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Mike A

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Posts posted by Mike A

  1. Posted

    On 3/16/2022 at 9:03 AM, Mike A said:
    On 3/16/2022 at 4:34 AM, GaryK said:

     

    I remember during the Arab oil embargo of 1973, when I was in high school, when a time change came, they adjusted it by 2 hrs. instead of 1

    CORRECTION:  I checked if my memory was correct on this, and found out what actually happened was that in January of 1974, the U.S. switched back to Daylight Savings Time with the intention of saving energy due to the oil embargo:

    https://www.washingtonian.com/2022/03/15/the-us-tried-permanent-daylight-saving-time-in-the-70s-people-hated-it/

    • Like 2

  2. Posted

    5 minutes ago, dave2013 said:

     

    I think that every generation has their token exclamatory slang. 

     

    The current one that makes me laugh is “wicked good”. My sense is that it’s used in the northeast U.S.  I think “OK, what is it? Wicked? Good? So so?”🤔

  4. Posted

    4 hours ago, GaryK said:

    I seem to remember some very dark mornings going to school.

    I remember during the Arab oil embargo of 1973, when I was in high school, when a time change came, they adjusted it by 2 hrs. instead of 1, so when I went to school at 8:00 AM, it was still pitch black and freezing, definitely felt weird.

    • Like 1

  6. Posted

    9 hours ago, birdguy said:

    It got me to thinking about kites

    Yes, those were the days.  We had lots of wind (near Ocean Beach), we were always flying kites. Something so simple can be so fun. Like said above, we sometimes combined all our strings to one kite to see how far we could get it to go.  The name I remember was Hi-Flier kites:

    https://www.antiquetrader.com/collectibles/hi-flier-rise-and-fall

    I also had a Jolly Green Giant kite that was huge.  Got it by sending some Green Giant labels to get it (remember getting stuff from cereal companies? Send 2 box tops & 25 cents to: 😄).  http://www.junkbox.com/kites/GreenGiantPromoKites.shtml

    In later years, I used to borrow kids (nieces, nephews, cousin's kids, etc.) and take them kite flying.  Purely selfish on my part; I wanted to fly kites, so having some kids along made me not feel so out of place as an adult flying a kite alone, but the kids always enjoyed it too. 🤣

  10. Posted

    2 hours ago, Luis Hernandez said:

    And in the end your wife got her own way 😂

    Phonetically-speaking, yes 📣. Happy wife, happy life. But his microchip ID is registered as Mikimoto, so I can call him Miki without cringing 😬 🤪

  11. Posted

    2 minutes ago, Luis Hernandez said:

    A friend named her cat Mickey

    We also have a black & white cat that looks similar, and his name is Miki. My wife wanted to name him Mickey, but I had to my put foot down on that notion right away, as what self-respecting cat would want to be named after a mouse? So she came back with “How about Mikimoto?”, who is credited with coming up with the technique of making cultured pearls:https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikimoto_Kōkichi So that is why we call him “Miki” 😉 

  12. Posted

    An opinion piece in today's San Francisco Chronicle:

    The media made me think San Francisco would be an apocalyptic hellscape. But it was lovely

    Billy Binion
    March 5, 2022Updated: March 6, 2022 10:41 a.m.
       

    CNBC host Jim Cramer says he won’t let his staff members go out alone on the Embarcadero.

    CNBC host Jim Cramer says he won’t let his staff members go out alone on the Embarcadero.

    Noah Berger/Special to The Chronicle 2021

    I’m not sure I’ve ever heard more discussion about a city over my lifetime than I have about San Francisco. That’s a weird thing to write, because, up until about a month ago, I’d never actually been.

    An East Coaster for most of my life, my exposure to the city had mostly been confined to the apocalyptic, 24-hour news and social media cycle of crime and drugs and poverty that has come to define it.

    San Francisco is currently the place most of us can’t stop hearing about because its story arc has been, I suppose, propped up as an archetype of the contemporary American story.

    And that story is a tragedy — a once-golden place now irreparably tarnished.

    So when I finally traveled there for the first time in late January, I was confident there would be no level of decay that could surprise me — a far cry from that hopeful place I’d seen depicted in the 2008 screening of “Milk” I attended as a high-schooler.

    I checked myself into my hotel next to the Tenderloin, dropped off my stuff and steeled myself for a weird and perhaps dangerous few days. I expected to find something evocative of a war zone — one where crime ran so rampant that you couldn’t walk to dinner, and if you were brave enough to do so anyway, you’d have to climb over rolling hills of drug paraphernalia and human feces to get there.

    Instead, it was lovely.

    My solo trip mostly consisted of a self-guided walking tour over the course of four days: from Union Square through the Tenderloin and down to the Mission, through the Panhandle and the Haight, from the Ferry Building to Chinatown and over to the Castro. What I experienced was a charming, colorful, animated place — a city that, like any city, appeared to have its share of problems, but still managed to coalesce in a way that only it can.

    That’s not to say that San Francisco’s issues don’t require addressing. There are onerous housing regulations that exacerbate homelessness, myriad rules hamstringing would-be business owners, high tax rates that impact those without means and a decadence that sometimes prioritizes government virtue-signaling over the needs of constituents.

    I would never presume myself capable of diagnosing every problem within a four-day tour of the city. But my introduction to the Bay Area was a helpful reminder that the media, of which I am a member, have a general tendency to ratchet up the negative while all but eliminating the positive, leaving consumers with a much bleaker story than exists in reality.

    There’s certainly no short supply of that when it comes to San Francisco, especially over the past year.

    “I don’t let (my staff) go out there by themselves,” Pennsylvania-based CNBC host Jim Cramer said last week, referring to the tourist-friendly waterfront the Embarcadero. “Even in daytime.”

    Activist Michael Shellenberger regularly beats a similar drum that, as he tells it, is meant to serve as a corrective to left-leaning media indulgence. But his approach — which recently included scaling a fence to break into the Tenderloin Linkage Center — is more likely to put himself at the center of a doomsday culture-war story than to tell the full one.

    So let’s look at a more full one.

    Much has been made, for example, of the supposed recent spike in property crime in the Bay Area. The numbers, however, are inconvenient for that narrative. In 2021, property crimes were down about 11% from 2018 and 2019, and down even further when compared with 2017.

    Property crimes in 2020 were a low for the decade.

    But what about violent crime? It’s also down from pre-pandemic levels; in terms of homicides, you’re more likely to experience violence in Hampton, Va., than you are San Francisco. The city does not crack the top 65. As it usually goes, that trend is particularly applicable to the more upscale neighborhoods like the Embarcadero, where Cramer puzzlingly says he is afraid to let his people go for a walk.

    I don’t mean to denigrate the way Cramer or Shellenberger or any number of people may feel — particularly those who live in the city and have watched it change. Though I’ve always considered myself to be politically homeless, I view the world broadly through a libertarian lens, which is to say: Mayor London Breed and San Francisco’s supervisors aren’t exactly my kindred spirits. I have no problem conceding that San Francisco has issues to tackle. But feelings, by their nature, are subject to the beholder — just as my blissful four days exploring San Francisco could never paint the definitive picture of what does or does not plague the city.

    San Francisco is no stranger to people projecting their feelings onto it. In the 1970s, it was a bastion for diversity and acceptance at the forefront of changing cultural mores; today, it’s a crime-ridden cesspool reflective of the American decline.

    I posit a simpler alternative: It’s a pretty place, rich with culture, that will continue to experiment with mixed results, as places tend to do. You likely won’t hear such a benign story on cable news. So turn it off, log off of Twitter and go outside.

    Billy Binion is an editor at Reason Magazine.

    • Like 1

  19. Posted

    That was a good game tonight. Every 4 years, Canada & the U.S. go to war for 3 hours at the Winter Olympics. I love the rivalry, lots of emotion & exciting play. Although technically it’s not a rivalry, as Canada usually wins.  But low and behold, the U.S. pulled out a win. The following is meant in good fun to celebrate a rare win:

    Oh, Canada, you lost to U-S-A

    Oh, Canada, hang your head in shame

    You scored first, then played your worst, allowing three straight goals

    You scored again, but guess what, so did the U-S-A

    Fi-nal score, four to two, oh, Canada, you must be feeling blue

    Oh, Canada, we say “adieu” to you!

  20. Posted

    "The test flight, which fell under the agency’s Aircrew Labor In-Cockpit Automation System (ALIAS), involved a UH-60A Black Hawk helicopter retrofitted with Sikorsky’s MATRIX technology, a core component of the program. DARPA defines MATRIX as a “tailorable, drop-in, removable kit” that can be added to many pre-existing aircraft without the steep expense of building a new, individualized autonomous system from scratch."

  24. Posted

    Hopefully they've made progress in addressing the degradation of the anti-radar coating encountered at high speeds along with other concerns involving stress to the airframe; wouldn't want this new engine aggravating those problems.

    https://www.defensenews.com/air/2019/06/12/supersonic-speeds-could-cause-big-problems-for-the-f-35s-stealth-coating/

    https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/21547/the-marines-are-still-trying-to-figure-out-when-its-f-35bs-might-literally-fall-apart

     

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