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This and the Georgian ski lift has made me rethink my Eurasian ski tour.

Sorry, but they should have let Top Gear die. The new hosts are just awful and boring. I'm so glad we have The Grand Tour on Amazon, what a coup for Bezos.

To be fair, what I thought is new is the cheaper motor running on regular unleaded gas more efficiently. Airplane fuel is insanely expensive compared to gas, and harder to get in remote places.
Ground effects plane/boats have been around for quite some time, but not in a commercially useful configuration. This seems like a big step up from small ferries or tour boats (faster and smoother rides) and far cheaper than small planes to buy and operate.

Yeah, the biggest ecranoplan was enormous, with immense lifting capacity but little evasive capacity, so they were awful in practice as military vehicles except as transports well behind the front. I can't find any instances of them being used in conflicts.

I hear you brother. I have already earmarked an emergency "flights, tickets etc for Slayers last tour" fund. My wife is kinda annoyed that we might have to skip our 10th wedding anniversary, but she'll get over it

... until the end of their upcoming tour at least. <sniff>

I'm not crying... I'm crying havoc.

Being held accountable for what we do is a good thing, but ignoring degrees and distinctions can turn it bad.

Weinstein out of a position of power, out of a job, and quite possibly into jail: good. Deserved, and sends an important message to those that might want to abuse their power in similar ways in the future. Precedent set -- however things worked before, we won't stand for that shit anymore.

Louis CK out of favor, and on record for doing creepy things which reduces opportunity to continue doing said creepy things. Also removed from positions where he could exert pressure to "consent" to said creepery where consent likely wouldn't be granted if the threat of job repercussions wasn't implied or patently stated. Again, good outcome -- in my opinion including the fact that he likely won't face criminal charges while Weinstein may.


Franken, on the other hand, was held accountable for actions in a way that I found troublesome for two reasons:

1) He was under scrutiny for past actions, yet placed under the judgement of current (bleeding edge current, even) behavioral standards. That is trending towards ex-post-facto law. I can't pass a law in December making it illegal to wear white shirts, then throw you in jail for having worn a white shirt in November before the law was in effect.

It isn't the same thing because sexual harassment has been illegal all along, and because he wasn't really facing legal trouble, just professional / political trouble -- where "ex-post-facto" judgments aren't prohibited. Still, it seems like when standards change we should try to limit judgement under current standards to current behavior. There's a reason why it works that way in law.


2) Furthermore, a lot of the scrutiny Franken was under completely stripped the behavior from context. Context is extremely important. That's why Weinstein "asking" women to "consent" to his rapey behavior wasn't OK, even though asking for consent is sort of the baseline "good"/expected behavior -- they weren't actually completely free to tell him to shove it.

Ignoring the context of Franken's behavior means that it is immaterial that he was working for the USO at the time, where on-stage suggestive stuff and raunchiness was/is pretty much the whole idea. Immaterial that on-stage "groping and kissing" stuff may well have been scripted as such, and basically consented to by the actors -- part of the show.

Combine that with ignoring degrees of offense, and we're listing Franken's name in the same sentence with Louis CK and Harvey Weinstein, which is ridiculous. Franken "had to" be a sacrificial lamb to demonstrate that Democrats are willing to walk the walk as well as talk the talk on this issue -- but did he really?

If more Democrats were willing to "tell it like it is", as I'd argue Maher is doing here, Franken could have said that the photo where he mimed groping a sleeping Karri Turner was a mistake, a joke in poor taste done in the context of an entire tour that seems in poor taste by modern standards, and that could have been the end of it. He could still be in office, and the Democrat party at large would have been better off, as would the net balance in Congress with regards to women's issues.

But nope. Context, distinction, and degrees are all meaningless, so Franken's name is in that same list of dirty sleazeball asshole men, no asterisks or footnotes necessary. I don't think the outcome of that game goes in a favorable direction.

You are correct sir. I saw the same tour. I did roll out while the smashing gourds played. Before they hit the stage the mood was awesome thanks to George Clinton & the P-Funk All Stars and the Beastie Boys. But I really enjoyed seeing them on the Gish tour at a small venue.

And Obama apology tour was the better move.
Trump is kicking ass and MAGA.

Admittedly, it was much funnier when I was 8 and the highly commercialised Tut exhibit was touring the U.S., but it still makes me chuckle.

I feel like I could make good use of a Portal gun on this tour.

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I'd wager that a reasonable percentage of the lucky guys that survived a full tour of duty wouldn't agree with the assessment of flak jackets being essentially "unstylish 40 pound vests".

Also, the video makes it sound like the success rate of coming back from a single mission was 25-33%. I think those numbers are more accurate for the rate of completing a full tour of 25 missions (before being rotated out). The number I recall is about a 4% loss rate on a single mission:
100%-4% = 96%
.96^25 = 36%

If the chances of coming back from a single mission were 33%:
.33^25 = (pretty much zero).

I wouldn't want to chance my life on a roll of the dice where I die unless I roll a 5 or a 6, but that's pretty close to accurate...


Those nitpicks aside, still a great video that gets the newer generations that are too young to either have a grandfather from the war or to have watched Memphis Belle a bit of a sense of what those guys went through.