Chinook Down in Afghanistan

Woke up to some bad news this morning in the form of hearing what apparently was a CH-47 "Chinook" shot down in Afghanistan by a RPG. It seems all crew were lost including many members of a Navy SEAL team. Chinooks have been in service since Vietnam and have a very good safety record.

I recall talking to a CH-47 pilot once and was amused when he told me that just before takeoff, you really had to stand on the wheel brakes otherwise the helicopter would try to scoot down the runway like an airplane.

Red Tails trailer will have you running with your tail between your legs.

Good news is George Lucas's movie about the Tuskegee Airmen is nearly completed and has a flashy new trailer. Bad new is that George Lucas has nearly completed a movie about the Tuskegee Airman. Regardless, it sure looks purdy and more importantly, accurate. I'll admit, I almost fainted at the 2:00 min. mark. We Fight!

Lucky bastage talks of flying rare A6M3 Zero

It’s from an island named after Rocky, so it has to be good! AvWeb brings us a great video of a modern Zero pilot discussing what it is like to fly a rare and amazing bird. I hate him. Some great stuff about the history and handling characteristics of the plane. I hate him. I love the radios wedged in between the machine guns. Did I mention I hate him? Enjoy.

Vote or Die - Literally

I know who I'm voting for this year. The fate of the colonies is at hand.

Road Rage

I never really noticed it, but many people are both impatient and rather rude when they drive.

I've been teaching my wife to drive (a short but uninteresting story)and it has been...an...interesting venture... Since she is just learning, she is very careful and takes her time on turns and changing lanes, etc. So, like a good instructor, I teach her the proper driving etiquettes of using turn signals and adhering to right-of-way of other drivers.

That said, I swear that half of the time, people ignore her signaling - even with a student driver sign in the window! People routinely will not give her space to change lanes when she signals. There was even one time when she had signaled to turn left into our house's driveway, some nimrod actually passed her on the left side! If she had been faster in her turning, the other vehicle would have had crashed into her/us. Then there was the person that beeped her horn at us for daring to make her 2 seconds late in her getting home (wife took a turn slow causing a delay in someone behind us pulling into their driveway).

I really wish I sometimes I was a plain clothes cop. There are a few people I'd pull over to have a chat with.

Oh, that explains it.

I’d been wondering for a while why my warlock didn’t feel as uber as it should have.
I couldn’t figure out why this could be. I’d grinded my way to the top of all the PvP gear that I wanted. I’d gotten all the high-dollar enchants, constructed the very best engineering trinkets and armor that I could get my hands on.
Sure, there was better stuff in the top tier of the heroic super-instances, but I never thought it that essential to get. I used to be able to hold my own in battlegrounds, but it seemed like I was slipping a bit lately.
After I found out that I couldn’t live without the new Olympic ‘spirit of summer’ pet, I ventured back into the world of level 70 battlegrounds…
Two observations: It’s much more fun to play with a twinked out level 29 rogue, and second – my lock just wasn’t as powerful as I remembered him to be.
It wasn’t until last night that I figured out why. Apparently, in the last patch, a whole new level of PvP gear had been released. Some of it was just marginally better than what I had, but some of it was much, much better. And this new stuff was apparently the new baseline standard for all serious PvP’ers out there.
As I started calculating the amount of honor I’d need to spend to get my mitts on the first piece of armor that I wanted, I quickly realized that this was going to take a while. Again.
This wasn’t the first time I’ve been faced with the horrible honor grind, and I suppose it won’t be the last… But now that I’ve seen how much good gear is out there for the taking… How can I resist??
Some of the stuff would make it much easier to venture into the pre-BC instances once again, and it seems that you really need to keep up with the rest of the world if you want to survive in the battle grounds for very long… so how can anyone resist?
But then, how long into the Litch King will it be before it all gets replaced by green items? Again…

Here we grind again…

Inverse Life Interest Postulate

I have noticed something.

I used to have all sorts of interesting things happening that I always thought were worth writing down. I would tell these stories to friends and coworkers and they seemed to be entertaining. This being the case, I always thought having a blog to publish these stories to the world would be something of an interesting experiment.
Would anyone else in distant corners of the world think these anecdotes were worth reading? My guess would be "likely not", but the idea always fascinated me.

Since then, two things have happened. These two things are not related, but I think one has had an effect on the other.
1. I very recently got married.
2. Even more recently, I got a blog.

After #1 occurred, I just don't seem to have any little interesting stories to put on #2.

I just can't make "putting together Ikea furniture" into a very interesting story. There's not a lot to put on a blog to describe "watching a movie on the couch with my wife."

I'm not saying life has become boring, but it just doesn't seem to be all that blog-worthy anymore. Perhaps after getting settled in with married life, things will once again be filled with transcription-worthy events.

I just hope my wife doesn't find this someday and get the wrong idea...