Journal of Post-Ralphaelite Thought

Back when I was in college, a couple of my hippie friends decided they'd vote in the Republican primary, with the intention of boosting the prospects of the Republican candidate they felt would be least electable in the general election. They pulled the lever for former California governor Ronald Reagan. Whoops. In the 2000 election, a number of "progressive" voters (my dear wife among them) turned up their collective noses at Al Gore and voted for Ralph Nader. Enough of them did in Florida to usher in 8 years of George W Bush. Whoops. Despite years of voting primarily for Democrats (with a few notable exceptions ) I found Gary Johnson, Libertarian presidential candidate intriguing - fiscal conservative, socially progressive, and to all appearances, not a bad sort. I reasoned that since Obama had a snowball's chance in hell of carrying Texas, it didn't really matter if I abandoned him to vote for Johnson. Besides, I found myself somewhat incensed at seve

Okay - Apple's Tim Cook is in the process of announcing shiny new consumer goods. The Applenistas have been waiting for this for some time now. Finally - the iPad Mini (yes, that's what Apple is calling  it, apparently). Specs: dual-core A5 chip, Facetime HD camera, 5MP iSight camera on the back. Lightning connector (of course). Screen resolution is 1024 x 768,  7.9 inches (diagonal measure). Cost: $329 for a 16 GB model. Not that you or I care, but they also announced some new iMac / notebook models as well. Okay, time to move on; nothing more to see here.

I've been following, on and off, the efforts to surpass Joe Kittinger's 52 year record for highest balloon ascent / highest parachute jump by Austrian Felix Baumgartner . After a delayed launch for wind, today Baumgartner did it: jumped out of a capsule lifted by balloon to 128,000 feet (that's around 24 miles) and plunging earthward, broke the sound barrier (and quite a few records) without benefit of aircraft. During his freefall he achieved speeds of Mach 1.24. The ride up took about 2 1/2 hours; the trip down, 11 minutes. The whole thing reminded me a little of watching the NASA launches of Mercury back in the early 1960's. Here's the trip down. Incidently, the gentleman talking is Joe Kittinger , the previous record holder, who acted as Baumgartner's mentor and was part of the team who pulled this feat off. You can read more about this on Wikipedia ; this was done with the corporate sponsorship of Red Bull energy drink. It was a stunt, but that&#