Every once in a while, I wish we had some money. It’s usually when you encounter something so out-of-the-ordinary that you want to go see it or do it. I ain’t talking about going to Dizzyland or eating in a totally different Olive Garden in another time zone. I mean something rare and wonderful. Like this restaurant in Salzburg, Austria:
OK, so a Mozart dinner concert is pretty neat in and of itself. We love us some Mozart. The musicians and singers seem several cuts above your average house band. But maybe the most piquant detail about the joint is Wolfie himself ate there, or at least had a plate in front of him while he guzzled booze and nuzzled opera singers. Hell, Christopher Columbus ate there. The place has been in constant operation since, no fooling, 803. That is not a typo. Not 1803. Eight-hundred-and-three.
How do we know this? Because Charlemagne’s best buddy Alcuin of York mentioned St. Peter’s Stiftskeller in his notes. It’s named St. Peter’s because it’s inside the walls of St. Peter’s Abbey in Salzburg.
I’ve eaten in restaurants where it seemed like the french fries had been under a heat lamp for 1200 years before they served them to me, but I’ve never heard of a restaurant that old, still in operation, anywhere in the world.
The facility has been expanded since its inception. The hall where they try to saw all the way through the violas was added in 1903, for instance:
So, if we had ridiculous money, we jet off to Salzburg and order the most expensive thing on the menu, probably by accident because my German is very, very rusty. We’d listen to Mozart, maybe sitting in the same chair that Mozart did, although not in the same room, I’ll grant you. I’d look for lots of wine stains to be sure it was the right one. But for the life of me, I don’t know where my wife is going to get an outfit like Mina Harker in the picture there.
I was roofing the house yesterday. The turret on the front had two panels left wanting after the last roofing soiree. Deuced difficult to get at. The roof is tall and pointy, and has eight sides. More or less, my house has a well-deserved dunce cap. There’s a sloping, curved porch roof blocking ladder access to the last two sides of it. I have a forty-foot ladder, and if you put the feet way out on the lawn you can just clear the lower roof and lay the top of the ladder flat on one roof panel, so I did. With the shallow angle it’s at, you don’t climb it so much as creep along it. My neighbors drive by and gawp, and think I’m a little nuts. I am, but the roof has nothing to do with it.
I’ll have to sweep the metal porch roof when I’m done, and while you’re waiting to see if I survive the bees, the furnace of the sun, and Mr. Gravity, let’s sweep some browser bookmarks into the interbin at the same time. After all, I’m pretty sure it’s Tuesday.
Burtynsky’s Shipbreaking photographs, like all his works, appear to us as images of the end of time. The abandoned mines and quarries, the piles of discarded tires, the endless fields of oil derricks, and the huge monoliths of retired tankers show how our attempts at industrial “progress” often leave a residue of destruction.
Absolutely stunning photographs, and I mean that every which way. The subject matter is staggering, and the photographer takes images brilliantly.
A ruined building in the middle of the Pyrenees records a tragedy for the people who lived there—a devastating fire that burned a settlement to the ground, destroying almost everything except a hidden gold earring. Now archaeologists’ excavation of Building G, in the strategically placed Iron Age site of Tossal de Baltarga, reveals a way of life derailed by violence: potentially, a forgotten episode of the war between Carthage and Rome.
Oh jeez. We’re back to the Punic Wars. Pretty interesting find, but I read it twice, but I still don’t understand what this has to do with Radar Love.
Actor Scarlett Johansson said she turned down OpenAI‘s request for her to lend her voice to a conversational ChatGPT system — and that she was “shocked” and “angered” that the company went ahead and used a voice that sounded very similar to hers anyway.
Open AI says they hired another person to do the voice. Someone who sounds like Scarlett Johansson. Yeah, that’s the ticket. Man, I swear these tech titans enjoy being sued. Here’s some free advice for Sam Altman: next time, steal stuff and re-use it from people without enough money to hire an army of lawyers, and without a publicist on speed dial to every major news outlet in the world. You know, like this guy.
GLEWBOT climbs up walls like a gecko and taps on tiles like a woodpecker to evaluate wall integrity. Like cleaning the windows on a skyscraper, the traditional inspection method requires specialized tools and skills. GLEWBOT can perform the same functions autonomously, dramatically reducing costs.
Free advice for the GLEWBOT people: Just add a camera and tap into the ever-so-much larger market for peeping toms.
The Justice Department, which has not said if it will accept the payment, declined to comment on the filing. Google asserted that its check, which it said covered its alleged overcharges for online ads, allows it to sidestep a jury trial whether or not the government takes it.
Hmm. Being cute with Scarlett Johansson is probably expensive. Being cute with Uncle Sam can get you droned theses days. Maybe Google should have made the check out for 110% of the amount. You know, just to make sure.
Su and her husband Burt, a secretary and schoolteacher, had married a year earlier and drove north from Boonton, New Jersey to build a new life in Alaska. To find the couple, Whicker and his television crew had to take a plane journey followed by another hour’s drive “along a do-it-yourself road”. Sleeping in hammocks and with not much shelter, it was clear the Lums had chosen a difficult path for themselves. And Su was due to have a baby in 10 days’ time.
There are about a zillion YouTube videos of people doing the whole alaskapocaloffgridhomeprepsteadingexpealedocious. I’m sure they’ll all eventually end up like the intrepid New Jersey couple.
Patients were randomized using computer-generated codes to receive either cryotherapy (liquid nitrogen applied to each wart for 10 seconds every 2-3 weeks) for a maximum of 6 treatments or duct tape occlusion (applied directly to the wart) for a maximum of 2 months. Patients had their warts measured at baseline and with return visits.
I won’t spoil the surprise at the link, but remember, there’s nothing that it can’t do.
A mortgage is a product, which is built by specialist workers using an immense and costly capital edifice, to be sold into a supply chain for consumers of that product. It incidentally happens to involve a house and a loan, but those two facts do not drive most behaviors of the mortgage industry. The structure of the manufacturing process, and the consuming supply chain, do.
Remember, if you’re feeling down, and all alone in this world, just miss a mortgage payment or two, and find out just how many people care if you’re alive or dead.
Well, that’s it for this Tuesday. By close of business today, my roof will be incrementally less leaky, and my bookmarks toolbar slightly lighter. You can vote for your favorite item in the comments. But remember: no wagering.
Sir Hiram Stevens Maxim was an interesting fellow. He was born in Sangerville, Maine in 1840. He eventually moved to England, and eventually became a British citizen. During his fairly long life, he invented and perfected all sorts of things. A pocket menthol inhaler (he suffered from bronchitis a lot), a curling iron, a machine for placing eyelets in clothes and shoes and whatnot, a watch demagnetizer, some sort of thingamabob to keep ships from rolling at sea, a coffee substitute, and what was probably the first automatic fire sprinkler. He made a pretty cool amusement park ride, a kind of merry-go-round with tethered cars that simulated flight. The ride is still in use at the Blackpool Pleasure Beach, and has been copied a zillion times, including by Disney. He tinkered around with actual flying machines, too. But just between you and me, I don’t think steam was the way to go, there, Hiram.
He also claimed to have invented the lightbulb, and got in a legal beef with Edison over it, and lost bigly. Eventually Edison invented the movie camera, and lucky for us, that allows us to see Hiram’s really big invention: The machine gun.
The video has been colorized, and someone has added some rat-a-tat sound effects, but that’s the man himself, demonstrating the first truly automatic weapon. Just spray and pray.
Then, at 0:48, he demonstrates something else with substantially more oomph. I’m not sure exactly what it is, or Hiram’s relationship to it. It looks like the deck gun on a military vessel. Whatever it is, I bet it could punch some holes in some things.
Hiram smiles, and takes a bow at the end. It’s easy to see why he’s so cheerful. He was stone deaf by that point. He was married at least twice, maybe without a divorce in between, and various women sued him for bigamy and child support for out-of-wedlock kids he supposedly sired. A man with good hearing usually limits himself to a single woman. A deaf fellow can handle almost any number of them.
Gladys Knight and the Pips on the Midnight Special back in 1974. That’s a really live, live performance. Some vocal acts on TV shows like that one would actually sing live, but the backing track was recorded. Plenty simply lip-synced. But you can see that there’s an orchestra off to the left, and they’re really blazing away on that number.
She was born to sing, I guess. She was on Ted Mack’s Amateur Hour in 1952 when she was just seven years old, and won it. The Amateur Hour was a prototype of shows like Star Search. There was a number at the bottom of the screen you could call to vote on your favorite act, and since long distance calls used to cost big money, you could mail in a postcard instead. Now a call is free and a stamp is sixty-eight cents, and the postcard might not get there in a week.
Gladys was originally on Motown, but Berry Gordy, the founder and head honcho, considered her a second stringer. Gladys and the Pips had a bunch of big hits anyway, like I Heard It Through the Grapevine and If I Were Your Woman. Eventually, Gladys and the Pips served as an opening act for Diana Ross and the Supremes. Diana Ross told Berry Gordy to get rid of her, because the audiences went wild for Gladys and sat on their hands for the Supremes. So Gladys went to Buddha Records, and some big paydays, and deserved every one of them.
Many people wondered why Gladys stuck with the Pips, when there was so much pressure on her to be a solo act. Well, one Pip is her brother, and the other two are her cousins. Some things are more important than money, I guess. Besides, someone has to go wooh wooh. Might as well keep it in the family.
Lots of ink spilled about kids these days. They’re either imbeciles who will never pay off their student loans, or they’re geniuses making mid six-figures at a FAANG outfit. Never anything in between.
But there’s a great deal of world between sullenly serving coffee and coding AI apps. I dislike the way the term “engineer” and “architect” has been purloined for computer programmers. I always preferred “code monkeys,” but no one ever listens to me. Anyway, the world needs many more practical, real-world engineers than we’ve got. It appears that Johns Hopkins University is producing some:
The challenge before Johns Hopkins University engineering students: Take a leaf blower, but make it quiet. Make it work as powerfully as ever, but do not allow it to emit the ear-piercing caterwaul that has gotten leaf blowers banned in some communities and cursed in many others.
Shocking their sponsors, their advisers, and even themselves a little, the students did it.
This isn’t one of those things that you read about that instantly disappears, either. It’s ready for prime time:
The design wowed Stanley Black & Decker officials, who can’t wait to start manufacturing and selling the new tools.
“It’s not just some cool theoretical thing that will sit on a shelf and never be heard from again—this is ready to be mass manufactured,” said Nate Greene, senior product manager at Stanley Black & Decker, who graduated from Johns Hopkins in 2017 with an engineering degree. “This is a really rare and dramatic level of success.”
The student team expects their solution could be adapted to quiet other similarly loud appliances like vacuums and hairdryers.
Good work kids. You’re sure to all find good-paying jobs when you graduate. And good paying jobs aren’t as good as being a Instagram influencer, of course, but somehow I think you’ll muddle through.
Month: May 2024
sippicancottage
A Man Who Has Nothing In Particular To Recommend Him Discusses All Sorts of Subjects at Random as Though He Knew Everything.
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