Heh.
Ukraine produces the turbine engines used in many Russian tanks, helicopters, transport aircraft and ships. Oddly enough, having Russian forces attack, invade and annex Ukrainian territory has resulted in the flow of new engines and spare parts to grind to a halt.
A recent flight out of Chicago took off in a heck of a light show.
In May of 2014, I posted about a book that looked awesome… a brand new “Making of 2001” tome. Four volumes, 1386 pages… and with a selling price of $750. Oddly enough, I never got around to buying a copy.
However, they have now released a paperback version. Sadly, it’s reduced to a single volume of 562 pages… but at least it’s affordable. On Amazon the basic price is $69.99, but right now they are pre-selling it for $46.93. I hear tell it has a whole lot of really good illustrations.
If interested… please feel free to buy it through this link. I’ll receive a tiny pittance!
If you don’t see the standard Amazon ad-box thing for “The Making of 2001” immediately above this… it’s probably a browser issue. So, try HERE as another link.
WTF Bad Science Fiction Covers is having “Cats in Space” week, showing a number of paperback SF book covers featuring – you probably guessed it – Cats In Space. There’s some amusing stuff here. Along with a lot of Really, Really Awful SF Cover Art. I mean… just bad. I mean, the one with the copyrightly-dubious image of the Robot from Lost in Space… yeeesh.
Cats In Space, or Space Cats, or Cat Aliens, or Alien Cats have long been a popular sci-fi trope. For some reason we just sort of accept the idea of aliens that look and act like cats, apparently far more so than we do Space Dogs. On the surface this seems an odd notion, since we have gone much further towards turning dogs into the mutant critters we want them to be. You’d kinda think science fiction writers would be littering the spacelanes with Space Dogs, or even Space Monkeys… but, nope, it seems the Space Cats have conquered the universe.
Here’s an interesting set of articles about the nuking of Japan, seventy years ago…
Three articles… one from August 6, 1945 announcing the atom bombing of Hiroshima; one from August 9, describing the bombing of Nagasaki; and one from August 14, announcing that the Japanese had surrendered.
Years back I lived kinda near San Francisco. I didn’t visit the city too often, however. Sure, it was a beautiful place full of interesting stuff… but it was loaded to the gills with bums and scumbags and hippies and other associated ruiners-of-civilization. For example:
In short, dogs, drunks and bums whizzed on this pole often enough to have corroded the base so that it toppled over and whanged a car.
The Shuttle C program was fairly well advanced when it was cancelled; a full-scale mockup was built, indicating that detailed large format diagrams should have been created. Sadly… this is the best three-view I’ve seen of this concept.
You know your country is in trouble when your military can’t afford bullets.
