August '10 Elimination

[dafydd manton]

dafydd, here’s something weird. When I read your post about your peculiar and depraved method of therapeutic massage, the voice inside my head that reads to me had a British accent, something like: “Step lively Lef-tenant, there’s a good chap, right so, Bob’s your uncle.” Normally the voice sounds more like Forrest Gump: “Loo-tenant Dan, ice cream. Loo-tenant Daaa-un, ice creeem”

Sadly for the rest of the world, Sancho, the first is the most accurate, what. Good show, old boy, bang on. (Well I was in the Royal Air Force for 15 years - moustache the lot!) Toodle Pip, old bean!

[Sancho]

Sadly for the rest of the world, Sancho, the first is the most accurate, what. Good show, old boy, bang on. (Well I was in the Royal Air Force for 15 years - moustache the lot!) Toodle Pip, old bean!

Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few

I thought I sensed a kindred soul. I’ve spent the last 28 years in the United States Air Force (all three branches in sequence: Active duty, National Guard, and presently the Air Force Reserves) It’s all been downhill after the first ten years. They tell me I’m in the twilight of a truly mediocre career.

Anyway, I’m currently reading a book that may interest you as a fellow aviator: Riding Rockets by Astronaut Mike Mullane, The Outrageous Tales of a Space Shuttle Astronaut. So far, it’s hilarious.

Early on in the book, Mullane talks about his father, a former B-17 pilot who’d served in the Pacific Theater of WWII. It sounds like his dad was quite a character and probably a teller of tall tales:

He described being attacked by Washing Machine Charlie, a Japanese pilot who kept the Americans from getting any rest by flying over their Philippine base at night and dropping pop bottles from an antique bi-plane. The air whistling over the openings would produce the scream of a bomb, sending everybody out of their bunks and into shelters.

“Boys, we named him Washing Machine Charlie because that damn Jap [with my dad, Japs were always “damn”] had the worst-running engine we ever heard. I know he tuned the engine wrong just to make it sputter and backfire and keep us awake. It sounded like a dying washing machine.” Then Dad would put on a goofy Red Skelton-like face, purse his lips, and produce a litany of fart sounds to describe the offending machine. My brothers and I would laugh and laugh and beg him to “pretend to be Washing Machine Charlie.”

A boom of thunder would put us on another flight. “Boys, one time our damn navigator [like Japs, navigators were always “damn”] got us lost in a thunderstorm. Lighting hit our plane. I could feel it crawling all over my body. My hair exploded off my head, which is why I don’t have any today. It heated the fillings in my teeth and I burned my tongue when I touched it to the silver.”

On other occasions he would swoop through the room with arms outstretched describing how gooney birds (albatrosses) would perch on the wings of his B-17 and hitch a ride during takeoff. The birds would spread their own giant wings and use the rush of air to achieve flight.

I loved the bit about the gooney birds.

[Aragorn Elessar]

"Anyhow in a Corner" was my favorite. The allegory represented by the ship was something many people can relate to, and the story was very well-written. All of the stories were good, though!