Holy shit, Sally Quinn! I’m reading this profile in Vanity Fair of the ever-sweet -and-easygoing Georgetown (DC) powermeister, Sally Quinn, when this pops up: “After the firestorm, she entered the concrete meditation labyrinth her husband had built for her on their country estate in St. Mary’s County, Maryland, to think.” Wha’? Concrete meditation labyrinth?
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It comes as no surprise that Michael Jackson’s Neverland had a secret bunker in the works. A Los Olivos contractor named Tony Urquidez was called in to build it. Even though now it’s just a big hole in the ground lined with concrete, FoxNews says that it was envisioned as being a “tilt-up building”:...
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The always-transparent China has been building a submarine base near Sanya, on Hainan Island off its southern coast. This represents a further expansion of China’s presence in this South China Sea/Paracel Islands area–a build-up that has been going on for the last twenty years. What I find interesting is that FoxNews calls this a...
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Duress code. Yes, it’s a real term and it means “panic code,” or a code that you give instead of your “real” code to indicate that you’re in trouble. Or under duress. I had never heard of it until reading The Nike Historical Society’s excellent section about security at Nike installations. One reader wrote...
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The Titan II Missile Underground Launch Complex (Large Image) is classic Cold War-era cutaway stuff. At the Titan Missile Museum in Arizona, you can tour the entire facility. As their brochure states: The Titan II Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) was the first liquid propellant missile that could be launched from underground. Equipped with a...
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Fail-Safe, the 1964 movie with Henry Fonda, Walter Mattheu, and yes, Dom DeLuise, is full of secret places. In fact, with the exception of the very beginning (when Walter Mattheu, tough guy that he is, slaps a woman and says, “You’re not my kind”), most everything takes place in the President’s bunker, the War...
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