Road Trippy - Day 5

Free Wifi - A symbol of civilization.

The Pensacola Regional Airport (PNS) is my kind of place; on the small side. Airports like Newark, Los Angeles and Houston creep me out for reasons I can't really articulate. I like a small- to medium-sized airport, like Eugene, Kansas City and Pensacola.

Just came from a real treasure - The National Museum of Naval Aviation. You could spend 12 hours at that place. The variety of aircraft is thorough, from the efforts of Orville and Wilbur to the FA18. It's almost too much to photograph, so I shot some of the unique fuselage graphics used to identify squadrons.


I also shot many of the "calling card" plaques left by flight groups and squadrons at Cubi Bay Cafe in the Phillipines, and now hanging in the diner at the museum.

When you get to see all the planes together in one place, you really get to appreciate the engineering, utility and inventiveness by those who design and fly planes. It's no such a good bomber? Fill the belly with camera equipment. You say a C-130 is too big for a carrier landing? Here's the plane that did it many times. Can't hit Tokyo with bombers because it's too far away? Meet Doolittle's Raiders. The fact that a retired marine drove our tour bus during the outside portion of the tour didn't hurt a thing.

They're calling my flight.

UPDATE: JetWay? We don't need no stinkin' JetWay:

UPDATE 2: The view from seat A-16, 7:20 PM, O'Hare Airport :

Road Trippy - Day 4

This morning I survived a close encounter with heart disease by having breakfast at a Chevron station on Dauphin Island. In addition to the typical fare one might expect at at convenience store, they also had some steam trays of breakfasty goodness for those not satiated by Oreo Bites and Powerade. I went with the sausage patty and eggs on a biscuit and then, to court further cardiac risk, got a chunk of another type of ring-style sausage to see what that was like. The chunk I ate was about 3 inches and so greasy and rich, I'm not sure I would have survived four inches.

After a quick angioplasty, we hopped onto I-10, into Mobile and to the USS Alabama. The South Dakota-class battleship has been on display for a while, but has now been fortified (and righted) since Katrina blew through. Probably the most interesting aspect of the tour was the contrast of high tech (for the era) and low-tech. This is from inside turret #2:

If I learned my naval history correctly, the Alabama has the 2nd largest guns (after the Iowa-class battleships) the navy ever sent out of a ship yard. To rap one's knuckles on the armored turrets is to knock on a granite mountain. Between squawking intercoms, slamming iron hatchways and the report of 14-inch guns, it's amazing anyone got off the boat with their hearing intact.

Lunch at Ed's on the US90 causeway, and then a slow, lazy tour of residential Mobile which varies from the stately grace of civilized New Orleans to the worst of Appalachia.

Road Trippy - Day 3

After some Southern Baptist git-up-and-go and a church dinner that, as Arlo Guthrie put it, could not be beat, we took a spin around the immediate area including the west side of Dauphin Island that got plenty of Katrina. It's gotta be tough to file an insurance claim when not only your house is gone but your lot has been dissolved and moved to another side of the island.


We also cruised around some of the boat yards in the area. Without the facilities you might expect, they make some pretty serious gulf-going vessels.


There we lots of shrimp boats stacked up in the docks, many of them with Vietnamese names and none of them looked like they were going out anytime soon.

Road Trippy - Day 2

Blytheville to Dauphin Island; something like 540 miles.

After a breakfast that should be considered an insult to the Continent, we sped off again south on I-55, past cotton fields, catfish farms and all the truck stops in West Memphis. There really isn't much geographical variety from St. Louis to Memphis. Seems like a broad historic floodplain.

Once out of Memphis (no stopping for catfish & longnecks this time) and into Mississippi, the scenery improves. The terrain undulates more, and there are tall pine trees on both sides of the freeway and often in the median. We managed to not stop in Coffeeville or Hot Coffee but did stop somewhere around Collins where I had my first Moon Pie, which, in my case, was not a life changing event.

Once south of Hattiesburg, I cultivated a new appreciation for Trent Lott: We travelled swiftly on billiard table-smooth, four-lane highways that cut through the middle of nowhere had no one on them. That's Trent Lotsa Appropriations I guess. He managed to get an airport named after hisself, too (notice no traffic on that highway, either).

After quite enough of Mississippi, we plopped onto I-10 near Pascagoula, entered Alabama proper, and broke south for the coast. Getting to the island means a trip through Coden and Bayou La Batre, which, to be frank, are the last places anyone from Alabama should want photographed for public dissemination.

It sounds heartless, but this is a place that really could have benefited from more of Katrina's wash-n-rinse effect. Katrina ended up making landfall about 70 miles to the west, sparing Bayou La Batre the full punch, so just about all of the crummy, poorly-maintained homes, each with their allotment of non-functioning cars, unattended domestic animals and budding shrines to the 70's sit-com "Sanford and Son," were preserved.

Crossing the 3-mile causeway and bridge leading to Dauphin Island is like changing planets, but any stopping point will look good after 1,400 miles over 2 days.

Road Trippy - Day 1

St. Paul to Blytheville - pretty much 845 miles of this:

Anyone who screams about sprawl has never traversed Illinois from top to bottom. It's a very good place for a wind farm, if you know what I'm saying.

One of our brief stops was in Mount Olive, where the Citgo station has a small problem with loitering locals.

Tomorrow, Dauphin Island . . . eventually.

The High Cost of Reality

There are some fresh readings now available from the What The Hell Is Wrong With People barometer:

Kara Brockett, a junior at Southwest State University, has piled up $25,000 in college debt. She works four jobs during the year and her parents help out a little when they can, but the fact remains: When she graduates and starts looking for work, she will have to find a job that feeds her debt rather than her ambition. "It's difficult to get into nonprofit work when your loan payments are as big as your rent," said Brockett, of Omaha.

I'll bet you we will read Kara's name in the paper in a few years in a story about how she charged up a boat load of credit card debt and now is having a miserable time trying to pay it back. And the politician that's running to her aid.

Rick Howden, a Winona State senior, will graduate this year with $48,000 in loans to pay back. "I now have to find a job that will help me pay that off rather than do something I really want to do," said Howden, of Cannon Falls.

What an incredibly horrible situation; having to pay the debts you incur.

Earlier in the day, several legislators announced that they were introducing a bill that would allocate millions to MnSCU colleges and universities specifically to put the lid on student costs. MnSCU includes the state's two-year colleges and those four-year state universities outside the University of Minnesota system.

Why is it that it costs money to make something cheaper?

Used to be you needed some decent grades to get into college - maybe a résumé, interview, letter of recommendation, etc. Now it seems you also need a whole bucket of naïveté.

Q: What's Hillary Got That Obama Don't?

A: Bill!

Captain Ed is all over it:

Hillary can't have Bill on the stage with her because he overshadows her. She can't have him campaigning separately because it gives the impression that she is nothing but a straw man (or woman) for a third Bill Clinton term as President. They had hoped to keep him at home, apparently, but Barack Obama has created a charisma deficit for the front-runner -- and now she has to evoke Bill at her campaign events to make up the difference.

More eveidence that the only thing Hillary stands for is Hillary. That woman won't make a choice at a vending machine without consulting polling data.

A Life Full of Living

Hank Bauer 1932-2007

One month after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Hank Bauer enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps. While in the South Pacific, Bauer contracted malaria, but recovered enough to earn 11 campaign ribbons, two Bronze Stars and a pair of Purple Hearts in 32 months of combat. His second injury came during the Battle of Okinawa, when he commanded a platoon of 64 men. Only six survived the brutal siege, with shrapnel hitting Bauer in the thigh and sending him home. Returning to East St. Louis, he joined the local pipe fitter's union and stopped by a local bar where his brother Joe worked. Danny Menendez, a New York Yankees scout, signed him for a tryout with the team's farm club in Quincy, IL. The terms: $175 a month (a $25 increase if he made the team) and a $250 bonus. Batting .300 at Quincy and with the team's top minor league unit, the Kansas City Blues, Bauer eventually made his debut with the Bronx Bombers in September 1948. He won the World Series with the New York Yankees seven times, and managed the Baltimore Orioles to another World Series championship in 1966.

Today's Bluntness

Government is so big because there are so many lousy parents.

1 The mother of infant appeared later, leaving the Baldwin County Corrections Center where she had been attempting to visit an inmate.

2 The father who left his 4-year-old son in an unattended car in subzero weather while he gambled inside Mystic Lake Casino was charged Friday with child endangerment likely to cause substantial harm.

3 Sheboygan police arrested a woman after she allegedly left her two children in a freezing car for 20 minutes while she went tanning.

Nice.

And in the Blue Corner, Packing Plenty of Punch . . .

Stolen from Ryskind.

Smart vs. Dumb: The Difference

Jay Reding nicely capsulizes the Amanda Marcotte matter and the problems John Edwards has made for himself.

ABC’s Terry Moran notes that John Edwards is taking heat for hiring leftyblogger Amanda Marcotte whose expletive-filled rantings are hardly the sort of thing that a reputable political candidate would want to endorse. Moran asks the right questions: At issue are Marcotte’s comments on her own blog, Pandagon, which has staked out a prominent place in the left-wing blogosphere. It’s pretty strong stuff; her comments about other people’s faiths could well be construed as hate speech.

Like it or not, Ms. Marcotte may have the right to free speech, and no one is arguing that she should be censored. However, what she says is incendiary, derogatory, and bigoted. Had she treated Islam the way she treats Catholicism, she’d be widely ostracized. Marcotte represents everything that is wrong with the lefty blogosphere — the constant profanity, the invective, the elevation of childish snark above analysis.

Like it or not, Presidential campaigns are known by the company they keep, and when they end up hiring a blogger whose singular talent is trying to be as offensive and vitriolic as possible, that sends the message that they haven’t been paying much attention.

Yea, it's a lot to keep track of but it's a very important matter to understand as the carnival of campaigns fast approaches.

Chateau Wal Mart

You park in the cavernous lot, go through the automatic doors, and the seasoned-citizen greeter hands you . . . the wine list:

Chateau Traileur Parc
White Trashfindel
Big Red Gulp
World Championship Riesling
NASCARbernet
Chez Boyardeaux
Peanut Noir
I Can't Believe it's not Vinegar
Nasti Spumante
Grape Expectations

The beauty of Wal-Mart wine is that it can be served with either white meat (possum) or red meat (squirrel).

WWSD - What Would Scooby Do?

Today I am recalling how every episode of "Scooby Doo" ended; with the bad guy in custody and lamenting that he/she would have gotten away with it "if it wasn't for those meddling kids."

The Office of Lawyers Professional Responsibility board filed a petition Tuesday asking the state Supreme Court to suspend or disbar Hottinger from practicing law for taking $8,820 from a trust account set up when a personal injury lawsuit was settled.

Ooooo . . . even I know that's bad and I'm not the lawyer here. Here comes the Scooby Doo cop-out:

"No one was harmed by anything. In fact, no one knew about anything until I disclosed it to the state bar."

Jeez, too bad the rules had to apply to you too.

Hottinger, a St. Peter Democrat who didn't seek a sixth term in 2006, has been working as a lobbyist.

What? I keep getting told that only Republicans are crooked. Remember Harry Reid's tirade on the Republican culture of corruption? Maybe Matt Entenza would like to comment.

Hottinger said he hopes his punishment is balanced with the other work he's done. He said he put substantial personal money and time into representing death row inmates in Texas and frequently gave lectures to law students on the ethical challenges of simultaneously being a lawyer and legislator.

Maybe Hottinger should have listened to some of his own words during those 'ethical challenges' lectures he gave.

Hottinger has been a licensed attorney in Minnesota since 1972, but he said Tuesday that he no longer actively practices law. Hottinger said he doesn't believe he has broken any criminal laws.

Maybe he no longer practices law because ho doesn't know what's legal and what is not.

(Sigh) Just another pantsload in line for a taxpayer-funded pension.

Up is Down, Black is White

Associated Press gets it backwards - what a shocker.

Republicans blocked a full-fledged Senate debate over Iraq on Monday, but Democrats vowed to find a way to force President Bush to change course in a war that has claimed the lives of more than 3,000 U.S. troops.

Actually this is just spin. The Democrats actually want to end debate and vote on the resolution. What the Republicans are arguing for is keeping debate open and considering other resolutions. That of course might make passing the proposed resolution less likely, which is what they are trying to avoid.

Small Purple Man Hauls the Mail

Nothing Editorially Paradoxical in the Paper Today

Groping for Answers Starts at Home

My fair city, Saint Paul, has been thrown into a panic about how to celebrate its annual Winter Carnival because it's so, um, cold. The way people are reacting to the weather, from city hall on down, is as if no one expected the weather to be cold (and maybe really cold) in February in Minnesota.

Well, I don't know how it got so cold all of a sudden but I've been spending a lot of time listening to Al Gore. He says that if we all merely change our light bulbs to from incandescent to fluorescent, we can stop the warming of Mother Earth - less energy used, less global warming.

Check this out: They turned off the lights for five minutes at the Eiffel Tower in Paris and the Coliseum in Rome to combat global warming. Clearly that worked, because it was 12 degrees blow zero Fahrenheit this morning at my house.

Hey, turn those lights back on, Frenchie; it's COLD outside.

School Board Seeks Matches

I sure love these modern times, where meddling parents and cowardly government-school administrators will not rest until the most stupid among us are shielded from all cerebral challenges and are freed from having to think for themselves.

Lakeville high school sophomores were required for years to read "Huck Finn," but that may change this year after some parents questioned the use of the book.

During discussion of the book, Lewis' daughter said she was uncomfortable with views she said students expressed — that blacks should go to hell and interracial marriage was immoral, for instance.

Heavens - no school should ever be a place where questions are raised and discussion ensues.

State laws dictate that districts form curriculum advisory councils — which include parents, teachers, community members, administrators and students — to help shape what is taught in classrooms. Although school boards have the ultimate say, they often take committees' recommendations.

Gwen Johnson, another Lakeville parent, said her son does not want to go through the "Huck Finn" unit but that "it's more embarrassing to go out of the classroom. He didn't want to be put somewhere alone. He'd rather sit through it."

Way to sabotage your son's future, mom.

We've had political correctness beat so hard into our collective skulls, that we are willing to throw literature, history and individual thought into the fire. Welcome to the new world; check your intellect, courage, reason, imagination and context at the door.

Global Climate Change Hits of the 70's

The glaciers were going to take over - remember?

A survey completed last year by Dr. Murray Mitchell of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reveals a drop of half a degree in average ground temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere between 1945 and 1968. According to George Kukla of Columbia University, satellite photos indicated a sudden, large increase in Northern Hemisphere snow cover in the winter of 1971-72. And a study released last month by two NOAA scientists notes that the amount of sunshine reaching the ground in the continental U.S. diminished by 1.3% between 1964 and 1972.

Others regard the cooling as a reversion to the “little ice age” conditions that brought bitter winters to much of Europe and northern America between 1600 and 1900 – years when the Thames used to freeze so solidly that Londoners roasted oxen on the ice and when iceboats sailed the Hudson River almost as far south as New York City.

Talk about your inconvenitnet truth. I guess it's time to throw more dung in the stove, I guess.

Meanwhile in the Mayor's Office

These are both form the same mayor of the same city from the same date.

Mayor Chris Coleman applauded teh Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report released today that underscores the serious nature of the threat of global warming as well as the imperitive for immediate action.

and

The mayor asked the public to follow common sense cold weather precautuions for adults and children including weating a hat, a scarf or knit mask to caove face and mouth, sleeves that are snug at the wrists, mittens (they are warmer that gloves), Water-resistant (sic) coat and boots and several layers of loose-fitting clothing.

Even in bald-faced contridiction, lefties love to tell you how to live your life.