Wednesday, April 27, 2005

Kermit's PSA

KermitPSA
I was reading Krisanne's blog, and see that she's bought a Mariner's Moose to be a mascot for her upcoming road trip. An absolute MUST for every road trip is a travel companion who doesn't take up much space and doesn't make you stop for restrooms. Or force you to listen to horrible music or complain about in-car temperature. Plus, Kermit's always in a good mood, probably because Miss Piggy is never along (for the reasons I just mentioned).

Which reminded me that I hadn't finished editing Kermit's public safety announcement video on why it's important to wear a seatbelt during take-off. The weather recently has turned sour so we haven't been flying. I hope it improves for this weekend, because we're going to New York on Saturday and hopefully we can take the Tri-Pacer up on Sunday.

Here are two versions, the larger one in full colour and higher resolution, the smaller one with old-movie effects, lower res and nearly all the colour removed (a nod to the age of our 50-year old airplane). Both have the same music, the opening theme from the film The Triplets of Belleville. I also toned down the propeller noise -- it's normally a LOT louder than what it sounds like here. And if you think the cockpit looks tiny, that's because it IS... there's barely enough room for the two of us in there, but if Kermit had gone to the back and buckled up like he did the first time, he'd have more room than we do.

KermitPSA-small.mov (3.5MBs)

KermitPSA.mov (12.9MBs)

As I was editing the video, David arrived home from his weekly Civil Air Patrol meeting to tell me he had to leave again for the second time in less than three days to investigate an ELT going off. At least this call wasn't after 3 o'clock in the morning, but for the second time it was a false alarm, and thankfully they called him only a few minutes before he left the house. Turns out the ELT was in a helicopter, and it went off because it got bumped. Of course, no one wants to ramp up the number of REAL search and rescue missions that involve plane crashes and fatalities, but the number of false alarms are high -- 19 out of 20, I'm told -- and nobody wants to get dragged out of bed to go on wild goose chases all the time, either.

If you want to find out what an ELT is, David wrote a post about it in his early days of Multiply journalling. There's also a link there to what it sounds like (a shriek that would wake the dead):

Another "find"