Linkzookery is a bit thin this week. Feel free to link to cool stuff in the comments or to trackback this post with posts you think MO readers will be interested in.

Also, I’d like to include trackbacks in the main post (like Wizbang does, for instance), but only for Linkzookery posts. That way I could work at getting Linkzookery to turn into a sort of “carnival” weekly feature and bring even more coolness to MO readers. It seems that there should be a way to do this, but I cannot figure it out. Anyone out there have any ideas?

Anyway, on to the Linkzookery:

The Dark Magic of Oil Sands
Another source of oil oil. I’m all for alternatives to petroleum, and I think that nuclear/solar/hydrogen/ethanol/bio-diesel/mrfusion is going to be critical, but alternative sources of oil become viable at certain prices and they’ll work with existing infrastructure.

Apollo 18 is GO!
Via Buckethead.

More $$$ for CVN-21
Should be named USS AMERICA, by the way.

US Army goes shopping for anthrax
What could possilby go wrong?

How We Built the Quintessential Sentry Gun
The kids of these guys will build the weapons in the cut scenes from ALIENS.

United Kingdom Aerospace and Weapons Projects
Cool site.

Iraqi film fest reveals psyches bruised by war

The F-14 Tomcat made its final public appearance as an active part of the Navy over the September 17th weekend in an air show at Naval Air Station Oceana, Va.

The classic Northrup Grumman fighter jet that rose to prominence in the 1986 hit film “Top Gun” and has worn U.S. Navy colors since its first test flight in 1970 attracted a legion of fans from around the world at its public goodbye.

“It’s basically a bittersweet day for us,” said Lt. Cortney Kinna, an F-14 naval flight officer from Amarillo, Texas. “It was our favorite airplane. I just think it’s the sexiest looking airplane out there. It’s unique, big, powerful and loud.”

The Tomcat will be retired after the USS THEODORE ROOSEVELT returns from her current deployment to the Persian Gulf area next spring. The last two Tomcat squadrons, VF-32 “Swordsmen” and VF-101 “Grim Reapers” VF-31 “Tomcatters” and VF-213 “Black Lions”, are aboard the ‘Big Stick’ and will transition to the F/A-18 Super Hornet when they return.

Radar intercept officers (RIO) said they will particularly miss the concentrated teamwork needed between the pilot and “backseater” to let the F-14 do its job. Unlike the F/A-18 Super Hornet, one said, pilots do not have the same cockpit controls in the front seat to operate the radar and fire all weapon systems.

“The Tomcat is a RIO’s airplane,” said Lt. Tim Henry, a Gettysburg, Pa., native who took his last F-14 flight during the airshow. “It’s sad. I caught myself looking around the cockpit.”

Retired Capt. Phil Grandfield, of Virginia Beach, said he favored the Tomcat over the F-4 Phantom and the F/A-18 Hornet in his 26 years of flying Navy jets.

“I’m most proud of having flown the F-14,” said Grandfield, who has more than 2,000 flight hours in the aircraft and made his 1,000th carrier arrested landing in the jet. “It’s a unique airplane. It’s respected around the world.”

The AIM-54 Phoenix missile, the Tomcat’s long range ‘fleet defender’ missile, was retired about a year ago, leaving the AIM-120 AMRAAM as the longest-range air-to-air missile in the Navy’s inventory.

Also posted at Winds of Change.
(more…)

U.S. Army soldiers, assigned to Charlie Troop, 4th Battalion, 14th Cavalry, 2nd Platoon from Fort Wainwright, Alaska, detonate caves that could be used for weapons caches outside Rawah, Iraq, Sept. 27, 2005. U.S. Air Force photo by Tech. Sgt. Andy Dunaway

For more pics of the operation, check out the Defend America photo essay.

Don’t forget that SERENITY opens today. If you like sci-fi, you will almost certainly like this film. I don’t think it’s as revolutionary as many claim and, in fact, the more I think about it the more I think it’s sort of “the Adventures of Young Han Solo” or maybe “Han Solo if he didn’t meet Luke”, but it’s good stuff and I doubt you’ll be let down.

I haven’t read a lot of reviews except for some by Grand Rapids area bloggers, but there’s a round up at Instapundit and also at Drezner. Most seem to be generally positive. I’d suggest seeing the movie before reading any in-depth reviews, and avoid spoilers.

I hope this blogger thing went well for Grace Hill Media and Universal. If it did, we’ll see more of it in the future. Not only cool because bloggers get to score free stuff, but because I think we’ll see better feedback on things. For instance, I have no personal obligation (no, really!) to anyone to write a great review despite the free passes. This was a good movie, and I said so in my “review”, which wasn’t really a review anyway.

As I noted, I was pretty sure going in that this film was going to be cheesy and mediocre-at-best, and I was planning to say so. And one of my first reactions after seeing and liking it was “oh no…I’m going to look like I’ve been bought”.

Of course, those inclined to like the film are going to be the ones signing up to get free passes and then write about it, so you’re probably always going to see more positive buzz than negative in the blogosphere. And I’ve no doubt that many CAN be bought. But this is a relatively inexpensive way to shine a light on your project and get “word-of-mouth” going, which is, of course, the most effective advertising you can get.

The key is that if something sucks we need to be sure to say that it sucks. Few take professional film reviews at face value because they lack credibility. The blogosphere, despite obvious short-comings, has a measure of credibility that the biggies don’t and this sort of “grass-roots internet” marketing has great potential if we don’t lose that cred by acting irresponsibly. Irresponsibility is what cost Legacy Media its cred when reporting on movies (among other things) and we need to be better.

UPDATE: I just posted this comment on Drezner’s post:

Don’t get me wrong. It’s cheesy.

But good. Not only good, but better than at least 90% of the sci-fi out there. I don’t think it’s particularly revolutionary, like many like to gush. But it’s a solid story with good characters in a good setting.

You rarely see more than one element of the story-characters-setting triumvirate in sci-fi, and often you don’t see ANY of them.

This is good stuff.

Philippines To Decommission Last Fighter Jet

Defense News:

The Philippines will decommission the last of its 40-year-old F-5 fighter jets, leaving the country without any aerial defense aircraft, an Air Force spokesman said Sept. 29.

Ceremonies for the decommissioning of the U.S.-made “Freedom Fighter” jets will be held at Basa Air Base on Oct. 1, marking the last use of these aircraft.

Only about five F-5s are still operational, Major Augusto dela Pena said.

With so many internal troubles, air defense against outside threats just isn’t a priority. So they’re going to try to use trainer jets as makeshift fighters. Good luck.

US Hands Holy Shiite City Karbala Over to Iraqis

Iraqi forces take over their second major city. Who would have ever guessed it? It’s almost like there’s a plan or something.

The DeLay Dilemma And The Successor Search

The Moderate Voice:

The Republicans have now come circle from those days when Newt Gingrich excitedly talked of an impending Republican Revolution that wouldn’t just be in terms of policy but in terms of political purity — a future with term limits, where the corrupt Democratic party order in the House would be overthrown and replaced by a more principled, honest, and ideological pure Republican era. Gingrich has since criticized Delay on ethics.

May we go out on a limb and venture that the GOP has fallen short of this goal?

and

On this and other issues, the GOP is facing a Moment of Truth: how to define its political soul. As the Chronicle reports, DeLay’s troubles could have an impact on campaign candidate recruitment and come amid debate over whether its wise to pursue changes in Social Security and whether the government should spend cazillions on Hurricane Katrina/Rita reconstruction.

The key battle — raging not just in the case of DeLay’s replacement, but in the case of Terry Schiavo, the selection of Supreme Court judges and others — is over the heart and soul of the GOP. Is it a big tent embracing various factions of Republicanism or a conservative tent where others are selectively allowed in? Is the conservative faction running the party? And is the dog wagging its tail or the tail wagging the dog?

I know I’m not the only Republican unhappy with the performance of most Republicans over the past decade or so. I mean, we all expect the Senate to be worthless in most cases, but the GOP has President, House, and Senate. And they still haven’t accomplished anything worth talking about.

At least I’m not bitter.

UPDATE: Incidentally, I don’t expect much to come from this investigation except a lot of press coverage.

Sat-Guided Cannon Ready to Blast

Think of it as the howitzer’s answer to smart bombs.

This could be hitting the field within six months.

How to Win in the Horn of Africa

I was just talking about this the other day to a friend. My point was that, despite the headlines from Iraq (and even Afghanistan if something bad happens to us), there are many other battles being fought in many other places, one of them eastern Africa. Some of the battles are covert “black ops”-type missions by special forces and the like. Many more of them are spy and intel jobs across the globe. Much of our foreign aid is either a bribe or a carrot to nations sitting on the fence.

And then there are the veterinarians.

Strategy Page on the Horn:

This theater of the war has a grand total of 1,400 personnel operating in an area five times larger than Iraq and Afghanistan combined. Yet, these 1,400 personnel are dealing al Qaeda serious strategic blows in a major offensive that is just as important as those in Iraq and Afghanistan. The organizations that have affiliated with al Qaeda need recruits, due to the fact that they are suffering heavy casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan. Villagers who have had their goats treated by American veterinarians or who have seen American soldiers spend five months drilling a well, are not likely to flock to the banner of al Qaeda. They will be just as likely to tell the Americans, who came to help them improve their lives, that there have been terrorist recruitment efforts. The recruiters will then be followed, and more intelligence will be acquired before various al Qaeda cells get rolled up.

While this is no doubt the plan, we need to keep in mind that not all of our efforts will be as successful as this seems to indicate. Many of our enemies will only too-eagerly allow us to drill wells for them or treat their goat, with no intention of every repaying us with kindness or even neutrality. Still, these efforts are relatively inexpensive and will work more often than not.

Worst case scenario if we drill a well for a village and treat all their goats? They think Americans are simply stupid for giving away free labor to people who will continue to hate them. But the worst case scenario in a military operation is much worse, even if the military operation is justified and goes perfectly.

Just remember that we’re only seeing a very thin slice of what’s happening (that’s colored by the lenses of Legacy Media) and that many of the battles don’t look like battles at all.

As I noted earlier, I was able to attend an early screening of the new film SERENITY. It’s based on the cancelled series FIREFLY, which I was unfamiliar with.

The trailer was particularly unimpressive, and I wasn’t really expecting much, to be honest. I must admit that I was pleasantly surprised.

Not only is SERENITY better than your typical sci-fi flick, it is in fact quite good.

Don’t get me wrong. This is sci-fi all the way, and the storyline and subplots aren’t exactly great. But it’s two hours of good entertainment and certainly more enjoyable than the vast majority of science fiction out there. Fans of the FIREFLY series, I’m sure, will enjoy it immensely, but even as one outside the cultish fan base I not only have no complaints but heartily recommend the movie to any sci-fi fans out there.

With two notable exceptions, the comedic lines are all in the trailers, which was a disappointment. Even so, they scored quite a few laughs. Being unfamiliar with the television series, I cannot really comment on how the characters develop or how the events in the movie will alter the landscape of the world the characters inhabit, but let me say that the story pulls no punches.

This is the sort of movie-based-upon-a-TV-series that fans deserve, or at least the type of movie I’d like to see based upon a series I like. Although I doubt I’ll go see it in the theater again, I admit that I’ll probably buy the DVD at some point.

As for the “Serenity Blogger Bonanza” event put on by Grace Hill Media, however, I must state that they need to work on it. While I commend their idea and believe that the blogosphere provides a great opportunity to market your goods to the audience you’re looking for in many cases, they really didn’t run the show very well. Probably just first-time mistakes, but they’re pretty glaring. And you can bet that criticism would have been pretty significant if not counter-balanced by the fact that the movie was quite good.

I noted the harsh tone general poor quality of their non-confirmation confirmation in my earlier post. On top of that, I sent two emails to the contact address, one with a question about my application for passes. Neither one got a response.

While that might be understandable, what happened at the theater is not. I arrived 45 minutes early as directed, but the Universal rep we had been told to see was not there. Not only that, but the theater, Studio 28, seemed to have no idea that there was any sort of “Blogger Bonanza” going on at all. The majority of the crowd had won passes through radio stations, and they arrived with slick passes and were shown right into the theater. The bloggers all stood around fuming in the lobby, identified by our computer-printed confirmations.

There ended up being about 25 bloggers from the Grand Rapids, MI, area for the show, which was sort of cool. One guy came all the way from South Bend Indiana, but most of us were locals. And as the minutes dragged by and more and more folks with radio station passes walked past, our collective patience began to evaporate. Don’t think we weren’t standing around talking about the “buzz” this act was going to generate.

When the rep finally showed up, he was just some guy in a sports jersey and a little legal pad with a list of names. He didn’t really know what was going on, and it took another 10-15 minutes for him to straighten things out with the theater and get our tickets.

I’d be curious to know if any bloggers attending other screenings had similar experiences.

That being said, the film was good and Murdoc gives it a strong “thumbs-up”.

UPDATE: Another Grand Rapids area blogger I ran into at the show, Justin, has two posts up on the experience, one on the film itself and one on the confusion before the show.

Todd at Amateur Megalomania:

I urge you to avoid other reviews like the plague if you have any intention of seeing this film. Moreover, take two hours and go rent the first disk of the TV show and at least watch the pilot. You only get one ‘first reaction’ at this movie, and you really should get a feel for it. Sure, it is watchable without the TV experience, but it won’t have the same impact.

I didn’t know the first thing about the series, and I was buying the whole thing. But, as is usual with these things, long-time fans will certainly have different viewpoints on many things.

Conversations from the Green Room:

And this post on the event.

WHAT EVENT!?!

That sums it up, organizational-wise. But in the end, fortunately, a good time was had by all.

I’m going to keep tagging other Grand Rapids reviews onto this post if/when I come across them. If you were there at Studio 28 and blogged it, drop me a line.