STUFF: News, Technology, the cool and the plain weird

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A MAN AND HIS WATCH  

When you find the right watch, it becomes an extension of you. That's been the case for generations of iconic figures like Paul Newman, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Elvis Presley. A Man and His Watch profiles those figures and the timepieces they wore from the perspective of author Matthew Hranek, who traveled the world conducting interviews and gathering the histories of 76 watches. Each piece is attached to an original photograph and a detailed story of some of the most coveted watches in the world.
216 pages. $24



 

I bought this book a couple of months ago but haven’t had a chance to look at it yet. Looking forward to reading it.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

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Massive Russian Cargo Ship With A Drunk Captain Plows Right Into Korean Bridge

Watching this video of the 5,998-ton Seagrand, a Russian cargo ship, slowly crash into the Gwangan Bridge in Busan, South Korea earlier today is one of those kinds of things that makes you want to yell at your screen. How does something like this happen? Everything involved is huge and either slow or stationary. What does it take to f**k up in such a grand and preventable manner? It seems a drunk captain helps.  

At first I was wondering if, somehow, the crew just, uh, forgot they had those huge cranes on deck and thought they could somehow clear the bridge? That seemed pretty impossible, though.

The massive ship hit the bridge and caused some damage to itself and the lower part of the bridge, though thankfully nobody was injured. The ship then backed away, perhaps hoping nobody noticed, but the vessel was intercepted by the Korean Coast Guard (KCG).

The KCG questioned the crew about what the hell happened, and found that the captain had a blood alcohol level of 0.086 per cent. In case you’re not familiar with the blood alcohol limits for piloting cargo vessels, the maximum allowed is 0.03 per cent.

It’s legal to consume alcohol on a ship as long as you’re not the one steering; as yet, it’s not clear if the Cap’n Drunk was at the helm.

Under an hour or so before hitting the bridge, the Seagrand hit a cruise ship and prior to impacting the bridge the coastal navigation service contacted the ship to warn them about running their big-arse ship into the bridge, but the captain reportedly didn’t understand English well and may not have understood. 

I mean, even if your English is terrible you’d think a panicked message from the port and a bridge filling up your view out the window might be enough to give a hint about what’s going on, but, you know, dude was pretty drunk.

The captain was detained by authorities and the owners and operators of the ship, VostokMorService and LLC SK Grand Shipping have been contacted.

In case you’re worried, the 1,400 tons of iron pipes carried on the ship made it to the port of Busan just fine, though.

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How The Biggest TV You've Ever Seen Helped First Man's Oscar-Winning Visual Effects Look So Authentic

It’s not hard to pick out all the visual effects shots in movies like Avengers: Infinity War or Ready Player One, but First Man was shot more like a documentary, so the extensive visual effects had to be seamless and invisible. To help accomplish this, built one of the most amazing TVs you’ve ever seen, allowing many flight sequences to be filmed on set with minimal post-production work required afterwards.

Scenes where an actor, who’s never actually flown before, has to pilot an aircraft are often filmed against a gigantic green screen that’s removed in post-production and replaced with footage of clouds whizzing by. But for First Man, Digital Effects Supervisor Tristan Myles reveals to the BBC that director Damien Chazelle wanted to recreate those scenes, such as the flight of the X-15, in camera. So the towering LED screen was built on a sound stage and used to play back animated footage of clouds and space behind a moving gimbal supporting an aircraft mockup and the actors.

Projecting footage behind a performer is actually a trick Hollywood has been using for decades, most often with driving scenes, but it’s been refined to the point where the results in First Man are impossible to distinguish from actual flight footage. The approach also minimizes the amount of post-production work needed for a shot, as reflections on windows, or helmet visors, are accurately captured during filming.

During production, DNEG also had access to archival footage of the Apollo programs from NASA, and was able to incorporate actual shots of launches into the movie. But the original footage was shot on film with a square aspect ratio, whereas modern movies are projected with a much wider vista. As a result, artists at DNEG had to digitally extend the original archival footage so it had a wider aspect ratio, using CG simulations of the smoke, steam, and fire generated during a launch. It sounds like a lot of unnecessary work, but adds a bit more authenticity to the film, which helped convince the Academy it deserved the Oscar for Best Visual Effects.

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The Helicopter Pilots Who Carpet-Bomb Islands To Battle Invasive Rats

Most people, if tasked with flying a helicopter over a Subantarctic island to complete a multimillion-dollar conservation mission, would be understandably nervous. But not Peter Garden.

“I’ve never been nervous—I enjoy it,” he told Earther. “This has never been a job for me.”

The responsibility that everyone else would definitely call “a job” is pretty specific: Dropping bait over remote islands infested with invasive rodents that were accidentally imported, often centuries ago, by European whalers and sailors. The baiting technique can effectively eliminate mice and rats that have pushed native and endemic species into decline. But if Garden or his fellow pilots miss even a small sliver of land, some rodents will survive to repopulate the island, and the mission will be a failure.

Dozens of governments and environmental groups around the world have hired bait drop teams to clear rodents off islands skirting European, Australian and North American coastlines, as well as some territories in the middle of the ocean. Each effort takes years of planning, but if rodents can be eliminated from these island—many of which are UNESCO World Heritage sites home rare and exceptional ecosystems—it’s worth it.

Mission staff loading bait into helicopter buckets on Macquarie Island, which lie halfway between New Zealand and Antarctica.

Only a couple pilots have the expertise for this work, including Garden, who has done 27 bait drops since conservationists first attempted the strategy a few decades ago. Over the years, he and his project coordinators have tried to think through every detail of what a project could possibly require, but the squads still find surprises with every new ecosystem they visit.

“The appeal of eradication is that you do it once, do it right, and leave the island to its devices, it locks in conservation gains in perpetuity,” Keith Springer, a freelance pest eradication project manager, told Earther.

Springer has worked with Garden on several bait drop efforts at the behest of government agencies, like the New Zealand Department of Conservation, and groups like the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. Drops demand a big sum up front — an the Antarctic Macquarie Island drop cost $19 million, for instance — but steward agencies have spent more than that cobbling together rodent control on islands for decades, according to Springer. If left alone, the mice and rats can chew their way through invertebrate and plant populations. Rodents might even attack live birds. Some of their prey, like the Hawaiian kāmaʻo, have gone extinct, while others, like the Chilean masafuera rayadito, are critically endangered in part because of rats.

Mission staff loading bait into helicopter buckets on South Georgia Island in the southern Atlantic.

“In the public arena, nobody gives a stuff about the bugs,” Springer said, “but an albatross chick losing the top of its head keys into people’s sense of outrage and injustice.”

As soon as a government asks for help, Springer puts out a call for pilots. Garden is likely to respond. The New Zealand native developed his helicopter skills spreading pesticides and fertiliser across his country’s hilly terrain. He’s been flying for conservation since the 1980s, when he helped the New Zealand Wildlife Service rescue the last kākāpō, a species of rare bird, from Stewart Island, the southernmost part of the country. While attempting to relocate the bird, the government realised that all potential havens were overrun with rodents, Garden said.

Many of these potential habitats were uninhabited and difficult to navigate by foot to spread bait. But it would soon become possible to eliminate invasive rodents in a different way. In the 1990s, hyper-accurate GPS tracking debuted that could guide pilots on perfect flight lines over otherwise unnavigable territory and guarantee every square meter would be hit by rodent bait. In 1998, Garden used one of these trackers to make Codfish Island, just northwest of Stewart Island, a suitable spot for kākāpō.

Because he’s been doing this so long, Garden is extra involved in a mission’s planning. He might, for instance, might meet biologists or park rangers on an island months before a bait drop to test the impacts on native wildlife. If non-target species like gulls can handle some deaths from accidental bait consumption, those losses might be worth it for the sake of the overall goal, Springer said. But if the island houses species that can’t sustain casualties — like the endemic woodhens and currawong crows on the soon-to-be-baited Lord Howe Island east of Australia — conservationists guide the animals into enclosures until all the bait has disappeared.

Other concerns arise on Antarctic islands, like Macquarie, which has king penguins. Roaring aircrafts can make the birds stampede and trample one another, so pilots on those missions practice fly-overs ahead of time to find a height that animals will tolerate.

After these trials comes the main event. A dozen or two support staff, from engineers to IT specialists to bait bucket loaders, might be on an island to make a drop successful, but once Garden takes off, he’s in charge of everything. A lever switch in his cockpit opens a gate in the bait pail swinging below. Keeping the helicopter at a consistent speed and height — typically, around 89km per hour and 45.72m off the ground — Garden regularly sticks his head out to make sure the pellets are falling. If that’s not enough multitasking, he also watches for birds. The albatross and giant petrels soaring over, say, Gough Island in the South Atlantic don’t dodge helicopters, and if a pilot strikes one of these massive birds, the damage can decommission the aircraft, according to Springer.

Mission staff loading bait into helicopter buckets on Macquarie Island, which lie halfway between New Zealand and Antarctica.

The other mission threat is the weather. Winds can easily whip over 161km per hour on islands above 40 degrees latitude, causing bait to scatter unpredictably or breaking off helicopter rotor blades. Crews often spend weeks waiting out bad weather, and Garden will sometimes sleep overnight in his helicopter if tents can’t provide enough shelter.

If everything goes exactly to plan—and sometimes it does—the crew doesn’t know how to react, Garden said. These drops require anywhere from three years to a decade of planning, with staff spending months away from their families to pull it off. And then in a matter of weeks, it’s done. “Everyone stands there and looks at each other, saying, ‘what’s next?’” Garden said.

The answer is, they wait. If a project fails, it can take two years for any remaining rodents to repopulate. If none are found at that point, the mission is considered a success. The next phase, ecosystem recovery, is what Garden loves most. Though he rarely returns to the islands he’s helped restore, he and the crew keep up with the surprising shifts biologists observe. Following a campaign to remove invasive mammals, including rats, from Campbell Island, the New Zealand territory started sprouting megaherbs, oversized, leafy plants with brightly-coloured flowers that have been described as “the equivalent of jungles in the sub-Antarctic”.

On Palmyra Atoll, all the mosquitoes disappeared after a bait drop in 2011—it seems the bloodsuckers were only on the Pacific outcrop for the rodents. Garden’s most recent drop on Desecheo Island, Puerto Rico in 2016 helped the island start regaining its role as a seabird nesting spot. “Things like that you can’t quantify when you start a project,” Garden said.

Mission staff loading bait into helicopter buckets on Macquarie Island, which lie halfway between New Zealand and Antarctica.

While he knows the job wouldn’t appeal to everyone, Garden has loved every mission he’s been on. “Unfortunately, [aerial eradication efforts] came at the end of my aviation career, so I’m quite sad I’m getting to that stage where I can’t fly anymore,” he said. “It’s been the highlight of my aviation career, to do something positive for the environment.”

That said, he and his fellow older pilots are looking for replacements, people who don’t need to rack up hours in the cockpit. “These are jobs that suit semi-retired pilots, who have time, experience, and don’t have anything to prove,” Garden continued.

So if another pilot out there finds themselves in that particular career phase, now’s the time to give Garden a call.

Leslie Nemo is a freelance environmental reporter based in New York.

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Detective Pikachu's Ryan Reynolds Tries To Pass Off Bad Parenting As Method Acting

Ryan Reynolds announced a new trailer is coming tomorrow for Detective Pikachu, while also taking us inside his super-serious acting process. But it sounds like it was also a way to try and explain to his wife, Blake Lively, why their daughters may not want him to pick them up at school anymore.

In a new parody video, Reynolds went “Outside the Actors Studio” for a glimpse at how he got into the character of Detective Pikachu for the live-action and computer animation hybrid film of the same name, which comes out May 10. He shared how he “spent the entire year” as the character. He studied Pikachu’s history, learned his mannerisms. He even tried to lose over 82kg so he could be the same size as the character, at least until doctors intervened.

According to Reynolds, the method acting for this ultra-serious role started the day he learned he was cast in Detective Pikachu, leading to an unforeseen event that can only be described as mild child endangerment. “I was on my way to pick up my daughters from school when I heard that I got the role. I didn’t show up at [the] school because Detective Pikachu, he doesn’t know who those two little girls are,” Reynolds said. “Who are they?”

Lively, who also appeared in the parody video, popped in to remind him that he knows who they are, they’re their daughters and he abandoned them at school. And they’re probably not going to go see his movie in the theatres after that, because actions have consequences buddy.

And in a stroke of what can only be described as genius, Lively also said the one thing we all know to be true about Reynold’s performance as Detective Pikachu. The thing we’re not supposed to say, but come on, we’re all thinking it.

“I mean, he didn’t even change his voice. It just sounds like him,” she said.

Thank you Blake, for being the voice of reason. And Ryan, stop method acting and go pick up your kids. They’ve been there for weeks.

 

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Ubisoft Reveals Tom Clancy’s The Division 2 “Dark Zone” Trailer

Ubisoft just keeps cranking out a new trailer every couple of days for Tom Clancy’s The Division 2, this one takes us into the heart of the Dark Zone. Here we’re given a snippet of the story and how the zones are basically death traps covered in yellow powder that will kill you pretty quickly, so you have to go in as a team to search for supplies while also fending off people doing the same thing. You’d probably avoid them altogether if not for all the loot you can grab and the weird missions that send you into them. Enjoy the trailer as we wait for The Division 2 the game to be released on March 15th.

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BOEING ‘LOYAL WINGMAN’ DRONE

Innovative technology has been something of a darkhorse lately, and while the biggest companies on the planet have been focusing on the transition toward artificial intelligence, Boeing has taken it upon themselves to lead the way for aviation-focused AI endeavors. Their newly introduced Airpower Teaming System (ATS) promises to be the company’s greatest contribution yet.

The ATS will focus on an unmanned, autonomous aircraft that will be piloted alongside modern-day military assets, providing a disruptive advantage for allied forces and unmanned missions as the “wingman of tomorrow.” The aircraft will offer a customizable platform that can be reconfigured based on mission type, squad-necessity, and range — providing military forces with a solution for multiplicative force and air power projection. The 38-foot drone boasts fighter-like performance, integrated sensors that will focus on intelligence, reconnaissance, and electronic warfare, and a 2,000 nautical mile range for essential mission readiness. The ATS is slated to get to work sometime in 2020 when the platform’s first test flight will take place.

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FLORENTINE CUSTOM KITCHEN KNIVES

Whether we’re talking kitchen gear or tableware, there is no tool more important than a knife. And while there are plenty of superb options on the market, the ultimate expression of cooking prowess and personal pride can be found in a unique set of cutlery, which you can have custom-made by Florentine Kitchen Knives.

Originally from Tel Aviv, FKK is actually headquartered out of Barcelona, Spain, as opposed to Italy, as one might assume. But that nugget of interesting information pales in comparison to what they can do for you regarding kitchen cutlery. Through their online customizer, they offer a trio of knife types — chef, paring, and table. Each knife is available with dual handle options — scaled (seven color options of traditional handle scales) or stacked (a rainbow of colored disks in either leather or Micarta) — and you can even get your choice of a 14c28n Swedish stainless steel or XC75 French Carbon steel blade with one of four finish options. Best of all, they’re all completely handmade. And if that’s not personalized enough for you, they’ll be offering completely bespoke options soon. Pricing starts at just under $100 a blade but will vary depending on your custom selections, so check out the FKK site for more info.

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Simulated Mission In Chilean Desert Shows How A Rover Could Detect Life On Mars

By using the barren Atacama Desert in Chile as a stand-in for Mars, researchers have shown that it’s possible to use an autonomous rover-mounted drill to detect life beneath a desolate surface. Encouragingly, the test resulted in the discovery of a resilient microorganism—exactly the kind of creature that could lurk deep beneath the Martian surface.

New research published today in Frontiers in Microbiology describes a trial NASA rover mission in Chile’s Atacama Desert that could mirror a future mission to Mars. The experimental rover and drill, designed by Carnegie Mellon’s Robotics Institute and funded by NASA, successfully recovered microorganisms beneath the surface — specifically, a hardy, salt-resistant bacteria. The test provided justification for a life-hunting mission to Mars, but the experiment was not without its challenges and limitations. As the new research showed, finding life on Mars—if it even exists — will require some serious technological innovations, a lot of cash, and a bit of luck.

Billions of years ago, Mars featured a temperate climate and liquid water at its surface, providing a potential environment for life to emerge. Today, life is unlikely to exist at the surface. Lethal levels of radiation bathe the Red Planet, and its tortured surface contains scant traces of liquid water. During the Martian summer, daytime temperatures near the equator can reach a balmy 20 degrees Celsius, but at night drop to a frighteningly cold -100 degrees C.

The rover’s robotic drill in use at the Atacama Desert. 

Conditions beneath the surface are a different story, according to Stephen Pointing, a researcher at Yale-NUS College in Singapore and the lead author of the new study. Just below the surface, rocks and sediment provide shelter from the extreme conditions above, providing a potential habitat for life.

As Pointing explained to Gizmodo, there’s no place on Earth quite like the surface of Mars, but the ground beneath the Atacama Desert in Chile offers a decent analogue.

“Some of the most Mars-like soils on Earth are in the Atacama Desert,” said Pointing. “There is very little water input to the desert and soils have become very nutrient-poor and extremely salty over time, and chemically they resemble the soils on Mars in several ways. In preparation for future missions to Mars we use places such as the Atacama Desert to test theories about the distribution of life and new technologies to search for life.”

For the experiment, Pointing and his colleagues deployed an autonomous four-wheeled rover equipped with a robotic drill, which successfully recovered subsurface sediment samples from a depth of 80 centimeters. The researchers compared samples recovered by the rover to samples collected by hand. Then, using DNA sequencing, Pointing and his colleagues showed that bacterial life in the sediments recovered by both methods were similar, showing that the rover technique was a success.

That said, the bacteria weren’t evenly distributed across the desert, and instead were located in seemingly random patches. This was on account of “limited water availability, scarce nutrients, and geochemistry of the soil,” said Pointing, adding that, in the search for life on Mars, “we may be facing the biggest ever ‘find-a-needle-in-a-haystack’ problem.”

Nevertheless, the new study is the first to show that microorganisms are distributed within specific subsurface habitable zones beneath the surface of the Atacama Desert.

“The surface supports a ubiquitous and unremarkable community dominated by photosynthetic Chloroflexi and these have been widely reported before,” Pointing told Gizmodo. “Just below the surface is where it starts to get interesting. We saw that with increasing depth the bacterial community became dominated by bacteria that can thrive in the extremely salty and alkaline soils. They in turn were replaced at depths down to 80 cm by a unique group of bacteria that survive by metabolizing methane as a food source.”

Excitingly, the new research shows that the subsurface of Atacama can support highly specialised microbes that could potentially survive the salty Martian soil. Moreover, Mars is known to contain copious amounts of methane at the surface, pointing to the possible presence of methane-gobbling microorganisms beneath the Martian surface, according to the new paper. An important next step for Pointing and his team will be to figure out how the subsurface microbes at Atacama are able to survive. To that end, they’re looking at possible strategies used by the bacteria to survive long periods without water and exposure to extremely salty conditions. In addition, the team would like to return to the Atacama Desert with a rover capable of drilling 2 meters down.

With all this said, it’s time for some reality checks.

The researchers successfully used a probe to detect life on Earth, which is admittedly not terribly difficult, even when the environment happens to be a desert. Life has flourished on Earth for billions of years, and it’s ubiquitous, even appearing in rock thousands of feet beneath the surface. Yes, the new research was done at a Mars-like place, but it’s still not Mars. At best, the new study presents scientific justification for a future life-hunting mission to the Red Planet, but any speculation about extant life on Mars remains just that.

Another important limitation of the new research is that the sediment samples were tested in a lab, and not by equipment on the rover itself. Pointing himself admitted this will present a major obstacle for Mars mission planners.

“For a rover on Mars there is a challenge in identifying unequivocal signs of life,” Pointing said. “The DNA sequencing method we employed is great here on Earth but is currently too complex to perform reliably on Mars. This is why indirect detection of other molecules known to be formed by living cells is probably the approach that missions to Mars will go with in the near-term.”

In other words, it would make more sense for a future rover to search for biosignatures—the remnants of biological life, such as inexplicable traces of molecular oxygen combined with methane, accumulated piles of microbes (stromatolites), and traces of fossilized waste, fat, and steroids. If anything like this could be detected, “then we would need new experimental techniques to test if any Martian bacteria were actually alive and capable of active metabolism,” said Pointing.

Lastly, and perhaps more discouragingly, there is the cost of sending such a mission to Mars. NASA and ESA are planning to send rovers to Mars within the next few years, but it’s not clear if either agency has the technological capacity or funds to organise a mission capable of returning Martian rock and soil samples to Earth for analysis. As SpaceNews reported just this week, NASA is unlikely to return Mars samples in the 2020s, primarily due to the expense.

Pointing admitted that a return mission would be expensive, costing hundreds of millions of dollars.

“However, the research will help us to address one of the biggest questions we can possibly ask,” he said. “Is Earth the only planet that supports life?”

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Left for Dead: The Comeback Story of Michter’s Whiskey

The rebirth of one of America’s oldest whiskey brands is complete with a new tasting room and distillery in Louisville.

On the unseasonably warm last weekend of 1983, I took a spin through the Pennsylvania countryside with my buddy Bob. We had no goal in mind, no plan other than heading north out of Lancaster. After several crossroads decided on the flip of a coin, we were running north on Rt. 501 near Schaefferstown, when we saw a sign: Distillery Road. It was quickly followed by another sign: To Michter’s Jug House–America’s Oldest Distillery. Tours.

How could we say no? So, we hung a left on Distillery Road and soon found the place, a cluster of brick-and-glass buildings, one surmounted with a big water tank in the shape of a whiskey jug, around a white wood-frame house. It was busy, with at least 20 other cars in the lot. We got out and took the tour. We were told that distilling had been going on there since 1753, and the site had gained recognition as a National Historic Landmark in 1980.

Okay, I had to look those facts up, and I’d be lying if I said I remembered much else from our visit. I know there was talk of corn and yeast, and I do remember seeing a small pair of squat copper pot stills. Bobby bought a little bottle of whiskey, and we got back in the car and headed north again. It was a good day: we wound up at the Yuengling brewery, and didn’t even realize that we’d just been to both America’s oldest distillery and brewery all in one afternoon.

Michter’s closed about seven years later, on Valentine’s Day, 1990. In 1997, I went to pay my respects to the abandoned buildings. It was a depressing day: cold, rainy, gray, as sad as the buildings slowly crumbled into the Pennsylvania countryside.

Why did I make that second pilgrimage? At the time, serious whiskey drinkers were obsessing about some 16-year-old Michter’s Bourbon. Ironically, it had been bought as the distillery was shutting down and was sold under the A.H. Hirsch label. It was phenomenal, but the supply was very limited. Chuck Cowdery wrote an e-book about it, aptly titled The Best Bourbon You’ll Never Taste.

I learned that the relatively Germanic-sounding “Michter’s” was actually a name constructed from “Michael” and “Peter,” the two sons of Louis Forman, who’d bought the distillery in 1950. C. Everett Beam, Jim Beam’s grandnephew, was the next to last master distiller. The last distiller, Dick Stoll, is in his 80s, and still lives in the area. (He is actively involved in a new small distillery, Stoll & Wolfe).

People talked occasionally about bringing the old distillery back to life, but the warehouses were falling apart, the brand was moribund, and the little copper stills had been bought by another Beam, David, and shipped to Kentucky. David was a retired Jim Beam master distiller, and apparently was thinking about starting up a small distillery with the stills. Nothing ever came of it, and they sat in Beam’s garage in Bardstown. That’s where I saw them again, about nine months after standing by the empty stillhouse in Pennsylvania.

About that time, a young entrepreneur in New York, Joe Magliocco, was taking a different look at Michter’s. He thought the brand might have some value. “Might was the operative word,” he told me, chuckling, on a recent phone interview.

Magliocco grew up in the wine and spirit business. “My dad, Tony, was a distributor and importer,” he said. “My first sales job, between junior and senior year of college, was actually selling Michter’s whiskey.” He started his own company, Chatham Imports, “a little supplier company that didn’t really have anything anyone wanted.”

When he decided to add a rye whiskey to that list of things no one wanted—and believe me, no one wanted rye whiskey in the mid-1990s—he thought of the Michter’s brand name. He looked for someone to negotiate with, but the brand had been abandoned. It was literally his for the taking.

That was the start of what he now calls Phase I of Michter’s. “The initial plan was to find some really good age statement whiskey, and put it out there,” he said. “We went around to people, and there was a lot of great whiskey. When we told them we wanted ten years old and older, they were really happy. There wasn’t any demand for it then.”

Magliocco tasted whiskies with his sales head, Steve Ziegler, and his mentor, Dick Newman, the former head of Austin, Nichols, which makes Wild Turkey. “We picked the style of whiskey that we liked a lot. We thought, if we ever do wind up producing, it would be a style we could emulate.”

Next came Phase II, which started around 2004, when a distillery in Kentucky (the identity of which is still under non-disclosure contract) started making Michter’s a few days a year. “It was more than just sourcing,” Magliocco explained. “It was made the way we liked it.” That included everything from using Michter’s proprietary yeast strain to filling the barrels at a lower proof, which is much more expensive but produces more flavor.

Once Phase II established the brand’s bona fides, and they were sure that enough people liked what they had produced, Magliocco started planning a distillery in Shively, a Louisville suburb. Construction started in 2012, and the brand first experimented with a small pilot still. In 2014, they put in a 32” column still and 250-gallon doubler and testing continued.

But that’s all it was: testing. This is when Magliocco and his distiller, Willie Pratt, really began to display the dogged insistence on quality that has become the hallmark of the reborn brand. Not just any white dog was going to become Michter’s. (Pratt was later nicknamed Dr. No, by the brand’s sales force for not allowing any whiskey to be sold until he thought it was ready even if it was in short supply.)

“We were distilling, but not barreling,” Magliocco said. “We wanted the white dog to be virtually identical, chemically and organoleptically, to the Phase II stuff. We didn’t barrel anything until August of 2015.” I visited in the spring of 2018, and toured with Magliocco and his current master distiller, Pam Heilmann, who had been the distillery manager at Jim Beam’s Booker Noe distillery. (Pratt retired a few years ago and handpicked Heilmann as his successor.)

The attention to detail was striking. The distillery was immaculate, everything was clearly labeled. Heilmann explained how the different whiskies were filtered using different technology; Pratt had carefully tested 32 combinations of filters and whiskies to determine the best combination for each. I was much more impressed by my second tour of a Michter’s distillery.

Meanwhile, Magliocco was working on another piece of the Michter’s experience. In 2011, Chatham Imports bought the historic Fort Nelson building on Main Street in downtown Louisville. The ornate building had even been used by Union troops during the Civil War but had been unoccupied for years. He wanted to open a distillery on what had been the city’s Whiskey Row before Prohibition, but it was not to be. The start of renovations revealed near-catastrophic flaws, including a brick exterior wall that was bowing nearly two feet over the sidewalk.

It took years, and an undisclosed amount of money, to restore the building. Right about the same time Magliocco bought the building, those old Michter’s pot stills came up for sale. He had been waiting for that, and got in touch with David Beam but he was a day late. Beam had just sold them to Tom Herbruck, who wanted to put them in his Tom’s Foolery Distillery in Ohio.

“I called Tom and asked him: ‘Do you want to flip it?’” Magliocco recalled, and I could still hear the eagerness in his voice. Hersbruck didn’t, but in 2015 he decided to expand the distillery beyond the little stills capacity, and asked Magliocco if he was still interested. Yes, he was.

So while the Fort Nelson building now looks unchanged, it was in fact rebuilt inside, complete with a new steel frame. It also houses the two little copper stills I’d seen in Pennsylvania, and the three cypress wood fermenters from there as well. The system has essentially made a roundtrip, since it was built in Louisville in 1976 by Vendome Copper & Brass Works. “Some of the guys from Vendome who installed the big equipment in Shively saw the Pennsylvania system,” Magliocco said, “and they said, ‘hey, my father, my grandfather worked on that!’”

Distillers Dan McKee and Matt Bell went through the same process with this set-up as had been done at the Shively plant. After months of tests and tweaks to make sure it tasted like the whiskey produced in the big still, the brand filled the first barrel from Fort Nelson on January 31, 2019.

I toured Fort Nelson a week later, and there were the Michter’s stills, back in Louisville about a mile-and-a-half from where they were made at Vendome. As I leaned on the rim of the cypress fermenters, which I’d last seen 36 years before, 600 miles away, I was struck by the different circumstances of the two visits.

In 1983, I’d seen a distillery on its last legs, in the midst of a last hurrah before ignominiously being abandoned to molder in the Pennsylvania hills. American whiskey was a losing proposition, slowly declining. It still saddens me to think of how the original Michter’s narrowly missed the spirits and cocktails revival that would start about five years after it closed.

There had been some resentment about the way Magliocco had picked up the Michter’s brand and ran with it, mainly from folks who would have liked to see the Pennsylvania site reborn. But that’s largely water over the dam now, washed away by the quality of the whiskey that has been bottled under the Michter’s label. (And to be fair, many historic Pennsylvania and Maryland brands are now produced in and owned by Kentucky companies.)

I talked to Magliocco about the symbolism of those stills. He was more excited that David Beam’s grandson, Ben Beam, was running them as a distiller at the Fort Nelson facility. “You can have the best equipment,” he said, “but if the people are sloppy, you won’t get good whiskey out of it. Our people are talented, and one of the reasons they’re at Michter’s is that they’re on a mission. They want to do what we’re doing.”

What’s next? Settling down and making more whiskey, “the greatest American whiskey,” Magliocco was quick to point out. “That’s the goal. We have another facility in Springfield, where we’re growing non-GMO corn, barley, and rye. It gives us more experience with grain. We continue to try different distillations and maturations. Sometimes things are uniquely horrible, and we get rid of it. But sometimes, hey, it’s really good! We’ll just continue trying to make really good whiskey.”

 

 

[MIKA27]

REY CAMPERO SIERRA NEGRA MEZCAL

Founded by mezcalero Romulo Sanchez Parada, Rey Campero Mezcal helps to represent the culture, tradition, and art of Candelaria Yegolé: a small town located in the Southern Highlands of Oaxaca. This rare expression uses Sierra Negra agave, a plant that grows wild and takes around 25 years to mature. It's no longer commonly used to make Mezcal, and this bottling was only released in Mexico, though some bottles have found their way into the United States. The artisanal mezcal is bottled at 97.2% ABV and has a smoky, fruity flavor upfront that makes way for a spicy, black pepper finish. $150

[Shelby07]

9 hours ago, MIKA27 said:

Left for Dead: The Comeback Story of Michter’s Whiskey

The rebirth of one of America’s oldest whiskey brands is complete with a new tasting room and distillery in Louisville.

On the unseasonably warm last weekend of 1983, I took a spin through the Pennsylvania countryside with my buddy Bob. We had no goal in mind, no plan other than heading north out of Lancaster. After several crossroads decided on the flip of a coin, we were running north on Rt. 501 near Schaefferstown, when we saw a sign: Distillery Road. It was quickly followed by another sign: To Michter’s Jug House–America’s Oldest Distillery. Tours.

How could we say no? So, we hung a left on Distillery Road and soon found the place, a cluster of brick-and-glass buildings, one surmounted with a big water tank in the shape of a whiskey jug, around a white wood-frame house. It was busy, with at least 20 other cars in the lot. We got out and took the tour. We were told that distilling had been going on there since 1753, and the site had gained recognition as a National Historic Landmark in 1980.

Okay, I had to look those facts up, and I’d be lying if I said I remembered much else from our visit. I know there was talk of corn and yeast, and I do remember seeing a small pair of squat copper pot stills. Bobby bought a little bottle of whiskey, and we got back in the car and headed north again. It was a good day: we wound up at the Yuengling brewery, and didn’t even realize that we’d just been to both America’s oldest distillery and brewery all in one afternoon.

Michter’s closed about seven years later, on Valentine’s Day, 1990. In 1997, I went to pay my respects to the abandoned buildings. It was a depressing day: cold, rainy, gray, as sad as the buildings slowly crumbled into the Pennsylvania countryside.

Why did I make that second pilgrimage? At the time, serious whiskey drinkers were obsessing about some 16-year-old Michter’s Bourbon. Ironically, it had been bought as the distillery was shutting down and was sold under the A.H. Hirsch label. It was phenomenal, but the supply was very limited. Chuck Cowdery wrote an e-book about it, aptly titled The Best Bourbon You’ll Never Taste.

I learned that the relatively Germanic-sounding “Michter’s” was actually a name constructed from “Michael” and “Peter,” the two sons of Louis Forman, who’d bought the distillery in 1950. C. Everett Beam, Jim Beam’s grandnephew, was the next to last master distiller. The last distiller, Dick Stoll, is in his 80s, and still lives in the area. (He is actively involved in a new small distillery, Stoll & Wolfe).

People talked occasionally about bringing the old distillery back to life, but the warehouses were falling apart, the brand was moribund, and the little copper stills had been bought by another Beam, David, and shipped to Kentucky. David was a retired Jim Beam master distiller, and apparently was thinking about starting up a small distillery with the stills. Nothing ever came of it, and they sat in Beam’s garage in Bardstown. That’s where I saw them again, about nine months after standing by the empty stillhouse in Pennsylvania.

About that time, a young entrepreneur in New York, Joe Magliocco, was taking a different look at Michter’s. He thought the brand might have some value. “Might was the operative word,” he told me, chuckling, on a recent phone interview.

Magliocco grew up in the wine and spirit business. “My dad, Tony, was a distributor and importer,” he said. “My first sales job, between junior and senior year of college, was actually selling Michter’s whiskey.” He started his own company, Chatham Imports, “a little supplier company that didn’t really have anything anyone wanted.”

When he decided to add a rye whiskey to that list of things no one wanted—and believe me, no one wanted rye whiskey in the mid-1990s—he thought of the Michter’s brand name. He looked for someone to negotiate with, but the brand had been abandoned. It was literally his for the taking.

That was the start of what he now calls Phase I of Michter’s. “The initial plan was to find some really good age statement whiskey, and put it out there,” he said. “We went around to people, and there was a lot of great whiskey. When we told them we wanted ten years old and older, they were really happy. There wasn’t any demand for it then.”

Magliocco tasted whiskies with his sales head, Steve Ziegler, and his mentor, Dick Newman, the former head of Austin, Nichols, which makes Wild Turkey. “We picked the style of whiskey that we liked a lot. We thought, if we ever do wind up producing, it would be a style we could emulate.”

Next came Phase II, which started around 2004, when a distillery in Kentucky (the identity of which is still under non-disclosure contract) started making Michter’s a few days a year. “It was more than just sourcing,” Magliocco explained. “It was made the way we liked it.” That included everything from using Michter’s proprietary yeast strain to filling the barrels at a lower proof, which is much more expensive but produces more flavor.

Once Phase II established the brand’s bona fides, and they were sure that enough people liked what they had produced, Magliocco started planning a distillery in Shively, a Louisville suburb. Construction started in 2012, and the brand first experimented with a small pilot still. In 2014, they put in a 32” column still and 250-gallon doubler and testing continued.

But that’s all it was: testing. This is when Magliocco and his distiller, Willie Pratt, really began to display the dogged insistence on quality that has become the hallmark of the reborn brand. Not just any white dog was going to become Michter’s. (Pratt was later nicknamed Dr. No, by the brand’s sales force for not allowing any whiskey to be sold until he thought it was ready even if it was in short supply.)

“We were distilling, but not barreling,” Magliocco said. “We wanted the white dog to be virtually identical, chemically and organoleptically, to the Phase II stuff. We didn’t barrel anything until August of 2015.” I visited in the spring of 2018, and toured with Magliocco and his current master distiller, Pam Heilmann, who had been the distillery manager at Jim Beam’s Booker Noe distillery. (Pratt retired a few years ago and handpicked Heilmann as his successor.)

The attention to detail was striking. The distillery was immaculate, everything was clearly labeled. Heilmann explained how the different whiskies were filtered using different technology; Pratt had carefully tested 32 combinations of filters and whiskies to determine the best combination for each. I was much more impressed by my second tour of a Michter’s distillery.

Meanwhile, Magliocco was working on another piece of the Michter’s experience. In 2011, Chatham Imports bought the historic Fort Nelson building on Main Street in downtown Louisville. The ornate building had even been used by Union troops during the Civil War but had been unoccupied for years. He wanted to open a distillery on what had been the city’s Whiskey Row before Prohibition, but it was not to be. The start of renovations revealed near-catastrophic flaws, including a brick exterior wall that was bowing nearly two feet over the sidewalk.

It took years, and an undisclosed amount of money, to restore the building. Right about the same time Magliocco bought the building, those old Michter’s pot stills came up for sale. He had been waiting for that, and got in touch with David Beam but he was a day late. Beam had just sold them to Tom Herbruck, who wanted to put them in his Tom’s Foolery Distillery in Ohio.

“I called Tom and asked him: ‘Do you want to flip it?’” Magliocco recalled, and I could still hear the eagerness in his voice. Hersbruck didn’t, but in 2015 he decided to expand the distillery beyond the little stills capacity, and asked Magliocco if he was still interested. Yes, he was.

So while the Fort Nelson building now looks unchanged, it was in fact rebuilt inside, complete with a new steel frame. It also houses the two little copper stills I’d seen in Pennsylvania, and the three cypress wood fermenters from there as well. The system has essentially made a roundtrip, since it was built in Louisville in 1976 by Vendome Copper & Brass Works. “Some of the guys from Vendome who installed the big equipment in Shively saw the Pennsylvania system,” Magliocco said, “and they said, ‘hey, my father, my grandfather worked on that!’”

Distillers Dan McKee and Matt Bell went through the same process with this set-up as had been done at the Shively plant. After months of tests and tweaks to make sure it tasted like the whiskey produced in the big still, the brand filled the first barrel from Fort Nelson on January 31, 2019.

I toured Fort Nelson a week later, and there were the Michter’s stills, back in Louisville about a mile-and-a-half from where they were made at Vendome. As I leaned on the rim of the cypress fermenters, which I’d last seen 36 years before, 600 miles away, I was struck by the different circumstances of the two visits.

In 1983, I’d seen a distillery on its last legs, in the midst of a last hurrah before ignominiously being abandoned to molder in the Pennsylvania hills. American whiskey was a losing proposition, slowly declining. It still saddens me to think of how the original Michter’s narrowly missed the spirits and cocktails revival that would start about five years after it closed.

There had been some resentment about the way Magliocco had picked up the Michter’s brand and ran with it, mainly from folks who would have liked to see the Pennsylvania site reborn. But that’s largely water over the dam now, washed away by the quality of the whiskey that has been bottled under the Michter’s label. (And to be fair, many historic Pennsylvania and Maryland brands are now produced in and owned by Kentucky companies.)

I talked to Magliocco about the symbolism of those stills. He was more excited that David Beam’s grandson, Ben Beam, was running them as a distiller at the Fort Nelson facility. “You can have the best equipment,” he said, “but if the people are sloppy, you won’t get good whiskey out of it. Our people are talented, and one of the reasons they’re at Michter’s is that they’re on a mission. They want to do what we’re doing.”

What’s next? Settling down and making more whiskey, “the greatest American whiskey,” Magliocco was quick to point out. “That’s the goal. We have another facility in Springfield, where we’re growing non-GMO corn, barley, and rye. It gives us more experience with grain. We continue to try different distillations and maturations. Sometimes things are uniquely horrible, and we get rid of it. But sometimes, hey, it’s really good! We’ll just continue trying to make really good whiskey.”

 

 

Thanks for posting this. Enjoyed the read. I discovered Michter’s a few months back. Try the sour mash, if you can find it. 

[MIKA27]

The GFG Style Kangaroo Concept Is A 'Hyper SUV'

I always wanted a car that looked like an insect trying to kill me when I get in it, and the new GFG Style Kangaroo concept car, designed by Giorgetto Giugiaro and his son, is pretty much that.

You almost certainly recognise the Giugiaro name—to call him “prolific” is an understatement, as he’s designed some of the most influential and lasting cars of all time. He did this with his son Fabrizio, which is where GFG comes from.

You may recognise the general shape and stature of the GFG Style Kangaroo concept because Italdesign has done a few lifted cross-country style supercar concepts in the past. There was the Giugiaro Parcour concept back in 2013, a lifted supercar, which was later reworked into the Audi Nanuk off-road supercar concept that had a diesel V10.

That makes the Kangaroo the third iteration in this weird car-family lineage, and this latest version is electric.

The all-wheel drive Kangaroo has a 90 kWh battery pack good for a claimed 451km of range (it’s not clear what testing standards this is based on), with two electric motors putting down a combined 483 horsepower. It has a claimed 0 to 60 mph time of 3.8 seconds and a limited top speed of 249km/h.

It has three different ride-height settings including up to 10.2 inches of ground clearance for ostensible off-roading, with 56cm wheels and all-wheel steering. The car is a space-frame construction with a body built of carbon fibre, with some of that exposed to contrast with the paint finish.

The styling takes the two previous Italdesign and Audi concept proportions and shapes it into something with a cab-forward profile reminiscent of the Jaguar C-X75 (maybe it’s just the orange colour), and a squinty face that sort of reminds me of those old Lotus concept cars that never became a reality.

Overall it looks about as silly as an all-wheel drive “hyper SUV” should look, with the dangerous-looking split-opening scissor doors serving as the cherry on top.

The car is reportedly an actual running prototype in partnership with CH Auto, and will be on display at the Geneva Motor Show this week. As for whether anybody will actually be able to buy this, I’m not sure, but am very doubtful.

It’s also not clear whether the can of orange Fanta in this interior render actually comes with the car or not, though.

[MIKA27]

Hurtigruten Expedition Cruises

Norwegian cruise provider Hurtigruten is adding new ships to their fleet, the MS Roald Amundsen and the MS Fridtjof Nansen. Modern and undeniably Scandinavian, the new ships have been heralded as "the worlds greenest, safest and most advanced" expedition ships. Indeed, these are the worlds first battery powered hybrid expedition cruise ships, designed to reduce emissions.

The Expedition Cruises are perfect for those who aim to explore the world’s harshest conditions on the cold fronts, their usual trips feature some destinations such as: the Norwegian fjords, Greenland, Antartica, Iceland and others. The Hurtigruten Expedition Cruises take their guests to some of the world’s most impressive scenarios with unique know how and expertise provided by over 125 years of experience in the field, plus they now have two hybrid vessels that are eco-conscious so you may feel more at ease traveling in them. Instead of casinos and luxury, you will have a more meaningful, authentic experience, while learning about the geography, history, and wildlife all around you. All the comfort is ensured by an experienced crew and a multitude of different possibilities are available so routine or boredom won’t become an issue. 

[MIKA27]

MERCEDES-AMG GT R ROADSTER

The only thing the Mercedes-AMG GT was missing was what it wasn't missing — a retractable roof. Mercedes is now rectifying the problem with the AMG GT R Roadster, combining the world-class luxury grand tourer with open-air motoring. The 4-liter, twin-turbo V8 is unchanged from the GT R, making 577 horsepower and propelling the drop top from 0-60 in 3.5 seconds and a top speed of 197 MPH.

An active aero system is tucked under the engine, helping to increase ground effect and improving high-speed stability. An active radiator inlet also opens, helping to channel air toward a double diffuser at the rear and better cooling for the rear brakes and other hotspots. TO make sure you get the benefit of lowering the top no matter the weather, Mercedes includes AIRSCARF neck warmers and climate-controlled seats wrapped in premium Nappa leather. Limited to only 750 units, the AMG GT R offers one of the best open-air driving experiences available.

 

 

[MIKA27]

The First Trailer For Game Of Thrones' Final Season Is Here

 

[MIKA27]

BUGATTI’S LA VOITURE NOIRE IS A $19 MILLION ODE TO THE GROTESQUELY RICH

Disregard your bank balance for a moment, and consider this proposition: Bugatti has designed a one-off, blacked-out car — built upon the Chiron drivetrain, and made out of carbon fiber and all the finest materials humanity has discovered — but it costs a whopping $18.9 million and you can’t have it for another 2.5 years, because Bugatti has to figure out how to engineer and homologate the preposterous thing. Do you take up that offer?

Any car fanatic would calculate how many Ferraris, McLarens, and Lambos could be had for such a princely sum, and how much driving can be done in 30 months, and decline as quickly and politely as possible. But if you’re a person more concerned with signaling their status or preserving their wealth, this $19 million Bugatti proposal is a no-brainer.

I talked to Bugatti design director Achim Anscheidt today while admiring a design model of his company’s newly announced “La Voiture Noire.” This vehicle will be a one-off — there’ll only ever be one made — homage to the Bugatti Type 57SC Atlantic. Designed by Jean Bugatti, eldest son of founder Ettore, the 57 Atlantic had an iconic all-black variant, which went missing during the Second World War, and that’s what today’s La Voiture Noire commemorates. Anscheidt tells me that once his design team finished with their work, the extremely limited-edition new car was bought by the first person it was offered to.

Because, why wouldn’t you? Purchasing a one-off Bugatti, at any price, is like buying futures in the stock of multibillionaires of the future. If you believe there’ll be more egregiously wealthy humans on the planet — whether in number or in amplitude of wealth — then it only makes sense to own extraordinarily exclusive items like this all-black Bugatti.

Anscheidt isn’t shy about the clientele that his company attracts, telling me that Bugatti has “a customer base that is used to configuring their yachts and their airplanes themselves,” and, further, that “if you compare it to the art market, it’s not so outrageous.”

I’m still reeling from the matter-of-fact manner in which those words were uttered, along with the inescapable logic they contain. The $19 million Bugatti La Voiture Noire will have the exact inverse value curve of a regular car: it’ll start to appreciate rather than depreciate the moment it’s delivered, and after 20 or so years, it’s likely to be an even more desired and exceptional art / status / wealth piece. Only a reckless fool would dare drive it.

Unsurprisingly, Bugatti’s new hypercar debut is the most expensive new car ever built and sold. What might surprise you, though, is that its escalated price is thanks entirely to its fancier design and scarcity. Bugatti didn’t make any performance enhancements relative to the Chiron, which is to say that the Bugatti Divo is still the best-performing vehicle that the brand offers. The Divo costs a comparably tame €5 million / $5.7 million, though that price is only of historic importance, as all 40 examples of it were sold to existing Chiron owners immediately upon announcement.

Before my conversation with Anscheidt concluded, he remarked that Bugatti is seeing a great response to all of its limited-run vehicles, and “there will be many more people who will want to have a one-off car made for themselves.” I’m confident that there are indeed millions who’d very much like that privilege. And I suspect there’ll be just enough who can afford Bugatti’s absurd prices in order to keep this farcical market for ultra-luxuries going.

[MIKA27]

DRIVEN: 007 X SPYSCAPE MULTI-SENSORY EXPERIENCE

When Ian Fleming created his famous James Bond character in 1953 with the book Casino Royale, readers across the world were drawn into the British secret service agent’s high-tech spy gadgets and debonair lifestyle. His character has taken a life of its own with numerous novels, major motion picture blockbusters, and now, a museum experience like no other in New York City.

This multi-sensory experience pulls the curtain back to let visitors explore the compelling process behind the 007 films while sharing the secrets of Bond’s legendary Aston Martin DB5. Visitors will have the opportunity to investigate an array of spy gadgets in Q’s famous lab, get close and personal with the original concept art from Oscar-winning production designer Sir Ken Adam’s studio, and enjoy some behind the scenes footage from Skyfall’s unforgettable finale. The spy museum experience will be open to the public on March 8 with prices for adults starting at $23.

[MIKA27]

Oris ProDiver Dive Control

Limited to only 500 pieces, the new diver by Oris is absolutely gorgeous. The Oris ProDiver Dive Control was developed in partnership with Roman Frischknecht, a Swiss commercial diver who spends his working life deep underwater, servicing the subsea industry. Made for professional divers, the rugged timepiece boasts deep water capability (rated to a whopping 1,000 meters), helium release valves and unique locking elapsed-time bezels. The watch is delivered on a black rubber strap and an additional yellow rubber strap is included in the box. $5K

[Fuzz]

2 hours ago, MIKA27 said:

BUGATTI’S LA VOITURE NOIRE IS A $19 MILLION ODE TO THE GROTESQUELY RICH

 

Leno would buy it.

[MIKA27]

New York's Morbid KGB Museum Is For Spy Nerds

New York’s new KGB Museum is, suffice it to say, a very strange place. The cinderblock-walled space occupies the ground floor of a pricey condo complex, and it recently underwent its “ribbon-cutting” ceremony, with a metallic rope serving as ribbon, which was cut through with a power saw.

Inside the museum sit dozens of glass cases featuring a massive (and occasionally baffling) panoply of Soviet and Russian spy gear, flanked by propaganda posters and uniformed mannequins.

The overall theme sits in an awkward position between its Spy v. Spy-style camp and brief reflections on the actual horrors inflicted by the Soviet bloc’s secret police and formal intelligence services.

With Russian intelligence agencies and the possibility of a new Cold War at the forefront of some American minds, it’s hardly a surprise that someone would choose to open a museum dedicated to the Eastern Bloc’s legacy of spycraft. The collection spans from the pre-World War II period to the end of the Cold War and beyond.

The KGB Museum, a project of Lithuanian father-daughter collector team Julius Urbaitis and Agne Urbaityte, sits at the junction of the US public’s Russia-related anxieties in 2019.

Per The Wall Street Journal, Urbaitis, a 55-year-old marketing executive, said the collection has been underway for 30 years. His personal stack of artefacts started in Urbaityte’s dance studio, which was based out of a former nuclear bunker in Lithuania. The 3500-strong display is both assembled from their collection, as well as items on loan from other collectors.

“I have a collector’s spirit,” Urbaitis told the Journal. “Every artefact is like an achievement when you find it, like a hunter who kills a wolf. Especially the ones that are one of a kind in the world.”

And the KGB Museum does have a specialised collection, with artefacts dating back all the way to the KGB’s pre-1954 predecessors, the Cheka, NKGB, NKVD and MGB.

It includes a lamp that allegedly belonged to none other than infamous Soviet strongman Josef Stalin, which is staged in a mock interrogation room and angled to glare directly in passing visitors’ faces. Also, his gramophone is on display.

You can peer through a prison-style door’s observation slit to watch footage of what life was like for Soviet prisoners of conscience. The audio from these prisoner films can be heard at a low level throughout the museum, giving the space an eerie ambience.

And after viewing a mockup of a sophisticated surveillance device disguised within a tree branch, your tour guide encourages you to don a modern reproduction of a KGB officer’s leather trench coat and pose for a photo.

There’s much for military and intelligence buffs to see here, while the bulk of the show is composed of innumerable examples of covert communications gear — mostly radios, including sets hidden in luggage.

A cipher machine of a model used during the Cold War, introduced in 1956. 

There are KVADRAT ultraviolet lighting devices, which were used to detect fake documents, reveal hidden cryptographic symbols and check covertly marked money used for bribery.

Not everything was designed in a secret laboratory... Pictured, KGB disguise kits with makeup and rubber wigs.

Elsewhere visitors will find a KGB-modified Imbir movie camera, also used by the German Stasi and agents in Czechoslovakia, with internal parts modified to save space for up to 61m of special thin film and covered in a soundproof case for concealment.

A 1941-era pinhole camera, sometimes concealed in a keyholder, used by Soviet and Stasi personnel. This model is from 1941.

There are cameras hidden in packs of cigarettes, which snapped a photo when a “cigarette” was moved up.

Perhaps the most inconspicuous photo-taking device is a gold-plated KGB ring from 1970-1980 that contains film wrapped around the finger, as well as a hinge that contains a fixed-focused, high-definition, single-shot camera.

A KGB camera concealed in a ring.

One exhibit showcases special phones used by KGB officers, including one with integrated memory that could be used to detect a call’s origin. Others show off Panasonic phones with built-in bugs, circuitboards revealed to show where the modified hardware was attached.

There’s even a letter remover, a simple tool designed to allow state agents to open and re-seal mail with no indication it was ever accessed by anyone but the recipient.

Lock picking tools. 

Other equipment on display had a more lethal purpose. There’s a tube of lipstick that can fire a bullet, a pen that does the same, and a replica of the infamous, ricin-pellet-tipped umbrella of the type allegedly used in the 1978 assassination of Bulgarian dissident-in-exile Georgi Markov.

The only other replica in the collection, Urbaityte told Gizmodo, is that of a Soviet bug hidden in a Great Seal gifted to US ambassador Averell Harriman in 1945 (sometimes known as The Thing).

A KGB lipstick tube, actually a tiny firearm—next to a cyanide-filled fake tooth and a spike designed to be stamped into the ground to hide dead drops.

While the curators were Urbaitis and Urbaityte, the actual financial backing of the museum remains elusive.

Urbaityte told Gizmodo that the museum was owned by Nothing Secret Group, Inc., a company in Urbaitis’s name, according to the tax office that prepared the documentation. However, she characterised the company in a separate email to another GMG reporter as “established by [an] American citizen who does not want to be publicized”.

As Smithsonian Magazine noted, this is a uniquely capitalist look at Russian spycraft — James Bond with a dash of The Death of Stalin.

For the privilege of viewing this extensive array of admittedly ingenious tools of espionage and oppression, visitors should be prepared to fork over $US25 ($36) for an adult admission, or $US43.99 ($63) for a guided tour.

 

[MIKA27]

HISPANO SUIZA CARMEN ELECTRIC HYPERCAR

It’s nothing new to see a brand take inspiration from the past for a future release. But it’s definitely a little more unusual to see a company reach back nearly a century into history to reboot a brand. But that’s exactly the case with the Spanish automakers at Hispano Suiza and their upcoming Carmen all-electric hypercar.

Rebooted by the very family that founded the original company back in the 1930s, Hispano Suiza is back and better than ever — hinging their new business on sustainable future technologies while remaining true to their roots. That can be seen clearly in the Carmen, an all-electric hypercar with styling inspired by the Art-Deco masterpiece that was the 1938 Hispano Suiza Dubonnet Xenia. Inside, however, it’s all modern — including a powerful gas-free powertrain that’s good for over 1,005 horsepower, a 0-62 time of under three seconds, and a 250-mile range. That performance is only bolstered by the vehicle’s ultralight carbon fiber monocoque and body panels (the whole vehicle weighs just over 3,725 pounds), as well as a number of aerodynamic design features and a double-wishbone suspension with active dampening. With only 19 units to be built through 2021, the Carmen starts at $1.7 million.

 

[MIKA27]

Legent Bourbon Blends Kentucky with Japan

We could go on for what seems like an eternity about our love of whiskey, bourbon in particular. While we’re consistently impressed with the interesting releases coming out of Kentucky, at the end of the day it’s all still the dark brown we appreciate and love to drink. Legent bourbon is kicking things up a notch with a whole new level of interesting because it blends Kentucky with Japan. Specifically, Legent combines Jim Beam and Suntory. Fred Noe, famous distiller of Beam, created the initial Kentucky straight bourbon whiskey distillate that was then shipped to Suntory’s distiller Shinji Fukuyo in Japan before he partially finished it in wine and sherry casks. In other words, Legent is a complex, layered bourbon that blends the best of Kentucky with the best of Japan, and honestly, we can’t wait to try what these two masterminds have created. The only issue with Legent right now is that we have absolutely no idea about distribution and availability.

[MIKA27]

Scientists: Maybe If We Only Dim The Sun A Little It Won't Backfire Horribly

When it comes to geoengineering the planet to cool the climate, there’s rightfully a lot of hesitation. Blocking incoming sunlight might seem like a quick fix to rising temperatures, but doing so could quickly tie up humanity in a decades-long project with alarming side effects like shifting precipitation patterns and changes in hurricane season.

Which is what makes a new paper released on Monday in Nature Climate Change so alluring. It shows that undertaking half measures to block the sun could end up providing the benefit of a cooler planet without many of the adverse impacts on other parts of the climate system. The results suggest there could be a role for geoengineering to play in saving us from a climate catastrophe, though it’s hardly the last word on what that role could be, or even if it’s worth the risk. And there are a few important caveats showing that there’s still a lot of research needed on the topic.

Most research on geoengineering has focused on how humans could offset all the global warming associated with greenhouse gas pollution. The new study takes a different path, though. Using high resolution climate models, researchers first doubled the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. They then used the models to reduce incoming sunlight enough to offset half of the warming associate with the rise in carbon pollution. Basically it’s like two steps forward, one step back.

They then looked at geoengineering’s impact not just on temperature but precipitation, evaporation, and tropical cyclones. Precipitation and evaporation are crucial components of the hydrological cycle that humanity relies on for drinking water, agriculture, and more while cyclones can cause massive amounts of damage and suffering. Climate change is already causing more heavy downpours and could be playing a role in increasing hurricane intensity (and is likely to keep doing so in the future).

The new findings show, though, that using a geoengineering half measure could reduce temperature and moderate the adverse impacts on the hydrological cycle associated with both climate change and full-on geoengineering. According to the study, tropical cyclone intensity would be reduced as well.

“Surprisingly we find only a very small fraction of places see the effects of climate change exacerbated,” Peter Irvine, a postdoctoral researcher who led the new study, told Earther. “If you kept cooling, you’d keep getting benefits of temperature but diminishing returns on hydrological variables. Offsetting all warming, and you’re beginning to introduce problems that are new.”

Indeed, some previous research that maxes out geoengineering indicates that the hydrological cycles would slow down, causing drought in a number of locations around the world like the Sahel region of Africa. The uneven nature of these adverse impacts has led to calls for the global south to be more involved in any decision making around it. The new findings don’t necessarily change the need for inclusive governance, but they do show one way geoengineering could be a potential tool in the fight against climate change.

That said, the findings come with some caveats. For one, no single study is a cause for action, especially when it comes to something as dramatic as intentionally altering the climate. The methods used to analyse the efficacy of halving global warming also might not paint a full picture of the impacts.

“[T]he study would have been more policy-relevant if it concentrated on a realistic (transient) global warming scenario and represented solar geoengineering using stratospheric aerosols,” Anthony Jones, an aerosols research who published a recent paper on geoengineering and hurricanes, told Earther.

Jones said that rather than looking at an abrupt doubling of carbon dioxide, using a scenario where pollution changes over the course of a century would yield more decision-oriented results. Ditto for replicating a specific solar geoengineering technique like injecting aerosols into the atmosphere (which can cause the stratosphere to warm and have other unintended consequences) rather than just turning down the incoming sunlight. Nevertheless, he said the results “strengthen the notion that a moderate solar geoengineering application would be highly effective at ameliorating most regional climate changes caused by global warming.”

That doesn’t mean sun-dimming will be coming to a stratospheric location near you anytime soon. And it doesn’t offer a substitute for what really needs to be done to address climate change. Irvine was blunt in his assessment that it’s only one piece of the puzzle, and a speculative one at that.

“This can’t solve climate change,” Irvine said. “Nothing about this gets rid of the fact that to stop the climate from changing, you need to reduce emissions to zero.”

[MIKA27]

Here's The Trailer For The Next Doom Movie

I don't know who was asking for another DOOM movie, but hey! Here you go.