Ron Downey’s aviation history blog, Aviation Archives, recently posted a pile of nicely high-rez photos of the McDonnell ASSETT lifting re-entry test vehicle from the mid-1960’s. If you’re interested in such things – and if you’re here, chances are good – wander on by and take a look. The rest of the blog is jam-packed full of goodies as well including documents and diagrams, mostly from McDonnell-Douglas programs like the F-4 and F-15.
On every conceivable technical level, this photo is awful, first and foremost by being horribly out of focus. But I like it not for what it shows, but for what was *about* to happen. This here is Bruce sitting in the little plastic-sticks-and-nylon-fabric cat “playhouse” Promptly after this photo he went back to the task he was performing just before the photo: madly (and futilely) attempting to dig through the side wall of the playhouse. Even through the bad photography you can kinda make out the crazy.
Raedthinn and Fingers…
So, earlier today some doofus hijacked an EgyptAir flight and made the pilot take him to Cuba Cyprus, using a fake suicide bomb to do his thing. At the end all the passengers bailed off the plane safely… but one stopped to take a selfie. Most of the time selfies are just embarrassingly bad bits of halfassed photographic self-promotion… but this’d be a selfie I’d be proud to hang on my wall if it was me:
March 17, a telescope in Austria caught this:
And as seen from Ireland:
… from a while back. Not terribly great, but what the heck, this is the internet, so here’s a cat.
Some recent views of the Thatcher area…
And this sure looked like a giant-scale trilobite fossil in the sky. Well, I suppose Cthulhu has to snack on *something*…
And far more relaxed than any human being ever has been or ever will be.
Raedthinn & Fingers in the front window perch. I gotta say I get a kick out of the side-eye Raedthinn’s giving me in the first photo.
A little snippet from a 1967 issue of Interavia magazine, showing the type of employee every high-tech facility needs.
“An official Lockheed Propulsion Corp. Portrait of Cat (Grade 1) Tiger guarding the microphone used for rocket motor count-downs. Tiger guards the master control complex against mice which formerly caused many thousands of dollars worth of damage by chewing instrumentation wiring.”
When I worked at United Tech in California, there was the main plant, overrun with the Union, where things got done real, real slow (and where things getting done *wrong* led to the destruction of the place). But there was a small spur of the facility, RAT canyon (Research and Advanced Technology) which was not unionized; that’s where people tried to go if they had to get something done that was either crazy, sensitive or needed doing before the sun explodes. And RAT Canyon had a guardian, Fang. Fang was a big cat, bigger than Raedthinn, and all muscle. And he earned his name; mouth closed, his fangs stuck down below his upper lips by about 3/8″. His purpose was to control the varmints, and he did his job well. I’ve often wondered what happened to Fang when the facility folded; I hope that the manager of RAT Canyon, on his last day there, as he loaded his last box in his truck, scooped up Fang and took him to a new home. But who knows.