Far South of I-10

*PETRARCA, FRANK J. Rank and organization: Private First Class, U.S. Army, Medical Detachment, 145th Infantry, 37th Infantry Division. Place and date: At Horseshoe Hill, New Georgia, Solomon Islands, 27 July 1943. Entered service at: Cleveland, Ohio. Birth: Cleveland, Ohio. G.O. No.: 86, 23 December 1943. Citation: For conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity in action above and beyond the call of duty. Pfc. Petrarca advanced with the leading troop element to within 100 yards of the enemy fortifications where mortar and small-arms fire caused a number of casualties. Singling out the most seriously wounded, he worked his way to the aid of Pfc. Scott, Iying within 75 yards of the enemy, whose wounds were so serious that he could not even be moved out of the direct line of fire Pfc Petrarca fearlessly administered ...

I was looking at google smashups linked from the High-tech Texan website , and one of the most interesting is the google map showing locations of all the SR-71 blackbirds with links to all the current photos, including summaries of all the SR-71 crashes. The crash that happened on July 30th 1966: M-21 tail number 06941 was destroyed 30 Jul 1966 when the D-21 drone it was launching bounced off the inside of the mothership's shockwave and struck 941 near the wing root. Lockheed test pilot Bill Park and Launch Control Officer Ray Torick ejected safely over the Pacific, but Torick drowned when his flight suit took on water. Sad to see such dry text to describe the death of someone who died doing their duty for their country.

I had to zoom up to canada for the last couple of days, yet another fools errand and a lot of travel for about 16 hours worth of work. I should have said "that's really not my job to go to the rig" and stayed home, but the manager there asked me, and I could hear in his voice that he was on the verge of mentioning that the last time I went there he paid for my wife to go too. So I went. 8 hours flying to edmonton, 3 hours lost in a hotshot, the driver couldn't find the rig, 3 hours working then 4 hours sleep on a bed with no sheets blankets or pillows (when did I become such a pussy?). 12 hours more work to finish drilling, wait one hour for a car, 2 hours to edmonton... no room at the inn by the airport, so we rode into edmonton. 3 hours sleep, then taxi to the airport in time to be two hours early. Whenever I'm two hours early I'm sure to check in, breeze through customs, immigration and security in about 4 minutes. (US immigration is in Canada, stra...

July 24 North Vietnam Increases Air Defense Capabilities 1965 In the air war, four F-4C Phantom jets escorting a formation of U.S. bombers on a raid over munitions manufacturing facilities at Kang Chi, 55 miles northwest of Hanoi, are fired at from an unknown launching site. It was the first time the enemy had launched antiaircraft missiles at U.S. aircraft. It's interesting to see that the first time we were fired at it probably wasn't a big deal. But after dozens of planes shot down over 8 years it became pretty important. What small seed of the future is happening now i wonder. Missiles shot at Israel or arms shipments from Iran to Syria? Or precision weapons to Isreal? Unfortunately we live in interesting times.

This from today's date during Korean war: Corporal Tibor Rubin distinguished himself by extraordinary heroism during the period from July 23, 1950, to April 20, 1953, while serving as a rifleman with Company I, 8th Cavalry Regiment, 1st Cavalry Division in the Republic of Korea. While his unit was retreating to the Pusan Perimeter, Corporal Rubin was assigned to stay behind to keep open the vital Taegu-Pusan Road link used by his withdrawing unit. During the ensuing battle, overwhelming numbers of North Korean troops assaulted a hill defended solely by Corporal Rubin. He inflicted a staggering number of casualties on the attacking force during his personal 24-hour battle, single-handedly slowing the enemy advance and allowing the 8th Cavalry Regiment to complete its withdrawal successfully. Read the rest, the rest is more interesting.

On this date in 2003 Saddam's Sons got their turn in front of the mortician's camera. We can weigh the pluses and minus' of the Iraq war, and this is definitely a plus. I don't have to live in a world where these dickhead are copresidents. As I continue to google this event all I seem to find is the outrage over showing their bullet ridden corpses.

One of my favorite blogs is Free market fairy tales from the UK. He does a "this day in history" type post almost every day to show the brilliance of English arms since the middle ages. Usually the post is something like: "During the Indian Mutiny Sgt Micklewaitstaff continued leading his 6 soldiers after being wounded 19 times while single- handidly winning the battle of Dungstinkalotpreshnam, and was awarded the posthumous victoria cross". I'm usually pretty amazed by these stories, until I think of the equivalent story in a flashman book and what really happened. I thought of trying my hand at this, and post tales of marshal valor from the west side of the atlantic. Today in history, (July 21st) was the first battle of bull run , or Mansassas to my fellow southerners. On July 21, McDowell, turning Beauregard's left, attacked the Confederates near the stone bridge over Bull Run and drove them back to the Henry House Hill. There Confederate resistance...

HBO is showing "The Hunt for Red October" this afternoon, which was a fantastic book and not a bad movie at the time. It just came out about 2 years too late when the Soviet Union was already in mid-collapse. This movie brought to mind something I thought of earlier in the week. As soon as the planes hit the wtc and the pentagon on september 11th, I immediately thought of the Tom Clancy novel "Debt of Honor", in which a war with japan ended with a 747 crashing into the Capitol building on purpose. I thought it was interesting that Al Queda likes Tom Clancy novels. Now that the war in the middle east is heating up, it reminds me of the book "Executive Orders", where a war happened after a cabal including china and iran hatched a plan to take over Saudi Arabia. Really nothing like what's happening now, except that one side effect of Korea firing it's missiles last week was an aircraft carrier group moving from the Indian Ocean to the Pacific, so th...

A link on Jerry Pournelle's mail page leads to a report delivered to the House committee on Energy and commerce on the study by Mann et al that purported to show that the 1990's were the hottest decade in the last 1000 years, and created that 'hockey stick' graph that is generally used as a prop when they are shouting "haliburton, oil, global warming, bushhitler" This report by emminent statisticians (who will now be accused of being in the pay of oil companies) seems to say that the original paper is a load of bunk, and was only peer-reviewed in the sense that a small group of scientists with similar beliefs used the same datasets over and over to confirm what each of them were saying. Mann et al., misused certain statistical methods in their studies, which inappropriately produce hockey stick shapes in the temperature history. Wegman’s analysis concludes that Mann’s work cannot support claim that the1990s were the warmest decade of the millennium. Report: “O...

It's always been funny to me how Bjorn Lomberg sounds like one of the most reasonable and intelligent people, yet he's often excoriated by enviroweenies as in the pay of big oil. His book the skeptical environmentalist approaches the global warming problem as an economic problem, how much does the kyoto approach spend for achieving what amount of mitigation? It finds kyoto lacking and suggests our money would be better spent fixing worse problems. There's a great article in the WSJ opinion journal that includes an interview with Mr Lomberg and discusses his latest project that attempts to bring together world leaders to prioritize problems. Turns out, without the hypsters, global warming tends to be at the bottom of the list. Prioritization, cost-effectiveness, efficiency--these are the ultimate in rational thinking. (It strikes me they are the ultimate in "free markets," though Mr. Lomborg studiously avoids that term.) They are also nearly unheard-of concepts ...

One of the side effects of the Calgary stampede is the city is full of drunken horny cowboys. My moderately priced downtown hotel's parking lot is apparently street- hooker central. I'm high enough up that I can't see if they are pretty or ugly, but it looks like there is a rotating crew of 4 to 6 blondes. I have no problem with hookering (hookerfication, hookerstitution?) on any moral grounds, but do their johns have to make so much noise? Horns and the roar of engines, followed by burning rubber declares to the world that some young guy got his first bj. I have to fight the urge to switch to granpa simpson voice "keep it down, you whippersnappers!" Being high above them in the hotel, I can watch the activities like it's a giant sim game, "SimCity, the dark side". Miniature car rolls up, honks their horn (/shake fist "quiet!" /shake fist off) negotiations happen, roll around the block, dirty deed, and back again and goodbye with a hug...

Jeff over at protein wisdom is dueling with a troll who has insulted and threatened his child who claims to be a professor at a western university. I'd say Jeff needs our support, but he doesn't need much help. With his razor sharp wit he's already cutting down this troll like she brought a knife to a gun fight. Best jibe so far: "When I’m done with you, Deb, you’re going to be an internet verb.". His site is down now due to a ddos attack, which is ironic; trolls are using zombie computers to attack. Updated well, the verb is Frisch , apparently it really was Deborah Frisch at the university of Arizona. To be Frisched will be to be hounded from polite society, at least on the web. I have no problem with profanity and insults in comments, but her comments against Jeff Goldstein's son were disgusting and specific. I think blogging should be like the mafia, leave the family out of it. Since Frisch broke that code, she should be shunned by all.

I tend to click on acidman's site just as a habit. Two or three times a day is what I used to read there music, girls with red toe nail polish, the crazy psycho cunt were all topics for my daily read. Godspeed acidman! It's going to be a very meloncholy blogosphere, if all the dozens of links that we read on a daily basis ever start to die off. i'm bummed and it was just acidmand's turn. I've got a few dozen links, and another 100 or so IE bookmarks for blogs that I read at least weekly...what'll we do when everyone is connected and people die or have problems. I think in a normal agricultural life people only knew 20 or 30 people. I wonder if we're meeting more now, or less. How will this look in 2o years? different I suppose.

The last post was rudely interupted by a fire alarm...I had to dash down 20 stories thinking, shit, I've got my hotel sorted for next week and it'll probably burn down, and my laptop too. False alarm though, but it made me think of all the fire alarms offshore, where if it's at sunday and 1pm it's obviously a drill, but if it's 2 am you are highly motivated to go instantly from a deep sleep to putting on a life vest and carrying your ass to an escape capsule or the muster area tout suite. All the time not knowing if the well is blowing out and on fire, or the toolpusher is having fun jerking our chains. This can lead to some interesting reflexes, so that a 2 am fire alarm in a hotel can make me groggily shoot half naked out of a room, standing around looking for a lifeboat. I did that once at the holiday inn in New orleans, some poor japanese lady saw me standing in my underwear and gave me a "gah! my eyes!" kind of expression, or maybe she said the japa...

It's stampede week here in calgary, which means two things, that my hotel has been trying to kick me out and it's parade day. My reservation was only through wednesday since I was only supposed to be here a couple of days. A new trick I learned for extending a hotel stay when the entire city is full, keep asking at the desk and ask a different person every time. Someone finally said yes and let me stay. Yee hah, the joys of overbooking. Oh yeah, and I just watched most of the parade through downtown calgary. It's hard for me to go to a parade, I'm from new orleans and I've probably seen around 200 parades, but here everyone is shouting ya-hoo, and I have to resist the urge to shout "show your tits!". Apparently calgary is very family oriented and would not appreciate the humor. (the horrors of a canadian jail are to be avoided at all costs) Anyway, my favorite parts of the parade this morning were the flyovers by the canadian aerobatic team (the snowb...

We went to the movies the other night to see the movie 'the breakup', but since the ever wonderful katy mills theater had a technical hiccup and canceled the movie, we switched over to see the movie *click with Adam Sandler. I thought it would be a typical funny but stupid Sandler movie, and from my wife's expression she thought it would be a stupid but not funny movie. It turned out to be the best movie I've seen in a while, and had me surreptitiously wiping away tears, since I saw so much of my life in the movie. Life, Death and wasting time as we fast forward through life on autopilot. How many days have I spent offshore just trying to get time to pass so i could get back home and drink, then go back offshore to earn the money to pay for drinking. (1991 - 1999 pretty much passed in an alchohol/offshore haze.) I often feel like a hippie stereotype...what happened in 1995?...heh, hum, he her hum. Since the millenium and I got married things are much better, but stil...