Ramblings’ Journal is Still Sleeping

This year’s Peachtree Road Race t-shirts weren’t too bad looking. They were certainly better than the other designs that were being considered.

Next year, I’ll have one of my own….

I was as much a Michael Jackson fan as anyone. After all, he was a heck of a musician. Nearly 20 years ago.

More recently, he had become a sad parody of himself, more memorable for his court cases and dangling of his kid out a Berlin hotel room window. Or as one person put it, going from being a pretty good looking young black boy to an ugly old white woman.

While I’m sorry the man is dead, he’s not the President. Enough of the wall-to-wall coverage already!

Of course, we won’t be so lucky. There’s going to be a full-fledged Viking funeral, complete with funeral pyre and the sending of his coffin-laden ship off to Valhalla, and the requisite tear-filled images on television, and non-stop video updates (like Fox’s Idol rerun of MJ songs last Monday night) until we all puke.

Behind this, Big Brother (which comes back to CBS next week), Bridezillas (I finally saw a piece of this over the weekend — and it’s a real trainwreck), and the Fox Reality Channel almost seem tame by comparison.

Just damn.

Sarah Palin announced Friday afternoon that she was going to be stepping down from the governor’s office because she’s not going to be a “conventional lame duck.”

She’s got a year and a half left in her term. Of course most pundits, both mainstream and not, are speculating that this will allow the one-time GOP VP candidate to concentrate on running for the GOP Presidential nod for 2012. She certainly needs to up her profile to get more than the farthest right wing of the Republican Party to seriously consider her, but that is not the way to do it.

Of course, there are those who insist that there is no other candidate that can run against the Obama juggernaut, and while that maybe true today, there is still time. Not a lot, but there is time.

The party has a lot to do to overcome the far left wing mindset, and the large-scale in-fighting that has forced misstep after misstep of late. This is not one of the ways to do that.

The Dead Rising 2 trailer unveiled this week at E3 can be summed up easily: “More brains…”

If Lil’ Kim (Jong Il) were on Twitter…

Now THAT’s impressive….From SavvyPyrate

The actual Air France A330 that's missisng, tail number F-GZCP - from JetPhotos.Net

Former CNN aerospace reporter and American Morning host Miles O’Brien looks at the missing Air France Rio-Paris flight from yesterday in his new blog.

(God, I miss Miles on CNN; after John Holliman passed, Miles was one of the best media voices on NASA and other aerospace subjects. His blog will be a God-send for stuff like this)

The plane, an Airbus A330, went missing over the ocean about four hours out from Rio with more than 200 people on board. French officials fear the worst.

Speculation seems to be centering on tropical thunderstorms in the Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ), the area around the Equator, which can spawn massive, powerful thunderstorms that tower more than 50,000 feet above the surface or more at this time of year.

It is quite likely the airplane was struck by lightning - or it could have triggered lightning by the mere act of flying at Mach .8 through storm clouds. It is not impossible that could have sparked a fuel fire – but that is highly unlikely.

Will we ever know what happened? This one will be hard. The wreckage will be likely strewn over a wide area – and locating the Flight Data and Cockpit Voice Recorders won’t be easy since they are likely at the bottom of the sea – possibly 24,ooo feet below the surface. Even if they are transmitting their homing signals, you would need a lot of luck and a pretty stout submersible to retrieve them.

Coverage of the crash is all over the place, but there is decent online streaming coverage in English from Paris-based news network France 24.

The Discovery Channel announced yesterday that they are bringing back Monster Garage as MG: Motor City. No word if original host Jesse James will return; he has a new series on Spike, Jesse James Is A Dead Man.

Discovery Channel is bringing back one of its most-recognizable franchises, Monster Garage. The new incarnation, MG: Motor City, will be set in Detroit, which has been hit particularly hard by the current economic crisis.

The debut episode of MG: Motor City will feature the team taking a Ford Model T and transforming it into a dragster.

The new series will likely bow this fall…

SciFi Channel had their upfront today, and announced that they are changing their name this summer to SyFy.

What the — !?!??

I don’t get it. NBCU figures that a change of name will freshen the image of the channel, so instead of something “original,” they figure that most won’t notice that they can’t spell!?

Just damn.

And it’s one that dirty old men can appreciate….

Nuff said…..