Polyus
Published 3 Sept 2021The Boeing-Vertol CH-113 Labrador was an icon of Canadian search and rescue for 40 years. It served on both the right and left coast and undertook many life saving rescues in its day. Originally ordered as two models, an army transport version and a search and rescue version, they were all converted to a common standard when the army took possession of their Chinook helicopters. As a dedicated search and rescue helicopter it excelled at its role. Its replacement is a long story for another time but involves several facepalm moments thanks to short sighted decision making. As a result it was kept in service longer than anticipated but still did the job well.
0:00 Introduction
0:27 Previous generation of search and rescue
1:18 Acquisition of the CH-46 Sea Knight
4:10 Definitive CH-113 Labrador model
5:53 Replacement and retirement
6:38 Conclusion
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October 23, 2023
Icon of Canadian Search and Rescue For 40 years; the story of the CH-113 Labrador
October 21, 2023
October 20, 2023
Look at Life – Oil Aboard (1963)
Classic Vehicle Channel
Published 18 Apr 2020The oil industry and the manufacture of fuel.
September 24, 2023
Architect Breaks Down Why All American Diners Look Like That | Architectural Digest
Architectural Digest
Published 1 Jun 2023Today Michael Wyetzner of Michielli + Wyetzner Architects returns to Architectural Digest to explore the design evolution of American diners. A cornerstone of American dining culture, their distinctive style has been emulated around the world making them a popular salute to the USA. Michael provides an expert look into the history behind their design evolution from the 1920s through to the 1960s and explains why all diners came to look like that.
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September 18, 2023
It turns out that buying up the rights to old rock songs wasn’t a good investment after all
Ted Gioia enjoys a little bit of schadenfreude here because he was highly skeptical of the investments in the first place, although the geriatric rockers who “sold out” seem to have generally made out like bandits this time around:
Back in 2021, investors spent more than $5 billion buying the rights to old songs. Never before in history had musicians over the age of 75 received such big paydays.
I watched in amazement as artists who would never sell out actually sold out. And they made this the sale of a lifetime, like a WalMart in El Paso on Black Friday.
Bob Dylan sold out his entire song catalog ($400 million — ka-ching!). Paul Simon sold out ($250 million). Neil Young sold out ($150 million). Stevie Nicks sold out ($100 million). Dozens of others sold out.
As a result, rock songs have now entered their Madison Avenue stage of life.
Twisted Sister once sang “We’re Not Gonna Take It”. But even they took it — a very large payout, to be specific. A few months ago, the song showed up in a commercial for Discover Card.
Bob Dylan’s song “Shelter from the Storm” got turned into a theme for Airbnb. Neil Young’s “Old Man” was rejuvenated as a marketing jingle for the NFL (touting old man quarterback Tom Brady).
Fans mocked this move. Even Neil Young, now officially a grumpy old man himself, expressed irritation at the move. After all, the head of the Hipgnosis, the leading song investment fund, had promised that the rock star’s “Heart of Gold” would never get turned into “Burger of Gold”.
That hasn’t happened (yet). But where do you draw the line?
I was skeptical of these song buyouts from the start — but not just as a curmudgeonly purist. My view was much simpler. I didn’t think old songs were a good investment. […] But even I didn’t anticipate how badly these deals would turn out.
The more songs Hipgnosis bought, the more its share price dropped. The stock is currently down almost 40% from where it was at the start of 2021.
Things have gotten so bad, that the company is now selling songs.
On Thursday, Hipgnosis announced a plan to sell almost a half billion dollars of its song portfolio. They need to do this to pay down debt. That’s an ominous sign, because the songs Hipgnosis bought were supposed to generate lots of cash. Why can’t they handle their debt load with that cash flow?
But there was even worse news. Hipgnosis admitted that they sold these songs at 17.5% below their estimated “fair market value”. This added to the already widespread suspicion that current claims of song value are inflated.
August 14, 2023
56 pounds of beer | Dorktown
Secret Base
Published 1 Aug 2023In the early years, the Minnesota Vikings were like many new franchises of the time: dysfunctional, bad at football, and often intoxicated. And then a former NBA champion came back home to Minnesota and changed the identity of this franchise forever.
This is the first episode of Dorktown’s seven-part docuseries, The History of the Minnesota Vikings.
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August 9, 2023
QotD: The “Merry Pranksters”
Ken Kesey, graduating college in Oregon with several wrestling championships and a creative writing degree, made a classic mistake: he moved to the San Francisco Bay Area to find himself. He rented a house in Palo Alto (this was the 1950s, when normal people could have houses in Palo Alto) and settled down to write the Great American Novel.
To make ends meet, he got a job as an orderly at the local psych hospital. He also ran across some nice people called “MKULTRA” who offered him extra money to test chemicals for them. As time went by, he found himself more and more disillusioned with the hospital job, finding his employers clueless and abusive. But the MKULTRA job was going great! In particular, one of the chemicals, “LSD”, really helped get his creative juices flowing. He leveraged all of this into his Great American Novel, One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, and became rich and famous overnight.
He got his hands on some extra LSD and started distributing it among his social scene – a mix of writers, Stanford graduate students, and aimless upper-class twenty-somethings. They all agreed: something interesting was going on here. Word spread. 1960 San Francisco was already heavily enriched for creative people who would go on to shape intellectual history; Kesey’s friend group attracted the creme of this creme. Allan Ginsberg, Hunter S. Thompson, and Wavy Gravy passed through; so did Neil Cassady (“Dean Moriarty”) Jack Keroauc’s muse from On The Road. Kesey hired a local kid and his garage band to play music at his acid parties; thus began the career of Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead.
Sometime in the early 1960s, too slow to notice right away, they transitioned from “social circle” to “cult”. Kesey bought a compound in the redwood forests of the Santa Cruz Mountains, an hour’s drive from SF. Beatniks, proto-hippies, and other seekers – especially really attractive women – found their way there and didn’t leave. Kesey and his band, now calling themselves “the Merry Pranksters”, accepted all comers. They passed the days making psychedelic art (realistically: spraypainting redwood trees Day-Glo yellow), and the nights taking LSD in massive group therapy sessions that melted away psychic trauma and the chains of society and revealed the true selves buried beneath (realistically: sitting around in a circle while people said how they felt about each other).
What were Kesey’s teachings? Wrong question – what are anyone’s teachings? What were Jesus’ teachings? If you really want, you can look in the Bible and find some of them, but they’re not important. Any religion’s teachings, enumerated bloodlessly, sound like a laundry list of how many gods there are and what prayers to say. The Merry Pranksters were about Kesey, just like the Apostles were about Jesus. Something about him attracted them, drew them in, passed into them like electricity. When he spoke, you might or might not remember his words, but you remembered that it was important, that Something had passed from him to you, that your life had meaning now. Would you expect a group of several dozen drug-addled intellectuals in a compound in a redwood forest to have some kind of divisions or uncertainty? They didn’t. Whenever something threatened to come up, Kesey would say — the exact right thing — and then everyone would realize they had been wrong to cause trouble.
Scott Alexander, “Book Review: The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test”, Slate Star Codex, 2019-07-23.
July 31, 2023
QotD: Stranger in a Strange Land at 50
Sexual mores changed but not, for most, in that direction. Living in southern California in the eighties, the view that seemed most common among young adults — many of those I associated with would have been people I met through the SCA,1 a subculture that had noticeable overlap with both science fiction fandom and hippiedom — was very different. The ideal pattern was stable monogamy but who could be so lucky? Insofar as it had been replaced it was mostly by the increasing acceptability and practice of casual sex.
There has been some development since Stranger was published, in practice and theory, along the lines of group marriage of a somewhat different sort. Polyamory is more self-conscious and, at least in theory, more structured than what we see in Stranger. Partners are classified as primary or secondary and a good deal of attention paid to what those terms mean and what behavior they imply. The result is in theory closer to the Oneida Commune of the 19th century, on a much smaller scale, than to the nest described in Stranger.2
This fits not only what happened in the real world but what happened in Heinlein’s fictional worlds. Consider a more sophisticated version of group marriage, the line marriage in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. It is highly organized, with new members brought in at the low age end on a regular pattern of alternating gender. There is extensive search/courtship. And the protagonist offers a plausible explanation of its social role, why the institutions developed and what purposes it served.
Finally, consider Friday, a later novel. The protagonist, surprisingly naive given her profession — secret agent — joins a group marriage, makes a substantial commitment to it and is booted out, her share of the assets stolen, when it is discovered that she is an artificial person, the superior product of genetic engineering. Her much later commitment to a second group marriage follows more careful research.
David D. Friedman, “Odds and Ends”, David Friedman’s Substack, 2023-04-29.
1. The Society for Creative Anachronism, a historical recreation organization I have been active in for a very long time.
2. The practice sometimes ends up as open marriage, monogamous for purposes of producing and rearing children but with no obligation to sexual exclusivity — an option made possible by reliable contraception.
July 20, 2023
Water Bombing Workhorse That Keeps On Evolving; the story of the Canadair CL-215, 415, and 515
Polyus
Published 16 Jul 2021The Canadair CL-215 is the most successful flying boat amphibian since the second world war. Its multi-role capabilities range from aerial spraying, search and rescue, cargo service, to its most notable role, as a water bomber. It has the most outstanding performance of any aerial fire fighting platform. Starting production in the late 1960s, it continued production in several forms through ownership by Bombardier and later by Viking Air. The latter is currently developing the exciting next generation CL-515 First Responder with deliveries expected in 2024.
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July 16, 2023
Cheap, Effective, Everywhere: The RPG-7
The Tank Museum
Published 7 Apr 2023Join Chris Copson as he presents our latest in Anti-Tank Chats. In this episode, we will delve into the fascinating history and practical applications of the RPG-7, a powerful anti-tank weapon.
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July 8, 2023
Canada’s Nuclear-Armed Cold War Interceptor: the story of the McDonnell CF-101 Voodoo
Polyus
Published 14 Aug 2020When Soviet or unidentified aircraft approached Canadian airspace in the 1960s and 70s, they were met by an iconic cold war interceptor. Armed with both conventional and nuclear weapons, they were a formidable foe in their day. It served to support NORAD and protect the Northern approaches into the North American heartland during the height of the Cold War. Although it was neither designed nor built in Canada, the reliable Voodoo remains a Canadian Cold War icon and was well loved by its ground crews and pilots.
0:00 Introduction
0:29 McDonnell F-101A development
1:06 F-101B Interceptor
3:11 Canada becomes involved with the Voodoo
4:15 The Nuclear question
5:08 Comparison with contemporaries
5:36 Operational History
8:04 Legacy and Retirement
8:48 Conclusion
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July 4, 2023
Buster Keaton Rides Again (1965)
NFB
Published 15 Jun 2015In this film Keaton rides across Canada on a railway scooter and, between times, rests in a specially appointed passenger coach where he and Mrs. Keaton lived during their Canadian film assignment. This film is about how Buster Keaton made a Canadian travel film, The Railrodder. In this informal study the comedian regales the film crew with anecdotes of a lifetime in show business. Excerpts from his silent slapstick films are shown
Directed by John Spotton – 1965.
June 19, 2023
1963: Mockumentary Predicts The Future of 1988 | Time On Our Hands | Past Predictions | BBC
BBC Archive
Published 17 Jun 2023Russian moon landings, week long traffic jams, a workforce replaced by automation and above all, too much leisure time!
These are just some of the bold predictions made in Don Haworth’s 1963 BBC “mockumentary” Time on Our Hands – a remarkable film which projects the viewer a quarter of a century into the future.
Imagine how the futuristic inhabitants of 1988 — a society freed from the shackles of endless hard work — might reflect on the way people live and work in 1963. Its aim is to look back at the extraordinary, almost unbelievable, events of the intervening 25 years — referred to as “the years of the transformation”.
“This Buoyant programme could be repeated a dozen times and still intrigue, delight and disturb me”
Dennis Potter, Daily Herald TV critic, 1963This footage is compiled of excerpts from Time On Our Hands, a faux-documentary film by Don Haworth.
Originally broadcast 19 March, 1963.
May 28, 2023
This Gun Could Reach Space
Real Engineering
Published 18 Feb 2023
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May 4, 2023
Why British train enthusiasts hate this man – Dr. Beeching’s Railway Axe
Train of Thought
Published 27 Jan 2023In today’s video, we take a look at one Doctor Richard Beeching, the man who ripped up a third of Britain’s railways with nothing but a pen and paper.
