I'll be off-line for a bit

Not that, considering my flakey posting schedule, anybody would notice, but I'll be off-line for a while. I'm having outpatient surgery and I'll need to recuperate.

Nothing serious, but you never know -- mistakes do happen. My only hope is that, should I be the victim of a surgical miscalculation, -- say an accidental head transplant like above for example -- is that I not be stuck with the noggin of a soy boy on my left shoulder.

Excellent summary of the Kavanaugh hearings

None Of Us Are Free

Get ready for an abolitionist weekend with Solomon Burke
and the Blind Boys of Alabama.

  

McKinley smiled and extended his hand...

Leon Czolgosz in custody

On this day in 1901 the anarchist Leon Czolgosz assassinated President William McKinley. From History's The Assassination of President William McKinley:

Despite the sweltering late-summer heat, a long line of people waited outside the Temple of Music when the reception began at 4 p.m. As the theater’s organist played a Bach sonata, the visitors slowly filed inside, many of them eager for a chance to meet the president and shake his hand. Near the front of the line stood 28-year-old Leon Czolgosz, a shy and brooding former steel worker. An avowed anarchist, Czolgosz had arrived in Buffalo only a few days earlier and purchased a .32 caliber Iver Johnson revolver—the same type of weapon that another anarchist had used to assassinate the Italian King Umberto I the previous summer. He now waited with the gun wrapped in a white handkerchief and concealed inside his jacket pocket. “It was in my heart; there was no escape for me,” Czolgosz later said. “All those people seemed bowing to the great ruler. I made up my mind to kill that ruler.”

McKinley’s anxious staff had added police and soldiers to his usual complement of Secret Service agents, but the security detail took little notice of Czolgosz as he strode up to the president at around 4:07 p.m. When McKinley smiled and extended his hand, Czolgosz raised his pistol—still wrapped in its white handkerchief—and fired two shots at point blank range. 

The above picture is of Czolgosz in Buffalo's jail. He did not repent his crime, saying in his confession, “I don’t believe in the Republican form of government, and I don’t believe we should have any rulers. It is right to kill them.”

Justice was swift. Czolgosz was tried, found guilty and sentenced to death in short order. He was executed by electric chair on October 29th of the same year as the assassination.

Taste testing WWII combat rations

In these videos a fellow by the name of Steve opens and samples WWII combat rations. Not sure I would be that pleased to munch on a 70 year old cracker, but he seems to quite enjoy the experience. I must say that his enthusiasm -- and possibly the stuff he is eating -- is infectious.

There are more videos, including ration packs from different countries and eras at his YouTube channel Steve1989MREInfo.

Labor? What's that?

I'm retired so's my days of laboring for the man, water-cooler gossip, punch clocks and tedious office politics are behind me. Still, a holiday is a holiday so here's hoping all you worker bees have a good Labor Day.

By the way -- I have no idea what Buster Keaton has to do with any of this.

1950's minimal California

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These are the photographs of Marvin Rand, a mid 20th Century photographer who specialized in architectural photography. He did a wonderful job of catching the clean and simply lines of the design sensibilities of the time. Found at Flashbak's Marvin Rand’s Gorgeous Photos of California Modern where there are more examples of his work.

She Drives Me Crazy

Get ready for a beserk weekend with BeKy.

Appalachian molasses stir-off

Old movie posters about dope fiends

Click any image to enlarge

Recently U.S. States hither and yon are legalizing marijuana for medical and recreational use. These are posters of exploitation flicks during the prohibition years of the drug. Under the guise of a dire warning they were stuffed full of wild parties, fallen women and much debauchery brought on by the use of the whacky tobacky.

There are more of these posters and a history of marijuana's prohibition at the post Anti-Reefer Film Posters and Why Marijuana is Outlawed.

Walking in Katmandu

A couple walk through Katmandu headed to Durbar Square. As they mention, there is a lot of beeping by the vehicles. Also, the subtitles they added were a nice touch.

Deception and reality

Vimalakirti Nirdesa Sutra 

Manjusri, a bodhisattva should regard all living beings as a wise man
Regards the reflection of the moon in water,
As magicians regard men created by magic.
As being like a face in a mirror,
like the water of a mirage;
like the sound of an echo;
like a mass of clouds in the sky;
like the appearance and disappearance of a bubble of water;
like the core of a plantain tree;
like a flash of lightning;
like the appearance of matter in an immaterial realm;
like a sprout from a rotten seed;
like tortoise-hair coat;
like the fun of games for one who wishes to die...

Deep Down Low

Get ready for a hallucinogenic weekend with Valentino Khan.

Japanese Noodle Warriors

Click any image to enlarge

This post pretty much exists for no other purpose than for me to use that title for it. Anyway, these are the work of the Japanese artist Taishi Arimura. From the Spoon and Tamago post where I found these images:

Arimura sculpts the food samples into the bodies of warriors. He then meticulously carves up the Styrofoam packaging of popular instant noodles – in this case, Nissin’s Cup Noodle and Donbei – to create the armor, which he adheres to the noodles. The final touch is either a fork or chopsticks as weapon and the warriors look like they’re ready for battle.

 

A rubber band refrigerator

In above video Ben Krasnow builds a refrigerator using rubber bands as the cooling element. Of course it doesn't provide a lot of cooling, but a thermal imagining camera shows that it does slightly lower the temperature of the chamber. Ben explains the physics behind it all.

Ben's YouTube channel, Applied Science, is well worth a visit. he has a lot of fascinating projects, including a DIY scanning electron microscope, that are all pretty amazing.

When are they bringing these babies back?

Click any image to enlarge

In this new age of neo-Puritanism with many, many sins to punish -- misidentifying one of the 1200 genders, illegal plastic straw possession, microaggressions out the wazoo and so forth -- social media mobs and twitter raging certainly have there places. Still, they lack a certain immediacy in their shaming.

Consider the advantages that old-timey pillories provided. Not only the public humiliation, but the opportunity to mock sinners to their faces, and even to chuck rotten fruit at them, add nice personal touches for SJWs.

Course if pillories do come back in style then sooner or later, and probably sooner, I'll end up in one. Ah well, in the words of Parsons from 1984, "Of course I'm guilty! You don't think the Party would arrest an innocent man, do you?" I guess I'll just have to face my punishment from my betters.

At any rate, enjoy these few pictures of pillories as you ponder what awaits you.

Touring the South Pole station

Above is a video of a woman giving a tour of the Amundsen-Scott South Pole station. My previous knowledge of Antarctic stations came from repeated viewings of John Carpenter's The Thing so suffice it be said I was surprised by how large and, well... how institutional it looked.

I also wondered how much effort it took to build the place. Below are two videos, which are long in run time, showing the early efforts to plant the station and then the work to build the newer station we toured above. All in all, a pretty amazing engineering feat considering the environment it was done in.

Missionary Man

Get ready for a watchful weekend with Hatune MikuV3 and Megurine Luka.

 

Aviation Week magazine covers

Click any image to enlarge

Here, and after the jump are a number of covers of Aviation Week which, depending on the date, is  also known as Aviation and Aviation Weekly and Space Technology. They are from the Internet Archives Aviation Week section where you can view more covers as well as browse the magazines interiors as well.

Casting an equestrian statue

This video uses animated etchings from the period to show the 15 year process of designing, casting and installing a monumental statue of Louis XV of France. Altogether it used 30 tons of brass. It was destroyed during the French Revolution.

Via The History Blog.