Enhance and Escape

“It’s the coldest time of year!  I’ve just killed one of the biggest forms of plant life on my planet – a rather small specimen, mind you; one that fits in a car – and brought it inside my home.”

“I will now hang various things of an aesthetically pleasing nature on it, and employ technology that makes it look like it’s burning with oddly-colored embers.”

“I will nail footwear over the house’s heating station.  I will put food and small luxury items in the footwear.”

“I will play music that, at any other time of year, would make me plug my ears and screech.”

“I will consume a liquid made of eggs, sprinkled with something that is hallucinogenic in high doses.  I will not use a high dose.  But I may add a mild poison, for recreational purposes.”

“I will sit with my egg-drink next to my simulated forest fire while the restricted music plays, and remark that this is my favorite time of year.”

There is something strange, very strange, going on inside the heads of people using the fast-acting psychedelic. Machine elves, anyone?

Have you encountered stick men, machine elves or other discarnate entities while tripping brains on DMT? If so, you’re not alone. The use of the powerful, fast-acting psychedelic dimethyltriptamine (DMT) generates reports of such entities on a regular basis.

The Mercury-Redstone Launch Vehicle would be America’s first step in achieving space-faring status. Like other early rockets, the Mercury-Redstone was derived from a ballistic missile design, the PGM-11 Redstone. 

The PGM-11 Redstone became America’s first nuclear armed Short Range Ballistic Missile for defense in West Germany and Europe during the Cold War, from 1958 to 1964. Under Chief Designer Wernher von Braun, the Restone Missile (a descendant of the V-2) was also developed at Huntsville, Alabama at the Redstone Arsenal under the Army Ballistic Missile Agency (ABMA), for which the missile was named. It first launched successfully in 1953. 

Variants of the Redstone Missile include Jupiter-A, Jupiter-C, and Juno-1. Juno-I would be the launch vehicle for the United State’s first satellite - Explorer I, in January 1958 in response to the USSR’s launch of Sputnik, three months earlier. 

The Redstone platform would be used as the initial launch vehicle for the American space program’s Project Mercury. The Jupiter-C, with it’s elongated fuselage, carried enough fuel to bring the capsule to the edge of space, burning liquid oxygen and ethyl alcohol for 143 seconds through a Rocketdyne A-7 engine. The first flights of Project Mercury carried empty capsules, followed by Ham the Chimpanzee, and subsequently the first American in space, Alan Shepard aboard Freedom 7, in May 1961.

Shepard would be followed by Gus Grissom two months later, aboard Liberty Bell 7.

The Mercury-Redstone would no longer be used to launch Astronauts following Grissom’s flight. But the design of the Redstone would prove enduring. The Saturn I rocket, initially developed by the ABMA and used for NASA’s Apollo program, used a cluster of Redstone tanks making up the first stage of the the I and IB of the Saturn family of rockets.

Injured swan hugs the man who saved him

An injured swan that was nursed back to health is returning to her home in England. Despite the reputation of being “mean” or “aggressive” this swan seemed to know that she was in caring arms.

Richard Wiese visited the swan sanctuary with members of other swan rescue organizations to assist with rehabilitation efforts. The swan that Wiese came to pick up had been injured after flying into a chain-link fence, ABC News reported. Wiese was trying to make the swan feel comfortable enough for transport and he managed to exceed expectations.