Digital Commoner

Monthly check reveals a new layout, which in some ways is not as clear as previous and a good deal slower and so I don't dwell as long as I might. Perhaps inevitably, it looks like a reasonable guide as to who might be gearing up for prolonged conflicts: the bulk of downloads in the US scattered among Silicon Valley and Washington DC, a number in both China and Israel and even one in Zaoprizhzhia. Besides being one of the hardest towns to spell, it's also on a frontline and somewhere apparently that is more interested in the notion of a self-launching boat than I am presently. This is unsurprising in view of the fact that theoretically it could be launched from a covert location on land to find the sea itself and go on to do whatever it was designed for: which I fear won't be childrens' birthday parties.

But the DARPA Lift 4 challenge just wound up and the sort of thing I'd have been up for sooner in life; but the whole idea of the public coming up with military solutions is relatively new in the US and non-existent in the UK, each having been borne of a patriarchal society in which you're not expected to come up with ideas unless you're on the payroll.

To qualify you had to be native to the US, which led to the bizarre conclusion that the winner of the challenge would be Canadian, but referred to by DARPA as a US entry viz. Avidrone. The aim of the challenge was to get a drone to lift four times its own weight and haul it over five miles (or it may have been minutes). To put it into context, DJI's agricultural drones used for spraying ~ which US farmers are crying out for ~ can lift just half of their own weight. Difference being, they can do so for much, much longer.

Disappointingly, although the top three entries from some eighty-odd got close, no one hit the 4:1 mark and of those that did, first and third were conventional helis. This is astonishing, not least because (a) they've always given away 20% efficiency to offsetting torque with a tail-rotor and (b) the winners specialise in dual-rotor types like the Chinook that do not suffer in the same way. I may mail them to ask why, but probably won't so you'll have to do it yourself.

What was good to see was that torque-less systems like that of the Fairey Gyrodyne appear to have been in the ascendant; although clearly not ascendant enough on the day. I've a couple of ideas up my sleeve for improving the efficiency of a single rotor that too is torque-less and that might best that magic ratio, but if I do so at all it will be via uploads to the Digital Commons. Then again there's a guy in the Lake District with a set of 23-foot gyroplane rotors for sale, which is quite the sort of thing I'd happily waste my money on.

The interest in replacing pin- and pass-codes with faces you might recognise (and others may not) appears to be gaining traction because as Victor Hugo suggested, there's no stopping an idea whose time has come. The ongoing interest in a drone that can lift an upright operator stood in a minimal phone-box eludes me however.

RV, US, UK.

Each special in their own way, North America's view of expansive living and another from the North of England with the expectation of a life lived with respect to its heritage viz. an ex-Army Foden to which a freight-wagon is appended.

Big Day Out: Beamish Museum of the North

You're almost certainly in the Northeast to visit the old seminary at Ushaw I guess, or the ancestral home of George Washington in the eponymous village it occupied. Consider if you would though a visit to a 'living museum' that has been expanded greatly since my first visit?

The idea for a living museum derived from a man in Scandinavia who realised that the buildings and artefacts of yesteryear were disappearing, along with the skills involved in their manufacture and use. He thus set about recreating villages as they once would have been, which is largely what they've done at Beamish. The idea has spread to the Black Country besides the ironworks in Shropshire, but this was likely the first on this scale.

So sit back, relax and let Colin do the talking.

First up, a steam hammer for pounding red-hot lumps of iron into the shape you'd dreamt of. The guide felt the nearest end did the pounding, but I suggested he was wrong and that those grooves were likely for rings to seal the piston, and the other end had a form of bracket that might be used to replace the hammer-head. They did let me back in later after negotiations withe the management, however:

Here they have re-created the safety-lamps used by the miners prior a twelve-hour shift. They were well paid, as you'd expect for squeezing through seams of coal just 18" deep (although 16" was permissible in Wales). In the adit mine you are able to visit, eighty-eight miners died when one of them unscrewed the bottom of his lamp in order to light a pipe. Universally unpopular afterward, it mattered less as he was dead too:

The engineering shed is worth a glimpse as it contains a number of interesting locos, like this one with a vertical boiler that they called 'the coffee-pot':

And you don't get a better view of a saddle-tank than this, nowadays. You'd only a choice to stash water in a tank behind the cab, or else in a 'tender' hauled behind. This was an innovative alternative, though harder to build and uglier too, some may say. Note the leaf-springs, in contrast the simplest possible means of suspension:

I queued for a visit to the coal-mine as hinted at above, and here ChatGPT helped in rendering an image of me as I might appear after emerging from twelve hours down the pit. Coal-miners worked six days including Saturday, got hammered in the pub afterward and went to church Sunday; to rinse and repeat until an early death. Nor would they get to wear a polo-shirt:

There were many makers of bricks in those days, and here are just a fraction:

To create the museum involved the recreation of any number of buildings, piece by piece, rather than have them demolished and forgotten for good. One example of just how well this has been done at the museum is the school seen here:

I like the names they'd not hold back from giving their products in times past, like the machine seen here at the bakery that would go on to get its own Marvel series:

Among the many vehicles restored to perfection at the museum are this one at the bicycle repair-shop. They were known as 'quadricycles' and pre-dated automobiles. to the extent Ford himself had a hand in their development. I think they'd go down a storm if electrified nowadays:

In the park, besides a band-stand and live music of the era there is this magnificent howitzer of World War One vintage. I was anxious for a moment as I couldn't spot a recoil mechanism, but if you look closely you can see the rails that the carriage will have slid backwards along. Whether this would be sprung or elasticated with bungee cords was unclear, but I was able to get over it once given an ice-cream:

Sheffield was among the last city to abandon trams back in 1960, Glasgow following two years later. The council in Sheffield is known for stupid decisions, one of which was to chop down the trees it was famous for not long after I went to the university there. I wrote them to say they were stupid, and stupidly they never replied:

I feature this exhibit here from the 1950s housing section, because I realised we'd had it in the family home for years not long after, though in a lighter shade. Called Rosebud, I'll have visions of it in a snow-globe on my death-bed:

Doing the loop of the museum are a range of public transports that include the bus seen here that would be known as a 'charabanc' and especially popular for tours of the countryside during summer-times in England. Here you can sit in it wearing a Panama hat and imagining that at some stage the vicar will be murdered:

The cost of entry is currently £35. It sounds a lot, but then it's a Disneyland for the demented besides fun for all the family.

Monday Mourning

There are days when, without wanting to do anything much about it, I can't see any point in living; to sleep for the best part of twenty hours and feel as bears must emerging from caves in Spring. Today I emerge nearer noon than when I first woke, catching an extract from Hiroshima 08:15 on the radio. This first-hand account is well worth listening to if you're having a bad day, incidentally, but I go on to watch a Financial Times vid on the 'Tube as well.

I do this largely in the hope that future historians of the diarised past will debate if 'the Tube' refers to London's Underground instead of a long-dead streaming service now that it's done telepathically? But the video documentary, which I feel we should call a 'vocumentary' but sadly don't, is about a collapse in worldwide fertility rates, which the man on the telly attributes to the introduction of smartphones circa 2005 and the lives (or lack of) that came with it.

I say this because none of the reasons given for a collapse in coupling, physically or as a way of life, were connected with religion ~ yet it largely governed how societies worked universally until quite recently.

The chapel above was designed by Pugin, or actually six of them seeing as at the time people hooked up physically. One or other Pugin would design both the Houses of Parliament and the school ~ Scarisbrick Hall ~ my son went to briefly because to my wife it looked like Hogwarts and I was paying the fees.

The chapel was connected to the Catholic seminary that began before Catholicism was legalised in the UK, and only closed as such in 2011. It did so not because, as I might have suggested to the dean, people were tired of majoring in paedophilia, but because there were not enough men applying to the priesthood.

But there were two forces essentially at play at the time, the one being a pressure to marry and to procreate shortly afterward; the other being to abandon any hope of doing so in obeisance to a higher calling. Nowadays it is more about watching the confected lifestyles of a your 'besties' at a distance, leaving little time or opportunity for going out and fucking them: as the dean and I lamented over a cappuccino.

For much of the time that the seminary was operating, that would have entailed not only off-spring but marriage in perpetuity, the only alternative to which would have been a life of abstinence in perpetual worship of a higher being and in the hope things improved after death.

Have a good week!

The author recommends a visit to Ushaw in the northeast of England, but was there too for the Parkrun they host. He did this in 00:31:52, for which he had any number of Hail Marys to recite prior a flat white and cheese scone.

Libya

In the credits at the close of the Netflix series on the bombing of Panam flight 103, the man jailed for arranging for a bomb to be placed on board appears at the steps of an Air Afriqiyah airliner upon his eventual return to Libya. Reader, I flew for that airline.

I was first aware of it as an instructor in the simulator nearby London Gatwick, this airline with number ‘9’ scattered around the tail-fin, ostensibly to celebrate the Sirte declaration of 09-09-2009. The national carrier, Libyan Arab Airlines was already to be banned from European airspace, as this one would be too ~ unless operated by a European outfit.

Accordingly I traveled to Dublin for an assessment as a captain on its fleet of Airbus 320s, which were to be operated by Irish company ASL. Aircraft were re-registered to suit, and I would be collected by these means from Gatwick and flown to Tripoli in Libya, where an airfield south of town that had been built during WW2 formed the nation’s principal hub.

We were to be accommodated in a hotel in the centre, whose uppermost floors were apparently occupied by the local militia or mafia, depending on your viewpoint, who provided protection in return. I was fairly clean-cut and well-built at the time, and in the bar you’d be clocked by fairly clean-cut and well-built characters who worked for either UK or US special forces or contractors ~ and figured you might too.

My room was on an upper floor and on hearing how occasionally there’d be people running around the corridors with AK-47s, I figured out a means of escape over the roof-tops. I had canvassed my elder brother, also an airline captain, for any advice he had on personal security and he wrote 'Tell them you're the Popular Front of Judea, not the Judean People's Front'.

The weather was spectacular, as was the food, catered for by Philippine staff who were treated with altogether less respect by the locals than we. In the evening this would be served at tables alongside the pool, the peace within the walled compound only disturbed by the occasional arrival of a US transport aircraft: what they were doing there we shall only discover when the action movie is eventually released.

The mini-bus driver was a Chelsea supporter, and we’d stop by housing estates to collect crew, where young men menaced us to some extent, just by their presence. I cracked a joke with one and he looked at me like he'd shoot me there and then on a bad day, which you get used to if you’re from Liverpool. On the way between town and airport we’d pass Gaddafi’s compound, which had been hit at night by countless cruise missiles. I asked if this had been noisy, my interlocutor looking askance at me as you might an idiot; the problem being nowadays. he went on, instead of only one Gaddafi to worry about, now they had three dozen.

We'd also pass a torture centre housed in a 1960s concrete construction of the sort Le Corbusier might have used for a French church, say. One of a pair, it was used to keep the citizenry in line. Otherwise besides the souk and an ancient fort, the town looked much as it had when an Italian colony, its parks and arcades quite stylish. The road to the airport had palm trees along its length down the central reservation and one evening one was ablaze and going up like a firework, which I guessed was what you'd expect from a trunk-full of resin.

At some stage the word went out as it once did in places like Northern Ireland that there was to be a shoot-out between rival gangs, and so we were asked to ship the aircraft to Misratah in advance of the much-anticipated showdown at the airport. At the national airline LAA left their aircraft in situ, including wide-body A330s as well as A320s, as they figured it was all talk. It wasn’t, and some billion dollars of flying real-estate went up in smoke. We had left in a hurry prior, which was quite exciting because it was possibly the only time I had jumped in an airliner to fly it visually at low level in vaguely the right direction and armed principally with Jeppesen's map.

We were not unduly disappointed to have left, apart from missing the pool and free lobster and steak, because the Romanian captain among has had been shot at from time to time whilst on the approach. It was unsurprising as the markets were awash with arms and even our young steward had a collection like you’d expect in World of Warfare. The breakfast buffet had been a thing to behold, and all of this free on top of our wages: although a tall lady, a politician and rights campaigner that I recall at the breakfasts, would soon afterward be shot dead to leave a husband and children.

The female cabin crew were largely from Tunisia next door, as they considered that women in Libya ought not to work and especially so with strange men, and moreso men as strange as I. Not long after we left too a Russian 737 crew in a nearby hotel were all shot dead, pilot and stewardesses, because the gunmen had not found who it was they were looking for and shot these people sat in the lobby instead, for they looked suitably Western enough for it to have been worthwhile.

During all of this a group of mechanics and pilots, probably at my insistence, took a bus to Sirte (the place of the declaration) where Gaddafi had come to a grisly end in a concrete sewer, as I recall, with a length of piping up his bottom. The walls were pock-marked throughout with bullet- and shell-holes, and Scud rocket-launchers sat on the streets where they'd been abandoned, so that we were able to sit in them to shout orders at each other in a Russian accent. There was a derelict food-market  I left myself into, and out back a pair of tanks that had been targeted by laser-guided bombs... holes in the roof, turrets blown clean off with the pressure and dead sheep in each for whatever reason.  

One day though we were in the descent from 35,000 feet and overhead Malta, and my co-pilot was a Libyan dual-national from Manchester; a lovely guy who I suspect will have known the Arena bomber; because there cannot be all that many Libyans in Manchester. By this stage a militia had taken over the tower in Tripoli, which was responsible for our initial descent into the Libyan airspace. Amidst instructions were people in the background shouting at him in Arabic, I doing the flying and he on the radio.

I asked him what the problem was and he relayed their insistence that we land at the new airport at Tripoli instead of our new home at Misratah. This was the military base the US transports had been using, recently pressed into action after the shoot-out at the main airport had taken out the terminal besides the national fleet.

They told him he'd be viewed as a traitor, and sounded quite cross about it so I summoned the senior to ask her if the passengers minded going to Tripoli instead. She came back and said they did mind, as half of them suspected they'd be shot on arrival. This was not a scenario we had practised during descents at British Midland in the simulator, so I said 'Fuck’ and handed the co-pilot control and got busy on a keyboard you could use to message Operations back in Dublin.

Normally it didn’t work, but happily it did and in response to my curt IF WE LAND IN TRIPOLI WE’RE ALL GOING TO DIE they suggested diverting to another country and so a man who had been beginning to imagine himself in an orange jump-suit was able to execute a right turn to Djerba, a holiday resort in Tunisia, as we scrambled among paper approach plates for a suitable radio frequency. I even managed to fit in a passenger address along the lines of, 'Ladies and Gentlemen and dear children, it's your lucky day, welcome to Tunisia and we’ll arrange the buses.' I'm not sure we did, likely being advised to leave the fuckers as anyone who has flown Ryanair could guess.

On balance, good to find ourselves among holidaymakers as unexpected guests at the hotel where the cocktails must have tasted extra special. I had wanted to visit one of the most outstanding Roman remains along the coast but it was considered too dangerous: an expat and girlfriend having been shot whilst picnicking at the sea side in a place where that was not altogether the ideal pastime. Problem being the ground-crew remained in Misratah, whilst we enjoyed cocktails at the seaside.

What to do? I recall we may have re-positioned to the airfield non-radio, memory is hazy, but I did suggest to the Ops department that as we were the only ones there we could load up engines running and hot-tail it at night to Malta at 500 feet, balls out. There were few if any fighter-jets still in use as I recall, the country effectively lapsing into the sort of city-states familiar from medieval Italy. If nothing else it'd give me the chance of trying to look like Tom Cruise and saying things like 'So let's get this baby off the ground...'.

In the event they would contract one of those dodgy contractors out in the Middle East that comprise ex-special forces security people still hooked on the adrenaline and the foreign travel, beside the lucre. They were piled into a mini-bus, instructed to shut the fuck up, and as they approached each tribal check-point they'd have a driver who'd be familiar to his mates at the barrier. Driver's would be swapped out and picked up at successive points along the route to Tunisia, where I like to think the last set of sentries asked for papers please in a German accent like they would on The Great Escape.

All in all though I left Libya with a love of Libyans, and you know those robes that Gaddafi wore when he sat in his tent? I got one for my son, who must have been about three at the time, and we have it to this day. It's from Misratah, but I'd have been happy with one from anywhere.

To be continued.

What's left of airliners on the end of RPGs

Indiana Jones and the Templates of Doom

Templates for the two backer-board sheets of ply

At the outset however we need a recipe to work from, and you'll need to take one 1220 x 2440 x 25mm sheet of foam, one 120 x 60 x 6mm backer-board, four 2440 x 25mm beams, two 2440 x 25mm laths, two 100mm laths for the water-skis and one Nigella Lawson. Now set your ingredients to one side and watch Nigella Lawson on YouTube for at least half an hour, until the mixture's suitably stiff and you're in need of a cold workshop.

A Game of Two Halves

The point is, when you log with a friend and colleague have parted with a six-figure sum, money is on a sliding scale. Take footballers. When I was based at Manchester Airport I'd be returned to the apart-hotel by taxi, and one day the driver pointed out the Genting's casino along with the fact that Wayne Rooney had lost a quarter of a million pounds there the previous evening.

A word here on the direction the UK is headed. Tony Blair, when not pursuing WMDs that existed principally inside his head, liberalised the gaming laws here to allow for mega-casinos such as that in Manchester. It coincided broadly with the introduction of the smartphone, which made the UK by far and away the global leader in leading any number of people down the path of ruin; until the US happily took up the baton. Whilst not actually one of the seven deadly sins, gambling does call upon greed and sloth in large part: Tony Blair's lasting contribution to the making of modern Britain.

But flying in China I was myself practically on a footballer's salary, albeit one nearer the bottom of the Premier League struggling to avoid relegation. And what I found was, you stopped caring how much things cost on one hand and on the other began to value time over financial reward. I realise this is no consolation to the homeless, for whom time may be the last thing they'd like more of, but there it is for what it's worth. You'll be pleased to hear anyway that I squandered the most of it anyway, eventually becoming known (as may one day Wayne Rooney) as the man who had a 500-Euro note lifted from a wallet he'd left in a toilet at Brussels Airport.

But we've strayed from today's lesson haven't we kids, which is not so much how to die as how to build a flat-pack catamaran? So take up your handouts if you could as I talk you through it, and no conferring.

We set out like Steve Jobs in trying to eliminate as much of the product as possible whilst still remaining afloat, and that produced the central section set to run on skis no farther apart than they'd be were you on the Ozarks, which are a river complex in the US and not a threat off the starboard bow of the starship Enterprise. The principal drawback of which was that the craft would flop on its side at the get-go: for what it needed was wiiings.

What we therefore do over a pork pie and a coffee at the brekkie-barm is to divide the problem in two, recalling how mum used to say problems shared are problems halved (Ed. Note to kids, they're not). Accordingly we shall build the decks that stabilise the craft as a separate module that can be stored elsewhere prior to use, like at a beach-bar for example where you can select one you feel suits your mood on the day.

Absurd, yes, but then so's life.

The laths in the upper sketch will be drawn to engage the beams projecting forward in support of the skis. Alternatively you can hitch horses to them to race across the Steppes.