Comments by "Helium Road" (@RCAvhstape) on "The History Guy: History Deserves to Be Remembered" channel.

  1.  @Idahoguy10157  Well, you'd be right to say it has no function today, except to remind us of what almost was. That air terminal has been documented in photos and videos; I don't think they let tourists into it often, but it's a beautiful piece of art deco work, functional or not. Passengers boarding an airship from up there would've had to walk across a swaying catwalk at dizzying heights, so even if it had worked it was not for the faint of heart.
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  2. That's one of my favorite movies, they don't make movies like that anymore.
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  3.  @briankoski2532  Did he live in a van down by the river?
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  4. Especially when blended with the meth.
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  5. Even though he's super famous, I feel like Ben Franklin doesn't get enough credit. As ambassador to France he basically saved the Cause by getting the French to back it and recruiting all these talented foreign officers to cross the Atlantic and join the Continental Army.
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  6. When I was taking pilot lessons they referred to small private planes as "lawyer and doctor killers". Be safe, dude.
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  7. If I was in charge, I'd troll everyone by naming the floors 13A, 13B, 13C, and so on. No escaping it.
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  8. I visited the Philly mint once in the 90s and got a tour. The guys who work there doing bill destruction are all bonded and background checked, and when they show up for work they had to change into coveralls with the pockets sewn shut.
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  9. Amazing how many people go to funerals for dirtbags like this. It's one thing to make a movie about them, because they make for good stories, but it's another to act like they're some kind of hero. I talked to an Italian guy from New York once and he told me that when he was growing up the mob would help out families in the neighborhood with stuff, especially the first or second generation immigrants, which was how they managed to have some level of popular support.
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  10. Well said.
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  11. Sadly, the commercial failure of the L-1011 knocked Lockheed out of the airliner business for good. Every once in a while Lockheed Martin floats on idea for a futuristic jetliner again, the latest usually being some sort of quiet supersonic tech, but concepts only, no serious plans to reenter the market. But the L-1011 is certainly a beautiful bird. Not too many left flying these days.
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  12. I am astonished to think that my parents made me mow the lawn and trusted me with a gasoline-powered foot-chopping machine unsupervised. I hated cutting grass but I liked operating the Briggs and Stratton motor, maintaining it, oiling it, and so on. I hit a golf ball with it once, as well as a few crab apples and even a rock or two. Damned dangerous thing but I survived and now I know how to handle power tools and work on engines.
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  13.  @juniorloaf12  It would be cool if NASA were to obtain a few B-1B bomber when the USAF retires them in the years to come; they have great speed and payload capacity anyway.
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  14. Or they're communists.
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  15. This was supposed to be light-hearted. Don't get all butthurt over it.
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  16. Then there was the USS "Forest Fire" (aka Forrestal), who earned her nickname from a horrible flight deck accident in 1967 that killed like 30 dudes. Camera footage of the accident and firefighting efforts was used for a training film that I'm pretty sure every American sailor and even some Marines were made to watch. If ever there was an example of how a ship can get scary dangerous in the blink of an eye, that episode is it.
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  17.  @bruce2357  Ah yes, TWA Flight 847. Time finally caught up with some of those SOBs, too, quite recently in fact. I also remember as a kid the whole Iran Hostage Crisis, and the good men who died trying to rescue them at Desert 1. I'm not above keeping score when it comes to that stuff.
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  18. saint denis I'm going to tell my Zionist conspiracy buddies to save a special place in the FEMA camp for you when we take over your flat Earth. Get ready, we're comin' for ya!
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  19. His flagship, the cruiser Olympia, is a museum ship in Philadelphia. There are a pair of brass footprints on the bridge where he stood when he (Dewey) gave that command.
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  20. As long as the ruling elite doesn't find some reason to cancel Jones before the pandemic is over.
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  21. His work is probably responsible for those brace things that come down over your shoulders to hold you in place on many roller coasters. The lap bar on old wooden coasters is far less effective.
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  22.  @QuantumRift  I was so waiting for that joke to come up.
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  23. Everyone who watched "Rome" knows Titus Pollo is the real father of Ceasar's kid. ;-)
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  24. Like Josey Wales said, "Hell with them fellas. Buzzards gotta eat too."
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  25. When I was little my dad had a series of Time Life history books, and the one on pirates I read over and over, and used to stare at the illustrations. I was surprised when, about 20 years ago, piracy started becoming a real life issue again in the far east and off the east coast of Africa.
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  26. He was stupid for agreeing to be their representative. But since he previously got kicked out of the navy for something so stupid as refusing to fold his hammock, I am guessing he wasn't exactly a rocket scientist to begin with. Poor discipline and stupidity go hand in hand, as most who've served in the military know.
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  27. I used to work in a welding shop. Whenever we would weld, cut, or grind galvanized steel pipe the fumes from the galvanizing compound would make you sick if you inhaled too much, and all the welders carried hard candy in their pockets because the shit would make your teeth taste weird, so sucking on a Jolly Rancher every so often would counter it. I'm pretty sure that wasn't doing me any good.
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  28. I knew there'd be a good Halloween ep!
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  29. tipperstefi1, tell the truth, did any pilots ever smuggle a Stetson hat into the cockpit, for, you know, just in case?
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  30. Japan wasn't hurting for carriers. Japan's problem was pilots. The training pipeline was very slow, and veteran pilots were sent into combat over and over until they were killed, instead of rotating back as instructors like the USN did. At Leyte Gulf the IJN actually had carriers sent in with almost no planes just to act as decoys. The Yamato class battleships had problems of their own, being technically inferior and slower than the latest US designs, which had better fire control systems and could keep up speed with nuclear carriers into the 1990s, proving to be adaptable to modern systems upgrades.
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  31. *Kodak. With a K.
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  32.  @kevinoverbeck4250  There was no middle class.
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  33. LOL at the part where the colonel sends in female soldiers to try and see if his guys would spill the plans!
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  34. I didn't know they were still building sidewheelers as late as 1891, would figure they'd all be propeller driven by that time.
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  35. I don't know, I think the part of history that contains Jar Jar Binks deserves to be forgotten.
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  36. I agree, sort of. The loss of SAC meant the loss of the most hardcore, squared-away part of the USAF, the guys who most took warfighting seriously in my opinion. Strategic nuclear warfare (and prevention of) is grim, deadly serious business. You fuck it up and everyone dies. The US could afford to lose a Vietnam War now and then without ceasing to exist, but the Soviet Union could never be allowed to believe they had a snowball's chance in hell of surviving a fight with the US, and SAC was a major part of that equation. SAC's professionalism set an example for the rest of the USAF and it was a well-known public trademark of America's strategic readiness. When you said "SAC" to somebody on the street, chances are they knew what you were talking about. Ask somebody today what "AFGSC" means, and they probably won't have a clue.
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  37. The kind where they tell you everything is racist, getting worse, and America sucks, so you should hate yourself and just accept socialism. Any part of your history to be proud of is to be minimized and ultimately forgotten in favor of the new narrative.
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  38. Lesson learned: tell the teachers exactly what they want to hear so you can get your grade and move on.
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  39.  @cmdraftbrn  No, it's because being a soldier is physically demanding and younger bodies are better able to handle it.
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  40. The nautical term for using an anchor to move a ship like that is called "kedging" if I recall correctly. During the war of 1812 USS Constitution got into a fight with a British squadron and due to complete calm lack of wind the ships got into a kedging race, with the Royal Navy chasing the Constitution, all ships using boats to carry their anchors forward and drop them, haul them in, and then repeat the exhausting process.
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  41. THG you didn't mention the fact that NASA put up a website where you could type in your name in the early 2000s, so that when New Horizons was launched they would put all the names on a CD stashed aboard the spacecraft. Somewhere out there in the far reaches of the solar system is a CD with my name stored on it now.
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  42.  @oncesedated4849  It was neither. The Germans forfeited any right to expect rescue when their U-boats were ordered to attack enemy chips engaged in rescue operations. They were known for torpedoing ships laden with survivors from other sinkings, even rescued German sailors. For you to defend them is shameful.
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  43. You see how aggressive adult chimpanzees are? We humans are talking chimps, with nuclear weapons.
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  44. LOL have you ever even heard of the 1970s?
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  45. What you said about how the forest has changed so radically in the last 100 years made me think. When we think about what makes our time different from the past we always think about things like technology, clothing fashion, hairstyles, etc., but it's important to remember that even the very land itself was different, something movies never rally seem to convey. I was in Virginia at the Bull Run battlefield and besides the obvious incursion of sprawl in the area, I couldn't understand the sight lines as described in history, and then someone explained to me that in the 1860s there were a lot fewer trees than there are today, because it was all clear cut for farming. Look at a map of Boston today and compare it with a map of the same city in the 1770s; not only are there obviously more buildings, but the landscape itself is completely different, rivers and shorelines all changed.
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  46. I used to watch Speed Racer religiously when I was about 4 or 5 years old. Later, when I was in my early teens, I watched it again with my brother, and we were surprised at all the grizzly deaths. Fiery car crashes with no survivors, and bad guys gunning people down. By comparison the later cartoons of the 80s were so sanitized that they made no sense anymore. I used to hate GI Joe because here we have an elite group of soldiers with advanced weapons fighting an elite terrorist force and nobody ever got shot, hurt, or killed, ever, despite them all shooting at each other constantly. Speed Racer was silly but it was good memories and it didn't pander to the socially conscious busybodies who never fail to ruin everything they touch.
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  47. The makers of War Games did not know about this, but the fear that an electronic glitch could accidentally do us all in was pretty common at the time. Coincidentally, around 1983 there was a real life incident at NORAD where somebody mistakenly loaded some tapes from a simulation, leading NORAD to believe for a moment that North America may be under attack, much like the first incident in the film.
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  48. I knew Marines who served aboard Wasp when she was brand new.
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  49. Sammy Hagar managed to get some pretty good mileage out of that one.
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  50.  @wendychavez5348  Oh. Seems complicated. I was thinking you were using the bottle as a magnifying glass or something lol.
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