An Eggcellent Guide

There seems to be a strong streak of silly running through model builders, with an almost fanatical devotion to Monty Python quotes for example.  Another thing that makes modellers happy is books that feature an insane amount of detail about a given aircraft, tank, or ship. 

This is what happens when the two meet.

Demented silliness at its best and a tribute to the sillier kits that Hasegawa puts out: the eggplane.

Captain Al

Continuing a series of posts about my late friend, Al Ulven.

As I've written before, Al loved to have fun and was pretty good at making his own if there wasn't any already in sight.  That skill served his desire for entertainment well, even as it occasionally exasperated others. Some of my more exasperated moments came as a direct result of Al fulfilling his retirement dream of owning his own boat.

I can remember him calling to say he had bought a boat which turned out to be a used Bayliner 2155 21" cruiser with trailer.  My father and I went to see Al's dream and Al gleefully showed off his first command -- Captain Al had been born. He even had a captains hat with the golden scramble eggs. It didn't phase Al that he didn't know much about boating or safety regulations. What mattered is that he had his ticket to fun in the sun on the Mississippi River.

It was love at first sight when Captain Al found his Bayliner and he adored the vessel over the years he owned it, though maintenance was far from his strong point.  It gradually faded from its initial glory, as he didn't have enough crew to regularly swab the decks and Al was slowing down a lot. We ended up assisting him on that and my dad did most of the maintenance work, especially during the spring and autumn when the Bayliner was either coming out of storage or going into storage.

While Al may have been slowing down physically, there was one thing he always liked:  moving at high speeds.  Fast cars entranced him, but were a little scary for him personally.  But the river looked open for miles upon miles and there he could race the wind.  At least until his deteriorating eyesite scared him one too many times.  More than once he had me get the Bayliner planing at high speed and enjoyed the ride, his face red from the wind and laughing gleefully the entire time.

On that image, I'm going to finish, for his various adventures on water require their own entries into the log.

Whoa! IRS to Run National Health Care?

The IRS will be the agency to determine who has acceptable health care under ObamaCare.

The IRS has been a loose cannon for a very long time, without any proper oversight.  Having them hunt down and punish people for having insufficient health insurance sounds great, doesn't it?  It would require a massive increase in personnel and power for this to be implemented.  Given their propensity to go after small fish and let the big ones off the hook when conducting audits, I doubt they would be any more fair dealing with health insurance regulation.

Does anybody rational think this is an intelligent idea?

The Creeping Cost of Bureaucracy or Baumel's Cost Disease

I'd never run into Baumel's Cost Disease before, but I find it most intriguing as it explains much of the runaway costs associated with healthcare, education, and government.  It also calls into question of how much we can cut from health care costs, especially when huge increases to the bureaucracy running it are proposed.  More paperwork means more labor, which means more money required, with any costs cut through other methods most likely negated.  Actually, I wouldn't be surprised if the increased costs of managing health care would dwarf all savings from streamlining other aspects. 

The intimidating thing about Baumel's Cost Disease is that it applies to education and all forms of government.  The more rules and regulations piled on will increase expenses that will never go down.  Eventually, you get to a place where you can't afford any of it.  Sound familiar?

Hat tip to Instapundit for the link.

A Suprising Newspaper Promotion

You would never see this in the USA these days.  The Daily Telegraph is giving away a voucher to pick up a free 1/72 Revell Spitfire Mk. II kit in the Saturday editon and another in the Sunday Telegraph for a 1/72 Revell Hurricane Mk. 1!  This warms my heart as it should any scale model builder and I hope parents take advantage of this opportunity across the pond.  Those two fighters were the backbone of the Royal Air Force in WWII, so a great chance at a history lesson is there besides teaching the joys of model building.

If such a thing were done here, it likely would cause a bunch of gray haired gentlemen to fight over the newspapers, I'm sad to say. The loss of hobbies where boys use their hands has been one of the more distressing changes in our society, as more passive forms of entertainment have taken over. You don't see that many youngsters building kits, they would rather be playing video games or watching movies.

As soon as my room is repaired and everything moved back in, I'll be eagerly getting back to finishing some kits myself.

Getting Closer to Real Transformers

This is a portable shelter that sets itself up with a push of a button.  Interesting to see if they get the costs down, I can think of quite a few applications for it from disasters to military.  I particularly liked the idea of it as a classroom for disaster stricken areas.

A Truly Useless Idiot

Sometimes there will be a public figure that gathers a following with rhetoric and positions that sound reasonable, even if you don't agree with them.  Then at a later point, the mask will come off and they will be revealed as nutcases or evil manipulators of the truth.

I haven't decided which Pat Buchanan is or if he is both.  But it is clear that he has very strong fascist leanings with his continued attempts to rewrite the history of WWII and Adolph Hitler in particular. There are so many things wrong with his statements in this article that I barely know where to begin.

First off, Hitler did want war, trying to make him out to be a peacenik who was forced to invade Poland is utterly deranged.  The British escape at Dunkirk enraged him as a failure to crush his enemy, he didn't let the troops escape.  The only reasons he tried peace attempts with Britain was due to his plans to double cross Stalin and invade the Soviet Union -- Adolf didn't want a two front war because of the drain on materials and troops. His dream of succeeding where Napoleon failed drove his foolish attack on the Soviets.

Then there is the farcical question about the Luftwaffe only having twin engine bombers.  The Nazi scientists were working on and did have four engine bomber designs, but they were at a low priority.  Why?  Simple answer:  they planned on having captured airstrips to fly their bombers from thanks to the blitzkrieg attacks being so successful at taking land.  The twin engine bombers were perfectly suited to this, where the four engine bombers needed large airstrips, as the US Army Air Force found out in the Pacific and England. Hitler's plans were concentrated on continental Europe and I often wonder what horrors would have happened if he's only had the one front war he expected.

Buchanan is either an outright liar or insane to be pushing this garbage, though history shows that both conditions are not mutually exclusive.  What is apparant is that Buchanan is a neo-Nazi, not just a sympathizer, but the full blown fascist that haunted the 20th Century.

He should be accorded no respect and his viewpoints widely publicized so that people will know what he really is.