The Best-Laid Plans…

…of mice and men often go astray or are thwarted or however that saying goes. S’true, though. I really did intend to come back and put up another post today, assuming I found something of note in my aimless meanderings around these here inter-tubes. Fate, however, intervened in the form of a phone call from great good friends…inquiring if I might be free for the evening? “Well, no,” says I, “but I AM reasonably inexpensive.” Badda-da-BOOMP!

So…to make a long story short, I’m recently back from a wonderful evening out with old friends…the finest kind. We had a fair meal (Clovis being extremely short on good eating places) and great conversation, to say the very least. My friends, Ed and Bernice, were staying overnight in the Cannon AFB transient quarters on their way up to Taos and vicinity for a ski vacation. Ed, Bernice, and I go back to 1975… I met The Second Mrs. Pennington for the very first time in Ed and Bernice’s living room on Tachikawa Air Base in that same year. A Red Letter Day, if ever there was one. But I digress… the basic point is that it’s always good to catch up with old friends…

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So. Today was a banner day for traffic here at EIP. Nothing much to speak of in the great grand scheme of things, especially if you’re one of the Big Dog bloggers, who get more hits in an hour than EIP does in a month. But for us Small Fry…big doings. I knew something was up when I checked the blog stats first thing this morning and saw I had 75 hits by 0930, which is about 75% of my average daily traffic these days. A little poking around in Site Meter revealed something of a mystery. Nearly all of the hits were coming from Lockheed Martin Corporation, and were from Fort Worth; Washington, D.C.; and Denver…in addition to a couple from Boeing… and they were all going directly to last Friday’s post, specifically “A Grounding of Eagles.” I’m not naïve…I know how these things happen: someone reads something, copies the link and e-mails it to his buds, and they forward, and so on. Happens all the time.

But. Why would folks from LockMart be so interested in what is obviously open source material? I can understand interest on the part of folks from Boeing, as Boeing is the owner (prime contractor...since the acquisition of McDonnell Douglas) of the F-15 airframe. But then again, Boeing should be as dialed-in as anyone could possibly be on this subject. I’m including a couple of screen-caps to illustrate the mystery, including one of a visitor who spent 91 minutes on the blog and had 29 discrete page views…which is something of a record, in and of itself. All told, 64 of today’s visits were from either Lockheed or Boeing. (As ever, click the images for larger...i.e., legible versions.)

And not a single comment!

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To close the loop on the ELINT Crow…here’s a photo my Buddy Dan sent of his WAS jacket. I’d forgotten the bird was holding a Sapporo glass.

Pretty cool, eh? Wish I still had mine...