Wednesday Overnight Open Thread - June 11, 2025 [TRex]-

Good evening Horde. The time has come for mid-week shenanigans of the overnight variety.

This is the Wednesday night ONT. This is also the school is OUT ONT edition!

Brian Wilson of Beach Boys fame joined the community of surfers riding the eternal wave earlier today. Wilson is credited as the leader and primary song writer for the band. The band began with Brian and his two brothers, Carl and Dennis. Eventually, they were joined by their cousin, Mike Love, and a friend from school, Al Jardine.

You probably know the song "Good Vibrations." Do you know the rest of the story?

On with the random weirdness that is the ONT...

This doesn't sound familiar at all. Nope. Not at all. Well, maybe a little bit...

Guessing that many of us identify with Calvin:

School's out but the learning never stops! Schoolhouse Rock!

Music time!

Caption contest. Ready, go.

Variation on the school bus theme:

Since this is a (quasi) smart military blog (at times)...

Yet Another Reprieve for the Dragon Lady?

Just weeks after Secretary of the Air Force Troy Meinke and USAF chief Gen David Allvin restated the USAF's desire to retire the U-2, a key Congressional committee has said that it should do no such thing. The USAF was planning to cease U-2 operations at the end of September, and retire the fleet during Fiscal Year 2026, which begins on 1st October. But the House Appropriations Committee (HAC) decreed this week that in FY2026, "no funds...may be used to divest or prepare to divest more than eight U-2 aircraft." Further, the Committee provided $55 million "for U-2 programmed depot maintenance [PDM] to fully restore three aircraft."

Lockheed PMD funding and operations is the key to keep the U-2 in the air. Apparently there are 31 in inventory: four two-seat trainers and the rest are the standard one-seaters.

On a separate but somewhat related note, sounds like lots of pizza being ordered at the Pentagon tonight. Stay tuned.

Anyone been to the UFO landing pad at St. Paul, Alberta, Canada?

In 1967, a proposal was made to build the world's first UFO Landing Pad as a landmark for the Town. The Government of Canada responded to this proposition and, during the grand opening on June 3 1967, St. Paul was declared the Centennial Capital of Canada.

Not sure why the good people of St. Paul thought the aliens will want to land there or how they determined their landing platform was of sufficient size, but maybe AOP built them a homing beacon for the platform and has seen spaceship design plans.

If you visit, don't miss the 42 foot high, 6 ton kielbasa about an hour away in the town of Mundare. The giant frankfurter commemorates the 50 year history of the meat processing plant in town.

Randomly stumbled across these photos of the Nikola Tesla Technical Museum in Zagreb, Croatia. Anyone been there?

The OSI Silver Fox Is a Wild Prototype with a Fascinating Backstory

Desperate companies don't often turn work away, so when Piero Taruffi knocked on the door in 1966 with plans for a prototype racing car, OSI was only too happy to oblige. The Silver Fox is what they came up with.

Intended to run at Le Mans in the Group B6 small-displacement class, and also set class-specific speed records, the Silver Fox was powered by a 1.0-liter Renault four-cylinder engine with tuning from Alpine. This engine was mounted behind the driver's seat in the left-hand pontoon, with seating for a passenger in the right pontoon.

The aerodynamics were very clever, with three separate wings for adjustable downforce. The front wing had to be set when the car was at rest, but the driver could adjust the middle wing mid-race. The contemporary Chaparral 2E had similar technology, and you can think of it as a 1960s-style F1 DRS (drag reduction system).

The Silver Fox was certainly an adventurous idea, but the collapse of OSI meant that it would die on the vine, not even properly test-driven. However, given the success of Taruffi's other projects, it might have been very fast indeed. Some sources indicate that a top speed of as much as 150 mph might have been achievable, but when displayed at Como, it was indicated that only around 105 mph might have been expected out of the Alpine 1.0L. Still, Taruffi did more with less.

The Pittsburgh police scanner keeps giving:

School's out for summer! Alice Cooper and Pink Floyd were too obvious. Briefly considered Van Halen, but instead, the Ramones provide our big ONT finish:

Should you find and follow all the mystery clicks? Yes you should. Written correspondence can be sent to moronhobbies at protonmail dot com. Are you lurking ?? Come out and play. Unless you're David Hogg. Then just go away.

posted by Open Blogger at 10:00 PM

| Access Comments