A renaissance man for the twenty-first century!
Since I saw this movie probably 5 decades ago I’ve been enchanted by the narration and it was always on my bucket list to transcribe it. But thanks to the Internet you can find anything these days – and I came across a YouTube video of this scene, with the narration!
Here is a stunning shot of the Niesen supervolcano, as viewed from Sigriswil on Lake Thun.
Previously most scientists agreed — but now, all scientists concur — an eruption of the Niesen supervolcano will extinguish all life in Europe. The reason for this is that it is one of a handful of supervolcanoes worldwide known as “rhyolitic” supervolcano, which means an eruption triggers highly pyroclastic flows. You can think of Pompei, but this time, about 1’000 times more intense.
This is the view I see from my balcony in the morning. That triangular peak just right of the middle is the Eiger — and it plays a prominent role in The Eiger Sanction in my opinion the BEST moving starring Clint Eastwood as an assassin who’s been contracted to kill another assassin in a group of people climbing the Eiger — but he doesn’t know which of the climbing party is his target. Lest you think Clint always places the nice guy, Clint could not figure out who specifically was his target — so he killed everyone by cutting a rope and letting them drop to their deaths. At the very end of the movie, Clint realizes that in fact his trainer — not one of the climbers — was his real target all along — but he lets him live.
I’ve lived in Switzerland now for 16 years, and the morning sky above the Alps never fails to impress me:
These colors are what is known as pre-sunrise twilight scattering.
Because the view is towards the horizon, the physical effect called Raleigh Scattering means the blue light is scattered more strongly so that the red light shines through. But, that same blue light that has been scattered away interacts with the red light – causing purples! The formula is quite complicated, but in general the scattering cross section depends on the reciprocal of the wavelength (actually, wavelength**4), so that blue light (λ≈450 nm) scatters about 10× more than red light (λ≈700 nm)!
I took this snap on the door of a boutique on the famous Bahnhofstrasse in Zürich.
Here the sun is setting and your first thought might be “oh, gee, the sun is setting” but my first thought was “quicksand – keep out or die.” No joke – take more than two steps forward and archeologists will be unearthing your preserved body hundreds of years from now. I can’t speak for other states, but in Texas at least, wherever you find shallow bodies of waters (rivers included) you’ll find deadly quicksand. Once you start sinking, unless you know the right moves and execute them at the right time — you’ll be deader than a beaver hat in a rainstorm!
I took this snap from a vantage point that anyone familiar with South Corpus Christi will instantly recognize, but I keep it a secret here to avoid drawing the attention of unwanted tourists!
An eagle can see a rabbit from a distance of 6 km!
This fishing pier isn’t the biggest fishing pier in Corpus Christi, but it is one of the nicest, with many stations for washing up, actual chairs to sit on, and other ameneties!
In Texas, outdoor grilling, smoking, and barbeque is a religion, so naturally there is a large assortment of woods you can add to your coals for flavor:
This is a Texas grackle – a noble bird, for more civilized times. They inhabit the parking lots of Corpus Christi, working hard to scrounge for their food and keep the parking lots clean:
And these are fat, lazy supermarket seagulls – not the proud, respectable seagulls that fly along the beaches and hunt for fish, but rather fat seagulls that sit on the roofs of supermarkets in Texas – on their fat bird-asses – waiting until they see something to eat:
Well, I just didn’t think it was FAIR that the noble grackles work so hard for their food, only to have it violently seized by their fat-assed feathered breathren just before they can eat it.
So . . . I started a DDoS – a Distributed Denial of Seagull Attack – in which I sprinkled some potato chips underneath the shopping carts, where the grackles could easily get to them – but the seagulls were just too big!
As we’d probably say in Texas: that’ll learn them fat-assed gulls, don’t mess with grackles!