Pic of the Day: Does This Bike Make My Arse Look Fat?

It would have been criminal to miss this shot, even though all I needed to do was drive straight ahead, point my little Fuji digital straight ahead, and let it do the work without distracting me.

This part of town has all sorts of interesting people riding the roads; there's a little guy (dwarf?) who rides a kid's bike. The high-rise handlebars give him the look of a biker with "ape hangers." I never had my camera ready.

Then there's Samurai Guy, who cycles up and down North Palafox. He wears an "armor" vest and helmet, both covered in shiny duct tape. Never got the camera up for a snapshot, but I did get him on video riding through a parking lot.

Ansel Adams had it easy: mountains don't move around.

Pic of the Day: Pickens, N. Wall Drawing

This is one of my first scale drawings of Fort Pickens; it shows the north wall, sally port, and sectional views of the innards of the place. This is part of the fort designed by Gen. Simon Bernard to simplify Joseph Totten's larger, more complex design.

Looking back on it 11 years later, it still looks good, though my eye keeps going to stuff I got wrong. Gonna keep my mouth shut and just enjoy the thing. I can always make a new one.

The Holy Grail of Pickens Drawings

By now it's clear that I'm a fort geek. I've been to Fort Pickens so many times that several of the Park Rangers know me by name.

I've got maybe a hundred pages of sketches and measurements, several hundred photos, some technical drawings, but after nearly 12 years of climbing and walking and measuring and scribbling, I have never put together a complete single drawing of the place. The smaller details--individual rooms, the curtain walls, each bastion alone--are easy enough on their own, but mistakes that aren't obvious in one can keep the whole thing from coming together. That's what happened with the 1:480 scale "hero" drawing I was working on in 2006--I couldn't get the northwest and southwest walls lined up.

The drawings I've found online and in Edwin Bearss' Historic Structure Report are low-resolution and don't blow up well enough to get good measurements from. The National Archives has everything I could possibly want--but none of the printing companies I contacted ever answered back (they don't want money? Well then!).

Then there's the #2 Plan that recently made Pic of the Day. I found it in a search on the Library of Congress website. They've got it as a 25mb JPEG 2000 image. It's good for archival, I suppose, since it gives a high degree of compression while preserving image detail. The format was supposed to replace standard JPEG, but 11 years on it's still kind of hard to find usable viewers. I went through several programs and the only thing that worked was the Express View plugin for Internet Explorer. You can open the image and save the visible section as a bitmap, but that's about it; no hi-resolution conversion.

It wasn't until I was looking at GIMP plugins that I finally found a program--IrfanView--that would let me open the JP2 file and re-save as a 75mb JPEG. Big damn file, but all the detail of Joseph Totten's original 1828 drawing is there, including his measurements along the Channel Fronts. This is the part of the fort that just wouldn't line up in my drawings.

I spent several hours just scrolling across the Big Picture, comparing the few sections of Totten's work that got built to my own and was pleased that I'd gotten so close to his numbers. All I was missing was that angle I'd never have gotten without surveying equipment...or an original drawing. Turns out it's just what I needed.

The "Heroes" tag is for Irfan and for Joseph Totten, who spent decades of his life in fortification engineering.

Pic of the Day: Summer's Coming.

I almost bought a window AC box last year, before the big artery blowout. Can't remember why I decided not to, but I regretted it soon enough.

I'm living in the same house as my mother and my sister (I'm supposedly the 'caretaker'...hah!). Both of them smoke and neither of them can leave the thermostat alone, so the place smells like an ashtray and it's always too warm (80?! Seriously?!) or too cold (65?!) because Mom can't make sense of the thermostat settings.

On top of that, my room stays hot year round because of my computer and a mini-fridge (no thanks to Hank--I got the fridge to keep him out of my food & drink stash). It's early spring and already close to 90 in here. Last summer was hell once all the health troubles kicked in. The AC box is my one splurge for the next few months, one thing I can do for myself right now.

In this, at least, life is good.

Song of the Day: Anthony Weiner's Civics Lesson

I've said it before. The Goposaurs people keep putting into office are dumb as a box of farking hammers. It seems like they can't help popping in front of any available camera to show just how little they know about doing their job, let alone how the government works.

At the end of March, Eric Cantor (R-Imbecile) and his Red Elephant pals showed that they didn't even have a "Schoolhouse Rock" level of understanding of the legislative process.

Said Cantor:

“What this bill says is it reiterates again the deadline, and that the Senate should act before the deadline, and that’s what the American people are expecting. The bill then says if the Senate does not act, then H.R. 1 [the House-passed bill] will be the law of the land.”

That's right. They wrote language into the bill that claims that if the Senate doesn't vote on a version of the House Bill, it will automatically become law.

There's a longer, better rant than mine at Sooner Blue 2's blog.

Yeah, I suppose that this could just be a dog-whistle gimmick for the Teabagger set, who really are this ignorant of how government works. But then I'm reminded of this raft of idiots:

Michele "Crazy Eyes" Bachmann, who gave a speech in New Hampshire commemorating the Shot Heard Round the World. When she was told that The Shot actually happened in Massachusetts, she didn't have enough sense to just correct the speech. She gave it again the next day. What do you expect from someone who claims the Founding Fathers ended slavery?

Jan "Crypt Keeper" Brewer, who lied about decapitated bodies in the Arizona desert, then refused to talk to the media about it. She tried to weasel out of it--"It was an error." No, it was a LIE.

Sharron "Second Amendment Remedies" Angle, who can't tell the difference between Hispanic and Asian.

Christine "wow, she can BREATHE and be this stupid" O'Donnel, who says she wouldn't lie to Hitler to save Anne Frank, but gets caught lying--Live!

James "Land My Plane Anywhere I Want" Inhofe, who endangered workers on a closed runway.

Scott "Screw the Courts" Walker, who first tried to lock protestors out of the Capitol Building (and ignored court orders telling him to stop), and is now ignoring orders to stop screwing around with his anti-union "law."

Rick "Medicare Fraud" Scott.

Louis "Duh..terrrr babies!" Gohmert. Fark's sake.

Rick "Frothy" Santorum (bahahahahahaaaaa!!!)

...and so many more that I just have to wonder whether they're as dumb--if not dumber--than their constituents. (What? You say I left out Caribou Barbie? Nope. Just not giving the Snowbilly any Blog time.)


With that in mind, New York Democrat Anthony Weiner has become my favorite member of Congress. To help his poor lost Republican friends to find their way through the complicated legislative process, Mr. Weiner brought a copy of "House Mouse, Senate Mouse" to work and read from it:





This guy's what a Democrat ought to be.

Pic of the Day: The Two Forts Pickens

On September 5, 1828, four men gathered at Newport, Rhode Island to review plans for several forts: General Simon Bernard, Colonel Joseph Totten, Major Samuel Babcock, and Captain William Chase, all of the Board of Engineers.

One set of plans--18 sheets worth--described Totten's design for the fort to be built on the west tip of Santa Rosa Island, guarding the entrance to Pensacola Bay from the Gulf of Mexico. Bernard was more familiar with the area. He pointed out that Pensacola's defenses were to include a second fort across the channel on Foster's Bank (Perdido Key, today). Reducing the size of the Santa Rosa Island fort without significantly weakening it would save a good bit of money that could go to building the other fort.

Both Totten and Chase wanted the big, elaborate design, but they deferred to Bernard's rank and his refusal to endorse the project. He was given time to come up with his own design.

Bernard did agree, however, that the channel fronts (at bottom in each picture) were satisfactory. Chase--the Engineer who would preside over the fort's construction--was given the go-ahead to start with those two walls.

Bernard's "streamlined" layout makes the half-bastions at the ends of the channel fronts into full bastions, shortens the north and south walls (north is to the left in both pictures), adds a pair of larger bastions at northeast and southeast, and cleans up the entire design by eliminating a lot of outerworks in the ditch (or moat).

The upper picture shows a lot of construction to the east of the fort, outside the ditch. Bernard scrubbed all of that, as well, giving the fort a leaner, cleaner layout. As it turns out, he's responsible for many of my favorite bits of architecture, such as the interiors of the northwest and southwest bastions and the curved stairs in the northeast and southeast corners of the parade. From Totten's surviving part of the project, we have the graceful 30-foot arches spanning the open casemates along the northwest and southwest walls and the impressive splayed arches in the west bastion.

I kind of wish Totten had prevailed, if only so I could explore his fort.

Most Aggravating Commercial

I'm a car guy. Love the classics--old Camaros, Mustangs, Chargers, Challengers, GTO's, Chevelles, Beetles, Microbuses, DeLoreans...which one's my favorite depends on whether there's one sitting in front of me.

Well, second-favorite. The X-11 is #1.

Anyway, there's an erectile disfunction pill commercial that bugs the living crap out of me. Our guy's driving his shiny, nicely-cared-for '69 Camaro through the desert. Car starts to overheat and steam, so he pulls into a rustic little gas station.

He goes in, buys what looks to be a 1.5-liter bottle of water from the cooler, takes a swig, and pours the rest into the hot radiator. No anti-freeze, and only the 1.5 liters, about a quart and a half, into a cooling system that takes a couple of gallons.

Didn't fix whatever was causing the overheating, either, apparently.

The voice-over calls our guy--and the viewer--part of the generation that knows how to "get things done." Really? He pops a hot radiator cap off (no rag?), pours cold water into a hot engine, doesn't try to figure out the problem. Didn't "get things done," really.

Hops back into the car, drives for hours and hours more before pulling into his 2-car driveway sometime in the evening or nighttime.

Yeah, I know, it's just a commercial; the "steam" was probably from a fire extinguisher; the manly guy with the car and erectile troubles doesn't have either one, he just got paid scale for showing up, and like that. After the shoot was done, the real owner took the car back to its garage.

But the clumsiness of the story kind of makes fun of those little pecker-pills: here's a guy who doesn't know what he's doing, possibly overheating and destroying the (expensive) engine in a rare (very expensive) car because he can't maintain it properly (wasn't that a mechanic in front of the gas station?). He's apparently also taking those pills. Did he put as much thought into using them as he did in maintaining the car?

I'm just glad I'm not the only Car Guy to be aggravated by this ad.