Handley_Page
Draco interdum Vincit
- Joined
- Aug 18, 2007
- Posts
- 78,217
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Dick Tracy and his famous wrist radio.
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Isn't it amazing how yesterday's science fiction is today's reality?
The Buck Rogers comic strip is generally credited with the first modern visualization of z parachute. Right or wrong.
Chuck (Charles M) Jones of blessed memory had a Daffy / Bugs one in space. The thing that got me was that it featured a transport mechanism rather like a Star Trek 'teleport'.
Owing to the curious, not to say odd-ball, way of the film management found on YouTube to it's viewers, I'm still trying to find it!
I was always impressed by Jules Verne being an entire century ahead of NASA in so many ways with "From the Earth to the Moon."
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I haven't read that for a very long time.
A fault which I must rectify sometime soon.
[He reckoned Mach 32 (36000 feet per second). That's a lot !]
'Faster than a speeding bullet! More powerful than a locomotive! Able to leap tall buildings in a single bound!'
(Oh, no. That was someone else, wasn't it?' )
wasn't that "able to jump a Quonset hut. . . "
WTF is one of those ?
The Navy was still serving MCIs, Viet Nam era C Rations, well into the 80s. You have not lived until you've eaten ham and eggs of indeterminate age. Guess we had to earn our sea pay somehow...
And yet people freak out over whether or not to eat something that's a few weeks (or months) past the "Best By" date.
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Ah, but didn't the 'makers' of those military rations DO SOMETHING to ensure preservatives in the can ?
Our "emergency rations" were cycled, every three months, and we always knew when it happened, because the POM (mashed potato) tasted 'different' (given enough salt, sugar or butter, it didn't taste too bad).
But food companies have to sell what the customer will buy.
The Armed Forces don't have that choice. They have to eat whatever the lowest tenderer has supplied.
Anytime I fly I try to forget...especially after reaching a 30,000-foot cruising altitude...that the only thing holding the wings on are bolts bought from the lowest bidder.
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But food companies have to sell what the customer will buy.
The Armed Forces don't have that choice. They have to eat whatever the lowest tenderer has supplied.
We had this explained to us when I was in the mob.
Many moons later, it was explained to me (by one of the Catering types) that the tests that went on following some 'new' recipe or package proposal, was very thoroughly checked by a number of departments, organisations or whatever (it was not a fast process !) before the price was considered.
My father was involved with that process for the Royal Navy.
He started during WW2 - he was very involved in the preparations for D-Day. As far as his family were concerned we were Beta-testers. That was very useful during the years of extreme rationing when catering size packs of sugar or one-gallon tins of Golden Syrup had to be tested. We weren't so impressed with 14 lb tins of Brussel Sprouts.
At Primary School we had a Show and Tell Day about cold places. The teachers were very impressed when I produced tins that had been test samples for Sir John Franklin's 1845 NE Passage expedition and a tin of biscuits recovered from Scott's Antarctic Base. The 1845 tins included one labelled Christmas Pudding. One of the theories about the loss of the 1845 expedition was that the tinning process had been flawed and had given the men massive doses of lead poisoning. Tests on the surviving tins in the 1980s showed that although there might have been some lead contamination it wouldn't have been in serious concentrations. The tinning process had been effective but was not intended to preserve food for 100 years. In theory the Christmas Pudding might still have been edible in the 1980s but no one was prepared to risk it. The alcohol content was very high.
I remember back in the mid-1960s we would get 5# tins of peanut butter at the Boy Scout camp commissary with "Department of Defense" written on them. They were supposedly leftovers from Korea that had been donated.
Once you scrapped the oil off the top the taste wasn't all that bad...and in any case, they made Spam sandwiches much more palatable.
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Spam and peanut butter!? I'm surprised that Baloo wasn't prosecuted for child cruelty.
Not a chance! Over the eleven years of summer Scout camp I attended, we learned that peanut butter was the magic elixir for any cooking we did. We even added it to the stew we made with all the leftovers at the end of the week.
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What leftovers ?
Anytime I fly I try to forget...especially after reaching a 30,000-foot cruising altitude...that the only thing holding the wings on are bolts bought from the lowest bidder.
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You're thinking of British Scouts. We were always short of food, unlike American Scouts who had food to spare.
Ah; yes, I was a bit confused there.
I've discovered that the little camera I leave in the car does not like the cold, even if the battery is in good condition. This is a bit of a bind.
That's the reason I stopped wearing boxers.