If you’re like me, you love demonstrations of speed and power. It’s a thrill to see a monster pumpkin catapult machine hurl a pumpkin two thousand feet downrange. Or better still, to toss a 200 pound refrigerator over 200 feet in the air. Now that’s entertainment!
The World Famous Acme Catapult team has been invited to be the first American competitor at the European Championship Punkin Chuckin contest in Belgium for next year, 2010. This is an exciting opportunity to take the American brand of punkin chuckin global! But they can only do this with lots and lots of help from people like me and you.
Full Disclosure: The Acme Catapult team is comprised of Bob Kruse who is my stepdad, and a few of his closest friends and coworkers.
This is a huge undertaking and the round trip overseas shipping costs, airfare, lodging, and food expenses will add up very quickly. They are in need of monetary donations and they’ve made it very simple to donate online via PayPal. Just go to the Acme Catapult website (http://www.acmecatapult.com/) and click on the PayPal Donate button!
I was playing around with Google Maps today and realized that the Google Street View folks have driven through my tiny little home town of Mackinaw, IL. They didn’t drive all over the place … they just made a beeline down the main drag. But still, very cool. So enjoy your online tour of Mackinaw, Illinois!
Click on any image below to view and interact with it. Click and drag to “look around”. Click on the street arrows to drive up and down the street.
[All street view images are copyright and owned by Google.]
Welcome to Mackinaw, Illinois where the population is around 1,500 very nice folks. It’s only 30 minutes from Peoria to the West and 50 minutes from Bloomington to the East.
This is the old historic Mackinaw Train Depot. It sat empty and in near ruins for many many years when I was growing up. When I was in high school, the historical society paid me to mow it. They also paid me to paint the historical sign that was displayed out front for many years. Some very smart entrepreneurs came up with the idea to make a tea room and a gift shop out of it and it’s been thriving now for many years.
Here is Mackinaw’s downtown park. It’s also very historic. I have some photos from the Mackinaw Sesquicentennial in 1976 of my family dressed up in Sesquicentennial garb and watching the time capsule burial ceremony here. That should be fun to open up someday. There is an historic naval ship gun turret displayed here in this park. You can see it on the left in the photo. It’s pretty cool and fun for kids to play on. Last summer I got photos of my boys climbing and playing on it, just like I did when I was their age!
Here is the only grocery store in the area … the Mackinaw IGA. I worked here during high school and Junior College along with many of my classmates. Sadly this store burned down last year. Here is another photo. The owner says they’re gonna rebuild, though.
Here is a view looking downtown. It’s a very small and friendly little town.
Mmmmmm. Ice cream. This ice cream stand wasn’t quite this big when I was growing up. It’s good to see that business is good and they have added on to the original little shed building.
The Christian Church in Mackinaw. It’s a beautiful building inside and out. This isn’t the church my family attended, but some of my friends attended here and I visited occasionally and have good memories from it. My United Methodist church didn’t get photographed by the Google Street View cameras or I’d include it here too.
Mackinaw Grade School. It looks quite a bit different than when I was attending. I attended here from Kindergarten all the way through 8th grade. The Junior high was in a different area of the building than the lower grades. I don’t think any of the original building remains anymore.
The Mackinaw Grain Elevator. When you live in the middle of corn country, you can’t hardly throw a rock without hitting a grain elevator.
Well, that’s about all the Google Street View folks were able to capture by driving down the main drag. There’s way more to Mackinaw than what you can see from these few photos, though. If you’re ever in the area, drive on through and stop by one of the nice little restaurants or stores. You’ll be glad you did.
Well, it was a long and hard day, but it was totally worth it! What a great experience it was to attend the Daytona 500 race in person and to be able to see and hear and smell and experience it firsthand. Below is a short 3 minute video on YouTube that I created from short video clips on my digital camera.
Being in the pre-race show (http://www.leucht.com/blog/2009/02/daytona-500-pre-race-show-practice-day/), I had to arrive in the parking lot at 7:30am and check in at the infield pre-race compound at 8am. They fed us some pre-packaged muffins for breakfast and set us loose in the infield and told us to come back at noon. So we basically had almost 4 hours to walk around and be tourists. I checked out the Fan Zone and the pit area and then I suddenly found myself on Fox & Friends After the Show Show (http://www.foxnews.com/video2/video08.html?maven_referralObject=3606113). There were lots of reporters running around interviewing people before the race.
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I was able to look into some of the garages while the crews were preparing their cars for the race. [Click on any of the photos for higher resolution versions.]
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The fans could also view the inspection area where cars were getting weighed and measured and inspected thoroughly to make sure they were following the NASCAR rules.
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While I was milling around, they let the Fan Zone crowd out onto the track and onto the grass between the pits and the grandstands. That was really cool. The track is banked at 31 degrees there at the finish line, which is pretty impressive when you’re right there trying to walk up and down it.
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Also, fans were allowed to sign the Start/Finish line.
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I didn’t do a great job signing my name. The bumpy asphalt was pretty hard to write on.
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One stretch of pit road was open for fans to walk around and look at the pit boxes and equipment. Here is a photo of Jimmie Johnson’s (Team Lowe’s Racing) pit area.
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Here is a photo of some of the Team Lowe’s pit tools. These were on the side facing the car … there were more tools on the opposite side too.
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Here is a photo of the back side of the pit box of Dale Earnhardt Jr. You can see they’ve got all the tires laid out and marked as to where they go on the car.
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Back in the Fan Zone, fans got to ask Elliott Sadler questions before the race.
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Time went pretty fast with all the activities and such. Then it was time to line up and get ready for the pre-race show at 2:30pm. There were about 1500 volunteer “performers” in this show. Most of the choreography involved simply walking from spot to spot and unfurling a banner. Pretty simple stuff. Here’s a photo of me waiting for the word to walk out onto the field.
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I took this photo during the finale of the show.
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I snapped this photo of Keith Urban during the pre-race show. He’s in a yellow t-shirt standing on a little mini-stage in the middle of the crowd.
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About an hour after the pre-race show, the race actually started. Took a while to remove the stage and clean up everything. Here’s a photo of the leaderboard and jumbotron as the race was starting.
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I watched most of the race from the pit area. It was pretty exciting and full of activity.
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At one point in the race, Jeff Gordon was having some sort of trouble and people started passing him. He came in for a pit stop…
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… and his tires were in pretty bad shape. You could see bubbling and the tread was starting to come off.
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Another shot of the old tires.
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Tom Cruise attended the race and watched it from Jeff Gordon’s pit box.
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The Cheerios team getting ready for the next pit stop.
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This picture shows a pit crew member measuring and recording the tread thickness across the face of a used tire.
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I went up and down the pits all evening, but decided that this was the view of the race that I liked the best.
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Soon after I snapped the above photo, it started sprinkling. Soon after that, the race was stopped and then eventually the race was called due to the rain. After the race was over and everyone was packing up, I caught Tony Stewart in his pit.
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An emotional Matt Kenseth won the race by being in first place when the race was red flagged and then called due to rain.
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After the winners circle ceremony I snapped this photo of the winner, Matt Kenseth, getting interviewed by the Speed Network.
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My last photo of the night. Here were the final standings at the end of the 51st Daytona 500.
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My long day finally ended and then I had to wait in line for an hour and a half for a bus ride to the parking lot, then I had to drive all the way home. I drove all the way to Titusville on US1 because I-95 was pretty packed and not moving at full speed as far as I could tell.
It was a long hard day, but it was very interesting and pretty fun, so I think I may do it again next year.
Subtitled: How to increase DVD viewership and make more money
This is an open letter from a conservative parent to all the Hollywood-type DVD publishing executives and policymakers out there. I know you’re very busy, so I’ll keep this article short and sweet.
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As a conservative parent, I want to protect my young kids from all the sex and all the violence and all the potty talk and I could go on and on, but I won’t. So many of the feature-length animated films that are released these days are rated PG instead of rated G, and this fact is disheartening to me. There’s a valid and technical reason a particular film gets a PG rating rather than a G rating … it’s got stuff in it that little kids (read toddlers and pre-schoolers) should NOT be watching!
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I’m a big fan of watching a DVD before I let my kids watch it. If there’s a little bit of content that I don’t want my kids to see, I can always fast forward through the part if I know it’s there. But there’s usually too much questionable content in many of the rated PG films these days to try to skip past it all. My solution: I don’t rent PG films for my kids at all.
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But there is a better solution. And it doesn’t even require any fancy new technology to be invented. The old standard DVD format already allows the viewer to choose from multiple audio tracks. And I’ve watched plenty of action/adventure DVDs to know that it’s completely possible to play a totally different “cut” of a film, such as a director’s cut or similar. So why not put a rated G version of the film on the same DVD along with the PG version? This simple idea would not cost the DVD industry a lot of money to implement and it would surely increase their revenues, since it would obviously increase the viewership of their DVDs among the conservative young family population.
Thanks for listening, Kurt
(Anyone who reads this: Please leave a comment/response to this article below and let me know … along with the DVD industry … whether you agree or not.)
We got a car pass and watched Endeavour launch last night on STS-126 from the NASA Causeway viewing site. It was awesome!
Elijah waits patiently for the launch. We got there almost 2 hours beforehand. Notice the nearly full moon out the window. A beautiful and clear night for a launch.
And we have liftoff! The picture doesn’t do it justice, because it lights up the night sky as if it were daylight!
We could see it almost all the way down to the horizon. Very cool.
Kurt
Thanks for visiting, Kurt & Sam Leucht Titusville, FL
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