Th’ Gaussling is still reeling from the news from London that the magnificent tea clipper, the Cutty Sark, has burned. This great wooden vessel was dry-docked in or in the vicinity of Greenwich, England.
Officials connected with the ship stated that “This is a significant blow and a major set back for the ship.” Well, yeah.
Perhaps the ship can be reconstructed and the duplicate put in place. Who knows? What a bummer.
When a friend said he had landed a part in a local production of the musical “Urinetown“, I did what most people do. I shook my head slightly as if to dislodge some interfering muck from my ears and sputtered “Wha, what?”. I could tell he was weary of this response. To his credit, he politely explained some of the highlights of the show.
Urinetown is a musical farce about a future with a water shortage so severe that even the flow of urine has to has to be regulated. Originally slated to open on 9/11/01, the opening was delayed for a rewrite. In the story, bald political corruption and dastardly corporate greed work together against a Gotham City backdrop to monopolize public toilets and exploit the need of the masses to … pee. When urinating in the bushes is outlawed, only outlaws will urinate in the bushes. And if caught, violators are summarily arrested and taken to Urinetown by officers Lockstock and Barrel where they suffer the consequences of their misdeed.
Officer Lockstock serves as both constable and narrator in this self-referential satire about the collusion of business and government. UGC (Urine Good Company) has a government sanctioned lock on the “Amenities”, public pay toilets, and enforces their use through corrupt police on the take. But when the government raises the fee for the use of an Amenity on behalf of their corporate paymasters, ostensibly to pay for continued “corporate research”, a rebellion begins and ends finally with a Malthusian note.
I will refrain from disclosing further details about the story. I will say that I thoroughly enjoyed the show and heartily recommend it to friends and colleagues.
Here is a link showing the evacuation of an A380. This airplane disgorged 873 people in 77 seconds. So I’m thinking, what if you don’t have a planeload of orderly Germans who know how to get moving? What if you had a load of fat, jetlagged American touristas with expensive stuff in the overhead storage? You’d never get out of that airplane alive because some nimrod would have to get up and grab something out of the inside of a zipped bag, dooming everyone to incineration.
When one of these meat wagons eventually goes down, it is going to be like a small town got wiped out. Like a screaming village falling out of the sky. In a water landing, this thing is going to cartwheel like a drunken gymnast when a wing dips and grabs the water, and from the parts of the fuselage that shredded open will fly whole rows of horrified passengers, some still gripping their bags of pretzels. The cabin sections will come to a halt and sink like a stone.
Oh. Well, I guess most of them do that. Regardless, it ain’t gonna be pretty.
Here is a test of the braking system of the A380. Ever wonder what happens when a big turbofan throws a blade? The folks at Rolls Royce released this video of a test. P&W released one as well. This is what you try to avoid when working around jet engines.
I suppose I have lost more frequently than I have won in my lifelong avocation of taking on sacred cows in the battle of wits. But, truly, sacred cows make the very best hamburgers. Pass the A1 …
Some new blogs have been given a place of honor in the blogroll. Good writing and laser sharp insight are the keys to this ascendency. If the dear reader is conservative and prone to weeping or bed wetting, it is probably best to click along at this point.
There is a hilarious post over at Lawyers, Guns, and Money called Birthday Girl. Side note: A lawyer friend is fond of saying “Lawyers, guns, and money- pick any two”.
And then, what can I say about Jesus’ General? Read General JC’s letter to the Secret Service re Cheryl Crow. If you are keen on some serious in-your-face-atheism, check out Hellbound Allee. Then there is one of the best Christian evangelical lampoons ever, Landover Baptist.
The Huffington Post is a recent find and is a treasure trove of political blogging at its finest- well, if you are a liberal. Read the open letter to Rudy Giuliani by my fellow Coloradoan, Gary Hart.
Then there is the Proceedings of the Athanasius Kircher Society. The post on the Do-Nothing Machine is particularly amusing. The reader may recall Th’ Gaussing’s previous post on the Katzenklavier.
Finally, The Agonist has some interesting insights into politics and is well written. I also like Goosing the Antithesis for its skeptical stand against belief in the supernatural.
Here along the front range of the Rocky Mountains we have a few alternative newspapers available- you know, the kind not owned by Rupert Murdoch. They tend to be a bit Bohemian and consequently are shunned by righteous Dittoheads. Other parts of the country have them as well- college towns mostly. They cater to those of us who aren’t afraid to be known as liberals. These papers run a syndicated cartoon called This Modern World by a guy known as Tom Tomorrow.
Because of copyright issues, I’ll have to link to the site rather than paste an image.
Albert Hoffmann, the discoverer of LSD, turned 100 years old this year on Juanary 11th. Happy Birthday, Albert! Scienceblogs.com relates the story of Hoffmann’s first deliberate LSD trip on April 19th, 1943. You might recall that Hoffmann was the Sandoz chemist who stumbled upon the psychotropic activity of lysergic acid diethylamide.
Just this last week, the medical journal The Lancet called for an end to the “demonization” of psychedelic drugs, according to Guardian Unlimited. The motivation behind the editorial in the Lancet was to urge a loosening of taboo’s connected with the use of psychedelic compounds. The widespread criminalization of psychedelics has made research with these interesting molecules quite problematic.
Perhaps the day will come when such materials are decriminalized and it will be possible to visit a psychedelic spa where one could go to have a safe dosage administered by qualified staff. But it wouldn’t be all fun and games, though. While the euphoric experience can be prolonged and profoundly vivid, there is a dark side. An account of the experience of the psychiatrist Werner Stoll is described in Chapter 4 of Hoffmanns book “LSD. My Problem Child”.
Hoffmann and Sandoz would watch their discovery move from a psychiatric adjunct to a full fledged inebriant adopted by a counter culture movement. In his book, Hoffmann laments-
This joy at having fathered LSD was tarnished after more than ten years of uninterrupted scientific research and medicinal use when LSD was swept up in the huge wave of an inebriant mania that began to spread over the Western world, above all the United States, at the end of the 1950s. It was strange how rapidly LSD adopted its new role as inebriant and, for a time, became the number-one inebriating drug, at least as far as publicity was concerned. The more its use as an inebriant was disseminated, bringing an upsurge in the number of untoward incidents caused by careless, medically unsupervised use, the more LSD became a problem child for me and for the Sandoz firm.
It was obvious that a substance with such fantastic effects on mental perception and on the experience of the outer and inner world would also arouse interest outside medical science, but I had not expected that LSD, with its unfathomably uncanny, profound effects, so unlike the character of a recreational drug, would ever find worldwide use as an inebriant. I had expected curiosity and interest on the part of artists outside of medicine-performers, painters, and writers-but not among people in general. After the scientific publications around the turn of the century on mescaline-which, as already mentioned, evokes psychic effects quite like those of LSD-the use of this compound remained confined to medicine and to experiments within artistic and literary circles. I had expected the same fate for LSD. And indeed, the first non-medicinal self-experiments with LSD were carried out by writers, painters, musicians, and other intellectuals.
Today, psychedelic substances are considered to be drugs of abuse and their use will lead to a long stay at the Gray Bar Hotel. Our Puritanical heritage seems everlasting. But rather than wallow in pity for my unenlightened brothers and sisters, I look forward to a brighter future where one could sit in a licensed psychotropic suite and explore the deepest recesses of consciousness brought out in full non-linear display, say, while listening to music. Everybody associates acid rock with LSD. That’s too easy. I’ve often wondered what it’d be like to listen to Leon Redbone in an altered state of consciousness. Kinda curious about what a baritone sax does to a brain on acid. Or David Bowie- Major Tom. I’m showing my age.
Ever been to the Royal Burgh of Auchtermuchty? Neither have I. It’s north of Edinburgh on the A91 on the way to St. Andrews, between the Firth of Forth and the Firth of Tay. According to Undiscovered Scotland, the name comes from the Scottish Gaelic phrase uachdar muc garadh, meaning “upper pig enclosure”.
Hey, I really dig Scotland.
The news of the mass shooting at Virginia Tech just seems to get worse as the day wears on. There aren’t words to describe it.
After the grisly scene in Blacksburg is cleaned up and the bodies are buried, we’ll once again switch on the TV and watch programming glamorizing gun-toting tough guys and violence. Not a night goes by on television where some plot isn’t based on the menacing of women by crazed or angry men, most with guns. Some people will solve problems with guns and others will cause problems with guns. The message is that guns bring satisfaction and command respect. Just look at the very title of the series The Sopranos and listen to the lyrics. “Woke up this mornin’ and got myself a gun …”
Maybe there is no causal connection between entertainment and what this shooter did. But I cannot help but believe that the more or less constant exposure to violence in our entertainment doesn’t dull our sensibilities and lower our threshold for what constitutes acceptable behaviour. Regardless, we have to start somewhere and cleaning up our tastes in entertainment is relatively painless. We need to create less demand for this crude stuff.
Obviously, the shooter is responsible for the murders, not the inanimate steel mechanism. But the common fascination we have with the gun and it’s stylized, even mythical, application means that this mechanical device has some kind of hold on us. Its ease of use and its ability to deliver death from a great distance makes it possible for anyone to deem themselves a “warrier” for a few minutes.
We are horrified by such violence when it is real. But we entertain ourselves with painstakingly elaborate dramatizations of it. We are gratified to watch fictional characters engage in gunplay with bad guys. We cheer as fictional cops rough up suspects because, as we all know, bad guys really shouldn’t have rights.
There is no mysterious or complex phenomenon to sort out here. Our American culture has a form of fragmented personality disorder with respect to gun violence. I don’t know if it’ll do a damned bit of good, but we need to come down from the saturation level of violence in our entertainment and recreation. The first thing we must do is to remove a bit of the glamor of gunplay.
We don’t have to give up our guns. But we do need to develop a new viewpoint or an advanced ethos about them. We need new icons and archetypes. It is time to retire CSI and The Sopranos as popular iconography. We must find better ways to fulfill our self image and need for power besides being handy with a gun. How do other societies do it? Any suggestions??
Here is an interesting link to a rebuttal in the Daily Kos written by someone said to be from VT.
This Wine Enthusiast link offers a small distillation unit for distilling the volatiles from wine or beer. Your next shot of brandy is only minutes away. Of course, the distillate may be flammable, so I’d be careful with that burner.
Check out the Museum of Lost Wonder. Pretty wild. Then, there is the day that they foamed the fountain of the Kazan Cathedral in St. Petersburg, Russia. If you’re keen on learning the top 10 prejudices Germans have about the USA, check out this blog. Hard to argue with it’s accuracy. Had a nagging urge to hop in a submarine and go for a dive? Check out U-Boat Worx. The specs say that it is limited to 50 meters depth. I wonder what the crush depth is- 150 meters? I’d imagine that the seals would fail first and the thing would flood before it imploded.
A new restaurant opened in town and this evening we made our first visit. It was started by a chef with actual culinary training. It is easy to tell the difference. The clue that this restaurant was started by someone with culinary training can be seen in how the staff were trained. The staff understand decorum. Decorum makes a big difference in the dining experience.
In far too many restaurants, the diner is met with a wait person who asks “What can I get for you guys”? Now, I’m speaking to those over, say, 35 years. Have you noticed this linguistic phenomenon? Wait staff at restaurants are only too keen on referring to adult persons as “you guys”.
Am I the only one who bristles at this?? I do not care to be referred to as “you guys” by teenagers or 20-somethings. This is how 8th graders refer to each other. Is it too much to ask of the adults who run these businesses to help their younger staff learn how to address people? It assumes a familiarity that hasn’t been earned.
Our town in northern Colorado is fortunate to have a 1000 ton/year trout farm within a few miles, so fresh trout is abundant. My wife had trout and it was excellent. I had a Minnesota Berkshire porkchop that was stuffed with a chanterelle sausage and covered with a standard sauce, all atop diced and baked sweet potato. The chop was tasty, though slightly dry. But I myself can only prepare a perfect porkchop perhaps 10 % of the time.
My favorite porkchop experience was at Emeril Legasse’s Nola Restaurant in New Orleans back in 2000. I refer to it as the “Pork Chop of the Century”. My God, it was devine. If you ever have the chance to visit Nola’s, do it. The service is first rate and the food is out of this world.
Nola also has a Turtle soup that is worth trying. I will say, though, that the flavor is a bit strong. Reptilian dishes have never been high on my list.
Lamentations on Chemistry 