A plane takes off. One engine fails. Then another. A calm, cool and talented Bay Area pilot realizes that a water landing is the only option.

Only this one was in 1956. And the water was the middle of the Pacific.

At one point, someone on a coast guard ship in the ocean below had this radio exchange with Captain Richard Ogg who was about to attempt the water landing (after circling for hours and telling everyone aboard to extinguish their cigarettes and assume the crash position):

Ogg: Your ship is sure a beautiful site.

Coast Guard: Thank you … glad it’s a comfort to you. We’ve got your bacon and eggs ready for you.

Ogg’s water landing was a little more rough than the one Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger would perform more than 50 years later, but the key result was the same. Everyone survived, including the captain who made the same two passes through the sinking fuselage before boarding the rescue boat. Here’s the story. Better yet, here’s the video:

Few folks in D.C. or watching on HBO had ever heard of Bettye LaVette before she performed opposite Jon Bon Jovi on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. That’s because her supposed breakthrough album was never released. The 1972 collection sat in a vault for about thirty years.

In recent years, LaVette has finally started to get some of the recognition she has deserved for so long. As unlikely as it seemed that Barack Obama would be president, it was probably less likely, a decade ago, that this virtually unknown lady – who a few years ago was playing Detroit bars for fifty bucks a night – would absolutely steal the show in front of hundreds of thousands of people during an inauguration weekend.

Check it out.

A few months ago, LaVette performed a version of Love, Reign o’er Me at the Kennedy Center with Roger Daltry and Pete Townshend looking on.

Of course, any story this cool had to be on Terry Gross, and this one is no exception.

Only on Fox News. Incredible.

One of their guests talked up the First Couple’s public displays of affection by explaining that they do a lot of touching, kissing and even “fisting.”

So waterboarding is torture but fisting is still allowed? Something tells me that applications to terror groups just dropped dramatically.

I can’t wait to see the associated Hitchens piece.

Milli Vanilli. Ashley Simpson.

And now Yo-Yo Ma and Itzhak Perlman.

That inauguration tune you heard on Tuesday was recorded.

We know the same was not true for the poem that came later, otherwise someone would have killed the volume.

After the last eight years, Obama can take the friggin oath every night of the week. If televised, it would probably do American Idol numbers.