Blue Angels Hold First-Ever Open Tryouts

PENSACOLA, FL—Harold Enderby's friends say that when he first saw the Navy's televised announcement that the Flight Demonstration Squadron, better known as the Blue Angels, would be holding open tryouts for the first time in its history, the lifelong aviation buff turned to his fellow sanitation workers at Doug's Dugout Bar-N-Grill and said, "Mark my words—I'm going to be a Blue Angel if it's the last thing I do."

And this Sunday, that dream came true for an incredible 43 seconds, as Enderby got the chance to fly the famed Blue Angels' F/A-18 Hornet directly into the tarmac during the first day of the Navy's most dramatic—and colorful—audition program ever.

Since 1946, the Blue Angels have recruited only elite military fighter pilots. But this week and this week only, the Navy is giving the public a rare treat: allowing ordinary, everyday citizens a chance to try out for the world's premiere stunt flying team. Memorial services for Enderby, along with five other late aspiring aviators and 81 others from the assembled crowd and surrounding communities, will begin Friday and continue throughout the month.

"Some of these folks may not have worked their way through four years of the Naval Academy, 10 years of flying missions as a naval aviator on three different carriers, two sessions at the fighter school at Miramar, and another 18 months of special aerobatics and flight operations here at Pensacola—like I did—but they sure had spirit," Blue Angel member Johnny Krewsh said. "They gave it their all and that's what counts. My hat is off to them, and to their surviving family members."

With would-be pilots lining up by the thousands and crowds predicted to grow even larger over the next six days, the excitement and death toll are both expected to rise.

"It was quite a sight to see so many citizens arriving at the airbase entrance just hours after the initial announcement," said Lt. Cmdr. Maxfield Walton, the officer in charge of registering and interviewing the excited applicants, as well as contacting their next of kin. "Who knows? Your old math teacher, a cab driver, the guy in the next cubicle who can't seem to do anything right—anybody could be the next Chuck Yeager. Now this is their chance to strap themselves into a† $41 million 1,200 mile-per-hour airplane and show us what they can do."

Though some of the amateur Angels got into the cockpit, suddenly realized they didn't know what they were doing, and jumped right back out, Navy officials said all who put aside their fears or lack of experience or physical disability to climb aboard a fighter jet were stars today.
The once-in-a-lifetime tryouts will continue throughout the week. But long after the flames resulting from this unique recruiting experiment have died—which FEMA personnel said should happen within 10 days—the fire of these plucky applicants' enthusiasm will shine on.

The enthusiasm of Erin Rappaport, a Springfield, IL eighth-grader who played flight simulators on her PlayStation and impressed Naval flight teams when she sat in the F/A-18 Hornet's cockpit for the first time and already knew, or could guess,† the functions of many of the jet's 188 different controls.

"That sounds just like Erin," said Rappaport's math teacher, Janice Billingsly. "We'll miss her very much."

Erin wasn't the only special person who flew here today; she wasn't the only female, or the only person to crash into Pino's Pizza on Grove Avenue, or even the youngest. But, witnesses said, she displayed incredible grit and a can-do attitude to her classmates who were inside eating pizza when she tried to fly by and wave.

Officials also singled out the determination of San Dimas, CA's Alfred K. McAllister—affectionately described by Blue Angels flight instructor Harmon Links as a "hell of a tough old guy"—who took off and just kept going.

"We almost couldn't find enough phone books for him to sit on, and he decided against the helmet because it knocked off his glasses," Links said. "But what a trooper. He never once looked back. Radar finally lost track of him about 200 miles out over the Atlantic, still climbing."
"I think he thought he got to keep the plane!" Links added. "If we ever locate and recover the wreckage, we hope to give him the proper burial he deserves."

Others noted the beaming face of Peter Collsworthy, a foreman at an Akron, OH cement plant for the past 25 years, who got the biggest roars from the crowd by far.

"He may have flunked the 'near-miss' part of the high-speed aerobatic pass, caused the death of a man with 17 years' flight experience when he sheared the wing off of Cmdr. Hickock's plane, vomited into his helmet, panicked, inverted the aircraft with the throttles maxed, and hit Mach 1 just before crashing into bleachers full of spectators with almost a full load of fuel," Blue Angels commanding officer Brock Saxon said. "But he nailed the steep climb and the steep dive, and he certainly had showmanship. If there's one thing I keep telling my cadets, it's that you can't teach enthusiasm. I think we all learned a little something about the power of raw enthusiasm here today."

"That crowd was rocking out to 'Danger Zone' when he plummeted into them at the speed of sound," said Lois Collsworthy, Peter's widow. "That would have meant a lot to him. He always loved that song."

--Thanks Onion, Credit their November 25, 2008 Issue 44•48

Scientists: "Turns out we don't know jack shit"

Colossal squid caught off Antarctica.

So it turns out the giant squid has an even more giant cousin, the colossal squid. And it lives now, in the deep sea. It's like one of the biggest animals to ever live on planet Earth, and it's just now in our modern, we-know-everything age of 2008 being discovered. They don't even know the gender of the 33-foot specimen in storage. Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens: open mouth, insert foot.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7367774.stm

How big will this story get???

"For him [Barak Obama] to an offer an inartful explanation of that which informs these people’s lives and voting patterns only underlines his weakness with this constituency."

Here are the comments from a San Francisco Fundraiser (link to original story plus audio):

OBAMA: "So, it depends on where you are, but I think it's fair to say that the places where we are going to have to do the most work are the places where people feel most cynical about government. The people are mis-appre...I think they're misunderstanding why the demographics in our, in this contest have broken out as they are. Because everybody just ascribes it to 'white working-class don't wanna work -- don't wanna vote for the black guy.' That's...there were intimations of that in an article in the Sunday New York Times today - kind of implies that it's sort of a race thing.

Here's how it is: in a lot of these communities in big industrial states like Ohio and Pennsylvania, people have been beaten down so long, and they feel so betrayed by government, and when they hear a pitch that is premised on not being cynical about government, then a part of them just doesn't buy it. And when it's delivered by -- it's true that when it's delivered by a 46-year-old black man named Barack Obama (laugher), then that adds another layer of skepticism (laughter).

But -- so the questions you're most likely to get about me, 'Well, what is this guy going to do for me? What's the concrete thing?' What they wanna hear is -- so, we'll give you talking points about what we're proposing -- close tax loopholes, roll back, you know, the tax cuts for the top 1 percent. Obama's gonna give tax breaks to middle-class folks and we're gonna provide health care for every American. So we'll go down a series of talking points.

But the truth is, is that, our challenge is to get people persuaded that we can make progress when there's not evidence of that in their daily lives. You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. So it's not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

Um, now these are in some communities, you know. I think what you'll find is, is that people of every background -- there are gonna be a mix of people, you can go in the toughest neighborhoods, you know working-class lunch-pail folks, you'll find Obama enthusiasts. And you can go into places where you think I'd be very strong and people will just be skeptical. The important thing is that you show up and you're doing what you're doing."

So how big is it? I got slammed after Ohio and Texas after counting Hillary out. I think as just as Al Gore and Jimmy Carter were about to weigh in to call on Hillary to withdraw, she's been tossed another lifesaver. Can she win big in 10 days???

More Onion Hilarity

Delicious Snacks Distract Congressmen From Horrors Of War

The Onion Movie

This totally missed my radar. Apparently, The Onion has been producing a movie, and it's coming to DVD.

Here's the trailer:



And here's the news source.

There Will Be Blood

A masterpiece, it is not. It's certainly ambitious, tries to be original, to stay true to its own voice and not cower in the face of what's safe, easy, and popular. And for the first half, it tells a damn good story. Sadly, where There Will Be Blood goes wrong is at the halfway point, when a crucial plot development occurs that pretty much derails the film's disciplined focus and, ultimately, severely dilutes its impact.

Which is a shame, since this really could've been a powerful movie. It sets itself up to be a dark and moving father-son story, and there are scenes after the halfway point that would've resonated so much more, had they not been overshadowed by the aforementioned disappointing turn the movie decides to take.

Perhaps not coincidentally, it's this turn at which director Paul Thomas Anderson's adaptation of Uptor Sinclair's Oil! ends, and his own take on the material begins.

This is not to say the movie simply stinks during the second half. In fact, there are some pretty entertaining parts, such as the infamous "I drink your milkshake!" scene (ironic how that phrase has become a catchphrase representing the film, even though it really sums up absolutely nothing relevant to the story at all). But those entertaining moments come at a cost—namely, betraying the story's original direction in favor of pointless scenery-chewing.

Daniel Day-Lewis is perhaps one of the few actors who can make scenery-chewing seem like the reason why we have actors. Luckily, Day-Lewis also knows how to imbue his characters with subtler stuff than that, and it's in moments where we see quieter, more complex statements of his suppressed rage and emotional pain that make his performance truly noteworthy.

In the end, the film is pretty odd, a definite mixed bag of memorable scenes, of staggering missed potential, of moments that are somewhere between amusing and disturbing. In some ways, There Will Be Blood feels both undercooked and overcooked at the same time. There are enough arresting parts to prevent the film from simply being dismissed as completely misguided, but the level of greatness it tries to achieve easily escapes the movie's grasp by quite some distance.

Still, this shows that some people in Hollywood are at least trying to make good dramas that take genuine risks, and that's definitely an encouraging sign for American creativity.

Elijah Cummings: "Say it ain't so."

Well, not exactly. But he said something to that effect at Roger Clemens' hearing:

"It's hard to believe you, sir. I hate to say that," said Representative Elijah Cummings. "You're one of my heroes, but it's hard to believe."

Here's the article.

I could go for a bottle of Elijah Craig right now.