Angry Bob

Yeah, well, don’t we all.

Fan club for James at War. (Ewww, I hate MySpace. What an HTML cesspool)

This is a spoof of this video by Nickelback.

You want the truth? Wikicrapia can’t handle the truth. Witness this horrid explanation of the Bumper-WAC program and in particular the launch of Bumper 5.

(correction 02/22/2008: Wikipedia has since made a lame attempt at resolving their abysmal excuse for documentation, mostly through plagiarism)
(update 04/17/2009: It’s improving — slowly)

You want a real description of the Bumper project? This article gives the best account currently available on the Internet.

“But what is this rant all about? ” you say. It is about my attempt to put into historical perspective a recording of the launch of the Bumper 5 that was published by the US Army on a 45 rpm record which I have had in my possession since I was a small child.

This is the culmination of years of dogged scouring of all online resources branching in untold directions that could have resulted in a diatribe that would fill a book. But enough of that, lets get to the meat of this post.

First I must say that this was one of my favorite 45s as a child. The sound effects were terrific! I played it relentlessly on the compact RCA (His Master’s Voice) dark brown Bakelite automatic 45 rpm record player my Mom gave to us. The record is horribly abused, but never-the-less I managed to clean up most of it with modern technology.

One more note before I unleash this to the world: Just after the ignition of the rocket motor you will hear an upward pitching squeal. That is the signature sound of a peroxide fueled rocket.

And now, with no further ado, The Launching of Bumper #5:

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OK, so now I hear those of you who didn’t bother to follow the links above saying “What’s so great about Bumper 5?”

Well, it marks the “first recorded man-made object to reach extraterrestrial space,” and here you will find extensive reading on the role the V-2 played at White Sands and for the US missile endeavor.

The last note is that I’ll gladly provide to anyone the raw wave file rip of the 45 who thinks they may do a better job of cleaning up this recording. More so, I’d love to hear from anyone else who may possess another, cleaner copy of the 45. Graphic scans of the original 45 are also available on request to those interested.