Busy Week.....memorial wise.

First off, I'd like to thank my dad for his service in the South Pacific during WWll. He's full of good, but horrifying war stories....like..they'd take all their empty bottles, put them in the bomb bay of a B-25, fly up over Japanese villages. Then they'd open the bomb bay doors. The bottles would fall out, and make a whistling sound as they fell. The Japanese villagers would come out of their villages, Japanese soldiers would come out and look for where this strange noise was coming from....And P-51 Mustangs would come along behind and cut everybody down. The small, mean part of my coal black heart wants to laugh...but the bigger part of me wants to cry. I'm pretty sure Japanese villagers had nothing to do with Pearl Harbor, but some of them for sure were pro Tojo. The Japanese soldiers among them were legitimate targets. No way to tell the difference when you're flying low and fast and strafing at 425 MPH in your P-51. And I'm looking at it with lenses that are 50 years down the road. I have the jacket and the patch he's wearing in this photo, along with other decorations and medals.

They'd pay the pilots of B-25's (in cigarettes and cash)to take beer up to 30,000 feet to get it nice and cold. The landing strips were lined with grass thatched huts on stilts. The huts were occupied by prostitutes. Easy and convenient. The guys who painted the pretty ladies on the noses of bombers used housepaint, and they were paid for their artistry in beer and ciggies. My dad tells me that he'd commonly see a squadron of planes fly into thunderclouds......and not come out. He'd see pieces of planes fall out of the bottom of the cloud, though. The plane pictured above was my Dad's second plane, a B-25. Look at the girls on that girl! The first one he was in was shot down. While he was in it.

The thing I hate most about modern warfare is that now the warriors tend to hide themselves amongst civilians. It's a despicable, completely amoral practice. We're seeing it now in Iraq and Afghanistan. On our side and the other side. We saw it in Central America in the '80's. The Sandinistas are not my heroes, Liberal though I am. They did the same kind of shit. They'd launch mortars from poor neighborhoods, and the other side would go "right back at cha!" Result...lots of dead civilians, not so many dead warriors. Civilians used to be off limits....

The wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald happened 30 years ago on November 10th. I know...I hate the song. It's turgid purple poesy.......but it is eerie, what the guitar plays. I'm all for eerie, and having the hair on the back of my neck raised.

Internet fun. Go ahead...type your message to the world in 4 lines on a post it! Then post it!

Stop motion fun from Plan B. I love stop motion stuff.

Since gardening season is over, I will free myself to talk about much less important things...like what's going on in the world. I have to have something to occupy my time, and my cheapest of the cheap cable package just doesn't do it. I've got Dan half convinced to do an upgrade. When that happens, I'll just sink into the abyss that is "What Not To Wear", or the History Channel. When I want to hear intelligent news that's not aimed at the lowest common denominator, I turn to the BBC. Not Fox. And right now, I don't have access to my BBC, which makes me a bit cranky. Because it makes me realise that the media in this country is shit. Not because it's too liberal or too conservative, but because it's shit. Lazy, patronising shit.

What really frightens me about America right now is people under 35 who are rock ribbed neo-conservatives. Malkin and her ilk, etc, etc. So young, and so completely bereft of a conscience. Their mantra is "I hate France." They dream of an American Empire. Their societal ethos is called Social Darwinism. They worship at the altar of Big Business and the "Free" Market. They hate Welfare, unless it's Corporate Welfare. They tend to love Ronald Regan. The man who turned the mentally ill out on the streets. There is nothing conservative about them, what they are is proto-facists.

I don't believe that my father and his co-horts fought and died for The United States of the Fortune 500.

Blogs I make sure to read every day:

Sense of Soot
Daily Kos

And global warming is not happening.