Simon Perry: Schemes, dreams & trivia

Every wondered what one hundred tons of explosives looks like when it blows up all at once?

For me it’s not so much the fire ball from the explosion, but the very real demonstration of how much faster light travels than sound and watching it as it disturbs everything on its expansion towards the camera.

Gives you a real idea of where the expression shock and awe comes from.

(via)

There’s a piece in Business Week about the rise of luxury cars in China.

I was amazed to see that the Rolls-Royce Phantom is about £800,000 after import tax!

(Photo: Business Week)

Arrived at Heathrow for trip to Monte Carlo. Getting here at 5:50 am I figured that it would be me and the cleaners - the place is _packed_. Lady on the baggage checking tells me that it’s crushed from 5am until 8:30, due to cheap flights and people getting connecting flights.

40 minutes to get through passport control and security. It’s a really de-humanizing process which makes you think that there’s some sort of psychological game going on here to pacify people before they travel. A horrible process that I’m in no hurry to repeat.

Makes me think back to how pleasurable the flight was from the Island to London. No queuing, just arrive, get on and go.

Note to self - must get the Gulfstream out of the garage and change the oil - or get to the airport after 8:30am.

I saw Cory commenting on BoingBoing that the goatse.cx domain is up for sale (strangely I’m bathing in Cory currently, reading his BB posts while listening to his reading of Peter Gutmann’s A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection - quite disconcerting).

This brings goatse back into my mind (*shudder*) and finally gets me to extract one of the photos I took at the amazing Bestival last year.

In the middle of site was a 9-foot-ish sculpture (for want of a better word) of the word Bestival that Bestival goers were free to decorate as they saw fit.

Looking it over I came across a goatse and the .cx domain label. As we know, it comes up in the most unlikely places.

Happily after I walked away, it was gone from my mind and the madness of Bestival continued.

Watching this type of content is interesting. It gives you a view of how forlorn the life of a standard solider is.

I can’t see it as a way to improve commissions to the Army.

The Army must hate that these videos are getting out - doesn’t improve the view of Army in many eyes.

Fantastically creative.

Thanks for Jack Phoenix who posted this on Ergo’s MySpace.

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How Uncle Sam Spends Your Tax Money

To service the $9 trillion-and-growing national debt, the U.S. government spent $406 billion on interest in 2006, up 13% since 2001. All told, about 15 cents of each tax dollar is spent on interest payments.

Fashions by Valentina Kobtseva

Originally uploaded by John~C.

Fashions Past - A great set of old fashion styles from all over the world.

Thanks to The Development Suite for the pointer.