It was an April Fool's joke, but I like the idea of moving back to the old "Hardee Hat" Stetsons of the Civil War and Frontier days. It just has a better feel to it than the black berets.

h/t Ace of Spades sidebar - dunno how to direct-link those, sadly.

Man, I'd never think to see George "Moonbat" Monbriot write something like this. It could be an old Gregg Easterbrook column in the Marty Peretz-edited salad days of The New Republic. When you have ol' Moonbat telling the panicky MSM to calm the hell down about an environmental catastrophe...

Heck, I was even yelling at some perverse paleocons to stop sniveling about Obama's allegedly unconstitutional Libyan adventure the other day over on Rantburg.

Strange days indeed. Everything's upside down, and it could turn back rightside up again at any moment.

Insty h/t.

I saw this link in the Althouse comments today. A real panacea for today's ration of panic about the Fukushima plants, which have even infected most of the conservative, pro-nuclear blogs and sites.

Man, Ishihara can be uncomfortably close to Hitler in temperament. Please don't call the man a "conservative", he's a fascist, capitalism-hating, racist, will-to-power extremist. And maybe Yamakan might want to think about getting into politics and giving up on anime - he's not much of an artist, and seems to love controversy and fighting things out in the media when he should be concentrating on current projects.

Lucid, clear explanation of the Fukushima partial meltdown. Long story short, it was ugly, but a forty-year old reactor at a troubled plant with a spotty maintenance history took two beyond-design-specification disasters in close succession & didn't kill anybody or poison its environs. It sounds like all the radiation casualties will be plant employees.

Frankly, the horrible damage done by the tsunami tearing through the grease, oil, and lubricant-contaminated environs of every port on the Tohoku coast & depositing all of those industrial poisons and toxic wreckage over the once-fruitful coastal plains is the actual environmental disaster to consider in this catastrophe. Those were beautiful fields being submerged under that black, foul hell-tide. They aren't beautiful anymore, and I'm not sure anybody should be eating food grown off of them for the next couple seasons at least.

We need nukes, damnit. The more of them we can build in safe locales (and yes, if nothing else, putting our nuclear power plants in places where we don't have to use design tolerances keyed to survival from a 9.0 earthquake and inundation by a 30-foot tsunami strikes me as *cheaper*, cheaper to build and cheaper to maintain), the better. A modern economy won't be run from power-plants burning unicorn farts and pixy dust, it's either nukes, coal, or gas - and the more of each, the fewer little old ladies get to freeze to death in the depths of winter when it comes down to the limitations. There are bureaucrats in Japan right now, cold-bloodedly plotting rolling blackouts in order to stretch the torn ends of their shredded power infrastructure around the Fukushima-shaped-hole torn in their power net. Redundancy is life.

Explanation link from Rand Simberg; youtube link from the Brickmuppet.

Yesterday was another busy day on the pumpkin catapult front. We finished assembling the devices and tested them in Jason's back yard while he kept an eye on a smoldering pile of crop refuse and brush which he was burning in order to try and kill off a late-blight infestation in his tomato patch in preparation for the new season.

My direct-fire spring-pull ballista was kind of a damp squib. It fired, reliably, but no further than about twenty-five feet - about the same range as a high-end SuperSoaker. It wasn't really designed to be adjustable, so that was it, boom, 25 ft. So, the finished device works, but isn't much more than a bulky, wonky-looking toy. At least the spring didn't fail - we had padded it out with a series of rubber sheets around the pull-axle, which was enough to keep it from self-destructing. Speaking of which...

Jason's spring-torsion trebuchet started out brillantly, destroying the sweet onion we had been using as a pumpkin-substitute (we managed to directly smack into a branch of the big maple behind Jason's house, which pretty much put paid to that object as a throwable payload), and firing for another two-dozen pulls with a light obsidian-pumicy rock about the right size and shape. After changing the angle of attack on the throwing arm, and modifying the base to add a trigger and a shelf for the sling and projectile, we got it up to throwing small rocks about 80-90 ft across Jason's yard - just shy of his property line. Then the spring failed.

Happily, since the spring was in a protective sleeve (actually, the leg of a pair of blue-jean trousers) and it wasn't really under explosive outward pressure, it didn't hurt anybody. When we took it apart to see what happened, we found that one of the mounting pegs had also snapped, which explained one of the earlier "SPRONG!" noises the machine had made on an earlier cranking. So, we had been putting a lot of stresses on this device. The spring failed just above the welds holding it to the octogonal plate holding the mounting pegs; best guess is that the heat from the welding process weakened the aged spring (to remind y'all, this had been taken out of a trashed automotive shock-absorber) enough that it eventually failed under pressure. The mounting peg was a separate issue, and the design group concluded that having used drillcore for the mounting peg had been a mistake - it was too hard and rigid for the horizontal sheer force being placed upon it by the design. We should have used mild steel instead.

They went back to the drawing table, and quickly banged out a replacement design based on a completely different principle, which would allow the salvaging of as many parts of the wrecked device as possible. The new device would use the second salvaged shock-absorber spring in a compression device - playing to the actual design usage of the original manufacturing process. The spring was mounted in a box on the base, with a bottom-plunger on braided steel cord threaded through the spring, so as to pull directly upwards, distributed through the body of the device by the construction of the box. The steel cord will be wrapped around a pulley-cam on a moving axle, which will be welded to the salvaged throwing arm. This retains the torsion motion, while avoiding any weld-work on the surviving reserve spring. We spent yesterday afternoon and evening putting together the new base & welding together the pulley-cam & modifying the original three-quarters-inch bar, which had been a non-moving support element in the old device & which had to be reworked to turn it into a smoothly-turning axle in some brass bushings.

Spent a few more hours in Jason G's basement yesterday, until the snow got too alarming for me to be out and about. We (well, mostly Jason) came up with a welded double-hook for the draw/catch/release on my device's shuttle. After fighting with some basic hooks I bought at Triangle Supply, Jason got an evil look in his eye and declared that he'd make his own. So he did, out of a bit of steel barstock he had on hand, reaming out an end, tapping it for a 1/4 screw socket, and then bending out two hooks with wrench, hammer, anvil, and cutter. Then he shaped the ends with a metal-grinder and used his welding rig to mate the parts together. Doublehook!

We drove a simple bar-based pull through the side of the device, and test-fired it in the garage, with nothing on the shuttle. That was probably a mistake. The light, store-bought spring was powerful enough to damage itself without any weight on the shuttle to bleed off energy. Jason had talked me into wrapping some rubber around the top axle, which probably kept the spring from shattering entirely, but after one dry-fire, the spring had herniated visibly. We talked about inserting a compression-spring ahead of the pull-spring to absorb some of that recoil shock, and he thought that we could probably just snip off the herniated section & re-bend a new hook to replace the removed section, but by then we had noticed that the weathe had dropped an inch and a half of snow while we had been mucking around with drilling and testing.

Meanwhile, he's still working on his welded-steel monster, and we built the wood frame for the base. He also started in on drilling out the plates for holding his fulcrum axle, but none of his proper drills were large enough to drive the holes needed to hold the 3/4ths inch steel bar he's using for his axle. So he drilled out as big as he could go, and then started setting up the plates on his power lathe with a four-corner chock and a, I don't know what you call it, lathe arm? After a couple minutes of this, he sighed, said it would take hours, and put it aside for when I wasn't there.

So there we are, Jason's device is coming along slowly, and mine got to its first partial-build test fire, and is going back for some re-design. And we got at least three-four inches of heavy snow last night - I haven't been outside yet to see what damage the night left us.

I had a busy Saturday. Jason G, who has a big workshop in his basement & garage, wanted to try building pumpkin-throwing devices for Jessica's little event in the fall, and his girlfriend was out of town for the weekend. So we spent the morning with Dan W, digging through piles of scrap at a junkyard in the ruins of a quarry facility outside of Pleasant Gap. We ended buying about fifty pounds of aluminum and iron bars, springs and the like, then hit a tractor supply shop and Triangle Lumber over near Jason's house. We met a couple of university folk back at Jason's place - Antonios whom I know from Otto's Tuesdays, and a guy named Jim who I think was at Jason's Superbowl party this year.

I was going for a simple spring-pull ballista, while Jason had this idea for a torsion-axle trebuchet design. I really just banged about without much estimation, calculation, or design, building a wooden frame around a nicely-formed piece of aluminum scrap. The frame and shuttle was mostly done by yesterday evening, although there's a lot of work & thought required in figuring out the exact nature and details of the pull and latch mechanism. I'm thinking a simple latch hanging off of the shuttle, and a cross-bar just before the full extent of the spring, so that the latch can simply "drop" onto the bar when pulled back across the locking cross-bar during cocking. When the device is inverted and placed into firing position, the latch can easily be yanked down by cord, triggering the device.

Dan W and I *tried* to assemble the device so that the formed-aluminum slot at the core was properly aligned so that the latch would be placed at the rear of the aluminum core, but I'm not sure if it'll do so or no. If not, we can always set up a bar across the top of the device instead, although that'll be yet another failure point. At least we went with a cheap and new heavy-duty door spring instead of the ancient and far-too-strong car-shock-absorber springs which we bought at the scrapyard. To be honest, this device doesn't feel like it'll throw a pumpkin all that far, if it works at all. But what the hey.

Jason's device is much more elaborate, and looking kind of steampunkish. He and Antonios and Jim were working all afternoon and evening on a lot of grinding, metal-cutting, and welding tasks, modifying one of the shock-absorber springs and building a delicate, cross-supported throwing arm out of little strips of steel. The in-process result I looked at at the end of the evening was about five-six pounds, I guess. Most of the mass of the device will be in the fulcrum cross-arm and the base of the device, I guess. My machine has most of its mass already - the only thing to be added is the latching mechanism, a detachable pull-stirrup, and another cross-bar.

Antonios is some sort of chemistry PhD, a professor I think, and he spent much of the afternoon filabustering, trying to come up with rules-lawyering ways around the "mechanical advantage only" design requirements. Talking about water-pressure rockets, gunpowder, dynamite, air-pressure - but mostly going on about a preposterous Mentos and Diet Pepsi driven device. I told him about the dry-ice and water in a two-liter toy we had made back at the Witch House which destroyed a garbage can.

But anyrate, yesterday, we tinkered, and made a heck of a mess in Jason's garage and workshop.

Jeez, I've been woken at intervals all night by intermittent crashes as big curls of snow and ice come smashing down off the steel roof & gutters onto my landing & the nearby pavement. Good thing I didn't park my car in the usual nook between the neighbor's planter and my front steps, because I'd probably have a nasty series of dents in the roof of my orange clown car by now. Rain, rain, rain.

No point in going back to sleep again today.

Back when I was a kid and Pittsburgh's papers used to make a fuss whenever it got named most livable city in the US (and this happened on average every two to three years), I was young and ill-informed and under the impression that this actually meant something. I wonder if Detroit was in the same position on those livable-city lists of my childhood? Were we always being made fools of, or is this a new game?

Detroit, #7 most livable city in America! If you're a twenty-something Patti Smith looking for a nicely grotty replacement for the Alphabet City of 1978, maybe. The best guess offered as to what's screwy with the metrics has to do with an inordinate weight placed on low-density housing and health services - which will tend to favor blasted industrial cities emptied out by imploded economies, yet still retaining the hospitals and alleged stocks of housing from the salad days of heavy industrialization.

h/t Instapundit. I'm starting to wonder how much he reads some of these links he's been passing along...

This is sad. Dwayne McDuffie had been for the DCAU in the Oughts what Bruce Timm had been for it in the Nineties - a centrally important writer, animator, and director. His Crisis on Two Earths was a pretty damn good OAV, he did a lot of good work on the Justice League TV series, and there's been a lot of positive buzz about his new All-Star Superman OAV which is being released this week. It's been a bad year for animation, between this and the death of Satoshi Kon.

Up until today, I had been kind of favorable-trending-towards-supportive of a Mitch Daniels presidential bid. Phlegmatic, conservative in an nonthreatening manner, exemplary experience as the governor of a middle-rank state, a real fiscal conservative - he's good on paper. Of course, he kept kicking 'own goals' by unnecessarily cheesing off the social conservatives, but I'm not a social conservative, so it wasn't a dealbreaker.

This is a dealbreaker. The proper response to an antidemocratic act full of contempt for law, order, and civility on the part of a minority is an iron-bound refusal to back down - especially when one is not in desparate straits. No lives are on the line here, just policy. There's no downside to smacking around a coterie of cowardly state legislators who've just lit out for the territories. It was a cheap and easy opportunity to show some backbone. What the hell is wrong with Daniels? It's as if he's afraid of the Overton Window shifting our way for a change.

On the plus side, Thune is bowing out of the 2012 campaign. Won't have to deal with his hypocritical High Plains embrace of the ethanol abomination.

What the heck? The Libyan regime collapsed? Overnight? And it is all over except for the bloodshed - it sounds like Gaddafi escaped a Ceaușescu fate by the skin of his teeth. If he's running for his home hamlet, he's finished. If he's using foreign mercenaries to butcher protesters, that means that he can't trust the military. You can't hire enough mercenaries, or pay them enough, to face off against your own army, unless your country's a lot poorer than Libya.

And seriously, when they're fighting pitched battles in the street with snipers and militiamen, I think it's safe to call them armed rebels rather than "protesters". Libya's a totalitarian state, if the party's lost control of their second city, then they won't take it back without a full-on Hama assault. I don't think Gaddafi's army is big enough to pull of a Hama, even if he could trust it enough to lead it into battle.

I'm not sure what to think of the politicians complaining about Gaddafi's forces' treatment of the protesters/rebels/street-fighters. What, were these people born yesterday? He's a scorpion, a bloody-handed vicious pocket Stalin. You think he was going to go "hi, sou desu ne" to street protests? Of course he'd try to slaughter them, that's what thugs like him do. What's interesting is that he tried it - and failed. Assad the Younger must be [censored] a brick right now. The Algerians must be absolutely panicked. I betcha they're cutting deals with anyone who might possibly lead a populist revolt, because Gaddafi's a heck of a negative example right now.

And before anyone gets too high on street theatre, Gaddafi's police state won't be replaced by a European social democracy. The ideas laying about prior to a crisis are what are used to resolve the crisis, and the alternative in Libya is your basic Islamic Republic toolkit. It's going to be ugly, mark my words.

h/t

I just finished reading Ending Day by Day. This is the fourth and fifth books in the Full Metal Panic light novel series which the three anime series were based on, specifically, the second Kyoto Animation series, The Second Raid.

It's a little interesting seeing what they pulled out of the book and what they added for the TV series - a little flashback during the Gauron scene got expanded into a major filler arc (if that isn't total jibberish) during the original Gonzo series, Gauron's pocket dragons got turned into women for the killer-moe factor, and an entire mini-arc complete with additional missions and underground firefights were inserted into the middle of the story to fill out the anime version of The Second Raid. The books flow more organically and make a more perfect whole, but I can see how a TV series can't back-load the majority of the fight scenes in the last five-ten minutes of the production. You could say that the structure of light novels lends itself to one big fight every two hundred pages, whereas a TV series better have some action every two to three episodes before the sponsors and the fans go postal.

We were lucky to get these two volumes in North American publication at all, as the series was canceled by TokyoPop the other year, and then tenatively revived. Light novels don't sell for peanuts in the American market - they're too fanboy and short for the mass paperback market, and too wordy and ancillary for the otaku market. But I do know that I'm eager for the next book in the series. We didn't get anything more from the animation studios, and word is that at least one reason is that the novels go off on a somewhat grim and gloomy tangent which could alienate the anime audience.

Nevertheless, I want to read Dancing Very Merry Christmas, as Japlish and goofy a title as that may be. Hold it together, TokyoPop! Keep on publishing!

I gotta wonder if meme-humor is what is left when postmodernism finishes the generational, Nietzschean work of killing God. No, seriously. Nietzsche originally started out railing against pietism, and a core element of that was encoded art - artwork built around shared cultural, ideological cues. A lot of classical art is mildly opaque to a modern audience, and it has to be explained because all of the biblical, allegorical, or pagan references assume a belief and education context which isn't present in the viewing audience.

When did "art appreciation" become a goal of education? Sometime in Victorian times? Dimitri Rotov used to go off on rants about the kitschy folk-music krep which reinactors and documentarians like to use to "signify" the ACW period; he insisted that the soldiers of the Army of the Potomac were highly cultured, and fond of highbrow opera music as a matter of course. It wasn't opaque, it wasn't difficult, it was popular culture, because everybody shared the right set of references, mostly religious.

The early Twentieth Century, all those religious references fell out of high-culture favor in the west, and were replaced by first Marxist, then Freudian signifiers. Those both burned out by the Seventies, although Freudian lasted longer in culture than Marxism, far as I can tell.

But people want and need signifiers, meta-content. To a certain extent, it's a need for meaning, no matter how nonsensical. Once you as a culture accept absurdity, madness becomes your meaning. Thus, Mario in a stained glass window.

[Deleted and re-posted after I discovered the purpose of that "harmless" comment spam - I'm pretty sure now that it's a marker for spambots to discover active blog comment sections. Pests.]

OK, it was a con, same as always, I guess. They're skewing older than they used to, and there were a lot of people, a little under a thousand, I think? Saturday morning and afternoon saw some significant snow squalls, and there was a bunch of furries running around in the snow playing around. Who knew that fursuits made for pretty good winter weather wear?

Geez, I almost forgot - there's an anime con in State College this weekend. I guess I'll do the one-day thing; I've no other plans today.

So I'm watching two completely unrelated and noncontemporary shows: the second season of Alias, and the last cour of Soul Eater. Alias is an early-Oughts J.J. Abrams big-budget spy-action-SF TV series affectionately known as "Spy Barbie". Soul Eater is a moderately well-budgeted two-season, four-cour shounen fantasy anime about meisters (sort of grim reapers, roughly speaking) fighting witches. They're both shows that rely heavily on stylistic flash & convoluted plotting and nested conspiracies, but you'd think they were otherwise unrelated.

Imagine my surprise when I suddenly found myself watching pretty much the same story:

1) a three-sided war between three organizations, at least one of which is unaware of the participation of the third in the fight -

the DWMA, Arachnophobia, and Medusa's coven

SD-6, Irina Derevko's clique, and the CIA

2) the war consists of a series of fights over semi-magical tchotkes, literal mcguffins created by a long-dead, legendary da Vinci figure -

Eibon and his Magic Tools

Milo Rambaldi and his deranged series of artifacts

3) a horrible, Medea-like harridan of a mother, murderous, vicious, sociopathic and dreadfully manipulative, walks into the figurative front-office of the "good guys" faction, and surrenders, in order to embody the Hannibal in a cage trope -

Medusa the Younger, having survived her own evisceration & possessed a random child, thus protecting herself from the whole "thou shalt not suffer a witch to live" thing the DWMA has going by hiding inside her body-hostage; this after a half-dozen episodes of manipulating her seriously disturbed woobie of a son Crona from the shadows into betraying that faction

Irina Derevko, who after shooting her estranged daughter and then her own Dragon in the opening episode of the season, apparently decides that it'd be more fun to screw with the CIA from inside of a deeply buried jail cell than from within the nominally safe confines of her own faction

They both have peculiar, attraction-repulsion relationships with core figures within the "good guys" organizations, Medusa with the hanging-onto-sanity-with-his-fingertips Dr. Stein, and Irina with her estranged husband, Jack Bristow.

These are terrifying mother-figures - unloving, unblinking and menacing. Medusa had a child for the express purpose of moulding it into a science experiment, denying it love and affirmation & infecting it with a species of madness to see if she could breed a "Kishin" - sort of an evil god. Irina had a child for the sole purpose of cementing her role as a loving wife & mother to a CIA agent and his child, and seems entranced by the strange creature from her long-past stint as a sleeper agent & assassin; the first thing she does upon being reunited with her daughter is to muse about how easily she could have killed her in infancy. Both characters are expressions of the vulnerability of children in the hands of their mothers, and the potential for what some wags have called "retroactive abortion". They're avatars of Kali - the killing-mother who brought you into this world and could quite easily take you out of it again.

Ouch. January was not a cheap month for electricity. 2/3rds to twice again as much as last year's bill for January. I guess this is what happens when you try to heat a place the size of my condo with only electric baseboard heat. Oh, well, my propane heater is back online, hopefully the rest of the winter won't be nearly as bad.

I'm watching the first season of Justified today, and I was thinking that their version of eastern Kentucky looks an awful lot like Armstrong and Clarion Counties of western Pennsylvania. I apparently was off, but not by much - it was elsewhere in Murtha's old district, little Washington & other locales in shooting distance of Pittsburgh. Apparently film crews use convention centers to double as airports these days - I was watching the commentaries for the first season of Alias the other day, and they mentioned that not long after, Homeland Security cracked down on crews filming at actual airports, and sure enough, the commentary on the pilot of Justified identified the "airport" that the protagonist transits through on the way to Lexington as actually the new Lawrence Convention Center in Pittsburgh.

I like the show so far, but then, I've always been a sucker for Elmore Leonard adaptations.