Archive for the ‘Guest Story’ Category

I was stationed at USAH Vicenza, Italy, as a 91P20 (X-ray Specialist), and for about 6 hours after my arrival I was the new NCOIC. Then suddenly a SSG arrived in command, a brand new 91P30 who had been promoted in his old MOS of helicopter mechanic! Needless to say, he was just about ready to be trained.

3 years later (he had actually become a reasonable tech) Rick got orders to Ft Sam Houston, a TDY to 91P Instructor’s course, and a PCS following that to Health Sciences Academy to be a 91P instructor. The day before he was to fly out with his family we were having an extended lunch at a local pizza and wine place (common in the early 80s).

Half way through the roast/farewell the PSNCO came racing in with a manila folder full of orders, saying, “Rick, you got to go to personnel NOW! You’ve been diverted! Here’s your new orders!”

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Oops, fixed HTML error. You can read the whole post now.

I thought about this before I read a recent post of Skippy’s. Actually, I thought about something similar a while back (see the entry on boiling gasoline). This is an attempt to remember and pass on my own lessons learned the hard way.

1. Dogs and people both die. Love them anyway and be nice to them when you can so you don’t regret it when they die.
2. Always wear long pants. This is because white athletic socks can get snagged on barbed wire electric fences. This is bad because you can wind up face down trying not to get shocked. There are also briars out there; also, it’s gross when hogs sniff your bare legs.
3. It’s better to put feed on the ground and lead a hog to where you need it to go than to get behind it and beat it with a stick. This may be applicable to people as well; said application is probably more complex.
4. “Pick up leaves, children. Pick up leaves.” I’m going to generalize this saying to: we should be productive and not let valuable resources go to waste.

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After the debacle that was My Mother’s Chili (it’s a title- it gets capitalized), tadalafil my mother was never allowed into the kitchen without competent supervision again. Or, ambulance at least, unhealthy she wasn’t allowed to make anything more complicated than peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. For myself, I made a vow that I would never commit the same sort of blasphemy against the art of cuisine.

Skip ahead a dozen years. I’ve graduated high school and am studying Education at the University of Akron. My wife and I have recently moved out of a shoebox-sized apartment (when I tell you it was so small that I could stand in the living room and reach the kitchen and the bathroom without actually having to stretch, it’s not really an exaggeration) and into our first house. I won’t go into detail about this house except to say that when we had it appraised, the building inspector gave it thoughtful stare and said, “Well, you can’t exactly call it a fixer-upper; we’re going to have to invent a new word…” We paid less on our mortgage for that house, near the heart of the town, than we had for the little rodent-infested apartment we had just moved out of, and it’s arguable that we were still being robbed.

In any case, though, it was an investment; our money was going into a sinkhole that would someday actually belong to us. In the meantime, though, we were so broke that we had to panhandle outside elementary schools in order to scrape up enough change to buy gas so that we could go to work and school. I’ll tell you, there’s nothing quite so depressing as realizing that the average five-year-old child has- in his pockets- roughly double your net worth…

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Greetings to the readers at Skippy’s List! I’m a young sailor at age 26, going by RivCA here (and elsewhere on the Intarweb) and I’ve got a story for you.

I am currently stationed in Naval Weapons Station Charleston, and I am discovering very quickly that this is one of the most stressful commands to be a student at. The “A” school here has an education program on par with Harvard Law and MIT. We get all the core classes needed to do our jobs over the span of a year and a half, when it takes them four to do the same. Fast-paced doesn’t quite describe it.

It turns out that the school is so stressful and the schedule so dense, that there are occasions to set up suicide watches. (It’s to make sure shipmates don’t commit suicide. Yeah, it’s that rough.) As you might have guessed, some people go a little kooky if they can’t handle things here. Just before my arrival, one kid went to Captain’s Mast for deciding to do a Matrix jump from the third floor, wearing a trench coat. Broke his leg in the fall, owes half his paycheck for the next two months, and discharge once he’s done.

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Note from skippy:  Longtime readers may remember when I had everybody click on a link to the best burger joint in the world so that me and my wife could eat there for free.  Well the owner of that place has a message that he would like to get out, and so I have offered to put it up here.

I’ve NEVER liked radicals. Conservative radicals… Liberal radicals… Black radicals… White radicals… Feminist radicals… Chauvinist radicals… what ever type of radical they are… I just flatly DON’T like them!

Do you know why? Because if they spent 1/10th of the time that they do protesting silly causes, on improving their job skills, the world would be a much better place to live in
. Give me shoemakers who strive to create better shoes… Dentists who strive to take better care of teeth… Policemen who strive to keep neighborhoods safer… Strippers who strive to give better lap dances…

In short give me quality, give me excellence, not pathetic activism. I know what you’re thinking…

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Discussion starter for you: What are the worst movie gaffs that you can think of?

For example, some people would say that in the movie Independence Day Jeff Goldblum’s character wirelessly communicating with the alien mother ship using a PowerBook 3400 (a model which has no wireless capability) and implanting a virus is the worst movie “hand waving” exercise in recent memory. Some people would say that the gaff is that he was able to write (and compile) a virus that knocked out the alien’s shields. In other words the gaff isn’t that there are aliens or that the aliens who are capable of inter-stellar flight aren’t peaceful (which is one theory of alien life that is alluded to in the movie). The gaff is that the crucial plot device couldn’t have worked.

I will now hand wave the second of those two gaffs away. They were able to write and compile the virus because the scientists at Area 51 had the alien parasite fighter to experiment with for years. The computer were capable (and now I’m hand waving) because they’re computer’s and the logic processes were similar. No, strike that– they wrote the virus on the fighter and just delivered it on the PowerBook 3400.

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First a disclaimer: even after all the following, I am still undecided as to the existence of ghosts. On one hand, I am a pretty pragmatic person, and like solid evidence of things; on the other hand, this all happened to me personally, NOT some friend-of-a-friend or whoever!

I’ve been a movie theater projectionist for a long, long time now; occasionally in newer theaters (my current one is a five-year-old IMAX — woot!), but many times, especially in my earlier days, I’ve worked the oldest places in the area. For one twelve year stretch I was at a theater built in 1911, which is where I encountered Caspar.

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South Armagh in Northern Ireland is rural…very, very rural!! There are some of the tallest, thickest hedgerows that you’ve ever seen and one of the main rules of patrolling out there is “Don’t use gates, bridges or any other channeled path”. This was brought in due to the fact that the IRA had been burying huge bombs under gateways between fields and in one instance, detonated it remotely, killing two guys and seriously wounding the other two guys in a section of 4 men. Getting through, over or around the hedgerows, ditches, swamps and fields full of mad Irish cows was always something to look forward to on every patrol…..NOT!!

Patrolling is also a bitch because of the amount of kit you have to carry. A normal patrol will see the average troop humping upwards of 40 pounds of gear, sometimes as much as 80 if we were on extended patrols or OPs. I only weigh 165 now pounds and was quite a bit smaller and lighter back then, so you can imagine what a bitch it was for me!!

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And now, nurse for the next part of the zombie story

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Here are links to two consecutive videos on a lost atomic bomb. By the way, I got a lot of buffering pauses; that could just be me.

Part 1 (2:30): http://www.wral.com/lifestyles/travel/video/5050531/

Part 2 (2:21): http://www.wral.com/lifestyles/travel/video/5059120/

Briefly, a B-52 crashed in 1961 with two atomic bombs on board. One was found. The other one never has been completely recovered. I’d heard everything on the video before except I don’t remember hearing the size of the bombs (megaton range) or how long they looked for the missing bomb. Oh, my dad said that he and one of his cousins went to the crash site to go looking around.

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