More Tropical Slop

Stuck inside for the... third day now.  Yes, that is a center of rotation around some weak tropical system south of the Alabama beaches, but I don't think it'll amount to much.   Neither does the NHC, which is comforting.

Anyway, I've been promising myself that I'd do some Deep Re-Arranging & Ditching of Crap around the house some nasty August days, and those days have arrived.  One weekday next week after the weather clears, I'll be taking a pickup truck load to the dump.  Still plenty of work to go, but it looks like we'll have plenty of ugly weather too.  "Make hay while the sun shines"?  "Clear junk while the rain falls."

Speaking of ugly weather, it's Katrina+21 day today!  Yes, Katrina's old enough to have a drink.  video  No mention in the Sea Coast Echo (the BSL newspaper), though I see that things have gone trendy in the old stomping grounds.

Let's finish with something good today, a breezy 15 minute run-through of how mountain bike tech has evolved since its start.  I love all the new stuff: 1x drivetrains, decent suspension, disc brakes, improved geometry, even dropper posts.  Better yet, we're seeing steps towards simplifying the new tech, making it easier to work on.  All good stuff.

A Beautiful Mess of a Plane

It was designed for but arrived a year too late to make it into WWII, so it was re-forged into the bridge between the Prop Era B-29s and the Jet Age B-52s.  Somewhat forgotten today, the B-36 Peacemaker was in service for less than fifteen years before it was phased out.  Seventy six years ago yesterday, one fell out of the sky over Canada; you can read about the incident here at This Day in Aviation.

Anyway, it's a beautiful plane in its own ungainly way.  Glad we never had to use them for their main purpose.

Beast of a plane, but I'd love to have gone up in one.  Once.

With the retractable gun turrets, it has a certain sci-fi vibe.

A New-ish D-Day Documentary

I say new-ish, because it's 11 years old.  Explains Bayou Renaissance Man at his blog (where he directs to a newly posted youtube video of the documentary in its entirety):

Back in 2014, the 70th anniversary of the D-Day invasion of France, Jean-Christophe Rosé produced this 90-minute documentary for France Télévisions.  It uses archival footage that was remastered and colorized, and is probably one of the best sources to understand what the run-up to D-Day involved (with training and other preparations) and the reality of combat on that day.

You can see my Dad very near the start at 1:50 in, and the footage is used again at the 15 minute mark.  He was a combat engineer who landed on Omaha Beach, Easy Red, somewhere in the third wave.  Anyway, here's the link to the documentary.  Total run length is an hour forty.

I didn't have a tag to fit this post, but it calls for a new one: history.  I'll be using this going forward, and will be adding it to a few older posts as I come across them.