(Roughly) Daily

A key requirement of responsible drinking is knowing one’s limits.  Now thanks to the good folks at Bar Stools, and their handy “Booze Death Calculator,” one can enter a few personal facts to learn just how many quaffs of one’s favorite poison– say, appletinis or Coronas or shots of Everclear– it would take to bring the whole show to a halt.  (In your correspondent’s case, it was, respectively, 25, 28, and 8.)

As we try to recall just how many steps there are in “that” program, we might wonder what Adolphe Pegoud was thinking when, on this date in 1913, he became the first European to jump from a powered plane in a parachute and land safely.  (Albert Berry was the first ever; he dropped from a plane over Missouri a year earlier.)  11 days later, Pegoud invented aerobatics when he completed the first (intentional) powered loop.

A Bleriot XI of the sort that Pegoud flew (source: rafaero.free.fr)