A 17-hour test flight where you end up right back where you started is probably pretty boring. Any way to spice things up is probably welcome, which is likely why. In this installment of Critical Hit - A Major Spoilers Podcast: I mean, how hard is it going to be to fight one little ol' hag? Visit the Major Spoilers store for. After spending 40 years and unspeakable amounts of investor money to make his dream a reality, Paul Moller’s flying car is finally available for purchase. Remember the Simpsons episode where Homer was sent into orbit? It had Buzz Aldrin and James Taylor as guests, and gave the world the Overlord Meme. The episode was. Warning: Invalid argument supplied for foreach() in /srv/users/serverpilot/apps/jujaitaly/public/index.php on line 447. The White Sox are sending all three of their most heavily rumored trade chips—third baseman Todd Frazier and relievers David Robertson and Tommy Kahnle—to the.

HBO is developing a feature-length adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s famous 1953 novel Fahrenheit 451 starring Michael B. Jordan and Michael Shannon, about a dystopian. The Unsound Effect trope as used in popular culture. In comics and shows emulating comics, we'll see words which indicate the action taking place. Inside Cannabis. Financial, legislative, agricultural, and all the other most important news about the cannabis industry. After more than a year, Game of Thrones has made its very welcome return. It was a reasonably quiet episode, by which I mean at least 50 people were still murdered.

The Mystery Of The Space Shuttle In That Simpsons Episode Where Homer Went To Space. Remember the Simpsons episode where Homer was sent into orbit? It had Buzz Aldrin and James Taylor as guests, and gave the world the Overlord Meme. The episode was titled Deep Space Homer, and I have some serious questions and theories about the spacecraft featured in the episode, a strange spaceplane called the Corvair spacecraft. The episode aired on February 2. NASA project to re- ignite interest in the space program by sending an “average American” into space.

Luckily for the show, that average American selected was Homer Simpson, and he was rocketed into orbit with real- life astronaut Buzz Aldrin and real- fiction astronaut Race Banyon. What interests me here, though, is the spacecraft that took Homer into space. When the episode aired in 1.

NASA was still launching the Space Shuttle orbiters into space on a fairly regular basis. These spacecraft were very well known to Americans, and visually they had a distinctive look that most American television viewers would recognize and understand instantly. You’d think representing the Space Shuttle as it was known to most people would be the way to go for the episode. For some reason, that’s not what happened. The spacecraft they used was called the Corvair spacecraft—the name is interesting to me as a car geek because, of course, it refers to Chevrolet’s infamous air- cooled, rear- engined compact car, which Ralph Nader famously claimed was “unsafe at any speed.” The name is also likely a play on Convair, the aircraft company. The Corvair was clearly a spaceplane like the real Space Shuttle orbiters, but that’s where the similarity ended.

It was far smaller- seeming than an actual shuttle orbiter, about 1/3 the length, and was launched in a different configuration as well. Instead of being mounted to the side of the large central fuel tank and flanked by solid rocket boosters like the shuttle NASA actually used, the Corvair was mounted atop a large rocket with four strap- on boosters. It looked dramatically different than the space shuttles we knew, and I haven’t found any good justification of why the Simpsons artists and producers decided they should come up with a new spacecraft design. I’m not the only one to have wondered this, of course, but from what I’ve seen no one seems to really know why this decision was made. More interestingly, it doesn’t seem like a whole new spacecraft was just invented for the show; I’m pretty sure the Corvair was based on an existing spacecraft design of the time, the European Space Agency’s Hermes spaceplane.

There’s a number of small . Images of Hermes were pretty well known in the late . I remember encountering pictures of it in, I think, a National Geographic? Either that or one of those copies of Oui I used to find in the woods. The Corvair orbiter design is a dead ringer for the Hermes, right down to the turned- up wingtips and large conical rear section. Air Strike 3D Ii Gulf Thunder Cracking. Even the proposed interior layout of the Hermes seems to match what we see in the episode, though, to be fair, I guess it could also just be a pretty generic cartoon spaceship interior.

There’s other contemporary spacecraft designs that could have influenced this as well—Japan’s space agency had the HOPE- X, there was another ESA project called Horus, and the Soviets had some similar- looking craft as part of their Spiral project, but none are quite as close as the Hermes is to the Corvair. Even if I’m almost positive the Corvair Spacecraft was based on the Hermes, that still doesn’t answer why. The. Simpsons decided to show Homer’s first trip to space as taking place in an aborted European spaceplane instead of the Space Shuttles that were so near and dear to American hearts. I don’t think it has anything to do with some inability to convincingly render a regular American Shuttle orbiter—Shuttles as we know them have shown up on The Simpsons a few times since the episode aired, and they were immediately recognizable: In fact, in a recent update to the Simpsons mobile game Tapped Out, they have both the Hermes- like Corvair on the launch pad and a conventional- looking NASA Space Shuttle together: So, I don’t think there were any technical animation- related reasons why the look of the Shuttle was so different. I think maybe the most reasonable answer is that, out of respect to NASA, the Simpsons art directors decided to make something visually different from the actual Space Shuttle, so they could give it a name like Corvair and have it fail in various ways without tarnishing the actual reputation of NASA.

Perhaps NASA insisted that it look different? I’ve reached out to NASA to find out, and am attempting to reach out to someone who worked on the Simpsons during this period. If I find out anything definitive, I’ll update, because you have a right to know the truth. As of right now, this is still just a great Simpsonian mystery: the secret endorsement of a little- known European spacecraft design over America’s own Space Shuttles. I’ll keep searching for the truth. UPDATE: Well, hot damn. David Mirkin, the writer of Deep Space Homer (and he created Get A Life, the wonderfully underrated Chris Elliot show) actually tweeted the answer I’ve been desperate to know for over two decades!.

Thanks, Mr. Mirkin! I liked your shuttle design, too, even if I’m still pretty sure you cribbed it from the Hermes. Internet Download Manager 6 11 Easy Install Security.

Leaked Emails Reveal Bill de Blasio Gets Kind of Dad- Feisty When His Staff Forgets to Help Him Speak Spanish. On Tuesday, notorious rag the New York Post took a swing at the king, publishing excerpts from emails sent by NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio to staffers and claiming that the emails proved beyond all doubt de Blasio is an “imperious bully of a boss who threatens his underlings with dire punishment if they fail to meet his demands.”Spoilers: This particular political email controversy is really about two things. The first is that de Blasio is being continually foiled, like a feckless park ranger in a Hanna Barbera cartoon, in his quest to have his staff type out scripted remarks phonetically. The second is that Post readers apparently remain reliably willing to whip themselves into a frothy lather about some of the dumbest controversies on the planet. In one of the emails, apparently written in relation to Upper East Side synagogue Congregation Kehilath Jeshurun, de Blasio wrote: This is literally the 1. I am reminding you all that phonetic spellings require one syllable to be capitalized to indicate emphasis in pronunciation. I have no idea why you guys can’t get it.

All of the folks in comms, speechwriting and my personal staff who looked at these remarks—it just takes ONE to catch it.. How can it be that none of you noticed the absence with the word Jeshurun. Work on quality control pls. Fix these remarks now pls.

Example: pho- NET- ic. In a later email with the completely unremarkable subject line “Guys, I’m fed up..”, de Blasio asked staff to please, for the love of god, just help him out with his Spanish like he asked a million times before: I have raised the problem of inconsistency in providing phonetic pronunciation and in providing clearly delineated Spanish (with emphasis on the proper syllable) many, many times. And yet between all of you, you haven’t fix . One “City Hall source,” who is definitely not just some random disgruntled conservative, told the Post, “He’s condescending and arrogant.

I’ve been in plenty of meetings with him. He’s known to kick staff out of meetings.”These emails were sent in January and February of 2.

Blasio took office, so hopefully the mayor has located someone capable of following simple, written instructions to help him not look like an idiot by now. Because otherwise, de Blasio might need to mildly chastise you, without like, swearing or anything, and then someone might forward one or two of those emails to the Post. Two years later. Of course, this tailor- made- for- idiots email controversy is rich coming from this particular paper, which has published histrionic grievances about everything from lazy millennials, the need to crack down on the homeless, affirmative action, millennials that won’t vote for Donald Trump, CNN, the manifesto- writing Google engineer, construction scaffolding, politicians who don’t ride the subway and politicians who do ride the subway to anyonestandingin. Times. Square. Can you even imagine how angry they’d be at those idiot bureaucrats in City Hall if they were embarrassing a Republican mayor? What a story that would be. Also, didn’t the Post think leaking internal government documents was treason or something?