{"id":21747,"date":"2018-01-21T11:06:46","date_gmt":"2018-01-21T18:06:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/?p=21747"},"modified":"2018-01-21T11:13:45","modified_gmt":"2018-01-21T18:13:45","slug":"stampede-string","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/?p=21747","title":{"rendered":"Stampede String"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Untitled\"<\/a>My old cloth sun hat, the one I wear\u00a0while volunteering\u00a0at the air museum,\u00a0has given up the ghost. After multiple washings to remove sweat stains, the brim no longer\u00a0holds its shape: one side flops down\u00a0to my eyebrow while\u00a0the other juts up, giving me the appearance of a deranged Aussie.<\/p>\n

I decided to visit a proper hat store and get one that’ll not only hold its shape but resist sweat stains, and this is the one I picked.\u00a0Those of us who work outdoors at the museum are\u00a0encouraged to wear brimmed hats for sun protection,\u00a0but there the guidance stops. Guidance or no, outdoor docents\u00a0settled on white hats. I’ll break ground with\u00a0a tan hat, but at least I’ll be able to say, if challenged, that it matches our uniform pants.<\/p>\n

I\u00a0wore bling on\u00a0the\u00a0cloth hat: miniature USAF pilot wings, a little gold F-15, my International Society of Air Safety Investigators pin, and the like, but with the new hat I’m going clean.<\/p>\n

I’m not\u00a0wearing it tomorrow because\u00a0it doesn’t have a chin strap. I can’t bear the thought of seventy bucks’ worth of\u00a0hat blowing off and rolling around in the dirt. I should’ve asked the haberdasher if he\u00a0had\u00a0accessory straps but didn’t think of it until this morning, so I looked online. Turns out they’re called stampede straps, and yes, Amazon sells ’em. By next week,\u00a0the hat’ll\u00a0have a strap and I’ll be in business.<\/p>\n

\"Untitled\"<\/a>In hat-related news, I bought a replacement visor for my motorcycle helmet, one with a secondary dark visor that flips up and down. Riding from Beatty to Yuma a couple of weeks ago, I was looking into the sun all day. The visor I had at the time was clear, so I wore sunglasses inside the helmet. The trouble with that was\u00a0they felt like they were digging into my nose. When it comes to glasses I’m like the princess with the pea; they can\u00a0be light as a feather but after a while I feel the weight pressing down.<\/p>\n

My son rode with us that day and he had one of these double visors on his Arai. Now that I have one too I can say\u00a0it’s a great improvement. All motorcycle helmets\u00a0should come with them. I wonder how many riders and drivers have crashed due to temporary sun blindness. It was a huge issue flying fighters, especially in a visual engagement, and I often wished\u00a0for three hands: one for the throttles, one for the stick, and one\u00a0to put between my eyes and the sun.<\/p>\n

\n

I like this. Nancy’s still got it.<\/p>\n

\"Screen<\/a><\/p>\n

I could rant and rave about Trump and his first year in office, but plenty of intelligent and insightful people already are and I have nothing new to contribute. Just this: he’s not going to be impeached. Nor will he be\u00a0brought up on criminal charges by Mueller;\u00a0nor is it likely he’ll\u00a0stroke out and become incapacitated. No Republican in the House or Senate will\u00a0take action against him, and since they’re in the majority, no Democrat can. In addition to having a majority in both houses of Congress, he has the Supreme Court in his pocket. He literally can “stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot\u00a0somebody” and get away with it. It’s tribalism run amok, which explains why evangelicals stick with him through scandal after scandal, and will still support him even if the Russian hooker videotapes come out.<\/p>\n

The one shot we have is to vote that tribe out and put ours back in charge. Our tribe is larger. We\u00a0can flip Congress from red to blue in 2018, then vote in a Democratic president in 2020.\u00a0Until then it’s\u00a0survive and resist. Tell you what, if we don’t<\/em> vote in 2018 or 2020, then fuck us, we deserve whatever we get.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I wonder how many riders and drivers have crashed due to temporary sun blindness. It was a huge issue flying fighters, especially in a visual engagement, and I often wished for three hands: one for the throttles, one for the stick, and one to put between my eyes and the sun.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[250,3,5,2,8],"tags":[2484,2485,2486,2024,650],"class_list":["post-21747","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture-wars","category-flying","category-motorcycling","category-personal","category-politics","tag-hat","tag-hat-strap","tag-helmet-visor","tag-trump","tag-voting"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21747","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=21747"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21747\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21754,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21747\/revisions\/21754"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=21747"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=21747"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=21747"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}