So, a guy decides to kick in the (incredibly cheaply made) front door of an apartment while wielding a machete. What could possibly go wrong? Well… the guy on the inside of the apartment having a pistol, for starters.
Didn’t kill the maniac, but it did at least put him down.
I’ve made available to all APR Patreon patrons full-rez scan of of an article from Mechanix Illustrated, March, 1956. “Why Don’t We Build an Atoms-For-Peace Dirigible” was written and illustrated by Frank Tinsley and is, to say the least, kinda technologically optimistic. But it demonstrated a difference in psychology between then and now… sixty years ago, thinking this kind of big was not seen as crazy as it would be today.
If this is of interest, please consider signing up to become a patron. For a pittance per month, you get all kinds of aerospace history goodies.
This isn’t exactly a music blog, but I found these interesting… isolated audio tracks from Queen’s 1977 “We Are The Champions.” Note I said “interesting,” not “great listening.” Stripped from the rest of the music in the song, the individual tracks show how they *need* each other. The a-Capella version *almost* works, but even then, not really.
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And all put together:
Let’s face it: the 70’s sucked. Viet Nam. Watergate. The end of Apollo, the rise of anti-nuclear knuckleheads, OPEC, Iran, Carter, inflation, stagflation, malaise, disco. But ya gotta admit, “We Are The Champions” was a bit of a bright spot. Nearly forty years later, it’s still hanging on, still a way to pump up a crowd.
This has happened before: some scumbag commits horrible acts, and either keels over in custody or his body gets scraped up after a battle. And so, now what do we do with the remains? Nobody except the other scumbags want his corpse in their mortuaries or cemeteries. So often the answer is “secret burial,” which still leads people to be cheesed off that the body of the bad guy is somewhere near them.
Bah.
How bout this? Cremate them. Take the ashes, and dump them into the nearest sewage treatment plant. Does this not solve the problem? Or how about this: we’ve all seen dead critters at the side of the road. Heck, I’ve seen dead cows, horses, deer and even moose at the side of the road, squished by cars, trucks, semis. The county or state generally does not leave these things there, but instead sends some unfortunate schmoes out to go scrape ’em up. Now, you’re a state road worker with a week-dead bloated cow, all 700 pounds of it, in the back of your truck. Clearly you’re going to take it *somewhere* where *somebody* will do *something* with it. Well… why not use that same process to deal with Skippy Al Dedbahdi The Undead Jihadi?
Nailed it:
Because the posters for “Reign of Fire” promised extreme awesomeness and delivered none of it, the Smithsonian Channel proudly produces… this (and I have no idea why):
OK, howsabout this: US Bomber Projects issues 1 through 12, plus US Transport Projects 1 & 2 and US Spacecraft Projects 1: separately they’d go for $60. But for, oh, a couple hours, get the whole mess for $40.
Sale has ended.
First images of the crash landing of the Falcon 9 have been published. It got *so* *close.* The hydraulics controlling the aerodynamic fins ran out before touchdown; I’m unclear on why that would cause the rocket to tip over at this point, because I’d’ve been pretty sure it’d be pretty much all-rocket control. Perhaps at the very last moment where the fins could have meaningfully bit into the air they went hard over and tipped the rocket, and the TVC system just couldn’t compensate in time.
The publishing industry goes through fads. UFO abduction stories are popular for a while. Then sparkly teen vampire stories. And then starting few years ago, yarns claiming to be non-fictional biographies of people who died, went and saw Heaven, then came back. Many people have seized on these books to back up their religious beliefs.
Whoops:
In short: in 2004 a six-year-old (with the unfortunate name “Alex Malarkey”) was in a car crash, seriously injured and pounded into a coma. Two months later he woke up and began to regale with tales of being shown around Heaven. Small problem: he now says that he made it all up as a way to get attention.
Amusingly, he apparently tried to tell the world of this fraud a while back, by posting message saying as much on the “Alex Malarkey Facebook fan page.” The moderators there deleted his message and banned him.
Coming sometime in 2015. I’m only a quarter of the way through the first book, so I hope the premiere is later in 2015. And I hope Syfy does a *far* better job with “The Expanse” than they did with “Ascension.”