This was the view from, of all places, a rest stop. The wind was blowing like mad, which seems to be the norm in Wyoming. That was the sort of place that makes me wish I was flying again, so I could see the place from above (but not too high above… the best flying is the kind where you have to keep an eye out for trees and such). Well, perhaps in a month or so…
Circa 1972, via North American Rockwell. Click on the titles to get higher-rez versions.
Click titles for higher rez versions.
In late 2007, I stopped at the USAF Museum and took a number of photos that I stitched together into a panorama. Sadly, as you can see here, I did a rather poor job of it: the camera was tipped upwards, leading to a “curved” panorama. On my swing through a little over a week ago, I went to the same spot and tried again. Did far better this time…
Don’t blame me, I didn’t name it. But here it is, a major road in Elkton, MD.
Counter Rocket, Artillery, and Mortar
This is a US Navy 20mm Phalanx anti-missile gun system mounted on a trailer, and used to bring down rockets and mortar shells in Iraq. It uses special ammo that blows itself up in flight so that the shells don’t come raining down on civilian areas.
Videos of the system in use are available here, here and here. Note that the rounds in flight all sparkle out at the end and disappear… that’s the self-destruct.
One thing that occurs… the trailer system looks pretty large. Yet decades ago the same gun was mounted to APCs; I’m left to wonder why the current system requires such an extensive infrastructure. Shrug.
Wow. Just… wow.
…cent,” General Anatoly Nogovitsyn, the deputy chief of staff of Russia’s armed forces, was quoted by the Interfax news agency as saying.
He added that Russia’s military doctrine sanctions the use of nuclear weapons “against the allies of countries having nuclear weapons, if they in some way help them”. General Nogovitsyn also said that would include elements of strategic deterrence systems.
It’s hard to understand just what the hell is going on in the heads of many of the Russian higher-ups. Clearly this is part of an effort to regain the former Warsaw Pact nations as part of a resurgent Russian empire, but it looks like they may be overplaying their hand. Rather than scaring their former vassal states into subission, they may be scaring them straight into NATO. Granted, the EU nations and by extension much of NATO are a bunch of damned wusses, but at *some* point someone will stand up to Putin and his gang and tell ‘em to get bent.
Granted, it’s unlikely that most people really want an obituary in the first place, but this one seems kinda harsh:
Dolores Aguilar
1929 - Aug. 7, 2008Dolores Aguilar, born in 1929 in New Mexico, left us on August 7, 2008. She will be met in the afterlife by her husband, Raymond, her son, Paul Jr., and daughter, Ruby.
She is survived by her daughters Marietta, Mitzi, Stella, Beatrice, Virginia and Ramona, and son Billy; grandchildren, Donnelle, Joe, Mitzie, Maria, Mario, Marty, Tynette, Tania, Leta, Alexandria, Tommy, Billy, Mathew, Raymond, Kenny, Javier, Lisa, Ashlie and Michael; great-grandchildren, Brendan, Joseph, Karissa, Jacob, Delaney, Shawn, Cienna, Bailey, Christian, Andre Jr., Andrea, Keith, Saeed, Nujaymah, Salma, Merissa, Emily, Jayci, Isabella, Samantha and Emily. I apologize if I missed anyone.
Dolores had no hobbies, made no contribution to society and rarely shared a kind word or deed in her life. I speak for the majority of her family when I say her presence will not be missed by many, very few tears will be shed and there will be no lamenting over her passing.
Her family will remember Dolores and amongst ourselves we will remember her in our own way, which were mostly sad and troubling times throughout the years. We may have some fond memories of her and perhaps we will think of those times too. But I truly believe at the end of the day ALL of us will really only miss what we never had, a good and kind mother, grandmother and great-grandmother. I hope she is finally at peace with herself. As for the rest of us left behind, I hope this is the beginning of a time of healing and learning to be a family again.
There will be no service, no prayers and no closure for the family she spent a lifetime tearing apart. We cannot come together in the end to see to it that her grandchildren and great-grandchildren can say their goodbyes. So I say here for all of us, GOOD BYE, MOM.
Yow. Either somebody was a crappy mom, or somebody is a crappy kid….
Been here for a bit over a week. I think Tak and Raedthinn are getting a bit of cabin fever. I do take ‘em down to the lobby now and then, and that seems to cure ‘em of their urge to explore… strangers do not impress them.
On the drive to Maryland I briefly stopped at the USAF Museum in Dayton (actually, I spent more time leaving the highway and getting to the museum than I spent at the museum itself). I was last therein October or so of last year, so I wasn’t expectign much to have changed. But there were a few surprises, including the newly-displayed Avro Canada VZ-9 “Avrocar.” This was a late 1950’s attempt to produce a high-speed VTOL aircraft… the result being an uncomfortable hovercraft capable of minimal speed and a maximum altitude measurable in inches. Ooops.
Went down to D.C. today to do some sightseeing. After driving for a few hours, I got to a Metro station, and took the subway/train/whatever.
The Metro is an effective and reasonably low-cost means of getting around D.C. However, the worst of D.C. was on full display on the Metro today: what can be accurately described as “feral” children. While this pack of genetic defectives pretty much ignored me (it is sometimes good to be large), the same cannot be said for some random woman that one of these retards decided to focus on. The twit in question was a roughly spherical girl (took a while to conclude “female”) with a pinhead and a penchant for thumbsucking (yeah, that’ll make you look *real* badass) who seemed to have an extremely limited vocabulary and a minimal grasp of English grammer, much less proper social behavior. She got pissed that a woman, who had no where else to be, was standing in the aisle of the Metro blocking her view of one of her idiot comrades, and opened up a tirade of moronic and sexually explicit insults.
Now, I’m as big a fan of profanity as you’re likely to come across. Expletives are a fuckin’ dandy way of making a point. But when you use expletives the way normal humans use vowels…. you are likely to not become a valuable member of society.
Anyway, the woman and I got off at the same terminal (L’Enfant Plaza). Irritatingly, Dipshit And The Gang also got off at the same stop. They followed the woman at close range for some distance, continuing to heap ill-considered witticisms; I followed *them* at close range to see what would happen. When the woman looked around and saw me, I moved up to her and started chatting like I knew her; at that point the Moron Brigade decided to wander off, likely to go be a burden to society on some other train. The woman said that she wondered what their parents would think of their behavior; my response was to point out that I thought it unlikely that they actually *had* parents, from a practical point of view.
Bah. If the children are our future… get me the hell off this planet.
D.C. is a freakin’ embarassment. Much of this has been driven by the failed Great Society, which in D.C. (perhaps more than most other major American cities) has produced a sense of entitlement, a disincentive for fathers to stick around, and a lack of work ethic. Marry that with D.C.’s decades of ignoring the Constitution with regard to the right of the citizens to keep and bear arms, and the failed public edumacation system that makes no real effort to truly teach, and you wind up with a city that actually tolerates children who are living out a real-life version of Lord of the Flies.
Anyway, after the fun and excitement of the Metro, I visited the National Air and SpaceMuseum. I’ve been there several times in the past, but my last visit was in about 1998. I noted a number of changes… from the X-ray and bag check at the door (another 9-11 Islam Outreach Success Story), to the disappearance of a number of displays (such as the early rocketry and spaceflight stuff, which I’m hoping has been moved to the Udvar-Hazy center), to the replacement of the NASM cafeteria witha friggen’ McDonalds. I didn’t spend the whole day there, just sorta ran through, but I still took a number of pictures:
An early concept sketch of the Douglas AD-1 “Skyraider” from 1943. Note the inclusion of at least one turbojet on the underside.
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Took a bunch of photos of the Rockwell HiMAT unmanned research vehicle…
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A McDonnell -Douglas hypersonic transport “Orient Express” model…
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A large stainless-steel Dyna Soar wind tunnel model…
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The X-45 hanging in the unmanned aircraft section….
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The SpaceShip One hanging near the Bell X-1 and the Spirit of St. Louis …
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The full-scale Apollo-Soyuz Test Project…
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And the starship Enterprise model from the original TV series… on display in the basement store near the toys.
After the NASM, I wandered across the Mall to the Natural History Museum. I noticed a large gathering, with someone screeching on a loud PA system about some god or other… I’m guessing they were either Satan or Loki worshippers. The screacher on the screen was yellling about how the world will soon be trashed by his god, and that this was a particularly desirable thing; in the singalong that followed, there was a *lot* of calling for fire to come down. As I said, probably Satan or Loki worshippers. Takes someone really kinda special (in the sense of “ding fries are done” special) to actually want the Earth to get blasted with fire and humanity wiped out with some small fraction getting to live on as slaves of the demon what who trashed the planet. Shrug.
During the singalong, there was, as I said, a whole lot of repetition of “fire.” Made me wonder if maybe, just maybe, it was a Beavis convention.
While at the Natural History Museum, I wandered through the mineral and fossil exhibit, which pretty much are all I’m interested in in natural history museums (oooh, lookie! Stuffed muskrats! Eskimo clothes! Zzzzzz…..)
After that I went to old town Alexandria specifically to hunt down a store that I had visited before (a model/book shop packed to the gills with aircraft and sci-fi model kits stretching back to the ’50’s), only to discover that it ain’t there anymore. Feh.
Well, hey. At least I didn’t get stabbed.
