Cop Car's Beat

Odds, ends, remembrance

Monday & Tuesday, 12/12/2020 & 12/13/2020 - Photos that had been passed by

Birds

The photo shows some of our collection of frequent visitors to our feeders and heated watering pan.

Yard & Remembrance of Younger Brother

Back-lighting showed off some of the dusting of sparkly snow we had on the morning of the 13th. As I pondered the scene I remembered Younger Brother who would have marked his 79th birthday on the 13th.

Younger Brother, PhD, 1941-2012

Remembrance of a dinner long ago

In the 1960s when Younger Brother and his family were traveling through Kansas on their way back home in California from Rolla MO (where YB was finishing up one or another of his degrees), Hunky Husband and I took YB and his wife Barb to dinner at Lakeshore Club in Wichita. (Please recall/know that, in those days, the only way to have an alcoholic libation with dinner was to belong to a "private club" with a liquor license. There was no such thing as a "public" restaurant where one could enjoy a glass of wine or beer with one's meal. Kansas was a "dry" state.)

As always, YB ordered a plain hamburger - one without sauces or additions of any kind - while the rest of us ordered steak, or lobster, or whatever. YB and I got to kidding around about it and we both got the giggles so badly that HH and Barb threatened to leave us there. Whenever any two of us three siblings got together, there was bound to be much laughter between/among us. I miss those days with YB. I miss YB and Barb, who preceded him in death by 21 years. May they rest in peace.

Monday, 12/21/2020 - Saturnalia happenings

Plumbing

Jeremy showed up to do a little plumbing for us. Once I told him all of our woes, he recommended a new toilet for Hunky Husband's bathroom - one that had a larger gateway between the water tank and the toilet plus having a tank-internal air reservoir to add power to the water stream going into the bowl to flush down the contents. It sounded like such a good idea that I told him that we would go with that. Other than that, I asked him to rebuild the interiors of the other two toilet tanks - one in my bathroom, the other in the guest bathroom. Jeremy will call to arrange installation when the company receives the new toilet.

The first photo, below, shows the interior of one of the tanks before rebuild. The second shows the interior following rebuild. In between, Jeremy was gone for a bit over an hour in order to run into Wichita for parts (at the same supplier that I, myself, use). Exciting. Be still my beating heart!

Astronomy

As everyone knows, the closest conjuncture of Neptune Jupiter and Saturn (as seen from the Earth), expected for the next some-odd-hundreds of years, occurred, today. (Stu blogged about it, nicely.) I had HH run me out to a clear viewing area to observe the spectacle. Like my viewing of Halley's comet in the 1980s, for which I drove (alone) to an area near the Pueblo of Isleta in New Mexico, the idea was much greater than the view. Oh, well. I recall that HH thought I was nuts to rouse Bogie & Dudette from sleep early enough one morning in March, 1970, to view a comet; but, I've tried to view most of the earth-shaking celestial events during my lifetime - well, since I was age 3.5 in 1941, at least.

A favorite songwriter (Tom Lehrer) releases his lyrics to the public domain

Back when the earth was still cooling, I had a friend (Jack Carter) who belonged to a fraternity (Lambda Alfa?) During the summers in the mid 1950s, the fraternity house closed down - except that Jack, who was taking courses in summer school, stayed at the house to provide security. As I was also taking summer school classes, I was invited to hang out with Jack and others of his friends at that house. It was during the first of those hangout sessions that Jack played some Tom Lehrer recordings (33 1/3 rpm vinyl). I immediately developed a taste for Lehrer's satirical music, passing that taste along to Elder Brother (Sigma Nu) and Younger Brother.

On the rare occasions on which we three siblings were together, there was bound to be singing of Lehrer's songs. Alas, Jack died many years ago in a tragic fire and Younger Brother chose to leave us several years ago; but, Elder Brother and I still observe the tradition - much to Hunky Husband's dismay. It isn't that HH isn't a Lehrer fan. He is. It's that he doesn't appreciate Elder Brother's and my fine singing voices. I think HH was spoiled by the fact that his mother and one of his sisters had wonderful voices.

HH's mother, as a young woman, earned money by singing at weddings and such and his sister sang in amateur opera productions in Phoenix, Arizona. I've never heard HH sing, so I cannot attest to his voice. He played clarinet and saxophone in high school, including in a jazz band; but, he tells me that he cannot carry a tune, vocally. On occasion, just to twit him, I sing "Do You Love ME?" from Fiddler on the Roof to him. He invariably answers me "Yes" in his speaking voice.

Back to Tom Lehrer: For your enjoyment, below are mp3 files of three of our sing-along favorites:

The Wild West Is Where I Want To Be

Tom Lehrer-We Will All Go Together When We Go (2)

Tom Lehrer-So Long Mom (A Song For World War III)

To see Tom Lehrer's declaration abdicating rights to royalties from his lyrics, go to Tom Lehrer's website. I won't benefit from Lehrer's action - I've never used his lyrics except for my own enjoyment, plus the fact that I own books of his sheet music. In addition, I write non sequitur-ally, over the years I've bought all of his vinyl and CD recordings that I've been able to find.

I hasten to add that I learned of the news through News for Nerds.

92-Year-Old Songwriter Tom Lehrer Releases All His Lyrics Into the Public Domain (tomlehrersongs.com) 11

Posted by EditorDavid on Saturday October 24, 2020 @10:34AM from the national-brotherhood-week dept.

Marketplace reports: Songwriter Tom Lehrer became a star in the 1950s and '60s writing and performing satirical songs that skewered just about everything... Lehrer, 92, announced Tuesday via his website that he's effectively putting everything he ever wrote into the public domain. That means his lyrics and sheet music are available for anyone to use or perform, without having to pay royalties or deal with lawyers... [Most of Lehrer's music "will be added gradually later with further disclaimers," according to Lehrer's web site.]

Lehrer's giving up those royalties. But in exchange, he's trying to give his work a new lease on life, said Siva Vaidhyanathan, a media studies professor at the University of Virginia. "Lehrer, in this case, is basically saying, 'Hey everybody, come revisit my material, come do with it what you want,'" he said... That could mean we'll be hearing more of Tom Lehrer's work, said Jennifer Jenkins, who runs the Center for the Study of the Public Domain at Duke Law School. "There is empirical research showing that when material enters the public domain, it actually gets used more," she said.
Lehrer's lyrics touched on geeky subjects including nuclear weapons, Wernher von Braun, and one song where he set the names of the chemical elements to a tune by Gilbert and Sullivan.

Wikipedia notes he "largely retired" in the 1970s to become a mathematics teacher at the University of California, Santa Cruz (also teaching the history of musical theatre). In the same decade he also wrote ten songs for The Electric Company, an educational TV show about reading broadcast on America's public television, singing two of the songs himself — L-Y and Silent E.

VE Day

Winston Churchill waving to crowds in Whitehall on 8 May celebrating the end of the war - Wikipedia

Seventy-five years ago buzz bombs stopped falling on English cities, carpet bombing stopped hitting German cities, and most of the various armaments in Europe were silenced. Truthfully, as a second grader, I recall when FDR's death (April 25, 1945) was announced on the intercom system at school, but not the announcement of the cessation of hostilities that occurred not quite two weeks later. Perhaps it was not announced at school. OTOH: I recall the birth of my brother (December 13, 1941), but don't really recall Pearl Harbor. I was too young to understand the enormous consequences.

VE Day preceded the end of our war by a bit over three months. VJ Day didn't come until August 15, 1945 - during my school's summer vacation. Not remembering the event, I can only speculate that I was spending a few weeks at my Grandmother H's farm or with Great-Grandparents S's at the time.

From the National Archives timeline:

May 8, 1945

V-E Day (Victory in Europe Day) Nazi Germany surrenders to the Allies, ending the war in Europe.

 

 

"Hands...washing hands" - Neil Diamond

I'm posting the following embedded video because Hunky Husband likes "Sweet Caroline" - and - because he says I kept asking the band to play "Sweet Caroline" in Alamogordo NM in 1970 while he was on temporary assignment there. Besides: Amy Farah Fowler, PhD, and Howard Wolowitz, Astronaut, like "Sweet Caroline".

Week in Review - 2020Feb22

We had just enough snow a couple of days ago that I was able to enjoy two bowls of ice cream before the sun started melting the snow down. The snow ice cream didn't turn out as well as had the one bowl that I enjoyed the week before; but, poor snow ice cream beats even Häagen-Dazs® in my judgement. It surprised me that this later snow ice cream was NOT the better of the two. The differences were two: this snow was powder snow gathered at 22 degrees Fahrenheit (previous snow was wet, at 32 degrees), and I had to use whole milk (had previously used 1% or 2% fat milk) The photo, below, is from five years ago; but, once you've seen one bowl of snow ice cream, you've seen them all.

This past week I've concentrated on data mining the "diaries" left by my parents. (This is not a short project. During the week I managed to complete data transfer for two years. Of course, I'm still working on Dad and Mom's diaries from the 1930s!) The data are then recorded in my Excel records. I don't know why I do this. When I die no one will look at those Excel files and I can hardly expect to live long enough that the worth of the records is all that great, even to me. (I do refer to those files, on occasion, to see when something occurred or where someone lived at a given time.) I am being reminded/told of stuff that I had forgotten, gotten confused, or never knew. For instance: I asked Elder Brother during his visit a few weeks ago, "Since Mom never had headaches, how was it determined that she was deathly allergic to aspirin?" His answer was that he thought our mother did have headaches and he was unaware of her allergy. Well...I was on firm ground about the allergy. It was on her "Medic Alert" tags and in her records. But, she wrote in her seventies about having bad headaches - sometimes for a few days at a time; so, I was wrong in my "remembering" her telling me that she never had had a headache in her life! Perhaps Mom merely told me that she had never had a migraine. EB agreed that Mom was the only member of our family who did not suffer migraine attacks. Below is a photo of the "diaries" (actually, most of the books are "planners") in one of the boxes - after I had removed a fist full of papers and newspapers.

Below are a couple of photos showing the sorts of notes that my father left in one of the "diaries" (from 1960) that he had used in which to keep miscellaneous notes to himself. On a very few of the pages, Mom had made entries of actual "happenings" of those days.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The page on the left is seen to be the legal description of a piece of property - on which stood the house in which Dad's mother lived in a tiny village in southwestern Missouri. The two pages shown in the photo on the right are notes that Dad took while studying the private pilot licensure kit that I had given him for his birthday in the late 1970s or early 1980s (on the left) and a sketch of the platting of the area in which Dad and Mom lived in Kansas City MO. On other pages are notes that Dad took about using my HP-19C, which I got in the same 1970s-1980s time frame. Since the "diary" is dated for 1960, one can see that Dad used that book for note-taking over a goodly number of years.

As I mentioned in a comment, on the 17th the neighbor set metal posts for the back part of his fencing. This morning, he brought in rolls of chain-link fencing to set on the post (photo, below) - which will probably be done, today, since the weather is supposed to be sunny and in the 50s.

 

Most useful hand tools

This (photo, below) is an array of my favorite tools.

In the above photo, my oldest tool is on the left and the tools are arrayed from there in decreasing age order. The small hammer was given to me by my parents when we lived in Tulsa - when I was 4-6 years old. At the same time, my two brothers were gifted with similar hammers and we could distinguish our own by the color of tape on the shank, just below the head of the hammer. Next is a pair of side-cutting pliers that my dad gave me when I left home for college. It was new, at the time (1955), and was accompanied by an assortment of basic hand tools that Dad had scrounged from his own supply. (Dad was a journeyman electrician.) I've always appreciated the thoughtfulness that Dad displayed. I'm sure that each of the tools in the set had been used by the time I finished my freshman year. Bogie now owns the tackle box in which Dad had placed the tools for me. (It's the red box, Bogie.)

The larger hammer, I purchased when I bought a house in late December (Hunky Husband and I had split up in January) 1977 and found myself missing some of the basic hand tools, having for the previous years used HH's or our jointly owned tools that I no longer owned. The well-used, multi-use tool next to it was given me by a tradesman who was either replacing sliding-glass door and windows or vinyl floor covering in HH's house, about a year after I moved back in with HH (1990). I admired the tool and, telling me that he had a newer one in his truck, the tradesman gave it to me. It was nearly as beaten up, then, as now.

The extending mirror, I put together for myself to help me delve into the innards of airplanes (mostly, wings on business jets) in surveying repair or modification sites. That would have been in the early 1990s. I bought a magnet that was on a telescoping handle and replaced the magnet with a mirror from an assembly in which the telescoping handle was too short. It extends to 23". Next to it is a newer version of the old multi-use tool. It and the multi-blade, ratcheting screwdriver next to it are only a few years old. The screwdriver shaft can be positioned as shown, at 90 degrees to the handle, or at 45 degrees to the handle. It replaced a "Screwball" screwdriver (purchased in late 1970s - photo, below) that I had completely worn out 5-10 years previously.

 

I regress: The first, small hammer shown in the first photo is not really the hammer given me by my parents. It is the hammer that they gave one of my brothers. I no longer recall whether it was Elder or Younger Brother's (and Elder Brother swears he never had such a hammer!); but, the story is that I broke a claw off of my brother's hammer and was then required to trade hammers with him.

I regress, again: What got me started on the whole tool thing is that I ran across a video on YouTube illustrating how to use the multi-use tool (which "they" call a "Painter's Tool").

 

 

ADDITION OF 2/6/2020 10:18am - Where tools and tapes are conveniently stashed, upstairs.

 

 

What Elder Brother Wanted

I'm sure that Elder Brother (EB) was happy to see us; but, the real reason he made the effort to drive here through treacherous weather was revealed shortly after his arrival when he said, "The laptop computer that [CC] gave me is driving me crazy! Norton keeps nagging me. I'd throw the machine away except it's the only machine that I have from which I can print!" Hunky Husband (HH) advised EB to do as he does. Said HH, "When I have a computer problem, I snivel and complain until [CC] fixes it for me." Replied EB, "That's exactly what I'm trying to do."

Image from MARZ [The nc6220 is a 14" laptop rather than, as shown in the graphic, a notebook.]

HH brought the ancient laptop, a Compaq nc6220, in and we set it up on my non-computer desk. The computer OS is Windows 7 which most of us know has only until the 14th of this month left on its "life". Microsoft has announced that it will no longer support Windows 7 after that date. That said, it is the only (of three or four) computer in EB's stable that runs anything more recent than Windows 98. You wouldn't believe what contortions EB goes through to do what he wants to get done. He still uses the single-floppy (5.25", for Pete's sake) version of Lotus 1-2-3 that I gave him when we both lived in New Mexico (Hint: I left NM 30 years ago!) The laptop that I gave EB in 2015 when I departed his Colorado home following a month of observing EB's recovery from cardiac arrest is slow and, because I had installed Norton 360 on it, it virtually choked whenever EB tried to do anything with it. [Truth be said, EB's patience is terribly thin and as is true with many of us engineers, he can't understand why anyone would design equipment/software in a manner other than the precise way in which he would have done so! Did I tell you that EB eschews use of a mouse, preferring to use keystrokes and touchpad? He also uses the DOS emulator to look at the directory, did not know how to delete a file or a folder, and did not have the first clue about several other things that we "normal" folk take for granted on computers. He worked on nuclear weaponry, of course!]

It took a while; but, by last evening, "we" had managed to uninstall all Norton files, install Firefox (which EB had been unable to accomplish), remove some stragglers of my own old files, and defrag the hard drive. At that point, EB was a happy camper who stowed his laptop in his car for cartage home. I hasten to add that EB connects to only one URL with that machine. He uses that machine, only, to access data that are available at the Wall Street Journal's website; thus, he isn't much worried about acquiring viruses online.

Progression in electronic calculators

A bit of family history in calculating equipment was presented in Slide Rules last year. Below is a photo showing most of my progression in electronic calculators. The photo fails to actually show my first electronic calculator, an HP-35, that I purchased in 1972 or 1973; because, that calculator went to Bogie a few years ago. I have no idea why I still have the case and booklet that went with it. Probably, I couldn't find them at the time.

Left-to-right in the photo are the (phantom) HP-35, HP-19C (circa 1978), and HP-48GX (circa 1990).

The machine that has been most-used was the HP-19C (photo, below). It was (to me!) a marvel. Unlike the HP-35, it doesn't lose its mind when it is shut off - thus the "C" for "continuous memory" in its model number. Not only is it programmable, but it has a small thermal printer built into the top of it for printing out programs, calculations, or answers. It saw use not only in calculations of aircraft structural quantities but in later calculations required in program management. It was totally useless in most of the work that I did while in Albuquerque as those programs were classified and a continuous memory machine was banned.

My latest and, undoubtedly, last electronic calculator is the HP-48GX (photo, below).

The HP-48GX owes its existence in my stable of machines to the fact that I returned to Kansas - to a job totally unrelated to what I had done in Florida and Albuquerque. In essence, I "started over" - in aircraft structures stress and fatigue analysis. There I was, back to actually doing technical calculations. The HP-48GX was well suited to the tasking. However, it didn't see much use because, within a couple of years, I started revising a rather large super-element NASTRAN model (on a Sun) that ran on The Little Airplane Factory's mainframe computer. The model had been built, sequentially, by about eight engineers over the previous two or three years; but, the latest NASTRAN guru who had been making a major modification to reflect a new option (a wide door that would allow ingress by a person on a stretcher, etc), was reassigned to work on the Citation X that was in development at the time.

The "Wide Door" model was used to certify the installation by analysis (except for the cyclic pressurization testing) rather than the theretofore standard method of using extensive testing. So large was the model that, in order to run it, I had the computer people use the "disaster pack" tape system. Not a great situation; but, it got the job done. The output was never printed out. I was able to convince the FAA engineer that he didn't really want to bring a truck to pick up the output, but would be better off with a huge book of microfiche.

Currently, the HP-48GX sees use, mostly, doing odd calculations suggested by blog postings, blog friends, or Hunky Husband - and, a couple of times each year, helping me balance my checkbook. It's a good little machine, but totally underemployed (as are many people, these days!)

In memory of Dot Miller

Over the past several years, I'd lost track of an old friend from Panama City FL. I met Dot when I moved to Florida to work on the Rapid Runway Repair Program at Tyndall AFB (now more well-known for having been devastated by Hurricane Michael in 2018) in April, 1981. She, with a BA in Math from Ohio State University, was a Civil Service employee who specialized in AICUZ (Air Installation Compatible Use Zone) determinations. Thirteen years my senior and the mother of seven children, Dot was a sister redhead and we fell into an immediate easy friendship. In fact, she mothered the whole workforce in my office - they being, other than me, young men. The photo, below, shows her and another friend, Corinne, at a picnic we had during my last spring in Florida (1983).

I transferred to Albuquerque NM in June 1983. In January, 1984, Dot was sent to the Kirtland Air Force Base to do some work, so she stopped in to see me (photo of Dot, below). She later was sent to McConnell AFB, just up the road a few miles from our house; but, I've no photos from that trip - in about 2000.

The last time I saw Dot was after we had retired from our respective companies. I had been in Kansas since 1990 and she had moved to Ohio just a few months before Hunky Husband and I saw her on our way to Bogie's home. (Born in 1925, Dot continued to work for USAF as a consultant until 2008.)

I found Dot's obituary, online, just minutes ago. She had died in 2015.

I'll remember Dot with a story that she sent me by email just a few weeks before I saw her - at which time we and HH toured the National Museum of the United States Air Force (again!) in October, 2004 - photo of Dot & me at that time, below.

I apologize for the yelling in the following; but, that's how Dot sent the story to me!

9/1/2004

Subject: A Funny Story  

GUARANTEED TO MAKE YOU SMILE.....   ESPECIALLY SINCE IT'S A TRUE STORY.

ON JULY 20, 1969, AS COMMANDER OF THE APOLLO 11 LUNAR MODULE, NEIL ARMSTRONG WAS THE FIRST PERSON TO SET FOOT ON THE MOON. HIS FIRST WORDS AFTER STEPPING ON THE MOON, "THAT'S ONE SMALL STEP FOR MAN, ONE GIANT LEAP FOR MANKIND," WERE TELEVISED TO EARTH AND HEARD BY MILLIONS. BUT JUST BEFORE HE RE-ENTERED THE LANDER, HE MADE THE ENIGMATIC REMARK "GOOD LUCK, MR. GORSKY."

MANY PEOPLE AT NASA THOUGH IT WAS A CASUAL REMARK CONCERNING SOME RIVAL SOVIET COSMONAUT. HOWEVER, UPON CHECKING, THERE WAS NO GORSKY IN EITHER THE RUSSIAN OR AMERICAN SPACE PROGRAMS.

OVER THE YEARS MANY PEOPLE QUESTIONED ARMSTRONG AS TO WHAT THE "GOOD LUCK, MR. GORSKY... STATEMENT MEANT, BUT ARMSTRONG ALWAYS JUST SMILED.

ON JULY 5, 1995, IN TAMPA BAY, FLORIDA, WHILE ANSWERING QUESTIONS FOLLOWING A SPEECH, A REPORTER BROUGHT UP THE 26-YEAR-OLD QUESTION TO ARMSTRONG. THIS TIME HE FINALLY RESPONDED. MR. GORSKY HAD DIED, SO NEIL ARMSTRONG FELT HE COULD ANSWER THE QUESTION.

IN 1938 WHEN HE WAS A KID IN A SMALL MIDWEST TOWN, HE WAS PLAYING BASEBALL WITH A FRIEND IN THE BACKYARD. HIS FRIEND HIT THE BALL, WHICH LANDED IN HIS NEIGHBOUR'S YARD BY THE BEDROOM WINDOWS. HIS NEIGHBOURS WERE MR. AND MRS. GORSKY.

AS HE LEANED DOWN TO PICK UP THE BALL, YOUNG ARMSTRONG HEARD MRS. GORSKY SHOUTING AT MR. GORSKY.

"SEX! YOU WANT SEX?! YOU'LL GET SEX WHEN THE KID NEXT DOOR WALKS ON THE MOON!"

RIP, Dot Miller, you were a good friend!

Cleaning out the Clutter

A few months ago, I took Hunky Husband into our workshop to see what he wanted done with piles of stuff that were sitting about, not having been moved since we moved into this house 20 years ago. He didn't see anything without which he couldn't live, so I started getting rid of the stuff - partly through placing it in recycle/hazardous waste/ecycle, partly by taking it to Goodwill or the Disabled American Veteran resale shops, and partly through trashing. I made great progress in the first couple of weeks, then my time got diverted to other projects - and I forgot all about it.

Thursday, I decided to replace a towel ring in my bathroom with an 18"-long towel bar. To do this, I retrieved level, steel tape, screw drivers, hex drivers etcetera from the workshop (plus my drill and bits from my sewing room - don't ask!) In the process, I realized that there was still much "stuff" to get out of the workshop. Today, I've focused on getting rid of a large box of stuff that was sitting on the floor and, somehow, stumbled across some vacuum tubes. Well...I've long (perhaps 65 years) had a soft heart for vacuum tubes. But...they gotta go! We have only one piece of equipment that uses vacuum tubes and it, too, is on the "get rid of" list.

Above is a photo of the tubes - and a handful of crystals (at the bottom of the photo) that would be used in fixed-frequency radio frequency oscillators. Woo-hoo. Some of the vacuum tubes are possibly from among a large box of tubes that I bought (at the price of a month's rent) as a freshman in college. That would have been 1955-56. I'm smart enough, now, to realize that the guy who sold them to me had probably stolen them from the US Army (Ft Leonard Wood - near our school); but, I was naïve in those days. And, no, I had no real use for the vacuum tubes at the time, but they were cute! HH has told me that, having imbibed too much one evening during the months in which we dated, I regaled him with my design for a transmitter that I would build to use some of those tubes.

How did the towel bar installation go? Well, the towel bar came with plastic inserts for use in hollow-wall construction. As it happened, one end of the towel bar was to be situated into an area that had something inside the hollow wall. Since I was unsure what was inside that part of the wall and didn't wish to injure the sewer pipe that might possibly run through that area, I came up with a work-around. I used heftier plastic sleeves than had been supplied, cut them off at the pointy end, installed them to act as bearings on the drywall, and used shorter (and larger diameter) screws than had been supplied.

Since I am rarely forethoughtful enough to take "before" photos, I'll give a photo of another towel ring that is in that bathroom. The ring in the photo normally holds a clean wash cloth. The "after" photo shows the installed towel bar. A hand towel gets bunched up in the towel ring, slowing down drying of the towel. (Since the wash cloth that is kept in the towel ring is always dry, being replaced, daily, drying time is not an issue.) The towel bar is long enough that the towel can be spread out, if required, or another wash cloth would fit in the available space.