Woohoo! Let the weekend begin! I don't have Memorial Day off, but I am getting Holiday Pay and a floating holiday. But until then, there are margaritas and vodka to be consumed!
Ah, to be a kid again.... Spoiler I haven't had this card since I was 12 or so. Last time I bought it was 1974 for $1, which was a lot of money back then for a piece of cardboard. It cost considerably more this time. What's special about a 1962 Roger Maris? It was the year after he hit 61 HR's, breaking Ruth's "Unbreakable" record for HR's in a season, so on the back the stat line reads: HR 61. A magical baseball number. (Before card companies and Beckett convinced folks that rookie cards were the best cards to have, people individually chose what the "Best" card of a player was. I always wanted the card after the season they did something awesome that was reflected in the stat line on the back. I discarded more Nolan Ryan rookies than I can count, they were boring.) Another special number: 1. This was the #1 card in the 1962 set, so it's very condition sensitive because it was the most likely card in the set to take abuse from rubber bands, being bumped, catching fire, whatever... This is a horrible picture of the card, all the scratches are on the plastic sleeve covering the plastic holder the card in encased in.
Look at that. What a thing of beauty. Now we get to watch spaceship slide through the atmosphere on board. It lands so fast it's like a cartoon of rocket landing before there was any space travel. Loving this.
Not as a grumpy old man, but just as an observation. . . Between other rapid technological advances, and modern CGI in films, I don't think a lot of under 30 people realize how incredible this is. And how remarkable it is that it's private, not just NASA.
Oh yes, but you've seen the ground-up view videos when it falls from the sky. The speed it slows down and lands just doesn't look real. It moves like a small RC toy and it's what, 13 or 14 stories tall in its first stage? And as mentioned, SpaceX is privately contracted. After some predicted kinks (what start-up doesn't have them) I think it's proven itself in spades. Cheap, fast, safe, fun to follow. You can't go wrong.
Elon is such an engineer that he warned them before hand that the first one was going to fail, but they wanted to go through with it just to get more data.
Jaws was a piece of rubber attached to a motorcycle engine. The starship Enterprise until very, very recently was a model on a string. My first TV weighed 600 pounds, was 4 feet long, but only had a 25 inch screen. It was only 10 years ago that Columbia exploded. As a kid it was a *big deal* to get a shuttle up and back. Still it takes a helluva lot to get even small satellites launched. Now a guy with Asperger's is launching and landing these things like it is nothing. We've been doing this only 60 years. We achieved flight in 1903, 113 years. My grandfather remembered getting around by horse. These kids and their internet porn. Fuck 'um. You don't what it means to dream.
And yet we haven't been to the moon in 40+ years. What the hell happened? We put guys on the moon using slide rules and computers the size of an apartment complex with less computing power then an iphone. 47 years ago NASA put guys on the moon, 47 years before that we were still using bi-planes with radial engines and people were writing scientific papers how if you went more then 100mph you'd explode.
Think about this...the SR-71 came out in what? 1956? 60 years ago. The B-52 came out around 1955. 52's are still in service, 71's...who knows? They're skunk works and it wouldn't surprise me if one or two were still in use. They were both introduced about 50 years after the Wright brothers first flight. In the 47 years after landing guys on the moon, we've made strides, but nothing even comparable to the difference between a Blackbird and the Wright's 20 second flight. Why and how did we make such great progress so quickly and then just kind of stew in our own success?
That and ignorance in science in general. There so much wonder out there... One hundred and fifty billion GALAXIES. We are soooooooooo insignificant, you can only imagine what could be out there. BUT we still have shit to discover in our own solar system: are comets the source of all water? And speaking of water, we have moons with entire oceans under ice sheets on the other side of the asteroid belt, who knows what could be in them. There are moons with enough fuel/energy that we could never run out. Look how fascinating Pluto turned out to be. Build the Wall!
Man, do I ever love me some SR71. This is one of my favourite stories, taken from a book called "Sled Driver: Flying the world's fastest jet". http://oppositelock.kinja.com/favorite-sr-71-story-1079127041
By the way, that book is insanely interesting, but also INSANELY priced... but I have a PDF version of it here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B-8WdLoVX1YRUFhILWRzU0Q5NFU/view?usp=sharing You're more than welcome to check it out.
SR-71 is truly in a class by itself. I loved fighter jets and became obsessed by the Blackbird after seeing a cheesy 80's kids movie called D.A.R.Y.L. We used to have a monstrous military air show here. The SR-71 was on display but didn't fly. It's so unique-looking. And BIG. It's long as fuck, like the B1. The B1 was amazing to watch fly. It's a big plane with near fighter-jet agility. It would rip and roll over top of our neighbourhood while we sat in the roof.