Phil Meloy

One problem with this Dan is that major airports such as London Heathrow simply do not have the capacity to land any more flights than they already do while room to expand the airport is also severely restricted. Larger planes offer a solution as regards increasing the number of people that can transit through the airport in a given period of time.

Wasilla man hard at work transforming 'mecha' dream into reality Carlos Owens Jr. hopes to pilot 18-foot-tall robot, with fists for crushing cars, at Butte racetrack By ZAZ HOLLANDER Anchorage Daily News (Published: January 2, 2005) WASILLA -- An 18-foot-tall horned steel robot with red eyes and claw hands is rising in a snowy suburban yard outside Wasilla. The red metal monster is the brainchild of Carlos Owens Jr., a 27-year-old ironworker and former U.S. Army mechanic. It's actually a "mecha," a mechanized shell that bestows robotic powers on whoever pilots it. Imagine the robot suit Sigourney Weaver wore in "Aliens" or the battle robots from "Matrix Revolutions." Owens is trying to build what he says would be the world's first fully functional mecha. He plans to start testing the project in spring for a debut this summer at a Butte racetrack in a show-stopper featuring flame throwers, bullets and sledge-hammer fists for crushing cars. He seems nonplussed by the fact that he's trying to succeed where industrial giants like General Electric have failed. And that he's doing it from his parents' back yard on Scheelite Drive. "I'm just going to build it and get it done," Owens said, a welding helmet pushed back on his head as he looked up at his creation. "I'll question myself later." Don't let that aw-shucks attitude fool you. Baby-faced but 6 feet, 5 inches tall, Owens is a man obsessed. The fever to create his own mecha has driven him since he was a boy. Now he's finally getting his first taste of fame. The backyard mecha got national play in a three-page story on CNET's technology-oriented Web site, www.news.com. Since the story appeared Dec. 22, Owens has counted about 45,000 hits on his own Web site, www.neogentronyx.com. Various local media outlets are clamoring for interviews. Yet his closest relatives and his fiancee still don't quite get it. "Nobody in my immediate family completely understands what I'm doing," Owens said. "And I can't blame them. How many people have an 18-foot robot in their back yard?" "Nobody gets it except for kids," he added a bit later. "Kids get it better than anybody I've explained it to." Owens grew up playing with Tonka trucks, watching Transformers and Voltron cartoons and "old-school" Japanese anime like Robotech. He learned to weld at age 14. He's the kind of guy who looks at something and wants to know how it works so he can build one himself. It's a calling that's already inspired several inventions, he says, including a self-starting seismic device to search for oil deposits. Carlos Jr. -- CJ, as his dad calls him -- was born in the Philippines, the first child of a couple who met in the U.S. Air Force. The family came to Alaska in 1994. Carlos Jr. signed up for the Army Reserves at 19, spent three years as a heavy equipment mechanic and remains in the inactive Ready Reserve. He worked four seasons for a seismic company on the North Slope. Last year, he became an ironworker, doing jobs including the new wing at the Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport and the new Valley hospital. Owens is building the mecha in his parents' yard because his former landlord frowned on the project when Owens began work in October 2003. Later, Owens moved in with his parents. Work is slow in winter. And he puts all his earnings toward the mecha -- $15,000 so far. Owens envisions arena fights someday pitting mecha against mecha, a new sport that would combine athleticism with engineering. He eventually wants to make mechas available to the general public with prices starting as low as $35,000, "more affordable per pound than any other robot." Way down the road, he says, his invention could even fight wars or forest fires. He scoffs at the U.S. military for spending $50 million on another mecha under development, a self-powered exoskeleton to boost the speed, strength and endurance of soldiers in combat. A photo on the Defense Sciences Office Web site shows a massive black backpack attached to metal leg braces. The mecha concept dates back more than 50 years. The boy-controlled cartoon robot "Gigantor" debuted in the late 1950s as Tetsujin 28 in a Japanese boys magazine, according to Fred Ladd's Official Gigantor Web site. The News.com story by John Borland includes a series of photographs illustrating the evolution of mecha, starting with Gigantor and followed by a more modern anime mecha, "Mobile Suit Gundam." Meanwhile, in a lab in the late '60s, the U.S. Navy collaborated with General Electric to create the Hardiman prototype, an incredibly awkward-looking robotic suit. The lab could only get one heavy wrench-topped arm to work. Here's how Owens says his own "mech" will work: Viewing the world through an LCD screen, he will operate the giant steel suit from a foam-padded compartment in the mecha's body. Twenty-three levers inside control forty-six possible movements. Rather than pull each lever individually, Owens will rig a system of cable lines to the levers that control larger motions. When he moves an arm, the mecha's arm will move. He moves a leg, a leg moves. Owens says he couldn't afford high-tech equipment. An 18-horsepower gas engine should provide more than enough juice to operate the 1 ½-ton suit, provided the human inside doesn't try to move more than one limb at a time. A hydraulic system powers the joints. Owens built the bottom half twice as heavy as the top. He doesn't want to topple. It could be hard to get up. "I don't want it to fall on its face," he says. "I'm going to be inside of it." Five years ago, Owens built a 35-foot-tall prototype from wood; it's folded for storage amid the birch trees in the yard. He says he initially hoped to unveil the mecha at last summer's Alaska State Fair but ran out of money for parts. Now he hopes to take the mecha for its first test walk in the yard sometime this spring, after the snow clears. He hopes to drum up contributions when he unleashes the mecha at Alaska Raceway Park just off the Old Glenn Highway this summer. The track's co-owner, Karen Lackey, had Owens as an English student at Colony High School, where she now teaches history. Lackey is glad Owens finally has an outlet for his creativity. In school, he filled spiral notebooks with science fiction, Lackey said. But the track owner is also looking forward to this summer's debut of a car-crushing, flame-throwing mecha that could draw a whole new kind of racing fan. "The thing is big and it moves, and I guess it shoots fire," Lackey said. "What more can you ask?"

Giant humanoid will fire flames Ananova.com An Alaskan man is building an 18ft hydraulic humanoid which can fire 20ft flames from its arms. Carlos Owens Jr says his creation will also be able to shoot 9ins nails from its shoulders. He has been building the £10,000 ($18,700) machine, which he calls a 'mecha', at his parents' house in Wasilla since October 2003.

Thanks - Tjobbe. In addition to the Dollar Brand disc I also picked a nice Dudu Pukwana Jazz Colours release called "Ubagile"

New Yorker article DEPT. OF FOREIGN RELATIONS THE BORAT DOCTRINE by Daniel Radosh Issue of 2004-09-20 Posted 2004-09-13 Roman Vassilenko, the press secretary for the Embassy of Kazakhstan, wants to clear up a few misconceptions about his country. Women are not kept in cages. The national sport is not shooting a dog and then having a party. You cannot earn a living being a Gypsy catcher. Wine is not made from fermented horse urine. It is not customary for a man to grab another man’s khrum. “Khrum” is not the word for testicles. These falsehoods, and many others, have been spread by Borat, a character on “Da Ali G Show,” which recently finished its second season on HBO. Like Ali G, Borat is played by Sacha Baron Cohen, a British comedian who specializes in prank interviews. As Borat, Cohen has told a dating service that he is looking for a girl with “plow experience,” persuaded a meeting of Oklahoma City officials to observe a ten-minute silence in memory of the (fictitious) Tishnik Massacre, and, most notably, led a country-and-Western bar in a sing-along of “In My Country There Is Problem,” whose chorus goes: “Throw the Jew down the well / So my country can be free / You must grab him by his horns / Then we have a big party.” It was partly Borat’s casual but relentless anti-Semitism that led Vassilenko to object publicly, in a letter to The Hill, a Washington weekly. (In real life, Cohen is an observant Jew, but the Anti-Defamation League also condemned him, arguing that “the irony may have been lost on some of the audience.”) “He says things that make people think that Kazakhstan really is a backward country,” Vassilenko said last week from his office in Washington. In Borat’s Kazakhstan, Jews attack people with their claws, and “Dirty Jew” is a popular film. But the real Kazakhstan has long embraced its thriving Jewish community, according to the National Conference on Soviet Jewry, and earlier this month the country dedicated the largest synagogue in Central Asia. “The President of the country came down, as well as the chief rabbi of Israel,” Vassilenko said. “There were all kinds of rabbis from around the world, and a New Yorker. He was not a rabbi, but you might be interested to know the name. The name is Ronald Lauder.” Vassilenko is also chagrined at Borat’s portrayal of women in Kazakh society, epitomized by his claim that “in Kazakhstan we say, ‘God, man, horse, dog, then woman, then rat.’” Vassilenko said, “I don’t think our women like that, not to mention the men. We have women ministers, women judges, businesspeople.” Nor should Borat have been appalled, as he was in one episode, to learn that American women can vote. American and Kazakh women both got the vote, Vassilenko pointed out, on August 26, 1920. It turns out that almost nothing about Borat’s Kazakhstan withstands scrutiny. Borat doesn’t look like an ethnic Kazakh. His Kazakh words “resemble some gibberish Polish,” Vassilenko said. And, while Borat has claimed that “in Kazakhstan the favorite hobbies are disco dancing, archery, rape, and table tennis,” Vassilenko concedes only the first and the last. Archery is “not prominent,” he said, and statistics show that the Kazakh sexual-assault rate is far lower than the United States’. (That may be because the crime is more likely to go unreported.) So what is the national sport of Kazakhstan? “The most known ones are wrestling and all kinds of sports that try people in how they master horses,” Vassilenko said. “Kazakhs were traditional nomads, so there are various sports like horse races. Another horseback sport is called something like Catch a—what is name?—Catch a Bride. And that is that a group of young guys race to get a bride, and she races away from them and they have to catch her while she fends them off with a whip.” This sport does not result in actual matrimony—just a kiss. According to Borat, a Kazakh man gets a wife by buying a woman from her father for fifteen gallons of insecticide. Vassilenko disputes this, too: “The men propose marriage with engagement rings.” There is an old tradition—“maybe a hundred years ago,” Vassilenko said—of men kidnapping their brides, but he claims that the practice is virtually obsolete. Also, he said, “If you want to do it for fun, you can do that,” but the woman has to be in on it. Travel guides mention a Kazakh sport called kokpar, a precursor of polo. When Vassilenko was asked about it, he hesitated, then explained, “That’s the one where a goat, a dead goat”—a headless dead goat—“is, um, being held as a sort of a prize. And then one rider has it, and he has to run away with it from others who seek to catch it and snatch it from him.” And then they have a party.

Congratulations Johnny.

Benny Bailey Donald Dean

"Concerning the planning, the nearby development was determined solely on its planning merits. One would have thought that in assessing any application for planning permission it would be the responsibity of the council to take into consideration any future impact a new development might have on the already existing community.

Duke Ellington & Ella Fitzgerald

South London jazz pub under threat A world renowned jazz venue in Barnes has been served with a noise abatement order that could force its closure after 45 years. The Bull's Head, which has heard international artists playing every night of the week for years, has until February 15 to keep the sound levels down. However, Young's brewers claim that to soundproof the Barnes pub would cost around £172,000, which they cannot afford. A block of flats was built next door and, during the planning stages of the development, preservation of the passageway between the pub and the police station was refused. Objections were lodged by the landlord noting that performances in the studio would be likely to disturb potential neighbours without the air gap of the passageway, Young's added. At the same time Richmond upon Thames Council approved a change in use of the site from light-industrial to residential. One resident of the new Laing Homes development, Stephanie Fallows, complained to Richmond council about the noise last month. Noise readings were taken and a statutory nuisance was established. A noise abatement notice was served on November 15. The landlord of the pub for the past 23 years, Dan Fleming, said of the possible outcome: "It would be dreadful, having spent 23 years building it up and keeping it going and bringing people in from all over the world. "All the wonderful people who have played here go back years. This is one of the biggest tourist attractions in Richmond. We have had to cancel events. We don't play loud rock music, it is acoustic music. This order has been thrust upon us and it is only one lady who has complained." Michael Hardman, of Youngs, who the abatement order has been served on, said: "Estimates to get the pub soundproofed would be around £172,000. We just can't invest that amount of money. "We feel very aggrieved because we have only had one complaint out of the entire population of Barnes. The jazz does not make money but it would be like taking a man's leg off. "It is a very successful, very well run pub. I expect Dan and his wife must be heartbroken. We feel very sorry for them. We are still looking at other possibilities." The council has confirmed that the notice required abatement of the problem within a three month period. It did not forbid the playing of live jazz, just the reduction of disturbance to people living nearby. There are a range of ways for minimising noise emissions and the council has been in discussion with the brewery over possible measures to reduce the noise to an acceptable level. A cost of about £5,000 has been estimated by the council to replace the doors and carry out acoustic work on the ventilation, not £172,000 to soundproof the entire building. A spokesman said: "Concerning the planning aspect, the nearby development was determined solely on its planning merits. It is not unusual to have pubs located close to residential developments and both be good neighbours." http://www.thisislocallondon.co.uk/misc/pr...hp?artid=554967

Yes it is a bit hard to find. I managed to pick it up about six months ago through one of Amazon UK's marketplace sellers.

Oh man, I once passed by an Italian couple having a nap on a bench in a train station, and the odour from their armpits could be smelled at a five feet distance ... so, if sleeping can be defined as some type of working ... They'd probably just had sex. "We're English, we don't have sex." Wasn't there an English film some years ago entitled, "No Sex Please, We're British"? I thought it was a joke. Do you mean it's true?? The English have something similiar which involves the imbibing of copious quantities of strong lager but you really wouldn't call it sex.

Here's a good South African on-line store One World which specialises in South African music that some people may not have heard of. I've just come across it and found two Moses Mololekwa CDs that I couldn't find anywhere else. Shipping charges aren't to0 bad if you opt for Registered International Mail rather than Courier. It will probably take a couple of weeks for them to arrive but that's OK. They also appear to have the Gallo Jazz Epistles CD that garth mentioned in stock.

We could start a mutual check by some neutral party, like, from the Netherlands ..... I refuse to have Dutch people check my underwear. I simply refuse. That sucks! Who would you rather have - the French!

Oh man, I once passed by an Italian couple having a nap on a bench in a train station, and the odour from their armpits could be smelled at a five feet distance ... so, if sleeping can be defined as some type of working ... They'd probably just had sex.

Happy birthday couw.

Hey, I thought we led the pack on that one... The UK opted out of the survey.

This smacks of more Brussells bureaucracy to me.

I hope you're keeping a video diary of all this.

Let us know how they get on.

ubu - what's it like getting smacked in the head by one of those brooms in the middle of winter when they've been soaked with rain and frozen to ice?

Friday December 10, 12:53 PM Festive Fisticuffs: Brawling Santas Arrested The world's biggest gathering of Santa Clauses has ended in a mass brawl. CS spray and batons had to be used to break up the fighting Santas. Some 4,200 people dressed as Father Christmas gathered in a small Welsh town for a charity festive fun run. But it turned into festive fisticuffs after some of the Santas headed to the pub for a seasonal tipple. The goodwill evaporated, to be replaced with around 30 Santas swapping punches. Five St Nicks were nicked by police. A Dyfed Powys Police spokeswoman said: "A very successful Santa Run day was spoilt by the drunken behaviour of a number of local individuals who managed to consume too much alcohol and became involved in a serious public order incident. "Police officers had to intervene in an ongoing disturbance in Severn Street and more people then got involved. The police had to draw their batons and use CS gas to quell the disturbance." She added that four police officers had suffered minor injuries. "You could see that a lot of the older male Santas were heading for the pub straight after the race," eyewitness Emma Jones told The Times. "It is such a pity that a few of them had too much Christmas spirit and spoilt it for everyone else." The fun run set the record for the largest gathering of Santas in one place.

Happy birthday Dmitry.

Finally got this one! A great compilation, indeed! Only I'd wish for a complete discography! Amazon UK has it for 9 £. ubu Thanks for the link ubu. I actually managed to order it from one of their Marketplace sellers for £2.16 a short while ago.

Does anyone have any info on these Jazz Colours releases such as this one? They seem to have been released around 1999. I've recently ordered their release of Abdullah Ibrahim's "Anatomy of a South African Village" through Amazon UK but it is yet to arrive so I can't comment on it at the moment.