cars have rear view mirrors for christ's sake.

You remember when I ran a few posts with dimwits making trains too big for the damn track or cannons with a 36 inch bore? and they did it on purpose? Well, the screwy thing is that screw ups can easily be just as big, and then they do it again. My god.

So it seems that over the last week we have managed to run 2 bloody satellites into each other (I mean space is pretty big, right? I mean that's why it's called "space". Doesn't matter. Not surprisingly, there is a law about what to do if you have a fender bender, or a big crack up. It's called the Convention of International Liability for Damage Caused by Space Objects or CILDCSO. For the love of Pete, you think even scientists can think up a sexier name than that.

The law boils down to a very simple concept: you launch it, you pay. The thing was they were expecting the damn things to fall DOWN. But if they hit another space object, and presumably, someone owns the other "object", and we know who that is, then it's like car insurance. Someone has to be found to be at fault. Trouble is the Russian satellite was dead, gonzo, junk. So, is it like that old rusty car on a side street that has no plates? And what happens to all the bloody parts that flew off? How can you sue if one of those slams into your garden? How to tell whose it is.

But anyway, I'll leave law to science. On another front, here's another poser. Just how do 2 nuclear submarines run into each other? C'mon, the sea is big too. And you'd figure they have a little more electronics than a fish finder on board. The British and French are blushing tonight.

But, it has happened before.

On 20 March 1993, the USS Grayling (name a submarine after a trout and see what you get) collided with the Novomoskovsk, a Russian ballistic missile submarine. And they were trying to NOT be seen by each other.

this is SAFER

While on the subject of air safety I could not pass up those wiley balloonist who gave powered, semi controlled flight a shot. This was only a few decades before airplanes with wings took off and somehow people were looking up a lot more. I mean they hadn't got the car worked out and trains were just getting going. You'd think they would maybe take the time to get one of them right at least before moving on. Since locomotives and horseless carriages still exploded with alarming frequency, you figure they would have got some of the basics taken care off. Oh well, same thinking that gave us the 30 inch bore cannon I guess.

A fellow Frenchman of Clement Ader was Henri Giffard. Just a few years before Ader's bat winged flyer, Henri actually flew around in a powered balloon. The year was 1852 and he flew an enormous 43 metre long hydrogen filled balloon that was powered by a 3 horsepower steam engine spinning a 12 foot propeller. This engineering marvel flew over 15 miles and was totally controlled by Giffard. Balloonists up till then were at the mercy of the winds. This made air travel, and transport, potentially viable.

The insane flammability of hydrogen was not lost on balloonists of the era. Giffard's wheezing and sparking steam engine was suspended well below the gas bag (mainly to give the huge propeller room) but he got the fire safety thing. The smoke stack pointed downwards and had water vapour from the boiler injected into it to snuff the bigger flaming chunks.

whats good for america, oh wait, that's GM

So here is a real doosie for you. From the jungles of Brazil I give you Fordlandia! Unlike any place on earth. Looks like Henry Ford was thinking that maybe if his cars were getting popular he had better make sure he had a reliable supply of tires to shod them. Rubber at the time came straight from rubber trees and Malaysian rubber was the most widely available. The British and Dutch had a monopoly on the market and this was worrisome. The fact that he did not control the supply made Henry nervous and he stepped up research to find a source of his own. Talk about raw materials. This was still on the tree next to the river.

Situated nearly a thousand kilometres up the Amazon, his land, Fordlandia, was a tract of hilly barren hardly fertile land covering over 10, 000 square kilometres. Talk about doing it the hard way. The town was locally called Boa Vista, or simply “Dearborn in the Jungle.” What was unique for the time was that this was going to be a rubber plantation, with managed agriculture replacing the traditional tapping of wild rubber trees.

The agreement reached gave him whacks of land, local police support and no tariffs on Ford equipment and materials entering Brazil. The Brazilians in return received a 9 per cent share of profits after a 12 year period. Things looked OK for Ford, then.

Once the first steam shovels arrived the jungle was never the same. Fordlandia became a North American suburb, complete with paved streets, bungalows, movie theatres, swimming pool and a library. Almost all of the the workers were locals and this whole world was just too weird for them.

Things don't get better. Staffed by engineers and managers who had never left an office, the rubber plantations were a mystery to them. The crappy soil eroded, or washed away during the rains causing tractors to get stuck and insane delays of equipment and supplies. To make matters even more insulting was the ensuing dry season, which lowered the river so much that boats couldn't dock. Guess they should've read the tide book.

The agricultural theories that worked in North America (closely planted rows to maximize production) only contributed to the spread of plant diseases and blights. This is the Amazon after all.

Things were not really going well so Ford traded some land for a parcel up the river a piece and started as second operation at Belterra. But big picture the whole shebang was not going to work. Fetid water contributed to malaria outbreaks and the local workers didn't get living in houses, eating in cafeterias serving unrecognizable dished like hamburgers and ice cream, or working a standard North American work day, which did not take into account the midday heat. Work stoppages were common and civil unrest became common. Ford's insistence on no smoking or drinking didn't endear him to the staff and attempts to cultural-ize the locals with poetry readings, weekend dances and English sing-alongs were just too strange. Paydays saw boatloads of local booze hit the streets and several days of low or non existent production ensued.

Fordlandia lated through the Second World War when Ford quietly paid out a quarter million dollars to the Brazilian government. His overall loss on the experiment was $20,000,000. Anyways, one of the inventions that came out of the war was synthetic rubber.

The picture above is a Fordlandia bungalow.

Walk tall.

Tip of the hat to my wife for this gem. Seems the British (masters of cast iron bridges and rubber trains) have been busy building mechanical elephants. Seems the 50's were their hey day with them roaming the beaches of a Saturday.

Frank Stuart built a pretty famous one and gave rides for the children. The thing is truly amazing with a fairly reasonable approximation of an elephant gait and the size, colour and proportions are bang on.

Why oh why would someone do this?

Check out this link for a cool newsreel and more links.
http://www.weirduniverse.net/blog/comments/mechanical_elephants/#When:15:05:00Z

Are you serious, c'mon.

I'm no stranger to writing about absurdly dangerous things we humans have devised for no other real reason than to try it out and see if it works. Like making a train so big it can't turn corners, or cars with 6 steering wheels.

Case in point. There has been a bit of media attention given to one Reverend Adelir Antonio de Carli, of Brazil, who strapped himself into a chair attached to many brightly coloured helium filled balloons. Apparently you can have enough of these balloons to get some serious flight out of it because the good father skyrocketed to 20, 000 feet before being blown off course. Sadly, he hasn't been since yesterday, not long after takeoff.

You may remember the fellow with the lawn chair and weather balloons, Larry Walters?

Did he, or didn't he?

This is from a story I saw on CBC today. Seems Luftwaffe pilot Horst Rippert thinks he shot down the author of The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. The famous French author was flying a Lockheed P-38 Lightning on July 31, 1944 when he disappeared. Rippert is quoted, in an exclusive in the French magazine, Le Figaro, as saying he shot him down. It later quotes him as saying he didn't actually see the pilot and would have backed off the fight if he had known who it was.

Antoine Jean-Baptiste Marie Roger de Saint Exupéry, his full name (they don't have book covers wide enough) was a famous aviator and aviation writer before he wrote the The Little Prince while in New York in 1942.

Spin dry.

Sorry readers, I gotta go with the flow. Just indulge me for a sec while I look at real shitty TV show spinoffs.

And just so I can get this out of the way, no matter what list I look up, what article I read or what pundit expounds what, Joanie Loves Chachi is ALWAYS top of every worst spinoff list. There.

But here's some stinkers that need raking:

The Woman From Uncle. No explanation needed.

Enos. Ok this needs a little bit of explaining: Dukes of Hazzard cop "Enos" moves to LA and is partnered with an African American.

Sabrina & the Groovy Ghoulies.

Gilligan's Planet. Mercifully a cartoon.

The Incredible Hulk: Married

The Oddball Couple. This is weird. A cartoon Odd Couple spinoff with animals.

Baggy Pants & The Nitwits. Yet another strange cartoon. It featured of all things, Gladys Ormphby & Tyrone, the Dirty Old Man from Rowan and Martin's Laugh In.

Peace off

So I was side tracked again and wound up reading about television. Most of whats written about the subject, at least about whats ON it, is like listening to a pro athelete talk about the "game". Yeesh. Anyway, the stuff I was reading was about real bad shows that are actually on tv, so . . . . . I had to go and find out some shows that didn't make a huge splash, or mercifully, never left the boardroom.

In no order, and I can't prove that these are really real ideas, after all the Internet is almost 100% correct, here are the winners:

Show Me The Salami, a Food Network show about the history of meat.

That’s Not Incredible,an ABC show about boring everyday life. The first show featured a guy who hadn't missed a day of work in 12 years.

Rango, an ABC western comedy starring Tim Conway and an American Indian called Pink Cloud.

Who can forget the Flying Nun? I can. In season 2 (it amazingly went 3 seasons) the show's star, the actual flying nun, Sally Field, was pregnant.

Saturday Night Live With Howard Cosell. This is the show which begat Saturday Night Live, when it ended after a few months, and gave us the Not Ready for Prime Time Players because on Cosell's show they were called the Prime Time Players.

Homeboys in Outer Space, I'm not even going to say anything, look it up.

Cop Rock, a combination of music video/broadway show theatre and cop show.

My Mother the Car, the name says it all, literally.

What were they thinking?

Couldn't resist telling you about who had birthdays today. January 9th was some strange time. The winners are . . . .

1901 Chic Young, Blondie creator. Yes.

1908 Simone de Beauvoir, existentialist feminist.

1913 Richard Nixon. I am not a crook.

and in 1940 Big Al Downing. Who can forget Bobby Poe and Poe Cats?

Beep.

So this is weird. I was combing the Inet looking for likely story ideas when I came across this CBC article about a Georgia Tech professor who looked at the attraction people have for vacuum cleaners. Ok, ok. The little Robot vacs called Roombas. I won't go on about it here because this article is much better written than anything I could come up with. Here's the link: http://www.cbc.ca/consumer/story/2007/10/02/roomba-study.html

But I got going on about it and had to find out what some of the first robots were like. Once again I'm off on another tangent. I'll be back to musical instruments soon.

Ibn Ismail ibn al-Razzaz al-Jazari, we'll call him Al-Jazari, made several robots, or automata, around the year 1200. Power for the machines was limited to clockwork mechanisms, water flow (from one vessel to another) or animal power. Electrical power was a few years away. One real big example of his early work is the elephant clock. Its actually a water clock placed on top of a real big wooden elephant. The body of the beast hides the mechanism and water. The top part is the exciting bit.

Later on he built the most robotic (at least to our idea of what a modern robot should be)of his mechanical inventions. These were true humaniod automata. And they were programmable. A camshaft ran through the device, and depending on where the bumps, or pegs were placed on the shaft, the robots, in this case a band of musicians, would alter what they "played". Mainly it was drums or cymbals that were struck. You essesntially got a different group of noises, but still, it was controllable.