Month: July 2005

I HATE it when that happens.

I only got a 60%. It starts out kind of hard, but it gets easier as you go along.

I didn’t even finish the Asia quiz.

ALTPICK.COM is a site for buyers to find artists, illustrators, designers, multimedia production companies, musicians, photographers, video directors, animators and other creative persons, and for all types of artists to display samples of their work.

Here are some illustrators:

Edel Rodriguez
Revelation Studios
Echo Chernik
Doug Erb
Jib Hunt
Alicia Buelow
Martha Rich
Brian Raszka
Jeff Soto
Melinda Beck
Linda Zacks
Elliott Golden
Joshua Krause
Brian Stauffer
Rudy Gutierrez
Victoria Kann
Autumn Whitehurst
Anja Kroencke
Gary Baseman

more more

“It is typical to have extreme temperatures this time of year,” said Anton Haffer, the National Weather Service’s chief meteorologist for Phoenix.

Haffer said in a telephone interview that in 15 years of forecasting here, he doesn’t recall a summer when new record highs weren’t set. There’s a good reason why: Reliable records for U.S. weather data go back only to 1895. Many dots remain to be placed under the bell curve of this country’s temperatures.

Another way to put the current heat wave into perspective:

“While many daily record temperatures have been set, there have been relatively few monthly or all-time records noted in the Southwest,” said John Leslie, a public affairs officer for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which is the weather service’s parent organization.

“While this region is unarguably in the midst of a significant heat wave, spells of very hot weather are not uncommon during the summer months,” Leslie told LiveScience.

1944 Adolf Hitler survives an assassination attempt
1955 Joel is born (50 years ago).
1969 Moon Landing (Zoom in).
1976 Viking 1 Lander successfully lands on Mars.
1994 Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9‘s Fragment Q1 hits Jupiter

White’s Hummingbird – Barnstormer J Herman Banning

Hummingbird 1926
engine: 90hp Curtiss OX-5
span: 33’2″
length: 23’6″
load: 1000#
range: 375
cost: $2,150

In the book, Black Eagles, by Jim Hastings, on page 60, J H Banning states: “In 1924 Des Moines, I found WW1 ace [?] Raymond Fisher to teach me to fly.” Banning then buys his own Hummingbird biplane, naming it Miss Ames.

Banning attended Iowa State College, and became the first black to receive a CAA pilot’s license, #1324. He bought the Hummingbird to use in the 1928 Iowa Goodwill Air Tour.

In the early 1920s J. Herman Banning (originally from Oklahoma) went to Chicago with the dream of becoming a pilot. When he tried to enter aviation school, no school would admit him because of his race. So he took lessons from Ray Fisher of Des Moines and moved to Ames to attend Iowa State College. Banning became the first black citizen to receive a pilot’s license from the government – number 1324.

Banning’s claim to fame is first that he was the nation’s first licensed black male pilot. Banning and another black pilot, Thomas C. Allen became the first black pilots to fly coast-to-coast from Los Angeles to Long Island, NY, in 1932. Using a plane pieced together from junkyard parts, they made the 3,300 mile trip in less than 42 hours aloft. However, the trip actually required 21 days to complete because the pilots had to raise money each time they stopped. Banning was a passenger in a biplane, sitting in the front open cockpit without controls, during a San Diego air show. The Navy pilot at the controls, trying to impress his more accomplished passenger, pulled the nose of the tiny plane up into a steep climb. The plane stalled and fell into a fatal spin in front of hundreds of horrified spectators.

James Herman Banning operated the J. H. Banning Auto Repair Shop in Ames from 1922 to 1928.

Flyers In Search of a Dream Video

The Natural History Museum of Los Angeles has a Box of Stuff (1228 Sam Moore Papers, 1931-1936)

We all love drinking.
We all love taking trips to see new and exotic cities.
It’s only natural that we should combine the two.

We are the proponents of an all-new way to enjoy one’s surroundings – Drunken Tourism.