Odd Lots
- KBAQ, our local classical radio station here in Phoenix, is going to be playing Halloween-ish classical music this evening, from 7 to 10PM Pacific time. You don’t have to be in Phoenix to hear it; the station can be streamed for free by clicking on the Listen Live button from your Web browser.
- The hard outer coating of candy corn is made from the same stuff as the old (and now uncommon) wood finish, shellac. I.e., the lac bug, which produces a resin that can be turned into a hard coating. I used to use a lot of shellac on my home-made bookshelves. I always wondered howthehell many bugs it took to make a quart of shellac. As for lac resin in candy corn:, it can’t be too toxic, or I wouldn’t still be here.
- From the Speaking Of That Department: When I was six, my Grandma Sade gave me a Pez dispenser and a little thing of Pez candies. When I ran out of Pez, I tried putting candy corn (which we had a bag of at home) into the dispenser. The dispenser broke, to my severe annoyance. The upside is that I took it apart and discovered how it worked. That said, I’m not entirely sure I ever had another Pez dispenser.
- M&Ms are popular with astronauts, so much so that the little spheroids are on the International Space Station menu. I’ll bet the same isn’t true of candy corn.
- Stratolaunch is having excellent results with their Roc carrier plane, which is currently the largest airplane in the world. It’s basically two aircraft joined beneath a single looooooong wing, from which Stratolaunch will test-fly hypersonic aircraft. More video here, with a better view of the Roc.
- Dayum. China has developed a drone that can drop robot dogs equipped with machine guns. This very gizmo was a plot point in my unfinished novel The Molten Flesh. There was also a drone with a lethal laser, but having protagonist Ron Uhlein jump on the back of a robodog gun made for a much livelier action scene.
- Under Elon Musk’s ownership, Twitter is about to start charging bluechecks $20/month for their blue checks. My guess is that Twitter will thereafter have a lot fewer bluechecks.
- The bluecheck program has been tacky since the platform’s creation, arbitrarily separating a wholly artificial elite from the masses. If Musk changes this to provide a bluecheck to anyone presenting verification credentials and $20, the blue check will still be useful, but it will no longer confer prestige. Real prestige takes years of effort to learn. This kind of fake prestige should be the first thing to go.
- Where will the hyperventilating anti-Musk crowd go? Could to be Twitter founder Jack Dorsey’s Bluesky, a decentralized network of networks held together by federation. I wrote about Bluesky at some length in yesterday’s Contra entry, which would be a good starting point if you’re interested.
- My guess is that Bluesky is roughly comparable to Mastodon, a federated social network that’s been around for some time. More is on Wikipedia. It sounds good–I like decentralization–but I find it remarkable how little there is about it online.
- For the first time in US history, there will be a total eclipse of the Moon on election day, November 8 of this year. They’re calling it the Blood Moon, which has a really creepy vibe to it, considering the current chaotic state of our political gestalt, On the other hand, today is Halloween, and creepy vibes are all over the place.
Posted in: Odd Lots.
Tagged: astronomy · aviation · food · music · robots · twitter
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I’m mildly surprised that your candy coating bullet is potentially novel information. I’ve been an amateur tobacco-pipe maker for about a dozen years, and one of the first things I learned was that shellac was (perhaps not is) a common “polish” for hard candies.
Back when I was young enough to eat candy with impunity, I didn’t consider its component ingredients important enough to dwell on. Now, at 70, I have my A1C to think of, and don’t eat candy anymore except on holidays where it’s unavoidable. This is true of sweets generally, and becomes truer with each passing year.
I’m a little unclear on one thing: How did learning to make tobacco pipes cue you in on shellac as a coating on hard candy? I’m not a tobacco guy (smoking killed my father) but are tobacco pipes finished with shellac? In truth I have no clue.
I know from experience that shellac goes bad over time once you open the can. If it’s been sitting in the can for a year or so, it no longer completely dries. I had a couple of slightly sticky bookcases for that reason.
Shellac has been used to finish pipes. Also, carnauba wax (another popular candy shine-coat). A friend had some shellac, and we tested the finish on a rather sad little pipe I’d made. The finish lasted for several years, barely showing any wear, despite the heat of smoking.
Trivia is fun stuff.
Is “cue you in” the way you say the expression, or is that just a typo?
I always thought the expression was “clue you in”, but like misunderstood lyrics, I could have been hearing it wrong my whole life.
I’ve heard it both ways; what I meant was “call your attention to,” and a cue is a calling to attention, to paraphrase the dictionary definition a little. “Clue” might be better English, but when I write too fast I don’t suffer over differences that small.
Heh – I did not know about that for Shellac, but I have always wondered about…
Artificial raspberry flavouring, which is derived “castoreum”, which comes from Beaver anal glands (and urine?).
Now – since learning that, I have always wondered – how many Beavers does it take to supply the world with it? Are we really trapping that many Beavers here in Canada? They must have synthesized a fully chemical replacement by now, no?
The Roc reminds me of the “Zwilling” twin-fuselage planes built by WW II Germany. The He-111Z was used to tow the Me-321 “Gigant” glider. There was also an experimental Me-109Z, and the US had the F-82 Twin Mustang, which served in Korea.