guy schmidt

More snow.

Looks like winter found us again. 

I streamed the Taking of Pelham One, Two, Three last night and man that theme music was real nice. And Walter Matthua is always a favorite. I think I’m going to go on 70s crime flick binge. Any recommendations? 

A photo from a tour of Stern Pinball by Marcin Wichary. Stern is “the only maker of arcade-quality pinball games in the world and is located just outside Chicago, Illinois.” /via poploser.org

When John Davidson’s apartment gets robbed, he learns that the easiest way to get his stuff back is to have one drug dealer lie to another drug dealer while he lies to the police.

Adding this to my collection of minor crime stories. More here, here, here, and here.

Everyday Sunshine by Fishbone. Wow, 90s flashback. Re-discovered after watching this.

A ‘Blue Marble’ image of the Earth taken from the VIIRS instrument aboard NASA’s most recently launched Earth-observing satellite - Suomi NPP.

- NASA Goddard

By Rebecca Marino.

In 1903 Dr Julius Neubronner patented a miniature pigeon camera activated by a timing mechanism. The invention brought him international notability after he presented it at international expositions in Dresden, Frankfurt and Paris in 1909–1911. Spectators in Dresden could watch the arrival of the camera-equipped carrier pigeons, and the photos were immediately developed and turned into postcards which could be purchased.

More pigeon-cam photos, including some of the pigeons themselves, on The Public Domain Review. /via

A MeFi post about “… (a) long-forgotten “hidden” rooms in houses and other buildings and (b) “dead space” in houses, e.g., large unfinished areas behind walls that are only perhaps discovered years later.”

Chock full of oddities. Like this one about a recently constructed dungeon found in old abandoned house. The house was mysteriously burned down before the police could complete their investigation.

The Washington Redskins logo redone by Wes Kull for his Gridiron League project:

Gridiron League is a collection of idealized NFL insignias that pay tribute to each team’s history and geography in a period-specific aesthetic that glorifies the Vince Lombardi-era […]

Many NFL franchises — Patriots, Broncos, Rams, Lions — have updated their uniforms and logos to a swooshed-out, dropped-shadowed, and more commercial-ready image, ignoring a good deal of their team’s heritage and the original rough-and-tumble character that the league stood for. The mud, blood, and grass stains that smeared across the varsity-style lettering and colors of jerseys past […]

Via Cameron Moll

You’ve probably already read this, but just in case … 

What do you get when you mix below-freezing air temperatures, frigid northwest winds from Canada, and ocean temperatures hovering around 39 to 40 degrees Fahrenheit (4 to 5 degrees Celsius)? Paved highways of clouds across the skies of the North Atlantic.

Photo and text comes from NASA’s Earth Observatory. Found on Bobulate.

The boy and I went for a little hike in the snow today. Followed that up with some snowball fighting.

Volkswagen Type 166 Schwimmwagen. I’m pretty sure I had a Matchbox car of this as a kid. /via

By Margaret Bernhardt.

Carl with motormatic 1964 by ripcordjerry.

Great article about the booming bike stealing business; about $350 million worth of bikes are stolen a year. Whose stealing them and why? 

Stolen bicycles have become a solvent in America’s underground economy, a currency in the world of drug addicts and petty thieves. Bikes are portable and easily converted to cash, and they usually vanish without a trace—in some places, only 5 percent are even reported stolen.

But my favorite nugget from the article is this:

Pegasus Technologies, a company in California, created a long-distance system for tracking bikes, which Sacramento police installed in the handlebars of a bait bike. It worked: when the wired bicycle was stolen, police located it across town and arrested the thief. Four months later, they tried it again; the same guy stole the same bike, threw it in a pool, and left the cops a note: “You got jacked U punk motherfucker.”