Minsk, the capital of Belarus, escorted there by a Soviet-era MiG-29 fighter jet."

I don't think that describing this as a state-sanctioned hijacking of a foreign-flagged airliner is at all inaccurate, if some of what's being said is true.

insisting there’s an IED onboard. Eventually the crew was forced to send out SOS (literally moments before the plane would've left Belarus airspace). MiG-29 took off and escorted it to Minsk. Security services entered the plane and arrested Protasevich. (2/2)

— Tadeusz Giczan (@TadeuszGiczan) May 23, 2021

The flight originated in Greece and was bound for Lithuania, and was aboard a Polish-registered aircraft operated by a subsidiary of Ireland-based Ryanair. Understandably, rather a large number of nations and organizations are a bit cross with the Byelorussian government at the moment.

.

Seen it before...

The nation's crazy uncle hasn't updated his new blog in a few days. I've seen it so many times, they always start out with the best intentions and go strong for a few weeks or a month, but gradually it begins to feel like a chore and the updates come fewer and farther between...

.