Surray Space Centre's minisatellite GPS hardware

On Fri, 14 Apr 2006 18:42:51 -0500, in a place far, far away, Pat
Flannery made the phosphor on my monitor glow in
such a way as to indicate that:

And speaking of real units, the French have just given this particular
unit the Legion Of Honour:
http://www.lileks.com/institute/publicity/lewis1.html
http://www.lileks.com/institute/publicity/lewis2.html

Somehow, Pat, you've never struck me as a Lileks fan.

Or did you just stumble on that via Google?

Rand Simberg wrote:


Somehow, Pat, you've never struck me as a Lileks fan.

Or did you just stumble on that via Google?


To tell you the truth, I don't remember how I stumbled on it; someone in
sci.space.history may have mentioned it, but it's hilarious.
The guy is from Fargo (100 miles to my east) and that makes his
observations even funnier, ranking right up there with Bruce McCall's
autogyro and Bulgemobile infested "World Of Tomorrow" future that was
highlighted in his "Zany Afternoons" book (check out the Caproni-Moroni
C2 "Scud" experimental Italian fighter plane on this webpage:
http://www.fiddlersgreen.net/AC/way-weird/weird.htm ).
The Lileks cookbook commentaries actually had me crying I was laughing
so loud:
http://www.lileks.com/institute/gallery/index.html oh, yes, I remember
those little cookbooks and the strange recipes they contained to go with
that bizarre artwork... and it all seemed so perfectly normal at the
time. Hell, our barbecue grill had strange transparent red handles with
clear ends on them that looked for all the world like life-size
projecting male nipples when seen end on. What in God's name _were_ the
designers thinking?
"We want this barbecue grill to say 'MANLY' in no uncertain terms!"
"Hey boss...how about if we put handles on it that looked like
projecting male nipples?"
"By God, get that man a shaker of Martinis! He's going to be moving up
in this company fast!"
Here's the spooky part of Lileks' site....many, many, years back my
friends and I went down to Minneapolis to see Gene Roddenberry
speak...he spoke in the motel we stayed at:
http://www.lileks.com/mpls/modern/th...ird/index.html
We found nothing at all odd about this place, which seemed right at home
in the midwest.
And that's the important part of Lileks' website- it lets you get out of
a tempocentric frame of mind, and realize that our present civilization
is probably going to look every bit as bizarre and funny when seen from
forty or fifty years down the road.
There we were, hundreds of Star Trek fans, watching the Star Trek
blooper reels, never realizing that we were captives inside of a
space-going Native American civilization of some sort, and that the
main computer of The Great Thunderbird Of The Galaxy (which probably
looked something like this:
http://www.lileks.com/institute/compupromo/1.html ) was malfunctioning,
allowing us to become the possible target of an asteroid! :-)

Pat