On April 25th in 1972 Hans Werner Grosse, an aviation hero of mine set a new world record for distance flight in a glider. From Lubeck in the north of Germany to Biarritz in the south of France a distance of 1,461KM or over 900 miles. This from a tow to 2,700 feet to start. All the rest was playing the atmosphere and gravity against each other. The record wasn't broken until thirty years later and that was by a three turn point flight in a glider with half again as much performance as the Schleicher ASW-12 Grosse flew. As a straight line distance Grosse's record has not been broken to this day. Hans passed away just a little earlier this year. I wish I could have met him.

The flight:

The pilot:

The aircraft (the ship in the picture is the one owned by Wally Scott of the USA that he flew to the previous record distance of 730 miles):

See the chute hanging off the tail? That was the only device the glider had for approach control. The flaps reflex up two notches for high speed flight and down one for low speed - they provide no significant drag that would help get this 42-44:1 glider into a field. There were no airbrakes as the designer Gerhard Waibel designed this aircraft for world breaking performance and he had trouble with integrating effective airbrakes into fiberglass gliders with long thin wings on the D-36 Circe university glider project when he was on that team. When you go to land an ASW-12 you pull the lever to deploy the chute. Usually it deploys and you make a nice steep approach and land. If you misjudged conditions and start to undershoot all you can do is jettison it, no second chances. If it doesn't deploy (and that happened from time to time) you have to rely on the old forward slip to get it down on the ground. That's one thing in a slab sided, draggy J-3 Cub but quite a bit more challenging in something that converts 1,000 feet of altitude to over seven miles of distance and has a 60 foot wingspan!

Ever since my wife was on a sailboat for the first time a year and a half ago we've been planning on taking the training to get certified to be in command of sailboats in the approximately 25 foot and up category. I'm competent to sail small boats - the ones where of you run a ground you just pull the centerboard up, step over the side and push then back into water deeper than about a foot. Give it a ballast keel, engine, galley, beds etc. and I'm out of my league. The pandemic has put that training off until next spring in all likelihood so I started looking for a little boat we could go sailing on this summer. Found one:

Crawford Melonseed skiff. One sail, two oars and not much else. A modern fiberglass boat based off a 19th century duck hunting skiff. I'm looking forward to getting it out on the water in the next few days. I was surprised to find one for sale out here. I don't think I've ever seen one in Vancouver before. Most of the sailboats in the 12 to 18 foot range are designed for racing and I wanted something more in the nature of a Wind In The Willows/Swallows and Amazons leisurely messing about in boats type. Not easy to find.

Just went out to do some grocery shopping and saw this beauty in the lot:

Injected 13B, limited slip, leather interior... Incredibly good condition from the tires to the headliner. The owner happened to get to his RX-7 at the same time I got to my car so we had a talk. A fifteen year old who came out of the store with his Mum gawked over the car too before she made him finish loading their groceries and get in the car too.

@aremmes Thighs can be really delicious but I'm a breast lover myself... wait, that came out all wrong.

@hfv Look at first picture, yeah, looks decent, look at second picture... what's the big problem? That little stain on the seat? Scroll down further on the second picture... AUUUUUGGHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!

Go back to first picture primed to look for awfulness... what sort of hell has that front wheel been through?

To put things in perspective Australia, with a population of about 26,000,000, has had 30,000 Covid cases and 910 deaths in total. That's pretty damn good compared to the fustercluck most nations made of responding to the disease.

@chariotoflove The guy sounds like an in-law of mine. She's laser focused on money in family situations, obsessed with getting what she considers her "fair share" and constantly forgets about the times she did get something from an inheritance or other windfall because it interferes with her self image of being a shortchanged martyr. When she gives anything or does anything for anyone you can be damn sure she expects you to pay for it somehow at 100% interest minimum - and you're going to be dealing with passive aggressive demands for it and trash talking behind your back about how ungrateful you are even if you return it five-fold. It's really sad in her case as she does have some truly great aspects to her character but is constantly making enemies out of friends due to this personality trait.

When my dad died I couldn't have cared less about what I might or might not inherit - I just wanted my dad back. F*** cancer.

@bandit "We need scanning electron microscope images of the bore surfaces and the ring groove and neutron imaging of the assembled unit, filled with fluid, installed in the vehicle and under pressure during a 3-4 shift initiated at redline before continuing to process your complaint."

@akioohtori "I know that no one gives a crap where I go or what I do" The lengths to which companies go to to track everywhere we go and everything all of us do would seem to suggest that isn't true. They may be doing so entirely out of greed for the manner in which they can monetize that information or use it to better persuade people to spend money directly, but they are certainly obsessed with tracking us.

@aestheticsinmotion What I miss most are trucks with bed heights that make loading and unloading easy.

@hfv Yes:

http://findclassicars.com/mercury/210214-1974-ford-lincoln-mercury-capri-mk1.html

@bison78 If you get the chance to drive one again, take it. I got to drive a 1923 T a while back (I was born during the Apollo era so in my case the gap isn't even fifty years). It's so different from even something a little newer like a Model A to drive. The Model A is really a lot like much more modern cars: clutch, brake, throttle, gear shift all where you would find them even today. The T though... and the remarkable thing is that through sheer weight of numbers the T control layout was the de facto standard for quite a long time.

@roadkilled This is the thing that surprised me the most when it came to driving in the UK when we went there for the first time in 2019 - parking facing whatever direction you felt like (parking partly on the "pavement" seemed weird too). On the way from Glasgow airport to the hotel we stayed at for the one night in Paisley before heading to Mull I got a serious adrenaline rush when the guy driving turned right up a narrow street and I saw the front ends of parked cars on both sides. I thought he had gone the wrong way up a one way until I noticed cars parked the other way farther up.

The idea of parking facing "the wrong way" seems so wrong to me but on the other hand the UK is one of the safest countries in the world to drive in so the evidence suggests it can't be that bad a thing to do.

@ttyymmnn I've got a lot of PIC time with the Jaguar. Mine got destroyed but it looked just like this one:

@aestheticsinmotion Nowhere by Ride is my most listened to album by a long way. Miles Davis Bitches Brew is probably second.

@kingt The rear bumper is a big mistake but I could live with the cladding on the rest of the car. I owned two Elements after all. The old one is still better looking though. At least the interior seems OK. I could do without any screen at all but that's pretty unlikely to be an option now and at least the main gauges in front of the driver look alright. I'm also curious about whether they made any improvements to the shifter on the manual. When I test drove a few WRXs back in 2018 I was surprised by how the shifter felt. I expected better.

@essextee I haven't run any flight simulators in years. Ever since I lost the ability to use the Microsoft Sidewinder Force Feedback Pro joystick. I used to leave the power supply for the force feedback disconnected and loved how smooth it made things work. I've tried a few other joysticks since and just couldn't get along with them. I brilliantly managed to lose the gameport to USB adapter it came with and apparently no third party ones will work properly - and it's been a long time since I had a computer with a gameport...

I actually got FS98 the same year I took my first flying lesson. I could make a decent circuit and landing in real life before I managed it in FS98!

@pip-bip They've become even more expensive? Damn! A little while back I looked at some Australian used Land Cruiser ads out of curiosity (what with the 15 year rule here in Canada I can at least half-realistically mull over importing one) and remember being amazed at how close in price most of the decade and a half old ones were in price to a new one.

@hammerheadfistpunch We're at 79% fully vaccinated and 87% at least on dose here in BC - which is pretty amazing considering how far behind we were in spring compared to a lot of places. Unfortunately the latest 24 hour period had over 800 new cases which is very close to being as bad as the second wave. The decision was taken to drop a bunch of the precautions a little while ago (masks in stores, reduced occupancy in certain venues etc.) and cases went to the current level terrifyingly quickly from a low of just 20 cases a day in a population of over five million.

I'm just glad we managed to get a few things like dentists checkups and eye checkups completed in the brief lull we had. Still haven't managed to get my aviation medical done though so it looks like I won't be flying until 2022 now.

@jawzx2