Nov 302011
 

If you’re a fan of MST3K, you are well acquainted with “Manos: The Hands Of Fate,” widely considered one of the worst movies ever made. Till now, the only prints of this steaming pile of cinema have been terrible in quality, matching the other aspects of the film, such as plot, dialogue and acting. Well…

Good news, everyone!

A pristine work print of Manos has been found and is being restored. Oh, boy.

‘Manos’ in HD

 Posted by at 8:25 pm
Nov 292011
 

The Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory reported in April 1947 on spin tunnel testing on a swept wing model of a P-47. The modifications were made to an existing Langley spin tunnel model, and it appears that the design was a NACA-Langley design rather than a Republic Aircraft design. By 1947, a swept wing piston engined aircraft was already an anachronism… unless there was some thought of making a research vehicle from a P-47 (as was done with the P-63 to make the L-39), by this time any swept wing fighter design would have had turbojet engines. Most likely the idea was to simply represent a generic swept wing aircraft, using on-hand resources.

The horizontal stabilizer was tested in two positions…. the P-47 original, and moved upwards and slightly forwards.

 Posted by at 7:52 pm
Nov 282011
 

APR issue V3N2 is just about done. All the articles have been written; I’m just working on some editing and some artwork. Hopefully it should be available by the end of the week.

This issue will have an article by Dennis Jenkins on a transport version of the F-106; a large (90+ page) article on the Lockheed STAR Clipper and descendant designs for a 1.5-stage-to-orbit Space Shuttle concept; and a sizable article on antecedents and derivatives of the Northrop F-23, including the “Christmas Fighter,” the NATF-23 carrier-based fighter, the operational F-23A design, the single-engined Multi-Role Fighter and the near-legendary F/B-23 tactical bomber.

In putting this issue together, there are some blank spots on a few pages, a result of formatting the text and images. The way most magazines deal with that is to hire editors who can arrange things professionally… and to stuff the magazine full of ads. I can’t afford the former. So I’ve decided to sell ad space.

What I’m offering is to put your “classified-style” ad in the issue for five bucks ($5). I don’t have many hard and fast rules here, just these:

  • Your ad can contain a web address, email address, mailing address and up to thirty to fifty or so words (I’m flexible here).
  • The ads do not need to relate to APR or aerospace.They can be for anything except for illegal, scamery or offensive stuff (I reserve the right to say “no”).

If interested, send me an email letting me know, or drop a comment below. Don’t pay just yet… I’ll wait till I see what sort of response I get and how many I can fit in.

 Posted by at 12:16 pm
Nov 282011
 

An odd gap in my records is a lack of good diagrams of the B-52. I’m not looking for them for resale, but for modeling and research purposes. I’ve a number of small Boeing diagrams, and some larger non-Boeing diagrams, but no good detailed large-format Boeing layout drawings of any version of the B-52.

If you have or know of a good B-52 (any model) layout drawing, either on paper or digital, please let me know. If the diagram goes into surface panel details, so much the better, but what I really need are reliable lines for the aircraft as a whole.

 Posted by at 12:12 pm
Nov 272011
 

Journalists sexually assaulted covering Egypt unrest

In short: two female journalists, one American, the other French, were sent to Tahrir Square in Cairo to cover the Islamist revolution. And they got themselves raped for their efforts.

I’m shocked, SHOCKED to find sexual assault going on among a bunch of savages.

Or as they put it on Fark:

French TV station sends two female journalists into Cairo’s Tahrir Square to cover Egypt unrest. Guess what happens next. Go ahead, guess

There are some places women should not go. This is not a sexist sentiment, but a purely practical one. I’d recommend evacuating all women and girls from nations undergoing Islamic revolutions, and leave them male-only societies for, oh, 65 years or so. That should make everybody happy.

 Posted by at 5:40 pm
Nov 262011
 

So, there’s a minor news story:

Watery secret of the dinosaur death pose

In short, some tests with dead chickens shows that a pose often found with dinosaurs (specifically, the head being pulled back, exposing the neck) doesn’t occur when the body is left to decompose on dry land, but occurs almost instantly when the body is submerged in water. Now, anyone who knows anything about fossilization knows that the most likely situation when a land critter would get fossilized is when it is very quickly buried.  This rarely happens on dry land; happens with some regularity with mudslides and flash floods. Since mudslides and flash floods tend to involve large quantities of water… this new study makes all kinds of logical scientific sense.

But not to everyone.

There’s always *somebody* who can take a straightforward logical proposition and twist it into utter bilge. Behold the medieval moronery on display among many of the commenters on this Free Republic thread:

Watery secret of the dinosaur death pose (Simplest explanation of Dino extinction: They drowned)

Ugh.

 Posted by at 11:51 pm