Post-coital update.

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Please remember Gcotharn's mom in your prayers. Though I've never met Greg, he's been a great friend and supporter of this blog, and it's a sad thing that has happened in his family. I hope his mom will have a full recovery.

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Oh hey, today is Earth Day! I forgot all about it. Damn.

And I took an extra long, hot shower too. While running the dishwasher. With the heat-dry selected.

I'm going to go turn off some lights now. I wouldn't want to kill the Earth on Earth Day.

Update: I just found out about a thing us chicks can do to save the Earth that I will most definitely not be doing. No thank you. Sorry.

Hat tip to Feisty Republican Whore.

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Q: Who was on the cover of Time Magazine when I was born?

A: Lilly Tomlin.

Q: Who was on the cover of Rolling Stone?

A: Fleetwood Mac, with cover story by Cameron Crowe!

Q: Who was on the cover of Sports Illustrated?

A: Bump Wills?! Son of the great base stealer, Maury Wills.

Q: Esquire?

A: Chevy Chase and two skunks.

Q: High Times?

A: Carlos Castaneda, sort of.

Q: TV Guide?

A: Jack Klugman as Quincy, M.E.

Q: Tiger Beat?

A: The Bay City Rollers, and The Hardy Boys!!! Bitchen!

Q: Detective Comics?

A: Justice League vs. The Calculator?! I love the Calculator's quote: "Now I compute that you have less than a minute to live!" Pretty comical.

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1 Playboy Magazine? Hustler? You know, the stuff we all read...

Posted by: shelly at April 23, 2006 09:43 AM (BJYNn)

2 I've remedied that shelly

Posted by: Scof at April 23, 2006 03:17 PM (TwwKH)

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Yesterday we lost one of the great legends of aviation, and an American hero. Scott Crossfield was the first man to travel twice the speed of sound. He died when his single engine Cesna 210A crashed in Gordon County, Georgia.

On November 20, 1953, Scott Crossfield's Douglas D-558-II Skyrocket dropped from the belly of a B-29 and accelerated to 1,291 miles per hour at about 72,000 feet over California's Mojave desert. He had just lapped the sound barrier, twice.

If you would like to see actual footage of the Skyrocket launching from a B-29, go here.*

If aviation fanatacism were a religion, the entrance gallery of the Smithsonian's Air and Space Museum would be its Bethlehem, Jerusalem and Mecca all rolled into one. As any visitor to this temple knows, all you have to do is look up and you will see alongside the Wright Flyer** a constellation of the greatest planes in the history of the world. One of these planes is the North American X-15.

Scott Crossfield was the first man to pilot the X-15, in its dual rocket configuration, on June 8, 1959. He was one of 12 test pilots, a group which also included Neil Armstrong. The plane flew 199 times, launching from under the wing of a B-52. Thirteen of those flights exceeded 50 miles in altitude, bestowing the title of "astronaut" on the pilots. Two flights exceeded 65 miles.

One X-15 pilot, Michael Adams, was killed when the plane began to spin and hit 15 g's before it broke up over the desert.

Here's a picture after a hard landing with Scott Crossfield at the controls. This was the X-15's third flight, and one of the rocket engines had exploded after launch. Amazingly, Crossfield walked away from this landing unhurt. Stud.

Scott Crossfield survived 30 flights in the X-15, including another mid-flight engine explosion. His last flight was in 1960, and all of the speed and altitude records were set later, by other men. But it was Scott Crossfield who made the courageous first test flights of this amazing and historic aircraft.

The X-15 could go 4,520 mph, almost seven times the speed of sound. It set altitude records that were not broken by any plane except the Space Shuttle until the recent flight of SpaceShipOne. The fifth American to enter space did so in an X-15!

Its highest flight made it to over 67 miles (354,199 feet). The X-15's rate of climb was 60,000 feet per minute. Contrast that with the 767 I flew in recently, which gets to its cruising altitude of 35,000 feet at about 2,400 feet per minute.

But those are just numbers. Wanna see how bad-ass this thing was? And how insane pilots like Scott Crossfield were to fly them? Check out this unbelievable video from inside the X-15, looking backwards as it launches. I had to run it a few times, and each time I was moved to shout something like "holy shit..." in disbelief. Keep an eye on the upper left, and you can see the contrails of the B-52 launch plane disappear in about five seconds as the X-15 rockets into space.

Just amazing.

Albert Scott Crossfield: pilot, American hero; born October 2, 1921 in Berkeley California; slipped the surly bonds of earth April 19, 2006.
_______________

* By the way, the Dryden Test Center site is amazing. There's so much good stuff here. Check out this fly-over shot of my alltime favorite jet. It's absolutely awe-inspiring!

** Not a reproduction, mind you. I'm talking about the real actual very first airplane ever.

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For F-16 fans, a cool video of low level flying through the fjords of Norway. Takes a while to load.

Hat tip to Shelly.

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May 16th is the release date for Elemental: The Tsunami Relief Anthology: Stories of Science Fiction and Fantasy.

Elemental has an introduction by Arthur C.Clarke and more than twenty stories by Brian Aldiss, David Drake, Jacqueline Carey, Martha Wells, Larry Niven, Joe Haldeman, Eric Nylund, Sherrilyn Kenyon writing as Kinley MacGregor, and a Dune story by Brian Herbert & Kevin J. Anderson, and many others.

I love Sci-Fi anthologies. My favorite one so far has been Redshift. They're a great way to find out about new authors, and it seems that some writers are more willing to take risks in the short story format than in a novel.

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Is there any subject that can't be examined by a poet? Here we have biology, in a Shakespearian sonnet by English poet John Masefield (1878–1967):

What am I, Life?

What am I, Life? A thing of watery halt
Held in cohesion by unresting cells,
Which work they know not why, which never halt,
Myself unwitting where their Master dwells
I do not bid them, yet they toil, they spin
A world which uses me as I use them;
Nor do I know which end or which begin
Nor which to praise, which pamper, which condemn.
So, like a marvel in a marvel set,
I answer to the vast, as wave by wave
The sea of air goes over, dry or wet,
Or the full moon comes swimming from her cave,
Or the great sun comes forth: this myriad I
Tingles, not knowing how, yet wondering why.

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I just got a spam e-mail from Tom Vilsack, Democratic governor of Iowa, and I presume a future presidential candidate. Don't ask me how I got on his mailing list, I have no earthly idea.

But apparently his PAC has been running a contest for the best ten word slogan to represent the Democratic Party. The contest is now down to the final ten slogans submitted by ten "activists."*

Funny thing about the finalists. Four of them aren't even ten words long. Typical Democrats. Always thinking the rules don't apply to them.

Anyways, I think it's unfair that we conservatives weren't allowed to get in on this contest. Do you all have any ideas for ten word slogans that encapsulize the Democratic Party?

I'll start it off:

"Democrats - because national security makes my head hurt too much."
_______________

* I love that word. To me it's a euphemism for jobless looney.

[cross-posted at The Cotillion]

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I must confess that I've never heard of Bavarian Dingle Loaf. But apparently it's like catnip to a kitten. Or a sex-kitten. The Weekly World News confirms this fact:

HEY, GUYS! You can bed more babes than you can shake a stick at by feeding them a medley of three "sex foods" that drive women wild with desire: Raw oysters, foot-long weenies, and the Old World favorite, "Bavarian dingle loaf!"

"Nothing is 100 percent, of course. But in nine cases out of 10, women who eat these foods are going to come on strong. And they aren't going to care what you look like or how much money you have.

"Bavarian dingle loaf is the icing on your cake. You can buy all the ingredients to make it from scratch. Or you can just do what I do: Buy a can of biscuit dough and knead it all together into a big ball.

"Then roll it out by hand into the shape of manly privates. You can even throw in family jewels on one end if you like."

Bill K., of Franklin, Tenn., says he tried the wonder foods on his female supervisor at work, "a real witch who hated my guts."

"I took oysters and the dingle bread to work, and gave them to her for lunch," he recalls. "The next thing you know we're in the stockroom doing it like Chihuahuas in heat.

"I even got a raise out of it!"

Seriously though. I don't know how scientific this research is. But I'd be willing to bet if you showed up at work with a penis shaped pastry for your female boss, you'd probably be cleaning out your desk before lunch.

Update: In case your interested: Penis shaped cake pans. Or if you really curious, and you're not at work, here are examples of some finished products within that genre.

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Mark Steyn's City Magazine essay [via Hugh Hewitt] is my second must read recommendation for today.

Find it here and read the whole dang thing.

Key passages [all emphases mine]:

If Belgium becomes a nuclear power, the Dutch have no reason to believe it would be a factor in, say, negotiations over a joint highway project. But IranÂ’s nukes will be a factor in everything. If you think, for example, the European Union and others have been fairly craven over those Danish cartoons, imagine what theyÂ’d be like if a nuclear Tehran had demanded a formal apology, a suitable punishment for the newspaper, and blasphemy laws specifically outlawing representations of the Prophet. Iran with nukes will be a suicide bomber with a radioactive waist.

. . .

In 1989, with the Warsaw Pact disintegrating before his eyes, poor beleaguered Mikhail Gorbachev received a helpful bit of advice from the cocky young upstart on the block: “I strongly urge that in breaking down the walls of Marxist fantasies you do not fall into the prison of the West and the Great Satan,” Ayatollah Khomeini wrote to Moscow. “I openly announce that the Islamic Republic of Iran, as the greatest and most powerful base of the Islamic world, can easily help fill up the ideological vacuum of your system.”

Today many people in the West don’t take that any more seriously than Gorbachev did. But it’s pretty much come to pass. As Communism retreated, radical Islam seeped into Africa and south Asia and the Balkans. Crazy guys holed up in Philippine jungles and the tri-border region of Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay who’d have been “Marxist fantasists” a generation or two back are now Islamists: it’s the ideology du jour.

. . .

With the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, a British subject, Tehran extended its contempt for sovereignty to claiming jurisdiction over the nationals of foreign states, passing sentence on them, and conscripting citizens of other countries to carry it out. Iran’s supreme leader instructed Muslims around the world to serve as executioners of the Islamic Republic—and they did, killing not Rushdie himself but his Japanese translator, and stabbing the Italian translator, and shooting the Italian publisher, and killing three dozen persons with no connection to the book when a mob burned down a hotel because of the presence of the novelist’s Turkish translator.

IranÂ’s de facto head of state offered a multimillion-dollar bounty for a whack job on an obscure English novelist. And, as with the embassy siege, he got away with it.

. . .

[I]n the 17 years between the Rushdie fatwa and the cartoon jihad, what was supposedly a freakish one-off collision between Islam and the modern world has become routine. We now think it perfectly normal for Muslims to demand the tenets of their religion be applied to society at large: the government of Sweden, for example, has been zealously closing down websites that republish those Danish cartoons. As Khomeini’s successor, Ayatollah Khamenei, has said, “It is in our revolution’s interest, and an essential principle, that when we speak of Islamic objectives, we address all the Muslims of the world.” Or as a female Muslim demonstrator in Toronto put it: “We won’t stop the protests until the world obeys Islamic law.”

Back when nuclear weapons were an elite club of five relatively sane world powers, your average Western progressive was convinced the planet was about to go ka-boom any minute. The mushroom cloud was one of the most familiar images in the culture, a recurring feature of novels and album covers and movie posters. There were bestselling dystopian picture books for children, in which the handful of survivors spent their last days walking in a nuclear winter wonderland. Now a state openly committed to the annihilation of a neighboring nation has nukes, and we shrug: CanÂ’t be helped. Just the way things are. One hears sophisticated arguments that perhaps the best thing is to let everyone get Â’em, and then no one will use them. And if IranÂ’s head of state happens to threaten to wipe Israel off the map, we should understand that this is a rhetorical stylistic device thatÂ’s part of the Persian oral narrative tradition, and it would be a grossly Eurocentric misinterpretation to take it literally.

[W]e face a choice between bad and worse options. There can be no “surgical” strike in any meaningful sense: Iran’s clients on the ground will retaliate in Iraq, Lebanon, Israel, and Europe. Nor should we put much stock in the country’s allegedly “pro-American” youth. This shouldn’t be a touchy-feely nation-building exercise: rehabilitation may be a bonus, but the primary objective should be punishment—and incarceration. It’s up to the Iranian people how nutty a government they want to live with, but extraterritorial nuttiness has to be shown not to pay. That means swift, massive, devastating force that decapitates the regime—but no occupation.

I think our main focus (while we still have the luxury of time) should be on fomenting internal opposition to the regime -- even what you might call internal strife. Take the mullahs minds off the outside world. Make them fear for their own survival. Promote a viable alternative to religious fascism, then give the people of Iran a gentle shove in that direction.

Sure, the days are gone when a Kermit Roosevelt could overthrow Mossadegh with about five guys, a pickup truck and 100 grand in "walking around money." But we can do it, with a little more of the same applied skullduggery, 21st Century style. The New York Times would have to be kept out of the loop, and I'm not sure that's possible when there's a whistleblower around every pentagon corner who thinks he's a hero with a book deal on the way.

Really though, as Steyn's article makes clear, there shouldn't be any debate about the stakes in this newest incarnation of the Great Game. And somebody needs to get on it.

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I just got a spam e-mail with a new twist. I'm sure you have all gotten those poorly written e-mails from Ojibwe Mumbojibwe of Nigeria, asking for your assistance in an "urgent matter." Well now they've gotten wiser. Here's the twist:

Good day,

My name is Sgt. John Crews Loius, I am an American soldier, I serve in the Military of the 1st Armored Division in Iraq, as you know we have being attacked by insurgents everyday and car bombs. We where lucky to move funds belonging to Saddam Hussein?s family hopping it was a bomb in the box, later we find out it was a fiscal cash .

The total amount is US$25,000,000 Twenty Five Million United State dollars in cash, mostly 100 dollar bills which is still in our co sturdy at the military base camp, now we find it as a Big Risk on us if our commandant nor the Iraqis People get to find out about this box of money because we are not allowed to have any money in our position for that We are seeking for a trustworthy foreign business partner who can help us in receiving this box of money

so that He/She may invest it for us and keep our share for banking. This is our plan of sharing my partner and I will take 55%, you take the other 45%.

No stress attached, for we have made all necessary arrangement for shipping it out of Iraq, Iraq is a war zone. We planed on using diplomatic courier service for shipping the money out in one large silver box declaring it as family valuables using diplomatic immunity.

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Wretchard posted a story [from I do not know where], which is simply horrifying.

During the Iran-Iraq War, the Ayatollah Khomeini imported 500,000 small plastic keys from Taiwan. ... After Iraq invaded in September 1980, it had quickly become clear that Iran's forces were no match for Saddam Hussein's professional, well-armed military. To compensate ... Khomeini sent Iranian children ... to the front lines. There, they marched in formation across minefields toward the enemy, clearing a path with their bodies. Before every mission, one of the Taiwanese keys would be hung around each child's neck. It was supposed to open the gates to paradise for them.

At one point, however, the earthly gore became a matter of concern. ... Such scenes would henceforth be avoided ... Before entering the minefields, the children [now] wrap themselves in blankets and they roll on the ground, so that their body parts stay together after the explosion of the mines and one can carry them to the graves."

These children who rolled to their deaths were part of the Basiji, a mass movement created by Khomeini in 1979 ... And yet, today, it is a source not of national shame, but of growing pride. Since the end of hostilities against Iraq in 1988, the Basiji have grown both in numbers and influence. They have been deployed, above all, as a vice squad to enforce religious law in Iran, and their elite "special units" have been used as shock troops against anti-government forces. In both 1999 and 2003, for instance, the Basiji were used to suppress student unrest. And, last year, they formed the potent core of the political base that propelled Mahmoud Ahmadinejad-- a man who reportedly served as a Basij instructor during the Iran-Iraq War--to the presidency. ... He regularly appears in public wearing a black-and-white Basij scarf, and, in his speeches, he routinely praises "Basij culture" and "Basij power" ... A younger generation of Iranians, whose worldviews were forged in the atrocities of the Iran-Iraq War, have come to power, wielding a more fervently ideological approach to politics than their predecessors. The children of the Revolution are now its leaders.

Clash of civilizations my eye. If that actually happened, those are the acts of barbarians -- worse than barbarians -- and not anything near civilized men.

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E.M. proves again why she is a daily must read.

Daily, mind you.

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