Hola, amigos! It’s been a while since I’ve posted a bag’s worth o’ miscellany.
A college friend and I, still close after all these years, are on pins and needles over today’s special election in Ohio. There’s just one provision on the ballot, whether or not to amend the state constitution to require 60% voter approval of ballot initiatives in future elections.
Currently it takes 50% voter approval (well, technically, anything over 50%) to pass initiatives and make them law. Today’s vote is being forced by Republicans in the state legislature who are trying to stifle Ohioans’ ability to put initiatives up to a vote and make them law. Its specific purpose is to keep voters from approving a constitutional provision to keep abortion legal in the state, an initiative scheduled for the regular election coming up in November 2023. Republican lawmakers fear a majority of Ohioans will vote to keep abortion legal, as have citizens in other states where it’s been put to a vote. So yeah … it’s a pretty important vote. You know Rachel & Steve are going to be all over it tonight on MSNBC, and we’ll be watching. (Update 8/9/23): The forces of evil in Ohio stand defeated! Way to go, Ohio voters!)
This same friend, talking about Trump and the possibility of a richly deserved comeuppance, says this: “We all want it, but, unfortunately, wanting won’t make it happen. I’d be satisfied with home confinement and no goddamn internet!”
Whether Trump will ever be fined, let alone imprisoned, for the things he’s done, I can’t say. Cable news carries on as if his arrest and trial are a done deal. Me? I’ll believe it when I see it, and not before then. DOJ Special Counsel Jack Smith is on it, but does his boss Merrick Garland have his back? State and city-level district attorneys are on it too (c’mon Fani Willis!). Still, knowing Maddow and friends have to generate viewers to keep their jobs, I take their nightly hyping of Trump’s imminent fall with a huge grain of salt.
There’s wisdom in memes, some of them anyway. Like this one:
“Boy, I’d like to see ol’ Donnie wriggle his way out of this jam!”
(Trump wriggles his way out of the jam easily)
“Ah, well, nevertheless …”
Jumping to a different friend — and another subject entirely— my niece asks if pilots have favorite airports to fly into over others, and if so, why? I’ll expand on the answer I sent her.
I for sure had favorite (and less favorite) destinations when I flew trainers and fighters in the Air Force, but I’m guessing this question is more about commercial pilots. I think I know enough airline pilots and cabin crew members to take a stab at it.
Some airports have difficult arrival and departure procedures. Some have short runways and confusing, poorly marked taxiways. Some are notorious for ground delays. Some, especially in third world countries, are downright dangerous. Some airports shut down at night for noise abatement, and if you’re scheduled to depart from or arrive at one just before restrictions go into effect there’s a lot of pressure not to be late or delayed because then you either can’t take off and will have wasted all that ground prep and taxi time, or you cannot land and have to divert to an alternate with a planeload of angry passengers.
But far more important, I think, are location and amenities. When I was stationed at Hickam Field, I ran every Wednesday evening with the Honolulu Hash House Harriers. Every other month, the crew of a Cathay Pacific 747 would join us for trail and on-afters. I don’t know how they pulled it off, but the two pilots, both men, and two flight attendants, both women, always managed to crew together on long-haul Pacific routes and all four were dedicated hashers. They told me more than once that Honolulu was their favorite overnight destination. Not that this has anything to do with the question, but all four were Irish and had formerly served in the Irish Air Corps (which up to then I didn’t know was a thing).
In my post-USAF career as a defense contractor, I often had business at Nellis AFB in Las Vegas, and the company would put me up at a La Quinta one block off the Strip. Some of the airlines contracted with the same La Quinta, and the crews I talked with there all loved it … nice & new, clean, big rooms, a short walk to casinos and restaurants.
Back quickly to my time in the Air Force, favored destinations for most of us were military airfields with good officers’ clubs and quarters. Stateside, it’s hard to beat Nellis AFB in Las Vegas, Randolph AFB in San Antonio, and Eglin AFB on the Florida panhandle. When I flew trainers, overnighting at Sheppard AFB in Wichita Falls, Texas, was great if you hit it on the right Friday, the night new doctors and nurses graduated from medical officer training and showed up at the club to celebrate. In NATO, it was RAF Mildenhall in the UK, because every Friday night British chicks came to the club to meet American pilots. Like I said, location & amenities.
Last, this interesting Tucson structure:
It’s a ramada in Saguaro National Park East, not far from where we live. Donna and I, along with our friends Mary Anne and Darrell, used to ride our bicycles down Old Spanish Trail to the park, where we’d take a break before doubling back home. The ramada we cooled off under at the park’s visitor center didn’t look like the one in the photo. It was newer and had a more Spanish-style roof.
What’s special about this older ramada, one of several located along the hilly eight-mile loop inside the park, is what’s on top of it. Our bicycling buddy Mary Anne forwarded a local newspaper article about these ramadas yesterday. The long rectangular panels on top are aluminum bomb bay doors from WWII B-29 Superfortresses, complete with brackets and hinges.
Actually, this makes sense. The Boneyard at Davis-Monthan AFB, the location where bombers and other military aircraft were scrapped at the conclusion of WWII, is just a few miles from the park. Waste not, want not, am I right? From my days as a docent at nearby Pima Air & Space Museum, I know there’s a long history of civilians putting scrapped military aircraft parts to use. Those thousands of wood & fabric Waco gliders we had left over from the invasion of Japan that never happened? The fuselages made awesome chicken coops! Belly tanks from prop and early jet fighters? They make good tanks for heating oil — you still see them in use all over South (and likely North) Korea, and a number of them were converted into dry lake speedsters right here at home.
Anyway, a bit of interesting local history, one I wasn’t aware of until Mary Anne clued me in. Thanks!