A Fool for Memes
. . . sorry, couldn’t help myself!
Air-Minded: The Warrior Ethic
My friend Dick Herman, in a comment to an earlier entry, asked for my thoughts on the warrior ethic. For a few years, back when my career was on fire, I was on the staff of a joint command, working with Army, Navy, and Marine officers. Army and Marine officers could philosophize about the warrior […]
Pickled . . . in Spaaace!
Report Uncovers Astronauts’ Heavy Alcohol Use. Oh my. Here’s what I read between the lines of the linked article: NASA, in the wake of the Lisa Nowak incident, has been busy hunting witches in the astronaut program. Astronaut pilots, astronaut mission specialists, and astronaut flight surgeons are turning on each other. It must be a horrible […]
Birding in the Desert (Part IV)
How unobservant I’ve been . . . we have goldfinches and I just noticed them! These aren’t the more colorful goldfinches you see in the East and Midwest, but for the desert they’re quite gaudy. If I were one of them I’d resent the name “Lesser Goldfinch.” These birds are quite small, about half the size […]
Domestic Bliss, Man Style
Saturday: early morning bike ride followed by a visit to our local coffee shop. Weekly yard chores. Worked on my other blog, fixing old entries that got screwed up when I upgraded to the latest version of WordPress (this blog, by the way, has been edited and is back up to speed). Went to the […]
Birding in the Desert (Part III)
The limitations of our little digital camera are becoming apparent. We need more megapixels, more telephoto, more cowbell! But I did catch two of our more elusive visitors today. The two small birds on the left are house sparrows. Whenever I fill the bird feeder pigeons, house finches, and quail come to visit, but every now and then […]
Gantlets & Gauntlets
These days I’m running the gauntlet of writers and publishers. Does running the gauntlet make you cringe? God, it does me. But not the writers and publishers of One Bullet Away and Cobra II: the Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq. In the first, which I recently finished, the writer runs the gauntlet four […]
God, Clinton, and the Second Amendment
Have I mentioned that my wife works part time at a local gun shop? Well, she does, and that’s how we came to be invited to an Arizona Friends of the National Rifle Association auction and banquet. One of the speakers was Scott O’Grady, the USAF Reserve F-16 pilot who was shot down over Bosnia in […]