Not much going on…we got our UPS for the TV and internet stuff in and installed and the second one for the file server is on the way…and we also got our grill cover. Neil finished the garage cleanup…got everything sorted and stored and we can now keep Li’l Red inside instead of outside.

Now this week…we’ve gotta get rid of Aunt Jemima syrup and pancakes, Uncle Ben’s Rice, the chef on the Cream of Wheat box and even Snap, Crackle and Pop.

Where will it end.

Now I know that Aunt Jemima has used a black woman in their marketing for over a century…but now it’s bad. Only…maybe let’s consider a couple of facts about that.

Did you know that Aunt Jemima was a real person? Yup…a former slave named Nancy Green moved to Chicago after the war and started a food company making…you guessed it…pancakes. She became pretty successful at her company…in fact she was so successful that the General Mills company bought her out and used her image in their marketing…she went on to become in addition to the company spokesperson a storyteller, cook, and activist as well as the first of numerous black women who headed the marketing. She died in 1923 as one of America’s first black millionaires…and remember in 1923 a million bucks was a whole lot more than it is now. 

Her likeness was found in pretty much every household in the south and I assume up in Yankee land as well…because we all used her syrup even if we made our own pancake batter from scratch with Bisquick since it was (a) cheaper than her pancakes and (b) we had it anyway for making biscuits…although to be honest we made them from flour, Crisco, baking powder, baking soda, and milk as often as we made them from Bisquick and milk. Back in the day…actual maple syrup was pretty rare and pretty expensive outside of the arctic Nawth where it was produced so hers was what we used down in the no longer PC term Dixie.

And ya know…if the brand started today and General Mills used her likeness to honor a black woman who achieved quite a lot…it might even be considered a good thing.

But nope…she’s gotta go…along with pretty much every other black person used in any marketing campaign? I guess having a self made black female millionaire spoil the narrative.

When do we get rid of the Nike Air Jordan logo? Do bald white men feel slighted because of Mr. Clean? Do gas station attendants quake in their safe places because of “the man who wears the big, bright Texaco star?” Or how about white women…do they tremble in their aprons over Betty Crocker?

There was this long discussion over the matter on Neil’s photography forum in the non photographic section…the thread is entitled “Cat True Facts” but other than a link in the first post it’s all about the left running out of things to be offended over…and how if marketing folks refused to use blacks in their marketing campaigns that would be bad…and how that would be damned if you do and damned if you don’t. Heck…even the. Land O’ Lakes logo is apparently being changed…they’ve ditched the Native American portion on their logo.

What’s next…Black Label whiskey? Dark rum? Red and white wine? Brown mustard? Egg whites?

Anyways enough on that.

I see in the news that the University of VA…known as UVA in the state…is changing the logo for their athletic department for the second time in 2 or 3 months. The university teams are known as the Cavaliers and the logo consists of a large upper case orange V with blue outline and two crossed cutlasses in blue below it. This has been their logo since at least when Neil was in high school. However…they changed the logo back in April or so so that there were sinuous edges on the handle portion of the cutlasses to honor the sinuous walls that are on the campus. These walls were designed by that well known slave owner Thomas Jefferson who just happened to be a big wig in VA politics…and they were designed in the sinuous manner for the simple reason that you need a lot fewer bricks that way. The wall is actually longer than a straight one would be but you can build thinner…and hence less costly…brick walls if they’re not straight. Now…where did Cavaliers come from? Good question…and the answer is that back in the 1600s there was a revolution in England over whether the king had sole and ultimate power or whether they would have the parliamentary form of government that they have now…and naturally there were two sides in this revolution. The Virginia Cavaliers was a pro royalist organization in the Virginia colony and most of the upper crust of the colony’s society was part of it…so when the university was founded later it seemed naturally to use Cavaliers for the mascot. Nothing in any of that seems racist to me…but apparently the WAMM has decided that the honoring the sinuous walls is racist because “the walls were only built to keep the hide the noise and view of the slaves outside the walls from folk inside the walls”. Seems pretty flimsy to me…but the university caved to the WAMM and has redone the logon…again…keeping straight lines on the edges of the cutlass handles. Whatever.

I see that Mr. Putin says that not only does Russia have “hypersonic” missiles that are “completely un-interceptible” but they also have hypersonic defense weapons.

Now I gotta tellya…”hypersonic missiles” is just a bunch of marketing BS. According to the definition…hypersonic means they go more than 5 times the speed of sound…and according to the hypersonic missile hysteria they are glide based vehicles that maneuver during flight to keep from being intercepted as well as flying at a “much lower altitude” . That sounds pretty good…until you realize that it’s all a bunch of hooey. The fact is that every ballistic missile is hypersonic…they travel at about 15 times the speed of sound pretty much from about 30 seconds after launch until they go boom at the target…so so much for hypersonic indicating a new capability. Moving on to flying at a much lower altitude…they’re still above about 98% of the atmosphere…up until the past year or so this was known as a depressed ballistic trajectory…and pretty much any ICBM or SLBM these days is capable of doing so albeit at a reduced range compared to a purely ballistic flight…but in either case they’re still essentially out in space…so so much for gliding. Finally…that new maneuverability…well warheads have been capable of maneuvering since about 1970…you might have heard that ballistic missiles since about that time have what is known as MIRVs or multiple independently targeted reentry vehicles…which means that a single missile can make multiple targets go boom. Now there are some limitations for MIRVs…you can scatter the warheads over a much further distance parallel to the missile flight path than across the flight path…but since they were all dumped off of a ballistic missile they’ll all hit the same place…that’s just physics for ya…unless you maneuver the various warheads to the right/left/short/long of the ballistic point to hit various targets.

Now it is certainly possible that gone could make faster missiles that remain in the atmosphere…and they would provide shorter reaction times than slower missiles would…duh…but in order to really maneuver much they need to be in the atmosphere so as to give the control surfaces something to act against to do this maneuvering. Remaining in the atmosphere means more air friction…which means more heat…and there’s a reason that a ballistic missile gains most of it’s speed after it leaves the atmosphere behind…that reason is to protect it from the heat…just like the heat shield on a space capsule does or the tiles on the space shuttle did. The fastest aircraft known is the SR-71 blackbird…holding the speed record of 2,193 mph…and the limit on the speed is both power and heat load. As you go faster…the amount of power needed and hence fuel needed increases geometrically…every mile per hour increase gets harder as you go faster…and the drag against the air generates more heat. Materials science just hasn’t caught up and trying to achieve any airframe that will go faster than about 5 or 6 times the speed of sound while remaining in the atmosphere and not melting simply becomes a heat/fuel/power problem.

The military has been working on making both aircraft and weapons go faster ever since the Wright brothers…but physics and engineering is the same for everybody. The likelihood of either side getting a lasting advantage through this hypersonic weapon crap is pretty small…but it is used as the bugaboo to get more defense dollars on both sides.

Interesting things found on the net.

If you go to Vienna Austria…be careful not to fart in front of the police. Apparently a fella there was fined 500 Euros because he farted inside the paddy wagon after he was arrested at the riot and drove the cops out of the vehicle due to the aroma…so if you get arrested in there make sure ya don’t lift yer butt cheek and let ‘er rip but go the silent but deadly route.

Apparently…the International Space Station is getting a new Universal Waste Management System later this year…that’s NASA-speak for toilet…I have no idea how the gentler gender will use this thing as it looks pretty painful…maybe it works like that You Go Girl funnel thingy that is marketed for female hikers. 

I found this picture which compares the size of the tallest mountain on earth…well, it’s not actually not the tallest mountain as the volcano in Hawaii is taller from the ocean floor than it is, but I digress…anyway Mount Everest compared to the Olympus Mons which is a shield volcano on Mars and is actually both the widest and tallest mountain in then solar system. Because of the diameter, height, and diameter of the planet…if you could stand at the base you would not be able to see the summit of the volcano…and if you could stand at the summit you would not be able to see any of Mars except Olympus Mons. Mars is also home to the deepest canyon in the solar system…the Valles Marineris…it is over 2,500 miles long, 120 miles wide, and 23,000 feet deep so it pretty much dwarfs the Grand Canyon which actually only comes in 4th place for canyon size on the earth…there are canyons in Nepal, Australia, and Tibet that are larger than it is. 

This one is self explanatory.

As is this one.

Although I have to admit…I wonder how many of today’s so called atheists actually know that the word means…I’m guessing not many. Most of them have just rejected religion and hence the concept of a god with either an upper or lower case and I’m convinced that most “atheists” are just rebelling against what their parents are or believe in…but that is not what the word actually means.

What it actually has to do with is…just why do we exist and how did we get here.

Ranging back to Neil’s Religion class in the parochial McGill Institute in high school…his teacher was a catholic priest named Father Hay who he was somehow tangentially related to but can’t remember the details…anyway the first day in class the good Father asked us if we existed.

We all agreed that we did exist and after a bunch of logic trees led by Father it becomes pretty obvious that if we exist today…well actually it was that day back in the early ‘70s…then something must have always existed. Logic tells us that if there was ever a time when nothing at all existed…then nothing could exist now since there would have been nothing make existence come into being…in short you can’t get something from nothing. So…if something exists now then something had to always exist. After another series of logic trees one comes to the conclusion that whatever existed back into the infinite before has to be either material or not material…or saying it another way either material or spiritual.

Those that come down on the spiritual as the thing that always existed are known as theists since they believe in theism…which is the belief that a God or gods exist outside of the material realm. This being has been called many, many names over the years and while we are Roman Catholic I’m not going to force the belief in a single God on anybody since there’s no actual proof…that’s why it is called faith.

On the other side of the equation…the folks that believe the universe has always existed are a-theists meaning not theists which got shortened to atheist…and I’m willing to bet that few if any of today’s self professed atheists have actually thought this through.

On the other hand…there’s pretty reliable evidence that the universe is 13 billion or whatever years old and is still expanding. At some point in the indeterminate future…all the energy in the universe will have been expended, all stars will have died and gravity which is an immutable constant will start to slow the expansion of the universe…eventually causing it to stop and start to contract…and after an amount of time approximately equal to the time from the Big Bang until expansion stops the universe will collapse into itself in one giant ball…and at least according to the theory there might be another Big Bang starting the process of the universe all over again…in fact according to the theory there have been an unknown number of Big Bang/expansion/end of the universe cycles going backwards in time.

Anyway…just a thought brought on by that last image.

This one brings to mind the logic jar we used to have when Neil worked for ISD in the SecDef’s bureaucracy…if you tried to inject logic into any discussion or decision you got fined and the money went into the jar…about once a quarter we took the proceeds down to the pub on the first floor and drank them.

Even better than “You want me to stop this car?”

And here for ya…a bit of humour…note the British spelling…from our friends across the pond.

All of these were gleaned from actual advertisements in UK newspapers.

FREE YORKSHIRE TERRIER.
8 years old,
Hateful little bastard.
Bites!

FREE PUPPIES
1/2 Cocker Spaniel, 1/2 sneaky neighbor’s dog.

FREE PUPPIES.
Mother is a Kennel Club registered German Shepherd.
Father is a Super Dog, able to leap tall fences in a single bound.

COWS, CALVES: NEVER BRED.
Also 1 gay bull for sale….

JOINING NUDIST COLONY!
Must sell washer and dryer $100…

WEDDING DRESS FOR SALE .
Worn once by mistake.
Call Stephanie.

**** And the WINNER is…. ****

FOR SALE BY OWNER.
Complete set of Encyclopedia Britannica, 45 volumes.
Excellent condition, #200 or best offer. No longer needed, got married, wife knows everything.

And finally…from the Greatest Living Scottish Thinker Billy Connolly…he is actually a comedian comes this.

“If women are so bloody perfect at multitasking, How come they can’t have a headache and sex at the same time?”

Cyas.