Upon This Last Day Of Hurricane Season 2025...

Some good news:

Tomorrow winter begins. (no, don't give me any of that 'not until the solstice next month!' business; no, just no)  What the hell happened to fall?

Reminder: Grand Ole Opry's 100th Tonight

Link to earlier blog post here.

ps, the next day Saturday 29th: Pretty amazing show.  It started with Ricky Skaggs whipping out a tune on "Uncle Jimmy" Thompson's first fiddle used on the Grand Ole Opry a century earlier, and then finished up an extra half-hour over the allotted two and a half hour time slot.  Not that anybody complained about that!

pps: Sounded great on AM.

Winter Field Day Approaches

OK, January 24th & 25th are still two months away, but it's never too early to begin planning.  As usual there are a few minor tweaks to the rules, so read and heed.  Here are the links:

• Main WFD page
• Rules page

The weather's been so hot this fall that I haven't had any chances for practice trips, but things are finally cooling off and it's looking good for the next few weeks.  Expect related postings soon.

More Grant Blight

 Waveland to Open Bids for Pier Repairs; article at the Sea Coast Echo

Five years after Hurricane Zeta... and Waveland's just getting around to fixing up the municipal pier.  See an earlier post for the definition of grant blight.

Think of all the tweenagers and teenagers who missed out on good times fishing there.  Those five-plus years are now mostly lost to a fog of video games, cheap beer, and worse.  If you neglect these amenities, the kids will find something else to do.  Getting these hang-outs back up and running after a storm should be a high priority, not something left to DC's mañana-go-round.

The ugly reality of grant blight.

Grand Ole Opry Marks 100 Next Friday

As a reminder (mostly to self), the Grand Ole Opry will have its 100th anniversary show on November 28th – that's next Friday, the day after Thanksgiving.  Don't forget to tune in.  I have no idea who's on the schedule, but I'm guessing that it'll be all over the WSM web site by this time next week.

Remember, just as with classical music being performed on period instruments (see Academy of Ancient Music), it's far better to listen to the Grand Ole Opry on AM radio.  Fortunately this is fairly simple across most of the eastern half of the United States during dark evening hours: tune to 650 AM just before 8pm EST and you ought to have a listenable signal.  You may have to physically turn a portable radio to point it toward Nashville; their internal antennas are somewhat directional.  Of course, being out of a city center (this is country music after all) and having a good radio will help considerably, but on the whole it's a pretty easy exercise.  If the ionosphere doesn't cooperate (or worse, you're stuck in a city), streaming from the above-linked web site is a lesser but tolerable substitute.

Anyway, don't let this one slide.  Tune in for a little piece of history as it happens.

Meanwhile, Down Home at the Apalachicola Airport...

 The Forgotten Coast Freedom Festival Air Show was held today.  Pretty fun!  Here's the schedule:

And here's one of the highlights, a fly-over by two F-35's out of Tyndall AFB:

Lots, lots more going on there.  Two of the major performances involved T-6 Texan trainers.  The main air show part ran from just before 1pm to 3pm, but there was plenty to do from gate opening at 10am to close at 4pm.  Short and sweet.  Also... the weather was perfect!  So, yeah, again next year.

And Then There Were Two

Two successful commercial space launch companies with reusable first stages, that is.  Blue Origin gets one off of and back onto the ground in one piece: Video at the BBC  It's short, under two minutes.  Go and watch the whole thing.

Congrats to Blue Origin!  This is very good news.  SpaceX was the first, but with them there was only one company with this capability.  One is a special number because it shows that a thing can be done.  However, it's also only one corporate failure away from none.  With two, we have some redundancy.  I'm reasonably sure that companies three and four are about to spring into the spotlight.  Exciting times!