Aichi M6A1 Seiran Graffiti

I chanced across Secrets of the Dead: Japanese Super Sub while channel surfing last night. There wasn’t much exhumation/archaeology/poking around, but it was very interesting and jogged my memory a bit (see below).

Embedding the video seems to be borked – click the image below to go to a page where you can watch the show.

Image via.

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In the program, we briefly encounter Unit 731; one of the missions planned for the I-400 class subs was an anthrax attack on the west coast of the US. As always, when Japanese war crimes in Manchuria come up, I marvel at the differences between post-war Germany and Japan. Germany was forced to confront the horror of the Final Solution; Japan was allowed to deny and rationalize.

Quite a while ago I came across (via ?? – where’s my Memex?) pictures of engravings found during the restoration of the only surviving M6A1 Seiran (three Seirans were carried by each I-400 sub). I wonder who made them and what he was thinking about when he did.

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National Air and Space Museum, Aichi Seiran restoration

Catching up 2 – frogs

Off I went to a frogger’s get-together – lovely frog room, good pizza, great company.

Epipedobates tricolor Highland

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Allobates femoralis – two of my passions reference LBJs (little brown jobs). I like them in both instances – there’s always something that rewards close inspection. Here, it’s flash marks on the thighs (not seen below, but obvious here).

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Madagascar has Mantellas – small frogs similar in some ways to the neotropical poison dart frogs. I’d like to put together a large Malagasy biotope vivarium – a Mantella species, a few Phelsuma of some type, and maybe a group of Uroplatus. (Also a Platycerium madagascariense + Cymbididiella rhodochila, but they won’t move around much.)

Mantella milotympanum

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One wall of the frog room.

Citroen XM Transporter with Maserati on top

This popped up in my Flickr contact stream and just has to be posted. The beauty of front wheel drive: no pesky back-end drive train to fuss over. That being said, I wonder how M. Tissier dealt with the computer-controlled hydraulic suspension – I’m hoping he added more XM components and hacked the control system.

Maserati transport...

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Maserati Bora on top, I think.