Didn’t Steve Guttenberg Direct E.T.?
The reason I don’t get enough work done is because I suffer from a rare combination of ADD and OCD. I haven’t been clinically diagnosed (nor do I actually know if it’s rare) but since I’ve already figured it out for myself, why should I pay some quack 200 bucks to confirm it? How it works is I flit about from one topic to the next until I settle on one and spend an inordinate amount of time on it. Even back in college I used to do this at the library and anybody old enough to remember the Dewey Decimal System can imagine how much time such flitting took. Needless to say, I never accomplished anything at the school library but I do know a lot about a bunch of useless stuff.
I’ll take you through the process that brought me to the main topic for this post. I was discussing with a friend the fact that The Bachelorette picked up her date in a helicopter. This put me in ADD mode, which made me think of the helicopter rides I took when I toured the Balkans. In turn I was reminded of the private flights I took in Afghanistan (I think I mentioned the flight on the C-5 with two passengers but neglected to mention my long flight as the sole passenger on a C-17). Then I was curious if one of those had indeed qualified as the largest private jet in the world. This got me reading up on C-17′s and C-5′s and even C-130′s (which I rode on a previous tour). Then I looked up a list of the world’s largest aircraft and found that the C-5 is seventh with some ahead of it now defunct. So basically, it’s quite possibly the largest plane anybody’s ever likely to ride on with just one or two passengers. Why does it matter? It doesn’t. It will never matter unless I meet Donald Trump and decide I want to throw that in his face. Like I said, I look up useless crap.
On the top of the list of largest aircraft ever built is the Hindenburg. This is where the OCD kicked in. I realized I knew nothing about the Hindenburg other than the fact that it had something to do with a blimp and that a news broadcaster covering the story popularized the term, “Oh the humanity!” (real humanity, none of that Gwyneth Paltrow garbage). As incredibly stupid as this is going to sound, I think I intended to look up the Hindenburg awhile ago but I confused it with the Lindebergh baby and learned all about that incident instead. I remember thinking at the time, “How the hell does a blimp fit into a kidnapping?” In my pathetic defense, they happened around the same time and the Lindebergh baby’s father was a renowned aviator, thus adding to the perplexity. If it weren’t for Leonardo DiCaprio’s films, I’d probably have the Titanic’s iceberg intermingled in there too- and I’d still be wondering if Hugh Hefner flew the Spruce Goose before or after starting Playboy (yes, I actually had the HH’s mixed up at one point- I’m really sounding like a ‘tard here).
So I spent a long time reading about the Hindenburg and the various conspiracy theories surrounding it before it occurred to me that the video would be available on YouTube. It is unbelievable seeing this gigantic aircraft crumble into nothing in mere seconds. Even more remarkable is the fact that only 35 of the 97 on board perished- I don’t know how the rest got out so fast. In case there’s anybody else who hasn’t seen it, I’ve put the original version below but it’s also available in a colorized version that’s spectacular. But if you’re anything like me, be careful visiting the YouTube site or you’ll end up clicking one link that leads to another that leads to footage of Japanese kamikaze pilots bombing warships. Then a couple hours will pass and you’ll ask yourself, “Am I really here as a result of a conversation about The Bachelorette?”
