For my readers in the Frozen North . . .

. . . proof that every (snow) cloud has a silver lining for at least one person.

Cool!  (Literally!)



Peter

Driving hints for Southerners caught in the snow and ice

Here's a helpful visual driving guide for those in the Southern states affected by this week's snow and ice.

Peter

The funniest table-tennis match ever?

Apparently this was a real table-tennis tournament, where the two players just got into the spirit of the thing and egged each other on to new heights of ridiculousness.  Funniest game I've ever seen!

I recommend watching it in full-screen mode.  I apologize for the banner links that appear on the video playback almost at once, but if you hover your mouse cursor over them, you'll spot the little 'X' that lets you shut them down.

Peter

Polish spectators seem to have learned . . .

. . . to stand further away from rally courses than their counterparts in other nations.  Given that their drivers seem to crash just as often, and just as hard, that's probably not a bad idea - as this Polish TV footage illustrates.

Oops . . .





Peter

Barbie Jeep racing???

I'd never heard of a 'Barbie Jeep' until today.

It's apparently an electrically-powered toy vehicle that's intended to be driven around the house (or perhaps the garden) by little girls.  It's part of a whole range of similar toys.

It seems boys will be boys when it comes to toys like that . . . even big boys.  It seems that Morris Mountain held a race for these things last year.  An offroad race.  Downhill.  With adult drivers.

Oy.

Watch it in full-screen mode to make the most of the mayhem.

Peter

Splitting the pillars

I've posted wingsuit videos here from time to time.  This one's from the testing of a new design of wingsuit, and begins with splitting twin rock pillars on the Sass Pordoi in Italy.  It continues with a jump from Les Vuardes in France.  I recommend watching it in full-screen mode.

I still say you can't pay me enough to make me fly that close to a mountain at those speeds.  A highly experienced wingsuit jumper was killed last year on the Sass Pordoi doing just that.





Peter

Muslim terrorists versus the Russian government

After the terrorist bomb explosions in Volgograd over the weekend, the Russian President has taken a hard line.

Vladimir Putin has vowed to pursue terrorists to their “total annihilation”, in his first public comments since the Volgograd suicide bombings.

In his traditional New Year's Eve address, which was broadcast at midnight from the Far Eastern city of Khabarovsk, (5pm in Moscow), he praised Russia’s unity in the face of both terrorism and natural disasters and promised to continue an unrelenting fight against the bombers.

. . .

Two more victims of Monday’s bus bombing and one victim of Sunday’s suicide attack in the city’s main railway station died overnight, Russian authorities said on Tuesday, bringing the total number of fatalities from the attacks to 34. More than 100 people have been injured.

I note that the Russian authorities are also making connections between the latest attacks and earlier Chechen terrorist atrocities, as I did a few days ago.

The series of attacks is grimly reminiscent of the build-up to terrorist “spectaculars” in the mid-2000s, including the Beslan School siege, in which more than 300 people died, 180 of them children.

Then suicide bombers had blown up two airliners in mid-air a week before they seized the school on Sept 1, 2004, in what security experts now describe as an attempt to divert the security services’ attention ahead of the main attack.

There's more at the link.

The resentment of Muslims in Russia against Putin's government is deep and long-running, dating back as far as Tsarist times.  As the Telegraph pointed out a couple of days ago, 'Putin faces a brutal, relentless attacks from rebels with no cause but revenge'.

To find anything in Russia that is comparable [to the Volgograd bombings], we have to go back to 1999, when a series of bombs – spaced out over a single September week -- demolished apartment buildings in Moscow and the town of Volgodonsk, killing hundreds. Officials appeared powerless and ordinary Russians panicked.

The prime minister, a little-known ex-KGB agent called Vladimir Putin, blamed the Chechens – despite their denial of responsibility – and sent in the troops. The army's crushing of the fragile self-declared Chechen state was the first battle in Putin's long campaign to reverse Russia's post-Soviet collapse, which had been symbolised by Boris Yeltsin's humiliating defeat by the separatists of Muslim Chechnya.

Putin, who was to become president within a year, took no chances. His artillery demolished Grozny to prevent rebels using it as a stronghold. His security services – as we know, thanks to the European Court of Human Rights – murdered rebels they captured without any pretence of a trial. Men were tortured. Women were raped. Artillery shelled the slopes of the Caucasus Mountains.

. . .

But across the mountains from Sochi, all is not well. Putin might have killed the rebels' leaders, but the rebels remain. An independent state is out of reach, so these young Muslims have ceased fighting for one, or for anything concrete at all. They fight for vengeance, through rage, or to fulfil the tenets of a religion twisted and distorted in the fire of war.

Since Putin "pacified" Chechnya, suicide bombers have struck airports and planes, stations and trains, streets and buses, rock concerts and markets.

The attacks have achieved nothing but misery and death, but they have kept coming.

Putin has tightened regulations, and given more power to his security services. His agents have pursued young Muslims they suspect of being terrorists, but that has angered the young men further. Tens of thousands of Chechens have fled Russia, and taken violence with them. There are Chechens fighting in Syria. This year, two refugees bombed the Boston Marathon.

Fighting spilled over into nearby regions of Russia also, and the bombers now are mainly from neighbouring Dagestan, a bewildering multi-ethnic sinkhole which is never plugged, no matter how much money Moscow pumps into it.

Insurgents there long ago ceased having a cause beyond revenge.

Again, more at the link.

Russia - and the former Soviet Union - have always had a robust response to terrorism.  As Strategy Page reminds us:

Back in the 1980s, for example, Islamic terrorists in Lebanon kidnapped a Russian diplomat. The Russians (then the Soviets, a distinction without much difference in these matters) quickly found out which faction had their guy, kidnapped a relative of one of the kidnappers, and had a body part delivered to the Islamic kidnappers. The message was, release the Russian diplomat unharmed, or the KGB (Soviet secret police) would keep sending body parts, and grabbing kinfolk of the kidnappers. The Russian diplomat was released.

More at the link.

I worked on an aircraft project with some Israeli engineers who were familiar with that incident in Lebanon.  They described it (with considerable admiration) in rather more graphic detail than the Strategy Page report.  They claimed that the kidnappers initially didn't believe the Soviets were serious:  so the latter seized several of the kidnappers' relatives.  Every six hours, on the hour, one of the prisoners was beheaded and castrated.  His head and genitals were delivered to the kidnappers, showing the marks of burns and other tortures.  Apparently the exchange of hostages took very little time to arrange after that . . .

I fear that Russia will now seek to use similar tactics against the Muslim population of central and southern Asia.  I wouldn't be surprised if the word was already being spread that for every Russian victim of terrorist violence, ten or more Muslims will die.  It's been done before.  Unfortunately, it's also never worked before, because fundamentalist terrorists believe that anyone who dies in that way is automatically classified as a martyr for the faith, and is guaranteed Paradise.  They're unlikely to be swayed by concern for their fellow religionists.

Watch the southern Caucasus and the Winter Olympics closely.  This could get very nasty indeed.

Peter

The Winter Olympics and the threat of terrorism

I'm sure most readers have learned by now of the suicide bomber who killed 15 people in Volgograd.  The city's in southern Russia, only a few hundred miles from Sochi, where the 2014 Winter Olympics are to take place in February.

I'm afraid this incident may portend an upsurge in Islamic fundamentalist terrorism in and around southern Russia during the Games.  It's very likely that terrorists regard the Games as an ideal opportunity to gain publicity for their cause, and inflict terror on the Russian government and people, whom they blame for the plight of their fellow religionists in territories such as Chechnya, Dagestan and Ingushetia.  For an excellent in-depth overview of the situation, read this leaked memo from the US Embassy in Moscow in 2006.

Islam has been repressed more or less savagely in the region since Tsarist times, and after the collapse of the Soviet Union, religious fundamentalists tried to use the resulting confusion to re-establish their dominance of the area.  The new Russian government fought back, resulting in bitter conflicts such as the First and Second Chechen War, disturbances amounting to civil war in several neighboring republics, etc.  Many of the terrorists who instigated and fought those wars managed to evade capture.  More than a few of them have fought in support of Islamic fundamentalists in other conflicts.  (Some are currently fighting in Syria.)  Their ideology has even reached the USA, with the Boston bombers reportedly influenced by Chechen revolutionary Islamic ideology.

If you or anyone you know is/are planning to travel to the Winter Olympics, you might want to keep the risk of terrorism firmly in mind.  I'd say that, based on their past actions and demonstrated ruthlessness, it's almost guaranteed that fundamentalist terrorists will try to take advantage of the influx of tourists to 'make a statement'.

Remember the Moscow theater siege?

Remember Beslan?

I'd rather not have my readers caught up in something like that, thank you very much . . . so if you're heading for the Winter Olympics, please be as careful as you possibly can.  Personally, I wouldn't go.

Peter

The unluckiest goalkeeper in the NHL?

Mike Smith, goalkeeper for the Phoenix Coyotes hockey team, must have had a pretty awful Christmas.  His team played the Buffalo Sabres in that team's home town on Monday night - and this happened.

A "butt goal"???  Now there's an ice hockey technical term I'd never heard before . . .

Peter

Down a bobsled run - in a car?

I'd never heard of taking a car down a bobsled run;  but in its obituary for the late Henry Taylor, the Telegraph noted that this was one of his achievements.

Born at Shefford, Bedfordshire, to a farming family on December 16 1932, Henry Taylor competed in speedway before switching to four wheels in October 1954 with a Formula Three Cooper Mark IV-Vincent. His talent quickly shone through and, driving a Cooper Mark VIII-JAP and Mark X-JAP, he won Britain’s 1955 and 1956 F3 JAP Championships.

. . .

Taylor’s love of speed also saw him become an established bobsleigh driver and in 1956 he won the Fairchilds Morgan Cup on St Moritz’s Cresta Run. He finished second in the 1957 European Four Man Junior Championships at the Swiss resort with Robin Dixon, later Lord Glentoran, as brakeman, the pair becoming members of Great Britain’s team at the 1958 World Bobsleigh Championships.

. . .

It was in December 1964 that Cortina GTs tackled Cortina d’Ampezzo’s bobsleigh run. The stunt was Ford’s salute to its drivers’ 200 Cortina victories in 21 countries. Some 19 drivers, among them 13 champions and including Jim Clark, Jack Sears, Colin Chapman, Vic Elford, Sir John Whitmore and Taylor, raced down the steep, winding, ice-covered run at over 50mph; the sport of “auto-bobbing” was born.

There's more at the link.

Intrigued at the prospect of a car going down a bobsled track, I looked for more information.  I found this video clip on YouTube.

I don't think I'd have wanted to be a passenger . . .





Peter

Puttin' on the moves . . .

Here are the winning Russian women's group from the 2010 Acrobatic Gymnastics World Championships.  Talk about flexibility!

OK, that's mind-boggling!  My fused spine is screaming in protest just looking at it . . .





Peter

Russian rednecks on tractors!

Who says rednecks are only to be found in the USA?

Peter

Driving on ice this weekend?

With the current ice storms in mind, here's a video clip of how the professionals drive on ice.  This is from the 2012 Rally Sweden event.

'Lords Of The Ice' indeed!  I loved the tractors with studded tires . . .

Peter

That's the fastest pontoon boat I've ever seen!

I'm sure many of us have seen pontoon boats on local lakes, dams, rivers and streams.  They're very popular for family entertainment.  However, they're usually relatively slow movers.  I've certainly never seen one perform like this!

That's a South Bay Pontoon 900 Sport series boat, with a third, central pontoon for stability, powered by a Mercury Racing 525EFI engine - the same unit that's won several offshore world championships.  It certainly makes that thing zoom across the water, despite the drag of three pontoons in the water and the aerodynamic inefficiency of its big hull - but it apparently consumes no less than 40 gallons (over 150 liters) of fuel per hour in doing so.  That makes even my pickup truck look economical by comparison!





Peter

Doofus Of The Day #740

Today's award goes to the team that's just submitted their design for the new Al Wakrah stadium in Qatar, to be used for the 2022 World Cup.  It's claimed the design is based on "a dhow boat that Qataris traditionally used for pearl diving", but its resemblance to something else has led to much hilarious (and frequently rude) comment around the world.

You can imagine to what that design might be (and is being) compared.  I don't even want to think about what the shape might inspire spectators to chant during matches held there . . .





Peter

Blink and you'll miss it . . .

This has to be the quickest pit stop I've ever seen!  It's by the Lotus F1 team at this year's Japanese Grand Prix, which was held at the Suzuka circuit last month.

OK, that's fast!  I wonder if I can derive any lessons on writing books from that . . . ?

Peter

Insane . . . but fun!

We've watched earlier episodes in Ken Block's series of 'Gymkhana' motorsport videos in these pages.  Now he's come out with Episode 6, which is a real humdinger - read more about it at the link.  I recommend watching the video in full-screen mode.

I had to laugh at the 'morningstar of death' near the end.  Who thought that up - not to mention making it so big it needed a crane to lift it?





Peter

A miraculous escape

You may have heard about the mid-air collision between two light aircraft filled with skydivers over Wisconsin last weekend. Video of the collision is now available, filmed by at least two of the parachutists using helmet-mounted cameras. It's amazing footage.

Definitely a constipation-curing moment, I'd say!





Peter

This is priceless!

Autoblog brings us this wonderful video clip of German TV host Barbara Schöneberger being driven around a track by rally ace Walter Röhrl in a new-model turbocharged Audi S3.  Watch the expressions on her face.

It's priceless!





Peter

Oops!

Rally driving mayhem at its best. What more needs to be said?

Boys and their toys, indeed . . .





Peter