Smiley Myrus

My doctor warned me not to watch videos of this kind before bed-time, but I wonder if you like me are trying to figure out whether a wind-machine might have been used in the making?

I'm thinking that yes, on that day in Malibu ladies and gentlemen of the jury, it had to be used in the absence of Nature coming up with the goods.

Exhibit A: flowers waving around in the foreground with no back-up from the rear

Exhibit B: spliced footage from the same shoot, the wind dropped to a dead calm

Exhibit C: a dog who's ears aren't flapping in the wind... for it's been turned off

I have contacted Miley to check, and to offer a chance to meet me over a pint of ale and bag of pork scratchings at a pub of her choosing next time she's in Manchester. Or at least a badge.

The Eyes Have It

The last four CEOs at Boeing provided themselves enumeration to the tune of a half billion dollars whilst the company's losses mounted, but as that's the MO in business during the period of decline in the West, it's hardly a surprise and likely what Rome was doing prior the 'goths turning up at the gates of Rome.

But put on the spot by one Senator Hawley, at the point at which he is asked about that (see the Netflix doc, #2 in the UK currently), the pupils dilate in a fight or flight response.

One thing about flying airliners is that once the departure's been dealt with and the autopilot's plugged in the options are (or were) to review the papers, eat your fried breakfast or talk shit with the co-pilot. And ideally all at once.

But flying with a Turkish co-pilot ~ who admittedly would be more likely to view the events of 9/11 from a Muslim perspective ~ he was of the opinion that it had been a deliberate act orchestrated from within the USA.

I suggested that if he watched the president's reaction to the news whilst listening to a class of school-kids, you can see that same response... and it can't be faked because it springs from a part of the brain that reacts before we're aware of it. Hitting a low bridge once at 40 m.p.h. I asked myself who was screaming like a Neanderthal; before realising it must be me because no one else was there.

Now many years on, the thinking amongst the people who think paedophiles spring from Pizza Huts is that the president would not have known because he would not have been involved. And the scary thing is, that looks like it might even be true.

What do you think? Could the Earth be flat, or our Moon really made of cheese? Let me know in the comments below... you sad bastards.

Ed. The following reconstruction may have been digitally altered.

bide a wEE

Prior that thatched woman with the hair, utilities used to be straightforward whether it were gas, electricity, telephones, water or what were known as the 'rates' or local council tax. Now they are uniformily expensive, fairly shit (literally in the case of the water utilities), in your face on TV all of the time and not least requiring that regular churn at the expiry of the contract.

In an effort to deter me from leaving one they practically doubled in price on expiry, EE has let me know what I'll be missing... as pictured below.

This is like, were Suzuki to hear I was considering a change of car, describing those benefits I'd be missing as (a) wheels on each corner and (b) one inside for pointing it in whichever direction I should choose.

And isn't that Meghan Markle who's sorry to see me go? They do use Kevin Bacon at every turn, whose forthcoming slasher movie can be seen at theatres near you or by livestream hereabouts if ever he appears at my door.

Ed. That's not going to happen Colin, is it, unless he falls from space?

Tekever Takeover

We've seen how heavy-lift drones are doing the heavy-lifting on the front line, but in addition to that there is the reconnaissance that allows for bombs to be dropped on targets like SAM anti-aircraft equipment at a greater comparative cost.

You'd like to think that after the Spitfire and Mosquito the UK could do this itself but instead they have turned to a Portuguese firm, which itself has funded the supply of such drones to the tune of $250 million.

Did you know however that they are manufactured under licence hereabouts before they are returned to Portugal, re-assembled and signed off prior to being driven to the front line in a low-tech Ford Transit van?

By such means the UK government has pledged £1 billion in the effort to shift some 150,000 of such drones over there in the coming twelve months. If that sounds like a lot, bear in mind the Ukraine alone deploys upto 10,000 per day.

If there is one thing war gears up more than any other, it's production lines.

These aircraft are snapped together like Airfix, something Boeing hoped to cut costs with at a non-union plant using anyone who could wield a spanner. Sections were, if you watch the Netflix doc, an inch out: okay for trousers but less so for airliners.

Blue Sky Thinking

We saw recently, didn't we, how contrails help reduce the transparency of the skies, so that they will never again be as blue as they were ~ or we like to think they were ~ during our childhood? Well turns out they increase global warming considerably, that veil they produce serving to trap solar radiation and warming the atmosphere.

They've even got their own interest group at contrails.org where you can order tee-shirts and spray-cans of shaving-foam to create your own trails in the class-room.

But now Google, guardian of this blog, has underwritten a project intended to ask pilots to ascend or to descend so as to stop producing these contrails at all... or at least in one small patch of sky.

They are produced in the first place by a process called sublimation, when the hot gases emerging from jet-engines freezes so quickly that they miss out the bit in the middle we learned about at school called the liquid phase... altogether. Had they not done so, the vapour would simply evaporate rather than form reflective ice-crystals.

All depends though on the temperature of the outside air, and the only way to alter that is to climb or descend into colder or warmer air. Note to pilots, the atmospheric temperature does not continue to fall with height but eventually stays put at the levels Concorde flew at, and rises briefly beyond. Back at space, however, you must not go out without a coat on.

Nonetheless as commercial aviation is set to double in the near future, all of this is about as effective as trying to mitigate global sea-level rise with dessert-spoons and buckets.

Shanwick is a conflation of Prestwick (Scotland) and Shannon (Ireland) and sounds like it should be pronounced without a 'w' but with an 'Ahaaar' at the end of it... but isn't.

Freefall: A Reckoning for Boeing

Netflix's doc as ever a valuable insight in this case into regular oversights related to Boeing product, and specifically the 737. Introduced in 1967, or just ten years after the Trabant to put that into context, it would be possibly the most reliable airliner to be built until such time as Boeing appointed Jack Welch's proteges as CEOs... when it would become perhaps the least reliable.

Withdrawn from service after two fatal crashes within five months, it was described on its re-introduction by Michael O'Leary as the most reliable airliner ever: when a clown like that says so, you know something's amiss. As with the Air Alaska flight above, when the stargazers would be delighted once it had shed a door or two mid-flight.

Welch prided himself at GEC on sacking ten percent of 'least performing' employees on a regular basis, which made him something of a saint to financiers but a bit of a cunt to everyone else. His proteges, rather than design a new aircraft from scratch, decided to keep upgrading what they had, which is when the problems started. For example, imagine running with the Trabant but adding everything to it that we hope for in a modern car?

And the problem with the firing thing was that the bulk of those were sourced from the quality department... employees with decades of service sacked at a moment's notice and their tires slashed instead of the carriage-clock. They went better, driving one whistleblower to suicide in a hotel parking lot prior to testifying. Organisations do exaggerate evil besides excellence, though, as I've suggested here before.

So when you get on a Boeing, chances are nothing amiss is likely to happen but do bear in mind that unlike with Airbus, any number of the people who built it viewed the process as fairly shit, and the product they build not one they'd want either they or their family to use on their next holiday... as the documentary suggests.

Ed. Thatcher had her own Jack Welch in the shape of British Airways' Lord King, who was known as Baron King of Wartnaby to her and as the warthog to everyone else. For 'warthog' again, read 'bit of a cunt'.

DRA, DRA Rasputin...

President Putin today said of the UK's support for Ukraine that (a) he's very angry and (b) has a nuclear weapon. This is because the long-range strikes hitting corner-shops nearby appear to be provided almost exclusively by UK drones like the ULTRA up there or ~ if not Molloy Aeronautics ~ the HYDRA seen down there.

Thing about humans is, we were designed for tangible threats viz. world on fire, not an issue but great TV; my house on fire, an issue as I've no TV.

Therefore we go on about climate change and how concerned we all are, but aren't really until there's no water emerging from the tap.

Likewise, war with Russia is not something to exercise any of us until a Russian drone lands on a Tesco warehouse and sends our burgers up in flames.

The reason we have a representative democracy in the UK as elsewhere is, as with the death penalty, the government feels it is more enlightened than the rest of us and should 95% of the populace not want to go to war with Russia, it doesn't matter for it will all work out well in the end; or at least until those big mushroom clouds start popping up here and there.

It's a great question though ~ appeasement or war ~ isn't it? Do we let apparent bullies do their worst, or fight back... ideally by getting others to do it for us first?

Was Nietzsche right, and does war reinvigorate a culture? Or does it simply ruin plans we had for the coming weekend?

Discuss... all night in an underground shelter.

Ed. Today's blog-post was sponsored by the Russian embassy, and I'd nothing to do with it.