Tales From the Front, Cold War Edition... the Other Side III

Did I ever tell ya The Second Mrs. Pennington considered joining the Air Force once upon a time?  Well, she did.  Read on for more...

There are numerous ironies in this letter and we'll mention a few as we proceed.  But, about the Air Force... TSMP jumped through all the recruiting hoops and was accepted into Officers Training School (OTS), pending a successful physical exam.  It came to pass that TSMP journeyed down from South Bend to Indianapolis to take the requisite physical and was met by some asshat of a USAF captain (recruiter type) who proceeded to make a less-than-subtle pass at her, a pass that, if memory serves and if Paula was accurate in her account of the event (and I have NO doubt at all in that space), would be considered sexual harassment... if not assault... in today's military climate.  Which put Paula RIGHT off and rightfully so.  And that was the end of that.  The Air Force lost someone who would have prolly made a damned fine ossifer... and may have even decided to make a career of it.  The young TSMP was quite patriotic in her youth, yanno?

That said... it was all prolly for the best, keeping in mind this was in the late '70s and the Air Force didn't look kindly upon mixed marriages, which is to say O's and E's, together.  Life might could have been hard in that space.

So... ironies.  Actually "irony," singular.  TSMP goes on quite a bit in this letter about taking my name once we married (I had no objection, seein' as how I always thought this was the natural course of things).  So, the woman remarried almost immediately following our divorce, but did she take her new husband's last name?  Ummm... no.  She is "Paula B." today and has been so ever since the court reinstated her maiden name.  So much for that "we are one" thing, eh?

One wonders.  But, Hell... as the lady said: "Who gives a shit?"

Today's Happy Hour Soundtrack: Possession

I surely love this tune by Sarah McLachlan...

Listen as the wind blows
From across the great divide
Voices trapped in yearning
Memories trapped in time
The night is my companion
And solitude my guide
Would I spend forever here
And not be satisfied 

I heard this on iTunes Radio this afternoon, on the Norah Jones station I defined a couple o' few days ago.  There's this about that... iTunes Radio is pretty good, as long as you set your preference on each and every station at "Discovery."  One has three options... "hits," "middle o' the road," and "discovery"... I've tried all three and "discovery" is the best, by far.  I now have eight stations defined on the meRadio and I've been exposed to some new-to-me artists performing some genuinely good stuff.  Me likee.

So, yeah... OK.  I said sumthin' good about Apple stuff.  Don't go thinkin' I'm turnin' into a fanboi, mmm-kay?  Just sayin'.

Wherein I Bring the Sunday Funny

This made me laugh right out loud...

DEATH OF THE OLD COW

Suddenly, a cow runs out into the road and a Limo driving late at night hits it head on and the car comes to a stop. The woman in the back seat - in her usual abrasive manner, says to Stan, the chauffeur, "You get out and check on that poor cow--you were driving."  So Stan, the chauffeur gets out, checks, and reports that the animal is dead but it appeared to be very old. “Well,” says the wealthy, abrasive woman, "You were driving, so you go and tell the farmer in that lighted farmhouse over there."

Two hours later Stan, the chauffeur, returns totally inebriated, a full belly, his hair ruffled, with a big grin on his face. "My God, What happened to you?" asks the woman.

The chauffeur replies, "When I got there, the farmer opened his best bottle of single malt scotch, the wife gave me a meal fit for a king, and the daughter made love to me."

"What on earth did you say?" asks the woman.

“Well, I just knocked on the door..........and when it opened I said to them, ‘I'm Stan, Nancy Pelosi's chauffeur, and I've just killed the old cow.’"

The h/t goes to an Occasional Correspondent (who knows who he is).

Saturday: Veddy British, Indeed

I drank Tetley's while I was in Ol' Bighty.  Still do, actually... but I'm kinda like the most interesting guy in the world in that space ("I don't always...").  And now to pour my first cup, of COFFEE.  (<=== no joke, that.  We're sleeping later and later these days.)

Wherein We Wax Nostalgic, Yet Again

I saw one of these today while I was out and about...

That would be a four-door 1961 Chevy Bel Air, which was about as butt-ugly a car as could be found on the street back in '61.  The roof-line was the principal cause of the ugliness, however... as you can plainly see from this vintage ad:

Yup.  I think I'd love to have me a '61 coupe with the optional 348 cu. in. motor.  What a beauty, eh?  The Beach Boys thought so, even if they were on about the '62 model...



OMG.  I didn't really do that, did I?  I guess I did.

Another Giant Passes

From the Usual USAF Source:

Robbie Risner Dies

Retired Brig. Gen. Robinson "Robbie" Risner, who spent more than seven years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, shot down eight MiG-15s during the Korean War, and served during World War II, died on Oct. 22 in Bridgewater, Va. He was 88 years old. "Risner was part of that legendary group who served in three wars, built an Air Force, and gave us an enduring example of courage and mission success," wrote Chief of Staff Gen. Marc Welsh in A True Airpower Giant, his tribute to Risner. "I'm proud to serve in Robbie Risner's Air Force and to try and live up to his example," stated Welsh. Born in Mammoth Spring, Ark., in 1925, Risner flew the P-38 and P-39 in Panama during the latter portion of World War II. Recalled to active duty during the Korean War, Risner completed 108 combat missions in that conflict, downing the eight MiGs in the F-86. On Sept. 16, 1965, the North Vietnamese shot down Risner's F-105 during a bombing mission and took him prisoner. He endured torture and solitary confinement at the infamous Hanoi Hilton prison during his captivity. Risner retired from the Air Force in August 1976. Among his decorations, he received two Air Force Crosses for his heroism in Vietnam. Risner authored the book "The Passing of the Night: Seven Years as a Prisoner of the North Vietnamese." A statue of him is on display at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colo. (Includes Washington, D.C., report by MSgt. Angelita Colón-Francia) (For more on Risner, read Nine Feet Tall from Air Force Magazine's February 2012 issue and Valor: When Push Came to Shove.)

Gen. Risner was a contemporary of Col. Bud Day, who also passed this year.  Both men were veritable giants among men and examples for all of us.

RIP, General Risner.

Well, That's ONE Way to Look At It...

From the Usual USAF Source:

Two Million Flight Hours for Predator-Reaper Fleet

The Air Force's fleet of MQ-1 Predator and MQ-9 Reaper remotely piloted aircraft this week hit the mark of two million total flight hours since the service began flying Predators in 1995, announced RPA operators at Creech AFB, Nev., on Wednesday. A hand-picked crew from Creech controlled the MQ-1 that reached the milestone flight hour on Oct. 22, states the base's release. "There is just no way to describe what an amazing event that was," said Col. James Cluff, commander of Creech's 432nd Wing/432nd Air Expeditionary Wing. It took the Air Force from 1995 to April 2011 to reach one million flight hours, but only an additional two-and-a-half years to accumulate the next million, according to the release. "The fact that commanders have had this [intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance] and precision-strike capability from remotely piloted aircraft when and where they have needed it for so long is a remarkable milestone," said Lt. Gen. John Hesterman, head of Air Forces Central Command. "But perhaps the bigger story and true achievement has been the unwavering dedication of the men and women who have made this capability available for such a sustained period of time. They have saved lives and made us and our coalition partners safer and more secure," he said.

One wonders just how many hours USAF's drone fleet would have accumulated if Obama were not the president.  Then again, USAF isn't the only outfit flying Preds and Reapers; the CIA has a rather large fleet of the beasties, as well.  It's gub'mint policy to "neither confirm nor deny" drone strikes and the agency that performs those strikes... in most cases.  As for me?  I get totally weirded-out whenever I go out to Cannon Airplane Patch and see a Pred shooting touch-'n'-goes.  Which they do.  Weird, I tell ya.  Just WEIRD.

Today's Happy Hour Soundtrack

Madeleine Peyroux singin' a live version of one of my favorite Warren Zevon songs...



That's an interesting take on the song.  I particularly love the string ensemble on this version, so very apropos for a song that still tears at my heart.  Here's Warren doin' a live version of the song:



Is that not just frickin' BEAUTIFUL?  We sure do miss ya, Warren.  A LOT.

Life Is Still Interesting

I intimated life could get a lot more "interesting" exactly a month ago today.  Well, things haven't changed one way or the other in a month's time: my back still hurts but the pain is neither lessening nor worsening, it's just there, all the damned time.  I suppose I should be grateful for the fact it's not getting worse, but this crap is beginning to wear me down... or it's making it hard for me to roll out of bed every morning, at the very least.  The only person or persons benefiting from this shi'ite are the kind folks at Bayer AG, whose "Bayer Back and Body" formulation is wonderful stuff.

Yeah, I know: bitch, bitch, bitch.  Alternately: It's always sumthin'.

Timing Is EVERYTHING

Heh. There IS a slight difference in the personae involved, isn't there?

And then there's this.... completely and totally unrelated to the above:

Now isn't THAT clever?  (h/t: a tweet from Brilliant Ads)

Today's Happy Hour Soundtrack, Wherein We Let It Loose

We have three of our favorite Stones albums queued up in the CD player... Exile, Get Yer Ya-Ya's Out (THE best live album, evah), and Sticky Fingers (which includes "Moonlight Mile," my ALL-TIME favorite Stones tune)... for today's Happy Hour, which we are taking on the verandah with all the windows wide-open and stereo blasting, for it IS a brilliant sorta day day here on The High Plains o' New Mexico.  We just now popped in for a refill after hearing this track:

Who's that woman on your arm?
All dressed up to do you harm
And I'm hip to what she'll do
Give her just about a month or two

Bit off more than I can chew
And I knew, yeah, I knew what it was leading to
Some things, well, I can't refuse
One of them, one of them the bedroom blues

She delivered right on time, I can't resist a corny line
But take the shine right off your shoes
Yeah, right off your shoes
Carryin', carryin' the bedroom blues

That's my very favorite song off this album and one that's served me well over these many years and through many a woman, too.  Looking back it seems like every single one of those wimmen were "all dressed up to do me harm," without fail.  But, Hey!  I was always about "beat me, hurt me, make me write bad checks" where wimmen were concerned.  That said, I never wrote that many bad checks in the literal, monetary sense (one? two?)... but I wrote MANY more than a few in the metaphorical sense ("Do you love me?"  "Oh, yeah, Baby... yes I DO!").  That said (yet again), I sure as Hell got beat up and I'm (mostly) thankful for the experience(s).  I think that says sumthin' good about me, but I'm not exactly sure what.

Well, OK then.  Beer me and let us continue as we've begun.  We have quite a few more memories to work out before we're done today.

Home, Kinda-Sorta, Once Upon a Time

From a tweet by Amazing Pics...

That's the world-famous Avenue des Champs-Élysées running up the center of the pic from the Arc du Triomphe to the Place de la Concorde (northbound orientation in the photo, but the street actually runs ESE in real-life).  I've walked the entire length of the avenue more than once, pausing at strategically-placed cafes along the way for refreshment.  Said cafes get few and far between as you approach the Place de la Concorde, though.  There's not a finer walk in creation when the weather cooperates, like on a wonderful summer's day.  Which brings to mind this ol' chestnut...

That's not the Champs, true, but Paris is a fine, fine place to be (relatively) young and in love.  I was that.  I also said Paris was home, once upon a time... and I do not lie.

In Which We Rectify an Embarrassing Situation

I had some of the neighbors over for After Dinner Whiskey Hour last evening, an impromptu sort o' gathering which usually works out to be the best kind.  But not last evening, however.  I hadn't been payin' very close attention to the status o' the likker locker and was mortified to find I was almost out of every-damned-thing.  I had enough Bulleit to make the male neighbor a few drinks (he took his whiskey with but a single ice cube... good man!) but the two girls weren't whiskey drinkers.  I cavalierly offered to whip up a couple o' G&Ts for the ladies and they accepted.  At which time the mortification set in: I only had enough gin to mix but two G&Ts.  Tonic?  Yes, lots of it.  Limes?  No doubt.  But GIN?  Ummmm, no.  We WERE embarrassed.  (Further: I killed off what remained of the scotch, too.)

Well, we fixed THAT today by making the 30 mile round-trip out to the Cannon Airplane Patch Class VI store.  And we are resupplied:

Until such time as we aren't, of course.  Rest assured I'll have the troop responsible for monitoring the inventory on the carpet later on today.  This is a situation with which we shall not up put.

The Sunday Re-run...

Four years ago on this date:

Tuesday, October 20, 2009

Linkage

There are war stories and there are sea stories... and then there's this. Do your fine self a favor and go... and then grin. A LOT.

Impulse Buy

So... we were in Wally-World yesterday, doing a mini-resupply run (beer and such) when this caught our eye:

We DO like Dan Brown and $17.50 seemed like a small price to pay for several hours of page-turning entertainment. I picked up "The Da Vinci Code" a couple o' years back when the ex-girlfriend and I were off on a long weekend in Dallas and was enthralled. That book made it through me, the ex-GF, her family, and mine before I lost track of it. And everyone said the same thing, to wit: "Wow! What a page-turner THAT was!" Yup. And we can only hope there's more of the same lurking within the pages of his latest...

All that said, I should note I read Mr. Brown because of the way he writes... and NOT out of any belief there's hidden truth or any such other "deeper meaning" in his plot lines, which is to say I ain't buying into the various alternate Gospel theories and such.  He just tells a damned good story.  Period.  End of report.

Committed to the Inter-tubes by Buck on 10/20/2009 12:47:00 AM 12 comments:

Yup, two posts.  Go read Lex's story at the link, it's one of my favorites of his.  Lord, do we EVER miss the man.

Saturday: Reality As We Know It

I never understood the appeal o' horror films, but I think I might enjoy this one.

My Mood's Improving...

... due in no small part to this:

Izzat YOU, Mom?  Sure looks like you!  Well, sorta, but a lil bit too chubby.

Added, somewhat later:

See the resemblance?  And yeah, that's me.  I wasn't ALWAYS skinny thin and dashing.

Get OFF My Lawn!

A couple o' irritating things in the overnight mail... this, first:

On the one hand I thought "Democrats.  Can't live with 'em, can't shoot 'em."  OTOH I thought "I'm sick to death of the Tea Party."  OTOOH I thought "they DO have a point."  OTOOOH (and I'm running outta hands at this point), they picked a piss-poor time to make THAT point, if it's valid and I'm not sure it IS.  I'm so confused, or mebbe I'm just not fully caffeinated.  Prolly the last.

And then there's this:

I don't subscribe to the Dream Houses Twitter feed, but someone I follow does.  And FuckingTwitter (all one word) ALWAYS includes one of these dumb-ass pictures (as a re-tweet from that org I follow) in a love note I get from them every morning.  First of all: mansions bore me; I couldn't possibly care less about architectural excess unless it's over 200 years old.  Second: there are never any people in these pictures, none.  Which leads me to believe the mansions are prolly made out o' Legos.

And now to pour my second cup.  I have a feeling raising my caffeine level will significantly improve my mood.

What's For Dinner, Buck?

If you think you've seen this movie before... well, you have.  We're doin' almost exactly the same thing we did in our first BLT post, so just call this the sequel, mmm-kay?

In the beginning

Near the end

Dinner is served!

Our sides were a bowl of Kettle brand sea salt chips and three Claussen dill spears; our beverage was an Anchor Steam beer... which we began drinkin' during the build process.  Boy, I sure do love me some BLTs!

And now it's out to the verandah for After Dinner Whiskey Hour, to be followed by the Beloved Wings playin' the Hated Avalanche, in Denver.  Life's pretty good at the moment.

Tales From the Front, Cold War Edition... the Other Side II

Some of you Gentle Readers commented on my art work in the first letter I published from that passel o' old correspondence that's still sitting on my kitchen counter, as we speak.  Like this:

Another bad mePhone pic

But we digress.  We're supposed to be on about art now, aren't we?  I found this in one of The Second Mrs. Pennington's letters to me:

Click to embiggen

That was from March 10, 1976, when I was off in Doi Inthanon, Thailand for four or five months building a radar site for the Royal Thai Air Force.  TSMP was remarkably accurate in her rendition of the radar tower, if nothing else.

Beautiful!

This time-lapse vid is from NatGeo and was in today's mail.



I've never been to Iceland, but only through the luck o' the draw.  The Air Force had two radar sites in Iceland during the whole of my AF career, one at Hofn and the other at Straumnes Air Station.  Neither location were what one would call "garden spots," but they were better than, say, Thule.  That said, the video above certainly displays Iceland's natural beauty.  I'm simply glad I didn't have the opportunity to enjoy some of it for a year.

In other news... we've been trying to watch the ALCS, which is a duty and obligation thing, given as how I'm an American and bezbol IS the National Pastime (so I'm told) and, further, Dee-troit is one of the two teams vying to represent the American League in the World Series.  And you KNOW I'm a big fan of things coming out of Dee-troit.  There's just one problem, though: compared to hockey the game is SLOW.  Painfully slow.  "Put you to sleep" slow.  I fell asleep on the couch during the third inning last evening and didn't wake up until the top of the ninth.  That said, I was gratified to see Dee-troit held on, won last night's game and tied the series up.  I've watched at three of the four games in this series... which is to say an inning or two before I fall asleep and another inning or two after I wake up... but it's hard to stay awake.  I'd do MUCH better at the ball park.