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Posted by Convicted One on Monday, September 28, 2020 8:07 PM

Overmod
 But that facial expression is someone else's ... give me time and maybe I'll remember.

Eustace Tilley. That's the face that has been on the cover of The New Yorker more often than any other, assuming an almost iconic representation of the magazine in the process. Fits to a tee..... 

I believe Eustace would be drawn to the type of hardware store I've been describing.  

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Posted by NKP guy on Monday, September 28, 2020 4:54 PM

Convicted One
NKP guy  In my opinion it's also the single most distinguished magazine, by any measurement, that's ever been published in the United States.

It's hard to imagine that they would have any objection to such an endorsement. 

   I take your point.  My assessment may have been a little heavy-handed!

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Posted by Convicted One on Monday, September 28, 2020 3:34 PM

NKP guy
 In my opinion it's also the single most distinguished magazine, by any measurement, that's ever been published in the United States.

It's hard to imagine that they would have any objection to such an endorsement. Whistling

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Posted by Flintlock76 on Monday, September 28, 2020 3:27 PM

Well, TR Junior didn't do badly at all.  A very distinguished civil and military career, and a winner of the Medal of Honor, although posthumously.

George Patton called him "The bravest man I ever knew."   

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Posted by NKP guy on Monday, September 28, 2020 3:13 PM

   It's not often that the namesake son outshines the patriarch.  This is a good example.

   It's not easy to be Wolfgang Mozart, Jr., or Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., or Franklin Roosevelt, Jr., or Cornelius Vanderbilt, Jr., or John D. Rockefeller, Jr., etc.

 

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Posted by Flintlock76 on Monday, September 28, 2020 3:02 PM
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Posted by Overmod on Monday, September 28, 2020 1:05 PM

No.  It's that gentle, dreamy sweetness.  

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Posted by tree68 on Monday, September 28, 2020 1:02 PM

Overmod
.. give me time and maybe I'll remember.

Joe E. Brown?

Joe E. Brown

LarryWhistling
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Posted by Overmod on Monday, September 28, 2020 12:51 PM

Flintlock76
Lady Firestorm thinks he looks like Moe.

He's a perfect mix of Shemp and Moe.  But that facial expression is someone else's ... give me time and maybe I'll remember.

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Posted by Flintlock76 on Monday, September 28, 2020 12:16 PM

NKP guy
 By the way, Flintlock, I was thinking Shemp Howard.

Me too!  Great minds think alike!

Lady Firestorm thinks he looks like Moe.  Close enough!

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Posted by NKP guy on Monday, September 28, 2020 12:12 PM

Nice photo, Flintlock (& Mike).  It's an older Harold Ross.  Your photo quickly brought to mind two comments on Ross's appearance.

Of him, the actress Helen Hayes remarked, "He looked like a troglodyte man, he had all those funny features...."

From:  Here at The New Yorker by Brendan Gill (1975)

   "That morning he had dropped in at Brooks Brothers and had asked to be fitted to a sports jacket.  He was a conspicuously round-shouldered man, with a caved-in chest and arms that hung almost to his knees, and the salesman he spoke to --elderly, dignified-- evidently felt certain professional misgivings from the start.  Jacket after jacket was taken off the rack, slipped onto Ross's peculiar body, and then slipped off again.  Nothing fitted.  Finally, the salesman could stand the strain of failure no longer.  "Sir," he said, "I have to tell you that it is impossible to fit you in this store.  I must ask you to take your custom elsewhere."  Upon which with a stern forefinger he pointed Ross the way to the elevators.  "Jeesus!" Ross said.  "You'd'a thought I was some kind of oorangootan."

                                           

   By the way, Flintlock, I was thinking Shemp Howard.

    

 

 

 

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Posted by MMLDelete on Monday, September 28, 2020 10:52 AM

Looks like Al Franken.

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Posted by Flintlock76 on Monday, September 28, 2020 9:24 AM

NKP guy
   Remember Life magazine and Time magazine?  Speaking of them both in the 1950's, one wag commented, "Mr. Luce publishes two magazines.  One for people who can't read; the other for people who can't think."

Do I smell a little professional jealousy on that wags part?  Or his frustration at not being able to get a job at either?

"A comic book for adults."  That's how I've described the "Osprey" series of softcover military histories, but in an endearing manner though.  I've always found "Ospreys" well-written and beautifully illustrated and a good way to learn about a particular war, campaign or battle, and the men who fought in them without having to "major" in it, if you know what I mean.  

Courtesy of "Magic Mike," here's the aforementioned Harold Ross.  Does he remind you of someone?  He does to me, but I won't say who.  Wink

https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/editor-of-the-new-yorker-harold-ross-speaking-at-hearings-news-photo/50524826

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Posted by NKP guy on Sunday, September 27, 2020 6:53 PM

Overmod
I would agree that Frimbo was no snob.  His literary style was assumed, I think, and in any case this was the 'old' New Yorker, the pre-Tina Brown New Yorker, before conscious snobbery as a 'fashion' became institutionalized in the '80s.  Whitaker was one of the least likely to be a condescending snob to anyone

   This comment brought to mind, among other things, an anecdote about one of  The New Yorker's editors, either Harold Ross or William Shawn:

   I'm not sure how it happened, but at some point in the dreary days of railroads dumping their passenger service, there was a hearing on the New York Central's plan to end another bunch of trains; or maybe it was about the demolition of Penn Station (I can't remember which & my efforts at research this afternoon were fruitless).  As this editor was (for some reason) testifying, one anti-train legislator deliberately made what he must have thought was a lacerating comment about The New Yorker...at least as far as he understood it.  

   When this committeeman referred to The New Yorker as "a comic book for adults," Ross or Shawn didn't take the bait and become outraged.  "That's a little heavy-handed," was his economical reply.  If brevity is the soul of wit, this is a prime example.

   I'm not sure how many New Yorker readers or subscribers we have on this forum. I started reading it at 18 and have been a subscriber since 1973; I can testify that there is nothing at all snobbish about the magazine, its style, or its readership.  Since 1925 it's always been aimed at the person "who knows his way around town...or wants to."  It is most definitely not for "the little old lady from Dubuque."

   In my opinion it's also the single most distinguished magazine, by any measurement, that's ever been published in the United States.

   Remember Life magazine and Time magazine?  Speaking of them both in the 1950's, one wag commented, "Mr. Luce publishes two magazines.  One for people who can't read; the other for people who can't think."

   That's a little heavy-handed, no?

   

                                                

 

 

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Posted by BaltACD on Sunday, September 27, 2020 2:25 PM

Overmod
 
Lithonia Operator
Technically, that would be a violation. 

Technically it is not.  In fact, it is no different than videotaping copyrighted broadcast programs for purposes of timesharing, which has been proven explicitly legal.  (Remember, he said no distribution, which we can interpret here as dissemination even by lending tapes to friends to watch for timesharing purposes). 

If the book is given or even loaned to someone else and they put it into a form they can read more easily -- so it can be enlarged on screen, for example, or converted text-to-speech via Kurzweil, or made legible via OCR for translation programs -- there is still no violation of fair use; in fact there is some precedent over exactly how much work in editing or modification can be made before the result qualifies as a 'new work' under copyright law.

More specifically, the use of scanned books as resources in a closed committee repository was deemed legal -- considered to be the equivalent of sharing a committee member's copy to be read and consulted in their home -- as long as care was taken not to 'let it out uncontrolled' (or do the equivalent for 'charging for home viewing' with videos or amateur plays).  As noted there are the equivalent of NDAs, with specified categories of damage and redress for breach, involved with some of these uses, and it would be a courtesy to request permission for these uses.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Jwo5qc78QU

Never too old to have a happy childhood!

              

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Posted by tree68 on Sunday, September 27, 2020 12:45 PM

SD70Dude
as opposed to messing around with booster cables (yes, they do come in XXXL).

Welding cables work, too...   Been there...  

Some years ago, in Rantoul, IL, I caught the end of what I suspect was a jump start on a locomotive.  The power source was a bedful of batteries in a pick-up.

I got there just as the worker was packing up the cable.

Seems as though I recall hearing/reading that some railroads that were tight on money (or perhaps some other reason) removed the batteries from locomotives, since they were usually running anyhow.  Fuel was cheap - easier to leave a loco running 24/7 than to replace batteries, I suppose.

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Posted by SD70Dude on Sunday, September 27, 2020 11:18 AM

zugmann
Flintlock76
The Russians had two ways to start a T-34 for example, the electrical starter (primary) and compressed air (back-up.) 

Flashbacks to when our 70M-2s were new.  They had airstarts, and needed 100# in the main resevoir to fire up.  So when you had a pair of them parked by themselves, and they bled all their air off, you couldn't restart them (someone fell asleep designing that).  You had to find another engine to hook up to them to pump them up.  I think they fixed that pretty quick - added a resivoir that wouldn't drain off or something.  I don't get to deal with them anymore, so I coudln't tell you for sure. 

The same thing happened here.  We then got told to never manually shut them down unless there was another locomotive in the consist, just let AutoStop take care of things.

Most if not all of them have since been equipped with backup electric starters, but that bulletin is still in effect.  

I actually prefer the air start system for locomotives, way easier to hook up an air line from another unit or a truck with an air compressor as opposed to messing around with booster cables (yes, they do come in XXXL).

Greetings from Alberta

-an Articulate Malcontent

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Posted by Flintlock76 on Saturday, September 26, 2020 4:23 PM

Overmod
You could always look at the Panzerfibel and find out... 

Well, needless to say I don't have access to a Pantherfibel, but I DO have access to Nicholas Moran, "The Chieftain!"

According to Major Moran's series on the Panther, there is  an electric starter on the Panther, but the inertial starter was supposed to be the one used with a cold engine.  I imagine the inertial starter got a hell of a workout in Russia!

For those interested here's Nick Moran's series on the Panther where he takes you around and in a restored example.  Starts with this one:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKKktWu6Rh0  

Parts two and three follow in series, about 45 minutes for the whole.

The driver's position is covered in the last few minutes of Part 3.

PS:  Aside from the gun and the armor, the Panther really doesn't have that much going for it.  I can see why there was nothing about it anyone cared to copy.

PPS:  Thanks for the Pantherfibel  Mod-man!  Fascinating, although I really couldn't understand much of it.  And Guderians Gothic script?  Forget it!  Although as I understand it a lot of present-day Germans have trouble with it too.  

In a way, the Pantherfibel  reminds me of the Vietnam era comic book style manual the army put out for the M-16.  

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Posted by Overmod on Saturday, September 26, 2020 2:20 PM

I think you're right, but 'pretentious' to me implies the idea of pretending that you're more sophisticated, or cool, or whatever than you actually are.  That's different from some like Beebe being a bit too precious, or Frimbo using That Literary Style.  Not to say that The New Yorker didn't show off the over-intellectualism -- often as a kind of house style -- in the pre-Brown era, but I don't think the authors and editors were pretending.

Those reading the magazine, or leaving on coffee tables or in bathrooms the way college kids in the early '80s all had their copy of Godel, Escher, Bach -- in the hope of being perceived as 'more cultured' thereby... that's another thing.  Plenty of those to go around, and plenty more when the magazine was retasked to cater to them.

I was not intending to disparage terrazzo as an art form, and particularly not as practiced by someone skilled in the art.  It has been my good fortune, relatively seldom by conscious intent, to find some of the best practitioners of arts like this, ranging from fusion welding through 'faux' painting grained wood to making twig furniture, and terrazzo has enough in common with marquetry alone to be both fascinating and highly respectable to me.

What I was meaning to say was that terrazzo for the wrong reasons, as it were, is almost a quintessential item showing the worst of what was bad about the '80s: expensive materials in expensive fabrication, showing off how much money you had to spend to those who recognize it ... as costing a lot ... but not necessarily understanding its provenance or the special 'language' in its composition. (This reminds me of the Hamptons firework wars between the yacht club and Plimpton, where it was 'common knowledge' that blue fireworks were More Expensive and so the show would get bluer and bluer and the ooohs and aaahs more fervently expressed as things went on...)

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Posted by Convicted One on Saturday, September 26, 2020 1:29 PM

Overmod
I would further maintain that the chief problem with 'snobs' is that they actively culture the separation between themselves and who they perceive to be their 'lessers' and behave in ways that often painfully reinforce this --

I don't think that the word "snob" was of my choosing. I believe that others here were the ones who volunteered that assessment. There are several here who seem determined to press the most negative possible connotation into the words of others.  For fear of the risk of being branded "combative",  I seldom try to even fight it, anymore.

To me,"snob" implies that one has the stature to justify their.....misery?  I was thinking more from the opposite direction, one who aspires to be more than what they are, and try to project an image in line with who they  would like to be....."pretentious" being the word which  Lithonia originally used...and which I felt  to be very accurate.

And I do believe that the magazine in question does an exemplary job of feeding that fire. YMMV.

As far  as terrazzo goes, I think you will find examples in buildings decades older than the 1980s time frame you mentioned.  I had the good fortune of associating with a guy who by that time  was a master in the early 90s, He had been in the business since the 50s or 60s, and I believe it goes back further than that.

He was the guy you called when you were making renovations to a building that had a terrazzo floor, and needed a perfect patch to fill in where, for example, a wall had been removed. Stuff like that. And it was he who enlightened me to  "elite" aggregates,  compared to the lessers.  Perhaps most amazing were his claims to be able to tell you what mine a particular seed stone originated from.  

Just because terrazzo has found utilitarian applications in high schools and libraries, is no reason to discount the entire art form. Although I've never been there, I believe there is a rather impressive example in the main lobby of the CIA headquarters, just as a reference.

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Posted by Flintlock76 on Saturday, September 26, 2020 1:05 PM

zugmann

 

 
Flintlock76
Funny you should mention that Zug.  That goofy Anime  show was apparantly a mega-hit in Japan, so much so the Tokyo Philharmonic even built a music festival around it!

 

The Girls und Panzer Movie also had a great orchestral version of When Johnny Comes Marching Home. 

 

This goes WAY back, (1905) but when Jack London was covering the Russo-Japanese war for the "San Francisco Examiner" he was shocked to hear a Japanese army band playing "Marching Through Georgia."

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Posted by zugmann on Saturday, September 26, 2020 12:40 PM

Flintlock76
Funny you should mention that Zug.  That goofy Anime  show was apparantly a mega-hit in Japan, so much so the Tokyo Philharmonic even built a music festival around it!

The Girls und Panzer Movie also had a great orchestral version of When Johnny Comes Marching Home. 

It's been fun.  But it isn't much fun anymore.   Signing off for now. 


  

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Posted by Overmod on Saturday, September 26, 2020 12:38 PM

zugmann
No shortage of videos of Japanese military bands performing songs from shows like Evangelion and Star Blazers (among others).

I suspect we'll see the United States Space Force band doing the same once it gets established.  Plenty of good SF reference to go around...

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Posted by zugmann on Saturday, September 26, 2020 12:33 PM

No shortage of videos of Japanese military bands performing songs from shows like Evangelion and Star Blazers (among ohters).  Seems odd for us, but I've heard it described as a marching band playing the Star Wars theme here.   Just iconic and well-known. 

It's been fun.  But it isn't much fun anymore.   Signing off for now. 


  

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Posted by Overmod on Saturday, September 26, 2020 12:31 PM

Flintlock76
Anyway, I'm assuming  that hand-crank system was a back-up.

You could always look at the Panzerfibel and find out... Whistling --EDIT: I mistyped the spelling and went back and corrected it and either crApple or the dimwit software that inserted the female dog 'corrected' it back for me.  How helpful of them! Dunce]

https://issuu.com/mechinf/docs/pantherfibel-01  (Note how Guderian gets into the spirit of the thing!)

(Not as good as the Tigerfibel of course... but not much is.  I'd still love to meet and know Elvira, even if she is the ultimate "female dog"-goddess of the 20th Century...)

[And where is my link to the Tigerfibel with the girl herself in all her glory...?]

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Posted by Flintlock76 on Saturday, September 26, 2020 12:08 PM

deleted 

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Posted by Flintlock76 on Saturday, September 26, 2020 12:07 PM

zugmann
The new Girls und Panzer reboot looks awesome!

Funny you should mention that Zug.  That goofy Anime  show was apparantly a mega-hit in Japan, so much so the Tokyo Philharmonic even built a music festival around it!

Here's the Tokyo Phil's version of Panzerlied, the best arrangement I've ever heard. The audience really get into it too!

(Not making any kind of a statement here, just sharing a rousing piece of music.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uSQKdpDnX2w  

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Posted by zugmann on Saturday, September 26, 2020 11:53 AM

Flintlock76
The Russians had two ways to start a T-34 for example, the electrical starter (primary) and compressed air (back-up.) 

Flashbacks to when our 70M-2s were new.  They had airstarts, and needed 100# in the main resevoir to fire up.  So when you had a pair of them parked by themselves, and they bled all their air off, you couldn't restart them (someone fell asleep designing that).  You had to find another engine to hook up to them to pump them up.  I think they fixed that pretty quick - added a resivoir that wouldn't drain off or something.  I don't get to deal with them anymore, so I coudln't tell you for sure. 

It's been fun.  But it isn't much fun anymore.   Signing off for now. 


  

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Posted by Flintlock76 on Saturday, September 26, 2020 11:49 AM

I was hoping you'd like it Mod-man!  It had me rolling on the floor the first time I saw it!

The inertial starter surprised me too, but it does make sense when you think about it.  Always pays to have a back-up if the primary fails.   

Anyway, I'm assuming  that hand-crank system was a back-up.

The Russians had two ways to start a T-34 for example, the electrical starter (primary) and compressed air (back-up.) 

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