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Right Angle: Backstage

True tales of underwater adventure, 3D movies and life on the quantum level, Andrew Breitbart meets Rick Moranis, and the Mystery of the Disappearing Earpod…

True tales of underwater adventure, 3D movies and life on the quantum level, Andrew Breitbart meets Rick Moranis, and the Mystery of the Disappearing Earpod…all this and so much less on this week’s edition of Right Angle: Backstage, made possible by you, our faithful members.

39 replies on “Right Angle: Backstage”

I have an even better story about lost rings and water. I was up with a bunch of friends in the mountains of California for a weekend get away. About 15 of us were playing and boating and swimming. One of the teenage girls got out of the water and exclaimed that she had lost a ring in the water. We headed in trying to find it. The water was muddy from all of us, so no visual search was possible. I waded into a good place and standing about waist deep I made my first effort to find the ring. I bent over and swept my right hand through the mud. When I brought my hand up the ring was on my pinky finger. Honest to God truth.

I served in the Army on M60A1 tanks. They were impervious to standard RPG weapons except the tracks and the sights. I would imagine the M1 would be better. As with the M60A1, the back of the M1 tank is vulnerable. Frontal assault on the hull will not damage the M1 with an RPG (except the sights). You can disable the sighting system or the tracks, but not the hull or the turret.

Like the cavalry before them, tanks are made to move. As long as they’re moving, tanks are hard for infantry to deal w/. But if they get bogged down and can’t move/maneuver, tanks become vulnerable to infantry.

That might have been the case once but the armored combat assets of today resemble horse mounted cavalry to about the same degree that a Viking Longship resembles an aircraft carrier. The principle of projected force remains the same but the application is totally different.

Tanks are vulnerable to infantry no matter what when one infantryman with one anti-tank weapon can destroy a tank over distance in the battlespace. If the infantryman can locate the tank and bring his weapon to bear he can destroy it. It doesn’t matter if the tank is stationary and concealed in some version of ‘bogged down’ or maneuvering at its full capacity, it can still die and die as readily no matter what it’s doing.

Maneuvering or stationary, tanks are also placed in high jeopardy by the introduction of air assets with tank killing capabilities. As are any infantry assets supporting those tanks. This threat to armor applies whether the armor is ‘bogged down’ or maneuvering at maximum ability.

Armored warfare doctrine has evolved greatly over time and things just are not as simple as they used to be. Oversimplification is dangerous as the situation becomes ever more complex.

My work is pretty generous handing out vacation time so what I’ve started doing is taking Wednesdays off in the summer. And it’s great! Work a little, rest a bit, work some more, take a couple days off. I’m going to keep doing that as long as they’ll let me.

Re the “high fructose corn syrup” thing, you can thank 2 government actions for this: Price controls (minimum) for sugar (2x above world price, if I recall correctly) and agriculture subsidies for corn. Food companies which need sweetener can either pay more for sugar or pay less for corn syrup developed due to “now that we have all this corn, what do we do with it”. Once that ball was rolling, lobbying made it a self-sustaining enterprise, leading us to today.

I watched that and enjoyed it. Except that my dog kept barking at the screen every time those cats did something energetic. I think she was trying to keep them in the box, dunno, not a canine psychologist. She often barks at animals on the TV screen, kinda weird.

Jim: What do you do when you come to a yellow light?
The Group: Slow down!
Jim: Whaaaaaat … dooooooo …. youuuuuu… doooo …whennnnn …youuuuu ….cooooom…. tooooo….. aaaaaaa….. Yellllllllowwwww …..Liiiiiiiight?
Best gag ever filmed, I think.

I’ll mention here that Christopher Carley the young actor who plays the priest in Gran Torino is my first cousin once removed, his mother is my first cousin.

I’ve been watching 50 year old Colombo episodes and couldn’t help but notice that the actors such as frequent bad guy Robert Culp are all matchstick thin with a slight bulge for a head.

Regarding Customer Service – I have a story that will shock and amaze.
My car was due a renewal of its registration here in the Commonwealth of VA. Years ago the VA DMV updated its web site to handle this and quite a few other transactions without having to go to an office. I logged in to pay my 4 schillings, and I see a notification stating that I can’t do this online this time. I have to come to an office.
SHUDDER
Why? Was the first question to come up. As I perused the site, I saw a bright pink bar that said “you have notifications”. With trepidation, I clicked on the bar.
What I found shocked and concerned me greatly.
My Driver’s License had been suspended.
It turns out that when my daughter moved to NC, and we dutifully changed her insurance agent to one in NC, I did not inform VA DMV that the car had left the state. Figured that paperwork would catch up. It didn’t. My fault.
So when the insurance got dropped on this vehicle, as far as they were concerned I had an uninsured vehicle. They send me a letter. I didn’t open it. Letter from a government agency, no thanks. OOPS!
There was likely a fine involved – Damn!
So, further perusing the VA DMV Site I see that one can make an appointment at my local office. So I made the appointment for 845. I took the morning off because it’s DMV and this could take a while to sort out and I still have to renew a registration.
I got there at 815 for my appointment, Kindle in hand expecting a long wait.
I had not even opened my Kindle, when my number was called. 5 minutes later I was out the door, DL restored, renewed registration in hand, fine waived. I left before my appointment time!
The lady at the counter actually smiled (this is DMV remember) and waived the fine just because she could and the car had always been insured.
It was as near as I can state, an almost pleasant experience.
If you have to go to the DMV, see if yours goes by appointments.
The guy who came in as I did and did not have an appointment was still sitting in his seat as I left.

I tried to listen to NPR for years in order to see if I was suffering from too much confirmation bias, to see if anything from that side made perfect sense, and because they would frequently have something of human interest that touched my desire for information or my empathetic streak. I learned the different ratios of tar to gravel in the roads of the cold weather states compared to the warm from NPR. I had to give up. I found myself screaming at the radio too many mornings.

That’s them. Tom (RIP) and Ray Magliozzi. Click and Clack the Tappet brothers. Fun show. Two MIT grads talking about cars along with a weekly puzzler.

So ask a millennial what a tappet is, then sit back and grab the popcorn. Works with “lifter” and “push rod” too.
Jocularity!

Wait a second … I thought “tappet” was a kind of button. As in …
“If you need something, see that button? Yeah, just tappet.”

Actually the realm that this movie is suppose to take place in is from a comic book called the Micronauts. Disney and Marvel had to invent the quantum realm, because Hasbro owns the rights to the Micronauts.

I have not listened to the 2/21 Backstage. The following is off topic. WSJ headline courtesy of “Drudge”: “Wall Street Backs New Class of Psychedelic DrugsPsychedelic-therapy industry gets a reality trip as investors focus on treatments costing less time and money” I have not read the WSJ article either. First they came to screw us with the Covid stab and now they come to are freak us out with mind-altering drugs.

Bill’s and Steve’s reactions to Scott throwing topics out there is why I agree with Bill’s position on keeping your topics tight until the episode.
You are going to lose out on the spontaneity of the comments.

I’m with you on that and …

For a brief while they were just doing the Backstage and then cutting segments out of it to make Right Angle releases. Which means that if you saw Backstage you saw the whole week’s worth of Right Angle too.

I’m behind these guys 100%, whatever they do and however they decide to do it. But doing it that way did take some of the fun out of looking for a new Right Angle to drop.

The problem before that was the Right Angle videos were being filmed after the Backstage show ended after already being discussed. The second discussions included almost none of the passion and authentic reactions the Backstage video had. I like the current setup better now.

Yeah, me too with the current setup. We get our backstage and then the RA’s are fleshed out and released during the week.

If the device is turned off, the “find my” app can’t see it.

Once I had that set up, my phone thought that I had left my tablet behind as I had turned it off.

You can work on air at depths to 200 feet on air but only have a couple of minutes of bottom time. A diver on a job I was on got the dive Supv. to agree to this. The diver made to depth quickly but could no longer tell left from right so the Supv. told the diver he was going to switch him to mixed gas what I remember mostly was the diver begging by saying “Please don’t put me on gas” while everyone in the dive shack was laughing.

..Oh yeah, one more thing. Great show! I (this looser, lol), can’t wait for the weeks episodes.

Rick Moranis stopped acting to care for his daughters; because he wife passed and he found himself a single dad!
A great example of doing the right thing.

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