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Category: rockets

You’ll Shoot Your Eye Out, Kid — But It’ll Be Awesome

You’ll Shoot Your Eye Out, Kid — But It’ll Be Awesome

I think that there’s less of a chance of you shooting your eye out, and more of a chance of you burning your house down — or the neighbor’s house down. I guess burning the neighbor’s house down isn’t really the worst thing you can do. I mean, you come out ahead because you still have a house, and you got to shoot off some kick-ass rockets.

It’s sort of like siting in a café, sipping coffee, and thinking about what brand of TV dinner you’ll have tonight while watching a train crash into the side of a building a block over. Naturally, it sucks that there was a train crash 20 feet away and you can still hear the sound of bones connecting with metal every night as you lay in bed, but you sill got to have your microwaved chicken alfredo. At least railway workers aren’t unceremoniously picking bits of you out of a shrubbery and throwing you into a plastic bag.

As long as you’re better off than someone else, there’s not much to complain about.

Wernher Von Braun, Eat Your Heart Out

Wernher Von Braun, Eat Your Heart Out

A lot of people like to gripe about how good things were way back when. Well what about right now? I’m sure that way back when was all very well and good, but it’s best not to ignore the present. If you aren’t careful it might become the past before you even have time to notice it’s happening. This video is already three years old. We landed on the moon forty-four years ago. It’s about time we start doing something right now. The sky is no longer the limit, the Earth has become an afterthought, and gravity is just a suggestion. Let’s get busy.

Last one to Mars buys the first round of space beers.

Why Is The United States The Greatest Thing In The History Of Ever?

Why Is The United States The Greatest Thing In The History Of Ever?


You know, Canada’s nice. Too nice, according to Canadians, but they’re just being, well, too nice about the whole thing. They don’t want you to feel bad about how nice they are. That wouldn’t be nice. The British Isles are fairly pleasant. They have nuclear weapons, but I never get the impression they’d use them or anything. They’re like the hood ornament on a Jaguar. It doesn’t matter what’s on the hood, because the car is always in the shop. I think Finnish people are nice, or would be, at least, if they would answer a question without staring at their shoes. Australians are a blast, of course. I think it’s all the Foster’s and everything being poisonous in their country that makes them so jolly. Why be glum if even the fuzzy, cute animals might drop you where you stand? The orchestra played at a 12 degee pitch on the Titanic, didn’t it? Might as well; it’s less work than panicking.

No, the US is not the greatest thing in the history of ever because we’re all nice, or fun, or polite, or smart, or salubrious, or even interesting. We’re the Greatest thing in the history of ever because we spent $25 billion just so we could do donuts on Old Man Moon’s lawn.

The rest of our Federal budget? We wasted it.

You Had Me At “Homemade Rocket”

You Had Me At “Homemade Rocket”


This one reached 121,000 feet.  Kewl. Past Kewl.

But of course, “homemade rocket” isn’t such a big deal, is it? Have we gone so far down the formal education/hell-bent-for-an-IPO rathole that we’ve forgotten that pretty much everything cool is homemade at first? Robert Goddard, who damn near invented modern rocketry all by his lonesome, essentially did it by going to the library and shooting things off in his yard. You can find this video on Google, which was started in a friend’s garage. Most cool things in this world are, you know.

We need more homemade everything. Especially cocktails. But rockets, too. And rockets and cocktails is best, I think.

[Thanks to Charles Schneider for sending that one along]