Author: TSO

The only ones I know of are the M60’s we had in the VAARNG that didn’t get proper PMCS. Other than that, how many semi-automatic machine guns are there?

(This post is traffic/comment bait, not a serious question.)

Who is this chick anyway? I googled her and she looks like the Tuff Toy my dogs have been fighting over for a year plus.

UPDATE: As Claymore aptly pointed out to me, does this mean that Freedom of Speech for the press applies only to quill and parchment writing?

UPDATE x2: Per comment below, I give you the auto-crossbow.

We need to move Congress on this immediately. Let’s get Dog Chew Toy chick to be our spokes-sapien.

Fricken hilarious.

As I have made clear in the past, I am a bit of a zealot for the belief that everyone should read “A Short History of Nearly Everything” by Bill Bryson. It’s history, science, humor all rolled into one. In short, it’s the best book I’ve ever read. Naturally, none of you will read it.

Nonetheless, I was listening to it at work yesterday and it was discussing the early days of Paleontology and a rather memorable Hatfields/McCoy’s type fight between two bone hunters. Wiki actually has a fairly decent discussion of it:

The Bone Wars, also known as the “Great Dinosaur Rush”,[1] refers to a period of intense fossil speculation and discovery during the Gilded Age of American history, marked by a heated rivalry between Edward Drinker Cope (of the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia) and Othniel Charles Marsh (of the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale). Each of the two paleontologists used underhanded methods to try to out-compete the other in the field, resorting to bribery, theft, and destruction of bones. Each scientist also attacked the other in scientific publications, seeking to ruin his credibility and have his funding cut off.

Their search for fossils led them west to rich bone beds in Colorado, Nebraska, and Wyoming. From 1877 to 1892, both paleontologists used their wealth and influence to finance their own expeditions and to procure services and dinosaur bones from fossil hunters. By the end of the Bone Wars, both men had exhausted their funds in the pursuit of paleontological supremacy.

Cope and Marsh were financially and socially ruined by their attempts to disgrace each other, but their contributions to science and the field of paleontology were massive, and provided substantial material for further work—both scientists left behind many unopened boxes of fossils after their deaths. The efforts of the two men led to over 142 new species of dinosaurs being discovered and described. The products of the Bone Wars resulted in an increase in knowledge of prehistoric life, and sparked the public’s interest in dinosaurs, leading to continued fossil excavation in North America in the decades to follow. Several historical books and fictional adaptations have been published about this period of intense fossil-hunting activity.

Anyway, I was doing some more research on it yesterday, and I cam across a PBS special on the issue that you can watch on your computer. If you have 50 minutes to yourself today, perhaps during lunch or something, I highly recommend you watch this. (Of course, saying that virtually guarantees no one will watch it.) Nonetheless, after the jump I have embedded the video “Dinosaur Wars” from PBS’ American Experience.
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If I was the RNC, I would run this ad 40x a day everywhere. Seriously. Chills.

Apologies for not linking to source, I honestly don’t remember where I found it.

Wanted to highlight the death of Sam Gibbons here today as well, since he passed yesterday. He was an irascible old bastard, and as left wing as the day is long, but man did that dude amuse me. He was much like Mr Rangel in that regard, who I’ve loved ever since a 3 minute ride on the trolley under the Capital one day when he berated me with a smile.

Sam M. Gibbons, a 17-term Democratic congressman from Florida who championed free trade and government support of health care, castigated Republican colleagues for “whimpering” and for six months was chairman of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee, died Wednesday at his home in Tampa. He was 92.

He was a student at the University of Florida and a member of R.O.T.C. when he was called to Army duty as a second lieutenant in the 101st Airborne Division. The night before the invasion of Normandy, he parachuted behind enemy lines at Utah Beach and led troops in a bloody battle. He won [Received you dumbasses] a Bronze Star and other medals.

There’s a pretty good post up at this site that talks more about him.

In Gibbons’ memoir I Was There – he described his experiences in WWII. It is peppered with details like how he replaced his gas mask with two cans of Schlitz beer before the D-Day drop.

“So with all this gear on me (the same for about 12,000 others), I was the third man to step out of plane #42, and dropping 800 feet to start what some have called ‘The Longest Day.’”

The story of how the paratroopers were dropped off course and scattered across the French countryside is widely known. Gibbons and a few other paratroopers managed to pull together and planned an attack on a nearby town.

“At the end of this council I brought out my two cans of beer, which we shared,” Gibbons wrote. “When the cans were empty we decided to leave them in the middle of the road as a monument to the first cans of Schlitz consumed in France and moved on.”

Chuck Oldham of Defense Media Network wrote that Gibbons’ story of the Allied landing in Normandy has always stuck with him:

Of all those stories … Gibbons’ story, written in a self-deprecating tone as it was in I Was There and popularized in Tom Brokaw’s The Greatest Generation, remains one that has always struck me as somehow being indicative of the American paratroopers’ fight during that early morning of June 6, 1944, with a young captain abruptly thrust into an unexpected leadership role, he and his men dropped far from their objectives, lost and improvising their way through a night of combat, and ‘marching toward the sound of gunfire.’

The young captain was with the 101st as it helped hold Bastogne during the Battle of the Bulge, and captured Hitler’s “Eagles Nest” facility.

I hope he and CSM Plumley are in Valhalla right now, bickering over a few cold ones. I’m going to buy one Schlitz on the way home, and consume in his honor. (At home mind you, not while travelling.)

UPDATE: Just a page from Brokaw’s The Greatest Generation discussing Mr. Gibbons:

Via TMZ.

I think I am taking bereavement leave.

This will mean nothing to 99% of you all, but for 2 of you, this will make you feel as good as it does me. Teddy Roosevelt finally won at Nationals Park….

As I was driving home from work (wife needed the car today) I was asking myself a science question, and didn’t have an answer. So, I figured I would throw it out to you chuckleheads, and see who has the biggest Physics brain.

What would the change be here on Terra Firma if the moon were in geostationary orbit instead of revolving the way it does now? (Assume that it is located at the same distance, but always present over South America.)

Obviously we would have no tides. But other than that, what? Would we be even more oblate that we are? The poles would still be somewhat flattened obviously, but would the earth be more egg shaped owing to the gravitational pull being a constant? What effect on tectonic movement? And while you are at it, do you think it would have changed history at all? I can’t help but wonder if man wouldn’t have set out West from Europe earlier to see why the moon was located there?

These are the questions that plague me, and I’ve noted in the past that we have some “big brains on Brad” so, any answer would be appreciated.