It seems to me that Saturday Night Live has not been very funny recently except for Tina on Sarah Palin. And I am not particularly interested in the Eric Massa fiasco, but this is very funny. (Please excuse the ad – this is NBC after all so they have to have an ad.)
All posts by Steve Stern
Ferraris, McLarens, Mercedei, and Red Bulls, Oh my….the F1 season starts
The weekend, the Formula One racing season starts in Bahrain. I am thrilled. The favored cars are Ferrari, McLaren, Mercedes, and Red Bull. (For an earlier post that is a very short explanation of F1 – as it is usually called – click here or click here for a longer Wikipedia explanation.) The fact that Red Bull is one of the favorites just goes to show how much money can be made in the energy drink biz.
F1 is pretty much considered the pinnacle of auto racing. In an effort to slow the cars down and bring the costs back into some form of reasonableness – the top teams were spending over $400 million per season – the engines have been made smaller; but they are still staggering fast cars. They are now only 2.4 liter engines that can rev to 18,000RPM and put out around 700HP – in a car that only weighs 1334 lbs. They can go from 0 to 100 km/h (62mph) in about 1.5 seconds, and 0 to 200 km/h in about 3.8. Over and over again for a couple of hours. They have a top speed of about 225 mph.
One thing I like about F1 is how international the drivers are with 2 British, 6 German, 1 Australian, 2 Brazilian, 3 Spanish, 1 Polish, 1 Russian, 2 Italian, I Swiss, 1 Finnish, 1 Indian, and 1 Japanese driver racing this year. That is a total of only 22 drivers and they all must have a FIA - Fédération Internationale de l'Automobile -Super Licence.
The favorite drivers are Fernando Alonso, Felipe Massa, Jenson Button,Sebastian
Vettel, Lewis Hamilton, Michael Schumacher, and Nico Rosberg shown below.
The cars themselves are ridiculous in their complexity with all sorts of little areo devises to make them slip through the air – every team has it's own windtunnel – and inverted wings to push them down to the ground so they will hang on to road better. The cars are meticulously made, but the resulting design is an acquired taste at best.
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Ever wonder why a Big Mac is so cheap
I have no idea how this happened, but, somehow we – we being you and I as represented by the US Government – pay people to grow stuff that we pay other people to tell us we shouldn't eat.
Happy Birthday dear Charlotte
At Fort Baker with a couple of above average Grandkids
A couple of days ago, I met my daughter, Samantha, and my Grandkids, Charlotte and August at Ft. Baker. In mid 1965, I was stationed there. Well, not actually, I lived at Ft. Baker, I was stationed at Hamilton Air Base. Well, maybe not actually, again, I slept at Ft. Baker, worked out of Hamilton, and lived during my off hours in the Haight. Let me explain.
I was a sergeant in the Army and a driver for Army General Andrew Lolly. I had been stationed at Ft. Bliss Texas, teaching HAWK – Homing All the Way Killer air defense missile – to German Air Force troops but was transferred to California for my last six months in the Army. I know, I know, rough duty, but somebody had to do it.
As an aside: General Lolly was an Army general but had been given command of the 8th Region of NORAD -Wikipedia says that NORAD pronounced NORR-ad means North American Aerospace Defense Command but, I think, at the time it meant North American Air Defense – making him the only Army commander of what was basically an Air Force show. Rumor had it that Lolly was given the 8th because it was the worst preforming Region. General Lolly was an all around great guy – especially to enlisted men – and by the time he left, the 8th Region was the best unit in NORAD. end aside.
So I was working for General Lolly who was stationed at Hamilton. Because I was in the Army, I was assigned to Headquarters Company at Fort Baker which was really the headquarters for a Nike Hercules missile battalion deployed around the Bay Area and assigned to NORAD.
The Nike missiles, armed and ready to go, were there because we were scared shitless that the Soviets were going to attack us at any minute. The Soviets were even worse than the Germans because they were Godless heathens, just like the Islamic Jihadists are even worse than the Soviets because they are religious fanatics who don’t believe in our merciful, compassionate God. But, don’t worry, the next enemies will be even worse (sarcasm intentional).
Meanwhile, I had met a woman who lived on Masonic Street just above Haight and I spend all my free time with her. But Ft. Baker was a great place to sleep and it has now been turned into a upscale retreat center. So I thought it would be fun to take a look at the place. Since it is in Marin, meeting Samantha and the Grandkids seemed perfect.
Ft. Baker looked good as did the view from one of the Herc Batteries.
And the grandkids looked great!