Tuesday, April 17, 2007

Newly Found Foundry Technique!

Props to Cox & Forkum, not only for having an alphabetical post list, but for pointing out Rosie O'Donnell (who I hide my family members from in the storm cellar) has recently discovered that 9/11/01 was the first time that fire melted steel.

If she promises to be nice, Rosie is hereby invited to a trip through the Ford Rouge River plant, where not only have men been melting steel for over 100 years, but melted steel has sometimes presented dangerous problems.


DETROIT FREE PRESS, 2/3/99:

DEARBORN -- In what looked like lava from an active volcano, 2,600-degree molten metal melted through a wall around a Rouge Steel blast furnace Friday in Dearborn. It was the same blast furnace where a worker, Francis Kidd, died in August from carbon monoxide poisoning. No one was injured Friday, company officials said. But coming after a series of incidents this year at the Ford Rouge complex, the early-morning accident shook up some workers. ... The problem might have been that tuyeres -- water-cooled brass valves that control the flow of air into the furnace -- had come off. And there was excess water in the furnace, which could have set off a reaction. There are hundreds of ambulance runs at the Ford Rouge complex every year. In August, a huge coal dust cloud escaped from the old power plant as workers were vacuuming coal dust out of the plant. It created a dangerous situation but did not ignite.

Sunday, April 15, 2007

From Russia with Love?

In my Ode to Conductor Valery Gergiev blog, Electric Conduction, I have managed to (thankfully) attract some who know more Russian than I, more about the world's greater conductor than I, and those who know more about Russian culture than I. Indubitably, however, ideas/feelings/political notions are going to clash as baby boom Ameericans and post-Stalin Russians start to compare notes, even about their favorite music.

Since my music blog, which I prefer to remain politic free, was beginning to descend into a second Cold War, I thought I would invite any and all parties who wanted to discuss issues regarding Putin, Rice, Brzezinski, Iraq, Iran, whether one nation has the right to "tell" another nation "what to do", free speech and Karl Marx, free speech and Groucho Marx, Bill Clinton, George W., Thomas Jefferson, Ivan the Terrible, Abu Ghraib the deaths of journalists under Putin's regime, the Chechnyan conflict, or even why Brown University keeps Sergei Khruschev on their history faculty when all he publishes is stuff about his dad. Один, два, три, идут!