.. of things to fill my secret hideout,

would have some serious fun with this.

Some cool stuff but given that you can get pieces of the ultimate iconic aircraft Concorde at aviation collectors fairs and places like concordecollectables.com for 20 quid or so and upwards the pricing does look rather ambitious for bits of common aircraft which are (as the article points out) fairly easily available. Just talk to some scrap metal merchants near London Heathrow, various military bases, etc if in doubt.

Somebody has done good market research. As many people have observed USA telco execs tend to be ex-bomber people so we are bound to see this in quite a few offices of various Ma Bell clones.

More fin than you might think. The pilot and co-pilot on the BUFF ejected *down*.

Actually it is the radar navigator and the navigator that eject downwards on the BUFF, the Pilot, Copilot, EWO and Gunner all eject upwards.

My coat is the anorak with the wires filling the pocket.

. . .looks more like a fighter ejection seat F-4 Phantom or similar. But it is most definitely NOT from a B-52: I know, I've got 6 year of flying them under my belt. . .

...who sits directly under a load-bearing I-beam...

Up? Down? Sideways? This looks like a fancy offcie chair with a few ex-aviation bits bolted on.

Ejecting downward in the Buff?

That such unsafe stuff is being sold. I mean - look at the number of legs...... You had better hope that health and safety dont spot that its one short of a jobsworth.....

I am sure i watched a series about this company on the Discovery channel a few years ago... could be wrong (but very rarely am, apart from when it comes to spelling)

ok after about 10secs of searching i proved myself right, the program was called wingnuts, looks like its been cancelled though.

and dragged it home in the pickup.

But I'm afraid I saw you coming, so that'll be 5,000.

No, pounds. Sterling.

Over twenty years ago my best mate Jim got married and I was his best man. I had to give him something special as a wedding present so I looked and asked around, one of my other mates just happened to mention that the military research establishment where he worked had thrown out a Martin-Baker Mk1 ejector seat( these were propelled by a cut down twenty five pounder howitzer shell) and that he had purloined it. Well, I leaned on him a lot and he finally sold it to me for seventy quid, the best damn present I ever gave anyone, though the new missus wasn't too keen on it even though I gave her some boring china plates. The consensus amongst us lads was that if the wife didn't work out she could always test the seat for Jim.Strangely, some years later she ran away with an IT manager!