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Sunday, January 27, 2013

Tales of a Legend....

As I have already declared someplace else on this blog, my favorite aircraft of all time is the Lockheed Martin SR-71 Blackbird. This plane and its pilots have a huge bagful of amazing tales to tell, but this following one, is the one that always warms up the cockles of my heart. In equal parts, about the capabilities of the plane, the confidence that the pilots had in the aircraft and MASSIVE FUCKING SHOWING OFF!

Taken from this website : http://gizmodo.com/5511236/the-thrill-of-flying-the-sr+71-blackbird


"In 1962, the first Blackbird successfully flew, and in 1966, the same year I graduated from high school, the Air Force began flying operational SR-71 missions. I came to the program in 1983 with a sterling record and a recommendation from my commander, completing the weeklong interview and meeting Walter, my partner for the next four years He would ride four feet behind me, working all the cameras, radios, and electronic jamming equipment. I joked that if we were ever captured, he was the spy and I was just the driver. He told me to keep the pointy end forward.

We trained for a year, flying out of Beale AFB in California , Kadena Airbase in Okinawa, and RAF Mildenhall in England . On a typical training mission, we would take off near Sacramento, refuel over Nevada, accelerate into Montana, obtain high Mach over Colorado, turn right over New Mexico, speed across the Los Angeles Basin, run up the West Coast, turn right at Seattle, then return to Beale. Total flight time: two hours and 40 minutes.

One day, high above Arizona , we were monitoring the radio traffic of all the mortal airplanes below us. First, a Cessna pilot asked the air traffic controllers to check his ground speed. 'Ninety knots,' ATC replied. A twin Bonanza soon made the same request. 'One-twenty on the ground,' was the reply. To our surprise, a navy F-18 came over the radio with a ground speed check. I knew exactly what he was doing. Of course, he had a ground speed indicator in his cockpit, but he wanted to let all the bug-smashers in the valley know what real speed was 'Dusty 52, we show you at 620 on the ground,' ATC responded. The situation was too ripe. I heard the click of Walter's mike button in the rear seat. In his most innocent voice, Walter startled the controller by asking for a ground speed check from 81,000 feet, clearly above controlled airspace. In a cool, professional voice, the controller replied, ' Aspen 20, I show you at 1,982 knots on the ground.' We did not hear another transmission on that frequency all the way to the coast."

Long live the legend of the Blackbird!




Monday, January 14, 2013

Fuckin' Ace.....

Why I love swearing.

1. Helps me get my anger out.
2. Provides my perspective of where I stand with things.
3. My ongoing fascination with the word "fuck".
4. The British accent. Swearing is made awesome by the Brits.
5. Simple humor
6. As a friend filtering mechanism.
7. Perpetual laziness towards an expansion of vocabulary.
8. A "will-never-fail" cultural ice-breaker.
9. A precursor to giving somebody a Welsh kiss.
10. To keep annoying people away.
11. Endless scope for improvement.

Tuesday, January 8, 2013

Remembering Stephen Fry.

Just as the passing of Christopher Hitchens was a great loss to the collective community that revels in his discourses about reason and objectivity and his polemic, the other Briton I think I have come to admire a lot is Stephen Fry. An eloquent speaker, staunch atheist, lovely bloke and so enormously literate and knowledgeable. Just listening to him speak about any ol' topic is a genuine pleasure.


Ramping Up.

If you want to work in the semiconductor industry, you better have passion for it. Buy, beg, steal, borrow that passion. That is fine.

Quality Engineering is like a purple dildo stuck up your colon. It does not come out. You will start liking it. Give it time.

Better be good at statistics. Get divorced, if that helps.

In here, you are always guilty. Guilty, until proven innocent by the occasional good news. And innocence is only proven by trace data and statistics.

Don't mess with women, is what I always say. It's never the right thing to do. But, stay out of the way of women who work in the semiconductor industry. They have huge brains and brawn and that indelible charm. Men, it seems, are at a natural disadvantage for once.

Be assertive. Or, get fired. Eventually.

Improvement Plans need improvement plans. They are recorded in Excel files that need an entry in another Excel file to be kept track of.

Start liking the idea of living in meetings and doing all your work after office hours. Also, those meeting things. They work.

Learn to keep up with the gazillion acronyms. Conversely, if your English is shit, you can come up with as many acronyms as you can.

The two most important laws to know are these : Moore's and Murphy's.







Monday, January 7, 2013

Asaram Facepalm.

Right now, I am going to say that I am peaceful and a reasonable person. I do not wish to hurt any other person just because they said something, however unkind. As a proponent of the right to absolute Freedom of Speech, I would accord that liberty to every citizen of India. Unfortunately, I am also not the kind of person, who will bury his anger deep inside. So, the best compromise that I have found, is to ramble and rant in cyberspace. These black and white bits provide the necessary catharsis. I also do apologize in advance, for my profane words and accusations. It is just me, trying to vent some anger, in the most politically correct way that I could find. Also, to make perfectly clear, I am not in the least homophobic and do not wish to present that already repressed section of society, in a wrong light. 

Asaram Bapu, as he is called, is a religious figure in India with a considerable fan following. In his latest brain farts, he comes out and cleanly accuses the gang rape victim of being equally responsible for the horrible atrocities that she had to suffer at the hands of her perpetrators. "Taali do haath se bajti hai", which when translated to English, means "It takes 2 hands to clap". I propose this. And this is only a proposal. As and when this brain-dead guru is alone in his rich haven, trying to catch a bit of rest after bullshitting people all day long, I and 5 clones of me catch hold of him. Tie his feet up and then tear his clothes out. Take turns raping him, utterly, without taking so much as a bit of rest. And after our bodies are spent, take a rusty old crowbar, and attempt to disembowel him through his colon. With all the force left in the 6 me's. Repeatedly, thrust that piece of blunt metal into his body to violate any semblance of human and humanity left in him. And I keep repeating that action, till he says, "Please do not hurt me. I am only your brother ". At which point, the next course of action would be to beat him senseless with that same crowbar, carry him out in a vehicle, throw him out in wilderness where only hyenas will find him and then try to run him over with the vehicle.

I write this grisly analogical reminder, of the horrible turn of events to serve as a reminder to anybody who wants to say that the girl was at blame. If your hormones and misogyny are not under your control, it is not the girl who is at fault.


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As an addendum, I am going to try and name every person who holds the same view. I won't be shocked if the list is quite long and includes some very famous/powerful/educated/erst-while sensible people.

Abu Azmi - Politician of the SP party.
Vibha Rao -
Mohan Bhagwat. - RSS Chief
Abhijeet Mukherjee - Son of the current President of India, Pranab Mukherjee.
Kakoli Ghosh Dastidar- Trinamool Congress MP.
Anisur Rahaman - Communist Party of India (Marxist) leader
Satyapal Singh - Mumbai Police Chief (Not exactly the same accusation, but calling sex education responsible for rapes is just plain stupid.)



Saturday, January 5, 2013

Remembering Christopher Hitchens.

Actually you rotten squirt of vaginal fluid, the meaning of life is that which the individual determines for themselves. What kind of pathetic wart on a diseased monkey's cock must you be to take joy in the passing of a person who committed no crime towards others or any misdeed worthy of such a shameful comment? Even the poorly-educated, xenophobic hypocrite in the sky that you prostrate yourself before would bitch-slap you given the chance.

-- Top rated comment on the video posted below.


*Huge Round of Applause*