Borepatch

I am surprised at my reaction to the Artemis II mission.  I mean, it's a huge bucket of money to throw at well connected aerospace contr...

Photo via The Silicon Graybeard . Sure, NASA spends taxpayer money like a drunken sailor.  Sure, Congress is using this program to throw tax...

This is Jeremy Clarkson from 1998, four years before he rebooted the Top Gear show.  They still had F-14s on the carrier.  This is a very co...

This is perhaps the Platonic Christmas song. 

This week is Thanksgiving* and so calls for what is perhaps the most American of all classical music, Aaron Copeland's Appalachian Sprin...

  If you are of a certain age, you will remember this Pultizer Prize winning photograph of a US Air Force officer returning from the Hanoi H...

This song is an anthem from Old America.  I listened to this as a teenager, and you (Old Farts) know how old I am.  This is from a time when...

The most Bad Ass Indian tribe in the old west was not the Lakota that did in the 7th Cavalry, but rather the Comanche.  S. C. Gwynne tells t...

We did it by treated German POWs held in the USA well.  Not just the US Government, but the American people treated them well.  They had bee...

I never knew he could play the piano, or that Johnny could play drums.  Or that Sid Caesar could play sax.

Porgy & Bess was first performed in 1935 and sadly has peaked.  Perhaps unsurprisingly, it was popular in the Soviet Union during the Co...

I was born by God's dear Grace in an extraordinary place.  Happy Birthday to that place. I pledge allegiance to that flag, and if that b...

There are some great video shots of the ship under tow in this video.

And then the *real* police show up.  Pure gold.

So this guy has a hydraulic press and he runs both a 100 year old American sledge hammer and a new (Harbor Freight looking) Chinese one thro...

The National Portrait Gallery has acquired the oldest photo of a First Lady , an 1846 daguerreotype of Dolly Madison.  This is a very cool p...

The Queen of the World and I were talking today, remembering the bicentennial celebration in 1976.  She pointed out that two years from now ...

The Queen Of The World sent me this sad story : The   ship's   remarkable speed earned it the coveted Blue Riband award from Great Brita...

The mid-20th Century was the high point of the much appreciated and much lamented in its passing "Mid-Brow"* culture: a set of soc...

Alternate title: how The United States accidentally committed suicide. Co-blogger and Brother-From-Another-Mother ASM826 and I have had a nu...