Out And About II

Last road trip I prudently rented a spiffy little car. What I saved on gas paid for the entire rental. Liked the car a lot. Turned out the agency sell-a-car division had one of the same make and model, with literally just a couple thousand miles on it, for sale at $7K under the sticker for the same car, new. Loaded, standard. Being as the agency was nice enough to eat high four figures of the depreciation and sell me a virtually new car, I couldn't pass it up. I'm cheap, but not stupid cheap.

What I save on gas the next few years is going to about half-pay the entire note on the car too. Given that it gets about 4X the MPG of the daily driver pickup I've been in since 2008, and commensurately, has a range about 200 miles greater on a tank of gas, with a gas tank 1/3rd the size, I've got some logistics to take care of from much farther afield.

Long-term logistics. (Not property; that's planned, and just wants the necessary cash to seal the deal.) And some new scenery after the first part of the year won't go amiss for a mental health break either.

The fact that I'll be spending less on gas for long trips than I was spending driving around town for a few days off is just icing on the cake.

And whether you like it or not, Kung Flu isn't a myth, and it's spreading just fine after Lockdown, as expected. About 3% of you are going to find that out firsthand in the worst way if you choose to ignore reality, but it's nominally a free country, so you got what you wanted, (and will continue to do so) like it or not. Or you can wear a mask out in the hoi polloi and wash your hands religiously, and never even notice the whole thing. Dealer's choice. It's still knocking off about 1K/day. Don't find out personally, hear? I can assure you it's not a pretty infection to fight. But given the other mega-whacktardery going on just north of Sanity hereabouts, time out in the world, and some prudent shopping trips, are a wee bit more necessary than continuing to blog the Retard Riots of 2020.

In fact, things are so weird overall I may have to plan a future trip to the periphery of Area 51, just to verify in person whether or not we're all living in a real-life episode of The Twilight Zone, being choreographed by our future alien overlords.

It couldn't possibly be much goofier than the spectacle being provided by the Leftist moron minions (but I repeat myself) currently driving the news cycle.

But at least you finally know what happened to all the kids who ate the paste, ran with scissors, and ended up in continuation school trying to get that GED, because public school was too hard.

A third of them are bong-toting radical Antifa morons, another third are media reporters and journalists, and the dumbest third are in politics, running the blue hives. You could look it up.

Just about like your mom and dad suspected when they told you couldn't hang around those idiot Doofus Family kids back in the day.

Blogging will therefore be light for the next several days, and return to normal towards the end of the week.

Stay safe, stock your larder deep and wide, and stay frosty. Entertain yourselves with those over in the right column, and always remember this important safety tip if the Summer Injustice Games of 2020 get a bit closer than you'd like: you can't get ballistics off of buck shot, and if they never find a body, it's really tough to prove a crime. And if you're not handily provided with multiple acres of contiguous desert like we are hereabouts, there isn't much that feral pigs and swamp gators in most of the rest of the country won't eat, given half a chance.

Be sure and drink your Ovaltine.
The chair is against the wall.

Four Trips

This one's dedicated to Phil and Angus , who can probably relate.

As legend and lore have it, no DIY project can be completed in anything less than three trips to the store. Yesterday and today, I improved on that.

About a month ago, the local merchants were flogging perfectly spiffy UHD TVs at ridiculous prices, so they could get the newest models in with even more features I don't want, at prices I won't pay. So a big screen for less than half price for a NIB set was worth the trip.

Where, due to work schedules, it sat on the floor for about a month.
So with a few days off, it was time to upgrade my movie viewing (I have not watched broadcast TV since Fat Bill was president, and miss it not a bit).

Having assembled most of what I needed, it was time to get to work.
I've got three cordless drills, and two chargers.
I could find one drill, the battery was dead, and that manufacturer has planned obsolesenced that voltage out of stock forever. I'll deal with the hunt for the drill, batteries, and chargers another time, but I need to install the wall mount for Big TV today, as planned.

So Trip One:

I needed a couple of odds and ends, and some coax and HDMI, and to get around cordless stupidity games, I wanted an old-fashioned hard-wired simple drill for light work. Went to Lowe's (who thoughtfully killed my go-to OSH harware store chain with malice aforethought, after rescuing them briefly from oblivion). Lowe's has the HDMI and coax. And they have the perfect hand drill.
Except they're out of the one I want.
They have plenty of the bigger ones, starting at from 2-3X the price of the simple one that's perfect for my needs.
Well-played.

So, gritting my teeth, I go to Big Orange Hell, where they have the exact same drill, for a buck less than Lowe's. And five of them sitting right where they should be, on the shelf, unopened.

Mirabile dictu!

Chalk up one for Homeless Depot.

I dodge the 200 migras shilling for day labor in the parking lot, and return home to put up a stupid simple wall mount that's perfect for the TV I have, and the space intended for it.

Except, goddamn them, GE has selected hardware made from Chinesium (an amalgam alloy of zinc, recycled beer cans, Prius body panels, and seagull shit, apparently), which strip, while simultaneously destroying the Phillips bit used, at both ends, while only going halfway in.

And the size hole their instructions say to pre-drill for the anchor screws turns out to be laughably optimistic.

F#&%.

Trip Two:

Homeless Depot winning by a nose, and being a wee bit closer, I return thence on Thursday afternoon, this time for actual hardware.
I selected a double complement of marine-grade stainless steel wood screws equivalent in size and length to one of the cheap-ass Chinesium pieces of $#!^ I managed to hand unscrew from the wall, with pliers, where it had lodged hallway in, totally striped. Because I needed a bicep workout anyways.

Then, not trusting things, I also secured large deck scews, heavy-duty common nails, and fender washers, in case it became necessary to explain the facts of life to GE's wall mount.

And a bit 1/32 larger than GE's recockulous instruction specified.

Thus supplied, I returned home for the next round of battle.

With the larger holes, the actual steel screws fly into the holes, and seat firmly.
The mount is nominally rated for 50#. The TV is maybe 10#. But I was putting it into mature seasoned studs, in a wall I'd added myself. And I weigh a bit more than 50#.

So after hanging on the mount myself, it didn't budge a millimeter.
That sumbitch isn't going to be dropping the TV on me this century.

Now the easy part: putting the TV on the mount.
I've done this with smaller monitors, and the mount itself is simplicity.
Line up the holes, and screw it down.
Easy peasey.

Flag on the play.

In their wisdom, the makers of a $400+ (sale price) wall mount television, have elected not to include the $2 of hardware for wall mounting.
That would be 4 screws, and 4 plastic adapter plugs.

What The Actual FUCK?!?!?

Maybe they thought I'd just carry it around on my shoulder like a ghetto blaster boombox?

I don't know.

But this is, bar none, the stupidest effing thing I've seen someone do.
And I live in Califrutopia, and lived in L.A. for most of my life, so that's saying something.
But they have a handy 800 number, for me to order the Wall Mount Kit for the giant flatscreen TV, it's lack being mentioned no-fucking-where on the package exterior when I purchased it. (I'm going to use that 800 number next week alright, but not to order the kit in question. I'm wondering how many times they'll hang up on me before I finish what I'm going to tell them.)

Who would do such a fucktarded thing?
That would be Samsung.
Samsung, you (insert the most vile racist anti-Korean slur you can imagine here, then triple it), as my old man used to say when he was alive, "the sonofabitch who thought that up should have the TV shoved up his ass, sideways." No, really, and actually.

At this point, I am this:[] close to taking the set to the range, and experimenting on it with 12 ga. slugs. But the mount is already installed, and I want my damn video.

So Trip Three:

But, I know the Three-Trip Rule, so I am only half surprised. So, I trot down to Best Buy, since they have a Geek Squad that does installations, where maybe I can buy, beg, or steal the celebrated un-included mythical legendary Wall Mount Kit that the (insert the most vile racist anti-Korean slur you can imagine here, then triple it) idiot f**kers at Samsung didn't include, to save themselves $2 cost.

But no, Best Buy has never heard of it.
Neither has Le Boutique Targét.
Nor WallyWorld.
I tried them first, this trip.
Don't even think about Sears; their aisles look like Florida after a hurricane, every day, as they lurch towards bankruptcy in a death spiral. They make K-Mart Big Lots! look good, neat, and well-run by comparison.

But the sales chick at BestBuy calls their Samsung rep (but diplomatically, doesn't tell them what I called their company, from CEO to janitorial staff) who used to be one of their Geek Squad installers, who is sure that my wall mount or TV must have the right adapters and screws to clamp the TV in place.
(He's as wrong as he can be about that.)

But, he suggests checking Homeless Depot, because that's what they used at Geek Squad, because their TV mount kits always have everything.

Ready to defecate kittens at this point, I've got no pride left, and nothing to lose, so I swing by Orange Hardware Hell yet a third time, as the sun sinks into the horizon.

So I go to their home electronics aisle, pry open a similar wall mount kit, and there inside, are the very screws and adapters needed.
Along with screws and adapters for every TV set known to man, in all likelihood.
Sold.
And for the helluvit, an HDTV antenna.

I return home again, this time long after the last Julio or Pedro has departed the lot, to undertake Round Three of hand-to-hand combat with a simple TV installation.

The screws and adapters fit like a glove.

The set is now anchored and perfectly aligned.

I plug it in, screw in the broadcast TV antenna, and the set works like a dream. (At least Samsung got that right.)

So, on a roll, I put in a couple of other thingamajigs for another pair of projects, plugging into the nearest outlet, in the bathroom.

I get them finished, and settle down to check online, satisfied with accomplishing (finally) what I set out to do that day.

After taking a bloody day to get it done.

Except...the computer has re-booted.
Funny, since I didn't turn it off.

Try to re-start it.

Then everything in the room goes deader than canned tuna.

And the microwave clock is out. Looking around, I find scoring on the bathroom outlet.
It's old, and not GFCI, predating that requirement handily, but it's never given me any trouble.

The kitchen light is flickering, like the bulb is going to fail. Then it comes on full.
But the demand heater is dead in the bathroom. And so is one side of the kitchen.
And everything downstream from there, including the Blog Command Central room.

And the front room A/C?!?
Now this is serious. No A/C in August?

And the breaker won't reset.
Despite multiple tries.

This now officially sucks. And it's too late to do anything, because everyone is closed.

So Trip Four:

Back to the store again, this time for the multimeter I never had, some wire strippers, and a new commercial-grade outlet.

Get home, turn off the outlet breaker, confirm it's cold with the new multimeter, and open 'er up.

And find 2" of white neutral wire charred and burned away (it dates from the 1970s), which has cooked off all the insulation, and the neutral is touching the bare copper ground wire.

Which shorted out the breaker as intended, and killed 1/3 of the house circuits.

Happy to have tracked down the problem without needing to get a new bus for the panel, I chop all the wire back, re-strip and feed them into an outlet 50 years newer, wire it in, throw the breaker, the multimeter confirms 120V, no smoke issues from the wall, and the breaker resets.

I have spent every penny I saved on the big screen TV on toys and supplies to plug it in.
And rewire a bathroom plug that was about to burn the house down.

Without burning the house down.

Or paying an electrician a couple hundred more $$ for a service call.

IANAElectricain by any means, but I rewired my first switch when I was a teenager (I wanted a dimmer in my bedroom, so I read how to do it, and did it). I generally don't play around with anything electrical more complicated than plugging something in, on principal, because gas (octane and natural) and electricity send more people to the emergency room every week than I want to be. (It's also embarrassing to be treated by your co-workers for Stupid.) And my primary use for electricity is to defibrillate dead people, and let me tell you, they jump when you yell "Clear!" and hit the button. I don't want to do the home version, especially accidentally. I can still remember the experiment at age 3 with the table knife and the wall outlet, and as I recollect, it stung a bit.

But I had the book learning, and most of the toys, so I'm happy about doing the repair myself, and getting the TV ready to rock. But I'm happiest that some union electrician 50 years ago did his frickin' job right when he ground wired my outlet properly, so I could save it and not burn the house down last night, or today.

For an encore, I'ma get me a GFCI outlet next week, and re-do that job one more time.
The skills will come in handy when I start building the Castle Anthrax and Camp Snoopy, probably next year.

Which is my explanation for why my homework is late.

And I think I've earned a nice dinner out.
Followed by Zulu or Lord Of the Rings on a wall-wide TV in UHD, as God intended.

And I've got an extra TV mount now.

Nostalgia - Not So Much

h/t Kenny

Over at Knuckledraggin My Life Away, the host posted the above hospital bill, without comment other than the post title "Inflation", from Feb. 1933, which tallies to $120.30, if I didn't muck up the math in my head.

You can read the site comments for the range of replies, but what strikes me most is nostalgia for a time that, frankly, sucked poop, by people who - none of them, to a near certainty - actually lived through it. Someone alive in 1933 would be 85 today. Anyone who remembered it at all would thus be 90+.

So Sherman, let's set the Wayback Machine for 1933, and see what we find about how it really was.

1933 was the height of the Great Depression. The Dustbowl was about to kick in.
Al Capone was a free man. The mobs ran speakeasies.
And you couldn't get a legal drink anywhere in the U.S. in February.
Prohibition wasn't repealed until December that year.

Depression breadline, NYFC. Two blocks long, five guys wide.
Two cops for order, and everybody dressed like gentlemen.

Unemployment was 25%.
(Unless you're from Trashcanistan or Shitholia, you've never seen 25% unemployment nationwide. Pray you never do.) Breadlines and soup kitchens to keep people from starving outright were a daily reality, had been for 3 years, and would be for another 7. Because many lacked the 7¢ necessary to buy a loaf of bread on their own, or the 10¢ price of a can of Campbell's Soup, and didn't have a pot to cook it in.

And that bill? $120.30.
Purely from an inflation standpoint, that would be about $7000 today, if we use gold.
(That's why your current $1 bill is worth about 1.7¢ compared to a buck from 1932.)
If we used gasoline, it'd be 1203 gallons. Which averages to $3600, give or take.
Kind of stiff, actually.
About 6 weeks' salary in 1933.
Or 7 months' average rent, for a two week stay.
1/4 of the price for either an average house, or a new car. 
If you were lucky enough to have a job at all, anywhere in the world. 
And after a decade of battles in the streets in Germany between national socialists and international socialists, including armed coup attempts, the Germans had put Hitler in power. That would pay dividends to the world right up through today.

And this was when a hospital, for the most part, was simply a motel, with round-the-clock maid service. There wasn't a helluva lot of medical practice going on for having a baby at that point in history, in any sense.

Medicine has made just a bit of improvement since 1933. (Starting with the fact that we're not your maid service and room service. There are hotels for that.)

Infant mortality in the U.S. in 1933 was 57.1 (deaths per 1000 live births). One in 20.
Now, it's 5.8. One in 200.

A tent and a wood stove, in the woods? Luxury!  Odds were one of those six kids wouldn't survive to age 18. Like dad and mom, most would be picking crops as soon as they were able. Which somehow got harvested before large-scale machines, and yet without importing 40M freeloading illegal aliens. Amazing.
 

 Flu, TB, and diphtheria were huuuuge killers, worse than cars and guns combined.
Everybody got measles by age 15, and it killed 6000 kids/year, year in and year out, for another thirty years.
Smallpox and polio were still a thing too.
The treatment for extremity infection, unchanged since the Civil War, let alone medieval times, was amputation, made only slightly less horrifying by surgical anesthesia. But as penicillin was only accidentally discovered in 1928, and its medical significance unrecognized for over another decade, it was not even an option in 1933.
Systemic infections, like an ordinary urinary or kidney infection, were another top killer.

Imagine dying from an ordinary UTI as one of top ten killers.
Or paying 1/4th the price of your house to have a baby.

Inflation? Not really.
Nostalgia? For suckers. Things are pretty nice right now, thanks.
Learn to appreciate what you've got.
But if you've still got a hankering for the Great Depression, even odds are you're going to get a first-hand experience one of these days.
Because the world's economies are living on a monstrous bubble.
And bubbles pop. Always.

Best see about a plan for that.

Vegas: The Endless Itch That Demands Scratching

h/t WRSA and Captain's Journal

So, comes out the info-tidbit that a helicopter, falsely "squawking" the transponder code for an inbound scheduled commuter jet flight, was hovering and then departing from the rooftop helipad of the hotel to the immediate west of the Mandalay Bay, with that departure just after the shooting stopped, and before police arrived either at the MB suite, or overhead in a police helicopter.

"Flight records and information obtained by Intellihub show that at least one assailant may have been extracted via helicopter for a 10:21 p.m. EXFIL from the southwest rooftop of the Delano Hotel just four minutes before Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department helicopter N911WY arrived in the vicinity for the first time since shots were fired at crowd goers attending the Route 91 Harvest Music festival"

RTWT

1) The Delano is still within the effective range of .223 weapon or weapons shooting minute-of-massive-crowd.

2) The east tower rooftop end appears to have a platform at that eastern end, allowing someone to see over the 15' tall rooftop parapet, directly at the concert crowd in question.

3) Rounds fired from that point at the crowd pass the Mandalay Bay tower in close proximity to the suite Paddock was found dead in, creating the exact false echo location problem I mentioned, with supersonic bullet cracks coming at the beaten zone of the target venue just about exactly 1 second behind the source point, from the 4+ acre wall of glass of the MB's north and southeast 43-story wing walls.
Which phenomenon, exactly as noted, including by me, only about twenty times since the incident, is something well-known, going back to military snipers like Carlos Hathcock only as early as the year 1965, and used by him that far back precisely to fool targets about from where they were being shot.

4) This gives you a second shooter (if necessary), or a primary shooter, with Paddock simply being DOA, getting cold, and waiting to be discovered, while allowing the actual shooter(s) all the time in the world to stroll over, step into their bird, and depart. If they used brass catchers, they're effectively invisible afterwards. They'd probably even have time for a second person or team, unarmed and unsuspected, to sanitize the shooting roost before departing inside the building, at their leisure.

5) You still need someone to shoot (and miss 199 times) 200 rounds at Mall Cop Campos, and then either step out, unscrew the stairwell door, rescrew it from the stair side, and depart up or down unseen and unknown; or else even easier, simply walk a few doors down the corridor on floor 32 at MB, enter another (uninvolved) room, and wait to be escorted out as a "frightened bystander" by LVMPD an hour and change later.

6) Which also tells you where the missing video camera flash drives and laptop hard drive walked away to, if they were ever present in the room during the shooting to begin with.
QED

FWIW: This is what actual facts look like: they explain things better, and they don't confuse it further by bringing up more questions than they answer.

Continued unknown: who, and why.

All of which is rampant speculation (which doesn't make it wrong per se). Just entirely unverified guessing.

Medical Statistics

In my favorite chapter of one of my all-time favorite books, science and technology historian James Burke illuminates the pivotal epoch when medicine transitioned from voodoo witch-doctor into the scientific evidence-based treatment that brought you CT scans, heart transplants, and gene splicing, to name but a scant few among hundreds of absolute modern miracles.

And to recap, it was not always so.

For millennia, medicine was more "by guess and by God" than anything modern practitioners would recognize as aught but the incantations of rude savages. Bloodletting, ill humors, and closely-guarded secret recipes were in vogue (and killing people like Aztec sacrifices on a festival day when the volcano was angry) right up to and including the Death of George Washington, who at a robust 67 years of age probably had nothing more than a viral cold and sore throat (completely unknown as such at the time), but was repeatedly and successively bled to death, right into shock, coma, and expiration, in December of 1799.

The reason for this sort of voodoo medicine was simple: the doctor who could cure you was afraid to tell anyone else what worked, because once the secret was out, any fool could do it. And there went the business.

Within a few short years, everything had changed, and medicine was forever revolutionized.

And why was that?

Well, it seems a rather diminutive Corsican fellow, arising from amongst the ashes of the French Revolution (Liberty! Equality! Stupidity! etc.),

had arranged for one newfangled curiosity to become common practice. In their rush to give away the store to everyone, the French decided to subsidize not palaces for the monarchs and aristocracy, but instead spend the treasure of the state on hospitals for the peasantry. 

And, helpfully, Napoleon created no shortage of patients, with years upon years of wars, famines, and conquests, across the breadth of Europe from Madrid to Moscow.

Consequently, doctors spared the acquaintance of Madame Guillotine were now working on the state's nickel (or franc, if you will). And unlike doctors in prior eras, the state wanted by-god results. And so the Enlightenment, denied entry into medicine for several centuries, was rather forcefully acquainted to doctors by way of statistics and empirical data collection.

The means were simple: there were dozens of hospitals in Paris. One hospital, like other trades, would do only one thing. Like, for example, broken bones. Or women giving birth. Or eye problems. Or gunshot wounds. (There were a lot of those to play with, courtesy of L'Emperor Napoleon.) And so on.

So unlike before, where a given doctor might be expected to deliver a baby, treat a dose of "French disease" (syphilis or gonorrhea), set a broken arm, and treat a skin ailment, all in the same day, now that same doctor might do nothing but see 10 or 20 or 50 broken legs a week. Without meaning to do it, specialization was born.

(They also had a brilliant but quaint custom: everything was free, right up until you decided not to do what the doctor ordered. Whether diet, rest, exercise, medicine, or whatever. It was a free country, but it was also a state hospital. So on the day that the peasant decided he was wiser than the doctor, the orderlies would pick up his pallet, carry it to the curb, the free-thinker would be told "God be with you, monsieur", and he would be deposited alongside the road, free to heal himself as he saw fit. O, for the good old days! But I digress.)

And now that the State was breathing down their necks for results, and payment for services was assured them, nobody wanted to be the worst doctor at the hospital. Madame Guillotine might still be looking for counter-revolutionaries, after all. So they began keeping track of what worked, and what didn't.

At, for example, the hospital for people shot in the leg, they might have 200 patients. Of these, 50 would simply have their bandages re-wrapped every day. Another 50 would be treated by having hot tar poured into the wound to cauterize it and stop bleeding and putrefaction (infection, though that process wasn't discovered for another forty years or so by Mssr. Pasteur, etc.), 50 more would be treated by somebody's grandmother's method of rubbing dog shit and cat pee into the wound daily, and 50 more would have their wounds cleaned with water previously boiled and then cooled, and have new clean bandages exchanged for old, soaked, putrid ones. Then they'd keep score.

Rewrapped cured 20 patients
Hot Tar saved 15 patients
Dog Shit and Cat Pee would save 3 patients
Clean water and bandages would save 48 patients.

So next month, with the previous experimentation known to them, everyone with new gunshot wounds would get clean water and bandages, and they'd save 192 out of 200 patients.
And those results would be discussed, the results written up and published, and disseminated at large to the medical community.
Voila!

Practical and effective medicine, formerly jealously-guarded personal tricks and treatments, now became community property of all doctors, especially those who had formerly been second-rate and second-class citizens, the barber-surgeons. Composed of former headsman like this guy,

who was entitled by rights after a given number of successful head-loppings to be allowed to retire from the chopping block, and hang out a shingle as bona fide and de facto qualified practitioner of certain medical arts (especially throat and neck problems, natch), rather than middling-nobility university-trained physicians in the mold of Hippocrates, the barber-surgeons were more of the try-what-works school of thought. The barber-surgeon charged less than a physician, so the common people were more apt to see them first, or only. And common folks weren't likely to fall for hokum, but would pay for what worked. Physicians thought of them as unlettered tradesmen, rather than noble educated healers, rather like the difference between the astrophysicist who theorized space flight, and the guy who screwed the fuel pumps to the rocket engine and made it go.

So the combination of pragmatism and statistics took the reins of the profession and practice out the hands of those (like the two quacks of Port Royal in Captain Blood)
 who were trying to keep their clientele, and put it firmly into the hands of those trying to get it right, who now had scientific evidentiary backing for what to do, and why to do it.

This was a new way to do things, and the increase took the world by storm. Coupled with Pasteur's Germ Theory, and the contributions of many others too numerous to recount in this brief piece, including the brutal statistics of the Plague maps of London in the 1800s

medicine became something advanced by steady, painstaking analytical progression, which ruthlessly weeds out the stupid, the traditional, and the worthless, which had hitherto been the root and branch of the undertaking. (And frequently, the reason for undertakers as well.)

So the French tried to simply give away medical care, and accidentally revolutionized it (which wasn't the Revolution they were trying for, but a damned good one by accident).

So what?

I told you this story to tell you the one I'll post tomorrow.

Part II
Part III

There Is No Such Thing As Knowing Too Much

Reference this thread at WRSA, based on these two from MDT.

What some folks think of as trivial arcana, whether we're talking military subjects, or any other field of subject matter, is frequently anything but useless, or trivial. Case in point today is the referenced subjects above.

Someone in comments at WRSA thought he didn't have a grasp on clearing landing zones, but that was OK, since he was never going to need it, nor have any friendly helos to need to clear LZs for.

Today's lesson:

Natzsofast there. Don't think two-dimensionally.

While you may not have helos, someone you someday don't like very well, and who has a hard-on for you and your tribe, might.

But a helo without an LZ/DZ is a wasted trip. Read anything about Vietnam from the first battle of Ia Drang in '65  ( We Were Soldiers Once, And Young, etc.) up through the Easter Offensive of '72, and nota bene how things worked for the US when Mister Charles had all the nearby LZs covered with interlocking fields of HMG/AAA fire. (Total US helo losses in Vietnam were nominally 43% - 5,086 birds out of 11,827 deployed there - but actually much higher, because many helos were shot down, salvaged, flew again, shot down again, salvaged again, etc., so that as long as they eventually flew again, they were not counted as destroyed. So we may have lost more total birds than we had on paper in the course of 10+ years of the Southeast Asia War Games.)

Point to all that being that while there's precious little jungle in the States, there's one helluva lot of impenetrable forest, as anyone in the PNW, or who served at Ft.s Bragg, Benning, Knox, etc., knows very well.
And if you can't land birds, drop troops, parachute in supplies, etc., and the only road access is easily blocked/degraded dirt forest service roads, you take a 21st century mechanized military, and turn them into 2d C. B.C. Greek hoplites, marching in on foot, carrying everything on their backs, and forced to evac casualties the same way. {Hint: for the hoplites in question, the Suckage Factor zooms up into the red zone at this point.} Which puts a militia (like raggedy-ass Afghanis, or Vietnamese peasants, for example) back on parity with the .Gov hoplites.

So you might should want to know how much room in square feet they need to get in every helo in

current inventory; how they plan to clear LZs, and where, and where the current LZ/DZs are; as well as the road grid down to goat paths in your AO. And how to deny or degrade them.

Again, not much good in Kansas, but in mountain and forest terrain, which is one helluva big piece of the country, pretty damned useful info to have in your head, and an area notebook.

Make buddy-buddy with the local LifeFlight, wildfire, FD/PD etc. guys.

(Because, for one example, your group is nominally a volunteer wilderness SAR organization. Which coincidentally gives you a reason to have medical supplies and training, feeding and base camp supplies, robust comms, and do helpful wild country exercises, and actually do good, while getting trained, and having a beautiful means and reason for recruiting some hard-assed like-minded folks. Just saying. And you can always swap walking staffs for something black, loud, and semi-automatic, come the day. So now you're not somebody the media's going to tag as racist survivalist Rambo nutjobs. You're the nice quiet local folks who find Suzy Dipshit and Bruce Nancypants from Dumbass City when they go hiking but forget things...like a map, compass, and clue, and then get lost and run out of tofu and soy latte on the backside of Mount Sonofabitch. Now you're little damned heroes.)

There are surveyed and pre-planned LZ/DZs in most limited access areas down to the county level, so they know where they can bring in a wildfire hotshot team, paramedic rescue, SWAT team, etc.

This is also true in urban areas. The FD, PD, and EMS already know they can't drop birds in everywhere, because of wires, towers, and other obstructions, so they have lists and maps of the same pre-surveyed contingency helopad/LZs.

And as we currently live in a relatively open society, such maps are not considered the tactical intel goldmine they would be and become in a time of more existential sportiness.

So there you go: military subjects, Greek hoplites, the Vietnam War, altruism, subterfuge, and John Pinette, all effortlessly rolled into a nice Sunday confection. Have I mentioned that I'm a huge fan of James Burke?

Thus endeth the lesson.

Administrivia

Based on averages, one of you today will be this blog's millionth viewer.
Since I have no idea who that will be, consider the bragging rights community property.
This blog plus my other one crossed that threshold back around New Year's; today's tally is for this blog alone. Which means about a quarter of my total views have been in the last few months. Maybe I'm getting the hang of this.
So to whichever of you rolls the view-dometer over, and the other 999,999 of you, my sincere thanks for dropping by. I've tried to make it worth the effort.

About as randomly chancey as Beethoven's Sixth Symphony filmed live, and played on Blu-Ray

Another h/t to Solomon over at SNAFU

from Oracles Of Norway Tumblr

Your body is an incredibly bizarre machine.
“What you see is a myosin protein dragging an endorphin along a filament to the inner part of the brain’s parietal cortex which creates happiness. Happiness. You’re looking at happiness.”

For those of you who derive personal comfort explaining away this one-in-a-trillion unlikelyhood of a self-assembling mousetrap with the complexity of a jet engine, as something that evolved as the result of random chance X millions of years of Darwinian Evolution, ROWYBS.

If you can't help proseletyzing your black helicopter version of reality in comments, show your work on how this particular single function, among tens of thousands inside you every day, came to be so. Focus on the evidence of the millions of catalogued defective attempts before this exemplar happened into being.

Otherwise, behold Proof #4,687,317 on why anybody postulating anything other than the work of a creative genius in designing Everything is full of metric buttloads of crap.

For those with IQs above room temperature and a sense of wonder, simply enjoy the fact that we have the technology to create this explanation and appreciate it now. Unlike what was available to certain small-minded cranky old fools on a ship sailing the Galapagos in the mid 1800s. If you bitter clingers had described this biological marvel to someone like that back then, you'd have been locked up in an insane asylum.

Special treat: a better, cleverer, funnier, and more acerbic exposition of the insanity that masquerades as science than any I could concoct in a week's fervent effort: Darwin Unhinged: The bugs in evolution.

Bonus: for anyone who felt betrayed by bait-and-switch in the title, with a spare 45 minutes and the processing power to multitask, here is Beethoven's Sixth Symphony:

When you feel the world in general, or life itself, is too petty, mean, gloomy, and doomed you ought to listen to it, to remind you of just the opposite.

Paradise, Bitchez

For the first time in two decades, I got the holidays off for personal vacation. (Seniority, or the gods of random fortune, thank you).

Consequently, by the time this goes up, I'm sitting on a beach much like this one.
Just because.

Happy Holidays, &c.

Back after New Year's.

How Stands The Union?

In the course of some forum debates on the nature of things, and what our choices are:

What do I think about government?
Government is not reason; it is not eloquent; it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master.
Wait, no, that was George Washington, after the Revolution.
That government governs best which governs least.
Oh, sorry, that was Thomas Jefferson.
Power always thinks that it is doing God's service when it is violating all his laws.
The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with power to endanger the public liberty.
Oh, sorry again, that was John Adams.

So I share the sentiments of the first three presidents on what government is, and I would love to live under a constitutional republic. Someday, I hope to.
Its absence and lack since long before I was born has been keenly felt in this country, and want of it is killing us. And by no means only metaphorically.
The time to start slitting throats is being forced upon us, but we're not there yet.

I inherently and immediately suspect anybody that argues for going there until all other options have been exhausted.
So until that day, the order of the day should be to so harry, harass, hinder, delay, and obstruct the machinations of the current metastasized abortion that they wonder what hornet's nest they've kicked over every waking moment of their lives, and those who would subject us to the very slavery our forefathers shrugged off at perilous cost drop the reins of government as though it were a red hot iron in their hands, repent of the vines and weeds they've sown around the nation's liberty as we hack them down and uproot them, and that they would flee with all haste to some more agreeable climate, physically if necessary.

To paraphrase another president, this nation cannot long endure a situation where half the country wants to be let alone, and the other half wants to direct every last detail of our daily lives, down to the minutes and seconds, and would decree that they have a rightful claim on every penny in our pockets, every drop of sweat on our brow, and every drop of blood in our veins to the very last one.
Our side's terminal handicap as those who wish to be let alone is that we are perpetually loathe to engage in any struggle if we can go about our business.
We just want to be left cheerfully to exercise our liberty. But the vanishing corner of moth-eaten liberties we are being left to is grown so excrutiatingly small and so increasingly intolerable, that we must either resolve to do everything in our power short of war to overturn and reverse it, or we shall reach the inevitable point that the only option at all is an open and all-out war to the death for one side or the other.

Some seem to be under the impression that we have an abbreviated continuum between a constitutional republic and anarchy.
In fact, we are on a ponderably large continuum, and can scarcely see constitutional republic off in the misty distance we've travelled since the over 200 years ago when we achieved it from where we sit, it is so far away and so long gone from any living memory. And we have descended so deeply into slavery, that even anarchy may seem a pleasant respite and a short step.

This isn't, for me, a left-right thing. It's more like travelling the seas.
Anarchy is sitting alone in a raft amidst a hurricane: as Hobbes noted, such a life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.
A constitutional republic is sailing on a luxury liner as masters of our own destiny.
And our current situation: Let's just agree that for fuck's sake, it's long past time to be arguing about the relative comfort of the different brands of chains they've put around our ankles, or trying to come to agreement on whether some smaller and lighter version is somehow more acceptable.
We've been measured and fitted to them for several generations, and had them placed on for longer and longer periods, to the point that now life without them is hard to recall, like horses broken to saddle, bridle, or collar.

I propose instead that we stop pulling on the oars until the chains come off and we're free to walk about or leave the ship if we chose, have a full say in whither it proceeds, and that the fellows with the whips are to be hung from the yardarms in haste.
While reserving the right to resolve to rise up and strangle the guy at the stern beating the drum with all possible dispatch the minute the opportunity presents itself if the response is more whip.

Do everything legally and humanly possible to starve the beast to the size of the Chihuahua our founders intended.
Dial it back from its current 12 on the dial, to a 1.
Hack, slash, burn, and starve it back to a size where we needn't live in daily fear of its predations.
And let's please, once and for all time, stop being "reasonable" about it.
When a man with a machete proposes to cut off my legs, the reasonable response is not to compromise, and agree to sacrifice only one leg, and say "It was the best deal I could get".

We should instead be the most frothingly unreasonable sons of bitches at the slightest predation on the public purse or our personal liberty that you'd expect from Genghis Khan's hordes hung-over, saddle-sore, and with blood dripping from their swords.
Getting anything from us, past us, or over us, should be as pleasant as trying to take a bone from a hungry Bengal tiger, or meeting a grizzly bear with a toothache.
On our best and most sweetly-disposed mothereffing day.

The other side should present the slightest suggestion of same with rivers of fecal material running down their legs, as their knees knock together, after having signed a will and settled their affairs, and should expect that the only thing that would be returned of such a delegation should arrive in separate small baskets.

Hint: This is not a job for the likes of John Boehner or Mitch McConnell.



{Update: Greetings to anyone from WRSA etc. who landed here from their link or similar, and my thanks to C.A. for the referral, and the subsequent rocket launch of views.}

It Was A Dark And Stormy Night...

Just about every week over on TSLRF , Ryan will pose the question "What Did you Do To Prepare This Week?"

This is this week's composition for me.

My truck, in the so-apt G.I. German pidgin phrase, is currently upgefucht.
Apparently the flaperators are cattywampus, making driving a No Go event. It took the dealer all week to figure that out, and they cleverly waited until it was too late to rent a car for the day to inform me.

I should mention that a rent check is due NLT tomorrow (today now), and I had no inkling they wouldn't have my shiny toy fixed long since. Live and learn.

So being practical, trying not to chew nails and spit shrapnel, and finding the silver lining, I decided I would use the opportunity to evaluate some of my relocation plans. Because if things go sporty and you need to get out of Dodge, what are Mr. Murphy's odds it will be the day your vehicle craps out?

Part of my belt-and-suspender plan is to use a more urban mountain bike as Plan B, putting it in the back of the truck to use just in case, including if I get more flats or have other breakdowns on the day than I can self-correct.

So looking outside around dinner time as I hung up the phone with the car repair magi, it wasn't the gray indifferent overcast of yesterday. Of course not. It was blowing about 15-20 MPH in what an Irishman would describe as a "soft rain" and what I'd describe as a heavy drool, coming down steadily. Oh goody.

Cold, wet, miserable = good training opportunity.

Now, to be fair, I've spent the last 20+ years walking 6-10 miles a night shift - 20 feet at a time - until the morning. I am middle-aged, there's a bit more of me than there was in my prime, but I'm not a total wreck. So I figured I could do this.

Destination was 16 miles, one way. So 32 miles.

The Good
I made it, there and back.
No chest pain, so I think I can skip my next cardio exam.
In fact, I deliberately took it rather easy, to simulate what it'd be like in terms of speed/distance if there were 40+ pounds of gear going along.
The bike, long neglected and dusty, was a trooper. As best as I recall, it's whatever was on special at Le Boutique Targette  or Le Mart du Walle  fifteen or more years ago. I'd like to say I maintain it like an Indy car, but lying is bad. Nonetheless, it did good service.
Besides work, I've been upping my PT, which paid off, but work has squeezed more of that out than I'm happy with.
It was wet, but all hail Algore, temps stayed in the mid-50s. Nothing like the arctic blizzards numerous of my correspondents and acquaintances are suffering through from Montana to Miami.
The Petzl Tactika Plus on strobe mode with the red cover on the back of one's head makes an excellent  bicyclist "don't hit my ass" warning light, besides being awesomely useful as a headlamp.

The Bad
There is no such thing as rain gear that keeps you dry if you're working outdoors. Not Gore-Tex, ECWCS, Helly Hansen, nor rubberized canvas. If it keeps the moisture out, you get wet with sweat. If it breathes, eventually it lets the moisture in, and not enough of the sweat out. You can shelter outside, or go inside, but if you work outside, you're getting wet, and I don't care who you are or what you have on.
The route was 1/3 uphill heading out, and 2/3 uphill heading back, and into the wind for most of both ways, because the front split on the ridge and blew, literally and metaphorically, in my face over most of the trip.
Wet bike brakes work no better than wet car brakes, especially on a big hill with my fat ass on board.

The Ugly
People drive like @$$holes in the rain.
Too fast, no visibility, and generally HUTA.
When you're in traffic on a bicycle, you notice it a lot more acutely.
Like when people in a quiet residential neighborhood figure that with no headlights coming, they can skip that annoying stopping thing at 4-way stops.
I was almost mown down half a dozen times by people exiting freeways oblivious, blown into landscaping by a semi, and the aforementioned red stop sign optional douche.
Plus any number of folks who figure with anything smaller than a bread truck yielding is optional. And this is with nothing bad happening but a well-blown misting - which is just enough to lift all the grease and oil and make the roads slicker than snot.

After Action Assessment
I have a stationary bike, along with the sort-of mountain real bike. I will be riding both more frequently. (Just not 32 miles in one go.)
The gel seat has issues. It's going to go, and I'm going to replace it with something better suited for my delicate derriere, and for serious pedaling.
I'm not ready for a Hover-Round yet (but I see the attraction). I'm going to look into the gel cell battery electric powered cycle motors. Two sets of batteries would have gotten me there and back, effortlessly and faster (they supposedly do 15MPH for about 15 miles.) With a stop for dinner part way, and another for a snack on the return, I made the trip in around 7 hours, so around 5 miles an hour, into the wind and rain, at a less-than-heart-attack speed. I rode 20-25 of that, and walked the rest. Which was good, in that they use different muscle groups, so it kept me from inducing softball-sized cramps in my thighs, which would have been a catastrophe. I rode more on the way out, and walked more on the way back. The last time I took a decent ruck march with a full pack was on Camp Pendleton, some five presidents ago. As I get my PT back to mil spec, that will change too, in increasing but gradual bites.
I'm also interested in a baby/cargo pod trailer, that'd hold 40-70 pounds of pack/BOB, food and water.
2 quarts of water during the trip was adequate for the weather and exertion. 2 quarts of Gatorade along with the water would have been better.
Forgetting to grab a couple of granola bars was stupid. Thank heavens for mini-marts, Dr. Pepper, and peanut M&Ms.
The weather was kind, so I went in trousers and polo shirt underneath the rain gear. If it had been 10-20 degrees colder, or I'd broken a chain or something, it would have been a reminder that "cotton kills".
Polarfleece hats are the shizznit. Scuba diving gloves are even better.
I'm thinking a thin neoprene shortie board suit, or a full-length one (with some strategic cutouts for ventilation and eliminating chafing) would work better than most commercial rain gear. And provide padding for the times you encounter houses where the people don't prune the trees or trim the hedges.
The bike is going to get a much deserved work-over at the local house of bike geeks.
And some repair items and spares. And a dedicated LED headlight.
It has pouches everywhere, so I'm stocking them with a small but adequate first aid kit, some power and granola bars, and a couple quarts of Gatorade, plus electrolyte tablets.
I need something for stray m-----f------- dogs. I didn't encounter any unpenned, but if I had, especially once I was tired and walking a stretch, I'd have been up a tree or screwed. Bear strength pepper spray would work on two-legged mutts as well.
I planned the route well, avoiding known crappy neighborhoods, and riding mostly through night-deserted industrial zones, and upper class neighborhoods. It would pay to do some route reconnaissance now from here to Camp Snoopy, once I have time and wheels, rather than employ the "hoping really hard" strategy to select the best route(s) on the day when it might not be optional.
Heavily laden, I know I can make 20 miles a day unless people are shooting at folks, in which case all bets are off. Some minimal storage unit caches between point A and Point Z could be a godsend, possibly even giving me a small place to hole up if necessary.


And that's about all I feel like pondering for now. I'm going to take some ibuprofen, and spend some quality time this weekend in the Jacuzzi, and I suspect the place will have a faint odor of BenGay or Tiger Balm for a couple of days. But I have all weekend to recuperate, while I wait for the restoration to me of a functional internal combustion-powered conveyace, a blessing I might have previously overlooked, but for which I will hereafter offer humble thanks, for some good time. Like at least until the pain goes away.







{Random Scientific Observation of Everyday Weirdness: I personally blew out some seven streetlights merely by passing by them, in almost every instance with no other person or vehicle closer than a half mile. Just me. There is no rational explanation known to me why this happens, and it creeped me out the first few thousands of times over the years, but now it's either just my particular super power, or the Force is strong with me. Or else my personal Guardian Angel flies about 17 feet over my head everywhere I go, take your pick. I'm not complaining, but if anyone knows where to trade this Super Power in, I'd have much preferred the power of unassisted flight, command invisibility, or the ability to pick the winning Powerball numbers all the time as one of my first choices. Nobody asked me.  As it is, more than one significant other having witnessed it has referred to it as my rogue Professor Dumbledore gene.}

Time Well Spent

I don't know how other people blog, I only know how I do it.

Before anything else, I have to want to say something. Thirteen weeks at bootcamp was probably the longest period of my life to spend most of a day shutting up whether I wanted to or not, and while I've overcome that temporary impediment, I still struggle sometimes to figure out what it is that's wanting to get out. And obviously, some days are better for that than others.

Secondly, for me at least, it has to occupy my attention enough to stay around while I play with it, once when it bubbles up, again when I think about it, and finally when I finally clack it out here for public inspection.

Thirdly, it has to be worth saying, and this is the hardest of all. I want something topical enough not to be a story about Sanskrit archaeology, but timeless enough to spend my finite amount of time on the planet bothering with. I figure if it isn't worth my time, it's not worth yours either. Or vice versa, take your pick.

Today I keep thinking about something I saw a few years back. One of the usual parades of Egyptian artifacts was caravaning around the country, and was visiting a local museum, as was I. There were any number of artifacts and curiosities, but the one that stays with me, and that always will, wasn't Tutankhamun's great golden death mask, or some other richly detailed and bejeweled knick knacks, but was rather just a piece of wood not even a foot tall.

What it was, was quite simply one of the most lifelike representations of a typical Egyptian court beauty I think I've ever seen. She was standing, perfectly straight and proportioned, and appropriately covered with the prototypical pleated cotton skirt/shawl, plainly visible and draped over every bit of the perfect form underneath. It was a wooden carving so finely detailed, you could pick out that much. Each curve and feature from her hair to her feet was entirely the equal of a Michelangelo in marble from 3500 years afterwards.

And what struck me was that 4000 years or more ago, someone, probably a royal slave, on some given day had undertaken to carve, with the most basic hand tools, on a simple piece of mere wood with so much skill and grace, such that 40 centuries later it would not only survive, but end up where I would look at it and marvel at the skill, the detail, the honesty of the representation of a woman who would be dust itself long since, if not for the timeless and priceless representation of her standing now in a glass case a foot in front of me, thousands of miles and years from when she had walked the earth, no doubt gracefully, across smooth limestone floors in Pharoah's court centuries before the time of Moses. And that of all the things from so great and vast a civilization that had once existed, but long since perished in the march of the intervening centuries, such a small wooden statue had survived, and travelled so far from where it was made, to make such an impression, as if it had been done just yesterday.

When you see something like that, something so simple and basic, yet so purely well-executed you could reproduce an actual person from it, and have difficulty determining whether the model was the source of the sculpture, or whether it was the other way around, it changes your perspective on what you do every day, and how you spend your time.

I'm not there yet, with blogging or any number of other pursuits, so I can only keep working at it. But who knows which little thing we do on any given day may become just like that little wooden statue, long after we're gone?

And so I can only conclude that if each of us also keep at it, and just once in our lives, manages to produce something that stands the test of time as well as that small bit of Egyptian wood did from 2000 B.C., we would be doing very well indeed.

Catch Me If You Can

So, I told you that last story to tell you this one.

After receiving, at taxpayer expense, surgery to correct the problem that almost cost me a kidney, in their beneficence, I got sent home on a couple of weeks' convalescent leave, to recover at home in sunny California.

Which gave me, at last, the chance to drive my very own Ford Escort clear across the country upon my return, with suitable funds, and a bit of planning.

I worked out the distances, and came up with what I expected the trip to cost, and require, in terms of driving time, meals, gas, lodging, etc.

So on the appointed day, off I went. Living in SoCal, I made a minor detour on the I-10, just to tag up at the terminus at the Santa Monica Pier on PCH. If I was driving coast-to-coast, I wanted full props for the effort.

It being late fall/early winter, I didn't want to risk snow or the associated delays, so I went the southern routes. Midnight found me in Phoenix, and ready to stop for the night, which I did. A 7AM wake-up and drive-thru breakfast, and I was off again.

I was surprised to find that the gentle grade I crested that day was the Rocky Mountains in NM, and on I went. El Paso by sunset.

And then, into the eternal nothingness that is West Texas. Hours and hours of nothing. So much nothing, they could sell you all you'd want, and they'd still have the corner on the market. Nothing like you'd have to watch Lawrence of Arabia in slow motion to appreciate. George Lucas was a fool for going to Tunisia: West Texas is Tatooine, and you can drive to it. Whether you can ever drive out of it was beginning to give me doubts. Somewhere around 1 AM, I elected to take an exit alleging to be Midland. But it was dark, and I couldn't see much beyond the exit lights.

Another early start got me to Dallas by about 3PM. Just in time for rush hour non-moving traffic that would make a native Angeleno proud. Once I got past that nonsense, I hooked up towards Texarkana, and fell in among the big rigs, cruising along blissfully, and happy to see trees again, which I'd missed for most of the previous day.

But trucks are trucks. Whereas I was driving in something that offended the dignity of Texas law enforcement on the highways: not the Ford, but the California plates. So amongst about 200 16-wheelers all merrily driving 20 over the limit, they bypassed them, and singled out my car to pull over.

"License and registration please, sir."

Trooper Dawg evidently ran my plates and particulars, then returned to my window to hand them back. He hadn't pulled out his cite book yet.

"Where are y'all headed?"

"Camp Lejeune, sir. I'm a Marine returning from convalescent leave, and I was bringing my car back so I could have it there on post."

His partner (who I hadn't noticed, but wasn't surprised to find out was back there) played his flashlight, like a luftstalag guard post, sloooolwy  over the big green sea bag in the back seat. My high-and-tight haircut was pretty obvious too, but I handed him my military I.D. and a copy of orders to confirm my story.

He retreated to the rear of the car to confer with his partner, and probably to let me sweat a bit. It worked.

About a minute later, he returned to my window, handed me my papers back, and said to me, "California to North Carolina? That's a loooong way, son. Slow down, y'hear?"

"Yes Sir!" You betcha sir, absolutely, positively sir. Apparently in Texas trooper math, Marine Corps cancels out California. I officially love Texas for that alone. I also drove at precisely 55MPH from that point to the border at Texarkana, despite the headlight flashes and horn honks from more truckers than I could count. Fair is fair, I made my deal, and I'm sticking with it.

I continued across Arkansas, accelerating at the state line, and made it to cross the Mississippi at Memphis, and get a room for the night. Five states in 2 1/2 days, and all the next day to only get across two more.

Tennessee was beautiful country. So was North Carolina. What I had failed to consider, however, was that most of it was posted at 55MPH, or in random stretches, and that I was driving both states the loooong way across. Which amounts to a helluva lot more than it looks in an atlas. And the incomprehensible maze around Raleigh kind of pissed me off. Apparently, to the hillbilly assholes who allegedly planned the routes there, the simple expedient of marking the proper exits has not yet trickled down. But after trying only 9 times to continue on the exact same route I'd started off on, I was finally free of their attempts to misdirect me.

And then, with still half a state to go, it got dark.

For non-military readers, leave is up at midnight, just like Cinderella's party. Now, having been gone for over two weeks, if I'd returned at 1AM or 2AM, or even 530AM, provided i'd been in my PT gear at 6AM for morning PT, no one would have said a word. But they could have, and it was also the principle of the thing, so I knew I needed to make up some time.

Consequently, around 10PM Somewhere In (hopefully western) North Carolina, still heading eastward, but not having made the turn to the north where lay Swamp Lejeune, I was flying along in my 4 cylinder rocket, tank full of gas, doing every bit of 90 MPH.

Folks thereabouts evidently go to bed early, and I hadn't seen a soul on the road going my way for about an hour by that point. I was just slaloming along on a double two-lane interstate, hoping to get to the post before I turned into a pumpkin.

So when I came around a long curve, on a highway with light standards no more than 1 per mile, I was rather quickly cognizant of the headlights, high up on the side of the road facing the other way, across the median and up by the woods, which snapped on out of the pinewoods murky darkness just after I blew by.

Well, maybe the shock wave woke up some couple necking or somesuch, thinks left brain.
Nuh uh, points out right brain, as the headlights describe a slow arc across the highway towards my side, as I zoom out of sight around the next few curves.

Besides noticing that the car is suddenly a good deal warmer, several things occur to me, with an astonishing speed:
I'm military personnel in a state that loves to jerk military personnel around, undoubtedly with some justification after 60 years of knuckleheads.
I'm in a car with California plates in backwoods North Carolina.
I'm doing 90 in a 55 zone.
That was almost certainly a state trooper, whose coffee and doughnuts just got interrupted, if not actually his nap.
He may not have noticed anything but a blur and headlights.
If I stop now, I'm the only thing moving on the road, and I'll be caught, cleaned, and filleted in about a minute.
At 90MPH, I'm covering a mile every 40 seconds. That means I'm already two miles ahead of where he was just over a minute go.
It's going to take him a minute or two to catch me, even with 125MPH on tap.
Since I'm already screwed, don't slow down!!!

So I floored it, in the 3 seconds it took to figure all that out. Still no sign of him in my rear view mirror. Also no sign of anyone else.

So for another minute or two, I'm flying. I didn't know an Escort could do 100MPH without pieces coming off, but so far, so good.

And then, a miracle occurred. The two-lane highway passes through a town, with a no-kidding four-way stoplight. And mine is red.

So after popping the drogue chute, throwing out the speed brakes, downshifting, and everything else but popping the hood up to slow me down, I make the stop without laying rubber or totalling the car. And STILL no sign of Deputy Dawg in my rear view.

As I'm sweating bullets waiting the endless interval (probably 10 seconds) for the light to switch, another miracle. Out of nowhere, three cars pull up to the stop, one going in each of the other directions!

Thank you Jesus!
Light goes green for me, and off I go, now at the posted 55MPH.
Everyone else, I see in my mirror, does likewise.
So now Dawg'll have 4 targets to choose amongst.

And then, a mile or two beyond Podunk, the road turns north (at last!), because somewhere ahead is the Atlantic Ocean, and I'm on the home stretch to Swamp Lejeune. And STILL no state highway patrol cruiser in my mirror.

So about two minutes later, I'm heading north on a two-lane road through the pines of Nowhere. A car appears behind me.  With highbeams on. But since I'm obviously nearer to civilization than I was an hour ago, I think nothing of it.

Until, in about 45 seconds, it makes up the two miles from the curve to me, and flying around me in the opposite direction lane, I see two NC Highway Patrol officers in their cruiser, tail wigwags flashing, going like a bat out of hell at what had to be every bit of 125MPH.

AND THEY KEEP GOING RIGHT ON PAST ME!!!!

Hallelujah!

And about another mile or two ahead, the only other car on the road with little old me doing my legal 55MPH, I see the back end of their cruiser pop up, and the brake lights snap on.

And they start shining their spotlights up dirt roads and driveways on both sides of the road.

Now, I'm laughing so hard my sides hurt.

A couple of minutes later I pass two really pissed off officers, doing about 10 MPH along a dirt side road, obviously looking for the sumbitch who interrupted their naptime a few minutes earlier, on the other side of the county, in an unlicensed rocket-powered dragster.

No way was some kid in a 4-cyl. Ford Escort impersonating Richard Petty.

I cruised onto the relative safety of the base at 1135 PM, and checked in with the Duty NCO at 1152PM.
Safe!

Better luck next time, boys.