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Docking, Berthing And Mooring

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Erin presented me with an idea for detailing the costs for berthing, docking and mooring based on ship's size.

The little black books were over simplistic, a ship is a ship, a berth is a berth.

GURPS: Traveller: Far Trader p. 66 has everything she was talking about, in detail.

SJ Games has already dropped the mic and walked off the stage.

C'est la vie.

Why My Conservative Panties Are In A Bunch

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The Supreme Court made another wrong decision.

It's happened before (Dredd Scott, Slaughterhouse), it will happen again.

With ACA the main reason I am upset that the cheater's technicality didn't kill it with the Supremes is two-fold.

First, they really had to do some circumlocutions to arrive at the decision.  If the law doesn't mean what it says, how the hell am I to abide by it as a citizen?  If the laws meaning can only be determined after a lengthy battle through the courts, that is not "rule of law" that's "rule of man" and it's unamerican.

Second.  They're clearly telling us citizens to get off our asses and elect a congress with a mandate for repeal and a president who'll sign it.

I am coming to believe that even if we do elect such, they will ignore the mandates of the people and continue on as before.  They don't even have the balls to stand up to a star chamber trade deal.

The staggering weight of "we're not voting ourselves out of this" suddenly crushes all of the hope and optimism I've ever had.

Fuck it, we're doomed.

I pray death will find me before the endgame really hits and hard.

Way back when I learned of how our government is supposed to work I thought that Americans would never become peasants and that we'd never be subjects to a ruling aristocracy.

I was wrong.

Vacation IMA

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I wandered up to Indy to see what there was to see.

Went to the Indianapolis Museum of Art to see the Bugatti.

1935 Bugatti Aerolithe

The really impressive part of this recreation of the car is they welded strips of the magnesium alloy together to make the complex curves because the original art of the forming was lost.

The no-flash photography rule did challenge my meager photographic skills.

More under the break!



1947 Norman Timbs Special

If you're ever wondering what the definition of "swoopy" is, this is the essence of it.



Kids talking today like their fancy "back-up cameras" are new and inventive.

Nineteen Fifty Six! <Drops Mic, Heads To Find The Early-Bird>

1956 Buick Centurion XP-301
I don't think there's enough air conditioning in the world to keep that interior habitable in summer Florida.  But what's a little heat-stroke compared to looking good!

Speaking of heat stroke...

No windows at all!  But there were speakers and microphones so you could communicate with the outside world!

Then there was the rest of the museum...


I looked at this and just thought, "I know how that person feels.  I have had that day."


Children are allowed in this museum, and out in the open, a sausage fest!

It was fun standing near this sculpture, over and over we heard, "are those hot dogs?"


My mom had a paper-weight sized replica of this Remington.  She'd have loved to have seen the original in person.

Tree!  Treetreetreetreetreetree!
Dragon.

There was a Japanese water-color in the exhibit (picture didn't come out) that I'd seen in person before!  While in the Army, stationed in Germany, I went to a museum to kill time before attending a performance of The Flying Dutchman (opera).  It was kind of neat that two random trips to a museum separated by many miles and years would put me next to the same piece.

Ugly enough to be a modern art masterpiece...


They also had an original IBM Thinkpad on display.

The modern design section made me really uncomfortable.  I know far too many people who OWNED or STILL OWN lots of the things on display.

Vacation IMS

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Also hit the Indianapolis Motor Speedway.

Forgot my Canon, so ended up using the Motox2g.

More Bugatti!




There are people who say there's no such thing as an SS Corvette.  There is one.

Maserati



To me, this is a fascinating study in packaging.


Because Harvey is a Harley Chick.


1903 Premier Special.


All about its engine.  That thing has a hemi in it!

Something is missing though...

Can't put my finger on it...
Oh yeah!  Where's the crankcase!?!?

Since everyone used a total loss oiling system anyways, having no crankcase isn't as bad as it seems.  If you click the link above you'll learn that it's missing the oiling lines.  The mechanic/co-driver worked a hand pump to move oil from a large tank to the moving surfaces.  Lots of steam ship engines were lubricated in a similar fashion, actually.


Chain driven rear axle.  You can kind of see the oil-pump in the mechanic's seat almost hidden behind the steering shaft.  You can imagine how covered in oil everyone must have been after the race, and the time period kind of dictates it's castor oil too.  Yummy!

Pics of the track from outside the museum.


Mini-Cooper on the track, The Precious in the parking lot.


Exiting the track.

The Corps Is Mother, The Corps Is Father!

Vacation Downtown Indy

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Over three days I visited several places around Indy.

Everything is below the cut just to keep this manageable.





After the Indianapolis Motor Speedway I went to one of Tam's familiar haunts, 20 Tap, and had the Cobb salad she recommended.

If you find yourself in Broad Ripple, do it!  It's so good I forgot to snap a picture.

On the way back to my host, I stopped by Sun King Brewing.


Top row L-R: Sunlight Cream Ale, Wee Mac Scottish Ale, Osiris Pale Ale.
Bottom row L-R: Big H Hefeweizen, Pop Corn Pilsner, Jani IPA.

Brought a 4-pack each of the top row home with me.  The only one I didn't like was the Popcorn...

I bought a large growler of the Big H, but it was uncontainable and sadly it needed to be drank to prevent further leakage.

The next day we tried to do the Sailors and Soldier's Monument.  Double fail.  Closed for renovations and some sort of youth gymnastics thing going on closing off much of the circle.

Got a pic though.


Climbed the stairs to the top of The Indian War Memorial.  Locked tight as a drum despite the web page assuring us that it was well within business hours.

Took a pic of the obelisk while I was up there.


I have to say that Indy really does monuments right!

Then we schlepped over to The Mass Ave Pub for lunch.



When confronted with the beer choices the waitress said, "I will remove thought from the decision making process!" then asked, "do you like root-beer?" I said that I did.

She brought back this...

5.9% ABV root beer.  Not even a whiff off alcohol flavor or odor.  It tastes just like a soda.

For some reason the breaded pork tenderloin disappears from menus right about the same place geographically as when the stop asking hot or iced and start asking sweet or unsweet.  They even had the proper tots!

There's even art everywhere.



The third day started with lunch at The Slippery Noodle, which despite my never hearing of it before, is famous.  I don't get out much.

Then to the canals!


There were ducklings too!


Mama kept an eye on us to make sure that the peeking didn't become Peking.


While down there I visited the USS Indianapolis (CA-35) Memorial.


In keeping with the "Indiana is Closed for McThag's Vacation" theme, the revisit to the Ropkey Armor Collection was thwarted by their M-W only hours, the alternate venue...


Vacation National Corvette Museum

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The NCM is Mecca for Corvette owners.

Not much changes from year to year, but the differences are often worth catching.

They had the concept cars that led (or not) to various generations of Corvette on display.


This is not a 2011 Grand Sport!


The big news since the last time I was up there was the sink hole.

This is the '62 that'd fallen in...

That'll Zaino right out!
The dome is almost fixed.



They have special parking reserved for Corvettes by the main entrance.  I had a sad when I was the only Vette parked there.  When I was leaving I'd been joined by a C7 and a C5 towing a trailer.  I didn't take a picture of that because a trailer hitch on a 'Vette is abomination.


$18 Trillion National Debt?

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Relax, I got this!


I'll be wanting to see some change too!

Government?

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We don't have a Constitutional Republic any more.

It's become like a giant home owners association.

Far more concerned that people are doing what they want without asking than living like YOU would like them to, and forcing them.

STEM

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After my dalliance with psych, I had yet to tap into my Voc Rehab offer from the VA.

I accepted and got them to pay for a degree in Mechanical Drafting and Machine Design, an associates program at the local community college.

I love the work and I liked working with engineers.

I also heard some flabbergasting stories about how they came to get their degrees.

Something that came up over and over is something I experienced myself.  Before I decided on going into psych, I was planning on going Aerospace Engineering.

Why the change of major, especially when I was spending my own hard earned on tuition and living with my mom to save money?

Cut classes.

Simply put they are classes intended to cull the herd of prospects advancing farther into the programs.

The first such gateway class at Iowa State University was Engineering Calculus.  It's the same math that math majors were learning across the hall, but graded very differently.  On a curve so steep that calling it logarithmic is an insult to exponential (or vice versa).

It was also taught by a TA whose first language was not English, nor was his second or third.  It's more an act of defiance and perseverance to keep taking the class until you blow the curve and pass than an actual accomplishment in learning.  Couple this with the likelihood of never actually manually doing these calculations again and you start to think you're wasting your time.

I took it twice before I passed on the third try.  And it burned me out harder than I've ever burned out before.

I took a semester off to consider my options.  Then two.  Then the rest of they year.  I got a shitty job delivering pizzas.  Got a girlfriend.

Then I changed my major.

With my Business Admin degree now under my belt I see something striking about the cut class.  The university gets paid whether you pass or fail.  The bar for failure is higher for intendants going on one track than it is for any other.  They get paid and also don't have to expand the engineering college to accommodate more students!  The people who fail out or give up don't impact the number of successful engineering graduates.  They have no incentive to make it make more sense!

So next time you wonder why there's less interest in STEM, the gate keepers have set up a system where the smartest people can see it's a scam and say fuck it.  And people like me too.

Doubt

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The original thought was sparked by reading about the recent Supreme Court decisions.

Notice that there was never any doubt about how the liberal judges were going to rule?  Notice there was lots of doubt, and articles written about that doubt concerning the position of the "conservative" judges?

Now expand that.

There are several things that Republican presidents and congressgrifters have done that displease me and I make note of them and try to remember at voting time.

I was recounting several of them recently for my host in Indiana.

It just occurred to me that I've never heard her or another liberally bent friend ever express a similar list for Democrats.

They sure are critical of Republicans, but nary a word about the other party's faults.

It's what we call a "tell".

Trip Trivia

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Starting and ending in my driveway, I travelled 2,464.4 miles total.


For some stupid reason the trip odometers display a max of 2,000.


This counts the near hours in rush-hour Atlanta traffic going less than 5 mph because the rubber-neckers were gawking at a wreck that happened in the lanes going the opposite direction, about 400 miles of local driving in and around Indy, twenty minutes creeping just north of Chattanooga because someone had apparently jumped off an overpass and the entirety of Atlanta on the way home at about 30 mph because of the torrential rains.


Not bad for a 436 hp hatch-back!  When it was pure interstate mileage it was about 30.2 mpg.  All the stops and goes that lowered the average speed also lowered the average mileage.

360° Experience | Fighter Jet | Patrouille Suisse

Technology

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Something that drove me a little nuts way back when I was playing Twilight: 2000 using the actual GDW rules was the scale of the maps.

I went to some effort to obtain genuine USGI Defense Mapping Agency maps of Poland in and around the areas depicted in the published adventures.

Those maps were lost... somewhere.

Because GURPS deals with real units and has stats for real guns, it's super easy to convert the setting from one set of rules to the other.

But I was back to the GDW maps.

The players never seemed to mind, happily.

I was bopping along today and remembered Google Maps...

Street View of Kalisz!

I can't say I am the first to notice how Google simplifies the mapping.

Anglave ran a Korean War with Magic campaign and he used Google Earth to good effect.  You could actually see why Task Force: Smith made their stand at that location.  It's the best ground for miles and with Google Earth you can get down to eye level and see the contours!

It figures that such advances happen as I no longer have much opportunity to game.

Dang it all!

Supreme Court Are Lawyers

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They're all lawyers, that's why they can't see the simple texts in front of them.

Row v Wade:

No power to do anything whatsoever in the text of the Constitution, Feds forbidden further by 9th and 10th.  States constrained by 14th.

No need of emanations or penumbras.

Gay Marriage:

Marriage is a religious ceremony.  1st Amendment means no Federal involvement, 14th means no states.  This also means that if the local Catholic priest won't tie your knot you've got no recourse.  It also means that there's no hard legal means to settle divorces, unless churches mandate the signing of a civil union as a condition of using their religious ritual.

Bigamy/Polyamory:

See gay marriage.

None of this is actually complicated, but just like simple laws become regulatory morass, stare decisis prevents simple rulings.

Hipster

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Tam can't be a hipster.

In every photograph I've seen of her...

The glasses (if any) are for eye protection.

The gun burkha is not flannel.

No discernible beard at all on her neck.

Not once, despite her frustrating me a few times, have I ever had the urge to punch her in the neck or blast her with a fire hose.

Snark is not irony.

Gay Rights

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Something to consider when you're worried about "teh gheys"...

Once they're just people like the rest of is, they will now be free to vote conservatively if they want, and lots of my gay friends do!

Over and over I wonder...

What party do I turn to if I don't really care about abortion, support gay rights, state's rights, the nation-state model and property rights and oppose gun control the UN and the creeping nanny-state?

Whom do I vote for?

Just Me I Am Sure

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I'm reading Scalia's dissent to King v Burwell.

I am sure I am not the first person to notice...

The technicality where States were confused for the Machiavellian THE STATE could easily have been caught and made so clear that only an idiot would have gotten the intent wrong;

IF ONLY THE GODS BE DAMNED THING HAD BEEN READ IN FULL, DEBATED COMPLETELY AND THEN VOTED ON!

Rather than doing "we have to pass it to find out what's in it" and parliamentary procedure skulduggery where the Senate actually generated a bill where The Constitution (remember that document?) says bills of that type were supposed to originate from The House.

The original ruling, National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius, where it became a tax instead of a fine underscores the problem of it originating in the Senate!

Negative Percent Lower Kit

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Lots of work to complete the lowers from this, but there's also a whole bunch in there!

Why

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How come my M&P 9 seems all whizzer-shiny high-tech and modern when I put a light on it?


I think it might be the resemblance to Winona from Farscape.

No, it doesn't look a thing like it, it's a feel thing.

We're all about teh feels now, right?
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