This one gets me every time: Tribute to the WWII generation.
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Weltanschauung Friends in the News
Weltanschauung friend Bonnie is in the Chicago media for her work helping raise funds to build a Fisher House there (one near the Hines VA Hospital and later another in northern Chicago)! Congratulations, and thank you very much for supporting Fisher Houses. For those of you who aren’t familiar, a Fisher House is a place where the families of service men and women can stay while their loved one recuperates from wounds.
Bonnie had some very nice things to say about Kevin Butler (Chicago Bears field goal kicker, rookie during Super Bowl ’85) and also about Gary Sinise and his Lt Dan Band (they played in concert to raise money for the Fisher House in Chicago). I second both, what great acts! It looks like the Lt Dan Band will be back to repeat the feat on 19 July 2008 at Cantigny Park in Wheaton, IL (Thanks also to Ms Deborah Rickert of Operation Support Our Troops–Illinois for the additional information about the upcoming concert; and thanks to Grant & Power Landscaping for helping support the overall effort)!
Below is the text of an e-mail from Fisher Houses for Illinois, Bonnie is mentioned in the second-to-last paragraph.
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The following message was sent out by the Fisher House Chair to it’s Committee: Hello to Fisher Houses for Illinois Board, Committees and Volunteers: We have really great news to report. What a thrill and what a surprise! Fisher Houses for Illinois received a generous contribution of $75,000 from fellow military support organization Operation Support Our Troops-IL (OSOTIL) at this non-profit’s July 21, 2007 Rockin’ for the Troops Benefit headlined by CSI:NY star Gary Sinise and the Lt. Dan Band. These funds are specifically earmarked for the Fisher House for Hines VA Hospital. |
| Debi Rickert, President of OSOTIL, presented the check to Fisher Houses for Illinois representatives before 10,000 attendees at the Benefit at Cantigny Park, Wheaton, Illinois. Added to prior OSOTIL contributions (in April 2007) for the first Fisher House in Illinois, this brings the total of OSOTIL-generated donations to $110,000. This earns a permanent plaque for this generous donor in the Fisher House for Hines. This organization’s volunteers have been a delight to work with from the get-go. They are dedicated to their mission and to support the needs of our members of the Armed Forces of the USA deployed in harm’s way. To date, OSOTIL has sent over 12,000 care packages to troops in Afghanistan and Iraq, 5,000 of those in 2005. OSOTIL has also raised enough money to fund the purchase of two specially equipped vans for wounded soldiers. Supporting America’s wounded military personnel is another facet of the mission that OSOTIL is looking to expand upon in the upcoming year. Fisher Houses for Illinois is fortunate to have OSOTIL partnering with us to help veterans in Illinois and the surrounding 16 states with the Fisher House for Hine. Please take a few minutes to e-mail OSOTIL President Debi Rickert at d_rickert@msn.com to thank her and her tireless workers for giving the Fisher House for Hines such a huge boost. In addition, we want to express our gratitude to the volunteers who manned the Fisher House for Illinois exhibit at the OSOTIL Rockin’ for the Troops Benefit and those who volunteered to work shifts with OSOTIL. Bonnie Chattler, Jim Boland, Rich Flatley and Barbara Kemp were magnificent as they built awareness of our mission by speaking with hundreds of attendees and distributing buttons and brochures. Rich Goulet and his wife, Mark Garry, Madeline Bikus and Mary Vaughn plus VFW members Vito DeSimone and Mike Henning worked shifts with OSOTIL in a number of areas from traffic control to ticket-taking and clean-up. |
Posted in Media, Weltanschauung Viewers
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The New York Enquirer
This may be the only thing I’ve ever read or heard from Michael Kinsley that was worth repeating. This was hilarious!
What’s fun is that I now get to find the Times’ most egregious errors, publish only their failures, claim that based on their ineptitude that their product is worthless, and call for everyone to stop reading the Times.
The parallels here compared to what they’ve been doing to us in the military with respect to Iraq are uncanny.
It’s like poetic justice.
Hat tip to HoyStory.
Trojan Lead
If it’s not one problem for American consumers who purchase Chinese products, it’s another.
Anyone who likes these new digital photo frames as much as I do, take heed!
Are any of the companies that make these digital frames publicly traded? I haven’t been able to find out.
Posted in Asia/Pacific, Business
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Last Week in Defense
There were a couple of fairly big stories in the DoD in the past week. I’ll consolidate them briefly here.
We lost an Eagle bro this week; one pilot survived, two F-15C aircraft destroyed in an apparent mid-air collision.
Navy successfully shoots down an errant satellite after notifying everyone in the world what we were going to do so everyone couldn’t point fingers at us and tell us we’re just like China. This is the first time we’ve done this from a boat. Last time we did this it was from an F-15.
Pilots safely eject as USAF loses it’s first B-2 ever. We basically just lost almost one-twentieth of our stealth bomber fleet. By comparison of numbers of aircraft (but certainly not comparing capabilities), it would be like 75 F-16s crashing all at once, or about six F-22s. Interestingly (and assuming I’ve done my bar napkin math correctly), the loss of the one B-2 represents a higher dollar figure than the loss of the corresponding number of F-16s or F-22s. Before anyone gets crazy and suggests we replace B-2s with F-22s (although there’s a certain ring to that possibility that excites the fighter pilot in me), it’s important to note that the B-2 doesn’t require quite as many multimillion dollar KC-135s or KC-10s to get it from one side of the planet to the other. Again, the capabilities are completely different.
**20080607 Update: The accident investigation report has been released–it was water-foul.
Posted in Military Affairs
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AFA Article About Aging Aircraft
The Air Force Association put out an interesting article relating the age of various USAF airframes to popular culture historical events. It’s kind of a twist on that e-mail that one university puts out each year to the professors that describe the shared cultural life-experiences of the incoming freshman class.
Posted in Air Force Association, USAF
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Back to the Frontier
I’m now "Downrange" again. I’ll make a preliminary effort to post whatever I can, but I can’t promise anything.
All I can say for now is that where I am, it’s hot.
Posted in "Downrange"
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An Illegal Immigration Analogy
Let’s say there’s a street out there in Hypothetica. On that street is a relatively nice big house with a couple spare rooms, 2.5 bathrooms, and a five-car garage. It’s a beachfront house with a yard that stretches from sea to shining sea. A nice family lives there, a husband, a wife, 2.05 children, and a dog (no cats in my analogy, with apologies to my cat-loving friends). The house has a small but imposing fence around it. Next door there is a slightly smaller house, a little more run-down, the yard is smaller but stretches from sea to shining sea just like the house to the north. Another family lives there, a very nice, very big extended family.
One day, one of the folks from the small house moves over into the bigger house. It doesn’t matter who, let’s just say it was one of the husbands in the extended family.
The man now lives in the big house. This brash move surprises the family, but they understand that the small house is a little crowded and not quite as nice, and the fellow is quite decent, so they lodge a couple oblique objections and complaints, but take no action.
The man gets a job, goes to work every day, and even stocks the fridge with beer (okay, it’s Milwaukee’s Best and not remotely anything German). After a few weeks he brings his wife and his 2.6 kids, and they keep their room nice and clean (lets face it, bachelors of any stripe just can’t match a good family team for cleanliness). The family is doing okay in the big house, and they sometimes hand some of the Milwaukee’s Best over the fence to the rest of the family in the small house.
The only problem here is that the family from the small house wasn’t invited.
What does the family from the big house do? They could ask the intruding family to go home, but this is where the analogy breaks down because it’s a simple matter for the family to walk next door in the story, it’s not quite as practical in the real world; let’s just say small-house family won’t leave if asked, they’re too comfortable in the big house. The big-house family could call the police to evict the other family, this would cause angst and aggravation all around. Or they could ignore the problem and let life continue. Maybe more families from the small house will move into the other spare rooms in the big house. Maybe not.
If we could rewind life, the big-house family could have invited the small-house family over to rent one of the spare rooms. That way they would have had a clean spare room, a little spare cash from rent, and extra beer in the ‘fridge.
Instead, big-house family is stuck with an awkward position where if they take no action, they’re spineless; but if they overreact, they’re mean. And it’s nearly a digital difference between spineless and mean.
Maybe there’s a way for big-house family to run next door and help make the small house more livable?
If I were as smart as Travis Patriquin, I’d make a clever PowerPoint presentation explaining the dilemma. Alas!
Blue Sky Hawaii
I’m blogging from Waikiki beach again. I’m here for a short TDY to Hickam AFB to see the folks at PACAF. You know, the sky in Hawaii just seems to be a slightly different shade of blue than anywhere else I’ve been. It’s always green here, too. I’m not sure I’d want to live here, but I’m pretty sure I’ll never get tired of visiting!
The great thing about these TDYs is that I get a chance to see friends. I just had dinner at an Outback Steakhouse with my friends from my North Dakota days. The slow-broiled sirloin was outstanding, as was the sundae! Great food and good conversation (and entertaining kids) make these trips worthwhile.
Posted in Asia/Pacific, Travel, United States, USAF
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February “RAP-up”
Today was a superb day! Scrappy, Pitch, Scooter, and I were going to double-turn ACM sorties. The original plan was to try to play "ACM Baseball," with Scrappy and Pitch "batting" first sortie and Scooter and I "batting" second. We set up four waypoints in the sky in the shape of a diamond. The object was to start at "homeplate," and fly from first base (the first waypoint) to second base, to third base, and back home. Red Air would play outfield by attempting to get a simulated kill on Blue Air, and if Red Air scored a missile or gun hit on Blue Air, Blue had to return to "homeplate" and start the trip around the bases over again (sort of like getting tagged out). If Blue got around the bases back to "homeplate" without getting tagged out, Blue scored. After both sorties, whomever had made it around the bases the most would win.
As life happens, Scrappy had a problem with his jet just after takeoff, so he held at the field with Pitch chasing him while Scooter and I flew some high-aspect BFM. We got about five sets done, which is actually quite a bit. Two things were working in our favor: We got airspace close to the field and it was VFR (no divert fuel required).
On the second sortie, all four of us managed to get out to the airspace, but the weather didn’t really facilitate a "baseball" game by that time, so we switched to something more like Tap-the-CAP. It was still a blast, even though Scrappy was in a completely clean jet (unlike the rest of us who were carrying centerline tanks).
With the second flight of the day my monthly training requirement was completed (I’d made RAP, as we say)! Of course, now this means no more flying for the rest of the month!
Posted in F-16 Operations, USAF
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