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In 1980, the late Glen A. Larson was at the tail end of a show deal with Universal Television. During a producers meeting, Larson literally put his finger on the show while deciding on his next project, which tentatively involved "a" talking car. Following many more meetings and phone calls, it was decided that although a certain car company seemed to be on the rails, its latest model fit the bill as something sporty yet practical, lean, quick and relatively affordable. The 1982 Pontiac Trans Am was chosen, pretty much single-handedly saving the company from dissolution and complete absorption into GM.

Three cars were detailed for the show: one external camera car and two for various internal work, not including vehicular stunts (wrecking Trans Ams for the sake a few seconds of air would have worked out very expensive; Hollywood already learned that lesson from The Dukes Of Hazzard (over three hundred '68 Chargers wrecked for some of the most famous car stunts on television, including the flip-bridge jump which more often than not split the chassis)). All three cars had the famous "Larson Scanner" which had made its first appearance as Cylon eyes on the 1978 show Battlestar Galactica. Very quickly, orders for the Trans Am meant that waiting times ran into several months - made all the more awkward because most of those orders specified the addition of the Larson Scanner even though it was entirely an aftermarket, custom modification made specifically by and for the show.

Some photos and more on this fascinating story of the Car That Could Talk, right here.

(Afterword: a former Pontiac GM, John DeLorean, would later go on to form the DeLorean Motor Company and his most famous creation, the Guigiaro*-designed DMC-12, would make a starring appearance in the Back To The Future trilogy).

*Guigiaro has also designed camera bodies for Nikon (the EM, F4 and the D800 to name three) and monocoque case prototypes for Apple (the Wiki page doesn't say specifically but I'm guessing the original iPod and the Figaro pen tablet), as well as the now classic shape for the Mark I Volkswagen Golf, the Lotus Esprit S1, and BMW Concept cars from 1961 through 2008.

I just watched today's edition of the UKColumn News, in which the host, Brian Gerrish, did a fantastic job of tearing the Daily Mail (and to a lesser extent, the Mirror) a new one for its shoddy reporting of the Hampstead abuse case in which two children were interiewed by police (who then for some reason posted the interview video on the internet) and a judge subsequently issued a single judgement stating that the mother had put them up to making the allegations to spite their father.

What Brian did was genius. He not only pulled the DM on their character assassination based merely on the judgement, he pulled them on their "red-top" style pseudojournalism and frankly appalling treatment of the family not just because of what they said about the mother, but rather what they didn't say about the behaviour of the police, the judge, and the local authority, in the face of recent behaviours by all three corners of the Establishment: that the police have not only repeatedly failed to investigate properly (they could have saved a lot of trouble simply by calling in the named persons and performing a physical examination of intimate areas which were described by the children in precise detail), they have also been shown all over the country to act against the interests of rape victims of all ages (Mickey Summers, Hollie Greig, Ben Fellowes, Melanie Shaw); that local authorities have repeatedly and blatantly failed to protect children as is their statutory remit; and that courts were places where justice must not only be done, it must be seen to be done, without fear or favour on the part of the judges and where harm has befallen one person due to the actions of another, in the presence of a full jury panel, the courts have failed in every single aspect when it has come to providing satisfaction for children and families repeatedly and consistently not by accident nor by negligence, but by design.

The first port of call for any journalist in such cases should of course be the other side - in this case, the parents. BOTH parents, mother and father. Not to simply rely on a SINGLE piece of paper for the entire source. That is even to a blind man, screams of such bias it cannot possibly be seen to be a fair representation of the facts even if it is headed "finding of facts" - there is ample evidence of "finding of facts" getting it wrong, even more so if the document being based on nothing more than the deranged imagination of a single individual who habitually gets pickled before 10am, as most High Court judges do.

That the police started the assassination by posting videos of children being interviewed in a way that was not only totally illegal in the first place, but that the children were basically led through the process and the video subsequently posted on the INTERNET, then they failed to carry out a full and proper investigation of their allegations, that they then went after the MOTHER, is a mix of technological horror and utter contempt for the sanctity of privacy, for which the officers responsible still have not answered.

The overview of this rant is simply: check your facts before you publish, it could be embarrassing if you get it wrong and someone publically calls you on it. The undertone, and one which is particularly close to my heart and pretty much my reason for being these days, is that if you are going to fail families and children, particularly if you enable or ignore the State-sanctioned abuse of children by agents of State or those they enable by their actions when you're in a position to do something about it, I will come after you and I will name you.

(sorry Soylentils, but I had to get that one off my chest. Technology's great an' all, but when it's used to destroy families, not so much. It's a better leveller but only when everyone gets a crack at it).

It seems that the Daily Mail (yes, I know), among other mainstream outlets (Guardian), are beginning to see the light (and realise why Blair abolished the death penalty for treason in 1999) over what's been happening for the last ten years regarding Britain's diminishing ability to defend herself from external threats. Something the UKColumn, an independent service, has been reporting for years.

While previously singing the praises or scoring political broadsides against the Government on such potentially explosive topics as the cost of the Prime Minister's lunch, the papers have studiously ignored the fact that while the ink hadn't even dried yet on the construction contracts for Britain's next generation aircraft carriers or the planes intended to fly off them (the F35 JSF contract which is now looking in doubt even as the number ordered has gone from 140 to 14), her old carriers Ark Royal, Illustrious, and Invincible, are currently in pieces in a Turkish knacker's yard, being parted off to metal recyclers all over Europe. The first of the new Queen Elizabeth class carriers, HMS Prince of Wales, was floated in a Fife dock last July yet still not a single aircraft has been certified flight ready for her. Meanwhile, one of the largest floating decks on the planet is anchored off the South coast of England in sight of the city of Plymouth, where she proudly displays a deck full of combat ready warplanes. It's not a British carrier, nor are the aircraft intended for the British carrier... I'll use the term "fleet" loosely, we don't even have an operational carrier now... it's the USS Theodore Roosevelt, anchored offshore for a five day visit because the sea is too shallow for her to come further in.

Sidenote: the F35 has failed to live up to performance promises, it has also run overbudget hence the drop in the order - which is costing the British taxpayer the same amount of money for 14 planes as it would have done originally for 140!

As for the rest of the Naval force, Britain is offshoring crews for the other ships because due to defence budget cuts, she finds herself unable to provide a full complement to any single ship. Even the coastguard are using foreign crews. The bite is being felt across all services, with Army and RAF numbers being slashed not through technological innovation, but through political wranglings, misappropriation of funding and equipment, and secret deals with Europe - namely the Franco-British Defence Agreement which ties our two armed forces into a conglomerate of Army, Navy, Air Force and Civil Defence/Police Forces commanded by the French and manned by Germans, Poles, Belgians and Spaniards. Winston Churchill would be spinning so fast in his grave we could generate electricity from him.

We fought off an entire nation back in the 1940s, today we can't even defend our borders from a baguette-wielding Frenchman. He simply outguns us.

In 1490, Leonardo da Vinci described in writing, an ancient technique by which an image could be projected into a darkened room, which he realised modelled the human eye fairly well and could also be used to safely view the Sun. Hence, da Vinci made the pinhole camera portable, giving rise to the photographic revolution wwhich persists to this day.

This is a short instructional on how to build a pinhole camera, also known as an obscura, in order to safely view the solar eclipse tomorrow.

What you'll need:

1 cubic or closely cubic shaped box about 150mm to 250mm to a side. A shoebox will be fine.
1 roll of black gaffer tape
1 sheet of white 70g or 80g A4 copier paper
1 roll of clear tape or parcel tape
1 sewing needle

Execution:

Cut off one end of the box (one of the small faces).
Lightproof the box with the gaffer tape by sealing all the seams and corners.
Place the open end of the box over the paper set on a flat surface, and tape to opposite sides as far up the sides of the box as you can draw them. Fold the corners in and tape the ends so you end up with a single layer of paper over the exposed end you cut out so the box is now sealed.
On the intact small face, locate the centre and use the needle to punch a single hole right there, perpendicular through the face and as small as possible. Wriggle the needle through the hole just once in a circular motion to clear any stray fibres, taking care not to enlarge the hole, and withdraw the needle.
Test the obscura by shining a flashlight at the holed face, you should see a projected image of the beam on the paper screen at the "back" of the box.

http://www.uh.edu/engines/pinholeprinciple.jpg (1925 illustration from The Boy Scientist)

You can also prepare any lensed camera by cutting a circle of thick card the same size as the lens hood and making a pinhole in the centre, then taping it to the hood. If your camera has a preview screen rather than a TTL viewfinder, use it.

So here's my idea, I want to run a photostory of the journey of a softmodded XBox Rev.1.6 Crystal into a wooden bartop gaming cabinet with the following options:

Hard wired flat Arcade control panel for two players;
Tripwired standard XBox controller in hidden compartment;
Wireless XBox controller in second hidden compartment;
Exposed (rearside) and offboard ethernet jack (will require some creative soldering and component through-mounting onto wood);
15" LCD panel (which already has composite input, built in speakers and a 12V rail);
Need to find a way to power the monitor with 4.2A at 12V regulated with no need for a fan, that's gonna be fun.

I don't want to be worrying about access to the DVD drive since the unit will not only be holding my entire XBox game library on the hard disk (200GB Western Digital, maybe a 250 IBM, it currently has a 20GB Seagate in it which was easy to install, didn't even have to hotswap anything), it will also be holding several emulators and several thousand ROMs (1763 on the SNES one alone), and because it's softmodded most of the admin will be done remotely over the LAN. There will need to be room inside to hold the DVD unit safely out of the way since the XBox doesn't seem to like to boot without it plugged in.

I'll be doing some napkin designs over the next few days, just to roughen up the edges a bit.

The condition often referred to as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, when applied to parents of children abducted into State custody for fostering or adoption, is a misapplication of words.

It should more properly be referred to as Post Traumatic Stress INJURY.

This is an INJURY inflicted by the State on families, for no baser reason than to make as much MONEY as possible through the selling and trafficking of the children.

This INJURY is inflicted on a continuous basis on the parents and on the children in the enforcement of separation by the State, in what can only be described as TORTURE, to two ends:

1. to make the children pliable so they can be trafficked. Problem children are routinely administered with chemical coshes.

2. to render the parents unable to mount a legal counterattack to the criminal activity of the State, by virtue of the fact that they have implanted into the public conscious the idea that PTSD/I is a mental disorder, a disease of the mind - when in fact it is a result of a malicious action by external influences.

The fact that Statute actively prevents those of “unsound mind” from mounting proper legal challenges (via the Mental Capacity Act as amended, which requires a statement from ONE General Practitioner, or ONE police officer), makes it a simple task for the State to invariably find in favour of Local Authorities in situations where parents file civil actions against them for vicarious child abuse. This, coupled with the fact that mere suggestion of mental illness in Family Proceedings is enough to entirely discredit parent litigators, is why no civil action initiated by a parent against a Local Authority has ever succeeded.

The ONLY cure for PTSI is the complete rectification of the influence that is causing the injury. This influence is best described as the deliberate alienation by segregation, of the children from the parents.

Of course, no doctor will give a PTS diagnosis if he is made aware of the circumstances surrounding the injury, which is a prerequisite to diagnosis, because that means railing against the NHS Trust which signs his paycheque (which would end his career), it would mean railing against the local authority that approaches him every so often for letters supporting their cases (which net him a pretty little backhander, tax free and untraceable because it's cash, but ssshhh! Don't tell them I've got the paper trail of no less than seven such transactions!), and it would mean bringing the entire social work, judicial and medical professions into disrepute!

Oh, let's do this thing!