Reader Tips

Reader Tips 32 Comments
 

Good evening ladies and gentlemen, welcome to SDA Late Nite Radio. Tonight, for your delectation and pursuant to our Saturday night distinguished lecture, documentary & interview series, here from Trains Unlimited is their most excellent Steam Trains, II, III & IV documentary. For those of you keeping score at home, that’s the Union Pacific 3985, a four-cylinder simple articulated 4-6-6-4 Challenger type of steam locomotive owned by Union Pacific Railroad, shown in the image to the right, and which is shown in the videos, and there is a lovely twist at the end of the videos, involving the 4-8-4 UP 844. Interestingly, perhaps, the UP 3985 locomotive, which was built in 1943 by the American Locomotive Company of Schenectady, New York, is currently the largest operational steam locomotive in the world.

Your Reader Tips are, as always, welcome in the comments.

32 Replies to “Reader Tips”

  2. well Vito…..as a hoghead mesself…and since yer talkin UP i’m surprised you haven’t exhibited the ‘big boy’…
    when you think that behemoth was designed to lift say 4000 tons and nowadays that’s borscht it sure makes you wonder…

  5. Nancy Pelosi clarified, at a press conference yesterday, what she did and didn’t know. She wasn’t briefed or informed about the waterboarding, she was informed that others on her committee had been briefed about it. But she wasn’t present at those briefings, therefore she wasn’t briefed about what they were briefed on, she was simply informed about what they were briefed on; in other words, she was informed about the briefings, and was briefed about the briefings, but not briefed about the waterboarding, so she was uninfor….oh, to heck with it, let her tell it:
    Pelosi: “The point is that I wasn’t briefed, I was told — informed — that someone else had been briefed about it. I’m only speaking from my own experience, and we were told that (waterboarding) was not being used. Subsequently, the other members of the committee were informed — ”
    Reporter: “And so were YOU…”
    “No I wasn’t informed, I was informed that a briefing had taken place. Now, you have to look at what they briefed those members. I was not briefed that, I was only informed that they were briefed, but I did not get the briefing.
    This next statement best sums up the bemuddlement about what she knew about “enhanced situations” — i.e. waterboarding:
    “The committees can look into and see the timing of who knew what and when, and what the nature of the briefing was — I had not been briefed as to what they were briefed on, I was just briefed that they were informed that some of the enhanced situations were used…”
    She was briefed that they were informed, meaning, she wasn’t briefed, and was not informed.
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lYwZa8jvNp4

  6. Nancy Pelosi has fallen off the edge-a of the world, EBD.
    There’s a chick like her in the Ellery Queen novel I’m reading.

  7. Now is the time at SDA when we juxtapose!

    Edmonton Journal, May 12: “No one tells us what specialists we can or can’t see, as some American HMOs do.”

    Edmonton Journal, May 13: “The Royal Alexandra Hospital will cancel 15 per cent of elective surgeries after receiving a directive from Alberta Health Services to cut costs.”

    UPDATE:

    Edmonton Journal, May 16: “Sick kids treated in tent”

    If you were inspired by M*A*S*H to be an MD, you’re about to learn the meaning of irony.

  8. Haroon Siddiqui’s good buddies in the Tigers have committed arson at a Toronto Buddhist temple. There’s only a brief link at Kathy’s five feet of fury, but it’ll be a story to keep an eye out for tomorrow. (Especially to see which ethno-religious minority gets the MSM’s most sympathy.)

  13. Translation of Nancy Pelosi: “I was briefed, but I didn’t inhale.” “It depends on what you mean by the word informed.”

  16. “The Russians want to stake a claim to the oil rights in the Arctic Ocean while the Catlin team wants to save us from oil.”
    …-
    “The Catlin Ice Follies
    The global warmists have yet another embarrassment on their hands.
    The Catlin Arctic Survey was the brainchild of British explorer Pen Hadow who organized an expedition to trek to the North Pole to highlight how global warming was melting the Arctic ice cap. But his quest was thwarted when Mother Nature responded with fierce winds, bitter cold temperatures, and just plain lousy weather which destroyed ice measuring equipment and hampered resupply efforts, which at one point, left the team close to starvation.
    While the Hadow team was struggling on the ground, a German expedition was measuring thicker than expected second year ice from the comfort of an aircraft with advanced monitoring equipment. They reported that this second year ice was up to four meters thick, rather than the two meters they expected.
    Meanwhile, a Russian expedition simply drove to the North Pole in trucks which might be described as Humvees on steroids, with none of the discomforts the Catlin team experienced. But the Russians were more interested in oil than ice thickness. The Russians want to stake a claim to the oil rights in the Arctic Ocean while the Catlin team wants to save us from oil.
    The problems for the Catlin team began shortly after they were airlifted to a point on the ice north of Canada about 942 kilometers from the North Pole. A fierce storm arrived with high winds and cold temperatures of -40 deg C which took a toll on equipment and the team. The high tech ice measuring equipment broke down along with the data communications equipment. The three person team also suffered from the brutal conditions and one of the team members had frostbite. As a result the team only covered a total of 434 km, which is less than half way to the pole.
    Instead of measuring ice electronically, team leader Hadow had to drill holes in the ice and measure thickness with a measuring tape the old fashioned way. And instead of a large number of ice thickness measurements, the team could only drill so many holes each day.”
    http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/05/the_catlin_ice_follies.html

  17. Found: Something Narcissist O’I can’t do.
    …-
    “Obama: I can’t tell Israel not to fear Iran
    Ha’aretz”

  18. David Axelrod suggests that Obama’s dog be named “Miss California”. Interesting how fat, ugly Leftists like him feel this incessant need to keep on trashing Carrie Prejean. H-A-T-E, the fuel that keeps the Left going and going and going.

  19. Vit – The elderly Gentleman we bought our house from was a steam locomotive Engineer. I could have listened to him for hours on end. Managing a 1000 HP monster in the middle of winter on the Canadian Prairies was not for the faint of heart !!
    They sometimes derailed, they sometimes blew up and they sometimes froze up. But the Iron Horse and their Drivers moved people and supplies so that the rest of us could live the good life.
    Contrast that with the likes of a Gore or a Suzuki today, who use what others have given them to fearmonger our kids into feeling guilty about their existence on Earth. Pathetic.

  20. AA Gill is a restaurant critic.
    This is a fantastic review wherein he eviscerates, skins, chops, sears, and roasts the ecomoonbats such as Moonbiot and the manbearpiGoreacle.
    They deserve the epithet: environ-mentalists.
    2 Titbits: “They [environmentalists] are ranty, repetitive, patronising, demanding, deaf, weirdly bonkers and smelly.”
    “It was a long-built-up tolerance and immunity gleaned from the sniffily sickly business of living with the livestock that helped make the West so successful.”
    Remember when Iggy said he loved the smell of cowshi* in the morning? And the Puffin shi*.
    Enjoy.
    …-
    “The great dichotomy of our times, given that everybody knows we all agree that climate, wet fish, bin bag, hot, cold, sperm count, salty, seal puppy, environmental yadda yadda is the globe’s greatest concern, and now that even Jeremy Clarkson separates his rubbish and force-feeds the caviar scraps to his organic chickens — oh yes he does — is how come, now everyone’s on side for planet-saving, nobody wants to vote for the saviours?
    Why is the green movement unable to make any appreciable dent in a western democracy? Nobody likes politicians, but apparently we like green politicians even less. We don’t like eco-spokesmen; we don’t want to vote for them, listen to them, have dinner with them, sleep with them or use them as domestic servants. For such a universally pressing problem, how come there is no popular environmental evangelist?
    It’s not as if we’re not listening. It might have been Al Gore, but he’s now a figure of roly-poly private-jetting two-home fun, and despised in America, particularly by Democrats and people from his home state, Tennessee. Mind you, slacks, blazer, cowboy boots and four chins was never a good look.
    Over here, it might have been Jonathon Porritt, but isn’t he extinct? The truth is, environmentalists are just not attractive. They’re not winning, engaging, amusing or empathetic. They are ranty, repetitive, patronising, demanding, deaf, weirdly bonkers and smelly.
    Environmentalists are the nutters with degrees in composting who sit next to you on the bus. But that’s not their real impediment.
    The real killer thing is the schadenfreude: the naked, transparent, hand-rubbing glee with which they pass on every shame, sadness and terror. No disaster is too appalling or imminent that the green movement can’t caper and keen with a messianic glee.
    Take George Monbiot, the Malvolio of the green movement, who, as I’ve pointed out before, would be a geography teacher if it weren’t for the amazing good fortune of imminent apocalypse. Every week, he sifts the minute details of demise, like a jolly self-congratulatory Scrooge. Most of us would rather drown with the polar bears and Bangladesh than get in a lifeboat steered by Monbiot. This is a real problem. Or, rather, it’s a serious blockage on the road to solving the real problem.
    Eco-advocates are viscerally unconscionable people. The enormous, vicarious pleasure they get from frightening folk makes them repellent, and they get all hurt when we don’t thank them for it. Nobody wants to trust a future to a bunch of malcontents who plainly have so much of their self-worth and cachet invested in it all going to hell in a recycled handcart. This isn’t merely a question of presentation, or marketing, or tone, or spin, this is serious cultural blindness and childish arrogance.
    Green campaigners are a larger part of the problem than jumbo jets and cow farts, and if your children drown or die of thirst or skin cancer, well, you can just blame George Monbiot for being so crawlingly unattractive.
    Two things reminded me of this recently. One was the mathematician who, with a statistician’s sense of humour, did a bit of back-of-the-envelope adding up and worked out that, theoretically, fat people cause more pollution and warming and dead seal puppies than thin people. Well, the lip-smacking pleasure the green commentators got from that, calling loudly for punitive slimming and weighing people at airports and in supermarkets. This said with the clear blond tones that are without embarrassment or, more important, memory. Putting the overweight on public scales is but a waif’s breath away from measuring people’s noses in the street.
    The other thing was how fast, after the discovery of swine flu, they got into print to blame factory farming and the horrid abuse of animals. They were still burying children in Mexico when someone in a converted barn in Wales was thinking, “Great, this is a really timely scare to help out the English organic pork market.” There was the hanging fact that species-shifting influenzas must be a shamanistic curse for
    our abusive nature. Some greens actually believe that sort of nonsense. Others just think it’s useful guilt-mongering. Most of our familiar, communally contagious diseases came originally from farm animals — their droppings, their milk and their muscle. It was a long-built-up tolerance and immunity gleaned from the sniffily sickly business of living with the livestock that helped make the West so successful.
    There is a real irony in this swine flu coming from Mexico. When stout Cortes, with his eagle eyes and a wild surmise, came to Tenochtitlan, he found one of the most fabulous cities on earth: a metropolis of market gardens built on floating islands, bisected by canals with vast stone temples.
    So he wiped them out and renamed what was left Mexico City. A great many, perhaps 90% of post-Columbian Indians and West Indians, were killed by diseases they had no defence against, because Latin America has no indigenous domesticated quadrupeds, apart from a few spitting llamas and some guinea pigs. So, not living with the livestock let in the genocidal germs. Getting the flying pig flu back from them is a sort of humourless gotcha. Though Columbus’s crew probably brought back syphilis — “Hi, honey, I’m home; I’ve got you a little something from the New World” — some genital scholars claim that there is evidence of pre-Columbian knob rot in Kingston upon Hull. (I’m not making that up. Really, syphilitic monks in Kingston upon Hull.) Anyway, the point is that living with farm animals may save your grandchildren’s lives — unless you’re Austrian. They just always go one species too far, don’t they? The whole hog. Because, you know, the famous Lipizzaner horses are all now raddled with syphilis.”
    “Fino
    33 Charlotte Street, W1
    Bar laid out with plates for dinner and wine glasses
    AA Gill”
    urlm.in/clem

  21. …use what others have given them to fearmonger our kids into feeling guilty about their existence on Earth
    One might logically think that those that find themselves in positions of privilege might be inspired by the potential of future generations’ abilities to confront problems. Of course, my assumption here is that said people have confidence in the future and are not in the game for temporary self-aggrandizement, filling their bank accounts and a dubious place in the history books.

  23. Has anyone else phoned Shaw/Starchoice to request that FOX news not be removed from their channel lineup? I just called and was told by the customer service representative that the channel would be removed on the 19th, that there was nothing she could do about it, and that I should call back after after the 19th, at which point it would be put back in.
    I suggested that this was ridiculous, and she put me on hold; after a few minutes, she came back and said okay, it won’t be removed.
    The customer service agent was entirely friendly, but the hoopla is ridiculous.
    Anyone else have the same experience?

  24. EBD,A few years back Shaw and Rogers were both in a spot of trouble over negative biling. They would up your bill by adding channels that you did not request until you specifically asked for them to be removed. This is the same sleazy arrangement but sort of backwards. Old habits die hard.

  25. “Haiti: the land where children eat mud
    Haiti is mired in historic debt and in danger of complete collapse. It is stricken by flood and famine, and kidnap, rape and child abuse are rife. So what is the West doing to rescue the ‘nightmare republic’?”*
    …-
    “Governor General to receive Olympic flame in Greece
    Governor General Michaelle Jean will begin the process of summoning the world to the Vancouver 2010 Olympics when she picks up the flame in Greece this October.” (nnw)
    *urlm.in/clew

  26. Peter Schiff is an American financial analyst who publishes a weekly vlog on YouTube. Here is his latest.
    There was one especially profound thing he said:
    “In America we have to figure out how to turn all of our malls and shopping centers into factories.”

  27. Piper Paul; “and are not in the game for temporary self-aggrandizement, filling their bank accounts and a dubious place in the history books.”
    But, .. but .. Big Al was challenged on that by a Congress Woman (?)
    His response (paraphrase); “Ma’m, if you think that, then you don’t know me.”
    Huh !!?? He must think we we’re all born yesterday.

  29. Re the steam locomotives….
    I was awed as a child at the nearby CPR station by the roaring, clanging spectacle of a train arriving.
    Imagine my reaction to inspecting a “Yellowstone” (300 tons of 4-8-8-6) displayed in a roadside park in Procter MN (just up the hill from Duluth on #2). That 300 tons didn’t count the attached tender which was all wheels (25 tons of coal and 25,000 gals of water). (constructed 1943 retired late 50’s) The fire box was feed by an auger (stoker).
    Google Yellowstone Locomotives

  31. In comparison, the Titanic had 50,000 hp. Amazing for it’s day, 1912.

  32. BERLIN – Stéphane Dion announced at the recent Liberal convention in Vancouver that he would be staying in politics. This is a good thing because a future Liberal government will have great need of his intelligence, commitment and stubbornness in dealing with climate change.
    Theworld is in economic crisis but we cannot allow this to delay the actions urgently required to secure energy supplies and to tackle emissions and greenhouse gases.
    ROFLMA. Translate if you need to.

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