Category: Florida

Tampa Bay Deal of the Day: B-57 Canberra bomber ejection seat!

Post author By Joey deVilla
Post date February 24, 2025

Click to see the ejection seat’s listing in Facebook Marketplace.

Maybe you’ve got a corner in your house for U.S. Air Force memorabilia, or maybe you’re restoring a B-57 Canberra bomber — but either way, if you’re looking for an ejection seat, there’s a seller in St. Pete looking to sell a B-57 Canberra ejector seat for $2,000 (but they also seem open to offers).

U.S. Air Force B-57 Canberra bomber. Click to see the source.

I was a big fan of airplanes and aerospace stuff as a kid, so I’m familiar with the B-57, which was made by the Glen L. Martin company, which later got merged in the 1960s into Martin Marietta, and then again in the 1990s into Lockheed Martin.

NASA WB-57 research plane. Click to see the source.

While the B-57 has long since been retired from the Air Force, NASA still have a couple of specialized versions, the WB-57, which they use for high-altitude research.

On the very off chance that you’re thinking of buying this seat because you think it might be cooler than using an elevator or stairs…

I’m pretty sure this seat doesn’t come with the rocket engine that actually does the work of ejecting you out of the plane.
You need to be aware of this equation:

That guy on the right is *not* the guitarist from Queen (but you should note that the guitarist from Queen is a physicist).

This basic physics equation shows how much force is required for an ejection seat to do its thing:

F is for force, the value you want to know.
m is for mass, which for the purposes of this discussion, we’ll say is the same thing as weight (cue the sound of my friend, physics professor Tom Simko, screaming “NOOOOOO!”). You have to account for the mass of whoever’s in the seat and the mass of the seat including the rocket engine and fuel.
a is for acceleration, which is physics-ese for rate of change of speed. Earth gravity, on average, accelerates you towards the center of the planet at a rate of 9.81 meters per second or per second, or to put in terms my American friends will appreciate, that’s about one and a half Ford F-150 lengths per second per second. To eject you, the seat has to accelerate you in the opposite direction of gravity, and at an acceleration greater than gravity — typically 14 to 20 times.

Pilots who have ejected from a plane report that they lost a little height from having their spines compressed from the force. If you had a big meal before ejecting, having your body and the digested food within suddenly weigh 14 to 20 times as much will probably cause you to crap your pants.

So yeah, this seat is best used as memorabilia rather than a cool thing you can demonstrate at your pool parties (“Hey, everybody, who wants to see me land on the roof?”)

Florida Florida of the Day Stranger than Fiction

The most “Florida” post on Reddit today

Post author By Joey deVilla
Post date February 18, 2025

Screen capture from Reddit’s "Florida" subreddit. The post is by "Neither-Chance8973" and the headline reads "I’m driving my mother in law to an airbnb in Bunnell from Miami for her 57th birthday. Can anyone recommend us any strip clubs within an hour of Bunnell> or any lounges?" — Tap to see the original post.

Wow — that’s pretty Florida. But it’s nice that other people get along with their mother-in-law as well as I do.

(No, we take Anitra’s mom to restaurants and museums instead.)

Accordion, Instrument of the Gods Florida It Happened to Me Music

Last Sunday’s accordion gig in Bonita Springs

Post author By Joey deVilla
Post date February 7, 2025

It’s been over a year since I’ve played with Tom Hood’s band, the Tropical Sons. 2024 was an unusually busy year for me, with a month-long trip to Asia, then getting laid off and having to kick my side hustle consultancy into my main gig (which is still ongoing), followed by other things ranging from my mom’s 80th birthday to hurricanes.

A couple of weeks ago, I got a text from Tom, asking how I was, and if I’d like to make the drive down to Bonita Springs to play a gig as part of their first annual World Ukulele Day. I’m not a uke player, but Tom is, and as the bandleader and President of the Tampa Bay Ukulele Society, he’s “ukulele” enough for the rest of the band to count.

Since neither Anitra nor I had been to Bonita Springs before, and my cut of the gig money would easily cover gas and a nice dinner, she joined me last Sunday for the two-and-a-half hour drive to the Shangri-La Springs hotel, where the gig was to take place.

Following the Code of the Good Bandmate, I arrived an hour ahead of the gig with my gear — accordions, microphone, mic stand, amplifier, assorted audio and power cords — at the ready. I got set up quickly, and there was plenty of time to get a nice brunch at their restaurant, Harvest & Wisdom, before the gig…

…but alas, a mix-up in the kitchen left us waiting for breakfast for 45 minutes. By the time they got things straightened out, it was time for me to hit the stage. I quickly had a little bit of my food before our first number.

Anitra explained what happened to the staff at the restaurant, and to their credit, they “comped” us as an apology for making us wait unreasonably long and causing me to miss out before the performance. They put my breakfast in a take-out box (see the pic above), and I managed to tuck into it during the break after our first set.

Delay aside, it was really good. I had the key lime pancakes with a side of sausage patties (see above), and they were buttery with a cake-y texture and downright delicious.

Anitra had a macadamia/coconut waffle (see above) that was also tasty. Both were keto-friendly and gluten-free, which was great, since we like to share food, and one of us has a wheat allergy.

Mild annoyance of our delayed breakfast aside, I’d gladly eat at Harvest & Wisdom again — their menu is interesting, and their food is really good!

As for the gig, it went well. Despite not having played with the band — Tom Hood on vocals, ukulele, and harmonica, Dave Helm on bass and vocals — we easily meshed together, sounded good, and had a lot of fun.

I’ve already been invited to join the Tropical Sons for Tampa Bay Ukulele Days 2025, which happens on the weekend of March 21 – 23.

Here are some photos and video from the gig:

My thanks to Anitra for taking the photos and video!

Florida It Happened to Me The Current Situation

Palm trees and a puffy vest

Post author By Joey deVilla
Post date January 23, 2025

My friends in my old home town, Toronto, won’t find Tampa’s current temperatures cold, but by local standards, it’s downright frigid.

The past couple of mornings have started at a temperature that Torontonians would consider balmy this time of year: 4°C (39°F). With Tampa’s humidity typically in the 90% range, it feels more like 0°C (32°F). I pulled out the olive drab puffy vest that my Dad gave to me as a Christmas gift ages ago — he had a thing for giving me warm clothing — and snapped the photo above to let my Mom know how I’m doing.

Map of northern and central Florida, showing temperatures in cities from Gainesville in the north and as far south as Lakeland and Melbourne. — I added the temperatures in REAL units, as opposed to Herr Doktor von Fahrenheit’s old-timey measure for phlogiston in the ether.

It looks like it’s going to get a little colder this weekend, which is going to be a challenge for the sizable portion of the local population that’s perpetually in shorts and flip-flops.

But at least it isn’t snowing in Tampa…

Editorial Florida The Good Fight

Florida Governor DeSantis’ latest attempt to enshittify higher education, starring Scott Yenor

Post author By Joey deVilla
Post date January 19, 2025

Scott Yenor, beside statements he has made:“Every effort must be made not to recruit women into engineering, but rather to recruit and demand more of men who become engineers. Ditto for med school and the law and every trade.” “If every Nobel Prize winner is a man, that’s not a failure. It’s a cause for celebration.” — Christ, what an asshole. Also, he’s mastered that “always in the front row of the strip club” look perfectly.

One of the guys — and I do mean guys — who’s bound and determined to turn the United States into Gilead from The Handmaid’s Tale is now where he can move society back at least one hundred years: midwest conspiracy theorist and Christian Nationalist turned Florida Man Scott Yenor. Florida Governor and champion of recrudescence Ron DeSantis recently nominated Yenor for a position on the board of the University of West Florida, located in Pensacola.

Yenor made some waves back in 2021 when speaking at the National Conservatism Conference, where he railed about the “evils” of feminism, labeled “independent women” as “medicated, meddlesome and quarrelsome” and referred to universities as “the citadels of our gynecocracy.”

He said: “If we want a great nation, we should be preparing young women to become mothers, not finding every reason for young women to delay motherhood until they are established in a career or sufficiently independent.”

By the bye, it’s ridiculous that I need to clarify my position here, but there’s nothing wrong with being a mother. I just think it shouldn’t be the ONLY goal for women, just as fatherhood isn’t the ONLY goal for men.

He also said: “Every effort must be made not to recruit women into engineering, but rather to recruit and demand more of men who become engineers. Ditto for med school and the law and every trade.” Yenor said.

“If every Nobel Prize winner is a man, that’s not a failure. It’s kind of a cause for celebration,” forgetting how much we owe Marie Curie (who won it twice — first for physics in 1903, and then in 1911 for chemistry).

“Perhaps mandatory gun training and promotion of wrestling and other acts of physical courage are necessary in our age of soy boys.”

In addition to being a professor at Boise State University in Idaho, he’s also quite unsurprisingly a former fellow with the Heritage Foundation and behind a now-defunct extremist website called Action Idaho, which produced a lot of far-right inflammatory screeds.

Yenor’s creepy little club

Talking Points Memo’s illustration of the SACR logo.

Through public records requests, a good number of Yenor’s emails (as a professor at a state institution, Boise State University, his emails can be accessed this way), it was discovered that he was involved with a secretive “boys” club” kind of organization called SACR — the Society for American Civic Renewal.

Talking Points Memo describes SACR as “A secret, men-only right-wing society with members in influential positions around the country is on a crusade: to recruit a Christian government that will form after the right achieves regime change in the United States, potentially via a ‘national divorce.’”

You should read the article. Here’s a taste:

Group members hold a distinct vision of America as a latter-day ancient Rome: a crumbling, decadent empire that could soon be replaced by a Christian theocracy. To join, the group demands faithfulness, virtue, and “alignment,” which it describes as “deference to and acceptance of the wisdom of our American and European Christian forebears in the political realm, a traditional understanding of patriarchal leadership in the household, and acceptance of traditional Natural Law in ethics more broadly.” More practically, members must be able to contribute either influence, capability, or wealth in helping SACR further its goals.

“Most of all, we seek those who understand the nature of authority and its legitimate forceful exercise in the temporal realm,” a mission statement reads.

Once in the group, the statement says, members can expect perks: “direct preferential treatment for members, especially in business,” and help in advancement “in all areas of life” from other members.

A very telling set of appointments

Yenor was one eight new appointees to the University of West Florida’s Board of Trustees. The announcement on UWF’s site subtly makes it clear that there were two sets of appointees:

One set was appointed by the Florida Board of Governors,
and one was appointed by Governor Ron DeSantis

See if you can spot the differences. Here’s the set appointed by the Board of Governors…

Incoming trustee (appointed by the Florida Board of Governors)	Their job
Rebecca Matthews	VP @ Automated Health Systems, a national health management services company
Rachel Moya	Chief Revenue Officer @ The Amos Group, an education data and technology company.
Ashley Ross	President @ Ross Consulting LLC and a political consultant with a specialty in campaign finance.

…and here are DeSantis’ appointees:

Incoming trustee (Appointed by Ron DeSantis)	Their job
Paul Bailey	Attorney @ Welton Law Firm. Also an adjunct professor at Pensacola Christian College and is a registered instructor with the National Rifle Association.
Gates Garcia	President and CEO at Pinehill Capital Partners. Also serves on the Catholic University of America Busch School of Business Board of Visitors. He was the recipient of the 2024 Richard and Jacqueline Lincoln Fellow for The Claremont Institute.
Adam Kissel	Chair of the West Virginia Professional Charter School Board and is a member of the Civics, History, & America’s Future Advisory Council for America250. Also a visiting fellow on Higher Education Reform for The Heritage Foundation, a senior fellow for the Cardinal Institute for West Virginia Policy, and a visiting scholar for the Texas Public Policy Foundation.
Scott Yenor	Chairperson of The Ambrose School Board, a professor of political science at Boise State University, an honored visiting graduate Faculty at Ashland University, and a Washington Fellow at The Claremont Institute’s Center for the American Way of Life. His research focuses on feminism, sexual liberation, and on dismantling the rule of social justice in America’s universities. He previously served as a visiting fellow on American Political Thought for The Heritage Foundation and a Fellow for the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.
Chris Young	Founder and senior partner @ Perry & Young Law Firm, COO @ Adcock Bros, Inc, owner and President @ Adock Transport and Adcock Direct.

Most notably, the Board of Governors’ choices are all women who are high-level business executives. DeSantis’ choices are all men, with two out of five of them having the kind of bullshit jobs that people who never really left student council take (namely Adam Kissel and Scott Yenor). It’s also notable that each of the mens’ descriptions in the announcement are longer than the women’s, with an additional sentence or two that establish their conservative bona fides.

Ironically enough, the previous article on the UWF site was about a financial gift to create scholarships for electrical and computer engineering students that included a photo that Yenor would absolutely hate:

We have a lot of challenges coming up here in Florida as well as the rest of the U.S. (and most definitely the tech industry), and if you care about its future, we’re going to need to counter guys like Yenor and his regressive rhetoric.

Headline of the day

Post author By Joey deVilla
Post date October 25, 2024

Wfla.com headline with picture of steak on grill: “St. Pete Steakhouse to be Transformed Into Funeral Home.”

It would be even more funny and frightening is the transformation was going the other way.

(By the way, here’s the article.)

Florida It Happened to Me Tampa Bay The Current Situation

Hurricane Milton post #14: Good thing I didn’t put away the generator!

Post author By Joey deVilla
Post date October 18, 2024

As Murphy’s Law would have it, moments after posting yesterday that I hadn’t yet put away our generator just in case the repairs to our neighborhood power didn’t stick…

…the power went out.

Shortly after that, our poor FedEx guy dropped off this heavy beast at our front door. I would have helped him, but I was in our back yard starting up the generator:

Just about every “battery generator” (a strange misnomer) went on sale during the period between Hurricanes Helene and Milton. EcoFlow seems to be the current favorite with both Wirecutter and a lot of its users, and they had a good package deal, so I ordered one. Alas, it arraived after Milton.

This is the Delta Pro, which stores 3600 watt-hours of energy, charges off a wall outlet, car “cigarette lighter” outlet, or solar panels. The package deal includes a 400 watt solar panel and a smaller power station, the River, whose job will be to power a CPAP and bedroom fan during power outages.

I’m charging the beast as I write this. More reports later, especially if I end up needing to use it!

Yenor’s creepy little club

A very telling set of appointments

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