Echoes in the Sky

Awa, a place to stay
Get your booty on the floor tonight
Make my day
Awa, a place to stay
Get your booty on the floor tonight
Make my day
Make my DAY
Make my day
Make my DAY
Make my, make my, make
Make my day
MAKE my day

the tower and spire of the church, with some wispy blue sky in the background. they were built in the early 14th century using “coursed rubble with ashlar quoins”, but the spire has been renovated with limestone recently, and is a different more sandy colour. the tower is squire, but the spire is an octagonal pyramid - with four small arched windows half way up. the contours of the square base tapering into the octagon give the appearance of wings or fins

colour photo, slightly blurry, of the X-24B from above, presumably after being dropped by its B-52 mothership. we see clouds and very few details on the ground far below. the craft looks like a white isosceles triangle, with slightly tapered wings, and three rear fins. in front of the (fairly set back) cockpit, the flat section that tapers down to the nose is painted black.

St James' Church in the village of Dry Doddington, Lincolnshire (locally famous for leaning approx 0.8º more than that tower in Pisa (after Superman fixed it))

and the Martin Marietta X-24B experimental lifting body of the early 1970s

co-incidence? oh ho-ho I think not

“LOOKING INTO IT”

etc

black and white photo. the rear of an airship, resting on the ground. pale, whith a boatlike hull, with a nice set of portholes at the rear of the car, and two very large props either side

the fantastic rear of the Parseval PL25 German patrol airship, which becomes some kind of alternate-universe dreamliner in its own right

Age yourself with gaming

A yellow and blue parrot/macaw(?) on a perch, it’s squawking things like “Bond! Bond!”, “Thank you! Thank you!”, and “Give us a kiss!”

An actress playing a flustered Margaret Thatcher. She’a on the phone to the charmer James Bond. OR IS SHE

to me, every worthy/serious Bond argument or opinion just ends at a dead end right here:

black and white photo. the nose of a Concorde just in view. the pilot is leant out of the side window, looking eye-to-eye at a fellow uniformed pilot who is "operating" a Leonardo ornithopter, presumably suspended from a crane that is out of view

the ornithopter may have been operated by Concorde pilot Jeremy Rendall, seen here bothering fellow Concorde pilot (and brother) Neil at a Heathrow Airport photoshoot

Came across this in my bookmarks today, from 1989

I might start implementing the old-fashioned five seconds of silence, before the continuity announcer inhales, into everyday life

youtu.be/ApYXnCaNG0Y

Photo of the first quarter Moon viewed through a birding scope - a ridge of craters along the terminator

I recently got a birding scope for a significant birthday. With a phone attached, I took this photo - I think it’s the Moon - yesterday evening, low in the smoky French countryside

How about it in pink? 🫦

black and white photo. A PZL M 15 Belphegor spraying white clouds, with a vast forest in the background

The “president shitting on his people” video is awful on many levels - including that AI has a reasonable chance of crashing the US stock market - but it also highlights that there is only one jet-powered fertiliser-spraying aircraft that matters 👹

Colour photo of Wernher von Braun in a smart parole suit, sitting behind a desk that has model rockets on it, in front of a large painting of a lunar lander approaching the moon. Except von Braun has Mr Spoon’s head, and various rockets have Heinz baked beans tins upper stages, and the moon is yellow

“We choose to go to Button Moon. We chose to go to Button Moon. Yahahahah. We choose to go to Button Moon in this decade and do the other things not because they are easy, but because they are hard. Shut your cakehole"

- Sid James, Ipswich Polytechnic, 1978

photo a journal article: “The Determination of the Position of Maximum Velocity in Turbulent Shear Flow F. DURST, B. E. LAUNDER Department of Mechanical Engineering, Imperial College, London”

“It's just one of those days when you don't wanna wake up
Everything is f*cked, everybody sucks
You don't really know why
But you wanna justify
THE NEED FOR A MORE COMPLETE DESCRIPTION OF TURBULENT MOTION”

(From the Aeronautical Journal of the Royal Aeronautical Society, March 1971)

Colour photo. a smallish twin engined taildragger on the banks of a lake, with wooded hills in the background under a clear blue sky. A fairly nice looking bird. Lots of straight lines, square side windows, straight functional dihedral wings and tail. Engines in long rectangular cowlings coming out far forward of the wings. This one looks to have a primarily dark blue fuselage, with white and yellow trim detailing on the wings and tail

Perhaps of the few aircraft that could be deemed worthy to survive the rapture:

the Evangel 4500 - designed by bush pilot Carl Mortenson ("no formal education in aeronautical engineering") for STOL missionary work. only 8 made - most came to an end in S America, but the 1st is still going (N4501L)

(I think we’re going to go with outer space daydreaming/escapism for a while)

Colour artwork. the eerie blood-red hues of the nebula frame the whole shot, glowing supergiant-blue in the centre against dark dust strands. in the foreground, the ship appears to be passing overheard - resembling a spire containing fuel cells, and a large lampshade rear

“A photon rocket glides swiftly across the face of the Triffid Nebula, bound for some remote part of our Galaxy"

art by David A. Hardy - featured in EXPLORING SPACE, by Heather Couper, 1985
(archive.org/details/expl...)

It was also, often, a communal journey - as the Internet was something you usually accessed in college or uni computer rooms

I remember a whole row of desks losing their minds when someone found the “Thundercats outtakes”

I like to imagine - 6 billion+ years from now - some residents of the remnants of this clumpy galaxy starting their own deep space survey, looking at our pretty galaxy as it is now, and wondering how things are going within one of the minor spiral arms 👋

Ah, so the reason Andre Delprat’s ornithopter “summerhouse” - built in Alexandra Park, 1906 - failed was mainly due to lack of legs..

black and white photo. a large Ryan Firebee guided missile - the with an “angry” shark mouth painted on its front air intake has been unveiled to a crowd of suited wiseguys. “BGM-34B STRIKE SUPPORT WEAPONS SYSTEM” is written above the curtains

“the hell are you wiseguys all staring at?! Scram, capish? Badda-bing badda-boom”

it was simply the most suitable photo I could find at the time

colour photo. Closeup of a hummingbird’s tongue extending from its beak

Diagram of a refuelling nozzle tip

Images showing a hummingbird’s tongue split into two when feeding

more good news: after consulting NATO document

ATP-3.3.4.6 - "AIR-TO-AIR (AERIAL) REFUELING EQUIPMENT: PROBE–DROGUE INTERFACE CHARACTERISTICS"

An F-22-sized hummingbird’s 8cm diameter tongue would fit in the refuelling nozzle tip

BUT, the tongue does widen into forks - could be an issue 🤷‍♂️

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colour photo. a KC-135 drogue operator, with a hummingbird squadron patch on his khaki suit, watched as a hummingbird approaches from the rear

If we take a Rufous Hummingbird, magically made the length of a fighter jet, with the same basal metabolic rate (BMR), all muscle/square cube law/biomechanics stuff discarded, and a (generous) weight of 200kg

it would need ~80t of nectar per day, which is what a KC-135 can carry!

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colour photo. A hummingbird hovers in front of a drogue-like fitting on a model KC-135, possibly 1:48 scale - suspended from a garage door or porch roof

apparently, yesterday was National Hummingbird Day, and it reminded me of something I saved off the other place a few years ago - someone (I’ve lost who, sorry) made this KC-135 Hummingbird feeder!

It got me thinking about a fighter-sized bird..

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colour photo. Side view of the shuttle and leading T-38, that are rather small silhouettes against a deep orange and yellow sunrise

"On 16 November 1982, Columbia approaches Edwards AFB bringing to an end STS-5”

(photo by Erik Simonsen (author of PROJECT TERMINATED! crecy.co.uk/project-term...)

colour magazine scan. an extremely colourful photo: two teenagers and a younger child, dressed in very retro jumpers and shirts, examine an elaborate display of metal (or shiny plastic?) rockets and other educational devices relating to propulsion(?)

from “Encyclopedic Dictionary of Young Technician”, a Soviet kid’s science and engineering book, 1987

(archive.org/details/luKr...)

colour photo. A book - “Une histoire des balloons”, with a pack of Baton de Berger Mini sausages and some cheap sunglasses

My current take on the “Meet the Performative Male hunky guy reading Harry Potter with an ice lolly” thing..

(with apologies, this was either from a Luftwaffe Im Focus magazine, or a “Luftwaffe in Colour” type of book)

Richly coloured photo, the booted legs of a Luftwaffe officer, lying down and leaning towards a lady in red dress and dark tights. They are sitting in longish grass and viewed from above, obscured by a large light-green umbrella with white trim, with the grinning Staffel mascot logo at the top

“from the private collection of a Luftwaffe pilot of Fighter Wing JG 54, taken in 1943 at 9/JG54’s airfield at Schwerin-Görries.

The ”Staffel Umbrella“, with hand-painted ”Devil’s Head“ emblem, created by members of the Staffel (squadron), appears to be made of parachute silk..”

Ok, technically it seems to be “International” or “National” Dog Day 🤷

Either way, that photo was from the Jerwan scrapbook - an amazing collection here:

t.co/OniWN3SOkT

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