"The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter." —Mark Twain
Ode to Mr. Moto! Six Mitsubishis — with bombs all set to slide — The sailor gave his guns a squirt — and there were only five. Five Jap bombers thirsting still for gore, Our N.A. blipped another burst, and now — there’s only four. Four grim and deadley Nipponese droned o’er the Eastern Sea, […]
This is collection of reviews previously posted on Paul’s Thing: these are the books, old and new, that I most enjoyed reading this year. I’m about to embark on Philip Pullman’s “The Book of Dust,” a potential contender, but doubt I’ll finish it before the end of the year (also, I’m sometimes disappointed with long-delayed […]
I’m enormously gratified to see Doug Jones win over the odious Roy Moore in yesterday’s Alabama special election. Values beat tribalism, but it was a squeaker. It shouldn’t have been as close as it was; if all Alabamians had turned out, Jones would have won by ten or more percentage points and there’d be no talk of recounts.
A few years back a friend told a friend of hers to hook up with me on Facebook. She thought we’d hit it off, since Kevin had been an F-15 maintainer at Kadena Air Base, stationed there at the same time I was. I didn’t know him then, but was happy to add him as a friend, […]
Stag bars and strippers went away over 40 years ago. Women have been flying USAF aircraft since the 1970s, and flying fighters since the 1990s. Does this guy seriously think Trump or Mattis is going to reverse time? Or that treating women as property and sex objects makes leaders?
This photoblog is primarily about the newly restored F-15A at Pima Air & Space Museum. I wrote about this Eagle in September 2011, when it was moved from the back acreage of the museum to the head of fighter row. What piqued my original interest was its tail number, 74-0118, because I flew 1974 Eagles […]
The cure for what ails me, that is: see photo. Apart from weekly trips to and from the air museum where I volunteer as a docent, I haven’t been out on the Goldwing for a proper ride in a month or more, but a window of opportunity opened Sunday and I called my friend Ed to see if […]
Remorse, yes; major-sin remorse, no. More like mild feelings of guilt for neglecting the blog, and you, my reader. I knew this would happen when I took on a competing writing task, my memoir, which creeps along in the background, one painfully-extracted sentence at a time. The day before yesterday I sent out a Paulgram newsletter. One of the […]