For the first time since March 31st, 2010, we have a Ducks In Anime sighting!

-Amagami SS, ep06
I knew I liked Kaoru better than Morishima...

A closer look at the duckie reveals something important...

...I HAVE THIS DUCK! 

To be sure, it's not an exact match, but the biggest difference can be put down to the anime style of drawing eyes... even the duckies have big ones!  For the first time, I can honestly say that I possess a Duck in Anime!  It came from Wal-Mart, if you're wondering.  Part of a matching set of four, each in a different color (blue, pink and green), only a dollar each.  They're from Infantino.

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You may remember back about a week or so ago, I mentioned in a comment to reader Will that the Duckford Airport was home to a warbird restoration shop.  It turns out that isn't quite the case, as I got the "restoration" part incorrect.  Instead, Courtesy Aircraft is a seller of classic warbirds and modern planes as well... and I was exchanging e-mails with them.  After three back-and-forths, I was told I could stop in any time during business hours to look around.  How cool is that?

It was a sunny afternoon as I pulled into the small parking lot next to Courtesy's hangar at the Airport.  I met Darcy, Courtesy's Marketing Director, and learned what I had feared: they were actually quite busy.  Turns out they had a few customers in town after their appearance at EAA AirVenture, which is good!  It did mean, however, that they couldn't spare anybody to escort me around the flightline.  I could stick around the hangar, I just couldn't go onto the taxiway... security, y'know.  I knew, and approved, even though it meant I couldn't get any closer than this to some juicy-looking aircraft:

Two T-6 Texans, just ahead of a pair of T-28 Trojans.  I gather that the high-visibility yellow-painted T-6 won a restoration award at Oshkosh sometime recently, in fact.  Still, the limitation didn't mean that there wasn't anything I could get close to...

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Just a teaser for the post I'll be putting up on Saturday...

It's a Notazero!

UPDATE: Pete Z reminds me that a T-6 makes an appearance in Yokohama Kaidashi Kiko, too:

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So this morning I woke up, turned on my computer and wanted to check something on my external hard drive... and got a message saying that the link I had on my desktop was null and void because it led nowhere.  Hm.  Well, I rebooted and when everything came back up, there wasn't a problem: there was the external HD.  That'll happen.

This evening, I got home from work, turned on my computer and had the same thing occur.  Hm.  Reboot, and there was the HD... until suddenly, it disappeared.  Wazzuh-huh?  Reboot, and this time, no external hard drive at all.  Oh, carp.  I plugged in a flashdrive, and Chiyo-chan recognized it, no problem.

I played with the cables, checking to make sure everything was plugged in firmly, and still nothing.  I tried unplugging the power brick for the HD, then plugging it back in.  Nothing... except a few minutes later, it came back... for three minutes, 34 seconds.  At that point in a song, it disappeared again, with this error balloon popping up:

Oh, lovely.

So I ran over to the Olde Home Pond, taking the hard drive with me, and plugged it into Ph.Duck's laptop, just to make sure that it's not Chiyo-chan having a problem.  No sign of life at all, just that stupid error balloon popping up repeatedly.  At this point, I'm into damage control mode.  Nothing irreplaceable on the drive, just 300GB of anime, six or seven seasons worth of Top Gear, and a lot of music.  The music is what I'm most concerned about, because while I have a good chunk of it backed up, there's some anime OSTs that I've glommed recently... and my BakaBT ratio is low enough as it is.

So after a couple of hours chatting with Ph.Duck, I drove back to Pond Central.  Once I got back home, I decided to try again.  I put the HD in its normal place, plugged in the USB cable and...

...verrrrrrrrry innerestink.  Very innerestink indeed.  You'll note that I said I plugged in the USB cable.  While, indeed, I had done so, it wasn't plugged into the hard drive.  It appears that I'm getting an error message because of the cable! 

Has anybody else ever had this happen to them?

UPDATE, NEXT DAY:  My external HD is back!  All it took was a new USB A-to-Mini B cable.  I'm still a little nervous about it, but all in all I'm optimistic.  And a big "Pbpbpbpbpbpbththhhhhhh" to the Geek Squad member who told me that it's "when things like (this) happen, it's never the cable."  Much happy here.

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^{(continued from the first post)}
Even though I knew I was in a great position, I didn't realize until just a few minutes ago really how good it was.  Here, take a look at this:

Obviously the duck isn't to scale, but that really does clear up where I was located: just over a half-mile from the end of the runway.  About 100 people and myself were lined up on the east side of 251, down to about where that farm area starts.  I couldn't have planned it better if I had tried... and the best part is, I DIDN'T plan it, it just worked out that way.  Should have brought some sunscreen, but such is the price of spontaneity.

When I arrived, there were some acrobatic planes doing their thing.  Then they finished up, and we waited for the main event to begin.  And waited.  And waited.  I figure that the big dark cloud moving NW to SE over the airport had something to do with the delay  As we were waiting, an older man and his wife pulled in.  They'd driven up from Peoria, nearly four hours, to catch the show.  "Your timing is great, they should be starting any minute!"  No sooner had I said that when a roar came from airfield; not one of high-performance engines, but of thousands of people cheering.  THEN came the loud whistling scream of six Pratt & Whitney F100-PW-229 engines, followed closely by a cloud of white smoke and...

...The Diamond roared by.  Actually, this isn't quite The Diamond yet, as #4 is still getting into position, but it soon would be.  While I, and everybody else, were agog watching The Diamond fly overhead, the two Solos, #5 and #6, took off and went dead vertical, gone from view in an instant.  Meanwhile, the four planes of The Diamond changed shape...

...and went by in the "Close Follow" formation, which transitioned back to The Diamond over the airfield.  As soon as they cleared, #6 whipped by over my head for a knife-edge pass of the crowd.  Alas, that picture is nothing but a faintly Falcon-shaped blur as he went by too fast for my camera to adjust focus.  However, the lead solo, #5, was coming right towards us in a level slow roll, followed by a rapid climb-out to his right, smoke streaming all the way.

Around here, I lost track of what maneuver is which... and I don't really care.  Onwards for the really cool pictures!

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No, not because Slappy got hit with a penalty for his ridiculous blocking maneuver in the Hungarian Grand Prix.  No, it's because he was the fastest F1 driver around Top Gear's test track in the "F1 Star in a Reasonably Priced Car" segment a couple of weeks ago.

How happy is he?  He went out and had a t-shirt made.

That's cool enough right there, but it gets better.  He also had t-shirts made for all the other F1 drivers who have been on Top Gear.  Drivers like Lewis Hamilton, Mark Webber, Jenson Button, and I presume Michael Schumacher all got their t-shirt:

Laughter all around.

Jeremy Clarkson, one of the three hosts for Top Gear, had the line of the night.  "What do you think HWMNBN's t-shirt says?  'I made Felipe Massa give me this t-shirt'?"

Bravo, that.

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It was just as bad as we thought it'd be.  But the winner wasn't who we expected.  THIS is your F1U! for the 2010 Grand Prix of Hungary.

STRATEGERY:  At the start, the RB6 of Seb Vettel pulled away from HWMNBN's Ferrari at a rate of one second per lap, and there was nothing anybody could do about it... until Heikki Kovaleinninninnie's Lotus lost a wing endplate.  This wound up right in the center of the track, a hazard that brought out the Safety Car.  Everybody dove for the pit lane except for Vettel's teammate Mark Webber, who inherited the lead.  But then Vettel decided to give his teammate a gap as the Safety Car pulled in, holding up the field while Webber tagged right behind the SC... and earned himself a drive-through penalty in the process.  Still, no worries for Vettel: he was substantially faster than everybody else but his teammate, and Webber would have to pit to get off his soft tires.  Except when he did his drive-through, he came out behind HWMNBN's Ferrari, and Webber made his supposedly fragile soft tires last until Lap 43 while stretching his lead out to about 25 seconds.  He stopped, changed tires and came out a few seconds ahead of second place.  Race over, it was only a question of how far ahead Webber would be.  The answer was almost 18 seconds, with Vettel third, unable to get around the Ferrari.

BORING:  The Hungaroring has been on the F1 calendar for 25 years.  This particular race seemed about that long on it's own.  When the F1U! staff is fast-forwarding through coverage, it's bad.  THIS is how we go into F1's summer break?  Great.  Thrilling, I'm sure.

*DRIVER OF THE RACE: Mark Webber.  To go 43 laps on a set of soft tires is impressive enough.  To do so while turning fast lap after fast lap while opening an insurmountable lead is nearly miraculous.  Yet that's exactly what the Red Bull driver accomplished on his way to becoming the season's first four-race winner.  There must be some panic amongst the other teams at the moment.

*TEAM OF THE RACE:  Red Bull.  First-third and they take over the lead in the Constructor's Championship and Driver's Championship?  Yeah, pretty darn good.  Could have... should have... been better, with only Vettel's stupid maneuver after the Safety Car prevented them from sweeping the top two steps of the podium.  If ever a team needed the summer break...

*MOVE OF THE RACE:  Mark Webber wasn't the only one to stretch his tires; Rubens Barrichello did as well, running his hard tires for the first 60 laps.  His luck on the worn rubber wasn't as good, though, and after he pitted he came out in 11th place, behind his old teammate, Slappy Schumacher.  For four laps, Rubens harried Slappy until they came onto the front straight.  Rubens pulled to the inside, and Slappy in his normal style decided to make it hard for him, despite his opponent being faster and on fresh tires.  He began driving Rubens hard to the wall as the Brazilian pulled alongside.  Barrichello's right tires got close to the concrete... very close... and then even closer than that.  How close?

Yeah, about that close.  Fortunately the wall ended before the Williams ended up grinding its starboard side down to the cockpit, and Barrichello made the pass cleanly, if angrily.  He was heard on the radio demanding that Slappy be black-flagged.  He wasn't, but he was given a 10 grid-spot penalty for the next race.  We here at F1U think he should be flogged for such a dangerous stunt.  We also think that Rubens Barrichello just won himself a Move of the Race.

*MOOOOOOOOOO-OOOVE OF THE RACE:  When the Safety Car came out, there was pandemonium in the pit lane, what with all the cars diving in to change tires.  The first hint we got that something was wrong came when we got a camera shot of Adrian Sutil's Force India tangled up with Robert Kubica's Renault.  And yes, Renault's lollypop man did release Kubica right into Sutil's path, but he had good reason to be distracted.

The Mercedes mechanics sent Nico Rosberg out without adequately tightening his right-rear tire, which came off at high velocity, rolled through the Sauber pitbox and into the Williams crew.  At that point, it was "caught" by Nigel Hope, one of their mechanics.  As Rosberg said later, "I was more worried about the (40-pound) tire than I was about Nige, one of my old Williams truck drivers.  He's a big guy."  Hope was taken to the medical station with bruised ribs.  One Mooooooo-oove to the Mercedes guys!

*SELECTED QUOTES OF THE RACE:

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I had an ulterior motive for purchasing my new digital camera when I did.  Y'see, I knew that this was the weekend for the Chicago-Duckford International Airport's annual airshow, named AirFest.  And I planned, as I always have before, to stand in the field behind Pond Central and take pictures of the USAF Thunderbirds, this year's featured performers, as they went by overhead. 

See, Pond Central is right at the edge of their performance cylinder, about two miles or so from the airport, so when they extend out from the runway they tend to fly right over my living room... literally.  However, they're usually the only performers who get that close, so on AirFest weekend I make a small change to my routine.  Instead of going to my usual grocery store, I head to a smaller, dingier place that has the advantage of being about a half-mile from the airport.  I've not usually gotten good pictures of the "supporting acts" from this location, but there's always a first time, right?  When I get to the store, there's no sound at all coming from the skies, so I head inside and do my shopping.  $70 later (and I forgot to get batteries, darnit!) I emerge from the Hilander and push my cart back to the DuckMobile.  As I unlock the Official Car of The Pond, I hear a strange, almost spooky, howling moan coming from the direction of the airport and getting louder.  Just as I look up, one hand unlocking the car door and the other frantically trying to dig my camera out of my pocket, the first of the jet performers, the F-15E of the US Air Force's Strike Eagle Demo Team screamed right overhead and low, rolled hard left and dashed away for what I assume was to be a high-speed "sneak" pass of the runway.  I quickly threw my comestibles into the back seat, moved my car about 100 feet west (no cars parking there), and waited for the moaning howl to come back.  And then it did.

He played around for a little bit, including one absolutely brilliant zoom for the skies that I couldn't get a picture of because the sun was too bright, then disappeared.  Content that I got at least one good picture, I got back into the DuckMobile... and then scrambled out again, because I heard a rumbling roar coming from behind me. 

I've never seen a F-4 Phantom II in the flesh before!  This one is from the Air Force's Air Combat Command "Heritage Flight".  A triumph of thrust over aerodynamics, the Phantom was called a number of derogatory names over the years, such as "Double Ugly", "Flying Brick" and "Iron Sled."  The Luftwaffe gave it the best nicknames, though: Luftverteidigungsdiesel ("Air Defense Diesel") and Eisenschwein ("Iron Pig").  Strangely though, I found it to be much more graceful in flight than the Strike Eagle.

And then something happened that blew my mind.

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