On display outside the Strategic Air & Space Museum in Nebraska…
Dec 122009
Dec 122009
I dunno, this just seems kinda tacky… a gold plated, non-functional M-60 at the Rock Island Arsenal Museum.
The info plate reads:
US M-60 7.62mm Gold Plated Machine Gun
Manufactured by Saco-Lowell. This weapons was given to the Commanding General of Weapons Command by Saco-Lowell upon completion of contract. This machine gun is made of unservicable parts.
Dec 102009
Hero-Gear is pleased to introduce BATTLE MUG
Battle Mug starts as a 13.5 pound solid block of 6061 T6 billet aluminum before it enters a state of the art CNC facility in Huntsville, Alabama. This facility produces specialized parts and equipment for the U.S. Department of Defense, major weapons manufacturers, NASA, and a host of other companies working at the U.S. Rocket and Space Center.
Built to military specifications, Battle Mug features a M1913 rail interface system which allows the operator to mount a standard issue M4 carry handle, tactical light, laser device, holographic sight (we call them “beer goggles”) or even a bayonet for close quarters, high risk operations.
Each individually serialized Battle Mug features Mil-Spec Type III anodizing and a crenelated base and is built with the operator in mind.
Whether you are fighting drug lords deep inside the jungles of Colombia, stomping out Al Qaida terrorists in Falluja Iraq, or eradicating no-good hippies in Berkeley, California…
Ummm… You can also get a set of fifty Battle Mugs for only $12,450.
<> Seems a bit steep to me, but how many other mugs are you likely to find that you can mount a grenade launcher to?
Also:
Dec 082009
From the Glenn L. Martin Aviation Museum archive, an inboard profile painting of the diminutive Martin Midget ground attack plane.
Note that much more on the Midget can be seen here.
Dec 062009
Certain products are sold with commercials that follow a predicatable sort of script. Beer is sold by happy party goers, sports cars by idjits with lead feet and unoccupied roads. And anti-animal-cruelty organizations beg for donations by showing slow-mo videos of sad (typically damaged) animals with a sad soundtrack. Well, as if this ad from the ASPCA wasn’t bad enough, the Humane Society of the US has decided to step it up a notch in a new commercial by adding large-font “thought bubble” quotes along with the sad critters. And of course, the “thoughts” the critters are expressing are not “hey, thanks for your help” or “won’t you please donate.”
Oh, no. Not even a little bit.
And then to top it off, they tack on this little nugget of joy:
Now, unless I really miss my guess, the basic purpose of these ads is to make people not only want to donate to the Humane Society, but to actually get off their butts and do it. But this ad does not have that effect on me. Instead, it makes want to grab a baseball bat and start whacking the crap out of things and people… starting with the damned television, progressing to the nearest animal abuser, moving on to the people who dreamed up this ad, and finally finishing with the executives of PETA (not because they were involved with this ad, but just because they suck so very, very much).
As might be guessable based on the “cat” postings I’ve made, I’ve a fondness for critters such as these. My oldest cat Koshka came from a rescue shelter, and was an abused cat herself (she still has numerous relatively serious psychomologimical issues… she recognizes weapons like knives and firearms, and runs away in stark terror). So you’d think that I would be the precise target audience. But if the result is not me diving for my checkbook, but instead diving for the remote control to turn the channel to something more cheerful like the latest episode of “House” or “Johnny Got His Gun,” I can’t help but think someone might’ve miscalculated.
Gah. It was bad enough when it was fictional.
Dec 062009
911 Call Released From Home Invasion Shooting
Cushing – Officials have released the 911 tape from this morning’s home invasion shooting that left an intruder dead from a shotgun blast.
It happened in Cushing, about 50 miles west of Tulsa in Lincoln County. Police say the female homeowner was awakened by her barking dog and called 911. While she was on the phone with dispatchers, police say she warned the intruder that she had a rifle.
Authorities say the intruder, identified as Billy Dean Riley, ignored the woman’s warning and threw a chair through the window. That’s when the woman opened fire.
…
RESIDENT – “i’ve got a big shotgun. I’m not going into a tiny bathroom…”
RESIDENT – “He’s walking around the house trying to find a way in…”
RESIDENT – “Oh crap, he’s at the back…”
911 – “Okay , (unintelligible) is advising that you can defend your property if you need to.”
…
911 – “I can hear him banging again.”
RESIDENT – “I don’t want to have to kill this man, but i’ll kill him graveyard dead ma’am.”
911 – “I understand.”
Reading the whole thing, it looks to be a sad story of a guy who got himself drunked up and went stupid. But as Heinlein pointed out…
- Stupidity cannot be cured with money, or through education, or by legislation. Stupidity is not a sin, the victim can’t help being stupid. But stupidity is the only universal capital crime; the sentence is death, there is no appeal and execution is carried out automatically and without pity.
- There is a grand total of one real victim here… the homeowner who was forced to shoot someone who chose to act the jackass. Hopefully she won’t need too much therapy, but even though some folk just need killin’, it’s not something that most people can just shrug off.
Still, that was a hell of a line.
And if you think the woman over-reacted, here’s another story from the same news source:
Reward Increased In Home Invasion Homicide
Sam Sanders was shot and killed by two masked intruders at about 4:30 a.m. on March 24th in his home near Fairland.
Dec 022009
OK, bear with me. This will seem like a pretty meaningless and trivial post (as opposed to the world-shatteringly important ones, like the cat photos), but I think there might be something of some cultural importance here.
Two science fiction shows from recent years that I found entertaining were “Stargate SG-1” and “Primeval.” They had a few points of similarity:
1) Both are set in the present day
2) There are wormhole-like things that allow for instant travel from this world to another
3) There are teams whose job it is to investigate these “portals” and what lies beyond
4) The government is fully aware of the portals and what lies beyond, but is covering it up from the public
5) There are, nevertheless, journalists trying to uncover the truth
6) There are competing groups trying to control the portals
7) there are dangers on the other side of the portals… and sometimes they come through into our world
OK. Now, the differences:
1) Stargate is American TV, set largely in America; Primeval is Brit TV set largely in Britain
2) The “Stargate” is a machine built millenia ago by aliens, and it opens a portal to other stargates on other worlds across the galaxy; the portals in Primeval are gateways to the distant past (or future) of Earth, and appear to be naturally occuring holes in spacetime
3) Stargate thus deals with aliens; Primeval deals with dinosaurs and such.
Now, here’s where this becomes interesting to me. In both shows, the people involved are *forever* getting in trouble with the aliens/critters on the other side of the portals. In general, they’re always getting their asses handed to ’em by those on the other side. But… while the Stargate team is getting whupped by aliens thousands of years more technologically advanced than modern humans, the Primeval team is getting spanked by critters with no more smarts than your average retarded rat. Now, why might this be? Well, let’s take a look at the teams involved:
Primeval:
Stargate:
Primeval:
Stargate:
Primeval:
Stargate:
Primeval:
Stargate:
I notice one subtle difference in how the teams are equipped. Did you catch it? That’s right… the Stargate team wears camouflage.
And packs heat. Lots of heat.
If you notice in the last of the Primeval cast shots, there is one guy tucked way in the back holding a shotgun. This character was an addition in the third season, when it was becoming obvious even to the BBC that “gee, maybe some form of defense might make some sort of sense, as these velociraptor chaps aren’t behaving properly.” But even then the guy was something of a puss… and of course none of the rest of ’em were armed (except for the occasional tranquilizer rifle which tended to not work terribly well on the bigger and angrier critters).
Granted, this Just Television. Getting too worked up about this makes as much sense as a Kirk vs Picard argument (when we all know the winner: Nuke ‘Em Sheridan). Still, I think a message of some small importance can be gleaned from this.
Anybody with more than a double-digit IQ should be able to figure out that if there is a Magic Portal To A Dangerous Beyond, you had damned well better prepare for all kinds of eventualities… and often enough those eventualities seem to be aliens and other critters that want to eat you. As a consequence, if you must send people through, or have a reasonable suspicion that those Dangerous Nasties are going to come through on their own…your people had damned well better be armed. This is just basic sense. And yet, the British take on the idea seems to be that arms are dirty, nasty things, almost more distasteful than being chewed up and swallowed by some prehistoric blighter. While in Stargate, they’d often enough go through packing not just guns… but nuclear fricken’ bombs. And when we encountered aliens, the first things we did was reverse engineer their weapons and power systems.
Interestingly, one thing that repeatedly startled me for the first few years of Stargate SG-1 was how often the team would wander into some alien village with machine pistols, rifles, shotguns, rocket launchers, zap guns, grenades, knives and what have you all hanging out in the breeze, right out in front of Odin and everybody… and the villagers/aliens – from paleolithic tech on up to Star Trek-level tech – *never* freaked out about it. For the longest time this seemed like an oversight to me. But then I realized that it was a rare case of Hollywood *not* being stupid. In a world where all kinds of people and aliens and critters are coming and going… of course you go about armed. Duh.
In the end, Willing Suspension Of Disbelief lets me sit back and enjoy TV shows about stargates and cracks in the fabric of spacetime; stories about aliens snakes living in people’s heads, and super-evolved bats. But I just can’t suspend disbelief enough to let Primevals’ wholly bizarre world of intentionally defenseless humans slip by without complaint.
Nov 222009
More specifically… for having legal, unloaded shotguns in a truck off school property.
From ChicoER.com:
The Willows Unified School District board of trustees has expelled a 16-year-old for having unloaded shotguns in his pickup parked just off the Willows High School campus.
…
Susan Parisio defended her son during the 105-minute public hearing at Willows Civic Center. She acknowledged that Tudesko was lazy for not storing the shotguns at home after a morning of bird hunting, but she questioned the district’s ability to enforce its policies off Willows High School property.“My son was not even parked on school property,” Parisio said.
Willows High Principal Mort Geivett and other district officials did not appear to dispute that the parking space was off school property, but they cited several justifications. One of them was the legal doctrine of in loco parentis – where school officials may act in place of a parent for school functions.
<>I sympathize with the kid… I’ve been there. Years ago I lost a crappy job because on a weekend when I wasn’t working I went target shooting on private property that allowed such target shooting. But since that property was near the property being rented by my employer, and because my employer was a paranoid nutjob (on the other side of the planet at the time, to boot), he decided that I was a danger. Pity I didn’t tell him that a co-worker kept a revolver in his desk, and another kept a Walther in his shorts. No, we weren’t paranoid gun nuts… we were Coloradans. Hell, the ground around the worksite was littered with 12 guage shells, AK-47 and M-16 brass.
Anyway, this school board needs to be fired. The kid was violating no laws and no rules.
Nov 202009
<> Bill Sweetman’s Ares Blog at Aviation Week shows an illustration of a seaplane taken from a 2006 paper written by two Lockheed guys and one Boeing guy. The seaplane design is unusual… but not terribly new. Wander over to the Ares blog and take a look… then compare it to the Lockheed Sea Sitter concept from the 1970’s. This monster of a plane (which I wrote about for issue V5N3 of the initial run of Aerospace Projects Review) was designed as a Sea Control plane… essentially a flying warship. Armed with two 20mm CIWS Gatling guns, a single 105 mm howitzer sticking out the port side, a Kamen SeaSprite anti-sub helicopter and a dozen Lance battlefield missiles in vertical silos.
Nov 152009
Back in the early/mid 90’s, when I was getting my Aero E degree from Iowa State U, the Iowa State Space Society put on several “Mid Continent Space Development Conferences,” where we got a surprising number of aerospace “luminaries” to come in and give presentations on whatever their topic was… Bill Gaubatz from McDonnell-Douglas on the Delta Clipper, Robert Forward on several “crazy” concepts (I drove him from Ames to the Des Moines airport – or vice versa – once, and had what at least to me seemed a good conversation regarding wormholes and time dilation with him), Seth Shostak from SETI, Len Cormier and his Space Van concept, Lori Garver from Ad Astra, Chuck Lauer (for orbital “real estate development,” later to be one of three founders of the late lamented Pioneer Rocketplane), Leik Myrabo (for whom I gave the introductory remarks, and managed to mangle both his name and that of Rensellaer Polytechnic… yeah, not one of my crowning moments) for laser propulsion, and numerous others. (now THAT is a run-on sentence!)
One of the others was Anthony Zuppero from the Idaho National Engineering Laboratory. He spoke to us of colonizing not planets (like Mars… at the time, the idea of blowing off Mars was heresy to young chuckleheads like us), but comets. And he showed us how it could be done, using the resources available in situ.
Sigh.
The days when I was young enough to think I might actually live to see such days.
Sigh.
Anyway: It turns out that Zuppero has written a book, a memoir on his experiences in aerospace. It is discussed in this article in The Register. And it is also available for free downloading as a PDF file HERE.
Yes, I was vain enough to do a search for my own name, since I knew I’d met him. And lo and behold, there it is, along with the names of fellow students that I haven’t seen, heard of or in some cases even thought of in 14 or so years. Hell, even my parents get the tiniest little mention.
I’ve not read the whole book, just a few bits (yes, starting with the MCSDC stuff). But his recollections of the MCSDC certainly match mine, and bring back the memories:
Pretty quickly I noticed that the only place I had ever been that was
more dismal than Idaho Falls in the winter was flying and driving
in Iowa in mid winter. The extra depressing element was that
from the air one could not see any mountains anywhere in Iowa,
and we could in Idaho Falls. We could see majestic mountains
from an airplane above Idaho Falls.
Got that right. Iowa in winter is charitably described as “dismal.” Especially when I recall that driving across Iowa in winter once involved my Ford Escort hitting a patch of ice, going into a spin on the entirely ice-covered highway and thinking “well, at least I’m the only idiot out here,” and then seeing the headlights of a Peterbilt coming out of the mist. Ba-BAM!
Another of Zuppero’s anecdotes, that, had I put some more thought into this some years back, could have saved me considerable headache:
I was supposed to be the featured evening speaker. But Robert
Zubrin, also there on no money, said it would really help if he could
speak in my place and I speak at his place. I should not have let
him. It is a status thing to be the featured evening speaker. Zubrin
did not publicly thank me for trading. That was the rub. Never
again, Robert.
Snerk.
Now, doesn’t that bring back a few years worth of unpleasant recollections…
Zuppero discusses his ideas at some considerable length in his book. In short… nuclear thermal rockets “burning” water ice, the ice taken not from Earth but from the comets that the rockets are used to colonize.
Zuppero also discusses his Asperger’s Syndrome at some considerable length… a topic of some small theoretical interest to me. And he pretty much nails it:
<> I will sometimes go too fast. I will sometimes say things that are
<>simply not supposed to be said that way. Because I am an Aspie,
<>I can’t see what’s wrong with doing these things at all. If I went
<>too fast or confused you, tell me and I will try to fix it. Maybe
<>not.If I use inappropriate language or say things that are too graphic
and just not proper in mixed company, or that are insulting or too
mean,
too bad.I’m an Aspie.
You are supposed to treat me nice, like we treat mongoloids and
other weird people.
…
You don’t like my exaggeration? Too bad. I’m an Aspie.
…
One always has a “day job” that you do to get money. One also
has a fantasy, a hobby daydream you think about all the time. It’s
the daydreams that make magic happen. And that is what
happened. However, it took a while and was mostly
disappointing the entire time. I never got rich either. And I got
fired a couple of times. Aspies just have a hard time with social
situations, like a boss.
…
Asperger’s Syndrome seems to be a real thing, just like ADD is a real thing. But it’s also become a somewhat fashionable diagnosis… seen by some as a convenient excuse for behaving like an asshole. But I’ve seen more than my share of “Asperger-Like” behavior in my aborted aerospace career . Aspies are, or at least can be when utilized properly, a massive benefit to whatever organization or project they’re working for. But what I’ve also seen are Aspies whose skills are ill-utilized (“Wow, you’re a great design engineer. Here, be an accountant.”), coupled with entirely too many non-Aspie assholes in positions of managerial/political power. Zuppero makes several references to Aspies being like Spock from Star Trek, which is a reasonable analogy… but imagine if Starfleet had taken a good hard look at Spock’s record and decided that he’d be best utilized as a singer of jingles for the “Be All You Can Be, Join Starfleet” ad campaign.
Download his book. It’s a bit rough (it’s clearly a draft, and needs some serious editting), but what I’ve read so far is certainly engaging.