Ray's X-Blog

Paragliding Spam During the dawn of the American space program astronauts didn't have it easy. Sometimes they called themselves "spam in the can," referring to the tight quarters inside the early capsules and also the lack of control they had over the vehicles. This was way before the days of the space shuttle. Instead of gliding to a landing like a plane after a mission, the astronauts just fell into the ocean, the fall slowed down by parachutes. A whole Navy fleet would search for the floating capsule and then it would be fished out. Predicting where the capsule would land wasn't an exact science with the early missions. Until I picked up an old book the other day, I didn't know that there was a plan to return the Gemini astronauts hang-glider style. Flipping through the slightly musty pages of America's Race For The Moon: The New York Times Story of Project Apollo (1962) I spotted an illustration for a proposed capsule design that would allow it to re...

V Is For Victory – For The Vatican It’s all over. On April 16, 2008 – a day that will live in infamy – Pope Benedict declared military victory over the United States of America. Or so says Tom Friess, host of the program Inquisition Update heard on domestic shortwave radio station WWCR. I was dialing around when I encountered his program. Tom warned that millions of Catholics were ready to obey any command from the Pope, a fifth column within our midst. I’m an ex-Catholic. Fortunately, I was never molested by a priest or a nun. But when I was an impressionable boy, the Roman Cultic Church did lay on the fear and guilt. In one catechism class a nun told us that when nuclear war erupted, an atomic bomb would open up a pit into hell. And unless we young sheep confessed our sins, we would fall into that pit, burning for eternity. A burn from a hot stove, she explained in vivid detail, was nothing like the ever-frying flames of hell. And people wonder why I’m a devout atheist. So wh...

Psychic Children: Reality Or Just Reality TV? I’m a 360 skeptic: I’m skeptical about everything, including professional skeptics. So I don’t rule out the possibility that on rare occasions a few people might experience some sort of psychic phenomena. Recently I watched a documentary series that purported to show actual psychic kids dealing with their powers. While I’m never had any special metaphysical powers, I can understand how these kids feel like outsiders due to the talents they have – or think they have. The problem with “reality” TV is that it has to be entertaining. Sometimes the psychic kids series went over the line for me, using special editing techniques like quick cuts to heighten the suspense. And if the producers could goose certain scenes through such effects, what else did they goose? I’m not saying the producers were deceptive but I’ve heard about others whose psychic talents were wanting at times: they couldn’t consistently produce the startling results and so s...