h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Phre:

That whole 'Wrong Way Peachfuzz' joke was based on 'Wrong Way Corrigan'.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Corrigan

I'm always amused by the way dumb jokes outlive their references. Just as everybody with a television now knows Foghorn Leghorn, the rooster, but has no idea what that was a parody of, or where the original comic got it from.

There was a radio show called 'Allen's Alley', with a character called 'Senator Claghorn'. The senator was from North Carolina and had a bombastic delivery. The voice actor who invented him stole the accent and mannerisms from a man in North Carolina who gave him a lift back in the Depression. It was a long enough ride for him to get the vocal mannerisms down...

I used to know a gentleman in North Carolina - a friend of my dad's - who talked exactly like that and drove everybody crazy. He was a notorious local character.

The Soviet Antonov An-2, built by the thousands in 1947 can fly backward in a reasonably stiff headwind.

I have seen bush plans take off into wind at a ground speed of about 10 MPH. Lots of planes can fly backward.

Also, the following list of birds can fly backward:
1. Hummingbird

Yes, we get hummingbirds here in the summer. I can attest - we have a feeder.

Can drones fly upside down?

It would be easy to build a drone that has reversible engines...for someone who builds drone...turn it over and takeoff...but your camera would be mostly seeing clouds...

There seems to be a modern-day fascination with drones. This whole thing about Amazon using them for deliveries seems ridiculous to me. Not that Amazon's more conventional means of delivery are flawless.

A Global Hawk costs approximately $30,000 per flight hour—on par with stealth fighter jets.

Surveillance drones operated on the U.S.-Mexican border cost between $2,500 and$3,500 per flight hour.

Each drone requires an hour of maintenance for every hour it spends in the air.

Each Predator and Reaper drone (our most common strike drones) requires a team of 180 people to operate properly.

The cost of producing a military drone ranges from $100,000 to hundreds of millions of dollars.

Over the next decade, the Pentagon plans to spend $40 billion on medium-to-large sized drones.

This assumes that there is any money left over after baling out the American economy after the Coronavirus Depression.