Thanks to an engineer at Google you can type “do a barrel roll” into search, and it will roll your browser view around and around. I didn’t even know this was a meme until today.
My dad’s a pilot and a different sort of engineer, so I sent him an email about the Google trick, and this is what he wrote back:
The barrel roll was my favorite aerobatic maneuver when I was a student flying T-28s. It is particularly challenging in a propeller airplane because you have to coordinate all the controls and change power as you go through it. It goes something like this: Start straight and level at 8000 ft. 220 knots. Start a rolling turn to the right adding a little power, a little forward stick to keep the nose on track, a little rudder to keep the ball in the center, at 45 degrees of turn you should be at 45 degrees angle of bank, continuing, at 90 degrees of turn your should be at 90 degrees angle of bank, at 135 degrees of turn you should be at 135 degrees angle of roll etc until you are back on your original course and airspeed.
Because I am a giant publishing nerd who enjoys tempests in teapots, last week was basically off the scale in terms of excitement. The New York Times weighed in on whether or not bookstores should be charging for author events, launching a thousand blog freakouts about whether this is elitist…
“No adequately loved woman kept her hair in that smooth helmet of shining, artificial blondness. Adored well-fucked women allowed their hair to be mussed, to tousle and even curl a bit.”
The wonderful guys at Out of Print Tees sent me their seriously gorgeous Great Gatsby shirt. In their honor I dug up and scanned the paper I wrote in high school, written when I’d been seventeen years old for all of a day.
Apparently I knew all about the motivations and inevitabilities of Gatsby’s poor choices in love.
What I really love are my teacher’s comments in red, and the points taken off for my lazy, hasty spelling mistakes. Clearly I was in such a heady rush to conclude my essay I couldn’t be bothered to care.
For a more legible view of the pages (read my essay! I was so adorable!) check out my mlkshk (scroll to the bottom of the page).
It used to be all you needed to get published was rohypnol, a turkey baster and ten minutes with Sonny Mehta. Today, a book’s marketing gimmick is developed so far in advance of the actual book you can actually get a deal with just a mockup of its eventual hashtag.
