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Where is the Random Thread of Randomness stuff that doesn't belong in other threads thread?

For some reason I just downloaded Jaws: The Revenge and will be watching that later on tonight. After skimming through to see if it was intact I forgot Michael Caine's immortal line when he crawls on to the boat near the end with dry clothes and exclaims "Bloody Hell, the breath on that thing!"

This is the sort of disaster porn that has been missing from my life lately.
 
Michael Caine was absent when he won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for Hannah and Her Sisters because he was filming Jaws: The Revenge.

IMDb: "Michael Caine said "Won an Oscar, built a house, and had a great holiday. Not bad for a flop movie." He was paid $1.5 million for seven days work in the Bahamas, and the schedule was so tight that the producers were unable to spare him so he could attend the Academy Awards, and he went on to win the Best Actor in a Supporting Role Oscar for Hannah and Her Sisters (1986)."
 
For some reason I just downloaded Jaws: The Revenge and will be watching that later on tonight. After skimming through to see if it was intact I forgot Michael Caine's immortal line when he crawls on to the boat near the end with dry clothes and exclaims "Bloody Hell, the breath on that thing!"

This is the sort of disaster porn that has been missing from my life lately.
Michael Caine was absent when he won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for Hannah and Her Sisters because he was filming Jaws: The Revenge.

IMDb: "Michael Caine said "Won an Oscar, built a house, and had a great holiday. Not bad for a flop movie." He was paid $1.5 million for seven days work in the Bahamas, and the schedule was so tight that the producers were unable to spare him so he could attend the Academy Awards, and he went on to win the Best Actor in a Supporting Role Oscar for Hannah and Her Sisters (1986)."

It's a God awful film if ever there was one, but I'm entirely ashamed to say that its a guilty pleasure of mine as is Jaws 3D, its on a par with secretly loving Jurassic Park 2 and 3 inspite of the fact they are complete and utter dogshit movies.
 
In other news I seem to be part of some sort of Reddit rebellion in a random sub. I love short circuiting tin-plated dictator mods by informing them they're violating their own "Code of Conduct" (which is laughable to begin with) and watching them slowly lose their minds. Fun times.
 
i was just thinking back to the time in the mid-80s or early-80s where my friend and I went out in a snowstorm to get out ears pierced. Remember when that was a thing? Anyway, we showed up with a couple of drunks in tow and the girl behind the piercing counter asked my friend if he realized his hair was green. Good times.
 
These could go in my other thread. And/or they could be broken out into separate posts, but I'm gonna do it this way:

You ever think about fictional things and know they aren't real but a little part of you can't help wondering?

The Highlander. You are immortal. But you age normally until you are "killed." Ramirez must've been old when he became fully immortal for example. What if that was real? And what if you were an immortal? It would suck to just keep getting older and older and older because you didn't have the sense to get yourself "killed." Would you eventually die? Or would it be like the immortals in "Gulliver's Travels," where they just keep aging and aging and becoming more and more feeble and decrepit--but never die.

Or the E.T. bond. What if, say, symbiotic healing were really a thing? Other day I noticed my dog had a bunch of wax in her ear--but not the other ear. This morning I noticed I had the same thing. There are days when she has a limp and I have a limp. When my Mom was dying of pancreatic cancer the relatives were like "GET HOME AS SOON AS YOU CAN, SHE COULD GO AT ANY MOMENT" and then I got there. And she started getting better. I thought I'd be there for a weekend or so and wound up for 3 months--or however long that emergency family leave allows.

What was the other thing? Wolverine's mutant healing factor. Or Captain America's super soldier serum. I've been unusually healthy in most of my life. And I've aged relatively slowly. Is that a thing? This thought was somewhat dashed when I tore my ACL--because apparently ACLs don't just grow back. But maybe I *do* have mutant healing factor--Marvel just got the "science" of it wrong. They address Wolverine getting broken bones by covering his bones with adamantium, but--forgetting the biological problems with that--that still doesn't protect the tendons and ligaments. And unless mutant healing works like a salamander or earthworm or something instead of a mammal, broken tendons and ligaments don't ever repair themselves.

These are the things that I ponder.
 
The other thing is the evolution of the telephone. If you're my age, growing up phone numbers were 7 digits long. In the event that you were calling someone "long distance" in another state or something, then you added 1 and a 3 digit "area code." Of course during my adult years cell phones became prevalent and now phone numbers are 10 digits long--the area code is just part of someone's phone number.

I mention this because a friend got me a 1943 Louisville phone book. And the dialing is wild. You know how phones have letters assigned to the numbers on their dials? It's the way phone numbers used to be: MA(gnolia)-2506-R. I'm not old enough to remember this, but I'm old enough to have seen it in stories or on old signs. Sometimes it isn't even 7 "digits". I'm looking at a HI(ghland)-6689 number.

Then there's the suburbs. So, looking at this phone book, if I'm in Jeffersontown and want to call Louisville, I dial 2+ the number. So: 2-MA-2506-R or 2-HI-6689 in the cases above. If I'm calling someone else in Jeffersontown, it's just 5685--like dialing another room in a hotel or office (do hotel rooms and offices even have phones anymore?). If someone in Louisville wants to call me, they dial 21-5685.

Poop. I had one other related thing on my mind, but I got distracted and now I forgot it. OH! That's it. Old pay phones. This is from History channel reruns. You know how the first pay phones worked? You'd dial the number and the operator would be on the line and tell you what the call cost. Then, depending on the size of the coin--nickel, dime, quarter, etc--it would be routed to different paths in the phone and it would hit a different sound-making device--bell, etc and the operator would know how much money you'd put in by listening for the sounds the coins made when they went into the phone. How wild is that?
 
The other thing is the evolution of the telephone. If you're my age, growing up phone numbers were 7 digits long. In the event that you were calling someone "long distance" in another state or something, then you added 1 and a 3 digit "area code." Of course during my adult years cell phones became prevalent and now phone numbers are 10 digits long--the area code is just part of someone's phone number.

I mention this because a friend got me a 1943 Louisville phone book. And the dialing is wild. You know how phones have letters assigned to the numbers on their dials? It's the way phone numbers used to be: MA(gnolia)-2506-R. I'm not old enough to remember this, but I'm old enough to have seen it in stories or on old signs. Sometimes it isn't even 7 "digits". I'm looking at a HI(ghland)-6689 number.

Then there's the suburbs. So, looking at this phone book, if I'm in Jeffersontown and want to call Louisville, I dial 2+ the number. So: 2-MA-2506-R or 2-HI-6689 in the cases above. If I'm calling someone else in Jeffersontown, it's just 5685--like dialing another room in a hotel or office (do hotel rooms and offices even have phones anymore?). If someone in Louisville wants to call me, they dial 21-5685.

Poop. I had one other related thing on my mind, but I got distracted and now I forgot it. OH! That's it. Old pay phones. This is from History channel reruns. You know how the first pay phones worked? You'd dial the number and the operator would be on the line and tell you what the call cost. Then, depending on the size of the coin--nickel, dime, quarter, etc--it would be routed to different paths in the phone and it would hit a different sound-making device--bell, etc and the operator would know how much money you'd put in by listening for the sounds the coins made when they went into the phone. How wild is that?
We old, man. I remember as a kid my uncle in Minnesota was on what they called a party line, wherein I guess a bunch of his neighbors and he were on the same line sorta, but each phone had a different ring pattern. So you could easily eavesdrop on your neighbors' conversations if you wanted to.

And speaking of that, early cordless phones, probably in the 40-50MHz range. I had a scanner that could pick those up too. Just kind of stumbled upon that by accident one evening.
 
I often think of sci fi stories, and how boring immortality would be.

But what if you had a normal life span, but ever time you fell asleep , time had moved on ten years, how inconvenient that would be?

In a week everyone you had ever known would be dead, in two weeks you'd be in a different century.
 
We old, man. I remember as a kid my uncle in Minnesota was on what they called a party line, wherein I guess a bunch of his neighbors and he were on the same line sorta, but each phone had a different ring pattern. So you could easily eavesdrop on your neighbors' conversations if you wanted to.

And speaking of that, early cordless phones, probably in the 40-50MHz range. I had a scanner that could pick those up too. Just kind of stumbled upon that by accident one evening.
I did comm for the Marine Corps so the wire/switched backbone side of that is kind of a time capsule of telephony, depending on what you're doing.

At, like, an infantry platoon level you have the "party line" level of technology--also called a local loop. The ubiquitous green metal phone with a pair of C cell batteries, in a zippered canvas case. Splice your speaker wire onto it and onto another phone, turn the crank to generate a ring. In WWI, before radios, they'd use them for patrols. The patrol would go out with a phone and a spool of wire and when you hit the end of the wire you were at the end of the patrol. Or you can splice them together into a "gun loop" so your command post can talk to your machine gun positions and maybe your forward observation post. Was there a way to turn off the ring? I forget. Maybe you didn't run one to your observation post. But yeah, you use a ring pattern so someone knows who should pick up. There was also a voice-powered phone that didn't have batteries to boost the signal. Barely a step up from 2 tin cans and a wire.

Next step up was the SB...22? I think SB-22 switchboard. This was the equivalent of the old-timey operator. You had a lunchbox sized green thing with a half dozen patch cords and an operator sat there and patched you to whoever you needed to talk to. I mean, as long as they were at one of the other 5 locations wired to the switchboard. Was there a way to tie it into a more advanced switchboard? I forget.

After that was a genuine automatic switching device. I think it was still analog and very basic. It was kind of the "middle kid" when I was in (early 2000s). It was too advanced to be in use at an infantry company and not advanced enough to be in use at a battalion HQ. But I feel like you could actually dial numbers on that instead of needing an operator.

After that was the SB-3865. Cold-War era digital switching. Able to support secure encrypted phones. Programmable. About the size of two rock concert road cases. The fun thing about that was, just above the control panel and display screen (which I remember being about 5" square and green or brown) was a big red button. Since it was developed during the Cold War, the idea was, if your position was being overrun by the Reds, you pushed the button and it melted all the circuits in the switch, making it useless. Now, psychologically, it's a terrible idea to put a big red button right at eye level to a sleep-deprived 20 year old, so the first thing you do when setting it up is duct tape over the button.

Up from that was the...TTC-42(?) "van"--4x the capacity of the 3865 in an actual enclosure with room for 2 people to sit and monitor the switch.

Then there were some newer devices at the general officer command level that I hadn't been trained on that could do everything that these older systems could, but in practice it was useful to have the older systems wired in for redundancy. That way if the new stuff went down you didn't completely lose your comms.

Oh, then there's the wire: We had "slash wire" which was basically just cheap speaker wire. Then we had "26 pair" which was essentially 26 pairs of speaker wire, bundled together in a rubber sheath with contacts that could be connected together to create a longer wire or connected onto a switchboard. There was tactical fiber, which was fairly fragile and unreliable. And then there was the MUX. Multiplexed UHF radio. Looked a little like a green Humvee version of a live TV news van. You put up a mast with a dish on it and pointed it at its counterpart at a different location, got the dishes pointed right at each other at the same height and when you got everything tweaked just right you could send voice or data over air instead of having to run miles and miles of cable. Fun times.

And I can safely talk about all this because it wasn't actually classified back when I was in and at this point it's the equivalent of someone telling you about building Websites by writing HTML code in Notepad on a Windows 95 computer. I'm certain things are much more advanced these days.
 
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