B-36 RESTRICTED Report - Optima's Cold War Redux

A priceless bit of Cold War Ephemera

Love the cartoon.  At one point in time, letting this book out into the wild probably would have resulted in many years in the Leavenworth Disciplinary Baracks. 

The B-36 was one of the largest airplanes ever built.  It was literally a flying fortress with multiple gun turrets.  The Maintenance Digest details adjustments to make the guns work right while limiting their ability to shoot something off the host airplane.  The drawing is luscious.  Can't you just picture this inside an Oliver?

I scanned some representative drawings.  The text is wonderful and full of descriptive language on how to properly warm up the vacuum tubes in the Thyratron Controller.  This was way before integrated circuits.

I like working with electrical circuits.  I can't say I'm that good with them, but at least I can understand visible circuitry.

I love our paranoid typewriter friends.  They remind me of the Spy vs. Spy cartoons from Mad Magazine.

More information than you can possibly want to know about the B-36 bomber is located on Wikipedia and the Interweb at large.  Yes, they really did have a nuclear powered prototype.  They flew it cross country over America.  It's almost like they were trying to help the Soviets, but the Cold War was a different era and a little radiation couldn't get in the way of national defense. 

This is one of my favorite old technical documents.  One reason is exclusivity:  how many of these could actually have been made?  Most should have been shredded.

This particular copy I found mixed with auto parts on a vendor's table at an automotive swap meet in Lawrence, Kansas.  So exciting to find something this nerdy in the wild!  There were and are substantial air bases in Kansas as well as multiple aerospace producers.  Perhaps someone brought this classified document home as a souvenir.  I'll never know how it came to be at a swap meet, but I'm glad I found it.

Olympia and the Onionskin Experiment

We got some new/old typing paper and Olympia (our resident peppy Olympia SM3) is here to tell you all about it.  Olympia is a household favorite.  I've written about and with her in previous entries.  In case you are wondering, the typeface is Professional Elite and is somewhat obscure.

"R" is for ROBOT Type

The sun was coming into the kitchen just so on Saturday morning.  So I put off the ritual grinding of the beans (much to the chagrin of my wife) long enough to grab the camera and bits to have some fun.  So hard to pass on good light...


The large type came with a random baggie full of mismatched goodness from an antique mall.  My wife was surprised there were enough letters there to make whole words.  Try and ignore the dust bunny residue for the moment.  The robot is a miniature reproduction of the Radar Robot.  The actual Radar Robot deserves his own post at some point in the future.


Radar Robot hadn't had his daily oil fix and was a little grumpy...

The gingercat is not going to be happy about what happened to her nanobugs.


As horrible as this robot rampage seems, there have been far worse in the course of American history:

For you youngsters: that is "Tricky" Dick Nixon in the background.  I remember the summer of Watergate all to well since it preempted cartoons and Godzilla movie reruns.  Oh, notice the lack of type dust bunnies?

You Monster

Fortunately, a good pair of bolt cutters costs more than the current bid of $19.99 (20 minutes left).

Turns out it was loved after all!  Final auction was well above key chopper range with lots of action in the last two minutes.  The potential buyer is still a Monster in my book.

Auction ID:  140625925248

Questions from other members : VINTAGE CONTINENTAL TYPEWRITER WANDERER WERKE GERMAN

Question & Answer Answered On Q:  Are you able to snip off the keys and just ship those? If so, how much to send to Detroit? Thanks. Oct-29-11 A:  I never have tried to snip off the keys. Do you know how it is done? how close to the key do you cut it? If I can get them in a usps small flat rate priority box it would be $5.20, if not, it would be $10.95 for the medium one. Thanks for asking.

Blogger Wallpaper

This is the product of one of the funnest photo shoots, ever!  My wife is working on getting a blog of her own up and running.  She is a far better writer than me, so it ought to be good.  I at least could contribute by creating a suitable wallpaper using everyday household objects.

As the blog title implies, I live in a House Full of Nerds.  The phrase has even caught on in our conversations with the typewriters.  So, let's take a look at the obsessive intellectual interests in our house.

My Spousal Unit:  Enjoys biographies, history and books about outbreaks of rare and incurable diseases that have altered our society one weak link at a time.  An English minor, she loves words and everything about them.  One of the reasons we still get the local newspaper is because of the daily New York Times crossword.  If that goes or the comic section gets any shorter, the Kansas City Star is a goner in our house.

Hannahbunnyshark:  My fourteen-year-old inherited a love of words and has been a freakishly good writer since she could first string them together.  A well rounded Nerdling, she also excels at math, science and the violin.  She is a fiction lover and is trying to get that ever important first post out on http://thoughtsatfullspeed.blogspot.com.

gingercat:  The eleven-year-old takes more after me with multiple, roving interests.  She loves books of any description, robots, art, typecasting, science and engineering.  The floss container robots and nanobugs in the wallpaper are hers.  She also loves cartooning and has posted her first typecast at http://nerdtopics.blogspot.com.  gingercat also has a mild obsession with Japanese puzzle erasers.  I was just reminded that she also plays the flute and the guitar.  So busy....

The three females in our house are Girl Scouts.  Shout out to the Girl Scouts!  Um, if you don't mind emphasizing science and technology again, that would make us all very happy.

Me:  If you read this blog, you have a pretty good idea of some of the things I enjoy.  Part of why I do this is for the pure love of learning about the evolution of technology.  The emergence of a modern Maker movement is exciting and gives me a lot of hope for the future of American technology and entrepreneurship.  Not surprisingly, I read a lot of science fiction along with old technical manuals, catalogs and ephemera.

The Nerd Collective:  We all like Star Wars, Star Trek (TOS and Voyager in particular) and anything printed on paper.  Like many Nerd Collectives, our house teeters on the edge of creating fatal paper slides.  The stuff we love tends to accumulate.  We enjoy being members of the Nelson-Atkins museum and see as much Shakespeare as is practically possible in our area.  We won't go into that new movie coming out on Shakespeare; whomever wrote his collective works had a wicked and wonderful way with words.

Oh, I forgot Trolly.  He came from a thrift store and started out as a prank present.  He has since become our travel mascot and appears in many family photos.  He also likes landscape photography.

P.S.  I am attempting a re-post as this did not show up on the Blogrolls.  Grrrr...

A Re-post (And desperate cry for Blogroll attention)

For the benefit of the last post on the subject of Blogger Wallpaper, I present this mostly blank re-post.  Please draw your attention to yesterday's post that did not find its way to the Blogrolls for one reason or another.

Juvenile Cold War Space Fiction

Front Cover:  Thank goodness for Rip and his brave friends!  Oops.  Looks like he pulled a Luke Skywalker and lost yet another gunner.

Inspired by a recent post at Richard's Writing Ball blog, I pulled out an acquisition from earlier this year.  Featuring the heroic Rip Foster, Assignment In Space is copyrighted 1958 and written by someone who chose the equally heroic sounding pseudonym of Blake Savage.

Savage, indeed.  I read a couple of paragraphs out loud to my fourteen year old and felt my IQ drop several points.  For safety's sake, I'm turning a portion of this entry over to the Olympia SM9.

Hmm.  The graph paper has green lines but doesn't scan all that well.  Perhaps I will give the SM9 a black/red ribbon and see how that works.  Comments on unusual vintage paper choices are welcome.

Let's take a look at the back and some of the in between pages:

Back Cover:  Looking mighty Soviet what with the typography and the red suits.  Nice shot, Rip!

Mining thorium is hard.

Getting shot in Zero G is even harder.

"You shoot that ship while I kick a planet into the other one's path!"

Wow.  I just realized how sarcastic this post became.  Really, I did not intend it to be this snarky.  I guess too many standards committee conference calls in one day makes me peevish. 

So why did I bring this book home?  Extreme snark aside, I actually love the cover art and illustrations.  In retrospect, I realize now that my kids have access to much better literature than I ever did.  Hey old folks - remember "Dick and Jane" in first grade?  "Assignment in Space" is high literature in comparison.

Despite my diss, this is the kind of stuff I loved as a kid growing up in the Space Age.  Yes, worrying about nuclear Armageddon was no fun at all.  But dang, I watched the first lunar landing live on TV.  How cool is that?