Category Archives: Uncategorized

One of the burdens and joys of being a grandpa is you become , with grandma, the  oracle of family history. Grandma will remember all the names and relationships, but it can be grandpa’s duty to put the world in context to the family.

We were at the excellent Museum of Flight in Seattle with my daughter and family. The two oldest girls loved the interactive parts, where you could launch a rocket or crash the lunar lander. When it came to just looking at history it was harder for them to get excited.

I did the best I could and found a link. The Redheaded Irish Wisecracker’s dad worked for Republic Aviation during WW2, and was refused military service because of his skills in supervising the production lines for … Continue reading →

The Boeing F/A-18E Super Hornet scored its first kill when a Syrian SU-22 Fitter was downed by an F/A-18E Super Hornet most likely from the USS George H.W. Bush (CVN-77) allegedly deployed to Sixth(6) Fleet in the  Mediterranean Sea according to GlobalSecurity.org.

I was never Blessed to encounter SU-22’s or the earlier Su-17/20 variants or I would’ve been writing endless posts about “there I was….” shooting them down. Known by its NATO codename: Fitter, they are very fast air to ground attack airplanes built as a knock off the USAF F-111 Aardvark of the 70’s.

Fitters have very limited air-to-air capability and only carry archaic thermal seeking missiles … Continue reading →

This is a reprint of a review I wrote published over a decade ago in the Daily News of Galveston County. It first appeared in 2006.

Seawriter

Authors give balanced view of Texas Rangers

By Mark Lardas

So here’s the Audible.com blurb for a field guide to swamp-dwelling troglodytes.

A Thought-Provoking Journey
Strangers in Their Own Land goes beyond the commonplace liberal idea that these are people who have been duped into voting against their own interests. Sociologist Arlie Hochschild journeys to Louisiana bayou country – a stronghold of the conservative right. Though this community’s ideas differ vastly from her own, she realizes that Americans share a few key principles – the desire for community, the embrace of family, and hopes for our children. Hochschild draws on her expert knowledge of the sociology of emotion to help listeners understand what it feels like to live in “red” America. Along the way she finds answers to one of the crucial questions of contemporary American politics: … Continue reading →

So amid all the swirl of investigations, congressional testifying, and, of course, the shooting of republicans, here is an interesting item.

Apparently Putin has offered asylum to Comey! Never knew the guy had such a sense of humour.

Your own Olive checking in from an urban public school. Yesterday, during the students’ regular dose of Islamic indoctrination, one of the actors in a dramatic reading uttered the F word. Well, the students went wild. That got a big reaction, and I was very proud of our students, because we teach them not to talk like that, and we model professional behavior, and we would be hypocrites if we then turned around and let some actors in an assembly drop F-bombs everywhere.
After the students settled down, the performers carried on with their lament about how hard it was for Muslims in the U.S. after 9/11. No mention of how hard it was for firefighters’ families who lost loved ones on that day. No, the correct lamentation, … Continue reading →