The best tattoo story I ever heard.

Good Cosh column on corona, with a statistical factoid in this tweet.

Not panicking yet.

Cousin Dave already knew this.

"Prove your innocence". That there is the whole problem with adjudicating crimes in a non-criminal court.

Rolexes as an investment strategy? skip to the 4:00 mark if you're short on time.

https://youtu.be/b9Y4bmbh1KY

https://newrepublic.com/article/156307/tourism-dieand-wont

"Short on time"... I see what you did there.

Thanks, Crid. If I have my math right, it took about 200,000 lbs. of propellants just to start the engines.

I'm sort of surprised it only took 4%. I should have known. As a kid I geeked out over the Saturn V.

Something to consider when dealing with information coming out of China.

In communist China, an individual or even a respected doctor in a research bureau reporting on contaminated food, much less a possible epidemic outbreak, is conceivably guilty of anti-government behavior. Said brave soul is subject to fines, travel restrictions, public shaming and perhaps prison.

Why? Because the Chinese Communist Party can dismiss the initial warning as illegal criticism of the party.

https://strategypage.com/on_point/202001299355.aspx

Paris Musées, a group of 14 public museums in Paris, has made a splash by releasing high-res digital images for over 100,000 artworks through a new online portal. All the works were released to the public domain (CC0, or “No Rights Reserved”), and they include 62,599 historic photos by some of the most famous French photographers such as Eugene Atget.

https://petapixel.com/2020/01/28/paris-museums-put-60000-historic-photos-online-copyright-free/

There was a great web page about the Paul Newman Daytona discussed in the Darth link. This isn't it, but it's still a good browse.

@Amy: College: where dreams go to die.

Anyhow, welcome to Maryland!

TC Williams has good links re: Kobe

"I'm sort of surprised it only took 4%. I should have known. As a kid I geeked out over the Saturn V."

I've done that forever. I saw all the launches - I went to school with one of the daughters of the Padleader, Guenter Wendt, during the years he ruled the White Room. Think the Shuttle's impressive?

Nope.

So, this past Saturday, I was in Huntsville at the Space and Rocket Museum, where they have an intact Saturn V (minus a new Command Module, Service Module and LEM) and several spare components.

I walked across the floor to the F-1 display, because their main engines have always fascinated me... then it hit me:
Red covers! The engine sitting there still had shipping covers installed!
Shiny, bright, and sitting on its delivery skid, this engine was ready to go to KSC and the VAB to be installed. Flight hardware, new, certified, it was abandoned on the shipping dock, in favor of social programs.

I was horrified. I had to look away from its obvious beauty: welds, safety wire, hydroformed and machined precision everywhere, a dream of daVinci's formed of tons of special materials... such a work of art!

Ever since then, the mid-'70s, we've been told we suck and to look at our feet. When this was built, we looked up. We could go to the Moon - and did.

Well, this is what happens when leaders have feet of clay.

> We could go to the
> Moon - and did.

Cost a lotta money.

On one of Uncle Cridmo's Parallel Planets™, no one who reads a science fiction book is ever allowed to argue on behalf of NASA's budget.

Not really, but I wish people would understand that whatever their favorite government program might be, the money for it came from holding a pistol to someone's head. (To the affirm you'd happily hold this pistol misses the point.)

Pro-Life Women Stand in the Shoes of Early Suffragists

Questions.

I can't live without a whammy bar, but this is handsome, if somewhat....

____________.

Searching for the word. Will get back to you.

Cosh has more statistical advice.

mpetrie, leaving aside the fact that abortion was very often fatal to women in the 19th century (as were many cases of miscarriage, due to infection), what doesn't get mentioned (I can't track this down right now) is that Susan B. Anthony and others were also opposed even to safe methods of birth control (such as condoms or diaphragms) on the grounds that it would lead to wives being forced into sex with their husbands. That is, wives supposedly didn't WANT to have sex.

Back then, this was not as bizarre or unusual an attitude as you might think. After all, even in the 20th century, there were parents who raised daughters to believe that "decent" wives didn't and shouldn't enjoy sex; they just tolerated it for the sake of the joys of motherhood. (Which may help to explain why, even as late as the 1950s, according to historian Stephanie Coontz, girls "were not taught how to 'say no,' they were simply handed wedding rings.")

I.e., maybe it didn't occur to those 1950s parents with few memories of pre-Hays Code movies (early 1930s) that the culture had changed, for multiple reasons, and teens in general were going to need more guidance, since girls were learning that sex could be fun.

Btw, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, mother of seven, DID support birth control for those who wanted it, IIRC, but she was quite different from Anthony.

As many have pointed out, it's foolish, in many cases, to assume that we can know what historic figures would think or say about the present when attitudes were so different back then. Would Abraham Lincoln necessarily have approved of mixed-race marriages today, given his dislike of abolitionists? We can't be sure. From one source, though:

https://scholarworks.gsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1108&context=history_theses

Excerpt:

...Interestingly, while Lincoln publicly gave a mild endorsement of Illinois’ interracial marriage ban, he rather surprisingly stated off the record that he found the ban pointless. Stating stated that he had no interest in marrying a black woman, Lincoln added, “If a white man wants to marry a Negro woman, let him do it—if the Negro woman can stand it.” See: James Oakes, The Radical and the Republican: Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and the
Triumph of Antislavery Politics (New York City: W.W. Norton & Company, 2011), 127-128...

(Note that he said nothing about a black man marrying a white woman. How COULD he possibly have raised that subject? He couldn't.)

> it's foolish, in many cases,
> to assume that we can know
> what historic figures would
> think or say about the present
> when attitudes were so different
> back then.

✓

Lenona, where else do you hang out, writings-wise?

The library - ha ha.

Google Groups used to be fun, but they're fading away and I don't like to register everywhere I go. (When Bratfree started making registration mandatory, years ago, I quit.) There's also a literary forum, but it's not as crowded as I would like and it's also not based in the U.S., so often, the people there don't know the books I know anyway, and it can be hard to get threads going.

(Security issues scare me more than ever - I saw a big scam story on CBS today. It mentioned that scammers are learning to spoof phone numbers from the FBI. It repeated the tip that the IRS, Social Security, and the FBI will never call you on the phone before sending you a document or a visit from a representative. But how long will it be before scammers start doing just that, with very good actors and fake documents? I no longer answer the phone unless someone starts to leave me a message and I KNOW it's someone I "know," such as some staff member from my doctor's office. Most strangers don't leave messages, thankfully.)

Wanna do a blog? Are you on twitter or anything?

Raddy, when I was in grade school, one of my friends was Peter von Braun. I went to their house a few times.

> when I was in grade school,
> one of my friends was
> Peter von Braun. I went to
> their house a few times.

!

Bravo, CD!

Twitter? You kidding?

All it reminds me of is the whirlpool that symbolizes the end of society's ability to concentrate for more than 5 seconds. (Not to mention the inability to put one medium over another, in value! One could argue that it's even worse than putting TV news over newspapers.)

And, as I've mentioned, I don't really have that much time to post anyway. Which is why my longer posts almost always consist of quotations. (Unlike some highly professional people, here! Very odd. Why do THEY have so much time?)

Btw, given all the negative news for the last two years about Facebook, I am so glad I was never on it...

> the whirlpool that symbolizes
> the end of society's ability
> to concentrate

I can certainly see why you see it that way.

Yet when you follow the right people, it can be particularly casual & intimate connection to some extremely bright and deep thinkers… And when they link an article or a book or what-have-you, it's rewarding like nothing heretofore.

Also, snickers.

PS- I agree about facebook.

"Yet when you follow the right people, it can be particularly casual & intimate connection to some extremely bright and deep thinkers…"

...and Crid is on there... too.

The whole spectrum of humanity, forced to summarize, an often but not always insurmountable restriction.