Month: October 2024

Turning the Page

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The countdown continues.  As I write this there are twenty-four days until the election.  From my point of view, I am desperate for this thing to be over.  After November Fifth I hope never to see Joe Scarborough, Rachel Maddow or any other poisonous talking head for the rest of my natural life.  My intent is to occupy my time with things that can have a positive impact on me and my local world.

Now it may be that from time to time I may have some reason to consider what the two national parties are doing as it impacts me.  That’s only reasonable.  But all of my efforts will be directed toward avoiding the policies of the federal and state governments that negatively impact my life.  I don’t delude myself that I can completely negate these deleterious influences.  But I intend to use whatever resources and logical analysis I can bring to bear to improve the way I and my friends and family live inside this place.

I look at this as a shift from a passive strategy to an active approach.  Instead of stressing over an election that I have absolutely no control over and which may be completely rigged from the get go, I can concentrate on my own actions and how they will impact the things I identify as in some sense controllable.  And that shift from passive to active I find very exciting.  For way too many years I have been fixated on reliving the experience of Ronald Reagan capturing the imagination of the majority of Americans and trying to change the course America was on.  Probably the closest we ever came to that was when George W. Bush was given a mandate in 2004 by the American people.  And he squandered it.  Well, time is growing short.  I can’t wait for the country to return to a consensus.  That may take decades or maybe never happen at all.  For me direct action is the solution.

Of course, my actions will be small, limited in scope and based on my interests and talents.  I intend to spend my time writing.  I think I might be able to produce some entertaining stories.  I want them to reach a sizable audience so I have a lot to learn about marketing and other aspects of book selling.  Some of the things I’ve heard about how you have to write ten novels ahead of time so that you can release them, one a month, in order to trigger the Amazon algorithm that notices such things.  That seems insane.  You have to write a million words before finding out if your story will be seen by anyone.  There’s got to be a better way than that.  But anyway, that’s one of the things I have to find out about.

So, come on November Sixth.  Get here already.  Put an end to polls, debates, pundits, special reports, psychopathic snipers, CNN, MSNBC, 60 Minutes, Joe Biden’s presidency and every other scrap of this long stupid ordeal that has eaten up years of my life but hasn’t improved it one iota.  Let me move on with my life.

Update:

War Pig commented:

I voted yesterday. Early voting in person at the board of elections. A strange process this time. After validating my identity via military ID card, I signed in and watched as a ballot was printed off for me. I don’t like that. I voted and left. Now I can see how easily electronic-counted ballots can be faked. It goes into a reader machine and I have no way of knowing if it is read correctly. I use ink to fill in the bubble beside the candidate. But when read does the machine record my actual vote or is it set up to record the wrong candidate one out of, say, fifty times?

Hmmmm. Since the Clintons are related by marriage to Soros and a relative of Soros owns the company that makes and supplies software for the majority of voting machines, it gives me furiously to wonder.

Photog responds:

Since the debacle of 2020 I plugged into the local electoral process where I lived.  And what has changed surprised me.  Even in New England there has been an upswell of monitoring of such things as voter registration lists and fraud.  Will it make a difference?  Hard to say but there has been some scrutiny.

Culinary Justice

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Recently there have been multiple stories in the news about citizens that are in revolt against leftist incompetence and ideologically driven lunacy by the very leftist mayors and city councils that they themselves recently elected.  Chicago and Portland are the prime examples that have been in the news.  And that doesn’t even count New York where the FBI has finked on Mayor Eric Adams and has set him up to be convicted of bribery in the near future.  In fact, in his case, it seems that he’s being persecuted for not going along with federal leftist incompetence and ideologically driven lunacy (understand, flooding New York City with illegal alien felons).

Someone might think I’d be happy to see these citizens awakening from their stupor and embracing moderation and practical solutions to their problems.

Hah!

Places like Chicago, Portland, San Francisco and New York haven’t learned anything.  They will take a tiny step back from the abyss of leftist madness and then double down on it shortly after.  They’ll hire a left-wing moderate and then harangue this victim day in and out every time he tries to solve a problem.  They’ll discover racism, sexism and transphobia anytime realism intrudes on their make-believe vision of their city and its problems.

No, I’m not seeing their pain as a wake-up call for a return to sanity.  They can’t possibly return to something they’ve never experienced in their lives.  It would be like expecting Massachusetts to respond to an enormous Democrat produced state budget deficit by electing an actual conservative.  No, what they do is elect a RINO like Mitt Romney who works at producing fiscal restraint while being endlessly attacked for his “heartless” cuts in human services.  And as soon as the budget is back in decent order, they’ll kick him to the curb and find some blue haired wack-job to come in and start the whole cycle all over again.

No, I don’t care a bit what halfway measures the Leftists take to stave off bankruptcy and prevent their cities from being literally sacked and burned down by barbarians.  Truth be told I want them to be sacked.  My favorite fantasy is imagining Portland burned to the ground and all of its hipsters eaten by Haitian gangs who run out of dogs and cats.

That would be poetic justice.  More than that, I think it might be the only thing that could make the rest of the American leftists really sit back and think about their devotion to “the cause.”  I mean, there’s nothing like seeing your brethren char-broiled over an oil drum full of scrap lumber and munched on by the local gang lord to give someone a new perspective on what the reality of decolonization might look like personally.  Of course, to different people there could be a nuanced range of reactions.  After all there are urbanites that thrive on discovering new cuisine choices.  Afghan, Ethiopian, even Mongolian cuisines have each made a stir on the foodie scene.  Well, pulled long pork or blackened hipster just might be the next chic menu item.  Who knows.  For the well-heeled diner one day it might be possible to get Kim Kardashian Ham and Eggs.  Or Nancy Pelosi Jambalaya.  The mind boggles at the culinary possibilities.

Tom’s World – 10OCT2024 – Museum Aircraft – 5

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TomD

This is a series of photos, all taken at the US Naval Air Museum on base at NAS Pensacola, of US Naval frontline fighters made by Grumman Aircraft introduced to service between the years of 1935 to 1970.

In that short time, front line aircraft evolved from biplanes with open cockpits and a couple of .30 cal MGs as armament to jets at the edge of the atmosphere firing supersonic radar guided missiles from close to 100 miles away. Top speeds went from 260 MPH to 1,560 MPH and rate of climb from around 2,000 FPM (feet per minute) to around 50,000 FPM. State of the art evolved even faster if the 1950’s design F-4 is taken into account.

 

The subject of these pictures is US Naval frontline fighters originally introduced from 1935 to 1970.

 

F3: The only aircraft in this series not labeled a cat of some description. The F3 was introduced in 1935 and used as the basis of design for the much more successful and capable F4F. There might have been at least some F3’s around in the Navy at the start of WWII but not many.

 

F4F Wildcat: The Wildcat was the Navy’s frontline fighter through 1942 and until September 1943 when it was replaced by the F6F. The F4F’s main adversary was the Japanese Zero which outclassed the F4F in a number of aspects. The Navy pilots had to be incredibly brave to get into fights with a much superior fighter. Two things happened: First a mostly intact Zero was found on an Alaskan island, refurbished and intensively tested. A large Achilles heel for the Zero was discovered: in a dive at speed, the Zero’s ailerons froze and it could not maneuver, especially to the right. If you got into a fight with Zeros, dive away, don’t even try to mix it up, or you will die. The second leveling is a result of the Japanese decision to leave their pilots on frontline service until they died or were wounded beyond any possibility of further service. The Americans took their best pilots and shipped them back to become instructors. The Japanese entered the war with supply of the best combat pilots in the world. 18-20 months later of near constant combat atritted that supply to a fraction. By the 1944 Marianas “Turkey Shoot” there were nearly no well trained Japanese pilots still living and functional to face the hoards of well trained American pilots in their then new and far superior fighters.

SONY DSC

 

F6F Hellcat: Speaking of new and far superior fighters, The Hellcat and its contemporary, the F7 Corsair, would be that. The F6 Hellcat combined with the atritted Japanese skilled pilot pool certainly changed the dynamic of Pacific Theater air combat. The F4F shot down 5,600 Japanese aircraft with a kill to loss rate of 19:1. Admittedly, the average Japanese pilot in 1945 was not even a shadow of an equal to the pilot pool in 1941. Despite the competition of the US Corsair, the F6F was the numerically dominant US fighter in the theater until the end of the war.

 

F8F Bearcat: Bearcats were a stripped and lightened improvement on the F6, with significantly improved performance in the metrics of agility, climb and speed. A little too late though, they were just being introduced as the war ended. You still see racing versions of F8’s at Reno and other pylon racing events.

SONY DSC

 

F14 TomCat: F14’s of “Top Gun” fame were the frontline Naval fighter, replacing the F4 starting in 1970 until being retired with the last units leaving service in around 2006. They were heavy, gas hogs, maintenance heavy, complex, expensive but damned effective. It’s fighter replacement, the multirole F18, isn’t as effective as a pure fighter

 

Tom’s World – 09SEP2024 – Museum Aircraft – 1

Tom’s World – 18SEP2024 – Museum Aircraft – 2

Tom’s World – 25SEP2024 – Museum Aircraft – 3

Tom’s World – 02OCT2024 – Museum Aircraft – 4

10OCT2024 – Looking Around This Morning

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I’ve got a busy day today but I figured I’d look around at the news and see what was happening before heading out into the world.  and right now most of the news seems positive.

Hurricane Milton did some damage but for the most part it wasn’t the hell storm some had been warning.  Thank God.

But it looks like the Democrats are being pretty open about the fact that the numbers coming out of private polls are not good so good for Vice President Word Salad.

Halperin is a Leftie but he has been hosting a large relatively bi-partisan zoom call and he has tried to allow both sides to talk about what they see is happening in the race without the one-sided echo chamber hiding the truth.  He says the people in the know on both sides think it’s not going Kamala’s way.  Hmmm.  Sounds promising.

A Better Mousetrap

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Camera Girl is a courageous woman.  She will bravely rail against anyone who offends her sense of justice.  Unfortunately, she usually does this when it puts me in the firing line of whoever she is challenging or berating.  This can get a little dicey for me.

So, she has the heart of lioness, except when it comes to mice.  The poor girl is terrorized by the diminutive rodents.  Something about their tails fills her with horror.  And so, she wages a war of attrition against them in all the outposts of the Compound.  Specifically, the garage and the large shed that houses the yard equipment.  My own feeling is that areas outside of the house and its various attachments are outside of the jurisdiction of polite society and so a mouse or two more or less is not cause for alarm.  But she disagrees vehemently.  Part of the reason is that she has to go through the garage to bring the dogs to the fenced in areas she lets them out into at night.  And if the dogs sense that mice have been in the area, they become interested and this frightens her into thinking that one of Stuart Little’s relatives might make an appearance and trigger the dogs to catch and eat it.  For her this would be even worse than one running by her.

And so, she has taken to mining the garage and shed with mouse traps.  Interestingly, seeing a dead mouse in the snap trap is not frightening for her.  Once rendered inert, she discharges the traps at the edge of the pond and literally caws for Moe the Crow and Poe the Raven and their ancillary corvids to partake of the murine feast provided.  I find this to be one of her most eccentric rituals.

Anyway, a crisis has emerged.  A year or two ago we switched from the venerable wooden spring traps to a newfangled jaws-like version made of plastic.  She liked these better because they made it easier to release the dead mouse from the trap.  But recently these traps have begun failing.  Apparently, the mice were now able to extract the peanut butter that she baited the trap with, without the trap snapping.  She would come back from her trip to the shed, filled with a sense of dread and tell me this tale of woe.  The world turned upside down!

Because Camera Girl had never developed the knack for setting the older wooden traps I have, of course, been recruited to become the baiter of traps.  And also, I have been tasked with solving the mystery of the failed plastic traps.  And it has been implied that if I fail to diagnose the problem and correct it, I will have failed as a man, a husband, and an engineer.

O tempora, o mores!

So far, I have installed the wooden traps with the prescribed bait that was provided to me by Camera Girl.  That much have I done.  But I have only just begun to investigate a cause.  Could the traps be defective?  Could they have gotten rusty and thus less sensitive?  Might the peanut butter have become old and therefore easier to remove?

My mind has raced to encircle this mystery within a thicket of possible solutions.  But these are deep waters.  I cannot be too hasty.  A proper plan of attack is needed.  I’ll need a budget to purchase supplies, tools and instruments.  I’ll need a detailed schedule to properly scope the project and I’ll need a scapegoat in case the project is a failure.  Maybe one of the dogs.  Updates will follow but I felt this project was important enough to warrant an introductory post to benchmark the effort.

The single guys out there probably assume I’m suffering the beginnings of dementia.  The married men will probably understand that this is just one of the many accommodations a man makes to keep a wife happy.  And after all the expression, “Happy wife, happy wife,” Is not far from the truth.  But I do wish someone would invent a mousetrap with lasers.  It would make the who thing much more fun.

Update:

War Pig commented:

Mamaw used peanut butter in her traps as well, but when the diminutive rascals found out how to defeat that, she went to bacon grease. Mice, in Ohio at least, cannot resist bacon grease. Also the plastic traps tend to not give the same force as the wood-and-spring traps. A healthy mouse can get out of them and resist a broken neck due to their lack of dynage. Living on a farm meant constant vermin control. The little buggars aren’t stupid. We have to change out methods and baits from time to time. Thankfully, a generation of mice comes along a few times per year. So anything learned from the last generation is lost to the grandchildren.

Apology to TomD and the Site Viewers

photog Current Events, Guest Contributors, OCF, TomD ,

Due to an error by the webmaster (me), TomD’s latest post on military aircraft “Tom’s World – 10OCT2024 – Museum Aircraft – 5” was not published this morning as it should have been.

Instead it will appear tomorrow at 9am eastern time.

Please excuse this lapse.  I’ve been juggling a few too many chainsaws of late and it’s beginning to take its toll.

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