Since I'm 15 years old, I've been eating at Jumbo's. I eventually married the owner's daughter. It is a Miami landmark, but it's also the best fried shrimp and chicken anywhere. That's right. Anywhere.
Sadly, because of the economy, it's been losing money by the handful. So take a look at this video and see why history will miss this one.
Click here (YouTube)
I need to point this out. This is the gold mine from The Zero Game. This is exactly what I said they'd do with it. This is exactly what they're doing. They see you right now. They told me. They see you shaking your head. They see it all.
Work begins on world's deepest underground lab AP
By DIRK LAMMERS, Associated Press WriterSIOUX FALLS, S.D. – Far below the Black Hills of South Dakota, crews are building the world's deepest underground science lab at a depth equivalent to more than six Empire State buildings — a place uniquely suited to scientists' quest for mysterious particles known as dark matter.
Scientists, politicians and other officials gathered Monday for a groundbreaking of sorts at a lab 4,850 foot below the surface of an old gold mine that was once the site of Nobel Prize-winning physics research.
The site is ideal for experiments because its location is largely shielded from cosmic rays that could interfere with efforts to prove the existence of dark matter, which is thought to make up nearly a quarter of the mass of the universe.
The deepest reaches of the mine plunge to 8,000 feet below the surface. Some early geology and hydrology experiments are already under way at 4,850 feet. Researchers also hope to build two deeper labs that are still awaiting funding from Congress.
"The fact that we're going to be in the Davis Cavern just tickles us pink," said Tom Shutt of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, referring to a portion of the mine named after scientist Ray Davis Jr., who used it in the 1960s to demonstrate the existence of particles called solar neutrinos.
Davis and a colleague named John Bahcall won a share of the 2002 Nobel Prize for physics for their work.
The old Homestake Gold Mine in a community called Lead (pronounced LEED) was shut down in 2001 after 125 years. Pumps that kept the mine dry were turned off years ago, so workers have been drying it out to prepare for the new research.
Before the labs are built, crews must also stabilize the tunnels and install new infrastructure. The lab at 4,850 feet is not much to look at yet. A rusty orange film covers the walls, floors, ceilings and debris left behind by miners.
The first dark matter experiment will be the Large Underground Xenon detector experiment — or LUX — a project to detect weakly interacting particles that could give scientists greater insight into the Big Bang explosion believed to have formed the universe.
Shutt, along with Brown University's Rick Gaitskell and nearly a dozen collaborators will work at the site to search for dark matter, which does not emit detectable light or radiation. But scientists say its presence can be inferred from gravitational effects on visible matter.
Scientists believe most of the dark matter in the universe contains no atoms and does not interact with ordinary matter through electromagnetic forces. They are trying to discover exactly what it is, how much exists and what effect it may have on the future of the universe.
Physicists have said that without dark matter, galaxies might never have formed. By learning more about dark matter, they hope to understand better whether the universe is expanding or contracting.
The research team will try to catch the ghostly particles in a 300-kilogram tank of liquid xenon, a cold substance that is three times heavier than water. If they tried to detect dark matter above ground, the highly sensitive detector would be bombarded by cosmic radiation.
Scientists hope to start construction on the two deepest labs by 2012 and open them by 2016. The projects are expected to cost $550 million.
Kinda hate the Washington Post for doing this (sinply because they can be exactly the kinds of snobs who’d walk right past this guy). But also gotta love them for doing this.
A Violinist in the Metro (Washington Post)
A man sat at a metro station in Washington DC and started to play the violin; it was a cold January morning. He played six Bach pieces for about 45 minutes.
During that time, since it was rush hour, it was calculated that thousand of people went through the station, most of them on their way to work. Three minutes went by and a middle aged man noticed there was musician playing. He slowed his pace and stopped for a few seconds and then hurried up to meet his schedule. A minute later, the violinist received his first dollar tip: a woman threw the money in the till and without stopping continued to walk. A few minutes later, someone leaned against the wall to listen to him, but the man looked at his watch and started to walk again. Clearly he was late for work. The one who paid the most attention was a 3 year old boy. His mother tagged him along, hurried but the kid stopped to look at the violinist. Finally the mother pushed hard and the child continued to walk turning his head all the time. This action was repeated by several other children. All the parents, without exception, forced them to move on. In the 45 minutes the musician played, only 6 people stopped and stayed for a while. About 20 gave him money but continued to walk their normal pace He collected $32. When he finished playing and silence took over, no one noticed it. No one applauded, nor was there any recognition. No one knew this but the violinist was Joshua Bell, one of the best musicians in the world. He played one of the most intricate pieces ever written with a violin worth 3.5 million dollars. Two days before his playing in the subway, Joshua Bell sold out at a theater in Boston and the seats average $100. This is a real story. Joshua Bell playing incognito in the metro station was organized by the Washington Post as part of a social experiment about perception, taste and priorities of people. The outlines were: in a commonplace environment at an inappropriate hour: Do we perceive beauty? Do we stop to appreciate it? Do we recognize the talent in an unexpected context?
This is my favorite new song. Rapping about physics!
Best part is the I can hear sSupersonic and Rob Bass in the background.
From Engadget:
CERN rap video about the Large Hadron Collider creates a black hole of awesomeness
by Joshua Topolsky, posted Aug 8th 2008 at 3:29PMBeen having a tough time figuring out just what CERN's Large Hadron Collider does? Worried that it will create a Möbius strip (a rip in the fabric of space where time becomes a loop)? Just love to jam? Watch this CERN-sponsored rap after the break, and have your universe totally destroyed. Er, but not for real.
[Via Protein Feed]
Copyedits are officially done and off and in the mail. Managed to sneak in a really good comic reference. Gotta make these things harder than just the Watchmen names in Tenth Justice. So today working on two new projects. One comics, one TV.
Also, see below from today's Washington Post. And people say it was all fiction.
The Washington Post
April 9, 2008 Wednesday
Regional EditionA Capital City With The Devil in the Details?; These Roads Aren't Paved With Good Intentions
BYLINE: Dan Morse; Washington Post Staff Writer
SECTION: STYLE; Pg. C01
LENGTH: 981 words
Presidential candidate John McCain keeps calling Washington the city of Satan. Turns out he's not alone.
"McCain was right," said David Bay, speaking by phone from Lexington, S.C., where as director of Cutting Edge Ministries he has long asserted that Washington's streets are positioned to usher in Lucifer as "the ultimate master of Government Center."
"You will need to have your maps of Washington, D.C., opened in front of you as we proceed," reads a treatise on the subject posted on Bay's Internet site.
Using Dupont and Logan circles as northern points, Bay instructs, you can trace various interlocking streets to form a demonic pentagram, one that bores directly into 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.
"It must be true, it's on the Internet," Larraine Wolman, a British tourist, said in perfect deadpan while gazing at the White House just before midnight recently.
She agreed to review Bay's map. Could she feel Satan?
No.
Wolman and her three British companions turned to walk back to their quarters at the Mayflower Hotel. This reporter followed, determining what they knew about the place. They knew that former New York governor Eliot Spitzer had stayed there, reportedly with a high-priced call girl. They didn't know how near the hotel is to the center of Bay's pentagram.
"He didn't get in trouble with Satan," Wolman said of Spitzer, as she stood in the Mayflower's lobby. "He got in trouble with his wife."
McCain, a Republican senator from Arizona, has regularly called Washington Satan's City over the past 10 years. He did so twice last month, including during a visit to the Atlanta headquarters of Chick-fil-A, the fast-food chain whose founder is such a devoted Baptist he keeps the eateries closed on Sundays.
"It's harder and harder trying to do the Lord's work in the city of Satan," McCain said, according to an Associated Press account.
Brian Rogers, a spokesman for the McCain campaign, said the Satan comments are obviously jokes. Indeed, on the stump, McCain doesn't refer to the District per se, but to the culture of special interests and ethical lapses in Congress he has long railed against.
Satan and Washington go back. After John Wilkes Booth murdered Abraham Lincoln, printers rushed out images of a horned and clawed devil whispering into Booth's ear at Ford's Theatre, according to "Manhunt," a book about the search for Booth.
On Aug. 20, 1949, The Washington Post weighed in, greeting readers with a headline atop the front page: "Priest Frees Mt. Rainier Boy Reported Held in Devil's Grip."
The story told of a 14-year-old Prince George's County boy who underwent "between 20 and 30" exorcisms, most of which had him breaking into violent, cursing tantrums and bouts of Latin, a language he had never studied. The article quoted unnamed "Catholic sources."
The case inspired a book that became the 1973 movie "The Exorcist," set in Georgetown, which scared the wits out large swaths of America. The Archdiocese of Washington knows of no officially sanctioned exorcisms since the 1949 Mount Rainier case, said Susan Gibbs, a spokeswoman for the archdiocese.
The most persistent rumblings about Washington as the devil's workshop seem bound up in history about the city's design and the role of Freemasons in building it. It's a connection explored in the three-hour DVD "Riddles in Stone: The Secret Architecture of Washington, D.C.," which notched a respectable 90th out of 1,363 titles recently in Amazon's general history documentary category.
Among the film's highlights is 1993 footage of Mason Strom Thurmond, then a U.S. senator from South Carolina, cement trowel in hand, marking the 200th anniversary of the U.S. Capitol in a Masonic ceremony. And while Masons served as architects to the White House, Capitol, Supreme Court and Washington Monument, the suggestion their leaders worked with Satan is "absolute nonsense," said Akram Elias, Grand Master of the Masons of D.C.
"It's an old story," Elias added. "They don't come out with anything new."
In the 2007 New York Times bestseller "The Book of Fate," a central character named Nico Hadrian advances the demonic pentagram theory of Washington's street layout and describes the White House as the doorway to Hell itself. Author Brad Meltzer said he designed Hadrian, a crazed killer who shoots his way out of a mental hospital, to be a "walking Internet" of various beliefs about Freemasons, among the "great bogeymen of history." And "The Da Vinci Code" author Dan Brown, according to his Web site, is at work on a novel that "explores the hidden history of our nation's capital," as "set deep within . . . the enigmatic brotherhood of the Masons."
Other satanic hot spots cited by believers include the U.S. Capitol and the Washington Monument. The latter was described by Bay, the South Carolina author, as a filthy, phallic and satanic homage to the god Baal.
Unlikely, said an avowed Satanist from Laurel.
He agreed to meet at the Washington Monument recently, strolling up the Mall in a long black robe and passing through a throng of sun-drenched tourists. A government contracting employee, the 37-year-old spoke on the condition that he be identified only by his satanic name (Gwydion Tiamat). Friends' houses have been firebombed, he said, and they're just pagans.
A husband and father and the director of the East Coast office of the Brotherhood of Satan, he said "a couple of thousand" Satanists live in the Washington area. This is a group that is widely misunderstood, he said: Members don't sacrifice cats; they're not out to hurt people; they simply acknowledge that humans are carnal animals and enjoy the freedoms and indulgences that flow from that understanding. "Having a whole Sara Lee strawberry cheesecake, for example," he said.
And in one sense, he mused, while looking toward the Lincoln Memorial and the infinite regions beyond, McCain is right.
"Satan," said Tiamat, "is everywhere."
It wasn't DB Cooper's parachute. Thanks to Jessica for keeping us honest.
FBI: Parachute isn't D.B. Cooper's (CNN)
Have to say, I've always been fascinated with this -- just jumping from the plane with the load of cash. How could I not be obsessed?
Plane hijacker D.B. Cooper's parachute foundvia Boing Boing by Mark Frauenfelder on 3/26/08
36 years after he jumped from a hijacked plane with a bag containing $200,000 in ransom, D.B. Cooper's whereabouts remain unknown. But his parachute was discovered yesterday.
If it is Cooper's parachute, that will solve one mystery -- where he apparently landed -- but it will raise another, Carr said.
In 1980, a family on a picnic found $5,880 of Cooper's money in a bag on a Columbia River beach, near Vancouver. Some investigators believed it might have been washed down to the beach by the Washougal River. But if Cooper landed near Amboy and stashed the money bag there, there's no way it could have naturally reached the Washougal.
"If this is D.B. Cooper's parachute, the money could not have arrived at its discovery location by natural means," Carr said. "That whole theory is out the window."
Damn inllectuals ruin the f'ing joke by overanalyzing the damn thing.
Why White People Like 'Stuff White People Like' (The New Republic)
And here's booklamp (LifeHacker), which helps you find books you like by measuring style, length, density and all the other reasons that reduce 400 pages of goodness to a lifeless bunch of words from a keyboard. Of course, I'm such a pig, I wanna know what they say about me.
I have to say, I'm so fascinated by what Best Buy thinks of me. Becasue much as I hate to admit it, I know they're right.
Read below (from The Consumerist). They're watching you now. They see you rolling your eyes at this...
LEAKS: Best Buy's Internal Customer Profiling Document [Insiders]
via Consumerist by Meg Marco on 3/18/08
Attention Profiled Shoppers: Consumerist is now in possession of an internal training document that teaches Best Buy blue shirts how to stereotype customers. While Best Buy's use of personas has been known for several years, our exclusively obtained document contains several brand-new Best Buy personas, including "Maria Middle America" and "Empty Nesters" Helen and Charlie.
Why do customers need to be stereotyped, you ask? Because some customers are good, and others are bad, and Best Buy employees need to know which ones are which.
Back in 2004, the Wall Street Journal announced that Best Buy had a new customer service strategy. The meat and potatoes of the new strategy was this: Best Buy would concentrate on outwitting pesky bargain-hunters (now known as "demons")and cater only to its most profitable customers, or "angels." This new philosophy was based on the work of Larry Selden, a professor at Columbia University's Graduate School of Business, and consultant to Best Buy.
Larry is all about the customer. He hates products, "...the obsessive focus on products needs to be replaced by an even more obsessive focus on the customer," he says.
One might assume that with this customer-obsessed guy directing Best Buy's strategy, there'd be an emphasis on customer service. Not so.
In fact, the first thing Best Buy did after adopting Selden's method was amend their return policy to include a 15% restocking fee. Too many "demon" customers were returning things.
The most important part this new world order is the "persona." Personas are essentially stereotypes that Best Buy's salespeople study in order to sell their most profitable services to different "types" of customers. Young urban males are called "Buzz." Upper middle class women are known as "Jill."
Each persona comes with a customized sales approach. Jill wants Best Buy to "help me find and fuel my new passions so I can remain true to myself," whereas upscale suburban Barry wants "premium brands presented as a total solution."
And what happens to those bargain-hunting demons? Best Buy CEO Brad Anderson told the Wall Street Journal in 2004 "that Best Buy will first try to turn its bad customers into profitable ones by inducing them to buy warranties or more profitable services."
"In most cases, customers wouldn't recognize the options we've tried so far," he said. Maybe this new document (which adds several new categories to the known Best Buy persona universe) can help.
NEW PERSONAS:
Meet Carrie (Young Urban Female), Maria (Middle American Female), and (Empty Nesters) Helen and Charlie!
Click on the pictures below to bring up the slides. navigate using arrows that appear (when moused over) at the left, top and right of the slide, or using the "previous" "next" and "gallery" links at the bottom.
PREVIOUSLY: Best Buy Profiles Customers
I love you so much I'm sharing this with you. Best hack ever.
How To Never Wait On Hold With Your Credit Card Company [Get To Human]
via Consumerist by Ben Popken on 1/7/08Reader Jamie shares a neat workaround so that she never has to wait on hold with her credit card company. She says that whenever she calls, "I do not use the 800-number on the back of the card. Instead, I use their outside-the-US instructions on the back of the card and call them collect at their regular phone number. When the credit card thinks that they are paying international collect call charges, they do NOT put you on hold - they take your call right away!"
Sorry if this makes you sad, companies, but this what your interminable queue times have driven us to. We're not going to sit in your cattle chutes anymore. You've wasted enough of our time, now we're going to waste your money.
Most are just eh, but the "better than" one is worth the admission. Have fun.
Top 10 Obscure Google Search Tricks
via Digg on 1/2/08When it comes to the Google search box, you already know the tricks: like searching for exact phrases in quotes like "so say we all" or searching a single site using site:lifehacker.com gmail. But there are many more oblique, clever, and lesser-known search recipes and operators that work from that unassuming little text box.
I love this stuff. I love that some company out there predicts not weather or style or tie-width -- but just color. The sad part? The year they predicted orange was the year The Tenth Justice was published...and broke out...with an orange cover.
Death to brown! In with blue!
Pantone cranks up the whalesong
'Anchoring and meditative' colour of the year
By Lester Haines
Published Monday 24th December 2007 10:34 GMTIn case you thought common-sense outfits like Pantone - the "global authority on colour" - were immune to rebranding madness, symptomised by the overwhelming desire to give forth in Strategy Boutique Newspeak, it's our sad duty to bring to your attention this announcement regarding the company's "colour of the year":
Pantone's colour of the year - Iris BluePantone, Inc, the global authority on colour and provider of professional colour standards for the design industries, selected PANTONE 18-3943 Blue Iris, a beautifully balanced blue-purple, as the colour of the year for 2008. Combining the stable and calming aspects of blue with the mystical and spiritual qualities of purple, Blue Iris satisfies the need for reassurance in a complex world, while adding a hint of mystery and excitement.
"From a colour forecasting perspective, we have chosen PANTONE 18-3943 Blue Iris as the colour of the year, as it best represents colour direction in 2008 for fashion, cosmetics, and home products," explains Leatrice Eiseman, executive director of the Pantone Colour Institute®. "As a reflection of the times, Blue Iris brings together the dependable aspect of blue, underscored by a strong, soul-searching purple cast. Emotionally, it is anchoring and meditative with a touch of magic. Look for it artfully combined with deeper plums, red-browns, yellow-greens, grapes and grays."
Splendid. Ms Eiseman doubtless did her soul-searching for this particular load of complete nonsense with the whalesong cranked up to 11 and in a thick joss-stick-generated scented fog. We wish her and our beloved readers a beautifully balanced, meditative, and anchored 2008. ®
Bootnote
Thanks to Roland Muts for the heads-up.
I promise, this is true: for a moment about two weeks ago, I told my wife I wanted to buy the Magna Carta. Now, let's not let the fact that I couldn't possibly come up with the expected $30 million for it get in the way of a good story. So I even mention this thought to my wife. She tells me I'm a schmuck. But let's examine: you know, just KNOW this thing is gonna go up in value. This isn't comic art. It's the MAGNA CARTA!
And now, I see how right I was. Note to self: next time, buy Magna Carta.
Magna Carta sells for $21.3M in New York
From Tahoo NewsNEW YORK - A 710-year-old copy of the declaration of human rights known as the Magna Carta — the version that became part of English law — was auctioned Tuesday for $21.3 million, a Sotheby's spokeswoman said.
The document, which had been expected to draw bids of $30 million or higher, was bought by David Rubenstein of The Carlyle Group, a private equity firm, the spokeswoman said.
I am so obsessed with this story...it just keeps getting better.
Sons of 'Dead' British Man Lash Out at Parents
Thursday , December 06, 2007Panama City — The sons of "back-from-the-dead" canoeist John Darwin have declared they are the victims of a scam after their mother admitted knowing her husband was alive.
Anthony and Mark Darwin have now turned their backs on their parents.
In a joint statement the sons said: "Having seen the recent media speculation surrounding our parents ever since our dad was arrested, we are very much in an angry and confused state of mind.
"If the papers' allegations of a confession from our mom are true then we very much feel that we have been the victims in a large scam.
"How could our mom continue to let us believe our dad had died when he was very much alive?
"We have not spoken to either of our parents since our dad's arrest and at this present time we want no further contact with them."
Anne Darwin is said to have come clean after a picture was discovered showing the couple in Panama in 2006 - three years after he was declared dead.
"My sons will never forgive me. They knew nothing," the 55-year-old told reporters. "They thought John was dead. Now they are going to hate me."
John Darwin's father Ronnie, 90, was shocked at the news.
"I can't believe his wife lived down the road from me and said nothing if she knew he was alive," he said.
Anne Darwin, who moved to Panama just weeks ago, also admitted cashing in a life insurance policy - but says she got the money in good faith.
And she is now preparing to return to England to face questioning by detectives after Sky sources revealed the couple were involved in a "plot."
John Darwin disappeared in 2002 in a suspected North Sea canoeing accident.
The 57-year-old appeared as if out of the blue on Saturday, when he walked into a London police station and announced: "I think I am a missing person."
He has since been arrested on suspicion of fraud and has been passed fit to be questioned by Cleveland police.
A reminder for those wondering what to do this weekend: you can still get a free (FREE) copy of The Millionaires on iTunes. Just go there and download away.
Anyhow. This is so easy, but here in Florida, we have vanity central. Like Dave Barry said, we also have every boat named WET DREAM. And so, the best of the best...
ASSMAN
via In The Pink Texas by Pink Lady on 11/12/07Out of the nine million vanity license plates, roughly one in 10 are in Virginia. This is not news to me. When I was in high school, my personalized plate on my Dodge colt was "YOU WISH."
Sixteen percent of the vanity plates are issued by Virginia, with New Hampshire and Illinois following close behind. Texas has the fewest, with only a half percent of drivers personalizing their plates. But Texas does have the most American eagle-cloaked-in-flag decals, as well as family names like Gonzalez stenciled on their rear windows.
"I think a lot of people have stories to tell and they really want pieces of those stories out there," said Stefan Lonce, an author on the subject. This is exactly why my license plate says "BLOGGER." I couldn't believe it was still available.
This guy fascinates me. Especially the, "slept just fine at night."
Pilot of plane that dropped A-bomb dies
By JULIE CARR SMYTH, Associated Press Writer
COLUMBUS, Ohio - Paul Tibbets, who piloted the B-29 bomber Enola Gay that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, died Thursday. He was 92 and insisted for six decades after the war that he had no regrets about the mission and slept just fine at night.
Tibbets died at his Columbus home. He suffered from a variety of health problems and had been in decline for two months.
Tibbets had requested no funeral and no headstone, fearing it would provide his detractors with a place to protest, said Gerry Newhouse, a longtime friend.
Tibbets' historic mission in the plane named for his mother marked the beginning of the end of World War II and eliminated the need for what military planners feared would have been an extraordinarily bloody invasion of Japan. It was the first use of a nuclear weapon in wartime.
The plane and its crew of 14 dropped the five-ton "Little Boy" bomb on the morning of Aug. 6, 1945. The blast killed 70,000 to 100,000 people and injured countless others.
Three days later, the United States dropped a second nuclear bomb on Nagasaki, Japan, killing an estimated 40,000 people. Tibbets did not fly in that mission. The Japanese surrendered a few days later, ending the war.
"I knew when I got the assignment it was going to be an emotional thing," Tibbets told The Columbus Dispatch for a story published on the 60th anniversary of the bombing. "We had feelings, but we had to put them in the background. We knew it was going to kill people right and left. But my one driving interest was to do the best job I could so that we could end the killing as quickly as possible."
Morris Jeppson, the officer who armed the bomb during the Hiroshima flight, said Tibbets was energetic, well-respected and "hard-nosed."
"Ending the war saved a lot of U.S. armed forces and Japanese civilians and military," Jeppson said. "History has shown there was no need to criticize him."
Tibbets, then a 30-year-old colonel, never expressed regret over his role. He said it was his patriotic duty and the right thing to do.
"I'm not proud that I killed 80,000 people, but I'm proud that I was able to start with nothing, plan it and have it work as perfectly as it did," he said in a 1975 interview.
"You've got to take stock and assess the situation at that time. We were at war. ... You use anything at your disposal."
He added: "I sleep clearly every night."
Tibbets took quiet pride in the job he had done, said journalist Bob Greene, who wrote the Tibbets biography, "Duty: A Father, His Son, and the Man Who Won the War."
"He said, 'What they needed was someone who could do this and not flinch — and that was me,'" Greene said.
Paul Warfield Tibbets Jr. was born Feb. 23, 1915, in Quincy, Ill., and spent most of his boyhood in Miami.
He was a student at the University of Cincinnati's medical school when he decided to withdraw in 1937 to enlist in the Army Air Corps.
After the war, Tibbets said in 2005, he was dogged by rumors claiming he was in prison or had committed suicide.
"They said I was crazy, said I was a drunkard, in and out of institutions," he said. "At the time, I was running the National Crisis Center at the Pentagon."
Tibbets retired from the Air Force as a brigadier general in 1966. He later moved to Columbus, where he ran an air taxi service until he retired in 1985.
The National Aviation Hall of Fame in Dayton plans a photographic tribute to Tibbets, who was inducted in 1996.
"There are few in the history of mankind that have been called to figuratively carry as much weight on their shoulders as Paul Tibbets," director Ron Kaplan said in a statement. "Even fewer were able to do so with a sense of honor and duty to their countrymen as did Paul."
Tibbets' role in the bombing brought him fame — and infamy — throughout his life.
In 1976, he was criticized for re-enacting the bombing during an appearance at a Harlingen, Texas, air show. As he flew a B-29 Superfortress over the show, a bomb set off on the runway below created a mushroom cloud.
He said the display "was not intended to insult anybody," but the Japanese were outraged. The U.S. government later issued a formal apology.
Tibbets again defended the bombing in 1995, when an outcry erupted over a planned 50th anniversary exhibit of the Enola Gay at the Smithsonian Institution.
The museum had planned to mount an exhibit that would have examined the context of the bombing, including the discussion within the Truman administration of whether to use the bomb, the rejection of a demonstration bombing and the selection of the target.
Veterans groups objected, saying the proposed display paid too much attention to Japan's suffering and too little to Japan's brutality during and before World War II, and that it underestimated the number of Americans who would have perished in an invasion.
They said the bombing of Japan was an unmitigated blessing for the United States and the exhibit should say so.
Tibbets denounced it as "a damn big insult."
The museum changed its plan and agreed to display the fuselage of the Enola Gay without commentary, context or analysis.
He told the Dispatch in 2005 that he wanted his ashes scattered over the English Channel, where he loved to fly during the war.
Newhouse confirmed that Tibbets wanted to be cremated, but he said relatives had not yet determined how he would be laid to rest.
Tibbets is survived by his wife, Andrea, and three sons — Paul, Gene and James — as well as a number of grandchildren and great-grandchildren. A grandson named after Tibbets followed his grandfather into the military as a B-2 bomber pilot currently stationed in Belgium.
___
On the Net:
Enola Gay Remembered Inc.: http://www.enolagay.org
Silly and small, but here's what's right in the world right now. Someone calling out what politics has become.
I rarely blog sports stories. Except for the ones that make me tear up in the end. And father-son references always help.
From The Austinist
Austin Accountant Does the Right Thing with Historic Homer
When Will Stewart of Austin bought a ticket in the outfield seats for the Chicago White Sox-LA Angels game on Sunday, he had no idea he was about to become a part of history.
But he was in the right place at the right time as Jim Thome's game-winning home run bounced off the rows behind Stewart and into his hands. It was Thome's 500th career home run, a mark that only 23 players in baseball history have reached.
Memorabilia like that home-run ball can fetch thousands of dollars at an auction, but Stewart, 28, chose to return the ball to Thome. In return, the White Sox offered Stewart two season tickets for the 2008 season and an autographed ball and bat.
Stewart, however, chose to donate the two season tickets to the charity of Thome's choice. The tickets will be auctioned off during the Joyce Thome Benefit for the Children's Hospital of Illinois, an event named in honor of Thome's late mother.
The team said they will fly Stewart out from Texas with a group of his friends to sit in Thome's box during one of the White Sox-Cubs games next season.
In the days leading up to the record homer, Thome said he wanted the ball back and planned to drive with his father to deliver it to the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, NY.
