Confession time: Donna and I didn’t turn out for the No Kings protest yesterday. I feel bad about that, especially knowing many of our friends did. Trump and the Republicans will hear from us in November though, and no, I’m not going to qualify that by adding “that’s if we get to vote” or “if there’s even an election.” Caught myself doing just that the other night, talking with an old friend over dinner … that’s asking for it, isn’t it?
I don’t know how many AWACS E-3s we can afford to lose. I think we were down to sixteen before one, along with a few KC-135 tankers, was destroyed in Friday’s Iranian attack on an airfield in Saudi Arabia. Yes, the AWACS fleet is old and there are plans for new & improved aircraft, but those are years away. We relied on AWACS for airborne warning, command, and control in my day, and I doubt that’s changed … in fact I think with data link between USAF combat aircraft and AWACS, the capabilities it provides are more valuable than ever.
But what do I know? As I was telling my friend after dinner, I’m no longer in the scuttlebutt network. Was a time I’d have heard, within hours, the inside deets on those three F-15E Strike Eagles shot down by a Kuwaiti F/A-18 pilot at the start of Trump’s World War Stupid. Crickets now. No one’s talking … not to me, anyway.
Donna has the cough and chest congestion I endured a couple of weeks back. I still have plenty of the Mucinex tabs I took for it. Not that they cured anything … it eventually went away on its own … but they helped with the discomfort and suppressed the coughing somewhat. Now to convince her what helped me might help her, always an uphill battle.
A credit card’s gone missing from my wallet and there’s a mysterious $14 charge at the corner Safeway (we never use credit there, only debit). An unnamed family member clearly has it but will go to her grave denying it. The obvious thing to do is to cancel the card before it gets used again … that particular card is the one we use for online shopping and streaming TV subscriptions, though, which’ll mean tracking down all those accounts and updating them. Another obvious step is to hide my wallet and the other credit cards, but that’ll be a losing battle. Donna periodically finds new places to hide the vermouth we use for clam linguini, but the UFM always finds it and though the level of liquid in the bottle stays the same the vermouth itself magically turns into water.
Well, you don’t want to hear about our domestic travails. I’m happy to report the scar from my latest Mohs procedure isn’t nearly as bad as I feared it would be, and I won’t have to grow muttonchops to hide it. The shower head we had installed is fabulous, and the dogs love the new utility sink in the laundry room … Fritzi, though, has been given a hint it’ll do double duty as a doggie bathtub and might be having second thoughts.
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A new season of For All Mankind has begun on Apple TV. I love that show, even though I doubt it’ll ever be possible for us to have a presence on Mars. In the first episode four kids who’ve been raised on Mars graduate from high school, and three of them are returning to Earth … two for college and one to become a Marine. I don’t think someone who has lived most or all of his or her life in one-third gravity would ever be able to adapt to full Earth gravity (let alone survive Marine boot camp). Even a manned trip to Mars and back will be a stretch … eight months just to get there, never mind how long you’d have to stay there until the planets are once again close enough for another eight-month trip home. No matter how much exercise you do in low or zero gravity, your body and bones lose strength, along with a host of other physiological changes. I do think it’s possible, and maybe actually in the cards, to set up a permanent Moon base, but its inhabitants would have to constantly rotate back and forth between Earth and Moon, as space station astronauts do. Our own moon, IMO, is about as far as actual humans can realistically get in our solar system … we’ll expand our reach, sure, but robotically, not in the flesh.
For someone who loves science fiction as much as I do, aren’t I the dismal one?