You know, when you travel, you have to stay somewhere. I guess you could sleep outdoors, but that’s a good way to get robbed or rousted by the po-lice.
So you need to sleep somewhere. Like a hotel or motel.
(I thought the movie was a little twee, but I do like that scene.)
From 1962, “The Great Tradition”, a promo film for the American Hotel Association.
Bonus: Another one I’m pretty sure I haven’t used (and I think I’d remember: it doesn’t turn up in a search): “Wings to Viking Land”. Really, “Viking Land”.
(Of course, she won an Oscar as best supporting actress for “The Last Picture Show”. Interestingly, she beat Ellen Burstyn who was also nominated for the same film.)
Bonus #1: “The Ultimate Supersonic Interceptor – F-106 Delta Dart” from the Dark Skies channel.
Back in the day, when I worked for Four Letter Computer Company in Round Rock that has nothing to do with fruit, they tried to force a new case management system on us called “Delta”. Many of the techs felt they would have been better off converting the money spent to $100 bills, piling them in the parking lot and setting them on fire.
I had a photo of the F-106 hanging in my cube with the caption “The only good Delta”.
Bonus #2: Okay, this one is longer, but it is a bonus: “Wings” from the Discovery Channel on the XB-70 Valkyrie. Speaking of #TheFutureWeCouldHaveHad: yes, it was a Mach 3 bomber, but it also served as a testbed for a lot of the tech that was intended to go into the SST.
Is it just me, or does the Tu-144 remind folks a lot of the XB-70? Granted, it lacks the two vertical stabilizers, but other than that…
Yeah, kind of a bad look there if you punch out and let your passengers get spread evenly over several acres of Siberian landscape. Sort of like the captain deserting a sinking ship ahead of the passengers and the rest of the crew.
Bruce Kirby, another one of those knock-around actors who was in just about every 1970’s detective show except that one.
Most notably, he was Sgt. Kramer in “Columbo”. He also had several guest shots on “The Rockford Files”, and appeared on “Banacek” and “McCloud” among many other credits. (He was also the police captain on “Holmes and Yoyo”.) And his credits go all the way back to “Car 54, Where Are You?”
Antonio Sabàto. He was most famous as one of the drivers in “Grand Prix”. He did a lot of Italian movies including “Escape from the Bronx” and “Ritornano quelli della calibro 38”.
Today’s video goes out to Gregg “Tuesday Morning Quarterback” Easterbrook. From 2014, a talk in the Theodore von Kármán lecture series at JPL, on NASA’s planned Asteroid Redirect Robotic Mission (ARRM).
I have a great idea for a TV series, if there was a network out there that actually did science stuff: “Cool But Cancelled”, a series devoted to all the awesome proposed space age projects that ended up getting cancelled in favor of various government boondoggles.
#TheFutureWeCouldHaveHad
Unrelated bonus: this is an old documentary from Oak Ridge (produced for the Atomic Energy Commission) about their experimental molten-salt reactor. I’m putting this here mostly because I like the idea of “molten salt”, and y’all know I’m a nuclear geek.
He did some theater work, but was mostly a TV and movie actor. He was “Julio”, Fred’s sidekick on “Sanford and Son”, Carlos “El Puerco” Valdez (the guy who kidnapped Jessica) on “Soap”, and “Chano”, one of the detectives in the early seasons of “Barney Miller”. He also did a lot of guest appearances, including nearly every major detective show of the 1970s (except that one): “Police Story”, “Banacek”, “Hawaii 5-0” (the good one), “Columbo”, “McCloud”, “Mission: Impossible”, and the list goes on. He was also Lieutenant Rodriguez in the early episodes of “Miami Vice” (that character got killed off and was replaced by Edward James Olmos’s “Martin Castillo”).
His movie credits include “Beneath the Planet of the Apes” and, interestingly, “The Other Side of the Wind“.
I haven’t put up any RoadRich bait recently, so today is his day.
“The Story Of Hong Kong’s Kai Tak Airport”.
I’m fairly sure this is a view from the ground of a 747 on final to Kai Tak.
And here’s a cockpit view of the Kai Tak approach.
Question for anyone who has the new Microsoft Flight Simulator: can you set up an approach and fly in to the virtual Kai Tak?
“Captain Joe” explains V1, Vr, and V2. If you watch movies (well, if you watch the kind of movies we watch) you’ll hear the pilots calling out those speeds. But what exactly are they?
“Crawl through a B-29 Superfortress IN FLIGHT!”
What is it like to punch out of an F-15 at 600 knots?
“Winter Olympic Playground 1960” is a vintage promo film for Squaw Valley, California, and the facilities there. Squaw Valley was the site of the 1960 Winter Olympics, and is about 40 miles from Reno. (The film was done by the Harrah’s Club casino in Reno: it looks like it was still there when I was there (with a slight name change), but it closed permanently in March of 2020.)