Farewell. The Flying Pig Has Left The Building.

Steve Hynd, August 16, 2012

After four years on the Typepad site, eight years total blogging, Newshoggers is closing it's doors today. We've been coasting the last year or so, with many of us moving on to bigger projects (Hey, Eric!) or simply running out of blogging enthusiasm, and it's time to give the old flying pig a rest.

We've done okay over those eight years, although never being quite PC enough to gain wider acceptance from the partisan "party right or wrong" crowds. We like to think we moved political conversations a little, on the ever-present wish to rush to war with Iran, on the need for a real Left that isn't licking corporatist Dem boots every cycle, on America's foreign misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq. We like to think we made a small difference while writing under that flying pig banner. We did pretty good for a bunch with no ties to big-party apparatuses or think tanks.

Those eight years of blogging will still exist. Because we're ending this typepad account, we've been archiving the typepad blog here. And the original blogger archive is still here. There will still be new content from the old 'hoggers crew too. Ron writes for The Moderate Voice, I post at The Agonist and Eric Martin's lucid foreign policy thoughts can be read at Democracy Arsenal.

I'd like to thank all our regular commenters, readers and the other bloggers who regularly linked to our posts over the years to agree or disagree. You all made writing for 'hoggers an amazingly fun and stimulating experience.

Thank you very much.

Note: This is an archive copy of Newshoggers. Most of the pictures are gone but the words are all here. There may be some occasional new content, John may do some posts and Ron will cross post some of his contributions to The Moderate Voice so check back.


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Friday, November 25, 2011

Mars Rover Launches Tomorrow Morning

By John Ballard


Barring any unexpected changes to the weather forecast at Cape Canaveral, the rocket carrying NASA's new Mars rover Curiosity will launch just after 10 a.m. EST tomorrow morning, with touch down on the Red Planet expected to take place in August, 2012. Curiosity is ten-feet long and weighs 1984 pounds, which makes it twice as long and four times heavier than the Spirit and Opportunity rovers. It has a top speed of 300 feet per-hour, but is expected to move around Mars at an average speed of 98 feet per hour. The rover's scheduled to spend 23 earth months -- one Martian year -- exploring the surface of the planet.



?More pictures and commentary at the Atlantic.


Touchdown scheduled for August, 2012.
Wonder if anything else will be about to happen then? Let's see...
Election coming up in a few weeks?
That has nothing to do with the schedule...
...does it?
Nah.
Surely not.  Must be a coincidence.



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1 comment:

  1. anonymous drive-byNovember 26, 2011 at 8:23 AM

    Yes, it is a coincidence. There are periods of time called "launch windows" which give the optimum conditions for sending a spacecraft to another planet. They occur every 26 months for Earth to Mars.
    See http://athena.cornell.edu/mars_facts/sb_launch_window.html

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