Six hours on the road to the SAC Museum west of Omaha. many hours on site, taking around 1,500 photos. Six hour drive back home.
Wheeeeeeeeeee.
My back hurts.
Sep 142021
Sep 092021
Some time during the next month or so I plan on taking a trip to the Strategic Air Command and Aerospace Museum near Ashland, Nebraska. I have visited that museum many times over the years, but always while traveling back and forth, thus never able to spend more than an hour or so. I wanted to get there during the work on the SR-71 book so I could properly over-photograph their SR-71, but schedule, cost and a little thing called a “global pandemic” kept me home.
I still want to excessively photograph their SR-71 in order to perfect the large format print diagrams. And additionally, a potential future book (in discussion with Mortons, but nothing certain yet) would be aided by excessively over-photographing another aircraft in the SAC museum collection. I plan on taking a *lot* of photos (likely in the thousands) covering several aircraft in painful detail.
I had hoped that the release of “SR-71” would bring in increased business (the APR Patreon/Monthly Historical Documents Program, USBP’s, etc), but as has been all too common, business has actually *dropped* since the book came out. One of these days I swear I’ll figure out how every time I try my hand at advertising business actually collapses. I suspect that the truth of it will help open doorways into research in practical time travel, faster than light travel and popularity with women.
So, once again, I’m grubbing for funds to support this trip. If interested in helping out, just below there’s a drop-down menu of PayPal options, from “moral support” to “large sums.” The “Best Of” option will get those who chose it, as the title suggests, a selection of the best photos, probably over a hundred. The “All the Photos” option gives the funder just what it says, all the photos taken at the museum, including any panoramic shots I stitch together. The photos will be provided by way of a Dropbox folder or a ZIP file with all the photos.
I *may* extend the trip another day down the road to Denver to hit up the Wings Over The Rockies Museum for the same purpose, but only if there’s enough “investment.” If that happens, those who go for the full set of photos will also get the full set of photos from the WOTR Museum as well.
UPDATE: I’ve updated the draw-down PayPal menu. It didn’t have the prices on there initially.
—
Sep 042021
Go ahead and *try* to imagine mandating that a cat wear a mask. It doesn’t work. Cats do what they do, with no regard to what *you* might want them to do. that’s why they’re awesome.
Aug 022021
Speedbump seems disappointed in Banshees thottery…
Jul 232021
Walk into a room and what do I see…
Jul 162021
Buttons has been feeling a bit under the weather lately. Mostly seems ok, but he’s had trouble with food. He’s hungry and demands food, but when presented with food he just sorta looks at it sadly and walks away. Best guess: his sense of smell or taste has been messed with. He wants food, he sees food, but he doesn’t *smell* food. And thus we get this portrait. He lay there for several minutes looking sadly at a pile of his favorite food.
A talk with the vet was unenlightening. So, I had to science the ᛋᚻᛁᛏ out of the situation. New bags of his normal food also did not pass muster, so it wasn’t a problem with the specific bags of food. Several bags of entirely different brands didn’t work. Treats, however, worked. But he can’t subsist on treats… partly because they’re just not that great nutritionally, but mostly because Buttons requires a special diet due to a predisposition to forming some sort of crystals in his urinary tract.
So, problem: cat wants food but won’t eat food. Hypothesis: his sense of smell is diminished. Observation: he will eat treats. Observation: treats are a lot stronger smelling that normal food.
Experiment one: Mix treats with food. Result: Buttons picked the treats out… but *did* eat some food in the process. Didn’t spit out bits of food, but didn’t seek them out, either.
Experiment two: crush treats to powder, mix with food, shake vigorously. Now food smells like treats. Result: Buttons eats *almost* like normal.
The root cause is as yet unresolved, but a workaround has been produced that will hopefully function adequately until things hopefully return to normal. Hopefully.
Banshee posing on a couch. This was not a brief moment; she sat this way for quite some time.
Speedbump sitting atop the couch.
Jul 162021
Jul 092021
Sometimes things are incompetent because the people doing those things are incompetent. And sometimes it’s malicious incompetence. One wonders…
For the cover of its diversity report, ODNI bought a stock photo called "Portrait Of Multi-Cultural Office Staff Standing In Lobby" and then photoshopped a woman in a wheelchair and a blind guy into it. https://t.co/BpvOg17CbA https://t.co/G59aVvba58 pic.twitter.com/Em6C1cFuFl
— Luke Thompson (@ltthompso) July 8, 2021
And just in case you think this might be some sort of fake… here is a link to the report. As of this posting, that craptacularly shopped stock photo is the cover image.
Jul 042021
Back when NASA dreamed big (the early 1960’s), there were many ideas for how to make really, REALLY big space launch systems. Solid rocket motors had a place at the time serving as either the first stage, or strap-on boosters for the first stage, for Saturn-class boosters. Most solid rocket production facilities are far from Cape Canaveral, so getting rockets from the manufacturer to the launch site could be a problem. Due to rail line restrictions, a case diameter of 156 inches was the limit: anything bigger wouldn’t fit through existing tunnels. But Aerojet and other companies had ideas for even bigger solids… I’ve seen drawings for boosters up to 396 inches in diameter, though 260 inches seems to be the largest given serious engineering.
In order to conveniently manufacture and transport these giants, Aerojet set up a manufacturing plant and static test site in Florida. Aerojet built several half-length versions of the 260-inch-diameter boosters, dug a hole in the ground, upended the rockets and fired them towards the center of the Earth, with the results being a small earthquake, a gigantic brown plume of solid rocket exhaust shooting into the sky and no production contract. The first test firing was in September, 1966, by which time NASA’s horizons had contracted substantially.
Solid rockets as an economical way to get to space, especially as a way to launch humans, is a technology whose day has passed. As military technology they remain as valid as ever; unlike liquid rockets, you can stuff a solid rocket into a silo and somewhat ignore it for years and then launch it on a moments notice. Having ICBM-sized boosters stocked up and stored away ready to launch a fleet of replacement GPS, communication and spy satellites when the Chinese swat our current fleet from the sky makes a lot of sense… but using solids to launch missions to the Moon or Mars is now a rather silly notion.
The full rez scan of the photo (and 4 others) has been made available at 300 DPI to all $4/month patrons/subscribers in the 2021-07 APR Extras folder at Dropbox. If you would like to help fund the acquisition and preservation of such things, along with getting high quality scans for yourself, please consider signing on either for the APR Patreon or the APR Monthly Historical Documents Program.
Jun 092021
Speedbump.
