The Bathtub That Must Stay Dry (Apparently)

Last night I did something I've never done before: I carried a bathtub. Well, helped carry it. One of my sons is redoing one of their bathrooms, and part of it includes replacing the bathtub (link goes to the specific one that was ordered). Well, I have a truck, and they do not, so I went to Home Depot to assist with pickup and transport (I didn't load into the truck - my son and a HD worker did that). After driving the bathtub to his house (I don't always do "truck things" - but it's nice to have when I do! that whole bathtub fit in the truck bed, an 08 Dodge Ram 1500 Laramie Quad Cab w/ ~6'4" bed, with the tailgate shut), I helped him unload it into his garage. So, now I've carried a bathtub, and I can no longer say I haven't. But I noticed something interesting after setting it down in their garage:

Riddle me this, skunk-man...

I know the Internet is a wild, wild place, but why does this page even exist? Pet Skunk Laws: A State-by-State Guide to Ownership. I mean, maybe you're trying to have an explanation of "why that odor exists at your place," but really, why would someone want a skunk as a pet?

Reminds me of this other site I'm pretty sure I've written about before: Pets or Food. And update: the have fresh clubbed baby seal available again! Only $69.95! The price on komodo dragons has gone up since I last visited, though ($200k), but they also now have dodo bird availability (only $9k). And their pets ready to eat are also certified organic, so you can rest easy.

They are also currently seeking a cat wrangler, so if you're in need of employment, go to their jobs listing and submit your resume.

That's all for now!

The Two‑Stroke Diesel Range‑Extender: My Own Weird Engine Idea

The Weird Engine I Can’t Stop Thinking About

A conceptual engine that lives somewhere between clever and questionable.

After spending way too much time writing about other people’s strange engines, I realized something dangerous: I have one of my own. It’s been rattling around in my head for years — a design that sits somewhere between “this might actually work” and “this is how you end up on a watchlist for experimental combustion.”

So here it is: my personal contribution to the Weird Engine Hall of Fame.

The Concept in One Sentence

A two‑stroke, diesel, supercharged, scavenged, constant‑speed engine designed solely as a range‑extender generator for a series plug‑in hybrid.

In other words: a tiny, angry, extremely efficient metal box whose only job is to sit in its happy place and make electricity.

 

The Tri‑Dyne Rotary: The Engine I Fell In Love With in an Encyclopedia (and Other Beautifully Weird Engines)

A retro-style technical schematic of a Tri-Dyne rotary engine — the kind of diagram that made 12‑year‑old me fall in love with impossible machines.

Some engines are weird because they were built.

The Tri‑Dyne rotary is weird because it never was — and yet it still managed to lodge itself permanently in my brain after I saw a diagram of it in an old Encyclopaedia Britannica. (That article had an excellent diagram, but you can see the basic idea from the cover of the July, 1969 Popular Science magazine — link courtesy of books.google.com — and that cover was the inspiration of the Gemini AI Nano-Banana generated image above — very similar to the diagram in the encyclopedia.) 

I remember staring at that diagram way longer than any normal child should stare at a hypothetical combustion chamber; in fact, I once used it in a project in high school for "what I want to be when I grow up," or something like that (the "what" was "automotive engineer" — I did work in the reactor department, mechanical division, onboard a Nimitz-class US Navy Nuclear Aircraft Carrier, but then I switched back to my computer days, and I've been doing that ever since).

The Tri‑Dyne was one of those “future of engines” concepts that lived entirely in beautifully rendered cutaway drawings. It promised all the elegance of a rotary without the Wankel’s triangle‑shaped chaos:

• three oscillating vanes
• three combustion chambers
• three power pulses per revolution
• and theoretically better sealing, efficiency, and sanity

It looked like someone took the Wankel, removed the Dorito, and replaced it with a mechanical flower that opened and closed in perfect synchronization.

It was mesmerizing.
It was elegant.
It was also, as far as I can tell, never actually built — which is probably why the diagrams looked so clean. Real engines leak. Real engines get hot. Real engines warp, seize, and fling metal shrapnel into the nearest wall. The Tri‑Dyne lived in a world where none of that existed. (Actually, to be fair, some of them only threaten to do that — usually the ones that are in vehicles I own — but the Tri‑Dyne never even got the chance; maybe we should rename it "Try-Dyne" since it never actually "did".)

But the idea?
The idea was intoxicating.

It was the kind of engine that made 12‑year‑old me think, “I’m going to build one of these someday,” and adult me think, “Ah. That’s why nobody built one of these.” (Actually, I'd still like to take a stab at building that thing someday... maybe I can get a 3D printer and build a prototype sometime.)

Still, I love it.
It’s the perfect example of the rotary dream: the belief that if we just rearrange geometry cleverly enough, we can escape pistons forever.

Spoiler: we cannot.
But I respect the optimism.