I was listening to NPR in the car and they were doing their kowtow-to-the-Republicans thing by turning the mic over to some MAGA chud to expound on the Charlie Kirk killing. My jaw dropped when he called it his generation’s JFK assassination, then went on to compare it to 9/11 and Pearl Harbor.
I changed stations but couldn’t stop thinking about what I’d just heard. Now that I’ve time to cogitate, I take his words as a form of generational resentment. We … the generations who came before his … do indeed have our JFK assassinations, our 9/11s, our Challenger disasters, our memories of where we were and what we were doing when we heard the news. Gen Z doesn’t have much yet, and on top of that it sees older generations, Baby Boomers in particular, as greedoids who gobbled up all the cheap college tuition, good-paying jobs, and affordable mortgages, then pulled the ladder up behind them. Not to mention Social Security, which’ll be a distant memory by the time they reach retirement age. I get it. They need their tragic heroes, and they’ll take what they get. Which, in Charlie Kirk’s case, isn’t much.
Who’s still mourning Rush Limbaugh’s death? No one, I suspect, not even on the right. Why? Because beyond inflammatory words, the man contributed nothing. Ditto Charlie Kirk. After his memorial service in Phoenix today I expect the furor to die down, and a month or two from now his killing won’t even be a blip.
The bats found our backyard hummingbird feeder and sucked it dry overnight. Donna got up around two in the morning and watched as a pair of bats took turns drinking from the feeder, which has a motion-sensitive video camera. Here’s a screen grab:
Gonna say this is a Mexican long-tongued bat. Not all bats have tongues that’ll go through tiny holes like the ones on hummingbird feeders, but that species does, and their range includes southern Arizona. I’ll leave the back porch lights on tonight to see if we can catch them in better lighting.
In some of my Air-Minded posts I’ve talked about arrested landings in the F-15 Eagle. Here’s an excellent video of one captured at Portland IAP the other day by Gherardo Fontana, which shows the process clearly. Look close and you’ll see the tailhook hanging down as the pilot approaches the runway, and during the rollout you’ll see it snap up as it catches an arresting cable laid across the runway, bringing the jet to a stop:
Emergency Oregon ANG F15C catching the wire during landing on runway 28L at KPDX after some hydraulic malfunction. The plane came to a smooth and safe stop in the runway. pic.twitter.com/E4fBFr6yA7
— Gherardo Fontana (@gfontana767) September 17, 2025
The times I’ve had to lower the tailhook and catch a cable on landing, the cause was always a failure in the Utility A hydraulic circuit, which among other things supplies pressure for normal gear lowering, wheel braking, and nosewheel steering. The procedure is to declare an emergency, request tower to raise the arresting cables if they’re not already raised, lower the tailhook and use the emergency handle to lower the gear, land normally, then lower the nose before passing over the arresting cable and letting it bring you to a stop on the runway … afterward, you stay in the jet and they’ll tow you in from there.
There are normally two arresting cables on military runways, one at each end, so if you miss the first one the second should snag you, but that’s a last-ditch situation. There’s an emergency wheel braking system you can activate if you miss the first cable, because who knows, if the hook didn’t catch the first one it might not catch the second one either. Anyway, in this case the hook does catch the first cable and bring the jet to a smooth but quick stop … not as violent as a carrier landing, but still pretty dramatic.
There. Now you know why Air Force fighters have tail hooks.