Well, let's see how I make out with a volunteer position at a local animal shelter.

which I am going to put in for in about an hour or so.

We shall see what we shall see. I think I may be useful because I don't want to sit around petting cats, dogs and rabbits all day long. I'm sure there's no shortage of those people and I likely won't like a lot of them.

What I can do is the dirty work which is fine by me. 

They likely need people to sort out animal food, wash sheets and towels and pick up donations which doesn't sound awful.

Actually I don't know what they need and I'll just head on down there and find out.

We shall see what we shall see.

Got back. Filled out an application and looked around. It's a much larger complex than I thought it would be.

I'm not sure this is going to be a good fit but if they want me I'll see what happens. 

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That was yesterday. I got back an email telling me that the next orientation won't be until April at the earliest. 

Off to try something else. I had thought of being a traffic control flagger and saw an opening and decided not to fill out their online application but to go straight to their office and go that route. That way I can check THEM out. 

Companies seem to forget that things are a two way street...or maybe they didn't forget. They hire you on line and then they can bait and switch or whatever. I like to look at whoever is hiring me in the eye. After I do that I can fill out the online bull$hit.

You have to remember that I have not gone out looking for a job of any sort in almost 40 years. Of course 40 years ago there was no internet and whatever I put on my application couldn't easily be checked out. Back then  I covered up 5 years of boat hopping by putting down that I had a hitch in the French Foreign Legion which actually wound up getting me through the door for an interview. The interviewer had never met a legionnaire before and wanted to meet one.

(I was smart enough not to tell him I had won the Legion of Honor for shooting 38 A-rabs off the back of a camel. Instead I told him I had spent my hitch fixing vehicles. It may have been a letdown and not what he wanted to hear but it was far more believable.

When I got there I saw a sign saying all whatevers should check into the main office so I walked into a garage and asked where the office was. I chatted with the guy that gave me directions and he said it was an OK outfit to work for which is a plus and a sneaky trick. Always check with employees if you can to see if the place is worth a $hit. I found the main office.

The assistant whatever saw me immediately and we sniffed each other's asses like a couple of dogs. We discussed what kind of jobs they had and the flagger positions sometimes get sent out of town which means I'm not interested. After a career at sea I now like to sleep in my own bed. I've fleabagged it enough for one lifetime. I don't want to get stuck working 7-12s in Outer Slobovia on some Interstate rebuild or something like that. 

Then he pointed out that they do need a few people to work in the yard which sounded interesting. I can fix stuff and build things so that might be OK. Anyway he said I had his interest and that I should come in Monday to talk to the Big Boss who was out of town.

I left feeling somewhat encouraged. 

The advantage here over the animal shelter is that I'd actually be drawing a paycheck which means my life will be a little easier because I'll have a little more money to spend even though I don't need it to survive. It'll mean that maybe I can upgrade my hobby stuff of get a good bottle of scotch and/or a steak dinner a little more often AND add to savings which may make a real difference with the current rate of inflation. 

Anyway I might pound some pavement tomorrow or maybe not.

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I saw a Gary Larsen comic about a guy

telling a woman "Hey, can't you see I'm reading?"

The title of the book was "How to talk to women."

The funny part about it is that that is something I wish I had tried.

I would have said the same thing under the same circumstances but with a charming smile. The beauty of doing that is if she got angry and stormed off it would have been a win for me. She obviously had no sense of humor and couldn't stand the gaff.

On the other hand had she broken out into laughter I know she would have been asked out on the spot.

My favorite one was the woman I approached with a bar rag and a straight face and asked her "Does this rag smell like chloroform?"

She took it and sniffed and replied, "More like ether." and handed it back to me. I thanked her and walked off.

Shortly afterwards I saw her leave with her girlfriend and a few minutes later she sneaked back in and made a beeline for me and sat down next to me.

Part two is my business.

 

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Thse smoke from cannons and gunfire at Gettysburg

Completely stopped traffic on US 30, US 15 and PA 116, In fact the traffic on PA 116 didn't clear up about 6 days after the battle. 

Abraham Lincoln said not to believe everything you read on the internet even though there's a picture with a caption beneath it.

The British won the Battle at Lexingon Green almost instantly. However, they lost over a third of their forces as they marched back to Boston because American sharpshooters hid behind billboards and phone poles.

George Washington's white horse really wasn't white. It was light grey. The reason that everyone thought it was white is because when people tuned into the 6 O'clock back then they only had black and white televisions and it looked white on the news.

The Indians used to stand on Interstate overpasses and drop pumpkins on covered wagons passing below.

When a youngster asked me if my grubby leather jacket meant I was a pilot I told him I flew as a forward air controller for Colonel Roosevelt in Cuba. The kid didn't believe a word of it but his mother did. (Typical)

Stick around for more history lessons. 

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Every time I whack someone or rob a bank I do two things.

The first thing I do is tape my cell phone under the third pew at Saint Anne's.

Also to defeat doorbell cameras wear a mask and ditch your clothes afterwards.

After the deed is done I swap out the barrel, firing pin and ejector in my automatic.

I explained to someone a while ago that suggested that every new gun get test fired and a bullet and casing kept for future reference.

Then I explained that Maryland tried this at great expense and it never solved a single crime.

On the credit side, when I said 'Every time I whack someone' he didn't turn into an overly excited blithering idiot.That left me with mixed emotions. While I missed the usual entertainment of wide eyes, stammering and stuttering, it was mildly refreshing to see someone that could figure out sarcasm.

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If you are in your twenties and are still making minimum wage

and are not either in college, an apprenticeship of some sort, the military learing a skill, or otherwise in a program of some sort to improve yourself then it's on you.

There's too damned much opportunity out there for those willing to improve themselves and these days the trades pay pretty damned good money. 

Hell, right now I could get someone a job that would start at about $50-60K and inside a couple of years you could easily be breaking six figures. Seriously.

Likely I'll have few takers because you have to be in reasonable shape and pee clean on demand. That eliminates a lot of people. You also have to be willing to go away from home for two to four weeks at a time. Common bellyache "I ain't gonna do that $hit!"

Hell, you don't even need a high school diploma! You just have to be able to read and write, add, subtract, multiply and divide and you can use a calculator for that. In fact a computer can generally do it all for you. 

I'm sick and tired of the younger people complaining about how minimum wage doesn't pay enough. They seem to think that one is entitled to be able to have a big house in the suburbs and a new car every couple of years for flipping burgers at the local fast food place.

It doesn't work that way. You need to have a useful skill of some sort. You have to be able to produce. You have to pay attention which means get up off of your dead ass and onto your dying feet and keep an eye on things.

You also have to be at the appointed place at the appointed time in the appointed uniform, generally coveralls or rags. (Rule seven: Never wear anything on board that you can't replace for more than a quarter buck at a garage sale. (Inflation in action)

Now you are not going to get promoted without doing a little self help work. You have to hit the books to enable yourself to pass the tests needed to advance. That means a few nights in the easy chair and kitchen table.

Still, that's simply an inexpensive investment on yourself. 

Invest in yourself!

In the FWIW department if you send me some kind of vague contact information I will send you where you can likely get a pretty good job at sea. No guarentees, but what do you have to lose?

  

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Holy smoke! Now THAT'S customer service!

Any long time readers know I don't review products here very often. IIRC the last review I wrote was in late 2009 or early 2010.

Athlon Optics customer service REALLY belted one out of the park! 

Seriously! 

Let's get the boo-hah part out of the way right off the bat before the Leopold $5000 scope crowd jumps in to this. I'm not talking Camp Perry here. I'm an irons shooter that finally needed a seeing eye cat to take me to the firing line, OK? I have always been a middle third of the pack shooter, OK? The best I have ever done was NRA Sharpshooter. Got that?

I'm 72 years old, can't see and now shake like a dog $hitting peach pits. You got that?

A truly top shelf scope would be entirely wasted on me at this point.

Still, with my eyesight crapping out on me I felt I had to do something so after I cried my eyes out over having to hang up shooting irons. After much moaning, wailing and gnashing of teeth I bit the bullet and started shopping for a basic service rifle scope. I was looking in the $200-300 range.

It was an Athlon Talos BTR which had halfway decent reviews and it seemed like a good bang for the buck. I found one on eBay NIB and ran with it. IIRC I paid about $200 for it.

I installed it and took it to the range and presto! I could actually see the target again! Hooah!

A few range sessions later the windage clicks turned mushy for some reason and it wouldn't hold zero. I was bummed and parked it. Later I went through the policy and looked at their guarantee and decided why not? Send it in and let's see what happens.

I read where the policy is repair/replace and sent it in a week ago.

This morning there was a package on my door and I was WTF? I don't remember ordering anything. When I opened it there was an NIB Talos BTR in the box, only not the Generation one I had bought but a new and improved Generation TWO!

It was like they sent one out to me three days before I sent them mine! What a turnaround! Amazing!

I bolted the new one on the rifle and decided that as soon as the weather breaks (as soon as tomorrow) I'm going to sight it in at 200 yards. I fully expect I'm back in business and this one will be OK. 

OK, the plan for me is to simply zero it for 200 yards and leave it there. I'm looking for something that will enable me to actually hit the target so I don't look like as big of a horse's ass that I really am. 

This is NOT a review for the scope itself. That may/may not come later. One of these days I'll consider writing that. However I am optimistic it will do the job better than I can. After all, the fast turnaround likely means they don't get a whole lot of returns which probably means the quality is good.

At this stage I think the dud I got was an anomoly. It happens to every company in business to some degree or another. Even the top shelf optic makers ship out a dud here and there. What surprised me is how fast they fixed the problem. 

What this is about is the absolutely incredible customer service Athlon has given me.

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I'm slow cooking a chicken soup and we'll see what happens.

It ought to be interesting. If it comes out OK I'm going to freeze a bunch of it for lunches. Should be a good deal in the long run.

Leftovers with an egg on top for breakfast today. 

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I finished the last of three WASP books and that subject gets parked. I would like to get one more book on the Battle of Athens, Tennessee under my belt because I see history starting to repeat itself locally.

Some idiot suggested the local PD could make money by giving tickets to speeders on a certain piece of the road and while it may or may not be a good idea to cover the area and clean it up a bit the idea of permitting a department to keep the monies generated is not a very good idea.

They tried a similar thing in Athens and while they voted their way  into it thay had to shoot their way out of it.

Frankly I'd like to live in a world where I could drop an elderly person off in front of a store on a rainy day without having worry about some overzealous clown of a cop handing me a ticket for parking in a fire lane. Letting the department issue tickets for the good of the department will have a CLEO deciding he now needs a tank or some stupid and useless thing to add to his empire.

 

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My WASP reading has made me think of my own experiences of women in male dominated workplaces.

As a sailor I have seen several. Not a whole lot, but several and it's been interesting because they get divided into two distinct cateegories and it's sort of a love/hate deal.

The minute they drag out the chick card I chalk them off. Right then and there. It wasn't going to end well.

On the other hand, every single one that comes into the business to make a living or answer a calling has done well. EVERY. SINGLE. ONE. 

They may not arrive very skilled but that didn't last very long. They were motivated fast learners and were not afraid to ask for help. They also knew they were being tested and if they were sent to get a bucket of prop wash or something like that either they didn't take the bait or returned sheepishly and knew it wasn't personal and that the guys did $hit like that to newbies as a matter of a rite of passage. They were newbies and that's what happens to newbies. The good ones took it in stride. They were there to make a living in their chosen field and were willing to stand the gaff.

Every single woman that I have seen play the chick card didn't last long.

One of them had actually been raised on a tugboat mainly by her father who was a tug skipper. It was clearly in her blood. She was an excellent boat handler. She was also smart, knew boats and knew men and later became a respected captain. In fact she showed she had integrity when she stuck up for someone being falsely accused of something.

Another one was a quiet, almost shy woman that was a girlie girl. She'd knit afghans during waiting times often and she made sure to wear a piece of feminine clothing, generally a blouse or a sweater. It waas a slick trick because it stood to be a quiet reminder she was a woman. 

Trying to be one of the guys never seems to work out well. Smart women know this and are simply women in a male dominated field.

I got along very well with her. Early on she was docking a loaded oil barge in snotty weather and I could tell she was nervous so I keyed the handy-talkie mic and said, "Settle down, Sweetie. You've done this before. Maybe we ought to get the hell out of here before we tear something up and try another approach."

Sure enough, that's what she did and nestled it into the dock so gently you wouldn't have cracked an egg if one was glued to the dock.

About a year later she had a frigged up crew change and missed her flight to Logan. I was headed to visit family in the Boston area so I gave her a ride to Quincy where she could catch the subway and then grab a train home from there. On the way she introduced me to WAZE which was new then and WAZE has saved me aa lot of time in traffic.

There were a handful of people that resented women. I remember a couple of grouchy old farts with undounded weird fears of whatever.

There were also a handful of guys that really didn't want women there and most of them shared the same reasoning. "If my wife finds out that there are women working out here she'd pitch a fit and probably try to drag me ashore!" While it really didn't hold a lot of water, I could understand their attitude. It did make a certain amount of sense.

Then again, who wants to be married to a woman that doesn't trust you. Oh, well.

A couple said that women didn't have the strength but didn't say it twice when I pointed out that he was no real Charles Atlas himself and I'd given him a hand a couple of times before. While the job is often physical it's not that physical.

Truth is I'm not the staunch defender of women, children and minorities. I'd like to think I defend giving everyone a fair shake and that fair knows no race, creed, color, sex or whatever.

I judge basically by three things. 

1.Their ability to do the job

2. Their character

3. Their ability to get along.

The rest is bull$hit.

Then again, you have to remember that working on the water is pretty much a calling as opposed to a job choice.

I've worked with more than one person that's tried to go ashore only to return.

I remember one guy that returned with a foolish look on his face. He'd gone ashore and was miserable but was trying to tough it out on the beach.

Behind his back his wife called the company and got him rehired, gave the man's employer two week's notice and the night before crew change had his seabag packed and told him to go back to sea.

He returned to his old job and sheepishly told me about what his wife had done and grinned when he said "That's when I knew I had married the right woman.

Back on task, it's not just the WASP mess that frosts my ass. That just opened things up and got me started. It's the whole attitude toward not using well trained and willing people to our distinct advantage.  

Edited to add. I just recalled that a few months back there was a discussion of a bomber that carries two crews and has a toilet of some sort and as usual someone asked "What about women?"

"What about them?" I answered. I used to take a pretty well preserved older woman for day sails in my sailboat. The head was a 5 gallon bucket and there wasn't a whole lot pf privavy and it never bothered either of us."

My attitude is grow up. If that's such a problem you don't have any business being there in the first place. 

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Do you have any kosher pork chops?

One of the meat guys at the local market sometimes gets too helpful.

I was looking at a package of pork chops and the meat guy asked me if I found what I was looking for.

"Hey. These pork chops look pretty good. I'm having a Jewish couple over for dinner. Do you have any kosher pork chops?"

He didn't know what to say other than "We really don't carry any kosher pork products." and shuffled off with a WTF look on his face.

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Speed bumps.

There's a lot of griping over speeding on a certain section of a nearby US Highway and the usual gang of people are talking about speed bumps. On  US Highway, no less.

I'm giving up on the arguements now because I know you can't fix stupid. Instead I think I will see if they get their own way and watch what happens. Maybe make a few bucks in side bets with the people that are pushing for it.

Right now traffic flows pretty good even though a lot of people are griping about speeders. So instead of punishing the speeders and letting the rest of us go about our business they want to punish us all with the damned things.

Bigger than$hit if they put down speed bumps it doesn't take a guided missle or even an old fashioned rocket scientist to see how that's going to work out. 

Everyone and their next door neighbor is going to slow way down for them and the people behind them are going to have to slow down a little slower and the people behind them are going to have to slow down even more.

Personally I'm going to come to a dead stop and creep over them in idle and add to the already made mess. I'm not beating my pickup at this stage. I'm tryong to keep it for as long as I can and the people that voted for it kiss my ass.

Now instead of complaining about speeders the same people that voted for it are going to moan, wail and gnash their teeth that traffic is tied up.

Of course the complainers will blame it on the city/county or whoever installed the bumps because they're too damned stupid to realize they did it to themselves.

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A while back someone said that you could get rid of an old TV somewhere for $20 

To which I replied, "Job opportunity. Offer to haul them off for $15 and then just dump a truckload of them in a ditch somewhere."

Of course that got a few aghast comments and someone babbling about the ecology and so on.

My answer was that the harder you make it to comply with a law the fewer people are going to obey it.

Let's see. Old TVs can only be taken to a mandated recycling center 158 miles away between the hours of midnight and 0400 and there's a $375 recycling fee. What does that tell me?

It tells me that old TVs are going to show up in all sorts of interesting places. It also says the Piccolo Enterprises (or at least his competition) is going to go into the TV disposal business at $350 a pop. Pick it up and take the $350 in cash, bring the TV into the garages and run it through the chipper, bag it in a plastic bag and toss it in the weekly trash, preferably in someone else's trash can that put it out the night before pickup.

On the other hand, if the city/county/state/Boy Scouts/Whatever decides to recycle them for free on the second and fourth Saturdays or every month for free at a local park or something easy to get to then a lot of TVs are going to get properly recycled.

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I just saw another one of those starving people in Africa collections

and the usual spiel about how where they live nothing grows so they're starving.

First let's look at the people asking for money. They're a relief organization and as such have a paid staff. It's in their interest not to solve the problem but to drag it on. If they solve the problem they will have to go into another line of work.

So the relief effort goes on and on and the people are still in pretty bad shape.

How about trying another tack?

Send them trucks and vans so they can move to somewhere they can grow their own food and once there give them a few basic, simple agricultural tools and a starter kit of chow and whatever to get them up and running.

On the other hand, the relief organization wouldn't be able to collect money anymore for that cause, now, will they? 

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I looked at my hands last night and it was depressing because

they have gotten soft since retirement. 

They used to be very hard, waxy and calloused. I was proud of them as they had made me a pretty good living. 

Since I started moving oil on the water the hard life callouses softened a bit because I wasn't swinging a hammer anymore. 

Then again, back in the day when I put down the hammer and went commercial fishing they softened a bit but got hard again when I went ashore. Still, as a fisherman I could look at my paws with pride and see the scars and nicks of being a working man which is/was a source of immense pride. (Then there's the scar on my right hand from the time of a heated discussion in Petersburg back in the day.)

My hands are an immense source of personal pride to me because they show me a life rather well lived. What's interesting is that I don't know where half of the scars and nicks came from. Most of them I probably patched up with duct or electrical tape and continued working.

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Another thing about the WASPs. 

There are times I wish I could run into Mister Peabody, Sherman and a sex change doctor. I would turn myself into an innocent looking bubbly 22 year 100 pound  old redhead tomboy with freckles and a big smile and mouthful of white teeth for about an hour and be transported to Congress in 1943.

Some congressman was saying that women had periods and would lose about 5 days a month because of that.

It would have brought me great joy to explain how women work and that there are things like sanitary napkins and things of that sort and how they are used in great detail and that he should ask the Surgeon General how women's bodies worked because obiously he didn't know.

And to top it off offer to explain to him how babies are made. 

The more I read the madder I get.

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ETA I am now looking for a job COMPLETELY out of my league.

Money is not the object here. Hopefully I can join a framing crew and get paid for what I am worth even thoug it ain't much at my age.

Subject to change.

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You don't hire someone and pay for their time.

You hire them and pay for the outcome.

Say you want a fence erected. You figure out how much the fence is realistically worth to you before you start shopping around and then ask for bids.

If all the bids over the price you set for yourself you self you simply do without. If they are at or under the price you accept the appropriate bid and get the job done.

When it's done it's done. If it takes them a month it takes them a month. If they do it in a single morning, they do it in a single morning. You pay the same agreed upon amount either way.

One of the biggest things I hear is "I got ripped off! It only took him an hour to make $150!"

You didn't get ripped off. You got a product at the price you were willing to pay for. If they did a good job you got your money's worth.

You're paying for a product. How long they take to produce it is their business.

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The best engineering in the world ain't worth squat without

I was going to make a post about an antenna tuner (by name) that has a reputation of being extremely well engineered but poorly manufactured.

It sounds to me like the company big shots are trying to cheap out to increase profits. The dumbasses.

Buy once, cry once. 

If they manufactured the product as well as they engineered it the tuner would likely have an excellent reputation and sell like hotcakes even if it cost a little more.

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Pre retirement memories from way back.

Several months before I retired someone told me that there was a pretty good chance that as my responsibilities dwindled that my brain would relax and things I had not thought about for decades would pop out here and there.

Looking back on it I suppose if I had not been told about it I likely would not have really noticed it when it happened. The thoughts would have come anyway and then been discarded unnoticed.

I remembered the day a playmate fell out of a tree and landed on his head, got up, rubbed it and walked off like nothing had happened. It should have killed him stone dead then and there. It happened about 60 years earlier and had long since been forgotten yet it popped up crystal clear. 

I remembered a part of first communion and for some reason a classmate showed up crystal clear. I was starting to doze off for a nap and that one passed through my mind. I laid back and enjoyed that one through the mind of a 71 year old man. She was a beautiful child and looked like a little cherub in her white communion dress. It was a crystal clear memory and it brought back a feeling of time gone by. In a way it was like looking at a Norman Rockwell painting in my mind. 

Some were a bit scary. I shuddered at the time I was underwater at Damon's point and surfacing as an outboard motorboat went over my head and the prop missed me by inches.

Then I recalled the time I caught a small trout with my bare hands in Bare's Brook where there was supposedly no fish. Bare's Brook was nothing more than a small, shallow stream. I released the fish immediately.

The whole process of these memories was very subtle and subdued much like the the subtle, subdued pinks and light oranges of the desert sky. I probably wouldn't noticed it happening had I not been told it might.

A few months afterward when the little visions stopped I asked about a dozen retirees if they had shared similar experiences. Most had not. One said that if he did he had likely forgotten about it. 

A couple did say that they they started recalling a little off-the-wall things here and there.

One guy categorically said it hadn't happened to him but a couple of weeks later met me and said that later that evening he thought about it and reported recalling the time he hit a baseball that was headed for someone's bay window and at the last minute s puff of wind, a gentle zephyr blew it slightly off course and it hit the window trim instead. He said he remembered the sense of relief very clearly.

Anyway I'm glad someone told me that it was possible that I would go through this little trip in life because I most likely would not have even given it a thought and it would have sort of 'gone in one ear and out the other' so to speak and gone unnoticed.

As for the morning sky, there's enough moisture in the air to make the morning sky interesting. There's a lot of subtle hues this morning. 

 

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I just started in on reading more about the WASP pilots

and realize what what a clusterphuque that most of the program was. The only part that seems to have come out OK was the WASPs themselves that did a better job statistically than their male counterparts. The women themselves did and incredible job and deserved a lot more than they received. 

One thing I noticed is a cross country delivery by a WASP generally took a day less than it did by a lot of men. That was attributed to 'WASPs don't carry address books', meaning they didn't goof off and visit girlfriends, relatives, whoever along the way.

One of the readers here said it may make me angry the way there women were treated and angry in not the word for it. I'm livid.

I read where some mechanic that thought 'women don't belong in the cockpit' put sugar in her fuel tanks. The plane crashed and I believe the woman survived. I'm sure the author would have mentioned if she was killed, but still. That in my book was attempted murder.

Then there was the hotshot lemon rinsed stud that was most likely thinking with his richard and started flirting with a WASP in midair and caused a collision. The woman's plane augered in and I think she was too stunned to hit the silk because afterwards they found her canopy was still latched. She didn't stand a prayer.

OK. I probably could have lived to some extent with the hotshot pilot crap but what really irks me to no end is the hotshot got off scot-free and it was glossed over with the 'boys will be boys' attitude.

Both of these people (and probably a lot more) should be getting out of Leavenworth maybe this Tuesday of next year. What bull$hit!

Actually in terms of man hours spent and so on and so forth the program really wasn't profitable in one sense. Generals, colonels and other ranking officers seemed too stupid to know what to do with them even though a 72 year old man 75 years later does. You leave them alone and let them do their job.

The question as to militarizing them kept popping up and Congress got involved and when that happens. They more often than not screw up everything they touch. An example of this is that in 1942 we lost 3 submarines to the Japanese. It was attributed to Japanese depth charges being too weak and set to a shallow setting. 

Enter some dopey congressman that said that out loud in Congress and by early 1943 the Japanese had sunk 6 of our submarines.

Quick fix. Leave them Civil Service and give them the pay, allowances, base priviliges, and the assimulated rank of a 1LT and call it good. Civil Service would have served to keep them out of the military and not subject to all the bull$hit that comes with it. Then on 3 Sept 45 had them declared veterans so as to give them a GI bill.

You just know that bigger than $hit that general officers (and a few pompous colonels) would have tried to scoop the attractive women to be their personal pilots although there was a fix for that one, too. I suppose they could have sent out a memo to all flag officers that if they even thought about it they would be reduced to their permanent rank (where applicable) and sent to some far flung remote miserable hell-hole outpost to count mess kits for the rest of the war. The bottom of the memo saying "THIS MEANS YOU."

The woman didn't just deliver airplanes. Some of them towed targets which was risky business because the shooters were using live ammunition to shoot at the targets with. A number of planes got hit. I have no idea of casualties but I read some were hit by errant rounds.

Other women towed gliders, some delivered cargo and a handful were trained to dogfight and were used as sparring partners by their male counterparts. I can imagine how that one worked out. I can just picture Joe College, hotshot pilot, lady killer and captain of the Hometown State College football team slinking back to the barracks after having just had his fanny waxed upstairs by a 105 pound little bubbly skinny, freckle-faced redhead tomboy with a big smile and a mouthful of teeth. Poor baby.

At one point early on after it's development a lot of men were leery as hell to fly the then new B-29. Quick fix. Dorthea Johnson and Dora Struthers were sent by Hap Arnold and trained by Paul Tibbets  to fly one to Alfamogordo and landed with a large crowd attending. The grumbling stopped instantly.

I believe Paul Tibbets used these women for other Manhatten Project related things. 

I can now see why Jackie Cochran convinced a black woman to withdraw her application. In the context of the times and circumstances Jacke was right in doing so because she already had her hands full fighting sexism and adding racism to the pot would have probably been the end of the entire program.

I would imagine that in 1943 that delivering an airplane to the deep south would not be an enjoyable experience for a black woman, either. There were places where German POWs could eat but black GI's were not. Jim Crow was the rule there. Even the army was segregated.

The women themselves did a better than incredible job but the way the program and the women were treated is a real black eye to our nation's history.

The more I read, the more I wonder how we managed to win WW2 with all the politics, infighting, incompetence and backstabbing that went on until one realizes that WW2 wasn't won by a professional army. It was won by citizen-soldiers that were pissed off at being there and wanted to get it done and over with so they could go home and get along with their lives.

On the home front it was won by our 'anything for a buck' businessmen and a lot of hardworking people in the defense industry. Fully a third of these were women that took off their aprons and left the kitchen for the defense plants. Rosie traded her spatula for a rivet gun.

FWIW I bought 3 books on eBay about the WASP program and only about 1/3 of the way through the first one (Clipped Wings) and already I'm pissed off.  

  

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One of the things about having a pea gravel driveway is that

you always seem to have to deal with pebbles being tracked all over hell. It's astonishing how they seem to show up everywhere. Hard soled flip flops seem to be the best footwear to keep from tracking pea gravel.

You really have to keep after things and it's a nuisance. A blacktop or poured concrete driveway is a lot easier to maintain and deal with on a day to day basis. You can just blow it off with a leaf blower and every couple of years when it starts to pick up black mold just spray it with bleach and if necessary pressure wash it. Actually I think concrete is the best. Blacktop tends to crack faster than concrete which will last practically forever if you do the prepwork and bed it properly.

Still, women tend to make choices based on appearance and to be fair, the pea gravel has a better curb appeal. 

I suppose that if I designed a house it would probably be a lot easier to take care of. I've posted my idea of a bathroom here before, a fiberglass drop-in unit with a tub, toilet, sink, pressure washer, soap dispenser and a floor drain. (I wonder if there's a market for that in that people would actually buy them.)

I will say I have cleaning the tub and surrounding tile down to a fine art. The evening before I spray the whole damned thing, tile, tub, fixtures down with orange Zep degreaser and leave one of those car wash type sponges on the sink.

The next morning when shower time rolls around I jump in and give the whole thing a wipedown followed by another wipedown with plenty of clear water and take my shower. 

On rare occasions the bottom ot the tub might not be brand new looking so I cover it with that blue toilet bowl cleaner and let it set a while. Then it gets a quick scrubbing and a good rinse and it makes the whole damned thing look brand new again.

Update: I'm spending part of the day shoveling out the house to put half of the gravel back in the driveway.

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"Your cell phone is a tracking device, you know." said some World Class genius.

"Oh, hell. I've know that for years. Any time I want to rob a bank or go and whack someone I leave mine taped under a pew at St. Ann's," I replied.

His jawdropped in shock which tells me that the world gets stupider by the day. 

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People are suckers for just about anything that comes down the pike.

You can sell a lot of them just about anything if you market it as being for thair own safety.

The other big thing is that most people go along with allowing the system to take someone else's rights away.

Someone said somehing about how a certain religion should be banned. The usual culprits of stupidity agreed. After all, it wasn't their religion on the chopping block. Why bother?

They always seem to forget one thing. If you give the powers that be the authority to ban one religion then you have given them the power to ban their eligion a little futher on down the pike.

Same holds true with firearms and everything else. If you give the powers that be the authority to ban one type of firearm you give them the power to ban them all.

Of course the marketing ploy commonly used it that it's for their own safety.

Seat belt laws are a pretty good example. 

Seat belts save lives. That's petty much a fact. We know this. People shoud wear seat belts.

However, making it legally mandatory is a crock because your safety is your business. How one makes themself secure is their responsibility and We, The People don't need a whole lot of help from the Nanny State.

Yet a not too many people raised cain over it. They just went along with it like a bunch of sheep.

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Over the years the VFW and the American Legion have pulled some pretty ignorant $hit.

Back in the 70s and early 80s I was getting reports from Vietnam veterans about getting shabby treatment from the WW2 guys.

"The tours were a year! Big deal! I was overseas for three years! You didn't do squat!"

That sort of thing.

They also tried to block legislation to keep Merchant Mariners and WASP pilots from getting veteran's status which they certainly deserved.

About 15 years ago I got into it with a WW2 vet that called merchant seamen a bunch of cowards and I set him straight pointing out that the US Merchant Marine suffered a higher casualty rate then any of the services did.

He countered with "Some of them rifle companies took 80% casualties!"

"When a ship got torpedoed on the Murmansk or Archangel run the whole crew died, and that, my friend, is 100% casualties." I shot back and then pointed out survival rates for torpedoed sailors and a few other things.

For years if you were not in Double you Double you two, the big one or maybe Korea  you were treated like a red headed stepchild.

Granted this has changed over time but it's worth mentioning.

Oh yeah, then there was Captain Frank Parker, USA. He was involved in a heated discussion over the ownership of an Italian monastary called Monte Cassino and a few other minor scuffles He suffered silently with PTSD that went undiagnosed for decades. Frank was a pretty notable exception and a real scrapper and defender of veterans, period.

He defended them with a sense of tact that one does not see too much of these days. The term 'bull in a china shop' comes to mind.

I was not there but I heard that someone griped that the Vietnam vets served only a year's tour and he had spent three years overseas. Frank tactfully answered "Yeah, and you spent the whole three years in England sitting on your fat ass and filling out paperwork." Then he went on to say that a lot of Vietnam veterans spent WELL over 300 days in combat during that year they served. He pointed out that damned few of them spent that much combat time during the entire war and the fact that most of them never saw combat.

That shut a lot of people up and I'm sure things changed at least at that post. I'm proud to have had Captain Frank as a friend of mine.

I would imagine that members of the 442nd RCT faced a certain amount of crap in various remote areas here and there but I'm pretty sure they were met with open arms in Texas where they are heroes for relieving a TXNG unit that was surrounded. I say this because there's always one dope that doesn't get the word.

I'm sure both of these organizations have changed a lot but it's only fair to point out that while they have done a lot of good over the years that have had their moments over the years.

Actually almost all organizations have.

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Kent State shootings 53 years later from an old man's point of view.

In 1970 four students were shot to death and 9 injured at a protest at Kent State University. I remember it well as a teenager and a couple of months later I talked to a chick that had been on scene at the time. She was still somewhat in shock over it.

The whole thing was a real mess. The OHNG had fired on members of the student body, killing 4 and wounding others.

Now let's look at it after my hot irish temper has had 53 years to sort out a few things...like who's responsible.

Lets look at the OHNG (Ohio National Guard) for a minute or two.

It was 1970 and the OHNG was armed with WW2 Garands. Not M-14s, not M16a1s, but leftover WW2 junk. The issue here is not how they were armed but why were they issued junk? My guess is that in basic training they qualified with either the (newer) M 14s or maybe even the (then) state of the art M-16a1s. 

What this tells me is money was the issue here. They had no money for equipment and training. 

Let's throw in a few more things from the time frame. The National Guard didn't deploy to Vietnam and to a lot of people was a pretty slick way to get out of going to Vietnam and having their cans shot off. Draftees served two years and stood a damned good chance of being sent to Vietnam. National Guardsmen served 6 years but didn't deploy. They owed basic training, a weekend a month and two weeks of 'summer camp' annually. Sure it was a pain in the ass but the alternative was probably worse.

Of course, with no money for training it probably degenerated to hanging around a damned barracks drinking beer every night followed by the Annual Summer Camp Bender, meaning they got no realistic training. 

After all, the money for training was being spent wholesale in Vietnam. So much that LBJ plundered the Social Security fund to finance that war. 

Bottom line: In this corner wearing the white trunks we have the emotionally supercharged student body. In the other, wearing the black trunks we have the semi-trained OHNG. Throw in a couple of second lieutenants fresh out of OCS that thought they were doing the right thing and what can ever have possibly gone wrong?

I really have a hard time condemning a bunch of kids in the OHNG that didn't have the proper training and discipline to do the job. Had they been trained regulars or even well trained Guardsmen the whole protest would have most likely been a nothing burger.

That again the student body doesn't have clean hands, either. The instant the first rock was thrown at the NG they dirtied their hands. They were asking for trouble.

On the other hand, a well trained unit would not have flustered. 

I don't know who fired the first shot but my guess is it was some panicky dumbass poorly trained kid running around with the safety off and a finger on the trigger. Maybe he knee jerked after getting hit with a rock, maybe he tripped. Hell, maybe he was an asshole and fired intentionally but the flurry of shots fired was a knee jerk reaction because they thought the order to open fire had been given.

At the time I was appalled at the conduct of the OHNG because I naturally assumed they were regular soldiers that just opened up on the kids for no good reason. As an old man that's sifted through the information I've found over the years things have gotten clearer and dimmer. Mainly clearer. I've been able to look at things and access the information with less emotion as time passed.

Where does the blame actually lay?

I'd have to say it's both parties. Throwing rocks at poorly trained armed men is an excellent recipe for getting shot at. Throwing rocks is deadly force and legitimately can be defended with by deadly force. You do so at your own risk. It was a sad case of when a$$holes collide. The whole sorry mess is nothing more or less than an unwanted by-product of the Vietnam War. The blame goes straight to the top. I'll hand that to LBJ who escalated it and handed it off to Richard Nixon.

The interesting part of it is the irony. A lot of the same members of the OHNG were in OHNG uniform for the same reason the students were protesting. They didn't want to get sent to Vietnam.

======================================

This in no way is a slight to those that served in Southeast Asia during that period. It is simply an observation of an old man that lived through the period. 

To our Vietnam veterans, stand proud.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

LBJ proudly wore a Silver Star that was issued to him when he got sent to the Pacific. I believe it was issued to him by FDR.

Several years ago I researched it and found out that he did in fact come under fire under interesting circumstances. 

The pilot of the airplane he was in wrote a statement that I read saying that the pilot was going over a Japanese held island that had ineffective anti aircraft fire that could not get up high enough to hit them. Apparently it was a short cut they took because they knew it was reasonably safe to do so. For some odd reason, pilots tend to avoid accurate anti aircraft fire. 

LBJ was looking out the window and asked what the black puffs were. They told him n was ineffective anti aircraft fire and he went into a total panic screaming at him to get the hell out of there.

A couple of years ago when I wanted to look it up again it seems to have mysteriously disappeared. Paging Charlie Chan. Charlie Chan, pick up the red phone. We have a mystery for you to solve.

Take that any way you want. 

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WASP pilots part 2

I do not know why I am making a post on this subject but I am. Actually I do. I was surfing the web looking for something aviation related and ran into an article about Hazel Ying Lee, a WASP pilot of Chinese descent during WW2. She was ferrying an airplane that was forced down in a wheat field and chased by a pitchfork wielding farmer that thought the Japanese. Having seen the movie '1941' I can see the humor of it.

 She is reported to be a 'fly anything and go anywhere' type of pilot. She was later killed in a Montana airplane crash caused by bad weather and confusion in the control tower. She suffered a mid-air collision and succumbed to her injuries two days later. 

Incidentally her brother was KIA at about the same time in Europe and her parents had a damned hard time getting her and her brother buried in the white section of the cemetary. (Refusing them was just plain wrong.)

That led me to opening another thing on one Sylvia Clayton. It posted her eulogy which began with this: 

Sylvia Dahmes Clayton On November 12, 2011 Sylvia Dahmes Clayton, WASP Class 43-5, climbed into the P-51 she so dearly loved and left the bonds of this earth soaring into the sun. 

I admit I kinda welled up when I read that. There was also a short video of her flying a Cessna at 91 years old. It is said she left her walker on the tarmac to take to the skies.

The program made a lot of sense in a time where women were generally delegated to the kitchen. While the American public would have gone ape $hit over sending women into combat having women ferry airplanes and tow targets made a lot of sense as it freed up a lot of men for combat duty. Look at it as an extension of Rosie the Riveter.

Actually it started off as two programs but shortly merged into one.  Jackie Corcoran, a self made woman that later became the first woman to punch a hole in the sky that got some of her training from Chuck Yeager was in charge of training.

While the program wasn't completely snow white, they had Asians and Hispanics in it, one black applicant was turned down by Corcoran because she felt that predjudice toward women was bad enough to deal with without adding skin color to it.  Looking at it in the context of the times I can certainly see her point. You have to remember that we are talking about 1943 and not 2024. The woman's name was Janet Bragg and she managed to make a career of some sort in aviation, retiring in 1965 with about 2000 hours of flight time.

One woman say combat. She was giving someone a lesson at Pearl Harbor at preciesly the wrong time on 7 Dec, 1941. When she figured out what was happening she made a fast emergency landing and she and her student jumped out and ran as a Japanese Zero strafed them and the airplane. (He missed both of them)

Other than that, none of them saw combat and they were restricted to CONUS.

Anyway, it was interesting digging through aviation history and finding out little tidbits here and there about people that followed their passion. In this case women back in the Dark ages that wanted to enter a male dominated field. 

When you think about it for a minute I'd have comfortably flown with any one of them because they were checked out to the same standard as their male counterparts and in many cases held to a higher standard because they had to overcome predjudice.

These days over the past several years I've been carted all over the country in various aircraft and encountered a few woman pilots and thought nothing of it. The last one I flew with I spoke with at DTW. Interesting woman and she had learned to fly 'the hard way' meaning she gave lessons, hauled freight and finally got into a regional airline and worked her way into the major leagues. IIRC (I may be wrong) she was flying for Delta when I met her.

Quite some time ago I watched a special on WASP pilots and there was one that was still active in aviation at a very ripe old age. IIRC she was in some program giving underprivileged kid flight lessons which I can see the point of why they were doing it. Maybe I'll get into that one later.

Anyway, someone asked her what her favorite airplane was and halfway through the question she interrupted the questioner and answered "P-51 Mustang!"

I can sure see that because pilots always want to fly the biggest and fastest airplane there is and this provided these pilots their dreams.

These women were not a part of the military, the WASP pilots were civilians as were members of the Military Airlift Command. Much later the WASPs got veteran status. Looking at things, a lot of them wanted to be commissioned as pilots but from my point of view, they probably had it better as civilians.

I would imagine that had they been commissioned that a number of them would have been scooped up by ranking officers to be their personal pilots to show off with and spent their careers bored to tears. MAC pilots were civvies, also and because they were civvies were not prone to anywhere close to the military crap they would have been had they been servicemen. 

In fact the logisticians wanted them to stay civilian just so they couldn't be shanghaii'd into military chores by ranking officers. I can picture some poor bastaard that had flown all over hell and was finally getting a good night's sleep only to be roused by some horse's ass colonel that wanted him to go out and pick up cigarette butts because 'the General's coming!'.   

God only knows what kind of crap those women would have had to deal with had they been active military.

As I write this I recall seeing something in the SF Bay area memorializing Maggie Gee, another Chinese WASP. It's fuzzy to say the least and it may have been a pronze plaque somewhere or maybe a picture in SFO or OAK. For the life of me I swear I've seen something but I can't remember what. Truth is, when when I was going or coming to and from work I was pretty preoccupied.

Here's a picture of Libby Gardener and she sure looks like a cool chick that loves what she's doing.

 

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I wonder what is going on with the mail

because I have been trying to chase down a few QSL cards from overseas that have been mailed months ago.

Italy and Croatia come to mind. 

The UK seems to have things in my hands in about a week, ten days when I get a card from a UK QSL manager. 

Years ago I got a card from an Italian ham I worked there and it took quite some time. Both of us were curious and had swapped emails.

I forgot how long it took but she said she didn't get mine for about 2 month and that she mailed it the day after she got it. It took about the same amount of time for hers to arrive.

I've got Iran in the log and he has an Italian QSL manager so the card is due to come here from Italy.

The other card is confirming Samoa and is coming from the Croatian ham that reports he sent me a card s couple months ago

Both of these people say they have resent at no cost to me a couple of days ago when I emailed them. We shall see what we shall see.

As far as dishonesty goes, the ham community is a fairly small one and word gets out when someone comes along and tries to pull a fast one. They get outed pretty quickly. Odds are very heavy those guys are on the up and up.

I've heard that a number of DXpedition groups are slow but come through.

About the only people I have heard that don't come through are the so-called Rebel DXpedition Group. They're reportedly halfway decent about confirming electronically through LoTW but not good about sending out cards.

Anyway, we shall see what happens.

&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&

In othe sad news I just got word that S57DX, Slavko Celarc of Slovenia is now a Silent Key and has passed recently.

Slavko and his family members built a damned good station and were on the air constantly and contributed a lot to the ham community.

The ham community got a lot smaller with his passing.

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H44WA (Solomon Islands) just confirmed.

I just got a QSL card from the Solomons, Guadalcanal.

It's a pretty good card and came fairly quickly which was a pleasant surprise. I worked them in late November and the card arrived yesterday. Under three months is pretty good for a major DXpedition.

One of the kids I grew up with had a father that lost an arm there back in '42.

My first Marianas QSL card came from a Japanese ham that had set up shop in Tinian about 10 feet away from the bomb pit Enola Gay landed on.

I've worked a number of those Pacific islands we fought over and for some reason I can't seem to figure out the bulk of them were Japanese hams on vacation.

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That didn't last long. The couch around the corner.

Which has bugged me for two days because it's a natural. Some things write their own story.

A neighbor is getting rid of a couch and has it on the side of the road with a 'free' sign on it. 

My mind went straight into overdrive and as is often the case I realized with any luck I could use it to create a pretty good $hitstorm. I resisted the temptation for a day or so. Finally temptation got the better part of me so I took my wheelbarrow, dumped my laundry in it and threw a couple empty booze bottles on top and capped it with a sleeping bag and headed to the couch after dark.

I tossed my sleeping bag on the couch, climbed in and sacked out.

The plan was to pass myself off as a homeless person sacked out in my well established neighborhood and hope someone snapped a picture of it and posted it on Nextdoor. I knew they'd never see my face if I slept facing the back of the couch.

I saw a potential epic $hitstorm in the making which is quite entertaining. A lot of suburbanites need exercise and I figured this would give them the opportunity to get a lot of it by jumping to conclusions, flying off the handle, and running off at the keyboard.

I'd get to see a lot of people out themselves and watch the NIMBYs go stark staring bonkers. Not in my back yard! The usual assortment of idiots that babble about how proud they are to live in a sanctuary city and then go ape when their sanctuary city gets overrrun by illegals. Or demand that the government opens homeless shelters and then go to pieces when they decide to open one half a block from their house. You know the type.

So I'm trying to sack out and inside a couple minutes the homeowner comes out and asks me what I'm doing. He had bagged me on a Ring doorbell camera. When he saw my face he recognized me and I explained that I was hoping to stir things up a bit. I told him that someone would probably snap a picture and post it on social media and there would be hell to pay.

He laughed like hell and told me to carry on. Besides, maybe someone would spot the 'free' sign on the couch and cart it off.

Sleep came rather slowly and a few cars here and there passed by. The cars headed down the street moved at normal speed likely because they were on the other side of the road and didn't notice me. 

A couple of the cars headed up the street slowed down so I knew I had been seen. Slowly I dozed off but not for long. "Hey! Wake up!" I heard.

I knew who it was instantly. It was some guy with a gun  and a badge and I actually recognized the voice. When I looked over at him I recognized the face. I'd chatted with him a couple of times before in a convenience store.

"Hey! I know you! You live around the corner. Wife kick you out or something?" he asked.

"Nah. Just catching a nap here for a few hours because I'm hoping someone gets outraged, snaps a picture and posts it on social media as a homeless. Nobody is likely to recognize my face so they'll panic over 'The Invasion of the Homeless' and the ensuing $hitshow should be entertaining." I said back.

"Yeah, it probably would but it's probably be a pain for the dispatcher because we'd likely get calls over it from panicky neighbors. Please do us both a favor. Just go home and get a good night's sleep." he said.

Then he looked at me. "You're the guy that asked the neighbors to keep quiet the morning after the 4th of July so you could sleep in after being up all night shooting off fireworks." he said.

"Guilty as charged," I replied. "For the record I was sitting on an oil barge in San Francisco when I posted that. I was bored at work that night."

His mouth ran away with him. "San Francisco, huh? That's a pretty good alibi. That was a pretty good one," he said. "A couple of us got a pretty good laugh and a couple people wanted us to bust you for illegal fireworks!"

As I was rolling up my sleeping bag the cop looked at the couch. "This one's in pretty good shape," he said. "I have a cousin that just finished school and moved out and is setting up an apartment that might be able to use it."

"I've got a pickup and if she'll pay for the gas I use I'll help her out by delivering it," I said.

"I'll let you know," he said.

Actually I don't think he was serious about the couch because cops generally don't like other people's junk. It kind of goes with the territory because they know what kind of animals a lot of people are. 

I packed up immediately and headed home pushing the wheelbarrow. The cop was just so damned pleasant about it there was no way I could refuse him. Then again, we got a pretty good department.

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