It's not a real aircraft carrier, it's a mock up of an American carrier that they built to use for target practice and propaganda. You can see where the "flight deck" has been damaged during February's practice. Real American carriers are a thousand feet long. This one is only about 700 feet. Via IHS Jane's 360.
The Middle East is so weird. Both the USA and Iran are posturing about how evil the other is, yet we are allied with Iran in fighting against ISIS, but we are also allied with Saudi Arabia, who is fighting against the Iran supplied Houthi rebels in Yemen.
In 1915, a German submarine torpedoed and sank the RMS Lusitania; 128 Americans were among the 1,198 dead. The event outraged McCay, but the newspapers of his employer William Randolph Hearst downplayed the tragedy, as Hearst was opposed to the US joining World War I. McCay was required to illustrate anti-war and anti-British editorial cartoons for Hearst's papers. In 1916, McCay rebelled against his employer's stance and began to make the self-financed, patriotic Sinking of the Lusitania on his own time.
Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt I. A fat wallet won't protect you from a watery grave. Or people making fun of your middle name. No wonder everybody calls him G.
I am in a big building, three or four stories tall, the size of a large high school. It's laid out in similar fashion with hallways and large rooms. It's some kind of research center and I work there. One of my co-workers has to go to another facility a short distance away and wants to know if I can give him a ride. Sure, we can take my bike, and I look around for my Shoei motorcycle helmet. "We're going on your motorcycle?" he asks. When I reply in the affirmative he tells me we need to tell Bill Abernathy. This is a name of a guy I knew in high school in real life, and sure enough when we catch up to him, it is the same, extremely neat, crew cut individual. He's packing up his gear. He has a big, soft sided bag full of compartments for all his stuff which he is dutifully stowing away. It looks like he is packing for a camping trip. We aren't going camping, at least I don't think so, but he is being organized and efficient, so he should be done soon. There are several other people there and while we are waiting for Bill to finish packing we fall into conversation with them. I make some crack and one of them responds that that is just the kind of thing you hear in California, where upon he launches into an examination of the foibles of the clothes conscious Californian, how "cargoes" can't abide "Dockers" or some such. "Cargoes" being men who wear cargo shorts. The argument seems to depend on the color or the existence of extra pockets, I start to ask for a magic marker or some blue paint so I can fix the color. But then I realize Bill should be done packing, and we need to get a move on. I turn around and find that Bill is eating his brown paper bag lunch. Whatever, we need to go, but now there is another problem. How are we going to bring Bill's four dogs with us? If they were toy dogs we could put them in our pockets, but they aren't, they are good, doggy sized dogs. This is made slightly more difficult by the fact that Bill is going to be accompanying us on his Razor scooter. Well, two dogs can ride on the saddlebags, and one might be able to ride perched on the engine, which is inexplicably mounted out in front of the front wheel of my otherwise normal Triumph Bonneville. Or we can clip a lead between the harnesses of two dogs and I can put the lead over my shoulders and carry two dogs dangling that way. The dogs may not like it, and it would be a bit of a strain on me, trying to steer the bike with this load on my shoulders. But we never get to that point, because how are we going to accommodate Bill on his scooter? I suppose we could tie a rope between the scooter and my bike and pull him along that way, but how fast can one of those scooters go? It all becomes just too much, visions of the front wheel of the Razor getting caught in a rut and throwing the whole thing on its side and Bill along with it are not encouraging. That is all.
I'm looking for more information, the video is pretty skeletal, so I type it in, but I'm clumsy and I get it wrong:
http://capitan-mas-ideas.blogpsot.com/
No problem, there is a website there as well. That's weird. I wonder if they have done the same with my blog title, and they have. Since they probably only had to pay for registering blogpsot.com, it isn't costing them much.
Update: I thought about this and then I got to wondering how many different ways are there to misspell blogspot? And how many of them have they registered? And how many other misspelled domain names have they registered? There could be thousands, and registering all of them would run into serious money. Somebody should check it out, find out just what's going on here. Somebody besides me, I'm busy. I have important stuff to take care of. Now where is that donut?
Fox News has a two-year old story by Tuvia Tenenbom about Jews, Germany and a book he wrote. He apparently considers most of German society to be thoroughly anti-semitic, though I am not sure that all of the examples he gives qualify as such. Just what qualifies as anti-semitic anyway? If you think someone is odd, weird, or just don't like them, and they happen to be Jewish, does that make you anti-semitic? I don't think so.
The most interesting part is his conclusion:
If today Germany doesn't wake up to its inner hate, a more sophisticated Adolf will appear and nobody will be powerful enough to stop him.
I was going to post a comment, but you need to sign in, and then create a user name, and then they want to know your birthdate and at that point I said bullshit and resolved to post my comment on me blog, so here it is:
It is our nature to be hateful. I think it must be a survival trait, Darwin, evolution and all that. Near as I can tell, the biggest problem with the Jews is that they set themselves apart: "we are Jews and you aren't". How can you be friends with someone who excludes you from their social circle?
I come across the Thach Weave in a story on the Daily Kos about some overlooked aircraft from WW2. It is an aerial combat maneuver from WW2. I found the video a little hard to follow, but it does give you an idea of how different the theory and practice are. Via Stu.
Iaman is contemplating having one of his hip joints replaced. To that end he's been investigating, and his research turned up this item. ¨The OR table is the single most expensive item in a OR with a life of 20 years. Cost $125,000.¨ OR, that would be the Operating Room. When I first read the price I was appalled. I knew medical equipment was ungodly expensive, but $125,000 for a friggin' table? But then I saw the picture and realized that 'table' was misnomer. And since hip replacements are one of the most popular surgical procedures at something like 250,000 per year, that 'table' is going to get a lot of use. If we're doing 5 operations a week, then that works out to $25 per operation. A small part of an operation that will cost around fifteen thousand.
Update September 2015. Changed operation cost estimate to more realistic value.
