Monthly Archives: November 2007

There will always be an England

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I found this note on how the RAF used to arm their nuclear weapons to be charmingly English . . .

Newsnight reveals that RAF nuclear bombs were armed by opening a panel held by two captive screws – like a battery cover on a radio – using a thumbnail or a coin.

Inside are the arming switch and a series of dials which are turned with an allen key to select high yield or low yield, air burst or ground burst and other parameters.

The bomb is actually armed by inserting a cylindrical bicycle lock key into the arming switch and turning it through 90 degrees.

There is no code which needs to be entered or dual key system to prevent a rogue individual from arming the bomb, although RAF crews were supposed to always work in pairs if they were near the bomb or had the keys for the bomb.

Opening up the hatch with a coin – then using an allen wrench (for the love of mike) to adjust the darn thing – and then launching with a bicycle key – is a touch worthy of Monty Phython. Mary Poppins would appreciate the thriftiness demonstrated; Yanks would spend billions on a special key system from Boeing. The Brits just ran down to the hardware store one day and called it good.

Cross posted to Space For Commerce.

The Cowboy Way

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I never have quite understood the appeal of the cowboy, when it came to the whole western-frontier-nostalgia-gestalt. How on earth did that particular frontier archetype sweep all others before it, when it came to dime novels, movies and television shows… given that the classic “cowboy” functioned only in a very specific time period; say for about twenty years after the Civil War. Admittedly, the Western cattle industry seemed to be co-located with spectacular bits of scenery, and the final years of the frontier per se offered all kinds of interesting potential story lines, many of them guaranteed to thrill urban, eastern wage slaves living blamelessly dull lives… but still.

For the generic cowboy was a himself hired hand. Yes, indeed – working for wages as hard (or harder) than any store clerk or factory laborer, tending to semi-wild cattle – of all the domesticated animals only very slightly brighter than sheep. Your average cow is pretty much a functional retard. If if has had one functioning brain cell to rub against the other, all that would happen would be smoke trickling out of their ears. And, not to put too much of a fine point on it – herding cattle, even on horseback was unskilled labor in the 19th century. It was grueling, low-skill, low-paying labor, most often seasonable, and most intelligent and ambitious young sparks didn’t do it for a month longer than they needed to. It was the sort of work done these days by high-school kids and illegal aliens, mostly until better employment opportunities came along.

You have to wonder, especially when there were so many other truly heroic epic adventurers available to hang the hero worship on. How did the cowboy even begin to loom so large – especially when the cattle business (and it was a business!) didn’t really begin to thrive until all the excitement was practically over? What about the mountain men, living on their wits in the early days, alone among the variously tempered tribes of the Great Basin? And surely the miners in the various gold and silver booms – they worked just as hard at pretty mucky drudgery, for themselves in the earlies and for their employers later on. And what about my own personal favorites among the frontier archetypes, the wagon-train emigrants, setting out with their whole families along a two-thousand mile road through the empty lands? Stage drivers and teamsters were quite a bit more likely to have adventurous encounters with the lawless element, or particularly hostile Indians… although even the stereotype of the Western towns being particularly lawless falls down a bit in contemporary comparison to elements of big cities in the East. Why one particular line of work would inspire a century of dime novels, moves and television shows is enough to make you shrug your shoulders and say “que?!” to the camera, like Manuel in Fawlty Towers.

So how did all that glamour and mythic stature come to sprout from acres of Western cow pies? Damned if I know, although I can take some guesses. The popular press fairly exploded after the Civil War, creating a demand for tales of frontier adventure. Right time, right place; and it has often been noticed that the typical Western TV show or movie perpetuated ever since is more often set in about the 1865-1885s time frame. Telegraph and the transcontinental railroads are in place, the Indians are reserved (with sporadic exceptions necessary to the plot of the moment, of course) and all the little towns have wooden sidewalks and glass windows, suitable for a reckless cowboy to ride his horse down one and crash through the other. But still – a pretty limited visualization of the frontier west – surely there was more, even in the late 19th century for popular culture to fixate on?

I wonder if the attraction for the cowboy thing wasn’t based on a melding of one particular and very old archetype and a certain cultural folkway. The archetype was that of the independent horseman, the chevalier, the knight – able to go farther and travel faster than a person on foot. There was always a predilection in the West to look up to the man on a horse, to see them as beings a bit freer, a little more independent. The cowboy might be a paid laborer, but in comparison to man working in a factory, much more independent in the framing of his work day and much less supervised. And as was noted in the lively yet strangely scholarly tome “Cracker Culture”, the Scotch-Irish-Celtic-Borderer folkway which formed a substantial layer of our cultural bedrock rather favored herding barely domesticated animals (and hunting wild game) rather than intensive cultivation. Better a free life, out of doors and on horseback, rather than plodding along behind a plough, or stuck behind a workbench – even if it didn’t pay very much at all.

It is fascinating to go back to the roots of the cattle industry – as I am doing for the final volume of Adelsverein ( or “Barsetshire with Cypress Trees and a Lot of Sidearms”) – just to discover how very, very different it was from what has always been popularly presented. Owen Wister didn’t get the half of it.

Beautiful Wife’s Cranberry Chutney

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This is a recipe Beautiful Wife has been using for about 10 years. I know the holidays are coming when I start to smell this throughout the house.

Beautiful Wife’s Cranberry Chutney (Adopted from Father Pat’s Recipe and it may be exactly the same, but after 10 years, God only knows.)

4 Cups whole cranberries
1 2/3 Cup Sugar (Splenda works great for anyone cooking for a diabetic)
1 Tsp Fresh Ginger
½ Cup (1 Med) Chopped Onion
½ Cup Thinly Sliced Celery
½ Cup (1 Med) Apple (Peeled, Cored, Chopped)
1 Cup Seedless Raisins
1 Tblspn Ground Cloves
1 Cup Water

Combine cranberries, raisins, sugar, ginger, cloves and water in a large saucepan and bring to a boil. Stir frequently. This is a good time to prep/chop the onion, celery and apple. When cranberries start to pop/split, stir in onion, apple and celery. Bring back to a boil, then lower to a simmer for 15 minutes.

If canned in sterilized jars and properly sealed can be stored on pantry shelf for quite a long time. Otherwise, refrigerate. Serve as you would with cranberry sauce, use as jelly, or as a marinade. Good with any meat, not just turkey. Great as a topping for oatmeal or on crackers with cream cheese.

Venomous Kate posted her stuffing recipe too.

Here’s a question…why do southerners think that their stuffing is the “authentic” kind? Didn’t yankees start the whole Thanksgiving thing?

Other recipes welcome.

It’s About Time

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PHNOM PENH, Cambodia – The head of the Khmer Rouge’s largest and most notorious torture center appeared in court Tuesday in the first public session of the long-delayed U.N.-backed tribunal probing the regime’s reign of terror in the 1970s.

The 4-year regime of the Khmer Rouge resulted in 1.7million deaths. Pol Pot, the dictator responsible for it, died in 1998 without ever being brought to trial.

I have no idea what delayed the trials for 30 years, but I’m glad to see that they’re finally going forward.

Source

Things About Myself That Surprise Even…Myself

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When the opening to the Bowie/Queen classic, “Under Pressure” begins…I secretly hope that it’s “Ice-Ice Baby.” I’m not proud of that.

I don’t find the the new vampire-detective drama “Moonlight” half as annoying as I thought I would. I mean, it’s no “Angel” but it doesn’t suck…and yes, I meant to say that.

I’m so not ready for the holidays…seriously…I think we had some silly idea that we’d have more money after I retired and we’d be able to get all new decorations. We might have a tree this year.

I’m really happy we have a fireplace…almost giddy especially on really cold nights.

I hate to admit this because I always have taught my airmen and the folks in the classes I’ve taught, “The first thing you do when troubleshooting anything electrical is to check your power supply.” Our clothes dryer was spinning but not drying…no heat. Did I break down and find my electrical probe to see if it was the outlet or perhaps the fuses? Of course not. I replaced everything in the dryer first. My son-in-law found the “so burnt it disintegrated in his hand” 20 amp fuse that was the real problem. I’m not supposed to beat myself too much over this, but jeez, I feel like a schmuck.

I’ve discovered from hearing recordings of my customer service calls at work, I say, “Ummmmm…” far too often. I haven’t done that in years…decades even.

I’d rather spend a Saturday afternoon cooking for my family and then spend the evening sitting around watching movies on DVD than to go out and DO something else.

So it’s strictly one step at a time for Bangladesh

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Bangladesh has been hit by a cyclone

DHAKA, Bangladesh (CNN) — More than 1,000 people have died in Bangladesh after a devastating tropical cyclone ripped through the western coast of the country, and the toll is expected to rise, a government spokesman tells CNN.

15,000 people hurt, 1,000 missing – it will be worse before it gets better. Villages are flattened, wells poisoned by salt water flooding, crops ruined .. ugh. Puts natural disasters in the West in perspective, hunh?

Oh and the fleet will be ashore soon

U.S. military officials said Friday that Defense Secretary Robert Gates was ready to dispatch Navy vessels carrying 3,500 Marines to the region to help in recovery efforts.

It is expected that the USS Kearsarge and USS Wasp would move from the Gulf of Oman. The USS Tarawa recently left Hawaii, and it could go to Bangladesh as well, officials said.

Semper Fi – again. I’m sure the Army barracks we used at the airfield in Dhaka in 1991 are still there, as are the spiffy flush toilets connected to the open sewers.   Watch your step at night, is all I can say – in a country that is pool-table flat the sewage doesn’t flow so much as amble.

Subject line hat tip
Cross posted to Space For Commerce.

Still Waltzing Madly

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So Philippa Gregory still has nothing to fear in sales competition from me as the author of “To Truckee’s Trail”, as I have to sell another one million, nine-hundred thousand plus copies before I can even think of buying that tastefully renovated castle in J.K.Rowlings’ neighborhood. I can’t make out from either Amazon’s stats or Booklockers’ how many – if any copies have sold in the last couple of months, because the book distributor Ingram has a four-month lead anyway. And individual POD books like mine are so expensive, relatively speaking, to print when they are done in runs of fifteen or twenty, rather than fifteen or twenty hundred thousand copies at a whack – that bookstores usually can’t get them at a 40% discount… which is a whole nother ball of wax, and the reason that the big-box-bookstores are an un-crackable nut for us independent authors. Thank god for the small local bookstores: I have a book-signing event planned tentatively at Berkman Books in Fredericksburg in December, and another one January 16th at The Twig in Alamo Heights. And my Number One fan, Mom, might be able to twist the arms of her literary friends in Escondido and Valley Center, and schedule something for me over Christmas week. Discouragingly, it still takes months to get reviews, though. Apparently not everyone can read a book as fast as I can.

Still, at least independent authors can get published now – they can get their books out there without having to pass through the gates of the literary industrial complex. There are other options than paying a bomb of money to a printer and stashing crates of copies in their garage. There is another way to find an audience, as independent musicians and independent movie-makers have already discovered. I have gotten together with a handful of other writers to brain storm some marketing strategies; all of us are either small-press or POD and totally exasperated with the current paradigm. There must be a better way for our books to reach interested readers. Without very much more ado, we formed the Independent Authors Guild, put up a website and a discussion group, published a newsletter (which will be a monthly) and began recruiting more members. So far we’re still working out future moves, and putting in sweat equity rather than a lot of cash. Check out the website… my work! (Not the logo, though – someone else did that, and it’s a book, not a pair of panties!)

Oh, and I scored a stack of books for reviews that I have to read and then write about. I promise I will post some more of that good bloggy ice cream here.

And I am four chapters in to the final volume of the “Adelsverein” trilogy – or “Barsetshire with Cypress Trees and a Lot of Sidearms”, and need to do some very specific research on 1) how to harness a team of draft horses to a wagon, and what driving them involved -diagrams would help enormously and 2) 19th century prothesis available for a below-elbow arm amputation. Does the BAMC medical museum have a collection, I wonder?

232 Reasons Why the Marine Corps Kicks Ass,

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232 Reasons Why the Marine Corps Kicks Ass, from the Marine Corps Times.

Cherry picking, we have …

2. Civilians have to find time to go to the gym. Marines get paid to go.

4. There’s no such thing as an “ex” Marine.

8. “Every Marine Into the Fight.”

18. The lance corporal underground.

22. “No better friend, no worse enemy.”

23. Typhoons approaching Okinawa often spark islandwide beer runs

26. 10 rounds from the 500-yard line.

36. Running cadences that mention napalm. And Eskimos.

55. As if ranks that include the words “master” and “gunnery” aren’t intimidating enough on their own, the Corps uses them both. At once.

60. Marines predicted the WWII campaigns in the Pacific years earlier and prepared for the inevitable. So when a Marine says, “Hey, I’ve been thinking .” perhaps you should take notes.

61. Give a Marine some free time, and he’ll rip down your dictator’s statue.

83. Chuck Norris was in the Air Force. Steve McQueen was a Marine.

90. Arty guys who do civil affairs. They blow it up, then they fix it.  Circle of life.

140. Gunnery sergeants. Don’t know the answer? Ask the gunny. Need something? Ask the gunny. In trouble? Avoid the gunny.

153. Shirt stays. Or garters. Whatever you call them, they’re a triple whammy, keeping your shirt tucked, your socks up and removing all that unwanted leg hair.

199. “8th and I.” Ten bucks says you have no idea where the Army chief of staff lives. Commandants don’t hide.

Cross posted to Space For Commerce.

Via.

Memo: Derisive Head-Shaking with a Splash of Schadenfreude

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To: Various Movie Producers
From: Sgt Mom
Re: The Current Gaggle of Anti-War Movies

1. Yes, that would be you that I am looking at; Mr. DePalma, Mr. Redford, and all the rest of you whose releases, despite being advertised expensively, applauded by the ever-so-cool award-giving set, and drooled over by your fan-boys and fan-girls in the critics circles to the point of having to tread water … are nonetheless tanking like the RMS Titanic. Audiences in flyover country are avoiding plonkingly earnest sermons like “Lions for Lambs”,”The Valley of Elah”, “Rendition” and others of that ilk as if they were made of plutonium. Fleeing reviewers aren’t even flinging any hilariously sarky remarks over their shoulders like they did for a vanity stink-bomb like “Battlefield:Earth” – which at least produced viciously amusing reviews. You guys can’t even hug that thin comfort to yourselves.

2. There is a somewhat soothing chorus of justification, cicadalike in it’s buzzing monotony: oh, it’s those silly proles in flyover country, they just can’t handle difficult questions, or they’re tired of the war, and really, popularity isn’t everything-our filmmaking is selective in it’s appeal, and anyway we’ll make it up in the overseas markets, or on DVD. Good luck with that line of reasoning, guys and gals. It’s worked for a good long while, and it may work for a little while longer, but methinks I see the edge of the cliff fast approaching. Wily Coyote, super-genius might stay suspended over thin air for quite some time – but eventually the laws of gravity and economics will apply. Piss off your natural audience once too many times, and one is as a tiny splat on the canyon floor, way down below. Just ask the Dixie Chicks.

3. See, it’s like this; you’re in the entertainment business. Emphasis on Entertainment, emphasis on Business. As a very wise movie producer observed some decades ago, “You want a message? Send Western Union.” Doing earnest dramatizations of your own opinions might make you feel all bold and stick-it-to-the-manly, and make your closed little intellectual set all misty-eyed with adoration for your cinematic genius, but frankly it’s leaving the rest of us looking forward to our next round of un-anethesthetized root-canal work, performed by a sadist with a jack-hammer.

4. And furthermore, (and I am looking at you, Mr. DePalma) reliving the 1960ies and the Vietnam War by recycling the same old scripts, the same old villains and the same old conventions is worse than tiresome. In vigorously painting the military, the US government and Americans in general with the same old United Colors of Atrocities, you are essentially doing the work of enemy propagandists. Adding insult to injury, it isn’t even good propaganda. You are insulting an enormous chunk of your domestic audience, routinely and substantially reducing the numbers of people in flyover country willing to plunk down $10.00 at the multiplex. This will not end well – again, recall the Dixie Chicks.

5. Thinking of all the stories that you are isanctimoniously gnoring, in order to churn out these politically correct wankfests is enough to make me want to pick up a good book. Or write one; a book that recalls to us what we are, what we stand for, and what we fight for. As for yourselves, enjoy the applause of your peers and their tinselly awards, and the perks that Hollywood offers you… for now.

Sincerely, Sgt Mom

My previous memo on the topic is here, and no, my first name is not Cassandra – Sgt. Mom

Good Grief, Here We Go Again

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According to this story, this lot of blue-nosed busy-bodies is having another go at banning mags like Penthouse and Playboy from being sold in military PXs and bookstores on base. God save us, and as a small “f” feminist and mother I object to acres of objectified flesh on display next to the Air Force Times and “Family Circle” as much as any other woman with taste.

But hey, to each their own. I am fully cognizant of the fact that the military is largely made up of men. Most of them are young men, supposedly straight, and historically with an abiding interest in the female form – either in the flesh or pictorially. This is just one of those facts of life that one has to accept, as tacky as the morally over-fastidious may find it. Like the poor and recipes for tuna-noodle casserole that call for a can of cream of mushroom soup, these things are with us always. I can adjust, although apparently the good Reverend cannot.

Because, you see… the BX/PX Navy Exchange are there to supply the military community with the materiel items they need. Think of it as Wally-World with cammies and jungle boots. Embrace that concept, my dear little well-meaning anti-porn crusaders; the stuff for sale in military exchanges is there because the military members want to buy it – not necessarily because it has been judged good for them, or in good taste. And in overseas military bases, there is often no other alternative than the BX/PX, other than mail order.

Getting on a blue-nosed high-horse about banning certain magazines being for sale in the BX-PX is the start of a slippery slope – which is why I give a damn in the first place. The danger is that if every moral crusader and his brother, or sister can make a show of their virtue by pitching a fit about magazines whose appeal is contingent on displaying acres of siliconized boobies and Brazilian bikini-waxed hoo-hoos… well, what can be next, then? Eco-crusaders banning car magazines? Feminists wanting drive out “Cosmopolitan” or “Martha Stewart Living”?

I can very well recall how “The Last Temptation of Christ” was ostentatiously dropped from the Exchange inventory, never mind that some of us stationed overseas wanted to watch it, even if only to see what the fuss was about. The book and magazine selection used to run the whole political gamut, right to left and every shade and relevancy in between – but allow someone to burnish their image by engaging in a campaign to ban this, that or the other for the ostensible good of all military members… not good. It treats members of the military like children, with the good reverend and his ilk deciding what they think is good for them to have. And it sets a damn bad precedent.

I may not like the skin mags much – but someone obviously buys them, and if the BX/PX is in the business of supplying what military members buy… well, then… there you go. They are the military Walmart, not the YMCA.

Scroll down and take the poll in the middle of the story.