When I wrote recently about watching an Apollo moonshot from 7,000 feet over Cape Canaveral, dichroic spoke of her husband, an aspiring astronaut. I never had such lofty aspirations. I was too old, too fat, too unfit when the astronaut program began. And I was far from being a natural pilot.
It took me too long to solo, and years after that before I was ready to take my private pilot's examination, the rating that allows you to carry passengers.
I had done most of my practicing in my Stinson 108-2 Voyager, a rag-wing tail wheel plane about the size of Cesna 172. The key thing is, it was a tail-wheel airplane, which meant you landed with the tail rolling along the ground, the nose high in the air.
But I took my private pilot's exam in a Cessna 172, a standard tricycle landing gear in which the plane lands level.
When I had completed most of the exam, and came in for a landing, I automatically pulled the nose high in the air to land on the tail wheel. Since the Cessna didn't have one, there was a hell of a grinding sound as the tiedown post dragged down the runway, undoubtedly shooting sparks all the way.
The examiners cursed roundly, reminded me I wasn't in my tail-wheel Stinson, and had me try again.
We examined the tiedown post when we get out. It was bent.
He passed me anyhow but said as he signed my papers:
"Now go out and learn to fly."
When it comes to serving the emperor, the AP is endlessly creative.
Take the story about an AP-AOL poll in which people chose villains and heroes.
AP manfully reports in the fourth graf of the story that "Bush won the villain sweepstakes by a landslide, with one in four respondents putting him at the top of that bad-guy list. When people were asked to name the candidate for villain that first came to mind, Bush far outdistanced even Osama bin Laden, the terrorist leader in hiding; and former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein."
But how could they possibly spin that to make Bush look good?
How about beginning the story like this:
WASHINGTON (AP) – Bad guy of 2006: President Bush. Good guy of 2006: President Bush.
When people were asked in an AP-AOL News poll to name the villains and heroes of the year, Bush topped both lists, in a sign of these polarized times.
Unh, well yeah ... Except "The president was picked as hero of the year by a much smaller margin. In the poll, 13 percent named him as their favorite while 6 percent cited the troops in Iraq."
Twice as many picked him as a villain, but hey that's balanced by .... arrrgh!
The American media is nothing if not predictable. A president out of office for decades just died and the media treated it like the second coming.
Out of 50 newspapers I checked, 49 of them carried the story of Gerald Ford's death on page 1, most of them as the lead story.
And most of them treated him as a hero who is saved the nation from Nixon-induced chaos. In truth, Ford initiated a massive cover-up of Nixon's crimes by pardoning him as one of the first acts he did on becoming president. It was one of the things that cost him the next election.
A nice guy, perhaps, but neither a great man or a great and important president.
I used to have a lively email correspondence, sometimes dozens of messages a day from on-line friends. It was hard to keep up and get anything else done. I would be annoyed at the spam, five or six a day during the worse periods.
Over the years, emails from friends have dropped drastically. At first I was puzzled, but shrugged and decided that people had just gotten too busy with jobs and families. For awhile they may have been lured into an active correspondence by the ease of email, then as the novelty wore off, they slipped back into previous habits and patterns.
I no longer think that is the case.
This morning I received:
-1 email from a friend
-1 requested commercial email from a bookstore
-39 spams caught by my server's spam filter.
-4 spams that got through the server's spam filters and ended in my Junk box.
-1 spam that fooled both the server's spam filters and my own and ended in my In box.
-6 Returned Mail messages from mail sent out from a website I own that has been hijacked by a spammer.
That's 2 legitimate emails out of 52 messages.
No wonder so many people have given up.
Spam is well on the way to destroying the promise of email interaction.
This is the way that the world ends, not with a bang but a quiet drowning.
Rising seas, fueled by global warming, have for the first time washed an inhabited island off the face of the Earth, a UK newspaper reports.
The Independent says the loss of Lohachara Island, once home to 10,000 people, in the Bay of Bengal marks the moment when one of the most apocalyptic predictions of environmentalists and climate scientists has started coming true.
And as the seas rise, we continue to slaughter each other for the oil that is burning up the world.
Michael Gaddy has a most wondrous plan for winning the Iraq war: Deploy the Warmonger’s Brigade.
The first battalion would consist of "...the immediate families of everyone in the Bush administration... W’s daughters .... Dick Cheney’s daughter... the children of all cabinet members.....all eligible employees and family members of the CIA, NSA, DIA, and BATFE. ..."
"Second battalion would consist of all family members of those in Congress who have supported the war....
"Third battalion would consist of all male and female members of those at FOX, NBC, CBS, ABC, and the Weekly Standard... all relatives of Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, and William Kristol... the New York Times, War Street Journal, and the Washington Post..."
In addition, he suggests that anyone displaying 'support the troops' ribbons should be drafted into the combat support battalion.
A great plan.
Read the whole thing at"
http://www.lewrockwell.com/gaddy/gaddy31.html
The Charlotte Observer was where I got my first look at newsroom computers mumble years ago. The Miami News sent me there to learn about the new technology.
I was introduced to a desktop computer, which was just a mysterious black box to me. The screen was blank until a Charlotte Observer staffer punched one button and it sprang to life with a message directed at me!
I was as astounded as a caveman coming across a Ford.
When computers were introduced to the Miami news a few months later, the powers that be were wise enough to let the boxes just sit there until we gradually became used to them, occasionally poking at them discovering that they didn't blow up.
The first computer system at the Miami News was housed on another floor in a specially air-conditioned room. The system that fed 43 terminals in the newsroom was basically two large cabinets serviced by a team of technicians on constant call. It had an astounding amount of memory -- 10 megabytes.
No, not gigabytes, megabytes.
That to service all 43terminals and all the incoming wires , AP, UPI, New York Times, sports, business, etc. Every six or eight hours, the system would crash as it ran out of memory. From all over the newsroom, would come screams of agony from reporters who had lost three or four hours working on a story without saving it.
The good old days.
I recently sent a piece about 9/11 to a few friends. The story involved a former air traffic controller, Robin Hordon, who has gone public on his assertion that 9/11 was an inside job.
One friend, James Longo, replied: "I thought about forwarding this but then I couldn't think of anyone who wouldn't either agree totally, or claim I was a left wing conspiracy theorist."
I know what he means. I'm no longer writing for one online magazine, primarily because the editor was so uncomfortable when I wrote a piece pointing out that 9/11 was an inside job.
He grudingly ran it, but wrote an editor's reply to a letter in the following issue that said, in effect, that I was his resident nut about 9/11 and didn't know what I was talking about. Even good leftwingers are afraid to face the truth.
Last piece I wrote for him.
If you're interested in the controller story, you can find it at:
http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/december2006/141206trafficcontroller.htm
No, for once I'm not talking about the Bush administration.
I'm talking about a fitting book to follow the incomparable "How to Shit in the Woods" by Kathleen Meyer.
"Humanure Handbook: A Guide To Composting Human Manure" by Joseph Jenkins
A review in the magazine 'Earth First! Journal' calls it: "An eco-Luddite anarchist's potty training manual."
The publisher says the author "boldly steps where no author has gone before. The book will surprise you with its timely relevance, delight you with its humor, and impress you with its thorough research. Brilliantly simple, profoundly mundane, this is one book you will never forget. Full of "eye-candy" illustrations..."
A book I'll never forget, maybe, but I am a little wary of those "eye-candy illustrations."
You can get it at Powells.com
All governments do it, particularly the United States.
But most countries try to hide the odious practice. Few countries go around murdering people in the open as Israel does with its "targeted killings."
And now the Israeli Supreme Court has given its blessings to the practice.
I forget. Who are the terrorists?
Headline writing is an art. You have to tell a whole story in a few words, or at least catch the attention of the reader so that he will read the complete article.
One of the best examples of a good, no brilliant, headline came 30 years ago when the New York Daily News screamed in a page 1 banner head: 'FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD'
The headline caught the essence of the story in five words. At the height of a fiscal crisis, President Ford had declined to bail the city out. Those five words lost him New York State in his 1976 race against Jimmy Carter, and with it, the presidency.
After voters repudiated Bush's war in the last election, he has told the public; 'DROP DEAD'.
He's not going to change course. We can't change his mind, so we'll have to change presidents.
Impeach the bastard.
It took only 13 years for the United States to admit that Prohibition, the ban on alcohol, was an utter failure and end it.
35 years ago, Tricky Dick began the "War on Drugs" -- that is, drugs other than alcohol. It is even more of an utter failure, but we refuse to end it.
Dumb.
My beloved wife
A tin of peach-flavored "IMPEACHMINTS."
The tin of sweets features the slogan, "Worst President Ever," and comes from The Unemployed Philosophers Guild. (Naturally, they have a website.)
The tin was made in China -- fitting, because Bush has encouraged his corporate cronies to ship so many of our jobs there.
It might be better if the mints were lemon flavored.
At last, someone in Congress is talking about impeachment.
Unfortunately, it's someone on her way out, Cynthia McKinney, a representative from Georgia who lost her bid for reelection.
McKinney introduced a bill to impeach President Bush. The legislation has no chance of passing and serves as a symbolic parting shot not only at Bush but also at Democratic leaders who are running in terror from the idea of impeachment.
In the bill, she accused Bush of misleading Congress on the war in Iraq and violating privacy laws with his domestic spying program. Earlier, she accused Democratic leaders of kowtowing to Republicans on the war in Iraq and on military mistreatment of prisoners.
Duh.
After months of study, the Iraq Study Group came up with its Plan For Iraq -- Eternal War.
They admitted the whole thing was a disaster, but said that we should carry on pretty much the way we are now.
And so nothing will change unless the Democrats develop enough backbone to impeach the president.
And that will happen about the time that pigs learn to fly.
The Democrats refuse to consider impeachment of the ugliest mass murderer and shredder of the Constitution ever to sit in the White House,
and
they refuse to cut off funding for the outrageous war he lied us into.
We elected these clowns in the last election why?
Stephen Schlesinger used a wonderful word I haven't seen before, one that perfectly sums up the core of analysts, commentators, 'opinion makers,' columnists, 'experts,' and other blowhards in government and the media (to the tiny degree they are separate) -- commentariat.
Perfect.
Oh, perhaps not in a legal or medical sense. But in the way that we ordinarily use the term, he is whacko.
If any Democrats realize this, they don't have the guts to say so. But a few voices in the corporate media are, amazingly, beginning to notice the elephant in the living room.
Frank Rich of the New York Times, wants to know if Bush has started talking to the walls.
Joe Conason in SOLON raises questions about the madness of George.
Paul Craig Roberts says “the president of the United States is so deep into denial that he is no longer among the sane.”
And we had better do something about it. This man has his hands on the button that can destroy the world.
"... as I've often said, where's the joy in out-debating a Republican and how would I follow it up? Do I arm-wrestle an elderly person? Steal from a blind man's cup? Log into Instant Messenger as LittleBobbyHotPants and tease Republican Congressmen?
C'mon."
Bob Geiger quoted on The Smirking Chimp