"Ask the Pilot" [.]

[fiefoe]

The best episode in the book - well worth the price of admission - is the snafu when our unfortunate friend fed a block of dry ice to a toilet:

    "He turns and looks at the toilet. But it has, for all practical purposes , disappeared, and where it once rested he now finds what he will later describe only as: a vision. In place of the commode roars a fluorescent blue waterfall, a huge, heaving cascade of toilet fluid thrust waist-high into the air and splashing into all four corners of the lavatory. Pouring from the top of this volcano, like smoke out of a factory chimney, is a rapidly spreading pall of what looks like steam. He closes his eyes tightly for a second, then reopens them. He does this not for the benefit of unwitnessed theatrics, or even to create an embellishment for later use in a story. He does so because, for the first time in his life, he truly does not believe what is cast in front of him."

It wasn't the good old days, but things were certainly interesting for some: '...the smuggling of Concorde specs into Russia inside toothpaste tubes'; 'The Soviets, ever the good contrarians, used to apply an opposite but equally effective version called anhedral, canting their wings downward.'

Two pieces of actual knowledge I came away with:

• Picture a 360-degree circle. To figure out which way a runway is pointing, add a zero. Runway 22 is pointing 220 degrees, toward the southwest.
• To face the holy Kaaka at Mecca, (Muslims) employ what's called the qibla, which is the shortest distance to Mecca from where they're standing, or kneeling -a kind of Islamic great circle.
  

References:  Diego Rivera's infamous mural at Rockefeller Center, Enola Gay, Chuck Yeager.

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Do over: This post should have been titled 'toad overload'.

At the library: There is a movie menacingly titled "Men Don't Leave". On a shelf nearby, there's "Lloyd's of London" promising swashbuckling romance, starring a startling pretty (and young) Tyrone Powell.