My first car – the 1950 Chevrolet

Posted on by The Old Wolf

The year would have been 1972, and I was living off-campus for the first time. A buddy of mine offered to sell me his car for $75.00, and wheels sounded like a great idea.
1950 Chevrolet Foldout-03

 

1950 Chevrolet flyer

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Mine was a dark green, about the same color as the top of this one. Sadly, I never had the presence of mind to take any photos of it.

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The interior dashboard; three on the tree. Notice the starter button to the left of the speedometer, with the choke just below it.

Engine

 

The straight six left enough room under the hood to house the entire Green Bay Packers starting lineup, along with your tools to boot; it was a joy to work on. A simpler engine I have never seen.

Sadly, the car was not in the best of shape… but I was young and very naïve. I ended up spending about $600.00 on brake work and front suspension (the kingpins were bad and had to be replaced, among other things); after that it ran OK, but had some compression issues. I decided to use the beast as a teaching machine, found a manual, and ripped the engine apart. I took the head down to a machine shop and had it re-worked, along with the valves – replaced a few worn-out parts, and put the thing back together again. It ran… sort of.

Life moved on, I stored it in various places and was later given a 1963 Ranchero by my dad… the Chevy ended up being towed to a junk yard where I bid it a fond farewell.

My Ranchero, 1972

 

1963 Ranchero with 260 V8. I loved this car too.

If I had it to do over again, I would have done many things differently… but I wish I had that car today. It was like driving a battleship, and had enough room inside for a whole lot of people.

Reminiscing, nothing more.

The Old Wolf has spoken.

Improving the psychokinetic tester (Fringe humor)

Posted on by The Old Wolf

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A rare picture of an elderly David Robert Jones[1], having improved upon the psychokinetic testing device for another evil plot.

By the silken breast of Mogg’s mother, I miss “Fringe.”

Olivia

 

Olivia Dunham uses her Cortexiphan-induced psychokinetic powers to defuse a biological bomb. Fringe, Season 1, Episode 14: “Ability”

In actuality, this 1928 photo, taken in Washington, DC is  Charles Francis Jenkins (1867-1934), pictured here with what might be considered an early flat-panel video display, its 48-pixel-square grid composed of small neon lamps. Found at Shorpy.

[1] From Universe 39

Book Review: Inferno (No spoilers)

Posted on by The Old Wolf

the-abyss-1

It’s difficult to share a review of a book without giving anything away, and to say anything at all about Inferno might take the delight out of some tiny plot twist for someone else. All I can say is that I enjoyed this book immensely – it was a page-turner and no mistake; I started to read at about 2:00 PM, and finished around 11:30 that night. I found it a lot more plausible in story line than Angels and Demons or The Lost Symbol, and I got a huge amount of enjoyment out of the fact that I had been in all the cities where the action took place, spending a good deal of time in two of them.  Now I want to go back…  and I need to re-read La Divina Comedia. If it’s done well, this will be an outstanding movie. On that note, why they’re taking so long to turn Symbol into a movie is beyond me, unless they’re finding it too convoluted. Time will tell.

The Old Wolf has spoken.

Message in a Bottle

Posted on by The Old Wolf

Or a gravestone, as the case may be.

From the Oregonian, December 23, 2012

The letter came in a box of Halloween decorations purchased at Kmart, but for a year Julie Keith never knew. It gathered dust in her storage, a haunting plea for help hidden among artificial skeletons, tombstones and spider webs.

Keith, a 42-year-old vehicle donation manager at a southeast Portland Goodwill, at one point considered donating the unopened $29.99 Kmart graveyard kit. It was one of those accumulated items you never need and easily forget. But on a Sunday afternoon in October, Keith pulled the orange and black box from storage. She intended to decorate her home in Damascus for her daughter’s fifth birthday, just days before Halloween.

She ripped open the box and threw aside the cellophane.

That’s when Keith found it. Scribbled onto paper and folded into eighths, the letter was tucked between two Styrofoam headstones.

“Sir:

“If you occasionally buy this product, please kindly resend this letter to the World Human Right Organization. Thousands people here who are under the persicution of the Chinese Communist Party Government will thank and remember you forever.”

“People who work here have to work 15 hours a day without Saturday, Sunday break and any holidays. Otherwise, they will suffer torturement, beat and rude remark. Nearly no payment (10 yuan/1 month, or $1.61).”

“People who work here, suffer punishment 1-3 years averagely, but without Court Sentence (unlaw punishment). Many of them are Falun Gong practitioners, who are totally innocent people only because they have different believe to CCPG. They often suffer more punishment than others.”

The letter was not signed.

CHINALABOR-popup-v4

The graveyard kit, the letter read, was made in unit 8, department 2 of the Masanjia Labor Camp in Shenyang, China. Chinese characters broke up choppy English sentences.

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The administrative building of the Masanjia labor camp and other facilities in China.

Keith started doing homework and digging around, and the letter was widely published on the internet. Responses ranged from outraged to skeptical, including those who pointed out that her publication of this material put the writer at risk if he/she were real.

On June 11th, 2013, The New York Times published a follow-up article indicating that the writer had been found, and was no longer in the labor camp. It’s an interesting read and lends credence to the original story, although there has been no other independent confirmation from inside China.

It appears that many companies who import Chinese products have no policies that bar the use of forced labor.

Just something else to think about the next time you go shopping at a big box store and the label says “Made in China.”

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The Totally Ghoul product – the letter from China was found in a package like this.

The Old Wolf has spoken.

The Roundhouse.

Posted on by The Old Wolf

Steam locomotives of the Chicago & Northwestern Railway in the roundhouse at the Chicago, Illinois rail yards. Photo taken December, 1942

roundhouse

The roundhouse was an integral part of the American (and worldwide) railroad scene, typically used for locomotive storage and repair. I learned what a roundhouse was in the 50’s, from one of my favorite children’s books, Tootle:

Tootle

It made perfect sense.

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Roundhouses memorialized on a 2012 Forever stamp

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Five locomotives lined up at Steamtown National Historic Site in Pennsylvania. “Steamtown hosted visiting steam locomotives during the Grand Opening in 1995. Five steam locomotives were posed in the Roundhouse for this photo. Historically, steam locomotives faced the other way in the Roundhouse to allow more room between the locomotives at the end where the work was done.”

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Roundhouse Museum

The Old Wolf has spoken.

The Internet, Someday

Posted on by The Old Wolf

Vintage Compuserve Ad 1982

CompuServe ad, 1982

As I commented somewhere else, when I think of how hard it was to connect to the “Internet” as it was back then, using clunky equipment, acoustical 300 baud modems, and processors slower than my current watch, I am astonished at myself for thinking it was all pretty sweet.

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Sitting in front of my Macintosh LC, watching NCSA Mosaic download a progressive jpeg file scan by scan, and still thinking that this was the neatest thing since sliced bread? I realize of course, that it took a while to bring processing speeds and data transfer rates up to where the process could be considered cost-effective:

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This Dilbert strip was from May 7, 1997; check the strips from the previous two days as well, they’re pretty funny in retrospect.

Now, with a core i7 machine and a 50MB internet connection (Pretty sweet, huh? Well, just Google around to see what kind of speeds Korea gets on a regular basis. All things are relative, still) I finally feel as if I have the processing power and download speeds to take care of my basic needs. I don’t do high-overhead gaming or image rendering, so I can’t see really needing anything faster for daily use. [1] But it’s taken us 30 years to get here.

<rant> Of course, I’m composing this post on an HP Pavilion Entertainment laptop, one of the worst purchases I ever made back in 2008. This computer is the piece of hqiz from hell (it was nice to see similar things from Shamus over at Twenty Sided, I felt totally vindicated in my white-hot hatred for Hewlett-Packard); the only thing I can say on its behalf is that five years later, it’s still running and I’ve only had to replace the cheap-john battery twice. I know others who have had much less favorable experiences with this particular line, mainly dead computers. The AMD Turion 64 is probably one of the slowest processors they made back in that day, combined with a pre-installed version of Vista and enough bloatware to delight the most jaded software rep; by the sacred skull of Mogg’s grandfather, I’ve ridden tricycles that could go faster. The kindest thing I ever did for myself was to wipe the whole machine and install Win7 Pro, which virtually doubled the response time… and it’s still slow. I’d like to get the entire corporate chain that designed and approved this abomination and condemn them to a year of using their own garbage… with a dial-up connection.</rant>

But Moore’s Law is still in force. Despite the fact that my work-a-day machine is pretty satisfying to use, I can’t possibly imagine what my two granddaughters, now aged 9 and 6, will have seen by the time they get to be my age. I won’t be alive, and I already envy them.

The Old Wolf has spoken.

[1] Well, I lied. If I were richer than Crœsus, I’d buy a professional system and a really nice video editing package, but that’s just a pipe dream for the present.

Terror in Three Words

Posted on by The Old Wolf

A recent question over at Reddit asked, “Can you Terrify Us in Just Three Words?”

Below, the top entries or ones that I found especially terrifying (with the really sick ones, sadly abundant, removed for family friendliness).

Search History Subpoena
You Tested Positive
No Toilet Paper
Frenulum Papercut Extravaganza [1]
Nuclear Launch Detected
We Should Talk
You’ll Never Retire
Wow, That’s Small
Continuous Kidney Stones
Everyone Dies Alone
Look Behind You
My Office. Now.
You’re Being Audited
Digital Rights Management
President Kim Kardashian
You Have Cancer
Nutella Was Discontinued
Amy’s Baking Company
No More Bacon [2]
Winter is Coming [3]
President Sarah Palin

I’d have to agree, most of these are downright terrifying. I’m reminded of Hemingway’s bleak short story: “For sale, baby shoes. Never worn;” also, the shortest horror story ever written: “The last man on earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock on the door.”

It was interesting to see what people consider terrifying.

The Old Wolf has spoken.

[1] Ouch! I’ve done my tongue on an envelope, but never this.

[2] One of the most terrifying of all

[3] I’m not a Game of Thrones fan – I’ve neither seen nor read it – but at least I recognized this.

Fuchsia, Mauve, Puce, and Teal: Ain’t nobody got time for that.

Posted on by The Old Wolf

… Well, at least not if you’re a guy. That’s the conventional wisdom, right?

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So, conventional wisdom would dictate that if you’re a guy, you’ll score very poorly on this test:

Color1

Try it if you’re curious – it’s an interesting experiment.

I expected to fail miserably; my wife is always telling me I can’t tell the difference between red, maroon, magenta, and… what was the name of that color?

Well, as it turns out, I’m on the very high end of the perception scale. Here’s what I managed to do:

Color2

My score was 8 – the lower your score, the better you did. The highest (worst) score for my gender and age range was 1970.

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And this chart shows where my weaknesses lie:

Color2a

So in terms of actually being able to see differences in colors, my skills are relatively good. However, in terms of being able to name them, I think that I probably fall squarely into my wife’s expectations. Except for a few odd colors, like fuchsia,

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which I happen to know because I love this particular plant, I don’t have a lot of names for colors that you don’t see in the office.

There’s not only some psychology at work here, but also some linguistic theory. The languages of some simple cultures, such as Dani, only distinguish two colors: mili for cool/dark hues such as blue, green, and black, and mola for warm/light colors such as red, yellow, and white. Now, that doesn’t mean the Dani peoples can’t see these colors, but only that they don’t have specific words for them. The sky might be “sky mili”, grass might be “soft mili,” etc.

The first color to actually break out as languages increase in sophistication is red, followed by a green/blue (grue) blend, followed by the separation of grue into green and blue. There’s a whole spectrum. One could draw some rather rude conclusions about the relative sophistication of the male brain, but I think that socially, it’s more a case of need and experience. Guys don’t need to know what color that mammoth is to bring it down; as long as you can describe the jerseys of opposing football teams, you’re golden. Ladies, on the other hand… well, you would never wear a mauve top with teal shoes, now would you? These things are important.

The Old Wolf has spoken.