Be the envy of every other survivalist and have your own converted cold-war Atlas-F missile silo home! You too can live in complete cold war safety and luxury. The converted missile launch site is marketed as a getaway, luxury home, and in my opinion is every survivalist’s dream. The property includes its own private runway, 2000 square foot luxury home above ground with master suite, a private airstrip, and a hangar/garage. Below ground, past the 2000 lb. blast doors and three feet of reinforced concrete built to withstand brutal missile assaults lies two additional stories of space in the converted control room where you will find two additional suites with luxury marble Jacuzzi baths and an escape hatch to your private hangar.
I learned something new after the US Airways flight crash-landed in the Hudson. When birds fly into jet engines, the resulting "bloody goo" that they're transformed into is called "snarge".
A Sep 2004 article in Flying Safety magazine provides some further details about snarge.
The most common method of collecting snarge is "by spraying the impact point on the aircraft with a water bottle and swiping it down with a paper towel."
Snarge is "Smelly by nature, and often packed with mold spores, gooey bird fat or amorphous bits of flesh."
Snarge looks like "something you find in your handkerchief after a bad cold."
However, bird experts regard snarge as "the ultimate identification challenge!"
These ridiculous shoes come in many different styles at the J. Rubio website. I saw a guy wearing a pair when I was passing through an airport recently, and he looked like the dorkiest dork that ever dorked.
The verdict is still out, however, on whether wearing them will turn you into the mythic monster known as Spring-heeled Jack.
I loved reading Harvey Comics as a kid, and into "adulthood." (They're not published anymore, alas.) Their universe was quintessentially wacked and weird. As famed comics scribe Grant Morrison has remarked in an interview, sometimes the willed naivete of Silver Age writers following the Comics Code produced much stranger stuff than any consciously avant-garde writer could.
Take the two page strip to the right for instance, from an old digest-reprint of some Casper stuff. To parse it is to risk madness.
Is Nightmare indeed a mare, ie, female? if not, and even if so, is that the gayest hairdo ever, on horse or human? Why does a forest gnome like to hang out with a ghost horse? Why is playing human cowboys popular among the gnomes? Likewise riding an airplane. And finally, how demented does a ghost horse have to be, to stick planks up its butt and into its chest, and then purr like a cat, all in an effort to emulate a mechanical device so as to placate a gnome?
How I miss Harvey Comics! Thank goodness Dark Horse is reprinting some.....
That most silly and pointless and inutile, yet much desired of flight mechanisms, the jetpack, is back in the news. You can read a New York Times piece about the latest model here.
And a review copy of this book recently arrived in my mailbox, portending lots of fun.
Yet such mechanisms pale before the magnificently insane accomplishment of Yves Rossy, who, a couple of years ago, basically turned himself into Iron Man. Watch his jet-powered flight below.
Paul Di Filippo
Paul has been paid to put weird ideas into fictional form for over thirty years, in his career as a noted science fiction writer. He has recently begun blogging on many curious topics with three fellow writers at The Inferior 4+1.