My kids are very worried about a black cat that we have seen roaming about for a few weeks now. They want to find its home. Does anyone know if this cat belongs to anyone. Thanks!<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
The black cat, which has no name, is\u00a0one of our daughter Polly’s creatures, a stray she took in. What do you want to bet\u00a0Sunnywood Estates is\u00a0soon at war, with us at ground zero? God damn it, they were right all along … black cats are<\/em> bad luck!<\/p>\n Moving on: I remember when Ellen DeGeneres was an up & comer known for intelligent standup, and later as a brave pioneer\u00a0for coming out on TV when doing so could easily have killed her career. That’s not the Ellen I see today when Donna (who can unerringly find her on one or another of 400+ channels with no more than two clicks of the remote) takes over the TV. Ellen’s appeal now seems, to me at least, depressingly lowest common denominator: daytime TV-style celebrity infatuation, with a screaming studio audience.<\/p>\n I’m coming to dread what I once welcomed:\u00a0the future. Specifically the looming threat of assisted living, where we all know what’ll be on in the TV room: Good Morning America, soaps, Wheel of Fortune, infomercials, Ellen in the slots between. When the men get their turn, it’ll be Fox News and ESPN.<\/p>\n Well, maybe I’ll be able to lock myself in my room and read … let’s hope I don’t go blind.<\/p>\n My interest was piqued this morning by an article headlined “Boeing’s radical ‘transonic’ wing design could mean higher, faster airplanes<\/a>.” Wait a minute, I said to myself, jet aircraft\u00a0have always<\/em> been transonic. Some WWII prop fighters could go transonic. What’s radical about that?<\/p>\n I clicked the link, where I read this astonishing statement:<\/p>\n During development, which is still at conceptual phase, engineers have also been able to obtain an increased top speed from a planned Mach 0.70-0.75 to Mach 0.80, only slightly below the speed of sound, or Mach 1.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The fuck? Was this written in the 1940s? Every<\/em> jet airliner\u00a0cruises in the\u00a0transonic range, Mach 0.72\u00a0to 1.0. Boeing 777s cruise at Mach 0.84,\u00a0747s at Mach 0.86. The slowest jetliners today are older models of the Boeing 737, bricks with wings\u00a0that putt along at Mach 0.74.<\/p>\n The F-15s I flew, though capable of speeds in excess of Mach 2.0, cruised at Mach 0.9 or slightly faster. Boosting airliner cruise speeds into\u00a0the Mach 0.9 range\u00a0would be a significant development, and perhaps that’s what Boeing’s “radical transonic wing design” is meant to help achieve. Meanwhile, when reading about aviation and aircraft, keep a grain of salt handy … the people who write those articles often have only the haziest notions of the subjects they’re assigned to cover.<\/p>\n For example, the\u00a0brouhaha (love<\/em> that word) over the Israeli F-15D that recently lost its canopy at 30,000 feet. Media reports, like this one on the Jalopnik website<\/a>, breathlessly portrayed the incident as a catastrophic emergency, one from which the crew’s safe recovery was nothing less than a miracle. Which gets clicks, and I suppose that’s what it’s all about.<\/p>\n In fact, though, there have been other F-15 canopy losses over the years. I once talked to a fellow Eagle driver who lost his canopy in a single-seat F-15A; he said it was no big deal. The windscreen, which is fixed to the airplane, protected him from the wind blast. He lowered\u00a0the seat, pulled the throttles back, descended to a lower altitude, and\u00a0found a safe place to land … which is exactly what the Israeli aircrew did in the most recent incident, the difference being they were flying a two-seat family model. The guy in back was exposed to considerably more wind blast than the guy in front, but he survived … he didn’t even lose his helmet.<\/p>\n
\n
![\"20190108141407_10](\"https:\/\/farm8.staticflickr.com\/7867\/39715665123_6464f0c020_z.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\n