Be Excellent To Each Other

A very, very wise decision.

I'm off to Blackpool this Saturday for a stag do.

I sense a new thread starting...

Nothing wrong with Blackpool, if you're:

A) A Geordie hen party

B) A scotchlander

C) A smack head

D) Any kind of nut job

I'm going to try harder...

Looking up in the school playground one breaktime and seeing the space shuttle in a clear sky.

Sitting in my back garden in Lincolnshire as a child with two F-117-A flying overhead, some time before they were officially real.

Seeing lights in the sky over RAF Waddington one night then seeing them move in a manner things just can't.

Watching the X-Files episode 3 or two or something where they go through the fence into the airbase and there are triangle ships flying like the shit I saw at Waddington.

The last flight of the Vulcan, from my GCSE biology class, through tear-filled eyes.

Watching The Miller's Tale at Lincoln Theatre Royal starring Brian Glover - due to the audience interaction I was sitting on the steps up to the stage.

The girl playing Alison stuck her real actual bare naked arse out of the window which was, blessed, be, directly above me and I got to see my first vagina smiling down at me from about a meter away.

9/11 - the text from some girl I was seeing at the time which simply read 'have you seen the planes'. Yes, I had.

Spiderman up a crane between Oxford Road and City Road, Manchester, at the beginning of Fathers for Justice.

The look on my mate's Mum's face when she spoke about the Whitehaven shootings at the taxi rank she was stood at at the time, a week later at her son's wedding.

A car in the slow lane rising into the air on the M4 when I was in the fast lane, the other car drifting to a stop at a right angle to me, and the lorry in my rear view mirror that obliged me to accelerate once again towards the car in front, it being the lesser of two evils.

The look on my passenger's face when she realised the 2 metre gap to the car in front and the equal one to the lorry behind were so small.

Regina Spektor's enormous, beautiful eyes, looking into mine, as she said 'excuse me, may I get past please'. How could I refuse?

The view out of the window on my first adult plane trip - to Cephalonia. Mountains! I'd never seen real mountains, and certainly not from above.

I thought Blackpool was terrible, then I spent 5 days in Great Yarmouth with the inlaws.

You know, they talk of a classless society. That' Blackpool, right there. No class whatsoever.

We walked into the B&B. "Do you have reservations?" Asked the woman. "Many" I replied, taking in my surroundings.

This made me laugh more than it should have.

[quote=pupil]The Sagrada Famalia in Barcelona (twice). Best piece of architecture I have ever seen. Utterly mind fuckingly mental.[/quote]
Been there recently and I didn't like it, it just reminded me of Gormenghast castle. It think its something you either really love or hate with a passion theres no middle ground.

Seeing a sea hare on my first holiday abroad to Mallorca, though they don't look much they really are awesome creatures.
Seeing a girl dressed up as Sakura from Naruto in a game shop, up town, ripping into the Pippa Funnell horse riding series.
A Virtual Boy at a bootsale about 10 years back.
Coming back to work from holiday to find there is a dead Alsatian in the chute area and that we would have to bundle it onto the back of our van and off to the tip later that day.
Watching the fish swim in the sea at a small wooded bay in Menorca.

MaliA is the new Bob Monkhouse.

I thought it was OK.

It's always covered in scaffolding.

Your face is covered in scaffolding!

All the better for your Mother to climb.

Most memorable thing I've seen was Concorde flying overhead when I was stood in my back garden with my brothers, uncle and cousins.

The sound it made was so loud I wet myself through fright.

I was 284.

The charred remains of a tractor that had just saved my life.

The view from my second (and third) flat in London.

Seeing said flat from a train about six months after I left and realising just how homesick I was.

An girl's breasts that were heroically fighting gravity (and winning).

My girlfriend waiting for me to arrive at Rome airport after not seeing each other for six months.

An empty swimming-pool changing room.

Holly Willoughby, in real life, for the first time.

A crowd of sweaty people throwing water in the air when they realised that I wasn't playing Britney Spears, actually.

Salvador Dali's "The Hallucinogenic Toreador", in the Dali museum, St Petersburg.

I could look at that painting for ever. I don't know anything about Art, but I do know that guy was a bloody genius.

I...what?

Walking up the stairs into Ayresome Park for the first time. The sense of open space was incredible. Looking back, Ayresome Park was a pokey little shed compared to the other stadiums I've now been to, but at the time, I was speechless.

Stepping out onto the viewing platform on the Empire State Building at 8:49am on July 11th 2010. Still makes me tingle thinking about that view.

Cresting a hill in pursuit of my runaway dog just in time to see her pulled under the wheels of a brown Ford Cortina. Having to watch the life slip away from her eyes and being powerless to help means that I don't think I could ever keep a pet again.

The Colosseum.

Adriana Sklenarikova, then girlfriend of Boro player Christian Karembu, standing waiting on the concourse of the Riverside Stadium during the second half of some dull end of season slog. I was working as a steward and she stood out like a beam of light. So tall. So elegant.

This place:


My brother's mate, Rich, pissed and stoned out of his head, offering to stab me with a butcher's knife to "see how it feels".

My baby (sorry)

This



I was sitting behind the goal.

Nah, I think that's pretty much to be expected. First time you see your own kid? That's got to be hard to beat on the 'memorable' front.

If I tell you, you'll be depressed for a week.

I was going to make a joke... possibly about a risky wank, but I've changed my mind after reading that.

Lied about next week, but this morning was frankly the most amazing time in my life. I'm going to stop splashing out on foreign travel and get people pregnant instead.

It's finally happened then? Congrats!

or did you get a burrito from the Wahaca van? They're really good.

Yes. I decided to keep it low key by spamming social network sites with photos. I'm not surprised that the news evaded you.

Hurrah! Well done to you all, etc.

Cheers. Best of all, I now 'understand', apparently.

Congrats, ApplePieOfDestiny!

Oooh, I finally thought of one to put in here (I'm rubbish at things like this, my mind goes blank) -- the Vehicle Assembly Building appearing on the horizon as we drove to it for a tour of the Kennedy Space Center. It looked big but close; but it turns out it was bigger and further away than I could have imagined. (If you look at this picture, each of the stars on the American flag that is painted on about 1/8th of one side is six feet across.)

The view from the CN Tower in Toronto, as I mentioned earlier, is definitely another. I'd passed on going up Willis Tower in Chicago a few months before hand due to the ridiculous queue, but this was better so it all worked out.

Thanks! I quoted this stat to Ali on Sunday, and she called bullshit.

It does sound like bullshit until you drive for about an hour and it just keeps getting bigger and bigger.

They also showed us one of the Crawler-transporter platform things they build the Shuttle launch assembly on inside the building before driving it out to the launch pad. It's like a huge platform with four big treaded drive mechanisms at each corner, and it drives down something that's about as wide as a motorway -- with the wheels spanning a distance from about one hard shoulder to the other. Each single link in each tread weighs a ton. This fact warped my mind.

Aha -- Wikipedia has the facts more accurate than my 15-years-ago-self can recall:

It's 135 feet across, apparently.

The VAB is truly astonishing. Wasn't lucky enough to go in there when I went to KSC, but would love to.

To give you an idea of the size of the crawler, if you look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:LC-39 ... y_pano.jpg you will see the junction where the crawler goes to Pad 39A or Pad 39B. Each "lane" of that track is not for "going" and "coming back", but for one side of the crawler.

The crawler can position the mobile pad containing the Shuttle stack with an accuracy of 1/64th of an inch.

Which makes the flag itself about 50m tall, the bit where the stars are would then be about 16m tall. There are 11 "rows" of stars, and 12 "spaces" between the rows, which would make each star 16/23m (about 70cm or just over 2 foot).

Unless I made a mistake of course...

Malc

You should have read Wiki a bit more.

Did they make it that big for the relativity ladder?