BraWarstm! Nice Will Vehrs over on Blog Watch 2 makes a request for a Valentine Day Party report and next thing I know I have caused an international incident. So do Megan and I get those cool light-sabre thingies?
Just call me Chaos Girl 
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February 18th, 2002 | Comments are closed
 I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it. February 17th, 2002 | Comments are closed
Any British Isles bloggers within range of London who are interested in getting together with the cream of the bloggerati on Saturday, 23rd February, should e-mail us at admin at samizdata.net” as soon as possible for information. We can probably handle a few more. Blog this, you bounder! Bloggin’ ‘ell!
 A veritable verisimilitude of Bloggers from Blighty Samuel Johnson February 17th, 2002 | Comments are closed
The FAA released AD 2001 06 22 a few months ago. This AD grounds all B17 Flying Fortresses until inspections of the wing spar have been carried out:
February 17th, 2002 | Comments are closed
It is a bit like some strange dream reading about the things Slobodan Milosevic has been saying in the Hague. In this parallel moral universe uniformed murderers are noble victims and the man who heads the government which pays the salaries of the murderers and gives them their orders, is absolved from guilt due to the fact he did not literally do it himself… whereas a couple hundred injured soldiers and civilians dragged from a hospital in Vukovar and then slaughtered by the brave Yugoslav Federal Army (not paramilitary cetniks) like animals at a nearby farm, are somehow just reduced to a shrug and ‘shit happens’. Matt Welch restored some of my faith that all America had not suddenly gone collectively insane by showing that people are not buying into the revisionist lies of Milosevic and his EVIL supporters and apologists. Also, and far more important than those human compost heaps, my e-mail address is not working properly so Perry, our Chris Patten baiting editor, will be setting me up with a proper samizdata POPmail account sometime today, instead of just a forwarder. Anyone who has sent me e-mail to my private address recently might want to send it again. [Ed: the new e-mail account is now set up as a POP mail account] Will Vehrs of Blog Watch II cannot be accused of submitting to demands by noisy Balkan women for three-star rating of articles… he gave me four! February 17th, 2002 | Comments are closed
Sgt Stryker reports on an idea batted around ten years ago in the Spring ’91 Air Power Journal: fill obsolete aircraft with explosives and use them as remote controlled flying bombs. It’s been done. The earliest I can think of off the top of my head was the secret mission in which Joe Kennedy Jr. died in WWII. He volunteered to pilot a B-24 Liberator packed with 20,000 pounds of plastic explosives from takeoff to altitude. He and the co-pilot were then to bail out. The Liberator was then to be flown by remote control from another aircraft… and crashed into its’ target. Unfortuneately the aircraft exploded before Kennedy and his co-pilot bailed out. This month’s Aeroplane carries a story about “A Cat With Nine Lives” which mentions in passing that a number of Grumman Hellcats were flown into North Korean targets with a less than 50% success rate. Between August 28th and September 2, 1952 six drone Hellcats carrying 1000lb bombs were flown into a power station, a bridge, a railway tunnel and other targets. The Hellcats were controlled by AD-4N Skyraiders of VC-35. Guess there is nothing new under the sun… erratum: I realized this morning that I’d said Flypast instead of Aeroplane, as both new issues were sitting on my desk and I confused which one I’d just read which article in… I’ve corrected this above. Addendum: a reader in Traverse City, Michigan pointed out a secret robot bomber project from WWII that I was completely unaware of. Information can be found here and here. February 17th, 2002 | Comments are closed
A few days ago I reviewed John Keyes’ new play and mentioned it would soon be going on the road. I rang him t’other day for details so our London readers can drop in to see this excellent bit of theatre. John will be performing his two act play at the Wimbledon Studio Theatre from Sunday February 24th to Tuesday February 26th. Enjoy! February 17th, 2002 | Comments are closed
The Blue Button is a highly polemical independent libertarian blog. It is largely limited to American issues but within that purview tends to throw a fairly wide net. The blog has a blunt ‘in your face’ style and it would be fair to say ambiguity and nuance are eschewed for the Monster Truck car crushing approach.
Quite so. The Blue Button says it the way the author sees it. If you like opinions straight from the shoulder, then this is the blog for you. February 17th, 2002 | Comments are closed
Congress is now discussing ethics of business. This is the first time for many congressmen – not business, but ethics. February 16th, 2002 | Comments are closed
Scott Rubush is far from impressed with all this technology and I, for one, am greatly relieved that, at long last, somebody has had the guts to speak the truth.
Says Scott and…
How right he is. I, too, am deeply nostalgic for the days when I could rise from my rat-infested bed of straw in the middle of the night to milk a goat, bury a couple of my children and vainly try to dig a turnip out of the frozen soil with rudimentary hand-tools. Those were the days when we had real quality of life. After all, what has technology ever done for us, eh? Well, I suppose there’s the steam engine, the lathe, penicillin, vaccines and manned flight. But, apart from those things, what has technology ever done for us, eh? Okay, well, there’s electricity, the internal combustion engine, steel, oil fractionating, synthetic fabrics, rubber galvanisation, intensive farming and antibiotics. But, all that aside, what has technology ever actually done for us, eh? And I suppose there’s radio, radar, cine film, pasteurisation, central heating, the lightbulb, plastics, telecommunications, the laser, microwaves, invitro fertilisation, the integrated circuit, computers and, of course, the Internet. So apart from steam engine, the lathe, penicillin, vaccines, manned flight, electricity, the internal combustion engine, steel, oil fractionating, synthetic fabrics, rubber galvanisation, intensive farming, antibiotics, radio, radar, cine film, pasteurisation, central heating, the lightbulb, plastics, telecommunications, the laser, microwaves, invitro fertilisation, the integrated circuit, computers and, of course, the Internet…WHAT HAS TECHNOLOGY EVER ACTUALLY DONE FOR US, EH?? February 16th, 2002 | Comments are closed
Despite my best efforts to filter out the Olympics, the bru-haha about the Skating Gold Medal has managed to show up as a blip on my radar screen. If I have got this straight, a Russian pair was awarded the Gold and a Canadian pair the silver only that seems to have outraged the whole world for some reason (there is a war on, you know) so a gaggle of IOC apparatchicks went into a furious round of secret investigations and deals were made in various smoke-free rooms and, voila, now the Canadians have the Gold medal instead. Apparently the judges got it all wrong Which leads me to a question: how does anybody know? First of all, skating is not a sport. It is a hobby; a genteel pastime, especially when it’s called ‘Ice Dance’ which is skating for homosexuals Secondly, how does anybody know who ‘won’? In football, Team A scores more goals then Team B. Simple. Team A has won. In Boxing, Fighter A is parading around the ring holding a belt while Fighter B is being carried out feet first. Fighter A has won. In swimming, Swimmer A makes his way across the pool quicker then Swimmer B. No arguments; Swimmer A has won Now skating: Couple A does some circles, triple salkos and pirhouettes. Couple B does some circles, triple salkos and pihouettes. And the winner is…?????? February 16th, 2002 | Comments are closed
Seeing as Will Vehrs of Blog Watch II is moaning about the lack of Valentine party reports, here I go. It all started off rather badly as I had a huge argument with my ‘significant other’. But that was probably just as well so this way I did not have him moping around later at the party like death’s head at the feast. I was joint hostess of this party with two excellent lady friends of mine at a pleasingly nefarious and very out-of-the-way venue that for certain reasons will remain nameless. We expected 30-35 people but eventually got more than 80 I would guess, which proved interesting. I have no idea where they all came from and how they found our semi-private party. The guys running the bar (huge kiss to Marko, DJ Klaus and Dobroslav) had to go out twice and restock, the last time the underside of Marko’s old Trabi was scrapping the ground and making sparks because there was so much in the back and on the seats. The title of the party was ‘Love and Massacres on Valentine’s Day’ and due to the preferences of one of my co-hostesses, the theme was ‘Goths in Love’: so I did radical things with my hair and had a rather fetching ‘tattoo’ painted on for the night. The party took place in a large concrete basement that was quite recently used as a bomb shelter, with two dance rooms, a chill room and a very unusual and, um, ‘sociable’ toilet room. Music in one room was things like Prodigy, Alice DJ, Jaxx, Chemical Brothers, Stromkern, Apollo 440 and Orbital and the other room stuck to the goth theme with things like local boys Gone, Laibach, Weeping Willow, Phantasmagoria and Drinking Skull, plus the inevitable Bauhaus, Sisters of Mercy, Siouxsie and the Banshees. The place had a ventilation system which seemed to be running backwards and so it got hotter and hotter as more and more people arrived to engage in crazed dancing and innovative drinking games. After a while there was an interesting layer of cigarette and who-knows-what smoke sort of hanging just below the ceiling which did look rather cool. A bit later I had a very surreal conversation when four of us got trapped in the toilet room for about half an hour. I got talking with a very beautiful Hungarian boy wearing a bullet earring, who told me he “knew the people whose party this was and they were all smugglers from Russia”. I would have liked to hear more of this fascinating story but then Marko managed to take the big steel door off its hinges with a huge screwdriver and freed us all. All the waiting people who wanted to go pee pee rushed in and threw us out and I never saw the strange Hungarian boy again. Many interesting things happened later but my memory gets hazy now…at least that is my story and I am sticking to it. It was a terrific party but I am really glad I didn’t have to clean up afterwards. Are you satisfied now Will? I demand *** for this revelation on Blog Watch II! February 16th, 2002 | Comments are closed
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