{"id":883,"date":"2005-04-20T12:29:00","date_gmt":"2005-04-20T17:29:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/?p=883"},"modified":"2005-04-20T12:29:00","modified_gmt":"2005-04-20T17:29:00","slug":"afternoon-notes-8","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/?p=883","title":{"rendered":"afternoon notes"},"content":{"rendered":"

1. As much as I dislike Orlando Bloom’s acting, I’m really looking forward to seeing this film<\/a>. I think the visuals from the trailers<\/a> coordinate with my imagining of that environment when I read Sir Walter Scott’s The Talisman<\/i>. Yes, the film does have the potential to be an Alexander<\/i>, but I have more hope that it will be done right with Ridley Scott behind the camera rather than Oliver Stone. Scott just has a better history of drawing out a coherent thematic core from epics of that magnitude. Well, that and the fact that Blade Runner<\/i> is in my all-time top five. That alone pretty much guarantees I’ll go see it.<\/p>\n

2. The easy availability of information on just about any topic imaginable through Wikipedia has reawakened a habit I used to indulge in years ago, namely that of randomly grabbing a volume of the encyclopedia off the shelf and just browsing through it over lunch at home. Wikipedia makes the activity even easier to indulge in, since I don’t even need to get up and pull another tome off the shelf in order to explore a cross-reference that may have piqued my interest.<\/p>\n

It’s certainly breathed new life into my once-rabid interest in anything related to aviation. Lately I’ve been poring over anything having to do with high-speed flight and associated methods of propulsion. Granted, most of this stuff I knew 9-10 years ago, but it’s fun to read again and to get up to speed (pun fully intended) with current developments in that domain. Some topics lately have included the XB-70 Valkyrie<\/a> (quite possibly one of the best-looking aircraft ever made, especially when you consider its potency), the alleged Lockheed Aurora hypersonic spyplane<\/a>, the Boeing X-43A<\/a>, scramjet technology<\/a>, RBCC<\/a> and pulse-detonation<\/a> engines, and supersonic aerodynamic phenomena like compression lift<\/a> and supercritical airfoils<\/a>.<\/p>\n

3. After watching Almost Famous<\/i> over the weekend with my mom (I’m always eager to get boomers’ reactions to films set in that cultural period), I was intrigued by one of the movie’s quotes, “Be bold and mighty forces will come to your aid,” said by the mother when speaking over the phone to Billy Crudup’s character. Evidently it’s attributed to Goethe, who I’d of course heard of but hadn’t known too much about. I researched him and have found him so far to be a very compelling and progressive (in his own time) thinker. He’s very quoted, and I’d like to get hold of some of his work to see if his is the same situation as Thoreau and Emerson, where the quality of their individual thoughts, expressed in a sentence or two, makes much more of an impression than the works in which they’re contained, taken as a whole. Anyone familiar with Goethe have any recommendations for a starting point?<\/p>\n

4. My car needs a new water pump. I ordered the necessary parts yesterday from an online parts source that I’ve dealt with before, and who is almost always fairly speedy (parts usually arrive in 1-2 days). I think the water pump must be on backorder, though, since the tracking number lists its delivery date as the 26th. My car’s been running quite hot lately and I’m eager to tackle the repairs as soon as possible, so that discovery was somewhat distressing. I ordered a lot of bits that should be replaced along with the water pump as well (timing belt, idler pulley, rad fan switch), so the shipment is in two parts, with one half arriving tomorrow, so there may be parts I can install over the weekend.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

1. As much as I dislike Orlando Bloom’s acting, I’m really looking forward to seeing this film. I think the visuals from the trailers coordinate with my imagining of that environment when I read Sir Walter Scott’s The Talisman. Yes, the film does have the potential to be an Alexander, but I have more hope […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/883"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=883"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/883\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=883"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=883"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.boldulysses.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=883"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}