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(Bonneville Salt Flats, captured last Sunday via the 'Cellcam' while driving "blue betty".)

After one very long week in a building buried deep in the 'salt flats' just outside of Salt Lake City, I'm now back at my desk in suburban California. I can't tell you what it was I was doing there, but I can tell you I was in Salt Lake long enough to eat at the Red Iguana, Rodizio Grill and at Cuchina Toscana.

All three were excellent, and the 'after hours' activities almost made up for the butt-numbing god awfulness of 'system testing', which went perfectly, which is to say nothing went wrong, which as I said, is "face-implanted-on-the-desk-thats-covered-with-your-own-drool inducingly-dull.

Nice town Salt Lake, but it's good to be home.

Posted @ September 29, 2007 08:30 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (3)

Top 10 worst public speaking ideas for infamous personalities

Somewhere on this list belongs the literally insane idea of a genocidal antisemitic hellhound coming to of all places, New York City and somwhere just before that is the idea that a genocidal antisemitic hellhound should receive an invitation to speak at an institution like Columbia University.

Here goes:

10. John Wayne Gacy visits 'boys town'.

9. Jeffery Dalhmer giving a speech at the Culinary Institute of America.

8. Ted Bundy appearing at a fund raiser for WEAVE.

7. Dan Rather signing books at an 'Accuracy In Media' event.

6. David Duke being extended and accepting a professorship at Tuskeegee.

5. Noam Chomsky as Guest Celebrity Conductor at the Annual Boston Pops July 4th "John Phillip Souza-pallooza" weekend.

4. Paris Hilton and Laura Schlessinger on a "reality show road trip" to - Salt Lake City by way of Las Vegas.

3. O.J Simpson doing a commercial for Marriage Encounter Weekends.

2. Larry Flynt at Disneyland, waiting in line at "its a small world" directly in line behind Andrea Dworkin.

1. J.Z. Knight at a CSICOP conference

If the man who shall not be named wants to come to the US, have him to come to Los Angeles. I can find more than a few of his former countrymen who live there today, in peace and freedom. Those who have escaped his nightmare of Islamic Revolution who would be more than happy to give him a reception he would not soon forget.

One also wonders why he isnt going to visit The Carter Center in Georgia. It would seem to me that the former President and the man who now leads the movement that held Americans as hostages against all standards of international law and decorum would have a great deal to talk about together.

Posted @ September 21, 2007 03:52 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (3)

warning: I aim to misbehave

Fair warning is given, I'm about to offend and irritate a fair number of you. I gotta powerful rant going and its about to flow out all over the keyboard.

Think of it like a Gallagher concert, don't worry about it, just get your plastic sheeting out, dont wear white, and enjoy the show. Try to remember that no matter how uncomfortable you may be that you are not the watermelon.

Here's a hint to the subject. It seems that someone from 'out of town' wants to come to New York, and somehow I'm all for it...

Posted @ September 20, 2007 02:23 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

Reno Air Races - 2007

I'm back, T-shirts in hand. I got interviewed for local Reno TV. In addition to the races that I went to see, I also saw Steve Hinton, Glacier Girl and the guys from "Moto Art".

I Had a great time. No, wait, I had a FANTASTIC time...

UPDATE: Slide Show Complete. Click here for a slide show of photos and comments.

Posted @ September 15, 2007 05:39 PM | Aviation | Comments (2)

Fossett lost and Ogle is still lost

The fascinating tale of the discovery of a wreck that might be a man lost since 1964, turns out to be incorrect.

Posted @ September 13, 2007 11:35 PM | Aviation | Comments (0)

frustrating blogger nightmare

Sometimes you can't think of a thing to blog about, and sometimes you spend days thinking about a single idea that you want to blog about and you get nowhere with it and you decide not to post anything on it and then theres when you finally have a big, "hallelluha" epiphany moment where you finally figure out a big,big thing that you have been puzzled by for 6 years...

...and you are so swamped with "revenue producing work" you cant sit down and get it into the blog.

but here it is: The Petreus hearings the week and bad Robin Williams movie I caught in passing this week, helped me crack the code of the "Bush Derangement Syndrome" virus. I now know exactly what it is that drives the left so insane.

It's not what you think. It's also why the left hated Rumsfeld. It's also why so many of us on the conservative side of the argument remain somewhat immune to the worst of the side effects from the disease.

and i-cant-get-4-hours-free-to-type-it-up-and-get-it-posted...

aaarrrgghhh!

The weekend is coming. But so are the reno air races. DAMN YOU FRANKLIN COVEY AND YOUR EVIL DAY PLANNERS!

Posted @ September 13, 2007 01:26 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

if it quacks like a duck

The Japanese Government says that this is a Destroyer. the 13,500-ton JSDF(Japanese Self Defense Force) Hyuga appears to my eyes to be the first version of something that could appear to be a Japanese Aircraft Carrier to take to the seas since 1945.

Which would normally be somewhat trivial, but since the Japanese consider "Aircraft Carriers" to be offensive weapons instead of self defense weapons, that would be a problem, because that would be against their Constitution,and thats why it can't possibly be an "Aircraft Carrier".

When you see this sort of doubletalk going on (because its clearly not a Destroyer) You get the feeling that the Minister of Defense got one look at this ship and said "We bought WHAT? How am I going to explain that to the Prime Minister!"

It's also interesting that it may be a Naval issue that brought Prime Minister Abe to resign. Apparently the Japanese government is ok supporting the Afghan mission, but not the effort in Iraq.

More details here.

(Note: She's a sharp looking ship, and if it gives pause to the Chinese and the North Koreans, then keep making them. And yes, I'm sure my long dead grandfather is looking down saying "mmmmm, japanese carrier" and wringing his hands in glee...)

Posted @ September 12, 2007 05:47 PM | Aviation | Comments (0)

by jiminy...

2 engines to 4 engines? sweet llama of bahama, what's Burt thinking that these folks are taking with them into orbit?

Im tellin ya, they are really missing the boat by not exploiting the downrange for suborbital hops across the globe. Take off in Mojave, land in Tokyo, have dinner and then go back in the same day. Now that would be cool...

Posted @ September 12, 2007 05:32 PM | Aviation | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

Fossett lost, but Ogle found

A fascinating tale from the SF Chronicle.

Those of you who are not from the area who are wondering how anyone in the modern world could get lost with all the electronic aids available and the preponderance of telephones, radios, and a McDonalds every 10 miles, you should be aware that this is some of the most remote, most difficult terrain in the lower 48 states. You have a better chance of being found on the backside of Mars than you do if you crash in this part of the world.

When I was a kid living in Northern Nevada, a private plane that departed from Stead AFB went missing one day. It took 10 years to finally locate the missing aircraft and it was only 15 miles from the end of the runway.

It was found by accident at the bottom of a ravine. I suspect that this too will be the fate of Steve Fossett, to be found by a hiker 30 or 40 years from now.

Posted @ September 10, 2007 08:06 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (4)

The Day Before

I don’t remember much about September 10th, 2001. I’m sure I had a list of things to do the next day, I’m sure I had an agenda to follow and things to do, but I can’t remember a single one of them.

I went to bed in one world on Monday, and I woke up in another one on Tuesday.

It all seems like another world; the things that we worried about on Monday, September the 10th. They were all torn away like thin tissue paper on the following day. I had a different life when I went to bed on the 10th from the one I woke up with on the 11th and the one I lead today from the one I lead then.

On Monday September 10th, I was working on a new team at work, concerned with converting Solaris to Linux, from Sparc to x86, worried if the next round of layoffs that was going through the entire industry would reach me and my little team of technical staff. Were we about to be “outsourced” like so many others in our business had been, or just “whacked” from the corporate roles altogether?

I could have said that about any day in September 2001, not just the 10th. I have no specific memory of that specific day, and yet it was a day that would mark the end of a way of life, you would think some memory of that day would remain with me. Nothing would be the same the next day, and yet, there was no sign that a major change was coming, no strange light on the horizon marking the coming fire.

I think it’s a sign of just how traumatic the day to come would be. If you get into a serious car accident, the fact that you forgot to mow the lawn the day before, which was right up to the moment of the accident the most important thing on your mind, right up to the moment your car went crunching along into the telephone pole, turns to vapor with only the slightest scent of sigificance left hanging on your mind after the accident.

Lawn? Mow? Laundry? Grocery store? Bagels? Pound patrami? Sauerkraut? What?

Big trauma is the kind of thing that wrecks your soul like a 5 year old wrecks a chessboard when he realizes he’s about to lose. He laughs at you and the flips the board into the air and all the pieces and the board fly about, while you just sit there at the table with a dumb look on your face. As you try to pick things up, you can’t really remember where you were in the game when it ended.

I lived most of my life in the shadow of the Berlin Wall. I didn’t live in Germany, but in Western world, the non-communist world, we knew that as long the wall was standing, there were sure to be men with guns, tanks, aircraft and missiles willing to make sure it stood there doing its evil business. There would be other men on this side, ready to stop them. No matter where we stood in the political spectrum, the shadow of that thing and all it represented, hung over all of our lives.

No matter what people think today, people should know that the Cold War went on for the better part of 40 years and people died fighting it every single day for that entire time. It wasn’t bloodless. It was bloody and right up till the very end, it could have gone either way. Men died and people were killed every day for 40 years. The fact that it didn’t become a nuclear exchange shouldn’t be used as evidence that there was no fighting and that it was peaceful. There was fighting and dying all through the Cold War.

It was not peace; it was living daily with the shadow of big horror that might be, lit up by the occasional flare of the “brush wars”. It was war fought on a more strategic level with more people wary of the consequences, but it was war all the same.

Once the wall came down, it took awhile for me to let go of it and all it represented. The war was over, but it seemed very unreal; it was the most unlikely of results. It was the last thing I expected to happen. I had expected the war to begin right at the very place that had seem people with champagne in one hand, using sledgehammers in the other to knock down the cement creature that had snaked through all of our lives.

The big war I had expected to come for all of my lifetime, never came, and for awhile I was actually certain that it was “just a trick”. It seems so silly now, but for the first couple of years, I kept looking for some sign that it was just fakery by the other side, meant to put us off our guard.

It never came of course, and eventually I had to let it go. I began to enjoy a world I could never image as a child. A world without Strategic Air Command and its unspoken Soviet equivalent making slow ovals in the sky, making their contrails silently with their deadly cargos ready to do the work we sent them to do with just a word. No SAC, no “Alerts”, we turned our missiles off and we all went home.

Frankly, it was a world without Soviets.

I remember the first time my son, born long after the end of the cold war asked me “ Daddy, whats a Communist?”. The question shocked me but half way through my answer, I was crying tears of joy with my explanation. An enemy so gone, they became a trivia question in a board game just five years after their complete collapse. In the end, the “10ft tall” men of the Soviet Union that I had feared in my childhood were no more than the equivalent of hunchbacked, gap toothed “carnys” in a travelling tent revival meeting in his. The Soviet was just an edge of town revival tent held up only by the point of bayonets, full of the sweet smell of good intentions, hot air and the promise of a better world made true by the desire to “stick it to the man”, but completely empty of anything that actually worked.

In 1989, they pulled up stakes, leaving nothing behind but a field full of litter, where the day before the glittery hopes of the little people were on display as evidence of their ascendancy.

If what happened on September 11th 2001 had happened on September 11th 1991, I think I would have been better prepared. I would have been half expecting it.

All through the 1990s, you read books like Fukyamas “ The End of History” that were basically made by people like myself who were lost in a world without any real meaningful challenge to the Western World. China? Yeah, they were Communist, but not really a competitor and after the collapse of the “Communist mother church” in Russia and the signs of the cracking at Tienamien Square, you felt like it was just a matter of time before they went too into the ashcan of history. Islamic terror? it wasn’t even on the radar. It was like fearing some splinter group of the IRA. A car bombing here, a hijacking there, a nuisance, but not really a threat. Iran? Couldn’t even beat Iraq in a 10 year war. In 1992, we beat the Iraqis, all while the usual leftists suspects said that thousands of Americans world die and that the US Military had ordered body bags in the thousands in anticipation, our doom was foretold because we were imperialists and they were strong men of the middle east, used to the ways of the desert, while we were soft and incapable western imperialists who would meet our doom as we had before in Vietnam.

The war, such as it was, was over in 100 hours and we, the soft Americans were victorious. Our losses of men in the war seemed inconsequential. We had faced the Soviet Union by proxy, its client the Iraqi Army and their equipment was as worthless for them as it was in Afghanistan.

Our troops came home to parades and the President said;“ We beat Vietnam Syndrome”. It all melted away in the mouth of history like cotton candy.

We put our trucks and tanks back into storage and we piece by piece dissembled the military. “War is hell” but peace can be utterly brutal to the military and the 1990s were worse than any peace before. There didn’t seem to be any sense to keep it all going, who was it we were we going to fight anyway?

For once, there was no need to worry about the enemy on the other side of the hill. The rules of business were replacing the rules of battle and warfare. “We might just get through this after all”, I thought. It was a warm syrupy opiate of a thought, and like most addicts I took in as much I could get, and overlooked the side effects.

The mind-set of the 1990’s were like cough medicine narcotics; all sweet and addictive and a spoonful at a time. The “world of the internet”, the new world of global commerce and a whole new way of doing business. Profit didn’t matter, “eyeballs” mattered. Business mattered, not military might, that was the old way and those days were gone, just like the wall itself was gone.

It was all so damn dumb. Like an office christmas party that goes on too long and gets too loud, you almost hope no one remembers it, but we do, we all do.

I don’t really remember what I was doing on September 10th. When I awoke the next day, it was as if I awoke in a house in the middle of a forest fire. Whether or not I had done the laundry the day before didn’t seem to matter anymore because by mid afternoon I was wondering if y the end of the day, I would have a house in which to do it.

To this day, I start the day the same way every day. I quickly check the TV, to see if any commercials are playing. If there are, then everything is ok. Because the first thing I remembered on September 11th was something I didn’t think about when I saw it at the time.

There were no commercials on that day.

My head hit the pillow on the night of September 10th in a world of concerns and worry for things that, in the end, didn’t really matter anymore. All sickly sweet and full of nothing but the numbing effects of an addictive, self destructive medicine I should have been smart enough to know better than to take in such quantities. A world of debating tax cuts, petty office politics and a stock market that was on its way down rather than up as it had been all through the 1990’s.

But the world I awoke to on the morning of September 11th, was a world at a war. A war that I thought in the "cherry flavored" 1990's would never come.

Posted @ September 09, 2007 09:51 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

Theres a certain something in the air...

Reno Air Races start in just 3 days.

Considering that I was super-ultra-mega busy with revenue producing activity this summer and barely had time for any aviation related activity, I will make a special effort to cover the event this year.

I'm experimenting with flickr and various video and photo capturing systems this weekend, so I will be ready for next weekends show. If you can't make it, come back next weekend for coverage of the Reno Air Races.

If you havent yet had the chance to hear 12 P-51 Mustangs at low altitude going by at 400+ miles an hour right in front of you; you shouldnt miss it for the world. The sound in the video doesnt begin to capture the feeling you get. There reall isnt anything quite like the sound of a V-12 Merlin going full out.

Except of course, the sound of the Wright 3350 which is the engine on this little monster here.

I go every year. I absolutely love it. My hair is standing on end in anticipation.

Posted @ September 08, 2007 09:47 AM | Aviation | Comments (2)

you can't make this stuff up

"The Syrian government has actually shown a lot of compassion in keeping its doors open, and being a host for so many refugees..."

Dennis Kucinich, in Syria, today, with a straight face.

Posted @ September 06, 2007 07:31 AM | Current Affairs | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

the jokes write themselves

Why yes, as a matter of fact I do have a certain "contempt for congress"; why do you ask?

Posted @ September 05, 2007 08:08 AM | Comments (1)

You know what his problem is, dontcha?

From the Daily Mail:

snip...

"...The ex-newspaper editor took great delight in making fun of President Bush for falling off a Segway - the two-wheeled, motorised, gyroscopically balanced scooter that, its makers promise, will never fall over. However, he was bitten by karma and suffered the same fate as Bush..."

...end snip

You know what his problem is dont you? Yes you do! Why, he's a toe-tapper!

Snip...

"...He broke three ribs after falling off the Segway at 12mph in California - just three days before he was due to make his biggest TV appearance to date, as a judge on the grand final of reality show America's Got Talent...."

In my experience, men who fall down in public are only looking for one thing...

A judge on a talent show? Suspiciously laying about in suggestive poses in public? He's a "toe-tapper", I'm telling ya, I got a aguy who called a guy who asked a guy and they all confirm. toes have been tapped...

Mark Levin probably thinks this guy is a "toe-tapper" too...

Posted @ September 03, 2007 04:00 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

Announcement: I've got a little list...

From this day forward, I shall use the perjorative term "toe-tapper" to describe someone I wish to mock. I hope to start a world wide popular movement of anti-"toe-tapping" bigotry.

We'll put a stop to all this well coordinated top hat, black pants and leather shoe wearing frivolity once and for all. The devils scourge of tap shoes, tap dance schools, the "black mass" of tap dancing contests and the subversive showing of Fred Astaire movies; all this shall end when the revolution comes my friend, you just wait. Soon, we shall all wear Vans and finally be free of the curse of patent leather and click-click-click clakety-clackety-clackof metal dance taps.

And after the tap dancers are gone, we shall start on the people who wear sandals to business meetings or formal affairs. First, we will start the slow torture with with those who wear sandals with socks,not just white gym socks but bright multi colored socks, and then women with big arms in sleeveless dresses, and then men who wear baseball caps with business suits will go. Not necessarily in that order, but they all have to go.

Which reminds me...

We need to do something about the millionare "movie stars" who go on national TV and look like they were just in the parking lot draining the fluid from the transmissions of their cars.

Cut your hair, sit up straight, you're on TV! You mom is probably watching. And for Gods sake, what have you got to whine about? What are you, a coal miner? if you never work a day in your life again, you will have a very comfortable existence. But nooooo, its whawhawhwhaaaa, oh cry for me argentina... I've had a summer of Lindsey Lohan, Amy Whinehouse, Owen Wilson and Britney "doesnt-everyone-hold-their-kids-in their-laps-when-they-drive,dammit-paris-I've-lost-my-underware" Spears. I never thought anyone would make me nostalgic for Madonna, but Spears did it. Thats how bad it is folks, where Cher once stood, now stands Madonna, and someday God-save-us-all will Britney "no-pants" Spears stand, only to be followed God knows what and I really do not want to know what it is that takes her place.

I used to think that the infamous "Donkey Shows" of Tijuana maked the final level of hell for the fallen and the the damned, but now I'm convinced in just 10 years time I will see "serious actresses" profess their desire to be in "The Donkey Show" to further their career.

Mark my words, that day is coming.

And exactly why is it that all you people in Hollywood all so damned unhappy? Oh wait, I dont care why you are unhappy I just want you gone, so get in the truck, its off to be processed, you slacker genius voice-of-a-haunted-generation-whos-neven-done-a-damn-thing wonderkid. I've had it with everytime these no talent goobers fall and scape their knees, they are off to 'rehab'.

Talented people dont go to 'rehab', they dry out, write great albums or books about it or they die 'before their time' in a bathtub in France. That's how nature deals with the curse of fame. The Gods look down, see how you've put your divinity inspired talent to work, and they find you screwing around and wasting it on "Daddy Day Camp III". Well off you go then, you get "walk the plank" into loser obscurity, only to come back as a shriveled shell of your former self in 50 years time, when the next generation discovers your comic or singing genius that you had for all of 10 seconds before you discovered the "fun" of some new and exciting version of morphine and got turned into a vomit covered, human toilet seat cover with a SAG card who really "just wants to direct".

You penance for your sins is you get to answer the question "so what would you do differently if you had to do it all over again" a thousand times a day until you die of a stroke on camera.

Amy Winehouse is right, Rehab is for losers. You want rehab? then get a job - a real job, a demeaning, soul sucking hourly pay, tax paying job, go feed your kids, all of them, not just the ones you live with on alternate weekends because your business manager said it would be good in the divorce settlement, and stop hitting the crackpipe everytime you inhale.

That will straighten your crap out real fast.

You are only going to rehab because your business manager has determined that you still have money to be drained out of your accounts, not because "you are special", because you aren't. Remember Pete Duel? Yeah, in his day, he was pretty "special" too. 20 years later, you can't find anyone who knows who he is.

Look in the mirror, you addict losers, thats you in 20 years, only Pete Duel was talented, it will probably happen faster for you.

How about Alfred Lunt? Name ring a bell?

how about Anna Magnani? No? Well they were both Academy Award winning quality folks. But you ask a random sample of 100 people if they know who the are, you'll get zip back except from the whackjobs. Thats fame for ya, you work your whole life, you get to be a statistic in a book somewhere.

The minute you are broke - dead broke and you can't even work on "Dancing with the Stars", rehab is no longer your option, jail is.Just like all the little people. Just ask Dana Plato, oh you cant because she's dead. Damn...

Robert Mitchum didnt go to rehab, he went to jail and you know what, I can respect that. He didn't whine about it(oh no! look what the man did to me, whahhahahwhaa), he didn't apologise, he just did his time, and went on to have a career. A good solid kick butt never gonna forget this guy career. And he still managed to raise three kids, all from the same wife, that he was married to for 37 fricken years.

Robert Mitchum: Actor-Badass-And no freaking "rehab".

And who decided these walking emotional trainwrecks should have a say in politics of any kind anyway? They can't do math, they cant drive, they are completely irresponsible in every way. Run for office? sure they are qualified for that, but talk about it, engage in discourse?What! are you kidding me? You wouldn't let half these people watch your kids for two hours while you go out to dinner, but you are going to pay 100 dollars a plate to go to a fundraiser with these losers so they can sit at an elevated podium with 100 other no talent goobers as they try to shake off a hangover, all while you look through opera glasses from 200 yards away and say "Honey, I think he's looking over here, no wait a second, thats his bodyguard holding his hair back while he inspects the palm tree up close. Wow he really cares about the environment, he's been looking at the base of that tree now for 10 minutes."

Actors. The original "toe-tapping" monkeys.

sheesh...

Posted @ September 02, 2007 08:39 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (2)

History File: Two Generations of McCains, Sept 2 1945

Vice Admiral John McCain and Cdr. John McCain Jr.,on board a U.S. Navy ship (probably USS Proteus, AS-19) in Tokyo Bay, circa 2 September 1945. Admiral McCain died a few days after this photo was taken.

The United States Navy had begun the process of occupation just a few days prior. Japanese Naval bases on the island of Honshu, including Yokosuka are already under control of US troops. Repatration of Allied Prisoners of War in the Japanese Home islands and under its control is under way as part of "Operation Swift Mercy" The Fleet has begun to assemble in Toyko Bay for the surrender ceremony on September 15th.

As part of the initial surrender agreements with Japanese, General Wainright and General Percival ( Wainright, who surrendered at Battan and Percival at Singapore) are to be reparitated with utmost speed, so that they may be part of the surrender ceremony.

62 years ago, the world had seen the end of Hitler, the end of fascism in europe, the total destruction of two cities to atomic warfare and the end of the Japanese Imperial Empire.

62 years ago this week, The end of World War II was at hand. In 9 days, John McCain III, a man who is today a Senator from Arizona and running to be President of the United States, with one son in the Marines in Iraq, would at the age of 9, lose his grandfather.

History has its way with all of us, but the eyes of our grandfathers never leave us.

Posted @ September 02, 2007 07:13 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)

North korea joins libya in nuclear capitulation

North Korea agrees to give up its nuclear ambitions.

There is no confirmation on the theory that the breakthrough came after Kim Jong-il was caught toe-tapping in the mens room.

This seems like good news to me,
- we didnt go to war
- we worked with 5 other states in the region which border North Korea
- we provided a diplomatic framework that didnt involve tromping off to Washington D.C. everytime someone wanted to talk about something

That and the removal of one of the routes to Nuclear Iran, seem like very good thing to me.

Its good news, which tells me the only thing we will hear about it will be those parts of the deal that appear to make President Bush look bad, buecase in the end thats all that matters. All news these days is after all, opinion, spin and entertainment dressed up in a suit.

Posted @ September 02, 2007 12:19 PM | Current Affairs | Comments (0)