Pilot's Log

*) Tried to sell my old wireless modems at a second-hand mobile phone store overday, and the store refused to buy them. I wonder if I should just consign them to a friend who has an eBay store.

*) Zvezda in Russia promises that there will be new kits in their Art of Tactic series that will be scale compatible with Wings of Glory WW2...and I'm particularly interested in the Bristol Blenheim bombers. Well, with the politics between Stateside and Moscow being what they are, I shouldn't expect to get these very quickly.

*) REIGN on CW is a mess. It's supposed to be historical but their visual RNA for scenery, props, costuming and casting is jarringly off-the-mark. Or, at least, I THINK it's supposed to be historical.

http://www.3dtuning.ru/en

This is a Russian car customizer Flash widget.

PS:


An attempt to rod a Chevy Lacetti (the closest thing they had to Moonshine).

I just downloaded a paper model .PDF file from RapidShare, and noticed through my search for the file that a lot of hosting sites have been hit with takedown notices or Russian viruses. If you have your eye on a download, get it now--but be very careful about it.

This past week on PBS, POV's documentary, "My Perestroika" was about the last generation of Russians to grow up under the Soviet system, who witnessed the fall of the Union and the subsequent confusion, desperation and strangeness that followed and continues for them.

Meanwhile, TH¡S had shown the William Hurt/Richard Burton version of Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. I've never read the novel, but I own a copy of Gyorgi Dalos' 1985: What Happens After Big Brother Dies and a Scholastic weekly magazine that has a condensed drama script version of the Orwell story.

I'm sure you're wondering where I'm going with this train of thought.

I'm not sure myself.

I think America is approaching the kind of historical crossroads that many nations have faced over the centuries. Perhaps by this time six years hence, we'll be talking about the Former United States of America...all a nation has to do to fall apart is for its citizens to doubt the premise that the system to which they have been born is morally superior to all others in existance. Maybe the falling-apart has already begun and the majority doesn't see it happen. Perhaps they'll wake up someday to empty Wal*Marts, no burgers at MickyD's and TV footage of tanks on Pennsylvania Avenue.

Or the opposite happens--the masses see their predicament, stand up...and the shotgun sings its song. And the United States stays what it is, in name only, for some generations.

Either way would be a nightmare.

( The Trailer )

( The Whole Thing? )

Welcome to Top Gun, Chinese Air Force style.

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I've Answered This Question Before.

Sagittarius Horoscope for week of October 8, 2009

In 1968, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn finished his book The Gulag Archipelago, a scorching indictment of the oppression that he and his countrymen suffered under the totalitarian regime of the Soviet Union. Banned for years, it was never formally published in his home country until 1989. Even after that, the new Russian government tried to control the teaching of history by suppressing texts like Solzhenitsyn's. This year, all that changed. The Gulag Archipelago became required reading in Russian high schools. At last, the truth is officially available. (Maybe one day the equivalent will happen in the U.S., with alternate histories by Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky and James Loewen finding their way into the curriculum.) I celebrate this breakthrough as a symbol of the events that are about to unfold in your personal life: the long-lost truth finally revealed.

I saw that book last week in the paperback bargain bin at the Dandridge library. I didn't pick it up because I had other priorities in mind at the time.

I rather doubt there are any "long-lost truths" left to be found in my life beyond the missing links of my family line. And even so, what benefits could they have for me this late in my life? Not that I like the idea of ignorance for ignorance's sake. There is no bliss in not knowing the world around one's self.

Got the 1982-vintage Clint Eastwood movie on DVD from the Big Lots bargain bin this evening. Just saw the end of the third act. The effects...have not aged well. The photographic grain is overmuch, the perspectives on the miniatures are unconvincing and they could have been smarter with the interfacing of the elements. But then again, it WAS 1982. A revolution has happened in the years since.

For the record, the Firefox story (if not all of Craig Thomas' pre-1984 technothriller novels!) is CANON for the Hackett Continuum.

( MiG Fighter-Bombers On Film )

This was shot at the start of the 1973 Day of Atonement War; the MiGs were being launched against the Israeli forces that were occupying the Sinai side of the Suez Canal.

One of those MiGs is now in the collection of the National Museum of the Air Force in Dayton OH. It was presented to the USAF in the Eighties as a symbol of the new friendship and cooperation between Egypt and the United States.

I'm researching MiG-17s because of a pending scale model project.