SATURDAY NIGHT PHIL COLLINS, GREEN DAY.

Phil Collins with Don't lose my number, a hit from his third solo album No Jacket Required (1985). Start at the 1:32 mark to skip the nonsense.





IIRC the guy was never meant to sing. He was Genesis' drummer, but after Peter Gabriel left the band following The Lamb lies down on Broadway (and pissing of his buddies with his theatrical antics), they couldn't find a lead vocalist and in the end Collins stepped in.



Green Day with When I come around. Album Dookie (1994).





Dookie refers to what the band members - Billie Joe Armstrong (singer/guitarist), Mike Dirnt (bassist), and Tré Cool (drummer) - call 'liquid dookie', which is how they describe their diarrhea after eating bad food on tour.


Dobranoc.


MFBB.

THURSDAY NIGHT VIDEO DUMP.

In Amsterdam, a follower of the prophet went Kristallnight on a Jewish restaurant. According to Selçuk Öztürk, the bearded chap being interviewed right at the beginning, it's all Trump's fault. A couple of years ago, Öztürk was thrown out of the PvdA, one of the Dutch socialist parties, and started his own muslim party, 'Denk'. On the programme are niceties such as that The Netherlands should offer schoolchildren the choice to opt for Turkish or Arabic as second language, that the government should support islamic education, and that The Netherlands should build a dedicated museum someplace in which its past as a slaveholding nation should be highlighted.





Wonderful cultural enrichment by a young Paleostinian dude. What's amazing - and outrageous - is the time it took the cops to take action against this scumbag.


In Mexico, the police chief of Cuauhtemoc, Edgar Perez de Peña, was murdered in a local restaurant by a cartel member. Prayers are asked for Mr Perez de Peña and his relatives.





In (Western) Europe, leftists and greens and actually most of the political establishment want to step up immigration of blokes like that Paleostinian thug even more, because diversity! Multiculturalism!

In the US, their ideological brethren want to stop building a wall that would keep murderous subhumans like that killer out.

It has been said a million times before on this site: Leftism is a mental disorder.


MFBB.

WITH PRESIDENT TRUMP, EVERY WEEK HAS AT LEAST ONE SANTA CLAUS DAY.

Okay, almost every week. On OCT 23, 1995, the US Congress passed the Jerusalem Embassy Act, meant to initiate and fund the relocation of the American Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. The ultimate date for this move was set for May 31, 1999.

On DEC 6, 2017, President Trump finally announced that he would implement the law. Henceforth, the United States of America recognizes Jerusalem as the Capital of Israel. Via FOX News:





Presidents Clinton, Bush and Obama consistenly waived their right to do what Donald Trump did on the grounds that implementing the law would harm national security interests - read, they were afraid of alienating islam.

Today, President Trump made good on yet another one of his campaign promises and demonstrated to the World how one treats muslims - by playing hardball and showing sheer and utter contempt for their 'sensitivities'. If (many) more politicians had one tenth of the current US President's guts, this awful abomination that is called 'islam', this global prison of body and mind for 1.6 billion imbecile and backward followers, this gruesome totalitarian ideology that corrupts, hurts and holds back Man... would not be able to be such a terrible burden for humanity. Islam only deserves scorn and contempt. Today's move is a huge step in the right direction.

If I may offer one good piece of advice: reasonable, sensible and decent people the world over, especially Westerners and Jews, should stay on high alert to meet any threat emanating from the followers of the so-called prophet with deadly force.



MFBB.

SUNDAY NIGHT ART SNACK: JACK VETTRIANO AND JEFF HEIN.

A work by Jack Vettriano from his Bluebird series, though I haven't been able yet to find out its title. Anyone know it, please drop a line.





This Scottish painter (born 1951 in Saint Andrews, Fife) has got his critics, but I guess they don't give you an OBE for nothing.



Then Girl in Orange by Jeffrey Hein.





Jeff Hein is a relatively young (b. 1974, New Windsor, NY) very promising artist. Check out his site here.



Nite. Have a good start of the week.


MFBB.

SATURDAY NIGHT CARLY SIMON, PEARL JAM.

Carly Simon with You're so vain. Album No Secrets (1972).





Two years ago Simon revealed the name of one guy, but only the one featuring in the second verse:


"You had me several years ago
When I was still quite naive
Well, you said that we made such a pretty pair
And that you would never leave
But you gave away the things you loved
And one of them was me
I had some dreams they were clouds in my coffee
Clouds in my coffee, and"


That would have been Warren Beatty. It's possible. I once read somewhere that he scr*wed close to 13,000 women. How his d*ck never felt off from a bazillion venereal diseases is beyond me.



Pearl Jam with Not for you. From the 1994 album Vitalogy.





Some stills, all of them courtesy NorthSouth of course:















Breathtaking! But if you feel tempted to go there yourself, as I do, be sure to go in summer. The pics above were shot in June. Guess it's a bit less hospitable in December.

But one day I gotta go there. That's for sure.


MFBB.

SEBELIUS, AXELROD SUDDENLY DISCOVERING BILL CLINTON IS A SEXUAL PREDATOR.

Via Mark Steyn, Kathleen Death Panel Sebelius has a change of heart re the Democratic demi gods (until yesterday). Which is weird, cause I never suspected Sebelius actually had a heart:





Damn you Sebelius and Axelrod! Just when one would be hoping for HRC to announce her bid for President in 2020, the democraps turn on her and her hubby!



MFBB.

OUTLAW MIKE'S GOOD READS: THE JACK REACHER SERIES.

I'd like it to happen more often but who am I to complain.

I'm talking about the Aha-Erlebnis of coming across unputdownables. I've always been an avid reader and as such I know that the category in question is pathetically outweighed by the rank and file in Bookland. I can sympathize with authors, mind you. There's TONS of good books out there that are a joy to behold but often a well-written book does not digest easily. I'm nearing the end of Hornfischer's The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors and while it's a superb read I've advanced thru it at a leisurely pace. At age 52, I'm as clueless as I was at 12 at what exactly it is that electrifies a writer's pen in such a way that stories blossom that get you hooked like nothing else. What's their secret.

And so, unputdownables being relatively rare, on average I come across one only once a year. If memory serves, in 1983 it was One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, for instance. Or in 1997, Desperation, by Stephen King. 2012, The Killer Angels by Jeff Shaara.

But 2016 was different. Dunno why, cause normally I'm more of a sci-fi, horror, or historical fiction fan, but in 2016 I gave the crime thriller Without Fail by Lee Child a shot. And boy that was the start of a rollercoaster which by the end of the year had seen me through the entire series:





The protagonist in Child's books is Jack Reacher, an ex MP who left the US Army at age 36 and who roams the continental USA on foot, by bus or hitching rides. In doing so, he comes across a kaleidoscope of criminal cases, often illustrating extreme human depravity, which require his intervention.

There's no telling how it will work out for you if after lecture of this here humble blogpost you give a Jack Reacher novel a try, but for me it was like grabbing a tiger by the tail and being unable to let go. I know I have devoured masses of Stephen King and Dean Koontz novels, the Dan Brown books were/are excellent, Mo Hayder's got some irresistible pageturners (tip: Pig Island), but Lee Child's Jack Reacher is a class of its own. There are those snobs who say Child's a commercial writer. That's bool. I don't care to what extent an author uses a trickbag to generate sales. What matters to me is do I get hooked or not? Once upon a time, as an adolescent I chewed my way through La Peste by Albert Camus. It was atrocious. Same for Ivan Turgenev's Fathers and Sons. Or Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea. OK, that's perhaps a tad unfair - but reading them through to the end required a huge effort. Camus bagged a Nobel Prize for Literature. I guess Lee Child never will. But trust me, if you were to be cast on an uninhabited island you'd be MUCH better off with Gone Tomorrow than La Peste.

Okay, enough talking. You can start with this one, 61 Hours. It will lead you nicely thru to Worth Dying For. From there it's but a short step to A Wanted Man. And bingo, off you go!





If you think you have even less time than ole Outlaw and you're looking for just one title, try Make Me. The worst in the series? There's no really bad ones, but Nothing to Lose came closest to boring me.


OK. Now get started.


MFBB.

SNC'S DREAM CHASER: SUCCESSFUL FREE FLIGHT TEST

The Dream Chaser is being developed by Sierra Nevada Corporation (SNC) Space Systems as a reusable automated cargo or passenger spaceplane. The cargo variant is meant to resupply the International Space Station with both pressurized and unpressurized cargo. The passenger variant will carry between 2 and 7 people to the ISS (or another space station in LEO). It will launch vertically on top of an Atlas V, Falcon Heavy or Ariane V rocket.


On NOV 11, it made a successful free flight test:





Here's a video simulating the Dream Chaser carrying crew to the ISS:








With its lifting body design it looks an awful lot like the Hermes, the ESA's cancelled project of a light shuttle system (which was meant to be carried to space on top of an Ariane rocket):




The nose seems to be modelled after the nose of the MiG 105.


MFBB.

BRUSSELS: MUSLIM SCUM INCREASINGLY CHALLENGING POLICE.

Last weekend it was hundreds of 'youths', read Moroccan 15-30 year olds, who ran amok in central Brussels after Morocco had been qualified for the World Soccer Championship in the Morocco-Ivory Coast match.

The riots then resulted in torched cars, busted up shops, destroyed traffic infrastructure, and 22 police officers wounded.

Yesterday there were again riots, near the Muntplein, not far from the earlier, ah, 'disturbances'. On these images, you can actually see police withdraw.





Bodes well for the future.



MFBB.

THE LEDUC 0.10 AND 0.22 RAMJET-POWERED PLANES.

I actually wanted to write about the appalling violence of our muslim friends in Brussels this weekend (22 police officers wounded, cars torched, windows smashed) and about the dhimmi Mass in Oostnieuwkerke (West Flanders) for Ann-Laure Decadt, the 31-year old mother of two who was murdered in NYC by an Uzbek muslim on 31 October.

Crucial info I learned on both events however, a.) that police was forbidden to intervene because engaging the Moroccans "would only make it worse" and b.) not one of the 1,700 participants for the funeral of Mrs. Decadt dared to use the dreaded JIM acronym ergo she died because of "senseless violence"...

... made me so sick I couldn't go on.

So it's gonna be a topic of an altogether different nature, the Leduc planes with their ramjets.


A ramjet aka athodyd for nerds (athodyd = aero thermodynamic duct), is jet engine that uses the engine's forward motion to compress incoming air, thus elminating the need for an axial compressor. It follows that at takeoff, ramjets do not produce thrust since the plane stands still, so that the plane either has to be carried in the air by a mother plane or else use booster rockets to acquire the minimum speed for the ramjet to start working. Ramjets function best at around Mach 3 (2,300 mph or 3,700 km/h), and can propel planes to speeds of up to Mach 6 (4,600 mph; 7,400 km/h).





So not only is there no compressor, but it follows there's no turbine either, because it's raison d'être is precisely to propel the compressor. In fact, theoretically you can look straight through a ramjet!


The concept is from French inventor André Lorin, who patented the design in 1913 already. Of course, lack of proper materials plus the fact that aerodynamics was a field in its infancy prevented him from building a ramjet.

But 25 years later René Leduc designed such a plane. Building started at the Breguet Aviation factory in 1938, but due to the war, during which the French were able to hide the project from the Germans, it was only completed in 1947. The Leduc 0.10 featured a double-walled fuselage, with the pilot controlling the plane from within the inner shell. The thin wings nevertheless held 1,000 litres of fuel. The carriage could only come out at landing.


Here's the Leduc 010, which had to be carried in the air first:





And this is the Leduc 0.22, which could take off under its own power:





A short video, sorry, but it's entirely in Fwench:






And yes, the Lockheed SR71 Blackbird is the best known example of a plane powered by ramjets.


Nite.



MFBB.

ARMISTICE DAY 2017.

One Sunday last June, I decided to go for a walk with our son. I'm a big fan of the Ardennes, but this time for some reason I thought I'd venture westwards instead - towards Heuvelland, a hilly area in the south of the province of West Flanders.

The region is characterized by a number of low hills, of which the highest, the Kemmelberg, reaches a modest 156 meters.

During World War I it was a heavily contested feature.


This is what the Kemmelberg looks like today (view from the West):





This is what it looked like in 1918:





Near the summit, there's a Monument commemmorating the French soldiers who fell defending this hill:





When descending the road leading west from the monument, you come across an ossuary containing the remains of 5294 French soldiers, of which only 57 were ever identified:





I couldn't help but think of the contrast of our overjoyed boy, descending the sun-soaked western slopes, and the desperate troops who a hundred years ago clung to Kemmelberg in torrents of both water and steel.



After we came back in the village of Kemmel, to the east of the hill, I drove a couple of kilometers eastwards yet, where I knew there was huge man-made crater... one of those created when English mines ripped the Earth's innards out on June 7, 1917. Here, Canadians and British had for more than a year been digging a tunnel of 521m, at the end of which they placed 41314 kg of ammonal. The explosion on 7 June 1917 was one of 19 along the front in Flanders, meant to demolish the German frontlines. On this very spot, near the village of Wijtschate, was placed the largest of the mines, and the explosion caused a crater 27m deep with a diameter of 129m. It is said that the detonations of the 19 charges could be heard across the Channel. Not all exploded though...


... in total, 24 mines had been placed...

One, the Germans managed to defuse.

Another one blew up in 1955 following a lighting strike.

In 2017, three mines are still lurking underground, like apocalyptic beasts patiently waiting to roar their ugly heads.


This is what the crater, locally known as the Spanbroekmolenkrater, looks like today:





Anglosaxon literature will more often refer to it as the Pool of Peace, because in the century since it has been filling with water, creating a pool 12m deep and 76m across. It is a War Memorial, still the property of Talbot House (Toc H) in Poperinge, for which the site was purchased in the 1920s by Lord Wakefield.

While I knew about the crater, I knew not of Lone Tree Cemetery.

I noticed a sign pointing to it when we had walked around the 'Pool of Peace' in a clockwise manner.

It is easy to miss, since it is so small and behind a farm, the buildings of which obscure it partly. This is Lone Tree Cemetery:





It appeared that the dead buried here were mostly from the Royal Irish Rifles 36th Ulster Division.


I noticed this grave in particular, because there was a tag attached to it:





The final resting place, "In Flanders' Fields", of Cpl. Hugh Spence, 12th Battalion Royal Irish Rifles.

He fell on June 7, 1917...





... the very day that the mine buried a mere 50 meters away exploded.

Now, it is known that the mine did not explode on the scheduled time. It seems there was a lapse of 15 seconds. It also seems that the British soldiers, anticipating the explosions as they were also the starting shot for an offensive meant to capture Messines Ridge, leapt to their feet, thinking the mine had been a dud. It is said that some even advanced.

And then the mine blew up anyway.

Was Cpl. Hugh Spence a victim of the explosion? Or did he perish while fighting the Germans later on that day?

I was unable to find out what happened. A quick search got me some meagre info dealing with 36th Ulster division personnel, among them Hugh Spence:

"Rifleman Hugh Spence, 12/6848, 12th Battalion Royal Irish Rifles, Son of Hugh and Elizabeth Spence nee McCormack, Coolkenny, Ballycastle, Co Antrim. Aprox. 19 years of age, deceased is buried in Lone Tree Cemetery, France [sic]. (Image No.7)"

Ballycastle is in County Antrim, on Ulster's northern coast. I remembered we had spent a glorious day there in summer 2011, when we visited the two top attractions nearby, Giant's Causeway and the Carrick-a-rede rope bridge. This is a photo I took then of that magnificent shore:





And I remembered how proud we were of our boy, who, aged 4 at that time, crossed the rope bridge as if he was strolling in our living room. Me, it gave me the jeevers.


A simple tag with a photo and a name pounded home how precious and yet how volatile a human life is. While life isn't easy for the grand majority of us, basically most of us today enjoy priviliges unknown to previous generations. On a fateful day somewhere in the middle of World War One a young man by the name of Hugh Spence was called upon to do his duty - liberate Western Europe from the German invaders. It does not matter whether the mine killed him or the Kaiser's troops - he died liberating my country.

And because of his sacrifice, and the sacrifice of his comrades, a century later our family was able to visit his country - in far more enjoyable circumstances.

I am grateful.


Cpl. Hugh Spence, of the 12th Battalion, Royal Irish Rifles, 36th Ulster Division... thank you. RIP. God Bless.



MFBB.

SATURDAY NIGHT TODD RUNDGREN, MICHAEL MC DONALD.

Todd Rundgren with I saw the Light. From the 1972 double album Something/Anything?, which he recorded partly at home. Multi-instrumentalist Rundgren also used a Putney VCS3 synthesizer, a portable coffer-like analog device favoured by Jean-Michel Jarre, King Crimson, Klaus Schulze, Roger Waters, Brian Eno and other illustrious names.





Hat tip OutlawDaughter. Btw, she's 16. Making daddy proud!



Michael McDonald with I keep forgettin'. From his 1982 debut solo album If that's what it takes.





Just like now and then a Black band will make rock music with balls, think Living Colour, now and then a White dude will make awesome soul.



Slaap wel. Thx for staying tuned, I hope I can resume 'normal' operations in a month or so.



MFBB.

BERLIN: ISLAM-THEMED PLAYGROUND.

Once again sorry for the very light blogging. Last summer, my main supplier went bust. Or as good as. Production was erratic from June to mid-September, and after that stopped entirely. In August, I was scrambling to find alternatives, and I found them, but deliveries of the new brands will only start in earnest next week - in other words three months later. The reason is precisely the dire situation my main supplier finds itself in, because as a result the competitors had to suddenly cope with an increased demand, resulting in longer delivery times. Since early September my company basically has had no income to speak of, and it's high time we resume normal operations. Just staying somewhat afloat financially consumes all my energy.

Anyway, thought I'd share this video with you, via Dutch pundit site GeenStijl. It's about a islam-themed playground in Berlin.





There's tons of news in my own country, very little of it good. But right now I'm too f*cked up to write decent posts.


Nite. Have a nice weekend.



MFBB.

SATURDAY NIGHT THE CURE, SOUL ASYLUM.

The Cure with Why can't I be you? Album Kiss me, Kiss me, Kiss me (1987).





Would you believe they've been around since 1976???




Soul Asylum with Runaway Train. Album Grave Dancers Union (1992).







Alternative rock band formed in 1981, from Minneapolis, Minnesota. The first two years of their existence they were known as Loud Fast Rules. Frontman is Dave Pirner. SA have been called grunge precursors.



Slaap wel. Sorry for the light blogging, the company is going through an extremely difficult time and consumes almost all of my energy.



MFBB.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY HILLARY!!!

LMAO + ROFL + PIMP etc




MFBB.

SATURDAY NIGHT JAPAN, DOUBLE.

Japan with Quiet Life. From the 1979 album with the same name.





UK New wave band, formed in 1974 in Catford, SE London. Singer/guitarist David Sylvian and drummer Steve Jansen are actually brothers, both born Batt.




Double with The Captain of her Heart. From the 1985 album Blue.





Swiss (yeah, SWISS) pop duo consisting of Kurt Maloo (vocals, guitar) and Felix Haug (drums, keyboards).



Nite.



MFBB.