Random photos, comics, etc.

[Ed Gordon]

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[Ed Gordon]

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[Jim Cassedy]

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Happy New Year!

[Frank Cox]

I've read stories before about people receiving mail when the address is "odd".

Someone apparently mailed a letter to MAD Magazine back in its heyday. All they put on the envelope was a drawing of Alfred E. Neuman, but the letter was delivered.

[Leo Enticknap]

My guess was that for second, read upper (as in, the factory that made this appliance is on one of the floors above ground level). Annoyingly, there are no Google Street View images for Chuangyuan Road, Zhongshan, available, so I can't try to solve the mystery that way.

Still, it's certainly a unique address. Maybe we should change ours to "Newhope Street, Building behind the Costco gas station and across the road from Kingston, Fountain Valley, CA..."

[Randy Stankey]

I wonder whether it actually means the FIRST floor?
"one OF THE second" floor might be a mis-re-translation that we might say as "One out of two?"
or would it be more like "within the second floor?"

Regardless whether it is a mistake or just poor grammar/writing skills in English, it's hard to believe that such a thing didn't get caught sooner.

[Leo Enticknap]

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Chen Jukun must be quite the architect to have created a building with multiple second floors!

[Ed Gordon]

Road Rage in Heaven

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[Leo Enticknap]

Massive sinkhole in England swallows canal boats

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Disappeared in a mushroom cloud?

[Leo Enticknap]

Last spring, my aunt died. Her husband (my uncle) passed away four years earlier, with the result that my cousins had to clear out their house totally before it was sold (I won't go into the emotional aspects of that, but they were significant). Among those items was a very large steel box containing family photos going back into the nineteenth century - several generations. I remember seeing it, and its contents, as a child in the 1980s in my grandparents' house, but not knowing what happened to it after that.

A family request came for me to go through, digitize, and distribute its contents within the family (I am a formally trained archivist, and worked as such in a previous life), and so on a visit last Christmas, my mother brought its contents over from England (on a Virgin Atlantic A350 as excess baggage, which makes for an ironic comparison to the photo which follows).

Over the past year, I've been gradually going through the contents of the box as time has allowed. About an hour ago, I scanned this photo, which was either taken or acquired by my maternal grandfather's brother, an Imperial Airways pilot (he flew HP-42s (pictured) and -45s, and then Short Empire flying boats in the 1930s, before enlisting with the RAF in WWII and being killed when the Sunderland he was flying was shot down in 1943):

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This is a 8x6, really dense emulsion paper print (early generation Velox, but appears to be an enlargement print), and so scanned very well.

Note the flagpole just behind the cockpit! Looking at the photo, my immediate reaction was "that is about as aerodynamic as a mounting a cinder block on top of the airframe." This prompted me to do a bit of online digging, which revealed that the flagpole was retractable. On the before takeoff checklist, the "third pilot" (what would later be called a flight engineer) had to crank it into the cabin, furling the flag in the process, and then he (and in the 1930s, it always was a he) was required in the after landing checklist to raise it again as the aircraft taxi-ed to the terminal.

[Leo Enticknap]

Another very long lasting ICMP battery and lucky escape:

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The projector this ICMP+ is in was installed by us in January 2019. The facility changed hands about a month ago, and the new owner had us back to clear the maintenance backlog. Nothing had been done in the intervening six years. There was no low battery warning after updating the projector's (DP4K-23B) and ICMP's software and firmware to current. The old battery read 3.01 after I pulled it out.

Given the earlier pic and Barco's recommendation of every four years, I wonder if they had an unusually strong batch of batteries at the factory in the fall/winter of 2018-19.

[Leo Enticknap]

Not what we were expecting to see on a morning walk around the development...

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He didn't seem the slightest bit bothered by the humans looking at him (from a safe distance). I have seen coyotes in the neighborhood before, but usually from my car when leaving at 4a for an early service call, and they disappear very quickly when they hear or see the car coming. This is the first time I've seen one in the middle of a weekend day, and with lots of people out and about.

I guess this explains why we used to see lots of rabbits and squirrels around the place, but don't anymore. And it's yet another reason why we made the right decision that our cats would be totally indoor kitties.

[Frank Cox]

You'd have to be pretty flush to pay $34.99 for that.

[Leo Enticknap]

Well here's a first world problem and solution...

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Eco friendly bog roll ... yours for the bargain price of $34.99 for a dozen!

This is the kind of thing I'd expect to see in Whole Salary Market in Santa Monica rather than Target in San Bernardino. I can't imagine they sell that many boxes.

[Jim Cassedy]

I was going through some ancient (1930 ) "American Cinematographer" magazines online and found
a fascinating article about the Technicolor company, as it existed in Hollywood at that time. I looked
up the address on Google Maps, and I wonder how many people using this gym today realize that
this was once the Technicolor HQ? The article mentions that they had about a dozen cameras at
that time, which were locked up in an earthquake & fireproof vault every night. (In the early days,
Technicolor transported their cameras to & from the studios daily) I wonder if the vault is still there?
The cameras pictured in the article are not the later 3-Strip "Wizard of Oz" ('Process 4' ) cameras,
but look to be the earlier 'Process 2' or "Process 3" cameras which used a single film, plus a pair of
red & green filters and a beam splitter that exposed two 35mm frames (one upside down) at a time.

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There is a part of downtown San Francisco, on lower Golden Gate Avenue, just off Market Street, which was once
known as "film row". 20th Century Fox, Warner Brothers, Paramount, RKO and a couple of smaller studios had
their Northern California distribution offices, screening rooms, and film vaults there. Although they are all gone now,
and that particular part of town has become very seedy, some of the buildings are still there and have icons of film
reels & cameras, etc cast into their plaster & stucco facades. Most of those buildings are now some sort of office
space, but I'm told that a couple of the nitrate film vaults and at least one of the screening rooms is still there,
although not being used for their originally intended purpose. I should get a picture of some of the building fronts
next time I'm in that area. (Although it's in an area I usually avoid, since most of the people you'd encounter on
that street now are either selling or looking to buy drugs or sex, or are 'up to something' of some sort. )

BONUS PICTURE:
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Technicolor "Process 3" negative. 2 images, (one upside down) exposed using
a beam-splitter plus red & green filters. The neg was used to make the dye
color printing matrices. (picture source/credit: filmcolors.org)