A musical blast from the past

Whilst looking for something else this evening, I came across the Eurovision song contest of 1967.  It was at this event that singer Vicky Leandros, representing Greece, first presented 'L'Amour Est Bleu', ('Love Is Blue').  There's a recording on YouTube of her Eurovision performance, but its soundtrack isn't very good quality, so I've chosen to use this one instead.  (The French lyrics, with an English translation, may be found here.)

The song was popularized in the USA in an instrumental version by Paul Mauriat and his orchestra.  To date it's the only piece by a French artist to hit No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 (in 1968).

I was still a child then, but I remember both versions.  Lots of nostalgia there . . .

Peter

At last, someone gets it!

Perhaps I take my reading too literally, but for many years I've been highly annoyed at sword-and-sorcery or fantasy novels depicting female heroines wielding mighty swords and wearing boobalicious armor, demolishing hordes of opposing warriors without breaking into a sweat or mussing their makeup.  For example, this Red Sonja comic cover is reproduced here courtesy of Wikipedia.

Speaking as a combat veteran, I'm here to tell you, muscle mass counts.  If the average woman takes on the average man, she'll lose any physical fight because he outmasses her and has greater strength.  If she's got extreme skillz, she might hold her own - or she might not.  His superior mass and strength will still wear her down if the fight's prolonged.  Furthermore, she has to get in close to land a telling blow.  If he can pin her at that instant, immobilize a limb or capture the blow as it's launched . . . she's neck-deep in the proverbial doo-doo.

The same applies to the fantasy armor worn by so many of these babes.  It's precisely the opposite of what armor should be!  Now Tor, publisher of many books in this genre, finally spells it out.

Assuming that you are avoiding the blow of a sword, your armor should be designed so that the blade glances off your body, away from your chest. If your armor is breast-shaped, you are in fact increasing the likelihood that a blade blow will slide inward, toward the center of your chest, the very place you are trying to keep safe.

But that’s not all! Let’s say you even fall onto your boob-conscious armor. The divet separating each breast will dig into your chest, doing you injury. It might even break your breastbone. With a strong enough blow to the chest, it could fracture your sternum entirely, destroying your heart and lungs, instantly killing you. It is literally a death trap—you are wearing armor that acts as a perpetual spear directed at some of your most vulnerable body parts. It’s just not smart.

There's more at the link.

Now, if they can just get their authors, marketers and cover illustrators to listen . . .

Peter

Boys and their toys - kitty edition

Although I don't think I'd want to get any closer to their enjoyment . . .

Peter

The Benghazi scandal - another warning signal

I'm sure readers have been following the unfolding of the Benghazi scandal (among others) in Washington over the past few days.  Personally, there's so much smoke in DC right now I'm thinking it's a sign, not of a fire, but of a deliberate smoke screen, intended to divert attention while the united Left (both Democratic and Republican) tries to ram through immigration reform while everyone's distracted.  That would be a national catastrophe, so we need to be very much on our guard.

Be that as it may, reader T. D. sent me a link to this 2008 article, reminding me that anything Hillary Clinton says about Benghazi should be taken with more than a few pinches of salt.

The former general counsel and chief of staff of the House Judiciary Committee, who supervised Hillary during the Watergate investigation, says her history of lies and unethical behavior goes back farther – and goes much deeper – than anyone realizes.

. . .

'A lifelong Democrat, Mr. Zeifman supervised the work of 27-year-old Hillary Rodham on the committee. Hillary got a job working on the investigation at the behest of her former law professor, Burke Marshall, who was also Sen. Ted Kennedy’s chief counsel in the Chappaquiddick affair. When the investigation was over, Zeifman fired Hillary from the committee staff and refused to give her a letter of recommendation – one of only three people who earned that dubious distinction in Zeifman’s 17-year career.'

Why?

"Because she was a liar," Zeifman said in an interview last week. “She was an unethical, dishonest lawyer. She conspired to violate the Constitution, the rules of the House, the rules of the committee and the rules of confidentiality.'

There's more at the link.

Two idioms come to mind:

1.  A leopard can't change its spots.
2.  Forewarned is forearmed.

Trusting Hillary Clinton's testimony about Benghazi strikes me as being just about as wise as trusting Richard Nixon's testimony about Watergate.





Peter

Microsoft as Big Brother?

If you thought Microsoft, Google and other big data and software companies respected your privacy (insert hollow laugh here), think again.  Microsoft's Skype subsidiary has been caught red-handed.

Anyone who uses Skype has consented to the company reading everything they write. The H's associates in Germany at heise Security have now discovered that the Microsoft subsidiary does in fact make use of this privilege in practice. Shortly after sending HTTPS URLs over the instant messaging service, those URLs receive an unannounced visit from Microsoft HQ in Redmond.

. . .

In visiting these pages, Microsoft made use of both the login information and the specially created URL for a private cloud-based file-sharing service.

In response to an enquiry from heise Security, Skype referred them to a passage from its data protection policy:

"Skype may use automated scanning within Instant Messages and SMS to (a) identify suspected spam and/or (b) identify URLs that have been previously flagged as spam, fraud, or phishing links."

. . .

In summary, The H and heise Security believe that, having consented to Microsoft using all data transmitted over the service pretty much however it likes, all Skype users should assume that this will actually happen and that the company is not going to reveal what exactly it gets up to with this data.

There's more at the link.

This is potentially a very serious breach of not only privacy, but also user security.  Note that Microsoft used the actual login ID's and passwords of users who linked to Web sites over the Skype service.  That means it recorded those logins and passwords, which are now stored somewhere on its servers.  One more successful hacking attack against Microsoft (it's happened before), and those logins and passwords could be in the hands of criminals, doing heaven knows how much damage.

A word to the wise;  don't trust Big Data, or Big Software.  They're in this to get whatever they can out of you - not for your benefit.  In particular, if you must transmit such sensitive information over open networks, change your ID and/or password - using a secure network - as soon as possible after you do so.  It's the only way to be safe.

Peter

For steam train fans

Someone had waaaay too much fun setting this up!

Peter

Take that, Big Brother!

Courtesy of a link provided by In The Middle Of The Right, I learned of a canny company that's taking full (and legal) advantage of the current regulations governing gas cans.  Readers may remember that these banned old-style jerrycans in 2009 - I stocked up just before they took effect.  They've also affected the design of the plastic gas cans and pouring spouts sold by many supermarkets and auto supply stores.  Since they came into effect, pouring has been much more difficult, thanks to the new anti-spill features.  (I find I spill more gas with the new cans than with the old ones!)  See 'How Government Wrecked The Gas Can' for more information.

Anyway, EZ-Pour has come up with an alternative for modern plastic gas cans, and another for jerrycans.  The company warns in capital letters:

'EZ-POUR REPLACEMENT SPOUT KIT IS DESIGNED AND SOLD AS REPLACEMENT PARTS SPECIFICALLY FOR PORTABLE FUEL CONTAINERS MANUFACTURED BEFORE JANUARY 2009'.

That's to clear their legal yardarm, of course.  The company notes, in more than one place, that a few minutes' work with a drill and a half-inch spade bit produces a vent hole in a plastic water can that accommodates the EZ-Pour 'push in vent' perfectly.  Do please note the emphasis on water can.  It would be illegal to do that to a post-2009 gas can, thereby converting it to the much more efficient pre-2009 design.  Furthermore, the company warns, 'Even though our spout will thread on the new cans, we do not promote using our spout to bypass the EPA emission standards on the new cans'.  So there. Srsly.

The company's jerrycan adapter allows its spouts to be used on such containers.  Since one can no longer buy (new) original, efficient-design clip-on spouts (which won't fit post-2009 jerrycans anyway), it's nice to have a viable alternative.  They offer a flame arrestor that works with all their spouts, and may be (ahem) 'used as a filter screen on our water spouts'.  I'm glad to hear that.  In that regard, the company warns (very seriously) (ahem) (underlined text is my emphasis):

IF YOU LIVE IN ONE OF THE FOLLOWING STATES YOU ARE NOT ALLOWED BY LAW TO PURCHASE THE GAS CAN SPOUT: CALIFORNIA, CONNECTICUT, WASHINGTON D.C., DELAWARE, MAINE, MARYLAND, MASSACHUSETTS, NEW HAMPSHIRE, NEW JERSEY, NEW YORK, OHIO, PENNSYLVANIA, VIRGINIA. IF YOU LIVE IN ONE OF THESE STATES, YOU MAY PURCHASE THE EZ-POUR WATER CAN SPOUT INSTEAD.

The water can spout is, of course, sold with their helpful 'filter screen' included in the kit.

Hmmm . . . I'm in need of a few more gas containers . . . and now I'm aware of my need for some accessories, too!  Don't you just love being legal like this?





Peter

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