{"id":25472,"date":"2020-02-19T11:17:37","date_gmt":"2020-02-19T18:17:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/?p=25472"},"modified":"2020-02-19T11:17:37","modified_gmt":"2020-02-19T18:17:37","slug":"what-a-croc-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/?p=25472","title":{"rendered":"What a Croc"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Untitled\"<\/a>My right foot wants to slide off the motorcycle footpeg. It’s partly caused by\u00a0alignment differences between my\u00a0replacement knees (I never have this problem with the left foot), but is more a matter what I have on my feet. Some shoes and boots have soles that resist sliding, some don’t.<\/p>\n

Yesterday I wore Crocs for a ride to the corner library and back. They stayed put on the pegs, but I felt unsafe: in a spill they’d come right off. I have a pair of motorcycle boots<\/a> that grip the pegs well. The thing is they’re a pain to put on and take off for short rides around town (I always wear them on\u00a0long rides). Still, I try to be a\u00a0good-citizen ATGATT rider (all the gear\/all the time), and I’ll have to\u00a0make myself take the extra time to lace them up snug and close the ski boot-style clamps.<\/p>\n

In my second or third year in Alaska, after one of our\u00a0squadron-mates\u00a0ejected from an out-of-control F-15 and spent most of a day in freezing conditions on the side of a mountain waiting for search & rescue, Alaskan Air Command\u00a0issued Sorels<\/a>, snow boots with thick fleece liners, to\u00a0all aircrew members. I\u00a0flew with them once or twice, but\u00a0quickly went back to standard flight boots<\/a>. The Sorels, I feared, wouldn’t stay on\u00a0during an ejection, and there I’d be, barefoot in the ice and snow.\u00a0Regular flight boots, on the other hand,\u00a0had been tried and tested in hundreds of ejections over the years (they were so good, in fact, that they were sometimes found a mile or more from the body, with\u00a0the feet still inside). The answer, for me, was to order my boots one size too large and wear thick wool socks.<\/p>\n

There’d been earlier attempts to get\u00a0Alaska\u00a0aircrew members\u00a0fly in\u00a0bunny boots<\/a>, white rubber boots with an insulating layer of air between the inner and outer surface, and in fact most wore them and stuck with them even after they got the Sorels. But\u00a0bunny boots were too big and clumsy\u00a0for the rudder and brake pedals in fighter cockpits, so\u00a0pilots in my unit\u00a0didn’t\u00a0wear them. I\u00a0tested\u00a0a pair during\u00a0a week of Arctic survival training at Eielson AFB outside of Fairbanks, and they did the job. The Sorels would have done just as well, and I kept mine for hunting trips and hikes. I still have them, up in the garage rafters.<\/p>\n

I’m thinking of Sorels and bunny boots because I’m reading\u00a0“Ice Ghosts: the Epic Hunt for the Lost Franklin Expedition<\/a>,” which references the disdain the British of the mid-1800s felt toward the Inuit people of northern Canada, who could have taught the survivors a thing or two about dressing for the cold.<\/p>\n

Back to the Crocs, though, which have been on my feet nearly every day since Christmas, ugly be damned. I’m a convert, a missionary of the Church of Croc. Do you have a minute, sir, to talk about footware?<\/p>\n

That’s all I wanted to say this morning. I suppose I could\u00a0offer some weighty thoughts on Trump’s pardons and commutations, but what can I say that isn’t being said, and more importantly, what can I do? Tell you what, though, elect me and by close of business on my first day in office I’ll\u00a0have pardoned Reality Winner and Chelsea Manning, and commuted the sentences of every person still in jail for selling marijuana.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’m a convert, a missionary of the Church of Croc. Do you have a minute, sir, to talk about footware?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,3,14,5,2,415],"tags":[3002,3001,2448,3004,3003],"class_list":["post-25472","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-consumerism","category-flying","category-military","category-motorcycling","category-personal","category-products","tag-flightboots","tag-footware","tag-fucktrump","tag-pardonrealitywinner","tag-ugly"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25472","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=25472"}],"version-history":[{"count":16,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25472\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25488,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25472\/revisions\/25488"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=25472"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=25472"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=25472"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}