Lighter than air memories

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When Leah and I went to Little River Falls on Wednesday (Dec 2), I saw something in the distance that I thought was a hot air balloon. It turned out to be a blimp.

directv blimp

So, not the Goodyear blimp.

As it happens I actually sat in the pilot’s seat of the Goodyear blimp during a flight over Augusta, Ga, back in 1978. Being a newspaper reporter didn’t pay much, especially in Augusta, but it did have its perks. When the blimp landed at the Augusta airport, they let some local reporters go for a ride. Each of us got a chance to sit in the pilot’s seat and twirl the large wheel that controlled its vertical direction. The wheel was at my right hand, next to the seat, spin it forward to make the nose go down, and backward to make the nose go up.

This is what I got after the flight.

blimp club

I’m a card-carrying charter member of the Goodyear Blimp Club.

A few days after the blimp left, we got a call in the newsroom that the blimp had crashed at the airport. It turned out that it didn’t crash, it just tore free from its mooring. There is a special line that unzips the blimp’s envelop and deflates the balloon if it comes free from its mooring. That’s what happened, apparently during a thunderstorm. I couldn’t find the article I wrote for the newspaper, but I found the Associated Press story we sent in another newspaper.

Way, way back in the very old days, my family used to go to Akron, Ohio, to visit my mother’s family. Once so long ago that the memory is dim, we drove by the huge blimp hangar at the Goodyear plant, located at Wingfoot Lake outside Akron. During the war (that’s World War II), my grandmother worked at “the Goodyear” as they called it.

Goodyear doesn’t build blimps any more. The current Goodyear blimp is not, in fact, an actual blimp. A blimp has a completely fabric envelope. The only solid parts are the gondola and its engines. When the blimp unzipped itself in Augusta, what you saw was the gondola and a large area that looked like someone had put drop cloths down for a huge painting job.

Today’s “blimp” is actually a semirigid airship, probably more accurately known as a Zeppelin, especially since it is what Goodyear calls a hybrid of a Zeppelin airship with Goodyear modifications. It was constructed at the Wingfoot Lake hangar.

Leah named one of the stray dogs that have passed through here Zeppelin, since we were on an initial-Z naming spree.

You can find more information about Goodyear’s blimp operations at their website.

The Directv blimp is, apparently, a true blimp.

Another perk I got as a newspaper reporter was a ride in a machine that is almost the polar opposite of an airship. I’ll post about that later.

 

Roaring falls

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We had a little over three inches of rain from Tuesday morning through sometime before dawn on Wednesday, December 2. When I took the dogs for their walk Wednesday morning, runoff was still sheeting across the road at our neighbor’s driveway. As I went further, I could hear the wet-weather stream formed from the ditch on Lavender Trail. A little further and the sound was everywhere. It was so loud as I walked down the mountain that it drowned out the noise of approaching cars. It made me wonder what the Little River Falls over in Alabama looked like. So Wednesday afternoon Leah and I drover the 30 miles over have a look.

Here’s what we saw. Click for a bigger image.

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Here’s what it looked like from the bridge just upstream.

upfallsLRC_2dec2015

The sound is necessary to appreciate the falls. Here’s a video I shot with our little Nikon point and shoot.

If you can’t view that one, try this one.

I have posted images of these falls before, once here and another time here. I thought I had seen the river high, but I was mistaken. This was really high. If I’m reading the USGS data correctly, this may be a new recorded instantaneous high flow.

Visiting day at the vet’s

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Sylvester has been having problems with blood in his urine for a while now. The vet gave him two antibiotic shots that didn’t work. We took him back Monday and the vet said Sylvester needs a different antibiotic that has to be given orally twice a day. We knew we couldn’t do it! So we are boarding him at the vet’s for about ten days so they can do it. They’re also putting him on a special diet that is supposed to help prevent kidney stones.

They said we could visit, so on Tuesday we took a blanket, two kitty toys and a little kitty dope. We took treats, but they said he couldn’t have them.

A guard led us down into the dungeon where Sly was interned with several other cats. He had just had a little accident involving his food bowl, his water dish, and his litter box, so he wasn’t looking his regular dapper self. He insisted that we not take a picture of him in his cell, so we got him while he was out in the “yard.” Here he is doing his stretches.

slystretches

I think he was trying to figure out if he could fit into Leah’s purse.

There was one pretty and friendly orange tabby in the next cell. He wanted to play patty cake with Leah.

pattycat

He also enjoyed a little head rub.

ticklecat

He was quite a handsome fellow (pretty lady?). We couldn’t tell from his name plate (“Bae?”).

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He didn’t want us to leave.

dontgocat

One of Sly’s downstairs neighbors was in recovery.

recovercat

He had just been neutered and was scheduled to go home that day. He was really out of it.

We almost missed these two.

clinic cats

I thought they were trustees, but the guard said they were the office cats and they started staying up there when the weather turned cooler. They watched us the whole time, although they didn’t really seem all that interested.

Sylvester was not a happy camper. Leah sprinkled some catnip on his blankie that we brought from home. As we left, he curled up on it and looked like he might take a nap after a few hits. Of course there’s not much for him to do but sleep. And plot his revenge. And it’s going to be bad!

You may already be a wiener

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If you watch television or get mail, you have probably seen the commericals or received the letter from Publishers Clearing House. This time it’s for a contest to win $10,000 a week for life. All you have to do is return the envelope with a completely and correctly filled-out entry form. My parents and Leah’s parents sometimes returned those forms. And why not? After all, it just costs a First Class stamp.

When we received our entry in the mail, I looked through its contents. Making sure the entry is complete is not as easy as it seems. You have to make sure every sticker is put in the right place on the entry form. Those stickers seem to be distributed throughout the contents of the envelope, and I counted more than 30 separate pieces of paper in the envelope.

Hidden in the depths of those papers was one titled “Sweeepstakes Facts.” Does anyone read that? I did. It says that the estimated odds of winning the “Up to $10,000 A-Week-For-Life” is 1 in 1,700,000,000. That’s one in 1.7 billion. Back not quite two years ago I wrote a post about the Megamillions lottery and scoffed at the idea that any individual player could expect to win at the absurdly overwhelming odds of one in 259 million. And here, this contest has odds of one in 1.7 billion.

It’s very hard to get any kind of intuitive understanding of just how ridiculously bad the Publishers Clearninghouse odds are. These odds are so high that it’s pretty clear to me that Publishers Clearinghouse has absolutely no intention of ever awarding the grand prize. There is not even a guarantee that the prize will be awarded, which, if you think about it, makes perfect sense. They almost certainly don’t print and distribute 1.7 billion entry forms, so they might not even print the winning number on any form. Of course,  they do offer a $1,000,000 prize to be awarded from a random drawing of all eligible entries if (when) no one wins the grand prize. It appears that at least that prize will be awarded.

Still, should you enter the contest? As I said, all it will cost to enter, other than a few minutes of your time, is a First Class stamp worth 49 cents.

Well, let’s answer that question. In the gambling world there is a concept called expected return. It is calculated by multiplying the prize amount by the probability of winning that prize. So, if a prize is $100 and the odds of winning are one in a thousand, the expected return is $100 multipled by 0.001 (or divided by 1000). That’s 10 cents. So, if the entry costs more than 10 cents, you should expect to lose money on the entry. Sometimes the Megamillions jackpot is high enough that the expected return on a one-dollar entry approaches, or in some cases exceeds, a dollar. That might seem like a reasonable contest to enter. Most of the time the expected return is more like 10 cents.

How does the Publishers Clearinghouse prize stack up in terms of expected return? Well, someone who is 65 today will on average live about another 20 years. (What! You mean I only have 20 more years to live? Damn! I’d better get busy living!) So, at $10,000 a week, that would mean $520,000 a year, or $10,400,000 over a lifetime. Take that sum and divide by 1.7 billion and you get about 0.6 cents. That six-tenths of a penny expected return on a 49-cent entry cost — not counting the waste of extremely valuable and limited time spent filling out the form.

So, is the Publishers Clearinghouse contest worth entering? No. It’s barely worth even the time it takes to throw the entry form into the trash can.

Cloudy skies like these are OK

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Last Sunday these clouds were hanging out over the house.

clouds22nov15

I like the way the strands of cloud seem like they have been smudged by some giant who tried to use an eraser on them. The smudges are virga falling from the tightly-space waves.

I saw this from the Walmart parking lot.

clouds25nov2015

I couldn’t get what first caught my eye because even my iPhone’s wide angle lens was not wide enough. What I wanted to show was a sky-wide field of clouds that looked like those at the top and bottom of the shot, separated by the thin, wispy clouds in the middle. But this shot was dramatic enough on its own. The blue sky looks like it has been photoshopped, but this shot is exactly as it came from the phone.