Archive for August 16th, 2010

Random hysterical notes.

Monday, August 16th, 2010

Interestingly, today is both:

The second link is by way of FARK. I was not aware until fairly recently that Kittinger not only held the record for highest parachute jump, he was also shot down over Vietnam and spent 11 months as a prisoner of war.

Ordinarily, I would suggest that someone needs to write a biography of Colonel Kittinger (he was a captain at the time of the jump, but retired from the Air Force as a colonel). But wait! Somebody has! (I have that book, but have not had a chance to read it yet. Craig Ryan’s The Pre-Astronauts: Manned Ballooning on the Threshold of Space is a pretty spiffy book, though, so I expect his work on Kittinger’s autobiography to be just as good.)

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Random notes: August 16, 2010.

Monday, August 16th, 2010

Obit watch: James J. Kilpatrick.

For those who are wondering, I’ll save you the trouble: I couldn’t find any “Point-Counterpoint” videos on YouTube, and Shana Alexander died in 2005.

In other news, Austin’s MetroRail service was disrupted this morning. Why? Well, someone found a mysterious package on the tracks that contained…a cow tongue studded with nails, along with a note (“incoherent”, according to the Statesman), and a photograph. There was also a glass jar found nearby with an unidentified liquid inside.

Edited to add: Lawrence sends along this link to cow tongues found nailed to trees at Prospect Park around this time last year. Speculation in the linked article is that this is some sort of Santeria ritual intended to stop gossip, which seems to fit in with speculation by Statesmen commentators.

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