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8 results for “jbcrawford”
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an old concentrating solar plant, with a complex history. I might write an article on it some time.
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Back when Safeway and Albertson's were merging, it seemed like a bit of a non-event here in New Mexico where we only have Albertson's. I was peripherally aware that this wasn't always the case: at Central and Tennessee, and at 4th and Cutter, are two buildings that I was told years ago were former Safeways.
And then one day I really looked at the Food King (not so long ago Lowes), further north on 4th at Griegos, and it is obviously a Marina-style Safeway.
Turns out that Safeway was a major grocer in Albuquerque from about the 1930s (when the two stores I mentioned first opened) until the 1980s, when, at the apex, there were 44 Safeway locations in New Mexico.
In 1987, Safeway was in financial distress and sold its entire El Paso Division (which included almost all of the New Mexico stores) to Furr's. Originally a Texas-based chain of cafeteria-style restaurants and stores, by the late '80s Furr's was mostly owned by a consortium of German investors and was the parent company of a number of smaller regional grocery chains in NM.
Furr's continued to operate them under the Safeway name for a few years until they were all rebranded as Furr's in 1990 (apparently Safeway made a deal to license the name to Furr's for a few years to ease the transition).
It didn't work out that much better for Furr's: in 2001, they went bankrupt. Some of the stores had already been sold by that point, but those that remained under the Furr's brand were liquidated and scattered to the winds. Some of them are still abandoned, 25 years later.
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Other elements of BSG, like their references to a CIC rather than a bridge, illustrate how Star Trek was based on naval practice by someone who didn't know all that much about the Navy, while BSG was based on naval practice by someone who was a huge nerd.
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you know what series is great about this? Battlestar Galactica. We *know* they're on SSB because they put the radio dialog through a duck fart filter. Bravo!
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think about it, narrowbanding the Federation must have been a huge hassle. You think they're on FM or still preferring SSB?
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Star Trek elides or fudges a lot of technical details for the sake of the narrative, like the number of torpedoes on board Voyager. Well, we can all forgive some liberties for the sake of a good story. But something that always bothered me is radio procedure: what does "hailing" mean? how do they "open a channel" given that it always seems to happen instantaneously?
This is an area where I think TOS is actually the stronger series. Uhura wears an ear piece, and sometimes even relays conversations, so we can imagine that when she tries to reach another ship there's some back and forth happening (via the earpiece and when she's out of frame) before she declares a "channel open."
In later series, the whole hailing/channel opening process is almost always instantaneous. I think we have to assume that some kind of automatic link establishment protocol is in use, and maybe even something like a friend and foe system. We can easily imagine that the Federation has some standardized protocol for this, and that the Klingon and Romulans and such have implemented it for the sake of signals intelligence if nothing else (and the Federaion vice versa).
But what happens when they "hail" an unknown ship? The writers occasionally nod to this with a line like "not responding on any frequency." What's actually happening?
In my head canon, Harry Kim is spinning a knob that goes from 17Hz to 60GHz muttering "cq cq please anyone hello" into a microphone.