Bayou Renaissance Man

 

Do note the acronym made up from the first letters of the words in the new task force name, and pronounce it as a single word . . .

Peter

 

I'm not a knife aficionado in the sense of salivating over a brand name, or this, that or the other fancy feature of a blade.  However, over many years in Africa I came to appreciate simplicity, strength, versatility and toughness in a knife.  We treated our blades hard there.  They were "rode hard and put away wet", to use a Texas phrase, and sometimes broke under brutally hard treatment, or were lost in the heat of the moment.  If a knife could last under that kind of wear and tear, it was valued.  You'll also understand that folding knives seldom withstood such treatment:  fixed-blade knives offered greater strength, and were thus preferred.  I've written about those experiences in earlier articles:

Wilderness & survival tools - price versus quality

Useful information for knife novices

I recently came across a small knife on Amazon that, after testing, measures up to my African expectations.  It's the "Duratech Compact Fixed Blade Knife".  (Click this and any other image for a larger view.)

It's a small knife, designed for neck wear, or perhaps sideways on a belt for inconspicuous carry, or even pocket use.  It's only 6" long overall, with a 3" blade (short enough to be legal almost everywhere - check your state's knife laws to be sure).  Despite that, it's very ergonomic.  I usually don't like small knives, because they're difficult for me to handle (I have large hands - I wear size 2XL gloves).  Nevertheless, this knife doesn't present that problem, thanks to a very well-shaped handle of just the right length and diameter to grasp easily.

The blade is the proper thickness, too, able to stand up to hard use (including batoning smaller logs - I know, I've tried).  It's very sharp, and retains its edge well.  (It cuts tough meat like it wasn't there, better than most steak knives.)  If you want the ultimate concealment knife, the wood grips are attached using Torx screws, so (with the right screwdriver) you can remove them and grasp only the bare full-length tang if you wish (I'd wrap it in something like gaffer tape or skateboard tape, if I were you).  The knife is also light enough (only 2½ ounces) to carry around your neck, underneath your shirt.  You won't notice it's there.

To carry it on your belt, you can superglue a belt/pocket clip to the sheath, or have a leather sheath made.  For pocket carry, the existing sheath is fine, and the knife is small enough to make that possible despite being a fixed-blade unit.

What really surprised me is the value for money this knife offers.  It's only $11.99!  I wouldn't complain at having to pay double that cost or more, because the utility it offers is worth that to me:  but at that price, it's an absolute steal.  Having bought one to try it, I promptly ordered half-a-dozen more.  They'll go into my "lend or give to friends in need" stash, and one will be in my wife's handbag.

I think this may be the best-value-for-money everyday carry knife I've come across in a long time.  It has all the strength of a fixed-blade, but is no larger than many folding knives, and the price is unbeatable.  Highly recommended.

(No, I'm not being compensated by Duratech in cash or in kind for recommending their knife.  I just think this is a screaming good deal, and I'd like my friends to know about it.)

Peter

 

Found on Gab.  Clickit to biggit.

Isn't that great?  I don't have a very "visual" imagination - mine's more textual and linear, perhaps not surprising in a writer - but some people have the most amazing ability to pick up what you or I might consider trash, or flotsam and jetsam, and assemble a piece of art like this one.  In doing so, they enrich all of us.

Peter

 

In honor of the occasion, here's what's always struck me as a quintessentially American celebration:  rock group Boston performing the National Anthem instrumentally at a football game on July 4th, 2006.

May the freedom we celebrate today continue to be a reality;  and may all who threaten that freedom lose their own.

Peter

 

The video is self-explanatory.

I wonder how many years it took for all that silt to accumulate?  It sure was reluctant to move.

Peter

 

The fighter pilots of the French Navy clearly have as much fun as those of the US Navy, to judge by the videos they produce.  Here's their most recent offering.

Boys and their toys, indeed!

Peter

 

I came across this photo of an old-fashioned metal shopping list on Gab yesterday.  Click the image for a larger view.

It brought back many memories, because my mother had one like it in the 1950's and 1960's.  It hung over the counter in the kitchen where she prepared our meals.  She'd flip one of the little metal indicators when she ran short (or out) of something, so she could prepare her shopping list more easily.  If it was urgently required, I might find myself sent down to the shops to buy whatever she needed;  otherwise, it waited for a big shopping run once per week.

The thing that struck me is, there is no provision for "fast" or pre-prepared food in that device at all.  Everything consists of the raw materials that a cook will use to make a meal from scratch.  There are no TV dinners, no "heat-'n-eat" meals, no pre-cooked sausages or pre-prepared salads or anything like that.  It was simply assumed that "food" meant raw materials, that would be prepared, cooked and served by someone in a domestic kitchen.  Compare that to today's shopping list.  How many of us buy "minute" rice (already partly cooked) instead of "raw" rice?  How many of us buy "microwave-in-bag" vegetables, instead of the older varieties that still required boiling or baking - never mind buying raw vegetables and peeling, dicing and preparing them from the beginning?  How many of us buy cooking sauces or seasonings (e.g. Gochujang, or pre-mixed curries, or Old Bay) instead of making our own, the way most old-time cookbooks assumed we would?

(Speaking of old-time cookbooks, I always giggled at the recipe for jugged hare in my mother's well-worn copy of Mrs. Beeton.  "First, catch your hare."  Quite so!)

I'm sure we've gained immensely in convenience and time-saving short-cuts in the kitchen through the advent of modern food processing.  However, I suspect our meals are over-processed compared to those of our parents and grandparents, giving us a lot less nutrition and a lot more "filler" materials.  I'd like to know how much of our current obesity epidemic can be attributed to that.

(Of course, another facet of that is the enormous growth of fast-food outlets and family dining restaurants.  When I was growing up, it was a rare and expensive treat to eat at a Wimpy Bar or a drive-in restaurant [how many former Capetonians remember the Spotted Dog in Mouille Point?], or to have Mom or Dad bring home a bucket of take-out chicken pieces.  Nowadays, that's routine for most families.  Pizza was never bought outside the home and eaten by hand - it was always made at home (including the dough), baked in the oven, and eaten around the table, with knives and forks.  Yes, I think I'm a food dinosaur . . . )

Peter

 

Found on Gab (clickit to biggit):

Peter

 

Full marks for creativity to the artist who designed this brooch.  A tip o' the hat to Phlegm Fatale for sending me the link.

It's certainly original.  I can think of all sorts of situations where a lady might wish to wear something like that, to display her contempt for proceedings, but in a non-verbal and artistic way.  As one commenter said of it, "[I] want it implanted in my forehead".

The Three Percenters logo has long since been branded as "racist" or "extremist", so it's fallen out of favor.  Perhaps this might serve as the foundation for a suitable replacement?  It could be produced as jewelry, in camo sew-on or velcro patches, etc.  It would simply and eloquently express its wearers' opinion of "woke" culture and politics.

Peter

 

Sometimes everyday graffiti is so well done that it becomes street art.  Courtesy of a link over at Ace of Spades, we find this article at Nailspot highlighting the work of Tom Bob.  Here are a few examples.

Creativity in action!  There are many more images at the link.  Enjoyable viewing.

Peter

 

The statistics of this engine are mind-boggling.

The Emma Maersk’s Wartsila-Sulzer RTA96-C turbocharged two-stroke diesel ship engine is the most powerful and most efficient prime-mover of super ships in the world today.

The RTA96-C is the largest engine in the world and is available in 6 through 14 cylinder versions, all are inline engines. These engines were designed primarily for very large container ships but similar large diesel engines run large ships of all kinds. Ship owners like the combination of a single engine and single propeller for reasons of efficiency and cost of production vs operation of these mega-vessels. As ships continue to get larger with new generations of larger container ships being built each year shippers like Emma’s owner, A.P. Møller – Mærsk, will need bigger engines to propel them.

To help relate to the size of this monstrous engine consider that one cylinder bore alone is just under 38″ and the stroke is just over 98″. And the alone engine weighs in at 2,300 tons and is capable of delivering 109,000 horsepower.

There's more at the link.

The Emma Maersk is more than a decade old now, and has been superseded by even larger container vessels.  These behemoths are powered by the same engine - just with a few more cylinders bolted on.

Here's Top Gear's Richard Hammond walking around one of these monsters and showing us how it works.

That's the biggest diesel engine in the world.  What about the biggest gas turbine - similar to the type of engine that powers the largest aircraft in the world (although those are much smaller)?  That would be the Siemens SGT5-8000H.  Here's a video report from 2008, showing the prototype engine being transported across Germany to its test installation at the Irsching Power Station.

Big and beefy indeed!

Peter

Here's another team with too much time on their hands.  They have a lot of fun with it, and with things that go bang!

(If the embedded video fails to play, click here to watch it on YouTube.)




Looks like a good time was had by all.

Bowling ball cannons are fun.  We had one at our annual Blogorado gathering one year, converted from an old gas cylinder.  It launched bowling balls to a very satisfying distance with a loud CRRRUMP!  (We had a reproduction Civil War-era M1841 mountain howitzer another year, which was even more fun.  I wonder if one could swage a bowling ball down far enough to fit the bore of a 12-pounder cannon like that?  Hmmm . . . )

Blogorado 2020 is coming up in a few weeks. I wonder what high-explosive mayhem the boys are planning this year?  I'm going to be taking a number of new toys with me, to function-test them and sight them in.  It's going to be fun!

Peter

Pilots of small private planes in Australia are being offered a chance that's normally blocked to them, thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic.  A tip o' the hat to Australian reader Andrew for sending me the link.

Private pilot Mark Keech has flown in and out of Sydney Airport as a passenger many times, but he never thought one day he would do it from the cockpit.

That changed recently when he flew a Piper Cherokee 140 four-seater aircraft onto one of Sydney’s main runways, which stretches nearly four kilometres [about 13,000 feet].

“I can land this thing in about 250 metres [about 800 feet] and they told me to get off the first taxiway as quickly as I could [because another plane was coming],” he said.

“The first taxiway is one kilometre [about 3,300 feet] away, and I said to my daughter we’d have to take off again just to get to it.”

Mr Keech is one of many small aircraft pilots taking advantage of Sydney’s eerily-quiet airport during COVID-19.

Ordinarily, Australia’s largest airport sees at least 800 plane movements per day.

Amid the coronavirus pandemic, that number has been reduced to about 60 movements, mainly of freight jets.

“Normally the airspace isn’t available, so [for hobby pilots] to be able to tick Sydney Airport off in their logbook is a special thing,” [Sydney Airport airfield supervisor Nigel Coghlan] said.

. . .

Mr Keech said he had to try and manage the excitement of the occasion with making sure he followed all the necessary protocols.

“It became surreal because on one hand it was the same as landing at any other airport, but then I thought ‘this is serious, it’s an international airport and I’ve got a 777 up my arse’,” he said.

There's more at the link.

The story reminds me of when my wife was flying her newly-restored pre-World-War-II aircraft down from Alaska to join me in Tennessee (a journey described in this series of blog posts).  She used the chain of airfields set up for the Northwest Staging Route (leading to the so-called Alaska-Siberia (ALSIB) route across the Bering Strait to the Soviet Union) from the USA through Alberta, British Columbia and the Yukon to Alaska during that war.  Some of them have very long runways, in order to handle large planes - far longer than Miss D. needed for her STOL-modified liaison-aircraft-turned-bush-plane.  At one of the airports in the Yukon, she touched down on its nearly 10,000-foot main runway, using less than 10% of its length, only to find that the FBO she needed was at the other end of the runway.  Undaunted, she simply took off again, flew down the length of the runway, and landed once more at the far end!

I'm glad the operators of the Sydney airport are encouraging their light aircraft pilots to make use of the facilities.  It must get interesting for the air traffic controllers, having to fit small, slow single-engined planes in between honking great jet airliners.  The small planes' landing speed is usually rather less than 100 mph, whereas the big beasts come in at two to three times that velocity - an interesting calculation in terms of vectors and closing speed.  The small plane pilots must find it equally interesting.  The prospect of "a 777 up my arse", as Mr. Keech put it, probably concentrates their mind wonderfully!

Peter

I, like many Americans, refuse to kowtow to the current plague of political correctness that's dominating many professional sports at present.  I haven't tuned into a single NFL game, and I won't unless and until they get back to their job of being sports entertainers.  If I want politics, I know where I can find it - and it won't be in a sports broadcast.  As friend and fellow blogger Jennifer said some years ago about Hollywood celebrities and their political opinions, "In my world, you exist solely for my entertainment.  So, shut your pie hole and dance, monkey!"  Ditto for sports professionals, IMHO.

That said, it's great to see amateur sportsmen and sportswomen show enthusiasm, drive and dedication.  A great example came last weekend at a football game between Hillcrest-Tuscaloosa and Wetumpka in Alabama last weekend.  You can read about it here, but I recommend you take the time to watch the video below.  (If it doesn't play, click here to watch it on YouTube.)

Hillcrest-Tuscaloosa was down 30-28 on its own 41-yard line, with 2.9 seconds left in the game . . . then they pulled this rabbit out of the hat.




Well done to those players!  Talk about sheer determination and grit!  They're an example to the professionals who are too busy talking a political fight to play the game - the latter being, after all, what we're paying them to do.  They seem to have lost sight of that reality.

Peter

Ian Webster has created a very interesting visualization of how the Earth - the entire planet - looked during various past ages and eras and epochs.  One can select an era from a drop-down menu, and see what the globe would have looked like during that time.  The continents move, vegetation patterns are shown, and other details provided.

For example, here's our planet during the Ediacaran Period, about 600 million years ago.




And here's Earth during the early Triassic era, about 240 million years ago.




You can see how the continents are radically different in shape and layout compared to today.

Recommended viewing, particularly for children studying at home.

Peter

I shudder to think how much time, effort, matches and glue went into this.




I think, if I'd spent so much time and effort building that, I might have shed a tear or two as I watched my creation destroy itself.

Oh, well . . .

Peter

I'm obliged to reader R. K. for sending me the link to these two tweets.

Back in 2019, a Twitter user asked:




The replies to that question are often amusing, but this one caught my eye.




Brilliant! How to baffle people with tech-speak bull-byproduct!  A Twitter hole-in-one!




Peter

I came across an article about an amazing "field artwork" by a French street artist who goes by the moniker "braga_last_one".  He has an Instagram account under that name.

He started with an old gas tank:




And when he'd finished, it looked like this:




There are full-size versions of both images in the article, together with more pictures and an interview with the artist.  Open each image there in a new tab or window for a larger view.  It makes entertaining reading, particularly for those who like art that provides a visual illusion and 3D effects.

Obviously, this image depends on viewing it from a specific angle for its effects - it wouldn't work if seen from any other perspective.  Nevertheless, it's a remarkable achievement, IMHO.

Peter

I had to laugh at this rendition of the "pirate hymn".  I'd never heard of it before.  Clearly, I've lived a more sheltered life than I thought I had!




I'm very glad there's so much good, clean, funny humor still out there, if you look for it.  One gets very tired of profanity in the guise of a joke.

Peter

I found an article at Merriam-Webster that had me laughing.  It's titled "'Slantindicular,' 'Flummadiddle,' and 8 More Silly Words from 19th-Century America".

Flummadiddle

Definition: something foolish or worthless

Flummadiddle is the sort of word that rolls nicely off the tongue, and even if people with whom you use the word don’t quite know what it means the conversation will be the richer for its presence. It has gone through a number of meanings and spellings since it first began being used in the early 19th century, with the earliest use apparently referring to a frill or fringe, as found on a dress.

… looking down, found I had disarrayed my fair partner of lots of roses, and two yards of flounce or flummediddle, which skirted the lower part of her dress.
— Ichabod, Boston Lyceum, March 1827

My stature is neither of predominating height, or insignificant brevity, and having observed that a redundance of ‘flemmediddle’ (as it is now called) is tolerable only on a lady of the first dimensions, and that a dress for the street without any addition of ornament looks rather a la Cinderella, or like a morning habiliment, a neat, appropriate trimming will be visible upon whatever I may wear, of my own work, (what a sneer, Miss Araminta! sneers do not become ladies, gentlemen may sneer as much as they please,)….
— Boston Spectator and Ladies’ Album, 21 Apr. 1827

Following its sartorial beginnings, flummadiddle began to be employed in other fashions; it comes up as a single-word headline for an article in a Massachusetts newspaper, The Salem Gazette, in 1829, without any apparent relation to the text of the article (which is about a walking stick); perhaps the editors of that paper simply liked the way the word looked.

By the middle of the 19th century flummadiddle was used variously as a verb or as an interjection:

L. (Jumping up.) Jupiter! thunder! a tete-a-tete with a vengeance! O, you etarnal varmint of a bat—I’ll show you how to flumadiddle around me!
— Spy-Glass, July 1840

O folly, fudge, and flummadiddle! We shall wait and see what next.
— Milwaukee Daily Sentinel, 18 Aug. 1848

In the 1840s it settled down a bit, and began to see service in the role that it was obviously born to play, which is as a synonym for fiddle-faddle, folderol, or flapdoodle.

The threat about retaining all Mexico is mere flummadiddle, of course.
— Boston Daily Bee, 8 Oct. 1846

. . .

Absquatulate

Definition: to depart suddenly; to abscond

In 1830 a newspaper in North Carolina, the Newbern Sentinel, ran an article about an unpublished dictionary, titled The Cracker Dictionary. The work appears to have remained unpublished (perhaps the title had something to do with this), but in reporting on the words contained in the book’s nascent form the article provides early written evidence of a number of 19th century Americanisms. Among these is absquatulate, which is spelled with an initial O, rather than A, and defined as “to mosey, or to abscond.”

In addition to absquatulate, the reader is informed of the meaning of a number of other similar terms, many of which have retained some degree of currency in our language; flustrated (“frustrated and prostrated, greatly agitated”), rip-roarious, (“ripping and tearing”), and fitified (“subject to fits”) have seen enough continued use that we define them in our Unabridged Dictionary. Other words contained in this never-realized dictionary, such as ramsquaddled (“rowed up salt river”) and spontinaceously (“of one’s own accord”) appear to have been lost with the passage of time.

Two of the loafers, we understand, were yesterday taken and committed to prison; the other has absquatulated.
— The Times-Picayune (New Orleans, Louisiana), 13 June 1837

There's more at the link, including words of which this originally-not-from-here American had never heard.  Startling, but certainly entertaining!

Our forefathers came up with some interesting descriptive words, didn't they?  I think we've lost something in that we don't seem able to emulate them, except in meaningless obscenities.  The English language deserves better, IMHO.

Peter