http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gV6noHEd6XE&mode=related&search=
Is objectively bigger, and dumber, and therefore better.
Holy shit. I need to see that shot of Lemmy's enterance ag-- oh, thanks, editor.
You know what else fucking rulz? Sweet's "ballroom blitz." When I listen to that I wonder how they could do anything that was not completely awesome.
Also, that Motorhead track begins with the guitar solo. Which makes it at least 10x more rock than tracks that leave it for after the middle-eight.
Virtually everything the Sweet did was not awesome. Here's one of the best-known examples.
ttaM: good point. Let's just cut to the fucking chase, shall we?
CN, I confess that I love-- and Ogged just might fight the temptation to make a cheap joke here-- "Little Willie."
Slade >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Sweet
Oh, Slade was awesome. Get your hands off my power supply!
Best youtube comment, and my future epitaph:
Looking fruity was part of the plan, mate.
Also
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xVFJrOlwdkw#
I just wonder if all this metaling is a good influence on the kids.
Hey, is this the thread where everyone is glamming the fuck out?
Oh yeah, by the way: WATCH THE BLACK OAK ARKANSAS CLIPS.
It's like the beta version of David Lee Roth.
Nigel Tufnel, please call your office. So many great things are going on in those videos. And there's a washboard.
Meanwhile, Slade was the beta version of AC/DC.
I loved that video! But I somehow forgot about the top hat!
Not to mention pioneering the "guitar that sounds like bagpipes" which became so popular in the 80s.
Actually I'm wrong, "Run Runaway" was from a 1984 album, much later than their "glam-rock" heyday, and after Quiet Riot made two of their songs into US hits. And several years after AC/DC began.
wow, I just noticed there's some overlap between the riffs in "little willie" and "run run away." Or else I'm having some mystical experience where everything appears as one.
Holy shit, I want that cape with the big Ming the Merciless collar. I would wear it all the time. I'd teach it it. I'd wear it to the beach. That is too cool.
Rob, I totally thought that too. I would rock that shit in the classroom.
Solves your pants problem, too, doesn't it? You just need to coordinate with the cape.
Speaking of 70s stuff with a glam connection (guitarist in a dress, etc):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqx5j-FuqeI
[absolutely amazing]
OMFG, somebody has to post on this, it's political and completely unrelated to this thread, but totally hilarious:
http://www.tnr.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20070702&s=hari070207
That clip is too sensational for me. I would prefer to watch the Run-of-the-mill Alex Harvey Band.
29: Oh, wow. Does anyone subscribe? I can only see the first paragraph, but it promises so much.
re: 31
You can use bugmenot to get a login. I can email you the article if you like.
BugMeNot has logins you can use. The article is great.
You can use bugmenot for pay sites? But that's stealing. On the other hand, I really want to read it...
re: 34
They allow you to register and read that article for free. It's not stealing. Just avoiding registering (ahem).
Is the woman on the deck chair Lucianne? Just guessing.
This is impressively stupid:
"Aren't you embarrassed by the absence of these weapons?" Buckley snaps at Podhoretz. He has just explained that he supported the war reluctantly, because Dick Cheney convinced him Saddam Hussein had WMD primed to be fired. "No," Podhoretz replies. "As I say, they were shipped to Syria. During Gulf war one, the entire Iraqi air force was hidden in the deserts in Iran." He says he is "heartbroken" by this "rise of defeatism on the right." He adds, apropos of nothing, "There was nobody better than Don Rumsfeld. This defeatist talk only contributes to the impression we are losing, when I think we're winning."
Iraq hid their air force in Iran? Because the two countries are such good buddies? The hell?
I see no glamming in the Benoit thread. Labs, when will I stop believing your lies?
Even more impressively stupid.
He is wearing sunglasses on top of his head and a bright shirt. Steyn's thesis in his new book, America Alone, is simple: The "European races"--i.e., white people--"are too self-absorbed to breed," but the Muslims are multiplying quickly. The inevitable result will be "large-scale evacuation operations circa 2015" as Europe is ceded to Al Qaeda and "Greater France remorselessly evolve[s] into Greater Bosnia." He offers a light smearing of dubious demographic figures--he needs to turn 20 million European Muslims into more than 150 million in nine years, which is a lot of humping--to "prove" his case.
too self-absorbed to breed
Not when incentivized by properly placed collagen injections!
Maybe that's the plan of the mullahs. Make everyone happy with three minutes of sex so they have more sex and more babies. And there will be 130 million new babies. Who will chase out the French.
re: 40
That quote deserves some kind of award for stupid.
42: Well, sorta kinda. Iraq landed its planes there and Iran said, "Thank you very much. We'll just be keeping these then." As always, Podhoretz doesn't know his ass from a hole in the ground.
I see that my dream of having a long thread dedicated to the awesomeness of Big Rock has died.
Does anyone know, offhand, why the hell the planes went to Iran? That wiki page notes USAF surprise at the move, which is understandable.
From the wiki: we sent 575,000 troops to Iraq the first time? Didn't we send a lot less this time? Were we trying to fuck it up?
Does anyone know, offhand, why the hell the planes went to Iran?
Saddam, as has been proven time and again, was a piss-poor military strategist.
49: even still. I mean, what was he thinking?
I thought it was he wanted to put them somewhere he could get them back after the war was over, rather than having them blown up / shot down during it. It's a bad idea, but not obviously the worst available.
re: 48
It was supposedly all about modern war fighting tactics, highly mobile infantry, air strikes, special forces, etc. Or at least that was the theory. Rumsfield seems to have believed they could fight with a fraction of the troops.
Right, i see that he didn't have great options, but thinking, hmm, maybe the Iranians will be keen on rearming me right after our war...Iranian possession looks even *worse* for Saddam then having the planes destroyed.
But Jesus Christ, that sure makes a mockery out of the idea that it 'was a good plan badly executed.' 1/6th the troops you needed last time when you had an international coalition?
We are a wily people, Labs. Have any young lady friends that you need me to keep safe?
It's a bad idea, but not obviously the worst available.
Really? Giving the air force to a mortal enemy isn't the worst idea available?
41: awesome, we will strike back against the Muslim hordes using our advanced multiple orgasm technologies! Hey, it's better than invading Iraq.
What mortal enemy, suspicious man? We are muslim brothers. Come, bring the air force, we will bring tea.
And you people wonder why I let Ogged top. You just can't say no to the man.
56: As opposed to what? Leave them on the ground, they get blown up. Try to fly them against the USAF, they get shot down. Try to fly them to Jordan, but the USAF anticipates, and they get shot down. At this point, Iran had slipped into a mutual-enemy-of-the-Americans status, and even though they didn't give the planes back, nor have they added them to their own air force, and it's not hard to imagine a not-too-different reality in which Iraq might have got them back.
54: Well... the much smaller force actually did a better job at pushing the (now smaller) Iraqi military around than the large one from the 90's did. Planning to occupy Iraq with a smaller force was idiocy, but it's become pretty clear that they did no occupation planning at all.
The Iranians didn't add them to their own air force? I remember reading that Iran had a desparate shortage of plane parts due to the embargo, and that Iranian planes have a nasty habit of falling apart midair.
Jake, I'm just doing this from the armchair, but Iran-Iraq relations were pretty bad in 1990, right? I'm having trouble imagining "a not-too-different reality in which Iraq might have got them back."
Also, do you think Saddam really was in perfect control of the Air Force one week into the invasion? It looks to me like the pilots might have gotten the hell out of Dodge on their own initiative.
JM is probably right. The Iraqi military dudes knew who was going to win, and they figured Saddam's days were numbered, so they went to Iran "We brought planes!" and they probably did get tea.
Iran had a shortage of American plane parts. Iraq's French and Soviet aircraft wouldn't really have helped that particular issue.
As for Iran-Iraq relations... I can imagine either "now that we have taught the Americans a lesson, give us our airplanes back or we will teach you one too" or "now that we recognize that we have mutual enemies, how about if we patch up our differences a little, starting with you giving us our airplanes back." In the end, I don't think that Iraq ended up any worse off than if the planes hadn't gone to Iran, so this decision really doesn't look that idiotic.
And 65. The Iraqi air force was the branch that was most obviously screwed by the Americans, and probably the most aware of their likely fate.
We didn't give Saddam spiffy American planes back when we liked him? Huh.
But note that JM's scenario is not evidence for Podhoretz's position.
I've also heard that fighter pilots are valuable enough (high skill set, arrogance a plus, cavalier disregard for death) that a lot of authoritarian regimes tolerate more independance from them.
The grandfather of a friend of mine was a fighter pilot for the Germans during WW2. He never bothered joining the Nazi party, never bothered with any of the rah-rah patriotism stuff, and when the refugees from the Soviets started walking from East to West, he stole a plane to pick up his girlfriend and bring her back to the Rhineland, where he was stationed.
Where has all the glam gone? Aren't there enough Iraqi threads for your discussions of military strategy? This thread was supposed to be about the days back when people were unafraid to be awesome.
68: Nope. I think just money and maybe intelligence data about Iran. All the fancy military hardware was French, until the Iran-Iraq war really started, and the Soviets started selling them more stuff. The Iranians had all the leftover American military equipment from the Shah.
Yes, yes, back to the ROOOOOOOOCK!
Pfft. I don't think you guys have the balls to rock this thread again.
Steve Albini has a golden touch for big rock-- Big Black's cover of Kraftwerk's the model does it for me, and the band's name includes the word Big. Plus that great PJ Harvey album he engineered, the Pixies album.... Also, I gotta say, I love the first song on the linked page (it's a cover of a song with a gentle acapella leadbelly recording), and cant stand thin lizzy, even ironically, so putting them next to each other like that... well, I'd just hate to see any of the thin lizzy rub off if the package wasn't sealed.
I'm fairly certain that this is the greatest rock video ever made.
greatest rock video ever made
I think Wendy O Williams would argue that point.
70--in Persepolis, satrapi says the iranian fighter pilots were imprisoned by the mullahs during the Islamic Revolution, but they were let out to fight saddam. but they only agreed to fly if the mullahs would play the banned Iranian national anthem on the teevee... everyone was shocked and moved to hear it....
The Iranians got mostly the newer Soviet kit - Sukhoi 24s and MiG-29s. I don't know if this was due to calculation (Save the shinies!) or the natural tendency, if you're going to do a runner, to grab the fastest toy in the box. They also got a couple of Il-76 transports the Iraqis had converted into a kindasorta homemade AWACS (or rather, homemade MAINSTAY, being the Russian radar ship based on the same airframe).
Some of the Mirage F1s were shot down attacking the ships in the Gulf - one launched an Exocet missile that got through the screen around Missouri, but didn't get past HMS Gloucester.
The Iranians have an *unknown* number of working F-14s, an *unknown* number of which have either the AIM54 missile or some kind of homebrew replacement of *unknown* capability. *unknown here means "no-one's got the foggiest clue, but do you want to be the guy who finds out?"