The Holy Grail Press
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Word of the Every So Often
ebon: (adj.) (pronounced: ebb-bun) dark brown or black in colour; ebony. Carl wore an ebon sash around his arm to tell everyone it was morning, so all around it was really confusing.
Everyday History
The Spruce Goose made is first (and only) flight on November 2, 1947. At the time it was the largest plane in the world. It still holds the record for the largest seaplane ever built. It has a wing span of just over 319 feet, is over 218 feet long, just a tad over 79 feet high, and weighs in at 400,000 pounds all fueled up and ready to go.
After its one time in the air, which lasted only 26 seconds and attainted an altitude of 70 feet, the plane made its way to the Evergreen Air and Space Museum in McMinnville, Oregon, which isn’t too darned far from the main offices of the Holy Grail Press. I knew the plane was big, but seeing it in person… I mean, Damn! That thing is big. Italics can't even do it justice.
The Spruce Goose, built and piloted by incredibly rich guy and aviation innovator Howard Hughes, was officially called the H-4 Hercules, but it was given the nickname Spruce Goose because it was made of wood. It was mostly birch, but they called it the Spruce Goose because of the grey colour, that, and it’s hard to find a species of bird that rhymes with a type of wood. Hughes built it out of laminated wood covered with cloth because of the metal shortage during WWII. It was meant to transport up to 400 troops and tanks and big stuff like that, but it took Hughes so long to build it that the war was over by the time it finally took off. Though the Spruce Goose was pretty much a very expensive flop, it did show others that really big planes could work. And they have.
The Stratolaunch ROC (Model 351) holds the record the largest wingspan, at 385 ft. The largest passenger plane is the Airbus A380-800, which is 238 feet long, and can carry 853 passengers, all of them seated comfortably with plenty of legroom. The longest passenger plane is the Boing 747-8, which is 250 feet long. And the largest military aircraft was the Antonov An-255 Mriya, which was 275 feet long before it was blown up by Ukraine in 2022.
Cartoon of the Week
Stuff
The History of the Future: The Sanity Shift
It was the 2030 Census that verified, indeed, that there were now more people in the Untied States who were clinically insane than those who were not. And it was in 2032 that the Supreme Court ruled that, by definition, “normal” was decided by the majority. Therefore, what once was considered to be crazy, was now the norm, and those who once were considered sane should now be considered extremely dangerous. Institutionalization was recommended. Speaking for the majority, Chief Justice Bidwell stated, “Shut up! I’ll kill you all! What are you looking at?”
Few “insane” people were ever locked up, though, because they quickly went underground. After all, it is a lot easier to pretend you’re yelling at somebody who isn’t there than to pretend you’re not. They learned to identify each other with secret signals, and would often meet clandestinely, so, as one member recalled, “We could just sit around and be quiet without anybody yelling at us or trying to take away our socks.”
One of the things that the new majority insisted on doing was driving, which had long been a privilege of the sane. By 2037, mostly because of all the people who had been run over, many of whom where indoors, it was determined that those people who had recently been in the majority no longer were. And once again, the definition of “sane” was revised to the pre-2030 status.
See, as well, the Shift of 2088, 2129, 2173, and 2222.
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