Random photos, comics, etc.

[Leo Enticknap]

It looks like the lid is closed, but even so, point taken.

Inspired by Frank's "unforeseen circumcisions" (a nasty accident involving a stand mixer?), there was a classic Freudian slip on the talk radio station I often listen to driving to and from service calls the other day. On the 22 freeway in Orange County there is an exit to Chapman Avenue. Traffic report: "...and on the 22 westbound, an accident involving a semi and an Amazon van has the off-ramp at Crapman totally closed..."

[Randy Stankey]

We have an upright vacuum cleaner with a removable dust container. It takes one trip around the living room before it needs to be emptied. Then, it needs to be emptied after sweeping the hall, the stairs and each of the upstairs rooms. There's enough fur to make a whole new cat!

Can you just imagine what the action of a grand piano would look like after a cat has been sleeping inside?

[Leo Enticknap]

We nickname this gal the Roomba wrecker, for exactly the reason you note. While she's shedding, the Roomba will last about 6-7 minutes in our bedroom before the shaft of the main brush roller clogs up with kitty fur to the point of stopping and throwing a hissy fit consisting of bleeps and multiple error codes. I then have to strip the thing down (as in, every rotating part has to be removed from the chassis and the cat hair manually removed from its shaft), before it is usable again.

[Randy Stankey]

A long haired cat sleeping on a piano?! We have two short haired cats that are pretty light shedders but, when we run the vacuum, we still clean up enough cat hair to knit a whole, new cat!

Can you just imagine what the inside of that Bosie would look like with a long haired cat sleeping on it and, occasionally, crawling inside. Cats love those kinds of places to hide out.

And the guy was worried about BASS??

[Leo Enticknap]

With those instruments, one could play Vaughan Williams' Concerto for Two Pianos in your living room! Wait ... you'd have to fit the orchestra in there, somewhere.

The cat on the baby grand looks like a dead ringer for one of ours:

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However, she can't stand even the slightest noise, and can only really relax in a room with almost complete silence. So the chances of her sitting on top of a piano are about as high as those of Taylor Swift selling her private jet and flying Southwest.

[Oliver Green]

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This is definitely the better more realistic version of this comic

[Randy Stankey]

I was thinking the same. Having a concert grand likely doubles the value of your house! In his case, triple!

Gosh! I hope that he's a professional, concert pianist or something. At least, he'd better play the piano a lot!

[Frank Cox]

It's my understanding that used full-sized concert grand pianos can sometimes be bought cheaply (relatively) because so few people have the room and the desire to have one that it's a really limited market.

That Bosie was apparently intended for a concert hall because it has the brand name written on the side.

Which doesn't mean that it was actually cheap. I'm sure cost of those pianos exceeded the price of a lot of houses. Probably costs a good chunk on an ongoing basis for maintenance, too. You aren't going to have one of those and let it go out of tune.

[Randy Stankey]

If the guy would trade in that Bosie for a Steinway he might not need to have a base trap in the room.

Bosendorfers have a stronger low end than Steinways. They've got 97 keys (on the Imperial) and the sound board resonates the low notes more. Steinways are stronger in the mid range. It has to do with the fact that Steinway uses one, heavy single piece of wood that's been steam bent to form the outer rim. Bosies have a thinner rim that's been pieced together.

If you play more traditional, classical music the Bosendorfer might be a better fit but the Steinway would be a better fit for Jazz and other modern styles.

However, if the guy's got the money to buy two pianos, each costing as much as a quarter million dollars, I think he should have the funds to give the room some better acoustic treatment instead of using a giant teddy bear as a sound dampener.

Unless, of course, the guy spent all his money on expensive pianos...

[Frank Cox]

Interesting use of scale and perspective.

The bear in first photo makes this guy's room look like a dollhouse. The second photo shows what the sizes actually are.

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The Costco bear is 7'9".

The pianos are actually 5'11" and 9'2", and you see just the 9'2" one in the second photo.

He says that he just put the bear on the piano for the picture; he uses it as a bass trap in the room since it looks more interesting than anything else he could find.

[Frank Cox]

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Sign on the door at the Pizza Hut in Timmins Ontario.

[Frank Cox]

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[Leo Enticknap]

It's a hole in the side of the plane that is designed to have two functions.

• If the aircraft is being used in a Ryanair-style, high density, pack 'em in like sardines configuration, the hole has to have a functional emergency exit door in it. As Tony notes, if it opened by rotating inwards (either on the horizontal or vertical axis), that would involve two major problems: you'd be fighting the psychological instinct of how people act under pressure (they'd be trying to push the thing out), and you would have to remove seats, luggage bins, etc. to free up interior space for the door.

• If the aircraft is being used with a less sadistic seating density, that hole does not have to have a door in it, but it does need to have a pressure-resistant plug. That plug needs to (a) not open if it is not told to, but (b) be easily replaceable with an actual door, if the configuration of the aircraft is to be changed from low density seating to high density.

So the only way you can enable both functions is with an optional door or plug that is designed to open outwards, but designed and installed and maintained not to open at all unless a maintenance tech deliberately opens it. The latest news seems to be that fasteners either weren't installed at all, or weren't torqued correctly, depending on which account you believe. I suppose that's the lesser of two evils relative to a design flaw, but it's still not good.

[Frank Cox]

https://media-cldnry.s-nbcnews.com/i...26p-7c2fa9.jpg

For some reason I can't save that picture to post here, but that's the interior view of that opening with the interior panelling removed. Normally, with the panelling in place, that section of wall looks just like the sections in front of and behind it.

It's a wall. Not a door.

Other people have apparently noticed the same thing:

https://www.cnn.com/business/boeing-737-max/index.html

In the aftermath of last week’s Alaska Airlines in-flight emergency, some aviation experts are questioning the structural design of the section of the Boeing 737 Max 9 that blew off the plane.

On that January 5 flight, a “door plug” – a portion of the plane’s fuselage the manufacturer can put in place instead of an emergency exit door – detached from the plane and was later discovered in an Oregon backyard.

In interviews with CNN, some experts argued that if that door plug were designed to be larger than the opening it covers and installed inside the plane, the force of the pressurized air in the passenger cabin would force the plug against the plane’s interior frame and a situation such as the one on the Alaska Airlines flight could have been avoided. However, such a design could have added costs and practical disadvantages, some said.

“It doesn’t make sense to me why they would do it that way and not have it installed from the inside, where it literally cannot come out unless there is a structural failure in the airframe,” said David Soucie, a former FAA safety inspector and CNN analyst. “Historically, since we have had pressurized airplanes, emergency exits are designed to come inward… so why would they have not done the same thing with this plug?”

[Tony Bandiera Jr]

The point is, it's not an exit. It isn't even a door. It's an opening in the fuselage with a cover plate bolted over it.

From the point of view of the passengers in the plane, it's just another section of the interior wall of the plane.

Are you going to attempt to exit by pushing on a random spot on the wall or will you go to the place where there's a door and use that?

C'mon now Frank, you are just arguing for the sake of arguing. What part of the end purpose of said opening do you not get? Blanked off or not, as I mentioned in my previous post, it would be impractical, costly and cause too much downtime to engineer the plug to be secured in a manner opposite of the intended (future) use of the opening. Think about it in terms of your theatre's doors as well. Say you wanted to change out the Auditorium main entrances to open in the opposite direction, think of the demolition, reconstruction and down time to do so.

I had already agreed with you and your brother that from the standpoint of a pressurized cabin, it is opposite of the physics. But you can argue with me all you want, but it will NOT change the fact that an emergency exit MUST open outwards to the exterior. And airlines for decades have designed emergency exits that way. And they aren't going to change it (nor will it ever get approved due the factors in my last post) no matter how much you, your brother, or me insist that it should be changed.

Let's settle on this though: It IS stupid that they even designed this fuselage with the need for a plug if a door wasn't to be installed. That was simply to save costs, as an alternate airframe would have to go through the ENTIRE certification and testing processes. Having been around aircraft for many years, that cost is substantial. Boeing was trying to save money, and it bit them in the ass, big time.