We Need This in the U.S.

Ford Australia makes what is essentially a Mustang truck:

Link here.

Now think about this.  A pickup to take on camping/biking road trips, to haul crap, to do all of those things everybody needs to get done but doesn't need a full-on off-road machine with which to do them.  This car/truck thing – a "ute" the Australians call it – is about the most practical thing going, doubly so if you're only going to have one vehicle.

In the span from 1957-79, Ford made a series of these hybrid beasts and they were quite popular at the time.  From 1960-65 Ford made the Falcon Ranchero, essentially on the same platform as the early Mustangs.  Mechanically, it'd probably be easy to transform the 2011-14 Mustang platform into a ute, but I doubt we'll be seeing anything like this anytime soon.  I suspect the market's not there, and there may be some Federal car/truck fleet mileage snags.

One of these days I may consider some custom work on the '12 Mustang to achieve this lofty goal.  But no time soon.

WW1 + 100 years

Today marks the generally recognized start date plus 100 years.  Here's the obligatory Wikipeda link.

Here's the crazy thing: looking through this morning's web editions from major news outlets, apart from a brief story about WW1-related music at NPR there were no mentions of this anniversary.  Have we forgotten?  No.  Has the mainstream press forgotten?  It appears so!

Do not forget history.  There is usually a heavy associated cost.

Reebok Bacon? Really?

No, it's real bacon made from pigs, not some weird antelope byproduct.  It's just being marketed by the athletic shoe company for their paleo/crossfit crowd, as discussed in this article.

This isn't the rhebok you're hungry for.

Put down the spork.  Move along.

Look, I'm all for bacon, think the paleo diet sounds like a good idea (and would do it too if PB&J was on the menu), and have no quarrel with the crossfit people.  But Reebok – the shoe company – selling bacon makes no sense whatsoever when Hormel sells perfectly good bags of the stuff pre-cooked and by the pound.  The shoe/meat marketing angle is just kind of weird.

Next thing we'll probably find out that tobacco is good for you.

Mystery Theremin I.D.'d

The mystery theremins in those two posts from last week (1 and 2) seem to be semi-custom builds by George Pavlov, as briefly described in this mention at Theremin World.

Absolutely beautiful, both in construction and sound.  However, considering that in an extremely rare appearance on ebay one sold last December for approximately $5200, I'll go back to practicing on my kit-built Etherwave.

Beach of Dragons, Beach of Legos

Or what happens when a containerful of plastic toys falls into the ocean circa 1997.  Full write-up at the BBC.

45 Years Ago Today

If you're fuzzy on Apollo 11's place in history, go brush up at Wikipedia.

Here, have a Sprite

Photographed over New Mexico, found over at Space Weather.
Summary about sprites from the Wikipedia article:

Sprites are large-scale electrical discharges that occur high above thunderstorm clouds, orcumulonimbus, giving rise to a quite varied range of visual shapes flickering in the night sky. They are triggered by the discharges of positive lightning between an underlying thundercloud and the ground.

Sprites appear as luminous reddish-orange flashes. They often occur in clusters within the altitude range 50–90 km (31–56 mi) above the Earth's surface. Sporadic visual reports of sprites go back at least to 1886, but they were first photographed on July 6, 1989 by scientists from the University of Minnesota and have subsequently been captured in video recordings many thousands of times.

Sprites are sometimes inaccurately called upper-atmospheric lightning. However, sprites are cold plasma phenomena that lack the hot channel temperatures of tropospheric lightning, so they are more akin tofluorescent tube discharges than to lightning discharges.

Happy thunderstorm season!  Think I'll take a ride on the beach now, before the current crop of storms move onshore.