Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the creators of South Park, grew up in Denver. When Casa Bonita, their favorite childhood restaurant, went bankrupt during the coronapanic lockdowns, they bought it and spent a rumored $40 million restoring it to its former glory. It’s tough to get a reservation so book as soon as you think you might be going to Denver!
Your visit to Mexico begins in a downscale strip mall (Dollar Tree) in Lakewood, a downscale part of the Denver metro area:
There are a variety of theme park-style environments that have been created inside. Here’s a village that houses the restaurant’s museum, for example:
You eat first and then wander. The $6.75 combination plate offered below is a pre-Biden price. Today it is $30 at lunch or $40 at dinner for one of about 9 choices. You won’t be introduced to the subtleties of regional Mexican cuisine, which has resulted in some people complaining about the price, but it does include soft drinks, dessert, and a 15 percent tip. It wouldn’t be easy to get out of Five Guys for much less.
After the meal, one can take in the Acapulco diving show:
They also have live musicians in various locations, a puppet show, a magic show, free face painting, balloon sculptures, etc. It would be easy to spend another 1.5 hours after the meal here. My one complain is that the arcade doesn’t include a South Park pinball machine (2,200 were made; Sega is a predecessor to Stern so the South Park guys could probably persuade Stern to do an updated version).
A few photos:
There are cave and mine sections for dining, but the premium seats are around the cliff diving lagoon:
Inside the cave…
It’s an experience, for sure, and I’m grateful to the South Park guys for preserving and revitalizing it. I wish that more restaurants were like this, but the cost of paying live performers is just going to go higher as health care costs inflate.
I made it to the USAF Academy in Colorado Springs last month. It’s home to just over 4,000 students, hardly any of whom learn to fly while there. The school has about 20 Cirrus SR2x piston-powered aircraft and some gliders. This fleet enables the typical cadet to take between 4 and 14 flights during the four-year program. The good news is that the academy has its own airport: KAFF. The bad news from the chart is a 4500′ runway 6576′ above sea level. A Cirrus SR20 with two average American guys on board and two hours of fuel would be lucky to clear a crush-proof cigarette package after a 4500′ ground roll in the summer (note that the big airport there has a 13,500′ lighted runway (“L 135”).
They’re building a new visitor center, but it isn’t ready yet. The old visitor center is named for Barry Goldwater, best known for losing the 1964 Presidential election to Lyndon Johnson. Goldwater was also, however, a pilot for the U.S. in World War II and, as a senator, promoted the idea of the Air Force Academy for the then-new standalone branch of the military, from which he retired as a Reserves Major General. (af.mil bio)
(Just for fun, let’s compare Goldwater’s politics to today’s United States. Goldwater wanted people of different skin colors to be treated equally; today’s Air Force Academy, like the U.S. Naval Academy, has a race-based admissions system (NYT). Goldwater objected to Eisenhower’s $72 billion budget for being too large; today’s federal budget is approximately $7 trillion per year, 100X that objectionable number. Goldwater suggested, in a July 2, 1967 NYT opinion piece (below), that Israel keep all of the land it had conquered in the six days of fighting in June 1967; half of Americans today are marching with the Queers for Palestine. Goldwater’s name will be expunged from the new visitor center in favor of a former academy director’s.)
The visitor center contains a somber reminder that sometimes the enemy wins or training flights don’t go as planned. Each white rectangle below represents a graduate whose life was lost while serving in the Air Force:
Bizarrely, in a world where my friends’ kids can’t get in anywhere, only about half of the cadets were in the top 10 percent of their high school class:
The Academy discriminates against those who are married and those who are over 23 (both would be illegal for a private college? certainly for an employer, right?):
Cadets are protected from streaming and other distractions by not being able to own any distractions:
In the gift shop, Nike’s logo appears right next to one of America’s most savage weapons, the AC-130. Nike is fully committed to diversity, equity, and inclusion (nike.com) and also happy when diverse people are equitable massacred by 105mm shells and 25mm Gatling gun rounds from an unseen aerial foe.
The cadets had all gone home for the winter break (at least 3 weeks) and the famous chapel was being renovated, but the Academy offers a planetarium show to visitors and one can walk around statutes of various USAF greats.
Here’s Hap Arnold, who commanded the WWII predecessor to the USAF. He was a huge enthusiast for strategic bombing of Germany and Japan and is quoted in The Man from the Future: The Visionary Ideas of John von Neumann as saying that he wished he had vastly more destructive bombs to drop on the Germans and Japanese (which, of course, he eventually did get, partially thanks to von Neumann).
Gabby Gabreski, who fought in combat during both WWII and the Korean War, and Paul Jennings Weaver, who was killed in Iraq War I while flying an AC-130, are examples of commemorated men:
Women get an award for showing up and ferrying aircraft around the Continental U.S.
On the drive back toward Colorado Springs there is an overlook for the the Academy’s airport with some signs explaining the flying and parachuting programs:
Today the Federal Reserve technocrats depressed investors by saying that interest rates won’t be lowered all that much in 2025 (unsaid: Congress won’t put down the deficit spending crack pipe and, thus, inflation is inevitable). Mary C. Daly, last seen addressing the diversity crisis at the San Francisco Fed and ensuring the stability and longevity of Silicon Valley Bank, voted with the rest of the governors to cut interest rates by 0.25%. The lone dissenter to the cut was from the Rust Belt: Beth M. Hammack, head of the Cleveland Fed (formerly at Goldman). Let’s follow Ms. Hammack going forward and see if she’s right about the inflation that the government and media assure us does not exist.
(A friend asked why the stock market was down today. She’s a physician and had interpreted the news from the Fed meeting as a prediction that the U.S. economy was going into a slump. My response: “Fed said it would have to keep interest rates high. Congress wont stop deficit spending. So the only way to tame inflation is high rates, which means stocks need high yields to compete w bonds. If a stock pays a fixed dividend it can only generate a higher yield by falling in price. Remember if you can buy a bond yielding 6% you need to buy a stock at a price where you’re sure you’ll get at least 8% return.” Curiously, the Wall Street Journal had a headline about the Dow Industrials (below) rather than the S&P 500.)
Speaking of non-existent inflation, I went to a museum today in Colorado Springs. It is inside a massive 1903 courthouse that is three stories high with a clock tower reaching skyward beyond. The volunteer at the front desk told me that it cost $420,000 to build.
It was replaced in the 1970s by a monster-sized concrete “judicial center” across the street:
What was inside the museum? An art exhibition in which paintings from any artist with a connection to the region were welcome… so long as the artist identified as “female”:
A reminder that SARS-CoV-2 was not the first pathogen to realize what fat targets humans living in cities presented…. (Colorado Springs was a cure destination for tuberculosis sufferers.)
The glorious history of test equipment… (HP had a division here making oscilloscopes, spun off and spun off and now “Keysight”)
It seems as though taxpayers got a good return on their $420,000 investment.
I finally made it to the Walt Disney Family Museum, smack in the center of San Francisco’s Presidio. Why is it in San Francisco when almost everything that Disney did was in Los Angeles or Orlando? Disney’s only child, Diane Disney Miller (mother of 7!), moved to the Bay Area in the 1980s.
I recommend that you have your Uber or Waymo drop you off at the top of Andy Goldsworthy’s Wood Line. You can then walk downhill through the Wood Line to the Yoda Fountain and from there it is an easy walk to the museum (arrive at the Wood Line about 40 minutes before your timed ticket to the museum).
Lucasfilm is headquartered in the Presidio and everyone is welcome to look at the Yoda fountain. Sadly, it is not inscribed “No, Try Not. Do or Do Not, There Is No Try.”
The museum is in the middle of the Parade Ground:
Getting into the museum costs $25 per adult or is free for those wise enough to refrain from work: an SF resident “receiving Medi-Cal and food assistance can redeem free general admission for themselves and up to three additional guests” (source). I got two free tickets via my Ringling Museum membership.
Back in the 11th century, it seems, Hughes d’Isigny and son Robert moved from France to England and that’s where d’Isigny was anglicized into Disney. The family moved to North America in 1834 (bouncing around Canada, Florida (Orange County, near today’s Walt Disney World), Chicago, and Missouri):
Disney was an ambulance driver in World War I and managed to refrain from writing a tedious novel about the experience:
Disney’s first animated movie company, whose techniques were informed by Animated Cartoons (E.G. Lutz) went bankrupt:
His second company, which featured Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, also essentially failed due to some badly drafted contracts with Universal Pictures, which took over the character. Walt Disney had to #persist through two business failures, essentially, before he could begin building the Mickey-based Disney that we know and love today. The museum does a great job of making it clear just how many false starts there were in what might seem like a steady inexorable rise to greatness.
Speaking of failures, both visitors and staff at the museum refused to accept the idea that simple masks had in any way failed to stop the spread of an aerosol respiratory virus (note also the spectacular autofocus failure of the iPhone 16 Pro Max just when I was relying on it to show that the young slender staffer chose to wear a mask while the older staffer did not):
Visitors are given a trigger warning, though it was unclear to me what the triggering content might be. Certainly, Song of the South clips were not played.
The trigger warning was repeated before a few signs that mentioned Squaw Valley Ski Resort, home of the 1960 Winter Olympics in which Disney provided some entertainment (in a victory for Native Americans, the resort was renamed Palisades Tahoe, thus removing all references to the existence of Native Americans other than the word “Tahoe” itself, which is a corruption of a Washo word for “lake”).
Nerds will appreciate the preserved multiplane camera, in which cels could be placed at different distances from the lens for more realistic perspective during camera motion.
What else is nearby? The Officers’ Club is now a free museum with a permanent exhibit devoted to the Native Americans who apparently won’t be getting any of their land back:
A temporary exhibit is up right now relating to the setting aside of the U.S. Constitution because politicians and bureaucrats declared an emergency and decided that it would be expedient to intern Japanese-Americans:
(Similar reasoning, of course, was applied in 2020 when the First Amendment right to assemble was tossed in favor of Science-dictated lockdowns.)
We didn’t leave by Waymo in an exciting rush of spinning LIDAR, but it would have been nice to!
Note Alcatraz in the background. If the U.S. government ever decides that it needs to reduce the amount of deficit spending/money printing that it does on the Cheat Our Way to Prosperity Plan maybe this island can be sold to a mid-level NVIDIA employee for $1 billion for use as a private home.
I spent Election Day-1 in Kissimmee, Florida, home to the Monument of States, which includes (I think) a rock from every state:
A closer look at some of the components:
If you’re going to watch election returns on TV and say to your friends, “A lot of these states are sending in a nominee who is as dumb as a rock” then this monument shows you the end result of each state sending a rock!
The definition of “state” seems flexible:
The folks who placed a time capsule here in 1993 for opening in 2043 didn’t factor in Science according to Democrats in the Northeast and California who say that all of Florida will be under water by then.
The city is officially at an elevation of 72′ above sea level so if the time capsule can’t be readily accessed there will be a lot of problems in Boston, New York City, and Washington, D.C. as well. It would be a shame if these murals were inundated:
The trip to Kissimmee was for aircraft maintenance and, therefore, I spent the whole day interacting with line guys, front desk gals, aircraft mechanics, and waitstaff. I sussed out that nearly all of these working class folks were Trump supporters. They believed that their standard of living had been reduced by Bidenflation and they didn’t want to compete for wages and apartment rent with another 10 million migrants. Democrats’ “tax the rich” promises did not appeal to them, despite the fact that they actually live the inequality that others only talk about. A line guy making $20/hour may be pumping Jet A into a $70 million Gulfstream. Why wouldn’t they be excited about a bigger government funded by taking stuff away from people whom they’ve met and who plainly don’t need it? It’s because they don’t expect to get any money or benefits from the government. Most of these folks earn too little to afford to have kids while maintaining what they consider to be a reasonably comfortable existence and, thus, they’re excluded from many of the most expensive government programs, such as public school and the various child tax credits. At the same time, they earn too much to qualify for the free housing, health care, food, and smartphone packages that recent migrants enjoy.
(The Census Bureau says that 32 percent of the people who live in Kissimmee are foreign-born and that over 70 percent of the residents are “Hispanic”.)
Returning to the election theme, it is understandable that an American might be passionate about who will spend nearly half of our GDP and who will decide whether teenagers get gender affirming surgery. But we shouldn’t let this interfere with our emotional connections to friends and family. I was sad to hear that a nonbinary progressive Democrat resident of Brooklyn found out that his conservative parents in an Upstate New York district voted Trump-Vance. He/she/ze/they said that he/she/ze/they is going to stop visiting their graves.
(Alternative from the same region: The cost of hosting migrants in New Jersey has been so high under the Biden-Harris administration that the Mafia had to lay off three judges.)
The leisure hours of a software expert witness at trial are few. I did find time to celebrate Hispanic Heritage Month by walking out of the war room and into Fort Worth’s Sundance Square for a September 21st event “Celebrating Hispanic Heritage Month with a vibrant showcase of lowriders and culture.” Here are some photos.
If you thought that the hydraulics on an Airbus A380 were complex…
Medium format never dies…
Elizabeth Warren’s family made it down to the event:
It would be nice if gold wheels were a factory option for the Honda Odyssey:
If a minivan isn’t sufficiently stylish, even with gold wheels, here’s what I think is an early 1950s Chevrolet Suburban (it seems smaller than today’s behemoths):
I reminded the person carrying this bag that “The Latinx do it better” was the correct modern form:
Some elegance:
Ideas for next time we have the Honda Odyssey repainted:
ChatGPT says that the correct expression for the situation below is “Mejor tu hermana en un prostíbulo que tu hermano en una Honda.”
Sundance Square during the event:
Later that night…
There’s an It’s Sugar store half a block away for dancers who get tired. They feature some Tim Walz gummi candies:
And some Kamala Harris/Joe Biden/Whoever Is Running the Country Peace for Our Time gummi candies for sharing with Iranian, Lebanese, and Palestinian friends:
Circling back to the subject of lowriders, is there another car culture that has been created by an ethnic group? We could perhaps say that minivans are the apotheosis of white American culture. Now that a substantial percentage of Haiti’s former population lives here in the U.S. has a distinctive Haitian car culture developed? How about an Arab-American car culture in Dearborn, Michigan?
I’ve spent a few weeks in downtown Fort Worth, Texas recently. It’s a lively city center with visual art, music, outdoor events in Sundance Square, restaurants, etc. The terrain is well-suited to cycling and there is a bike share system with reasonably good coverage for places that a visitor might want to go. The ethnic mix reasonably reflects recent immigration trends. Spanish is commonly spoken and there are usually at least a few Arabic speakers out and about (the women covered in hijabs, at least). I’m not fitting in that well due to (a) lack of cowboy hat, and (b) saying “hello” to folks encountered while out walking (a sign of mental illness in any true city, but standard practice in our corner of Florida (pedestrians and drivers wave to each other in Abacoa, Jupiter as well if any kind of eye contact is made)).
Texas seems to be home, so to speak, to plenty of homeless people. Nothing like the zombie army you’d find in a California city, of course, but a shocking prevalence compared to suburban or small town Florida. I had remarked on this a few years ago to an Uber driver in Austin, Texas. He was from Afghanistan and I asked him what the situation in Kabul was. He explained that nobody was homeless in Afghanistan because relatives would take in and care for anyone who couldn’t take care of himself.
Outdoor maskers are uncommon in Fort Worth. It’s nothing like my recent stay in Sherman Oaks, California, where I needed to walk only 1 block from my hotel to meet an outdoor masker. However, 100 percent of the outdoor maskers that I’ve encountered in Fort Worth seem to be unhoused (formerly known as “homeless”). I don’t remember seeing unhoused people, even in California, wearing surgical masks prior to coronapanic. Why are the unhoused more enthusiastic today about the protective possibilities of a surgical mask than the general population is? (To be sure, only a small minority of the unhoused in Fort Worth wear masks.)
One of America’s greatest art museums, the Kimbell in Fort Worth, is showing seven enormous tapestries right now. These depict the Battle of Pavia (1525) and were made roughly 500 years ago from wool, silk, gold, and silver thread. Each one is about 30′ wide and 14′ high, perfect for the Palm Beach County starter home. The curators praise the human artists behind these works, but I’m wondering whether robots couldn’t do a better job in many ways and thus revive this form of art.
(If you miss them in Fort Worth, you can see them while stocking up on fentanyl in San Francisco beginning in October and eventually back at their home in Naples, Italy (leave everything that you value in the hotel safe!)). Here are a few photos to give you a sense of the scale and detail:
To revive the art form, a computer program would need to be able to take in multiple photographs (the typical tapestry shows multiple scenes), come up with a cartoon, and then pick fabric to match the colors in the underlying photographs. How could robots do a better job than humans? Robots have more patience than humans and could perhaps work at a higher resolution. We have a broader range of colors available with dyes and could also add plastic thread to the palette.
There are some companies that purport to make tapestry-like art from photographs, but they do it by printing rather than weaving.
What else did I see at the Kimbell? Readers would be disappointed if I didn’t provide a gift shop tour…
The building itself is a Louis Kahn-designed landmark:
The lighting was a bit dim, but I managed to capture a Follower of Science (concerned enough about SARS-CoV-2 to wear a mask, but not concerned enough about SARS-CoV-2 to shave his/her/zir/their beard):
The modern art museum across the street is also worthwhile and provides clear instructions for making your own $1 million artwork at home:
The Amon Carter Museum, famous for its collection of Remington and Russell, is a 5-minute walk away (might feel longer in the 100+ degree heat).
Texas is not as rich a location for the masketologist as California, New York, or Massachusetts, but I still managed to find people who have elected to do jobs that inevitably expose them to thousands of potentially infected humans per day and who attempt to avoid contracting a respiratory virus by wearing simple masks:
(Supposedly arrived from Vancouver by truck rather than in 10-minute hops from Tesla Supercharger to Tesla Supercharger.)
A couple of times, we walked by the Beechcraft Starship, in which high hopes, a proven Pratt engine, and Burt Rutan’s design genius worked together to produce something that was worth less than the two engines still in boxes from Pratt. Approach and arrival…
Wikipedia says that six were airworthy as of 2020. We went back to take another look towards sunset:
Some more fun Rutan stuff in the EAA Museum:
Here’s a Hawker Harrier derivative, still serving in the active duty U.S. Marine Corps (supposedly retiring next year):
Never forget Leonard v. Pepsico, Inc., in which a plaintiff attempted to take Pepsi up on an advertised offer for one of these not-to-easy-to-fly planes:
It was found that the advertisement featuring the jet did not constitute an offer under the Restatement (Second) of Contracts. … “The callow youth featured in the commercial is a highly improbable pilot, one who could barely be trusted with the keys to his parents’ car, much less the prized aircraft of the United States Marine Corps. … The teenager’s comment that flying a Harrier Jet to school ‘sure beats the bus’ evinces an improbably insouciant attitude toward the relative difficulty and danger of piloting a fighter plane in a residential area. … No school would provide landing space for a student’s fighter jet, or condone the disruption the jet’s use would cause. … In light of the Harrier Jet’s well-documented function in attacking and destroying surface and air targets, armed reconnaissance and air interdiction, and offensive and defensive anti-aircraft warfare, depiction of such a jet as a way to get to school in the morning is clearly not serious even if, as plaintiff contends, the jet is capable of being acquired ‘in a form that eliminates [its] potential for military use.'”
I’m not sure how to characterize this one:
American transportation then and now…
Dyke Delta “Whitehouse Limousine”:
Down to the basics:
A Rotax-powered helicopter (with T-bar cyclic):
A 1936 Stinson promoting the health benefits of a 5-cent Pepsi:
Adjusted for official CPI, that’s equivalent to $1.14 in today’s mini-dollars so you might say that Pepsi is cheaper because it is possible to buy a can at Walmart for less than $1.14. However, I think Pepsi in 1936 was likely served at a drugstore counter where people could socialize with friends and, therefore, the present-day comparable is perhaps what a soda would cost at a fast-food restaurant (though, of course, the modern soda is also much larger).
A scale replica of the P-38 by the Brown Arch:
If “buy a shotgun” doesn’t give you an adequate feeling of security, here’s the Home Defense Edition of the Cessna T-37… the A-37:
Oshkosh is more of a social gathering than a trade show, but people still ask “What did you see that was new?” Let’s get that out of the way, then….
Skyryse has a fly-by-wire system that can turn the $1 million Robinson R66 turbine-powered helicopter into a machine with at least some of the intelligence of a $500 drone. I booked and they confirmed via text an appointment to fly their simulator, but when I showed up they said that their schedule was full and sent me away without offering an alternative date-time. I hope that they’re better organized when dealing with the FAA certification authorities!
Champion resurrected what is apparently an old project: a bolt-on electronic magneto that is powered via the same mechanism that powers traditional failure-prone mechanical mags (Avweb). They’re saying that it will take two years to get it FAA-certified for four-cylinder engines and then an unspecified additional amount of time to get it certified for six-cylinder engines. We talked to another manufacturer who makes some stuff that you’d think would be straightforward and could earn a blanket approval for a wide range of airframes, but instead requires FAA approval on a per-airframe basis. “Each airframe takes at least six months,” the company’s chief engineer said, “and sometimes an employee tells us that he needs a signature from a more senior employee and, even though the senior employee isn’t doing any substantive review, that takes months.” EAA was so sure that something like this could never be developed that there isn’t any space for it on the Wall of Ignition in the museum:
Just in time for people who identify as “women” and sought-after minorities to have responded to the call for them to get into aviation, the airlines have almost completely stopped hiring. Quite a few had already committed to booths at Oshkosh so they were there to collect contact information for some future date. Due to the rich having gotten so much richer in the past few years, however, NetJets is an exception:
Speaking of celebrating “women”, we met a U.S. Marine Corps veteran who had flown F-4 Phantom jets (“with enough power, even a brick will fly”) onto aircraft carriers at 135 knots. His wife bravely sits right seat as he flies a simple piston-powered aircraft today. For her achievement as a passenger she was gifted with a “WomenVenture” T-shirt and invited to be honored in a dramatic photograph (note the B-52 in the background, which was a big hit with our kids):
The man who went through Marine Corps boot camp and then risked his life every time that he got anywhere near the F-4 received no T-shirt.
The former Confederate Air Force was at the KidVenture area to teach the young that women (WASP ferry pilots) and Black pilots (Tuskegee Airmen) “triumphed over adversity” (unlike Americans who fought in World War II and triumphed over Germany and Japan?):
What else happens at KidVenture? The little ones learn Air Traffic Control, soldering, riveting, etc.
Circling back to those who triumphed over adversity, “Women in Aerospace” are celebrated with a wall-sized poster in the EAA Museum and this was one of the first things that we saw on entering the grounds:
(EAA is passionate about the inclusion of “women”, but not passionate enough to build permanent restrooms around the event grounds and its campgrounds. So the core of EAA AirVenture will always be people who are happy to take care of themselves and their kids for an entire week while using outhouses. (See also U.S. airlines. They say that they want to recruit pilots identifying as “women” but won’t offer the out-and-back-live-at-home lifestyle that Ryanair offers. With the exception of Allegiant, they are limited to recruiting pilots who are happy to be away from their kids for 10-22 days per month.))
Speaking of the museum, if you want to know how I get defriended, here are a couple of images that I posted to Facebook with the captions “COVID-safe aviation” and “Democrats donated a model of Donald Trump’s design for Air Force One if he should be elected for a second term”:
We are informed that children are innocent and kind and become aggressive only after being corrupted by adults. Based on my discussions with children, if they ruled the world’s nations a lot more disputes would be resolved via strategic bombing. This was a great year at Oshkosh for bombers. World War II was represented with two of the two airworthy B-29s, one of the two airworthy Avro Lancasters, and multiple B-25s. The Cold War was represented by a B-52 and a B-1B flying over on a couple of days (triggered the Apple Watch to warn about damaging noise levels; maybe the software should be smart enough to cross-check with airshow NOTAMS?).
Boeing enabled the U.S. to destroy Germany and Japan and threaten Russia with an annihilation of the whole planet via the B-52. What’s the company up to now?
The Boeing Pavilion enabled visitors to design a livery. I did one that combines a rainbow, a trans triangle, and golden retriever fur:
The EAA Museum contains a good quote for why EAA matters:
Here were the primary T shirts of 2024:
The shirt that I wanted to buy, but couldn’t find, is this one from Chinese-owned Continental (on the back of a guy listening to a talk by Burt Rutan, which I’ll cover in a separate post):
