Posted onJuly 27, 2015byJames|Comments Off on Happy Birthday, Gary Gygax!
Ernest Gary Gygax (July 27, 1938 – March 4, 2008 ) was an American writer and game designer, best known for co-creating the pioneering role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) with Dave Arneson, and co-founding the company Tactical Studies Rules (TSR) with Don Kaye in 1974. Gygax is generally acknowledged as the father of the role-playing game.
This is Restaurant M. It’s a special restaurant in Tokyo that will be open for only one day. On that one day, you can get fairly standard food from the McDonald’s menu. But it will be offered to you fine china, ornate silverware, and bleached linens. The table service will, of course, be far superior from that which you can find at your local burger joint. You can see more photos at Kotaku. Unfortunately, it’s unclear what toy comes with the Happy Meal.
Posted onJuly 21, 2015byJames|Comments Off on What is the difference between venomous and poisonous animals?
As Jolene Creighton in Quarks to Quasars puts it, “The quick and dirty way to separate venomous creatures from poisonous ones is by thinking about bites: If you bite it and die, it is poisonous; if it bites you and you die, it is venomous.” So a cobra is venomous and a poison dart frog is poisonous. (I guess if you want to be picky, a snake could be considered poisonous if you eat it and ingest its venom.)
Space shuttle Atlantis lands for the STS-135 mission marking the final mission of the Space Shuttle Program at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Time of landing was 5:57 a.m. (EDT) on July 21, 2011.
The “just at dawn” landing was one of the most memorable landings ever, as shown in this picture:
Posted onJuly 20, 2015byJames|Comments Off on “The Eagle has landed.” Remembering Apollo 11: July 20, 1969
Left to right: Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins, and Buzz Aldrin, the crew of Apollo 11. Photo: NASA.
On this day in 1969, humans walked on the moon for the first time. The Apollo 11 spaceflight brought Americans Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to the lunar surface on July 20, 1969, at 20:18 UTC.
Michael Collins, the mission’s third member, remained in lunar orbit. All three men returned safely to Earth after an 8-day mission that began with a Saturn V rocket launch from Kennedy Space Center in Merritt Island, Florida on July 16.
This was the fifth manned mission of NASA’s Apollo program, which ran from 1963 to 1972 and included 6 missions that landed on the moon. These were the first and last times human beings set foot on another world.
Posted onJuly 19, 2015byJames|Comments Off on You Can Now Get An Apollo-Edition Mustang Because The World Is Great
Special edition cars are often just motorized platforms to test the limits of human eye-rolling. There’s something about those Harley Davidson-edition F150s or the Fiat 500 Gucci cars that just feels like shameless brand-whoring. But not this one. Not these Mustangs made to honor the Apollo moon missions. These are terrific.
The car is pretty much exactly what you’d think it is: a Ford Mustang GT (with 627 HP here to make it at feel more rocket-like) done up to resemble a bit of hardware from the Apollo era. It’s got the black-and-white color scheme of a Saturn V, and has vertical USA decals and small American flags and hood stripes that read, again vertically, UNITED STATES in such a way that it’s impossible to look at them and not picture that same stock footage of the Saturn V launching in your head. You know, this sort of thing:
That’s a pretty good thing to pop into your head when you see a car.
The design scheme unquestionably suggests a NASA rocket. It’s stylized and simple and iconic, and they resisted all the temptations I would have had to stick a bunch of fake valves and vents and access panels and stuff on it. But they still manage to get a fun surprise in here, too, with some red-orange LED underbody lighting meant to suggest the heat of re-entry on the Apollo capsule.
I know many out there may find this silly or over-the-top, but I say fuck that, life’s too short. This is simply fun. The Mustang has long established itself as the premiere platform for non-essential accent lighting experiments, with sequential indicators, shaped puddle lights and all that, and this underbody lighting fits in perfectly.
I mean, look at the top image of the car there at night with those lights on. It’s dramatic and exuberant and fun. If that’s too much for you, why the hell would you even consider buying a car designed to look like a rocket? You wouldn’t. This car is an unashamed fantasy-appeasement tool for all of us (myself included) who, somewhere deep down, still want to be an astronaut.
You may have a shitty job, but how terrible would you feel everyday if you left work and walked out to your own personal rocketship? It may be faintly silly, sure, but in the best possible way.
James Garner (born James Scott Bumgarner; April 7, 1928 – July 19, 2014) was an American film and television actor. He starred in several television series over more than five decades, which included such popular roles as Bret Maverick in the 1950s western-comedy series Maverick and Jim Rockford in the 1970s detective drama The Rockford Files.
