In honor of the Feast of St. Grouse, here’s a link to an ebook version of J.K. Stanford’s hilarious The Twelfth and After.

Wikipedia model article.

The boys from Top Gear get away with taking hypercars through little tiny streets in Italian cities for laughs, but I suspect they measure first. This guy did not.

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NY Post story.

He needed a wire leader and plenty of line.

This video is an example of being too close to a bull moose and how quickly they can decide to charge on you.

It is from Clear Creek County. The individual just by chance came upon the bull walking along a willow bottom heading towards a lake. pic.twitter.com/Z2usuHpPit

— CPW NE Region (@CPW_NE) August 8, 2021

HT: Vanderleun.

Michael S. Malone addresses the great disaster of our times: Free enterprise capitalism metastasizing into Corporate Enforcer of Correct Speech and Thought and China Ally.

You don’t have to be very old to remember when Silicon Valley represented the shiny technological future.

It was the land of brilliant entrepreneurs starting fast-moving new companies. An enclave of perpetual optimism, where the brightest young people went to change the world — and got very rich in the process. A place that didn’t grow old, but revised itself every decade into something perpetually exciting and new.

But today, to many Americans, Silicon Valley has become the locus of everything wrong with a technological revolution that has grown dark and totalitarian. It is the heartland of cancel culture, it’s giant social networking companies censoring free speech. It uses its wealth to influence elections. And its companies are in bed with some of the worst regimes on the planet. Congress and the Federal Communications Commission are looking at ways to break up the biggest Valley companies. Polls show that a majority of Americans no longer trust Big Tech. And surveys have revealed that a sizable number of Valley workers can’t wait to leave.

What happened? How did it all turn so bad so quickly? …

Freeware may be the most pernicious invention of the last few decades. You don’t buy tech anymore; you rent, you subscribe and, most of all, you get it for free. How can you say no, especially if you’re an adolescent? And all you have to give up is every bit of information about your life so that it can be sold around the world.

You no longer own your own data. That may not seem like a big deal now, but we are rushing towards a world of tight social control. The single most soul-rotting characteristic of modern Silicon Valley is freeware. It has granted companies absolute cultural, financial and political power, the kind that no company before them has ever known. And that power has corrupted these companies absolutely. …

Besides freeware, the other great discovery of the last 20 years has been that if you give consumers a platform and the tools to create their own product, they will happily become your unpaid slaves and not only surrender their personal data but also spend thousands of hours making you rich. And because of that, you don’t have to grab increments of market share from your competitors. Instead, you need to scale to an almost unimaginable population of users/slaves who become so committed that it is almost impossible for them to escape. After that, you can even control their words and actions — an opportunity too great to pass up.

RTWT

“Pendennis, sir,” he said, “your idleness is incorrigible and your stupidity beyond example. You are a disgrace to your school, and to your family, and I have no doubt will prove so in after-life to your country. If that vice, sir, which is described to us as the root of all evil, be really what moralists have represented (and I have no doubt of the correctness of their opinion), for what a prodigious quantity of future crime and wickedness are you, unhappy boy, laying the seed! Miserable trifler! A boy who construes δε and, instead of δε but, at sixteen years of age is guilty not merely of folly, and ignorance, and dullness inconceivable, but of crime, of deadly crime, of filial ingratitude, which I tremble to contemplate. A boy, sir, who does not learn his Greek play cheats the parent who spends money for his education. A boy who cheats his parent is not very far from robbing or forging upon his neighbour. A man who forges on his neighbour pays the penalty of his crime at the gallows. And it is not such a one that I pity (for he will be deservedly cut off), but his maddened and heart-broken parents, who are driven to a premature grave by his crimes, or, if they live, drag on a wretched and dishonoured old age.

–William Makepeace Thackeray, The History of Pendennis, 1848-1850.

HT: Bernie Sanders (not the communist one).

Conrad Wise Chapman, “Submarine Torpedo Boat H.L.Hunley, Dec. 6,1863, American Civil War Museum, Richmond.

The Civil War Picket reports that scientists at a Clemson University Conservation Center have learned a great deal about the clothing and personal effects of Captain George E. Dixon and the rest of the 8-man crew of the C.S.S. Hunley. Dixon was evidently well-to-do and a sharp dresser, wearing a cashmere coat on that fatal evening.

On Feb. 17, 1864, H.L. Hunley made history by becoming the first submarine to sink an enemy warship. The 40-foot iron vessel — bullets pinging off its iron exterior — planted a torpedo in the hull of the Union ship USS Housatonic, setting off a charge that sent the Federal vessel and five crew members to the sandy bottom within minutes.

The Hunley disappeared beneath the waves and entered the realm of legend. To this day, historians, scientists and others debate what caused it to end up on the ocean floor. Discovered a few miles off Charleston in 1995, and raised in 2000, the Hunley is being conserved at Clemson University’s Warren Lasch Conservation Center in North Charleston.

Experts have been analyzing the incredible array of artifacts found inside the submarine and are now working on a volume about the crew, including personal effects such as clothing, buttons and shoes. They hope to have the volume, which they are preparing for the U.S. Navy, finished later this year.

“The Hunley as a crew did not have a set uniform at all. They wore what they were comfortable or what they were used to,” said Nick DeLong, maritime archaeologist at the center. Six of the eight wore something that was part of a military uniform.

RTWT

This is the BEST GOP ad I have seen this cycle.

Just perfect.

pic.twitter.com/c08jc92Xyc

— Benny (@bennyjohnson) July 29, 2021

Teddy Daniels is running for Congress from Pennsylvania’s 8th Congressional District.

The Gold Penny or Mancus of 30 Pence, was struck during the time of Ecgberht, King of the West Saxons between 802 and 839.

Evening Standard:

An Anglo-Saxon coin discovered by a metal detectorist is set to fetch up to £200,000 [$277,791.37] at auction.

It was unearthed by a metal detectorist at West Dean, on the Wiltshire and Hampshire border, in March 2020.

Experts say it is the only late Anglo-Saxon gold coin in private hands, with eight other specimens held in institutions – seven at the British museum.

The coin, which weighs 4.82g, is expected to fetch between £150,000 and £200,000 at a sale of coins and historical medals by auctioneers Dix Noonan Webb on September 8.

This coin probably represents a mancus, a gold denomination that first appeared in central and northern Italy, but was current in England already before the year 800.

RTWT