"The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter." —Mark Twain
There I was at 30,000 feet
A few weeks ago I posted an entry about Lindy lights, the light beacons that helped airmail pilots in the 1920s and 30s navigate at night. A friend sent me a link to another blogger’s post about early aerial navigation aids. Did you know that in addition to the beacon lights, there were also giant […]
In past Armistice Day blog posts I’ve quoted some of Dad’s WWII letters from the Pacific Theater, where he was a gunner aboard an oiler, a minesweeper, and an auxiliary repair ship. Looking back through these documents, which I have saved on a computer file, I came across a letter I sent my father in 1995, when I was posted to Nellis AFB, Nevada to help run the Nevada Test & Training Range.
By now everyone has heard about Kentucky Senator Rand Paul plagiarizing the work of other writers in his speeches, books, and op-ed columns. The senator’s reaction to the story is evolving: it began with denial; morphed into attacks on Rachel Maddow, who first reported the story; now his staff is busy scrubbing stolen material from his […]
Scroll to the bottom of this post to see two updates added on 10/29/13 and 10/30/13. I originally planned to put irony quotes around the word Thundercraft, since no USAF pilot I know would be caught dead using the term. But what the hell, it was Republic’s collective name for the fighter-bombers they designed and […]
Yesterday was my day to volunteer at the Pima Air & Space Museum, where I lead back-to-back walking tours at 10:30 and 11:30 AM every Wednesday. There were no takers for the 10:30 tour, so I used my unexpected free hour to walk around the grounds taking photos of new exhibits. The first thing to […]
I live to serve, and it’s time I got back to work.
Suddenly a massive old-growth tree near the table where his guests were sitting jumped into the air and shot off sideways at 230 kilometers an hour.
Speaking of stupid, I commented on an F-4 fighter thread running on my Facebook news feed.