USNS Impeccable & USNS Victorious vs. the Chinese Navy

AP and Reuters both had reports about five Chinese ships that harassed a U.S. surveillance ship in the South China Sea this past Sunday. At the time of the incident, the USNS Impeccable was about 75 miles of Hainan, China - in international waters.

Said Chinese vessels "...shadowed and aggressively maneuvered in dangerously close proximity to the USNS Impeccable (T-AGOS-23), in an apparent coordinated effort to harass the U.S. ocean surveillance ship while it was conducting routine operations in international waters," the Pentagon said in a written statement.

Two of the Chinese vessels came by the Impeccable within 50 feet, waving Chinese flags and told the U.S. ship to leave the area.

USNS Impeccable sprayed its fire hoses at one of the vessels in order to protect itself which cause the Chinese crewmembers to disrobe down to their underwear and continued to close to within 25 feet of the Impeccable.

And when the Impeccable alerted the Chinese that it was seeking a safe path to depart the area, two of the Chinese ships stopped "dirctly ahead of USNS Impeccable, forcing the Impeccable to conduct an emergency 'all stop' in order to avoid collision. The Chinese dropped pieces of wood in the water directly in front of Impeccable's path.

Turns out that THIS is the third such incident over the past week. The first one was last Wednesday when a Chinese Bureau of Fisheries Patrol vessel used a spotlight to illuminate the ocean surveillance ship USNS Victorious (T-AGOS-19). This incident took place 125 miles from China's coastline in the Yellow Sea. The Chinese ship crossed the bows of USNS Victorious at a range of 1,400 yards in darkness without notice or warning.

The next day, a Chinese frigate crossed the USNS Impeccable bow's at a range of about 100 yeards. This was followed two hours later by Chinese Y-12 Aircraft whivh conducted Eleven (11) fly-bys of Impeccable at an altitude of 600 feet and ranges from 100 to 300 feet away from the Navy vessel. Then the Chinese frigate showed up again to cross Impeccable's bows yet again - this time out to aobut 400-500 yards away. Again no "rendering of courtesy or ntoice of intentions."

And then on Saturday, a Chinese inelligence collection ship challended USNS Impeccable over the bridge-to-bridge radio, "calling (Impeccable) operations illegal and directing Impeccable to leave the area or 'suffer the consequences."

USNS Impeccable is an twin hull Ocean Surveillance Ship, a part of the Military Sealift Command's (MSC) Special Mission Ships Program. Now, these ships are operated by civilian mariners who work for private companies under contract to MSC. The USNS Impeccable was launched in 1998, and commissioned into the US Navy in 2001. While underway, it deploys a LF passive sonar that requires a combined crew of merchant marines, surveillance towed array sensor system operators (SOC) techs, and regualr U.S. Navy sonar technicians.

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Ref. Unregistered News.com: http://www.unregisterednews.com/2009/03/09/usns-victorious-harried-by-chinese-y-12-aircraft/

Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USNS_Impeccable_(T-AGOS-23)

Raiders of the Lost Ark Transcript

Anybody who has been following my blog for any length of time will know that I am a BIG Indiana Jones fan.



I was visiting The Raider website and there was this posting to Mystery Man on Film's blog and he had a transcript that was or a meeting between George Lucus, Steven Spielberg, and Lawrence Kasdan. Check below for the links. The transcript is in Adobe pdf file format.



Quoting Mystery Man on Film's blog: "Some background first. Spielberg suggested that Kasdan write Raiders because he admired his Continental Divide script. Lucas agreed. Now, imagine with me: Lucas had just released Star Wars, the biggest film in the history of Hollywood and a cult phenomenon. Spielberg had just released Close Encounters of the Third Kind and before that, Jaws. Now Kasdan was called in to have a story conference with the biggest names in Hollywood who wanted to talk about their next blockbuster. The conference took place at the L.A. home of Jane Bay, who was Lucas’ assistant. They had 5 consecutive 9-hour days to talk about the story. This .pdf is a transcript from taped recordings of those meetings."

Indiana Smith was one of the earlier versions of the famed explorer. It just doesn't have any Zing! But, as far as spoofing, then Indiana Smith would be a great name indeed.


Again, quoting Mystery Man on Film: "... Spielberg and Lucas were idea machines. They could’ve sat there coming up with Indiana Smith ideas forever. There were enough ideas generated in these meetings for two films, which they actually used for two films."

And this is going to be my last quote from Mystery Man's website. It covers the background history of Indiana Jones and Marion Ravenwood: "Interestingly, the discussion about Marion was hardly as thorough as the one about Indy. For a while, they weren't sure what kind of girl to have as a counterpart to Indy. Lucas had first described the love interest as a blonde double-crossing German agent, which they ended up using in Last Crusade.

"Spielberg said, “She should have hair like Veronica Lake. You only see one eye at a time.”There was talk about a big name professor who taught Indy everything he knew. Then there was the idea about this German girl, and for the sake of expediency, Kasdan suggested that Indy instead have an affair with the mentor’s daughter, which they loved.

"And then Lucas and Spielberg were off and running with ideas about how’s she’s been left in Peru and has this bar and is trying to get money together to get back to the States and loves (and resents) Indy to no end. In fact, Kasdan said he wanted Indy and this girl to already have a history when they meet because, “I like it if they already had a relationship at one point. Because then you don’t have to build it.” Hehehe…

"Then the discussion turned to how old Marion and Indy were at the time of the affair: (NOTE: G = George Lucas, S = Steven Spielberg, L = Lawrence Kasdan).

"G — I was thinking that this old guy could have been his mentor. He could have known this little girl when she was just a kid. Had an affair with her when she was eleven.
"L — And he was forty-two.
"G — He hasn't seen her in twelve years. Now she's twenty-two. It's a real strange relationship.
"S — She had better be older than twenty-two.
"G — He's thirty-five, and he knew her ten years ago when he was twenty-five and she was only twelve. It would be amusing to make her slightly young at the time.
"S — And promiscuous. She came onto him.
"G — Fifteen is right on the edge. I know it's an outrageous idea, but it is interesting. Once she's sixteen or seventeen it's not interesting anymore. But if she was fifteen and he was twenty-five and they actually had an affair the last time they met. And she was madly in love with him and he...
"S — She has pictures of him.

"And now consider the dialogue of that scene in the film:
INDY: I never meant to hurt you.
MARION: I was a child! I was in love.
INDY: You knew what you were doing.
MARION: It was wrong. You knew it.
INDY: Look, I did what I did. I don't expect you to be happy about it. But maybe we can do each other some good.
MARION: Why start now?
INDY: Shut up and listen for a second. I want that piece your father had. I've got money.
MARION: How much? (End Quote)"

Have fun reading it.

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Ref. The Raider.net ( http://www.theraider.net/)
Mystery Man on Film blog ( http://mysterymanonfilm.blogspot.com/2009/03/raiders-story-conference.html).
Transcript link itself ( http://www.sendspace.com/file/cnoe3r ).

Florida Jets 2009

I wanted to change things up around here and decided to post this link to RC Universe's coverage of the 2009 Florida Jets.  (http://www.rcuniverse.com/forum/m_8549023/tm.htm) Check out the pictures there.  

I could make a cheesy statement about why I like jets here, but will let the reader make up their own when you view the pictures there yourself.

Financial News for Home Loans and Loan Modifications

Here is the information that was released recently about how mortages and loan modifications, and other options will work in the future under the Obama Administration.

Check on the link below to view pdf files on the subject matter.

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Ref.  Financial Stability  (http://financialstability.gov/ )

The New Starship U.S.S. Enterprise as Desktop Wallpapers

Over on the trekmovie.com webpage, I was looking through the past pages and came across the wallpapers posting. This is the link to that page.( http://trekmovie.com/2009/02/23/first-look-at-tobias-richters-uss-enterprise-wallpapers/ ). It was originally posted on February 23, 2009 by Thorsten Wulff.

Tobias Richter is a big Trek fan and veteran CG artist and the owner of The Light Works graphics studio in Cologne, Germany. His model of the new Enterprise is based solely on reference material available (the official image released, the three trailers, and even the toy images). These are as accurate as it is going to get until the movie comes out in May.
Read more about Tobias Richter and the Enterprise Wallpapers over on Trekmovie.com.

The images with this posting are credited to the trekmovie.com website and Tobias Richter.

Glenn Beck and State Sovereignty Rights

Check out this Glenn Beck YouTube interviewing NH Representative Dan Itse about State Sovereignty Rights (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I36vH_uTbic ).  This was originally aired on February 13, 2009.   As of that airing, there were 20 states that had some sort of legation dealing with sovereignty.

Paper Modelling

Have you ever attempted to make one of those paper models look like what the photographs in the magazine (or nowdays, online)? Sorta like the picture above? Yeah, me too and failed every time that I tried. And everynow and then, I get the urge to try again.

Just discovered this website and included in it was this model of the Ark of the Covenant scale almsot scale to the correct dimensions for one's 1/6th scale Indiana Jones figure. See the related link below.

On Paper Replika.com there are many subject items to choose from. There is even a Star Wars section. There is even a papermodel of the UFO that crashed at Roswell in 1947 (based on the testor's kit it looks like to me). Or how about the Discovery from the movie "2001 A Space Odessey." Pretty neat.

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Ref. Paper Replika.com (http://paper-replika.com/)

Ark of the Covenant-( http://paper-replika.com/index.php/Ancient-History/Ark-of-The-Covenant.html).

Discovery from movie 2001 ( http://paperkraft.blogspot.com/2009/03/discovery-one-papercraft.html)

Roswell UFO Crash ( http://paper-replika.com/index.php/Others/Roswell-UFO-Paper-Craft.html).