Holiday Silliness

**csadn** · 12-30-2015 16:22

An associate of mine posted this to FB -- I confess, I was involved in the writing of it:

I am not a religious person, so my "Christmas" decorations tend to follow the secular line of "Random Animals From Snowy Realms". Most of them are inflatable, for reasons of ease-of-storage.

However, I had forgotten this is one of those "El Nino/La Nina" years, which means the weather has been somewhat more... blustery... than usual... and I *thought* I'd used enough sandbags for ballast....

And they're big enough, they can make a connection when they land on power lines.

What I'm trying to say is: All those news reports about Armies Of Penguins Parachuting Into Neighborhoods And Wreaking Havoc -- my bad....

**flash** · 12-31-2015 00:18

Those darn penguins again ! They have a lot to answer for.

**Tonx** · 12-31-2015 07:18

Cornwall Air Ambulance MD-902 G-CNWL had a bizarre encounter on it's way to a shout two days ago - a Christmas inflatable which had torn loose from a building or garden somewhere passing by at 1,500 feet.

Because these things are not metal they cannot be seen on Radar. The local news says that G-CNWL was on it's way to an accident near Falmouth when they passed this giant inflatable!

**David Manley** · 12-31-2015 08:51

When I was at uni in Southampton in the 1980s some of my chums thought it would be good fun to inflate a "pneumatic lady" with party balloon helium. Unfortunately the now fairly buoyant "lady" broke free from her moorings in their garden and drifted across the city until she became entangled in a TV aerial of a house in Bitterne. She must have caused quite a stir as she was featured on the front page of the local newspaper

**Fokker Fan** · 12-31-2015 09:22

Originally Posted by csadn

An associate of mine posted this to FB -- I confess, I was involved in the writing of it:

I am not a religious person, so my "Christmas" decorations tend to follow the secular line of "Random Animals From Snowy Realms". Most of them are inflatable, for reasons of ease-of-storage.

However, I had forgotten this is one of those "El Nino/La Nina" years, which means the weather has been somewhat more... blustery... than usual... and I *thought* I'd used enough sandbags for ballast....

And they're big enough, they can make a connection when they land on power lines.

What I'm trying to say is: All those news reports about Armies Of Penguins Parachuting Into Neighborhoods And Wreaking Havoc -- my bad....

**Sagrilarus** · 12-31-2015 09:39

You guys see the news from my neck of the woods? A surveillance balloon broke off of its moorings here in Baltimore and dragged its very large, very conductive data cable across power lines through northern Maryland and southern Pennsylvania. It knocked out power to about 25,000 homes and businesses.

When the thing finally came to Earth in a farmer's tree the police opted to deflate it in the traditional way, shooting at it. But of course they found out the same thing the World War I pilots did -- it's not like a party balloon that's pressurized, so it just kept sitting there inflated, with very small holes in it now. And this one wasn't flammable. So they had to just wait it out for a couple of days until they could recover it.

There used to be two in the air out my window each day, one got away, the other one is down until they figure out what happened with the first. Apparently the cable these things use is worth some serious buckazoids.