The A-10 is a hell of a plane. There will be no more of them, and no more like them. And that’s a shame ona certain level; a plane that can bring a pilot home after taking a Mighty Blow from the enemy is of course a wonderful thing. But the role of the A-10 is being taken by the likes of the F-35 and drones; the F-35 *should* be survivable by dint of its stealthiness and high altitude; the drones will be survivable because, well, there’s nobody to kill. A drone might have the ruggedness of a Faberge egg, but if one gets blown to bits…meh. Only money.
On the other hand, no drone pilot will ever have a story like this guys:
Photos from a week or so ago. It has not meaningfully rained in months; the consequence is lots of dust and smoke in the air. On most levels that… well, it sucks. But within a certain subset of photography, it can result in some interesting shots.
My sister had to write a paper about a question that affects the world. I said her topic should be, “Does Toto really bless the rains down in Africa?” She gave me a cold stare and asked what I was talking about. It was at that moment I realized that we weren’t related.
a transgender inmate, charged with raping a woman, sexually assaulted four fellow inmates just days after being remanded into an all female jail.
The solution to this problem seems to me to be obvious: unisex prisons for those convicted of violent crimes. Not prisons where male and female and “other” prisoners can mix freely, but prisons where the prisoners stay in their individual cells unless specifically released for some officially sanctioned purpose. This would eliminate the entire problem of violence in prisons, as well as drug use and learning new anti-social skills from each other.
Though I bet it gave the stenographer instant carpal tunnel…
Now that the Democrats have convincingly demonstrated that we are now well past the days when the Senate understood the concept of “advise and consent,” when they would vote for the Presidents Supreme court picks even if they disagreed with the picks ideology because picking the USSC was the Presidents job, at least we can look forward to occasionally interesting and entertaining ways to drown out the loons who think that their voice needs to be raised at all times. It will be a fun slide into the destruction of the Republic.
The facts: a track of 2.5 meter long prints of some kind were spotted via sonar on the floor of the Pacific. That is of course interesting:
The article starts off yammering about UFOs and that sort of rubbish, but does eventually get around to mentioning that sperm whales have been known to snuffle along the ocean floor for purposes of their own.
The article fails to mention the true source of these footprints: a sleepwalker from R’lyeh.
A 1969 Bell Helicopter design for a high speed stowed-rotor tiltrotor. This was meant for USAF search and rescue and featured gun turrets fore and aft (each with a Minigun) and four turboshaft engines under the wings. Doubtless the gearing from the engines up through the pylons and along the wings to the nacelles would have been an engineering nightmare. But if it worked, it would have resulted in a tiltrotor with the hover performance of the V-22 and a cruise speed of 400 knots.
An article on the similar D270-900-112 (the main visual difference being that the engines were separately podded) was included in US VTOL Projects #1.
I have made the much-larger full-rez scan of the cutaway available to $10+ APR Patreon patrons. If this sort of thing is of interest, please consider signing up for the APR Patreon.
OK, you durn younguns too young to have seen Ralph Bakshi’s 1977 animated film “Wizards,” here’s a good and distinctly NSFW rundown:
“Wizards” was incredibly odd even then, and as the presenter here notes, this movie filled with sex and drugs and Nazis and violence and blood and gore had the same rating as “Frozen.” As he also notes, the anatomically correct and terribly non-Disneyesque elf princess Elinore is now arguably a Disney Princess.
As just plain bizarre as this movie was, filled with plot holes and budget limitations and acid flashback animation, the way in which the Good Wizard ultimately defeats the Evil Wizard always – since I first saw this on HBO circa 1978 or so – struck me as just simply spectacular and was something I’ve long wanted to pilfer. For example: in my own unwritten Harry Potter fanfiction from before “The Deathly Hallows” came out, I wanted to end the thing with a massive battle between the Good Wizards and Voldemorts forces, with Voldemort gaining the upper hand. And just before he strikes Harry down, James Bond (Daniel Craig version) steps out of the shadows and caps Voldemort in the noggin (and, yes, I had it all worked out how that could have been done. Gah.). *THAT* would have been an ending worth watching.
The plane had stopped at Mecca, which is currently undergoing a flu outbreak. The possibility of a pandemic originating in Mecca, where *millions* of people from around the world – including a large percentage of people from the third world, where diseases are common and healthcare is minimal and backwards – has been raised before. If planes coming from Mecca are arriving filled with people carrying a dangerous infectious disease, considerations should be given to quarantining the city itself for a few months until the disease runs its course and burns out.
Photo unrelated. Or is it?
Of course, it’s also always possible that the sick passengers simply had the fish.
