I’m sure there are creepier names for a new virus, but none spring to mind.
It has 1,000 times the volume of the common flu. Found in Chile and Australia so far. Doesn’t seem to be related to other strains of virii.
Lotsa folks won’t be too thrilled with this headline…
It’s an AP story so I dare not quote from it, but it makes for interesting reading.
Related:
Total Lifetime Grosses
Domestic: $7,597,898 93.4%
+ Foreign: $540,890 6.6%
= Worldwide: $8,138,788
Snerk.
More than half a dozen years ago I started working on a book: US Bomber Projects Since World War II. I made some good headway on the research and drafting sides of the effort, and put out a “Preview” to test the waters (which you can still order here. If you haven’t, yer a commie). As with many such efforts, it took much longer than initially expected, started to balloon out of control, helped end my aerospace career and, before too long, became somewhat redundant. When I started working on USBPSWWII, there were no books like that in the world. Lots of Luftwaffe, 1946 stuff, but basically diddly squat about US projects. But before long, reputable publishers started putting out books that covered the basics on USBPSWWII. So since the book was becoming an encyclopedic monster that would not only cover ground other had covered, but would be massively, prohibitively expensive to print, much less buy, I let the project slide into oblivion.
A while back I was talking the project over with a friend, explained why it collapsed. And she pointed out a whole new reason why, instead of letting it be stomped on, I should have charged ahead with it way back when. An important reason, a reason I should have thought of years ago, a terribly motivating reason: spite. And since that’s virtually the only reason why I do much of anything anymore, spiting fate if nothing else, I cracked open the files and started working on it again.
The original plan is still kaput. One great big book that covers, in detail, the evolution of the B-52 and the B-58 and the B-1 would be impossibly large. The original plan was something like Aerospace Projects Review on steroids, with hundred-page articles on a whole bunch of topics, covered in great depth. But a lot of these designs have been covered in the other books that have been published. So… the revived US Bomber Projects will cover the *less* well known designs. Sometimes in my researches I’ve come across designs for which the only documentation is, say, a three-view drawing. In the normal course of things, these designs would be largely left by the wayside since their stories cannot be told with detail and confidence. But now? Heck, those will be the USBP bread and butter. And it won’t be restricted to post-WWII stuff; the war years produced some amazing concepts. There are designs from the 1930’s that really need to be shown.
US Bomber Projects will, instead of one giant book, be a series of short magazines or booklets, covering eight or so designs per issue. The designs in each issue will be unrelated to each other, but there will be “arcs” through the issues. For example, designs leading to the B-48 and B-52 and B-59 are followed from the get-go.
I’ve got the first two issues wrapped up; I need to revise me websites and upload the files, all that mind-numbing necessary stuff. I hope to have #1 and #2 ready for sales within a day. I’m thinking $4 per issue?
Tell me if you’ve heard anything like this:
An adult male confronts an unarmed 17-year-old male who he believes is committing a crime. The adult claims that the teenager turned upon him violently, so he shot the teen and killed him. The teens family claims that the teen was a good kid, and that the adult was a murderer who acted as judge, jury and executioner. The state arrested the adult, put him on trial and the jury found him not guilty. As a bonus, one of the participants here was black, one was white.
Sound familiar? Here’s where the story goes off the rails: the President had nothing to say about it. CNN didn’t devote a large block of its time to covering this story, calling up talking heads who claim that this was a miscarriage of justice. The Department of Justice didn’t yammer on about civil rights violation charges.
The case in question: one Roderick Scott, a 42-year-old black male, shot dead one 17-year-old Christopher Cervini, who was white. This occurred in New York State, which blighted region does *not* have Stand Your Ground laws. Even though the parallels to the Martin/Zimmerman case are blatantly obvious, the national response could not have been more different. Why could that be?
The lesson in *both* cases here is, honestly, “don’t assault people or otherwise act the thug, or you might get shot.” But there is money and politics involved in the more recent trial that was not involved in the earlier case.
It would be interesting if those in the media yammering about the “tragedy” or “miscarriage of justice” of the Zimmerman verdict would be confronted with the Scott verdict at every turn, and be made to explain why America is horribly racist when two remarkably similar cases produce remarkably similar verdicts even though the races are swapped around.
Last time foreign invaders wanted to destroy Britain, Edward R. Murrow was there on the scene…
[youtube psZBaJU_Cvo]
Seems vaguely relevant:
Back in 2007 I visited the Bell Aircraft Museum in Niagara Falls, NY and got a chance to poke through their archives. Sadly, my scanner chose that day to not work, so all imagery I got came via photography with an indifferent camera. While it was more or less ok, it was not such a good system for capturing good images of glossies.
One such glossy was a 1960’s Bell concept for a hovercraft designed to transport Saturn V stages, presumably from the Michaud facility near New Orleans to Cape Canaveral.
Hmm. How could a major American city fall so far? Sure, a lot of it was due to Detroit being based on a single industry, cars. But auto manufacturing hasn’t exactly utterly fled the US; there is a lot of it in southern states. So why would existing industries leave the city that is most closely associated with that industry? Hmmm. Maybe we should ask the mayors that Detroit has had ov3er the last 50 years:
Dave Bing May 11, 2009 – present Democrat
Kenneth Cockrel, Jr. September 18, 2008 – May 11, 2009 Democrat
Kwame Kilpatrick January 1, 2002 – September 18, 2008 Democrat
Dennis Archer January 3, 1994 – December 31, 2001 Democrat
Coleman Young January 1, 1974 – January 3, 1994 Democrat
Roman Gribbs January 6, 1970 – January 1, 1974 Democrat
Jerome Cavanagh January 2, 1962 – January 5, 1970 Democrat
Hmmm. What’s that old saying that suddenly springs to mind? Oh, yes: “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again but expecting different results.”
It’s time to sell Detroit to the highest bidder. I suspect Halliburton could make some good use of the place.
If you’ve been pondering getting cyanotype blueprints, now’s the time. I will shut down production and availability on them by the end of the month.
