The forthcoming Tom Cruise movie “The Mummy” features a scene where a C-130 flies into a flock of brdis and plummets from the sky. The characters sitting in the cargo hold are then tossed hither and yon. Normally in a big budget flick this would probably be done with CGI. Maybe some wire work. But this time they went the “Apollo 13” route and actually built a set inside a modified jetliner, and shot scenes while the jetliner performed parabolic “zero g” maneuvers.
How hard is it to make bread? Well… if you have adopted socialist policies, I guess it can be real hard.
Due to the sort of brilliant economics we could expect from a President Sanders or Warren, Venezuela doesn’t have enough wheat to make the flour needed for a sufficient supply of bread. Consequently, bakeries that are selling their very limited supply of product at elevated prices – you know, basic supply and demand – are getting into legal trouble with what passes for the government.
This is part of why it takes so long to get anything done around here…
There’s a keyboard in there somewhere.
Here’s a PR film from the US Navy, circa late 1960’s, extolling the virtues of their hydrofoil vessels. Hydrofoils, like jetpacks and flying cars, are old technologies that always seem to scream “future;” but unlike jetpacks an flying cars, hydrofoils have actually entered service. Just never with the US military, with the exception of a handful of the Pegasus class patrol bats (in service from ’77 to ’93). Cool as they were, they just never seemed to quite catch on… they made for some very fast ships, but at considerable expense, and a whole lot of maintenance. And I suspect there was always some paranoia about just what would happen if a hydrofoil ran into a log or a boat or a whale while at top speed.
The film includes some spectacular footage, and some just awful background music.
While hydrofoils had their day fifty years ago, the somewhat similar SWATH (small waterplane-area twin-hull ) concept has popped up much more recently. Witness the “Ghost” from 2014:
Recently sold on eBay (for $500) was a display model of the Boeing proposal for the C-5 program, which of course lost out to Lockheed. The Boeing design (circa 1965) was vaguely like a Lockheed C-5 merged with a Boeing 747… roughly the configuration and fuselage size of the C-5, but with the raised upper deck and the standard “jetliner” lower tail surface of the 747. I have surprisingly little on the Boeing C-5, but I do have some fairly detailed diagrams of a civilian passenger version, and a few derivatives. Interestingly, while this was clearly part of the genesis of the 747 – which by every metric was a far greater success for Boeing than the C-5 was for Lockheed – it was actually a model 757. As the design effort continued the 747 designation would become the jumbo jet, while the 757 designation would be applied to a much smaller jet.
This one is a tad odder than the reappearing star. At one AM on March 1st (I can narrow this one down because I sent a text to a friend) a series of nuisances reached a pinnacle.
Throughout the night there had been a number of odd noises, like *things* bumping up against the side of the house. Some years ago a horse wandered into the corner of the house; this sounded like a smaller version of that, so I assumed that it was something like a deer. In addition to the *thumps* there was some “clacking” sounds associated with the bumps, so I assumed that it was deer antlers bonking against the side of the house.
This occurred several times over a span of three or four hours. Several times I looked outside, but didn’t spot any deer. Shrug.
Then at about 1 AM anomalous noises moved from the side of the house. I’m sitting there doing some CAD drafting, the TV on making some background noise. Even the cats were bored out of their minds; the joy of running around like idjits had burned itself out and they were reduced to a vegetative state. So I hear this noise overhead. I was unsure if it was a noise out in the world or it it was on the TV, so I put it on mute, and the noise occurred again.
What it sounded like was a smallish hoofed animal stomping around on my roof. My house does not have an attic, so sounds on the roof come through pretty clearly. But a roof is not a naturally tenable place for a hoofed animal to get to in the first place, so my first thought was that I was just hearing things. But then I noticed that both Raedthinn and Buttons were staring intently at the same spot in the ceiling. Whatever I heard, the cats heard too. Then it stomped around a bit more.
Curiosity won out over inertia, but caution was also called for. Coyotes and semi-wild dogs are reasonably common out here; armies of raccoons are not unknown, and there have been reports of mountain lions and even *humans,* if you can believe it. So, I grabbed a coat, shoes, 2,000 lumen flashlight and a 12 gauge and stepped out to see what was on my roof.
Turns out… nothing. Not a damn thing. Except for a light coast of snow, maybe a quarter inch deep, sufficient to show footprints, of which there were none. None on the roof, none around the house. I walked all the way around the house and checked out the whole roof; nothing disturbed the snow except my own footprints. The snow was there from earlier in the day, so any deer bumping into the house should have left tracks.
Since there were other witnesses in the form of at least two cats, I know that the sounds were real. Under other circumstances I’d suggest that the sounds were the result of the house settling or otherwise flexing due to temperature or even geological effects (we get the occasionally just-barely-detectable earthquake). But I’ve lived here since 2004, and while I’ve heard this house make a bunch of noises, I’ve never heard anything resembling “hooves on the roof.”
Speculating further from “settling,” the only thing that kinda seems halfway practical is that a very large raptor or eagle landed on the roof, just on the tips of it’s claws. I suppose if that were to happen, it might not leave visible marks in shallow snow. But a tiptoeing, stomping giant bird of prey doesn’t seem entirely likely either.
So this one falls into not only the “that’s odd” category but also the “the universe is screwing with me” category.
The next best thing to video of new atmospheric nuclear tests is previously unseen film of old nuclear tests. Sure, it’s not even close… it’s patently obvious that new atmospheric nuclear tests is something the United States needs to do, but I guess we’ll just have to take what we can get.
Lawrence Livermore National Labs has embarked on a project of finding and scanning and digitally restoring up to ten thousand films of above-ground nuclear tests. This is being done partially for the historic aspect, but mostly because nuclear weapons designers today have nothing to go on *but* old data, so, the more data they have, the better.
LLNL has set up a YouTube playlist of some of these.
And this one. HOLY CARP, this one.
And now there are two B-29s in the air. The story of “Doc:”
I’ll never see it, but I’d pay real money to see a restored B-36 claw its way back up to the clouds. And to provide a flashback on that – on several levels – here’s the old “Great Planes” documentary on the B-36:
Sometimes the news media gives the spotlight over to someone who really doesn’t seem to deserve it. Monday, that someone was one “Jason Pollock,” a supposed “documentarian” whose claim to fame was the release of a “documentary” about Gentle Giant Mike Brown, the guy from Ferguson, MO, who got shot when he tried to take a gun from a cop. Pollock has unveiled “new evidence” in the form of previously unaired security camera footage from the small store that Brown robbed moments before he got shot. This footage was actually shot half a day earlier and appears to show a much more sedate transaction. The problem, though… what the hell does a video from *hours* earlier have to do with the events later in the day?
Pollock made the rounds on the news channels Monday. I first noticed this overactor when I turned on CNN early in the day and caught him on Brook Baldwins’ show, where he was going absolutely bugnuts. Sadly I can’t find a complete copy of the interview on YouTube; this one starts several minutes in, after Pollock performed some his more energetic theatrics:
He appeared elsewhere on CNN:
And Fox News:
So we’ve got a guy wh either has no self control, or is a very bad actor (or both) given lots of free publicity for his propaganda. From his pint of view, it’s a win… hell, he’s even getting free press *here.* But that aside, there are two takeways that occur to me:
1: If the news media wants to avid the “fake news” label…maybe they should avoid bringing on guys like this.
2: The sort of unhinged derangement on display here seems to be greatly on the rise since the election of Trump. We can look forward to a whole lot more of this. And what’s more, it’ll not be restricted to just lunatics going buggo during interviews; expect violence. Well, expect more violence.
As is undoubtedly the case with most people, I’ve seen lots of strange stuff. Attack hippies on fire off the shoulder of Pearl Street, for instance. But as with most strange stuff, the bulk of such things are readily explained, and are honestly pretty mundane.
From time to time, though, I’ve seen stuff that’s harder to explain. Stuff that other people might ascribe supernatural explanations to. In most of these cases, I assume one of two things:
1: My eyes were just a little “funny.” Not having perfect vision, for instance. And lots of the happen at night, when things are hard to make out anyway.
2: Psychological aberrations. I don’t do mind altering drugs of any sort, don’t drink or asphyxiate myself for kicks, nor do I have psychoses or schizophrenia, but that doesn’t mean I don’t get tired, or that my blood sugar never goes goofy, or that … who knows. Any advanced computational system can get glitchy from time to time.
Still, there are sometimes things that happen that are a bit of a puzzlement. Long ago, well before I started pilot training in my college days, I learned that if you wanted to keep a career as a pilot you didn’t report UFOs. And something I’ve noticed many, many times is that a whole lot of people who report weird stuff promptly expand on the observation into unwarranted speculation. See a UFO? Fine. Assume that its an invasion from Zeta Reticuli? Ahhh, no. Hear a bump in the night? Fine. Declare that your house is haunted? Dude, no.
I live out in the sticks. This has afforded many opportunities to experience some damned strange stuff. Urban areas are swamped with the lights and sounds of people and machines, but out here there’s a level of quiet that you come to expect and anomalies are more readily detected. And so… I’ve detected a lot of anomalies. And… what the hell. I’m getting old, I have no chance of becoming an airline or military pilot, I’ll never be an astronaut. I figure I might as well recount some of these, they may provide some momentary amusement. Most can likely be shrugged off, but in the moment they often make my hair stand on end. I remain a skeptic and a materialist, but that doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate a good moment of weird. These will be non fiction, recounted as accurately as I can. Some stranger than others. Some might make for useful or interesting plot points in stories if someone wants to use them. If so, let me know.
Ok, the first one to report was Sunday night. Well after sundown I went outside to look at the night sky; it was nearly cloudless, which was great, but there was a full moon that kinda blotted out a lot of the stars. Off to the west are hills often seen in my photos, and they were pretty well lit by moonlight. With snow on them, they showed up pretty well. There was one bright star getting close to setting behind the hills, a minor sight I like to watch. And over the span of two or three seconds, the star faded as it went behind the hill.
Perfectly normal and mundane. Nothing odd about it, just s nice sight.
Then the star came back.
A couple seconds after it disappeared behind the hill, it popped back up. Then, a few seconds later, it disappeared behind the hill again. This all occurred while I was standing still. There are no trees or structures on the hilltop that the star could have been momentarily obscured behind then emerged from, just flat rock. Since the hilltops are several degrees above the horizon, there shouldn’t be issues with the sort of atmospheric effects that can make, say, the sun setting over the ocean eventful
Hmmm.
Now, one possibility is… a cow. Or a deer, perhaps, standing on the hilltop. The star went down behind the deer, disappearing from my sight… then the deer walked away, revealing the star again. And then the star finally set behind the hill proper. This could certainly explain it in a perfectly rational, natural way. But in the moment it was really rather startling to see. Once a star sets, it’s supposed to stay the hell down.
Next time: your narrator breaks out the boomstick.