Mallard

@martin-w Well, you might try it first, before you knock it... Cheers from someone who hasn't eaten meat since 1998, but would probably go along on a Snipe hunt Mallard

Archimedes screws https://mobile.twitter.com/edi_airport/status/506767734882189312 Cheers Mallard

I remember seeing the civvie-B-17 in a book on airliners of the world from 1967 that I probably still have somewhere... The illustration showed it in a bright yellow all-over livery, but judging from the pictures on the SAS facebook website https://www.facebook.com/SAS/photos/on-of-the-ex-usaaf-boeing-b-17-bombers-converted-by-saab-during-world-war-ii-to-/10150641755460788/ they look like either bare metal or something of a darker paint scheme. It might have had to do with how the planes were used... Domestic flights might not have been an issue, but if a B-17 suddenly appears over German (occupied) skies things could have gotten a bit hairy. It's a pity that I can't find any pictures of the interior. I can't imagine how cramped the seating must have been. There is an interesting list of civilian operators at https://www.wikiwand.com/en/List_of_Boeing_B-17_Flying_Fortress_operators and for those hankering for a real pax-variant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_307_Stratoliner Cheers Mallard

Emirates today took posession of the last A380 ever to be built... https://www.bbc.com/news/business-59667835 Cheers Mallard

It would be creepy - and at the same time amazing - if the android had "awoken" independently and then indeed been aware of itself and its surroundings. But as it is it's a fancy animatronic that probably will end up on some Disney ride or at a Japanese hotel desk... 😉 Cheers Mallard

Took me a while to find out that it's an autogyro. And I was a bit sceptical about the name, as I thought they might be piggybacking on the world-renowned Fraunhofer Institute. But it seems that the developer's name is Fraundorfer. It's no flying car But if they build it with electric or hybrid propulsion (as they intend to) it might be interesting... And it actually exsists Cheers Mallard PS - yes, there are a number of bloopers on the site. I hope they take more care with the build of the aircraft itself 😄

I'd rather go for this one - at least it's still in the water 🙂 https://www.devalk.nl/en/yachtbrokerage/100715/ONE-OFF-SAILING-YACHT-18M.html (disclaimer: I'm in no way affiliated with the broker or the seller) I first encountered cement and concrete ships when I saw the SS Crete Boom in Ballina, Co Mayo. A bit more on her here: https://www.discoverireland.ie/mayo/ss-crete-boom-ballina-s-concrete-ship At first it seems an unusual building material - but the more you dig deeper, the more examples you come across. Although not many of them are on the top of mountains... Cheers Mallard

I think I'd perhaps get another shampoo. That earthy brand seems to have unintended consequences... Cheers Mallard (who only so far has only gotten headbonks from his neighbour's cat)

Yes - because that's a Zeppelin NT which actually has three engines, two in nacelles on the side of the lifting body (of which the propellers can individually be swivelled 90° upwards and 30° downwards) and one engine in the back which powers two props. This configuration also makes the NT useable as a resarch, survey and observation platform that can "anchor" itself stationary over a defined location - although most are used for sightseeing. I used to see one of them regularly come over Freiburg in southwestern Germany for tours over the Black Forest. It was based at Lake Constance, where it would run schedueld sightseeing flights. Aparently the views from the passenger gondola (which can seat up to 14 passengers) are quite spectactular, as it has impressively large windows. Cheers Mallard

Like Garys, I'm wondering if such an intense walkaround inspection of the plane itself would not the job of the crew? I get the checking of ramp clutter and all connections to and from the plane (and all access points and panels like the potable water one you mention) that have been affected by the ground servicing involved while it's on the ramp, but are you qualified to to make a judgment call on the mechanical aspects of the aircraft? And what happens if you see something amd voice your concern (to who?) that the crew says will do just fine? Or are you just reeeeeally into planes? 😉 Cheers Mallard

In several of the graves there were still traces of the wooden coffins, which actually had us quite excited and were a pain to document and retrieve. Of course they rot and decompose in the soil, just like the human remains do. Even the base of my garden fence is almost completely gone, and that's only 20 years old 😉 In fairness - arid/desert environments are naturally something else, but as soon as there is a fair amount of moisture in the ground, then wood's a gonner (and another "unless": unless the ground is thoroughly saturated with water, then it preserves wood and other organic material - which is why it's a mixed blessing, when we get to excavate medieval latrines. Fantastic things to be found there, but - man! - the stink!) Cheers Mallard

As they mention at the end, the design is very complex. As far as I'm aware, that's also the reason why it never really caught on in shipping, where especially tugboats were the main area of application as the rotors would improve the maneuverability considerably. But the flying prototypes do look cool 🙂 Cheers Mallard

Burial customs and rites are just that. They always fit in the context of the society at the time. It used to be highly formalised who could go where and in which cirumstances, and most of that has been relaxed/abandoned in the western societies. In your partictular case you might believe that one should simply tip the remains of grandma on the rubbish dump and be done with it all (environmental issues aside), but there are others who may want to take other measures - and why deny them that? Oh, and by the way - the remains I dug up after 1500 years had to most of the part also "become one with the earth" again, so that's no argument against a full-body burial. (And before anyone asks - almost 100% of the remains unearthed during archaeological excavations are reburied in a modern cemetery after anthropological examinations, especially if we know that they came from a society that followed Christian traditions). Cheers Mallard

They might see the burial as a ritual sacrifice to pacify the gods of the road... I've certainly encountered the one or the other "entertaining" theory about things that have been discovered in strange circumstances Ah, now - you Danes (if you call us Irish Brits, than I can call you Swedes Danes) 😉 also have a rich heritage! Thing is, you exported quite a bit of it all around northern Europe... Nope, I'm actually a pre-historian (we're the fellas who get to theorise even more eccentrically, as there are no written records to help us along). But when I worked for the state department I was on the clearance and rescue team. That meant dealing with whatever had to come out of the ground fast. When someone wants to build a home or developers plan a housing project or retail area they have to get the "all clear" from the department first. It looks at the site they want to build on and see if there's anything on record from that area. If something is found on file of a previous discovery then it has to asess the risk of potential additional features popping up there. And if there's any concern we get sent out to clear the site first. Somehow I mostly ended up on housing developments that were planned on former cemeteries. My last tally was that in the three years that I worked for that department I got to excavate and document more than 400 graves (ranging from what we suppose was a chieftan who was buried together with his horse to a young woman with an infant and everything in between) - but I could also be called upon when someone discovered something somewhere by chance. These tasks have nothing to do with the romantic image of an archaeologist carefully dusting off some artefacts with a little soft brush and humming and hawing about his discoveries, then lighting a pipe and contemplating his own existence in the context of the rest of the universe. That only happens of research excavations run by the universities. I was on a couple of those - an early Bronze Age smelting site in the French Alps, a lost castle that used to guard the entrance to one of the valleys in the Black Forest and the remains of a fortified house here in Dublin. But the rescue missions were quite a different kettle of fish alltogether. We had to be out in all weathers, sometimes even getting commiserations from the builders from neighbouring sites who were laying down their tools because they could not continue their work, while we kept slogging on. I once had to thaw the top levels of a grave with a gas burner, as the ground was frozen solid. I've also been just a couple of centimetres under a three-ton excavator shovel that kept on diging to the left and right of me while I documented and slavaged finds from the post hole of a Bronze Age house. And - no - I never found gold... But all in all it was a lot of fun! Of course I could not make a living from the job (very few can), so after a stint in the records department I moved on. Cheers Mallard

Building on a grave site is actually not that unusual. I'm an archaeologist by trade, and occasionally the department for heritage that I worked for might take the decision to leave buirals in the ground if we knew that they would not be disturbed by foundations or basement excavations. That was especially the case in developments where, for example, retail was proposed for a site which pretty much meant just laying down a concrete slab on which the shop would be built. We recorded the features for future reference, but actually more often than not whatever is already there is safer when left in the ground. There's a many a grave still under a supermarket in southwestern Germany 😉 And there's at least one almost complete Roman fortress under a district administration centre... Residential developments were something else, as not all future house owners might be comfortable with the knowledge that there might be someone lurking in/under their basement. I blame the Poltergeist movies... (one time we did get the future residents of a housing development around for an open day event to explain why we were there and what we had discovered so far and it ended in a couple of the neighbours-to-be almost proudly comparing how many "bodies" they would have in their cellar (although this was one of the cases where we had to remove everything as the graves were in danger of being destroyed by the excavation works - so there was nothing there anymore, when the houses actually went up)). In some cases designs might be changed and the features integrated in the finished projects. This is the site of the Merowingerhalle in Biengen which I worked on and the half-round brick outline demarcates the edge of a burial mound from the early Middle Ages. That silvery thing with the glass plate inset is the central grave (now empty, of course) that people can look down into. Here they incorporated the location of the burial mounds (note the central graves marked by the rectangular features) - and even "reconstructed" some of the mounds in the landscaping. So - hats off to whoever planned that road in Indiana. They obviously wanted to get from A to B on the shortest route, but still respected the grave 🙂 Cheers Mallard

I was a bit (positively) surprised at how overwhelmed Shatner appeared to be - but later one of the pundits on one of the news channels mentioned that it probably did take an actor to actually convey some of the feelings that one might have after such a ride. Most of the "professional" astronauts were trained to stay calm and controlled and that's why they often enough came back with not much more than a "that was cool/neat/humbling" answer - perhaps with the exeption of Chris Hatfield - while Shatner was visibly shaken. Let's see what spoken word song act he'll come back with next 😉 Cheers Mallard

Just noticed that the original picture of the "dashboard" did not come up properly - here's a retry Cheers Mallard

Have a go in a Citroen 2CV - we have three buttons, two which you can see to the right of the speedometer (which is in km/h, not mp/h! and incorporates the fuel gauge (bottom left) and battery charge indicator (bottom right). The little arm-like lever which ends in the silver ring is used to flash the headlights. Then there are 1. Control button to see if the bulb for the low brake fluid warning light still works 2. Windscreen wiper (on / off - no newfangled intermediate speeds) 3. Hazard lights (out of sight on the left of the casing The bumpy thing below the two buttons is used to pump water to the windscreen - it works mechanically and just like a kid's toy water pistol. (OK, so then there's still the indicator (the stalk to the left of the steering wheel) and the headlight control stalk which you twist once to get the parking lights on, a second time to get the headlights on, and then you can push it forward for high beam. You can also push the headlight stalk towards the steering column - and that's how you sound the horn. Just behind the head of the light stalk you can also make out the orange choke. And then there's one simple mechanical slider for cold/"warm" air, and another for guiding that up or down. And finally a twisty wheel, which opens the ventilation flap to let the air in below the windscreen (that bright area behind the grill just above and to the left of the speedo - there's another opening on the passenger side. Smaller passengers are sometimes grateful for that, as it means that they can look straight through, underneath the actual windscreen itself)). Who needs anything more? 😉 Our driver- and passenger side front windows are in two parts, the lower half hinges upwards. The little nipple that you can see on the lower part of the window frame slots into a receiver on the top of the door frame. To close the window you simply pull it out and let it fall into the catch that you might just about be able to make out at the centre of the lower door frame - it's operated by gravity (down) and muscle power (up), so no buttons there either. The back windows don't open at all. And to think that Citroen built that model with only a handful of changes from 1948 right up to 1990... Quite often I get people marvelling at how little there is to that car, and yet it still gets us from A to B. Cheers Mallard

Well - Murphy, my lodger, was quite fascinated while watching this me. And now he's giving me the "they're right, you know..."-look. Cheers Mallard

Just like Tim_Capps I use the free Adblocker Ultimate and am spared by ads on pretty much all of the sites I visit. I also have my browser (Firefox) set to delete cookies as soon as I leave a site if I have no option to disable them at the beginning - with several exceptions for pages (like Avsim) that I regularly visit. Just the other day I wanted to do a reverse telephone number search on a German website - and had to manually disable 203 (in words: two hundred and three!) cookies, as they did not offer the "accept all" / "reject all" options... Cheers Mallard

But what if... Cheers Mallard

Not only was it a (admittedly grainy) slightly faded but still slighly garish Kodachrome print, but a short while later my mum said there should also be a Super 8 film around somewhere as well. And we did indeed not only find that, but also got the projector up and running. So I could see that gleaming piece of machinery (I mean the car, not my parents) in motion. Now the picture of my dad in his MG TF from the beginning of the 60s was indeed in black and white - so I can't guarantee that car was actually painted in British Racing Green - as he claimed 🙂 I do think it's strange sometimes how intensely the past can be changed in our minds. My dad's exclamation was triggered by us visiting a classic car show where a gleaming red TR4 (A IRS, to be precise) could be seen. He was completely convinced that that was exactly the same like the one he had, down to the polished steel rims instead of the often used after-market spokes and some other options that the car at the show was equipped with. It set off all kinds of recollections about the tours he did in that thing around Sydney and the Blue Mountains, and - grinning - the girls he managed to take along for "the rides". Among them a later Miss Australia, no less (something that was actually confirmed by my mum, as they had all moved in the same social circles before my parents got together)! But you would have expected him to get the car's colour right... Oh, by the way - I regularly wake up one to two minutes before any alarm I set to any time I have to 😄 It's something I'm quite happy about, as in the rare cases where the alarm does the waking I always have the feeling of being ripped from sleep instead of waking up by myself. The first way makes for a much better start to the day. Cheers Mallard

And I can tell you quite categorically, that after 45 years you cannot say categorically what you saw. It's a bit like my father who used to go on about his flaming red Triumph TR4, which he claimed was what got my mother interested in him - until I found a picture of that car in an album in the attic one day. It was black. Cheers Mallard

What those three objects could also be (and I was surprised by a similar thing a while back): flocks of birds. They can be active at night, especially when the moon is out. Without binoculars you will just see blobs moving about. I was taking some snaps of a 3/4 moon some years back and saw something from the corner of my eye moving in a steady line across a part of the night sky. Even with binoculars I could not quite make out what it was, until I hear the honking of ducks... Cheers Mallard

Here's a pic from June '20 - the area in your first picture is in the foreground, the structure in the second and third one is now just about recognisable above the nose of the Air Zero G aircraft on the right (the access to it seems to be overgrown). Seems there is not much left of both features.. Cheers Mallard