Walking on the Moon

My sweet baby points out this incoherent web site that sells perhaps the best thing ever.  Do yourself a favor and cut right to commercial.

Are there happier words than 50,000 volt stun pen?

Jeremy Elson managed to get assigned a 6606 squawk on Tuesday, without trying. A pretty cool piece of luck on a doomsday-hyped day. His flight was safe.

If you are amazed and frightened by other’s misfortunes with heavy equipment, this collection is pretty impressive. Sure productivity killer for aviation enthusiasts. That link is courtesy of my sweet baby.

She also saw this find of heretofore lost Winsor McCay art.

Finally, Christopher Bahn at the AV Club brings us a fine piece of surreality. A copy of Kurt Cobain’s suicide note with Google Ads content interspersed. Eerie. Creepy.

More Elvis/Geller mayhem.

Well this story is a little close to home. Link courtesy of Jeffrey Rowland’s Overcompensating. But you’re already reading Overcompensating, I’m sure.

Now there’s a headline more suited to a Tintin book than the real world. And yet the BBC ran it. OK, something close.

At the Planes of Fame Airshow, Kevin and I ran into a guy who assures us that an RC enthusiast built a flying Spruce Goose. Sure enough, it’s out there.

For a post about a really great event, this is going to be kinda boring. Almost 2 weeks ago, Kevin Lahey and I flew over to Chino for the Planes of Fame Air Museum‘s annual airshow.

If I haven’t said it before, the collection of WWII aircraft at Planes of Fame is really phenomenal, and you can get right up close and personal with them. They have several one-of-a-kind aircraft and many, many rarities. Many are flyable, and on the first saturday of each month they have a special event and fly something cool.

As wonderful as all that is, it really pales before their airshow. Now, I haven’t been to an airshow in a long time. I love to fly, but I just don’t get to a lot of them. This was huge fun. There were tactical displays from the Navy and Air Force flying modern jet fighters and a few aerobatic and wing walking displays, which were all fine. For me, the really impressive stuff was the incredible array of WWII (and even WWI) aircraft that they put in the air. Most, if not all, of them from the Planes of Fame collection.

At one point they had probably 25 flying classic warbirds in flight simultaneously, including 2 B-25s and a B-17. There was also a Spitfire and a P-38. And I know for a fact that wasn’t the whole collection. They didn’t fly the Zero in that formation (though it flew in the show), nor the Northrop Flying Wing.

Of course, I took no pictures. Because, well, I wouldn’t have been able to capture things very well at all. If I get a chance, I’m going to try to get my brilliant photographer buddy Tom Beecher out to one of these.

If you like old airplanes at all, you should check it out.