I don’t recommend the work except for military buffs. It is laced with jargon and inside perspectives that don’t add to the plot. I only kept reading because I’ve been many of the places mentioned in the southern (Philippine) islands. One pestering theme throughout the book is the way army types have these little rituals that glorify themselves. They lose all understanding about the way others perceive the situation. Anybody who has been buttoned up in a tank with a burping, hungover, dropout who eats beef and bean burritos for breakfast isn’t thinking about glory.
Another example is the personalization of military jobs. Just say the soldier picked up the gun and shot the gook. I don’t need to know it was Jacob Marcus Halstrom, the third eldest of five Arkansas farm boys, [insert list of medals here], who activated his delayed blowback model 52 semi-automatic 9mm Parabellum 20-shot, always taking a mental note . . . well, you get the idea.
The author, Dale Brown, knows his cockpits and I am certain people who like to memorize acronyms can share his excitement about the switches and doodads he does tend to go on about. But the book is twice as long as it need be because of politics. Do we really need to know what tasteful color of shirt some admiral was wearing?
And why is it war news always interrupts the president during a golf game and never while he is taking a big, steaming dump? And why does he need all those advisers, diplomats, chiefs, ministers, secretaries, advisors and committees if he is just going to ignore them all and play it by ear? If every foreigner is a spy, every contact is a suspect, and every embassy a CIA headquarters, can’t we work around it in fewer chapters?
Two other things I don’t buy are these billion dollar airplanes headed for the scrap heap suddenly becoming ideal for counter-insurgency work by the last minute addition of space hardware, usually via some civilian firm headed by a boy-wonder. While I admire the venerable B-52 fleet, the rest of the air force doesn’t impress me. What good is a half-billion dollar fighter that has to be deployed with six other airplanes to carry its maintenance crew, forklifts, beer ration, press corps, and a few wagon-loads of spare parts?
The other thing is female crew members. Is that distant screaming due to missile-lock or a broken nail?
On my way to the library, it was strange to bike past the shop for the first time since 2005 and not stop in. Both Fred and I forgot to take down our exterior signs and the landlady has left them there to give the place that lived-in look. I’m still experiencing slight symptoms from that single day of helping Bryne paint two weeks ago and I’m learning that stress has a delayed action on my physiology. The shoemaker was constantly worried that one day I was going to keel over, so I biked right past there, too.
I wanted to research a little more on Doppler weather radar. I had the notion that only the emitter would be able to interpret the returning signal. Yes, sometimes I do ponder these things. The difference in wavelength of the returning signal is very small, and the raindrops give a spectrum of results. Well, my brain continued, if I knew the original frequency, a base receiving antenna should be enough to interpret the results. Again, not a single article in the entire library on this topic. But I learned in May that the radar domes are 38 feet in diameter.
Here’s your trivia. Only 19 cents of your food dollar is the product. The rest is transportation, packaging, advertising, and such. Much of that food is bee-pollinated, which costs the farmers plenty. So somebody has devised an electrostatic pollen spray the does away with bees. Good, because it turns out an Australian virus is killing all the local honey-bees. The average woman owns 30 pairs of shoes and spends $1,729 per year on apparel. That’s more than I’ve spent on clothes in my life, a bit on an exaggeration.
And, interesting I think, that most elevators have a height limit of around 1,900 feet and most never go beyond 600 feet. Something to do with the properties of long suspension cables. Ah, but we’ve all gone higher than 600. What you did not know is the elevator silently and imperceptibly switched shafts along the way. You heard it here, first.
Return Home
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
