Top Secret!

Val Kilmer passed.  His debut film, Top Secret! remains a reminder of what a skilled comic actor he was, and what skilled filmmakers Abraham's, Zucker, ans Abraham's were.  The opening sequence with the song Skeet Surfin' is so utterly unexpected.

After watching it again,  I realized that if you are under 50, many of the cultural references and movies may be incomprehensible gags: The Blue Lagoon, exploding Pintos, Casablanca, all World War Ii movies, the East German Women's Olympic Team (which were fiercely hormonal abused men, or severely roided up women).

If Monty Python Added This Scene to a Movie...

From a discussion of thr Battle of Lepanto (1571):

"Even after the battle had clearly turned against the Turks, groups of Janissaries still kept fighting with all they had. It is said that at some point the Janissaries ran out of weapons and started throwing oranges and lemons at their Christian adversaries, leading to awkward scenes of laughter among the general misery of battle."

Cutting Big Pieces

The Sherline vertical mill is so tiny that people with big boy mills sometimes call it a jeweler's mill.  The Y-axis has about four inches of travel.  Trying to cut stock approaching that dimension in Y is often a struggle because the mill vise will contact the column at the far end of travel.  The trick is also to get the cut line far enough off the position of the column that the mill vise goes to either side of the column.  

In addition, the mill vise back jaw is so deep that the quill needs to be quite some distance from the column.  The Sherline allows you to stack spacer blocks between quill and column to solve this.  It is not an elegant solution and I suspect Sherline would cringe at seeing this.

Perhaps Letting Europe Go Under is Less Silly Than It Sounds

J.K. Rowling linked to this 3/31/25 Daily Mail article:

"A toddler has been kicked out of nursery after being accused of transphobia, new figures reveal.

"The child, aged either three or four, was suspended for 'abuse against sexual orientation and gender identity', data from the Department for Education shows.

"The offences took place in the 2022-23 academic year at a state school, according to The Telegraph.

"Statistics indicate 94 pupils at similar primary institutions were suspended or permanently excluded for transphobia or homophobia in the same year.

"This included ten pupils from Year 1 and three from Year 2, where the maximum age was seven, and one child was of nursery age."

My Wife Ordered an Espresso Maker

Not PRC:

 Made in Ukraine, not PRC.

Does No One Make 6-32 Stainless Steel Hex Nuts Outside PRC?

 Amazon, Tacoma Screw, McMaster-Carr, no luck.  Tacoma Screw did have Taiwaneae made.

My Impressions of France and Switzerland

 Paris and Marseilles are crowded and noisy.  Bern and Basel in Switzerland was also crowded and noisy.  Our hotel in the suburbs of Bern was quiet.

Food

The food was often surprising.  Not bad or good, just different.  We were desperate for something fast in Marseilles, so we ordered at a kiosk in a McDonald's on the corner from our hotel.  The fries were awful.  Ther Big Mac was different in some way that I cannot articulate.  It was okay, just not home.  By comparison, the Burger King fries in Basel, Switzerland were indistinguishable from home.

There were a number of meals that were only okay.  My daughter and wife were ga-ga over how good everything was.  I did not feel their amazement.  I wonder if our ten mile days might have contributed to how much they enjoyed their meals.  The French onion soup around the corner from Nortre Dame was completely typical of what I get here.  The croissants were wonderful, but not immediately superior to what I get in any supermarket here.

Safety

I felt safe in all of these cities.  French police in the Paris train station, the Louvre, and Eiffel Tower, were all carrying M4s.  Even in the subways, I felt reasonably safe.  The streets were clean.  Public rerestrooms were generally clean.  Beggars were less common in Paris than San Francisco (admitedly, a low bar to beat, but simlar to Boise).  I saw one beggar in Switzerland.  There were few obviously homeless people in any city we visited.

Diverse

One of the consequences of imperial France's insistence that all their colonial possession citizens were little Frenchmen, regardless of skin color, is that France is very diverse.  While some Muslim women were wearing hijabs, most were not.  My interactions with Muslims in customer-facing roles seemed friendly and appropriate.  Admittedly, I did not go into any of the bad sections of Paris.

Curiously, an East Indian woman told my daughter that the crime problem only became an issue with Africans arriving.  Whether this perception reflects reality, I do not know.

Friendliness

Everyone but one person in a tourist-facing role was friendly and kind, contrary to the stereotpe of difficult Frenchmen.

Language

The conquest of the Middle East by Alexander the Great created a single dominant culture with a common secondary language, Greek.  The Internet and American dominance in culture has done the same for English.  While the customer-facing people all spoke and understood English, they were grateful when my wife and daughter attempted French.  At least no one served us a chocolate-covered tractor.