"Your one-stop source for improper ideology and freedom seeds."
What was (and might have been)
A friend visited the Pima Air & Space Museum (PASM) in Tucson a few weeks ago. I told her if any particular airplane spoke to her, I’d write an air-minded post on it. Well, you never know what’s going to catch someone’s eye. In her case, it was one of our orphans, a Douglas B-23 Dragon. PASM’s Dragon has been […]
I found a pretty great photo of my blog’s namesake, the infamous desert highway mystery attraction/tourist trap known as “The Thing.” This photo dates from the 1950s, when The Thing was in its original Mojave Desert home on Route 66 near Barstow, California. It moved to its present location on Interstate 10 near Willcox, Arizona, in […]
Institutionally, the military services have never forgotten the crippling constraints imposed upon the conduct of the air war in Vietnam: Target lists were reviewed at the White House in the informal atmosphere of the Tuesday lunch, attended principally by President Johnson, his press secretary, the Secretaries of State and Defense, and the President’s special assistant for national […]
Many months ago I said I’d monitor news coverage of the trials of the 11 motorcyclists arrested after a videotaped beating of a motorist in New York City. I believed then, and believe now, that the motorist did something to start the fight, but unfortunately whatever happened to set things in motion was not videotaped. I hoped that once the […]
The F-86 Sabre has been on my mind lately. The Sabre was a pure air-to-air jet fighter with a high-mounted seat and 360-degree visibility, father of the F-15 Eagle, grandfather of the F-22 Raptor. As a boy living at Ramstein Air Base in Germany in the 1950s, I dreamed of someday flying the Sabres I saw flying overhead. Today I’m a volunteer […]
Army A-10s? Not gonna happen, folks. Here’s something I posted to Facebook the other day: People ask me why, if the Air Force no longer wants A-10s, it doesn’t just hand them over to the Army. The answer boils down to roles. From the 1960s into the early 1990s, the Army flew an armed observation aircraft […]
Guess who got a new telephoto lens for Christmas? Any guesses where he went with it? Clearly I have much to learn. Here are a few of the less-embarrassing shots I took at Pima Air & Space Museum the day after Christmas: As always, clickage will take you to the full sized images on Flickr. — […]
This all started when I posted a cool photo on Facebook: When I posted that photo I didn’t bother to identify the nationality of the jet, but some of my friends wondered about it. Good question … what are those colors? I used to know those markings pretty well: the answer is Belgium. Then, two or three days later, a […]