Doofus Of The Day #705

Some school science experiments should be planned more carefully.  Just sayin'.

Peter

Tragedy in Oklahoma

There's not much I can add to the outpouring of news stories, sympathy and aid about and for the victims of yesterday's devastating tornado in Oklahoma.  There's no reliable count of the dead, injured and missing yet, but it's very large.

I'd like to ask all my readers to please contribute what you can - even if it's only a prayer - to help those affected.  There are many places to donate (although I personally won't support the Red Cross, thank you very much, having experienced their 'assistance' after Hurricane Katrina!), but my money will be going to the Salvation Army.  They don't use donations to pay grossly inflated salaries to their administrators, or to cover massive 'overhead' expenses.  Click here for their donation page for the Oklahoma disaster.

Peter

Invisible drums?

If Rowan Atkinson is to be believed, yes indeed!

Peter

Still crudded, but here you are

This is a really nasty head cold/flu, but I'm working my way through it as best I can.  Blogging will be lighter than usual until I can concentrate better - and as for working on the next novel, that's on the back burner until I stop sneezing all over the plot!

I had to laugh at this report from Milwaukee.

You get a sense of the bawdy but beloved tradition at the Holler House. Female customers, particularly first-timers, are encouraged to remove, autograph and leave their bras behind because, well, just because. Typically, they modestly wriggle out of them right there on a bar stool, or they retire to the ladies room.

It's a practice that Skowronski herself began one crazy night in the 1960s.

"We all got bombed, all these girls. And we just decided to take our bras off and hang them up," she said.

Dozens of bras dangled from skis, a coal bucket and other odd objects attached to the ceiling. Men's underwear was up there, too. But this week, Skowronski's son-in-law took them down for fear that city inspectors would return and slap them with a fine, which according to the official "order to correct condition" can run from $150 to $10,000 a day.

. . .

The Milwaukee Department of Neighborhood Services has inspected the Holler House many times in the past but has never before deemed the bra display a potential inferno. The written order from last month's visit said "curtains, draperies, hangings and other decorative materials suspended from walls or ceilings shall meet the flame propagation performance criteria of NFPA 701."

. . .

Realizing its straps were twisted on this one, the department Thursday dismissed the order. The official explanation for the DD-sized mistake says something about the bar having a smaller occupancy rate than originally thought, and therefore a less stringent fire code.

There's more at the link, including pictures of the . . . er . . . apparel in question.

Bureaucrats!  Talk about boobs enhancing themselves . . .

Peter

Crud defeats blogging

I've been running a fever all day, and my tired, sore eyes are finding it hard to focus on screens or books right now;  so there won't be much blogging tonight.  I hope I'll be able to put up more posts tomorrow morning.

To keep you amused, Brigid has written a very nice review of my first novel, 'Take The Star Road'.  I think she and Sarah Hoyt have both seen more clearly what I was trying to achieve with it than many younger readers, who haven't grown up steeped in the works of the 'Big Three':  Asimov, Clarke and Heinlein (those of you who don't know their work, but who enjoy good literature, are in for a treat!).  Thanks, Brigid!  Much appreciated.

As of the time of writing, five full days (i.e. 24-hour periods) after publication on Amazon, the book's sales performance looks like this:

It appears to be holding steady in the top 30 sellers in both of its categories (Space Opera and Military science fiction). It dipped below 20 over the weekend, when sales slowed, but it picked up again today. As more reviews are posted, both on Amazon and on other blogs, I hope it'll continue to improve.

I'm most grateful to all of you for your support and kindness in reading it, and encouraging others to try it. I'm selling about 97 copies for every one borrowed through Amazon's Prime program, so that's a really healthy ratio. I'm not making a huge amount per book, because I deliberately priced it low to attract readers. The second book, of approximately the same length, will probably also be low-priced for the same reason. The third and subsequent books will be longer, and be a little (but not much) more expensive. I want people to keep buying and reading them, after all!  In today's economy, it behooves me not to be greedy, and to give my friends and readers value for their reading dollar.

Finally, for those interested in the food we eat (and who isn't?), see the article 'Dear American Consumers: Please Don’t Start Eating Healthfully. Sincerely, the Food Industry' over at Scientific American.  It's a telling exposé of how we, as consumers, are manipulated by the producers of everything we eat - and how they profit from every fad and fashion, whether it's good for us or not.  Recommended reading.

Take care, friends.  I'll be back later.

Peter

A man-made snowstorm

Here's a video clip of an Airbus A380, the world's largest commercial jetliner, taking off from a heavily snow-laden Cologne airport in Germany.  I reckon it cleared the runway and its verges for the next several aircraft to follow it!

That's quite a cloud of snow it kicked up.  I wonder if they had to repeat the brushing-off and de-icing of the aircraft waiting behind it at the threshold of the runway?

Peter

Naval history comes to the surface

I was astonished to read that a vintage brass 19th-century Howell torpedo has been recovered from the seabed off Coronado in California.  What's more, its discovery was both serendipitous and probably unique.  Stars & Stripes reports:

The so-called Howell torpedo was discovered by bottlenose dolphins being trained by the Navy to find undersea objects, including mines, that not even billion-dollar technology can detect.

. . .

At the Point Loma facility, 80 dolphins and 40 sea lions are being trained for mine detection, mine clearing and swimmer protection. When the U.S. led an invasion of Iraq in 2003, dolphins were rushed to the Persian Gulf to patrol for enemy divers and mines. Dolphins guard U.S. submarine bases in Georgia and Washington state. This fall, dolphins will deploy for a mine-hunting mission off Croatia.

To train the dolphins, Navy specialists sink objects in various shapes in rocky and sandy undersea areas where visibility is poor. The shapes mimic those of the mines used by U.S. adversaries.

A dolphin is then ordered to dive and search. If it finds something, it is trained to surface and touch the front of the boat with its snout. If it has found nothing, it touches the back of the boat.

When a dolphin named Ten surfaced from a shallow-water dive last month and touched the front of the boat, Navy specialists were nonplused. "It went positive in a place we didn't expect," said Mike Rothe, who heads the marine mammal program.

A week later, a dolphin named Spetz did the same thing in the same area. This time, the dolphin was ordered to take a marker to the object.

Navy divers and then explosive-ordnance technicians examined the object, which was in two pieces, and determined that the years had rendered it inert. On one piece was the stamp "USN No. 24."

The torpedo pieces were lifted to the surface and taken to a Navy base for cleaning and to await shipment to the Naval History and Heritage Command, located at the Washington Navy Yard.

There's more at the link.

The Howell torpedo was one of the first designs that actually worked as intended.  You could 'fire it and forget it';  it would run in a straight line (albeit not very far) at the depth you pre-set, and explode on striking its target.  Only one was previously known to exist, at the Naval Undersea Museum in Washington, DC.  Here's a picture of that unit from the Museum's Web page about it.

There are more pictures at Wikipedia's article.

Kudos to the dolphins and their trainers.  I hope they got extra fish for that - and not the 'tin fish' variety, either!

Peter

The crud, she is not nice!

Just got up from my third session of sleep today.  My body can handle a work period of about 4-6 hours, then it just collapses on me.  I'm still running a low-grade fever, with severely blocked sinuses, but so far nothing's spread to my chest.  I guess I should be grateful for that!

Oh, well . . . at least I'll be able to get in several hours of writing on my second novel in the small hours of this morning;  then it's heigh-ho to wake up Miss D. for her workday, and I go back to bed.  I'm sure she'll say something rude about that!





Peter

Doofus Of The Day #704

Courtesy of reader J. M., we find this excruciatingly funny newspaper excerpt from a police blotter:

I suppose it could have been worse.  Icy Hot is bad enough, but he might have used Bengay - and think of the implications of that name under the circumstances!





Peter

Remember the Trayvon Martin affair?

It's looking more and more as if the prosecution's case in the Trayvon Martin affair is falling apart at the seams.  Human Events reports:

The release of evidence in George Zimmerman’s murder trial quickly made a mockery of his second-degree murder charges, and threw a further layer of shame upon media and political opportunists who misrepresented a tragic, but fairly straightforward, case of lethal force employed in self-defense.

It is remarkable to take stock of this evidence and realize that it supports every single aspect of Zimmerman’s statement to the police.

. . .

Jim Hoft at Gateway Pundit relates the discovery of video from Trayvon Martin’s YouTube account, removed at some point during the last month, that shows he was actually involved in some sort of underground “fight club.”

Also fatal to the prosecution’s case is the discovery that Martin had THC in his system – he had apparently been smoking pot that night.

. . .

Despite the prosecution’s awareness of the autopsy reports and eyewitness testimony, they included none of it in their affidavit against Zimmerman.  Criminal lawyer and Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz, who has been beside himself ever since the Zimmerman charges were filed, writes in the New York Daily News that it’s time to drop the charges, but doubts State Attorney Angela Corey “will do the right thing,” because “until now, her actions have been anything but ethical, lawful, and professional.”

. . .

Dershowitz also mentions a suspicion I’ve harbored since the weird, circus-like press conference at which Corey announced the charges: they’re a political instrument designed to buy time for everyone to cool down, leading to a long trial that dismantles some of the hysteria built up around the Trayvon Martin case.  If true, the strategy is understandable… but utterly outrageous.  The United States does not do “show trials.”  The justice system is not a safety valve for releasing unhealthy levels of political tension.  Individual citizens are not pawns to be shoved around in media games by gun-control advocates, race hustlers, or opportunistic politicians.  The purpose of law enforcement is to protect the public, not appease certain segments of it.

There's more at the link.  Bold, underlined text in the last paragraph is my emphasis.

This is perhaps the most significant element of the case at present.  If it emerges that the appointment of the prosecutor, and her dogged pursuit of charges against Zimmerman, stem from nothing more than a witch-hunt designed to appease a potentially volatile part of the local community, it makes a mockery of Florida's legal system.  If Federal authorities are also involved, it does the same to the Federal legal system.  I hope that this will attract the attention it deserves, and that all the facts will be uncovered.  If they are as they appear to be at present, heads must roll - and I don't mean Zimmerman's.

Peter

Sorry about the relative silence . . .

. . . I've been fighting off the galloping crud that hit me last Wednesday.  It returned last night.  I've spent several hours sleeping, and I'm popping pills and spraying stuff up my nose to be able to breathe.  Not fun.

I hope more regular blogging will resume in the morning.  Until then (and because I need something to smile about!), here are seven of the encounters between Chief Inspector Clouseau (played by Peter Sellers) and Cato (played by Herbert Kwouk) in the 'Pink Panther' comedy movie series.  The underlying plot line is that Inspector Clouseau has instructed his servant, Cato, to attack him without warning, so as to keep his reflexes sharp.

Peter

That's an operator who knows what he's doing!

It always amazes me to see how some of the biggest machines can be handled with delicacy, even grace, to get in and out of tight spots, or do complex, finicky tasks.  Here an excavator driver shows us how it's done.

I'd have been petrified of unbalancing the thing, so that it fell off to one side . . .

Peter

Getting the cops' goat???

Or is it the other way around?

... on Monday a goat was found trespassing into a resident’s garage ... Chief Kyle Aspinwall [of Mont Vernon, NH] responded to the scene and captured it, but not without a fight: The goat, which is believed to be a female even though it “refused to identify itself,” resisted arrest.

“The goat really did try to head-butt the chief,” said Sgt. Aaron Daigneault.

. . .

The brown-and-black goat’s owner wasn’t identified so the escapee was placed in a local resident’s home. That is, until it escaped for the second time, on Tuesday morning.

There's more at the link.

Hmmm . . . in Mexico (where goats are frequently encountered on the menu), in days of yore attempted escape from the law - real or staged - often led to 'ley de fuga'.  That being the case, and given the Obama administration's efforts to legitimize illegal aliens, I wonder if New Hampshire cops know that goats - which aren't native to that state, and are therefore (presumably) illegal aliens - make pretty good eatin'?  Just sayin' . . .





Peter

Doofus Of The Day #703

Love it!  Today's award goes to three would-be burglars who locked a Texas home-owner in precisely the wrong place . . .

Gotta love locking the guy in the one place he could get his hands on a gun!  It's a good way for a burglar to get a Darwin award to go with his Doofus prize!





Peter

A Venezuelan carjacking goes wrong

I think Massad Ayoob will regard this as a classic example of what he calls "a sudden and acute failure of the victim selection process".  Warning - the video may disturb sensitive viewers.

Guess he won't be hijacking any more cars . . .

Peter

You people are blowing my mind!

It's now almost exactly 61 hours (2½ days) since I put 'Take The Star Road' out on Amazon (it 'went live' at 3.57 p.m. last Tuesday).  I've just woken up (my back is doing its usual thing, and telling me that no, I can't sleep any longer) to find this:

Wow.  At the time of writing, 'Take The Star Road' is the 8th-best-selling e-book in all of Kindle (paid) Space Opera, 10th-best-selling in all Space Opera on Amazon (print, e-book and audio-book), and 12th-best-selling e-book in Kindle (paid) Military SF!

Friends, I don't know how to thank you.  I could never have even dreamed about (let alone aspired to) numbers like these without your enthusiastic help in buying the book yourselves, and even more importantly, getting the word out to others that it exists and is worth reading.  It's still very early days, so I can (and do) hope for further improvement on these figures;  but even at their present levels, I would never have expected or predicted this, so early after launch!

From the bottom of my heart, thank you all very, very much.  Please don't stop!  This is worth waking up for!



Peter