Grrrr…

It’s spring, so it’s THAT time of year around here…

Spring is in full throttle, with summer just around the corner. Around this time, events around me inevitably trigger the same two recurring questions, like clockwork, year after year after year. And the questions are these:

  1. Why do these teenage girls’ parents let them leave the house dressed like NFL cheerleaders?
  2. Am I going to have to spend another summer weaving my car around rude bicyclists who think they own the road?

It is this second question I’m currently pondering, as I witnessed earlier in the day some poor sap driving a car, stuck behind a gaggle of inconsiderate male bicyclists (the rude ones are always men), none of whom apparently had a job they needed to get to this particular morning, opting instead to impede traffic for the adults who actually do.

Full article HERE from PJ Media.

They are starting to ‘infest’ the roads around here, all tricked out in their lycra, spandex, or whatever with ads all over them. And in gaggles of 5-10, moseying along taking up one entire lane, even though the roads have just been repaved with WIDE shoulders. And yes, they get pissy if you pass them…

Just because the Hotter Than Hell 100 is hosted here one weekend (when all of us stay home), doesn’t mean we like having our driving to the store or taking care of business to be slowed down/interrupted/have to slam on the brakes when one or more of them cyclists decided to blow through stop signs or red lights.

I will have to admit the ‘best’ blow off of bikers I ever saw was down in Adelaide, AUS back in 2012. The cyclists were everywhere, and I was headed up to RAAF Edinburgh. We didn’t have too many problems when it was four lane, as the cyclists pretty much stayed in the left lane (driving on the left, not the right like here). BUT, when it got down to two lanes, with a 60 KPH speed limit, we suddenly slowed down to about 20…

I was three or four cars back from a ‘lorry’ (Aussie 18 wheeler), and he finally laid on his horn, downshifted, and rolled coal as a squad (maybe 20) of cyclists scattered like a covey of quail!

We all sped up staying nose to tail and got by them as they cursed us, threw water bottles at us, etc. But I made my meeting… LOL

 

In Memoriam…

ADRC Ev Littlefield. A friend gone too soon…

We gotta get rid of those turbines, they’re ruining aviation and our hearing…

A turbine is too simple minded, it has no mystery. The air travels through it in a straight line and doesn’t pick up any of the pungent fragrance of engine oil or pilot sweat.

Anybody can start a turbine. You just need to move a switch from “OFF” to “START” and then remember to move it back to “ON” after a while. My PC is harder to start.

Cranking a round engine requires skill, finesse and style. You have to seduce it into starting. It’s like waking up a horny mistress. On some planes, the pilots aren’t even allowed to do it…

Turbines start by whining for a while, then give a lady-like poof and start whining a little louder.

Round engines give a satisfying rattle-rattle, click-click, BANG, more rattles, another BANG, a big macho FART or two, more clicks, a lot more smoke and finally a serious low pitched roar. We like that. It’s a thing…

When you start a round engine, your mind is engaged and you can concentrate on the flight ahead. Starting a turbine is like flicking on a ceiling fan: Useful, but, hardly exciting.

When you have started his round engine successfully your Mechanic looks up at you like he’d let you kiss his girl, too!

Turbines don’t break or catch fire often enough, which leads to aircrew boredom, complacency and inattention. A round engine at speed looks and sounds like it’s going to blow any minute. This helps concentrate the mind!

Turbines don’t have enough control levers or gauges to keep a pilot’s attention. There’s nothing to fiddle with during long flights.

Turbines smell like a Boy Scout camp full of Coleman Lamps. Round engines smell like God intended machines to smell.

Pass this on to an old guy (or his son, or anyone who flew them, ever) in remembrance of ALL those who know the meaning of BMEP.

I learned about Radials as a young sailor, starting S-2F and EC-121s. And yes, you did develop a feel for them or you blew them up…
You learned how to count blades, which engines on which acft were hard starters, which ones were easy, which ones liked to give you a stack fire, etc…

Yes, the Connies had the ‘short’ stacks, so this was normal to see ‘fire’ out of every engine…

Interesting…

The first charges against one of the soldiers arrested in the underground nightclub in Colorado Springs is public…

An Army soldier who was arrested as part of a raid on an underground nightclub in Colorado Springs, Colorado, last week is suspected of possessing and distributing cocaine while also trafficking firearms with high-capacity magazines to illegal aliens, according to a criminal complaint.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Colorado announced Thursday that 28-year-old Staff Sgt. Juan Gabriel Orona-Rodriguez has been charged with a single count each of distribution of and possession with intent to distribute cocaine and conspiracy to distribute cocaine.

Filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Colorado on Wednesday, the criminal complaint alleges that Orona-Rodriguez sold cocaine to an undercover Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agent the week of April 21.

Full article HERE from Fox News.

That answers a few questions we had, but raises quite a few more… An article, HERE from the Colorado Springs Gazette has a few more answers.

The staff sergeant had apparently been told the company was off limits, and he did not have permission to work a second job, according to reports. One wonders how many of the other Army personnel were in the same boat?

And why did their command let them get away with it? Fort Carson has been in the news for other issues in the last year, including questions about their food service, command climate, and ‘internal’ issues.

I guess now there will also be a CID investigation into dope dealing on base, to add to all the digging they will be doing into the other 16 Army soldiers there…

One also wonders about the staff sergeant’s background and how he got hooked up with the gangs associated with the underground nightclub. And whether we will ever know the truth, or whether it will be buried.

Not like that hasn’t happened before…

This…

Is scary as hell…

A bill to allow medically assisted suicide passed the New York state Assembly on Tuesday, but still faces opposition from religious leaders and other hurdles that could prevent it from being enacted.

The Medical Aid in Dying measure passed 81-67 after more than four hours of debate, with more than 10 Democrats joining the minority Republicans in voting no. It’s still unclear whether it will be considered by the state Senate or whether Gov. Kathy Hochul supports it. Ten other states allow similar practices, including Oregon, which legalized medically assisted suicide in 1997.

The bill’s supporters say it offers a compassionate choice for people who are in pain at the end of their lives. Advocates include physicians and terminally ill cancer patients, as well as people whose spouses and siblings suffered in their final moments.

Full article, HERE from Gothamist.

The states in green, including DC, already authorised Medical Aid in Dying (MAID).

No surprise that they are all Dem states, as are the ones with ‘pending’ legislation…

Friends in Canada, both military and civilian, are up in arms over its use in Canada, especially when ‘aimed’ at military veterans with PTSD. Numerous credible reports of the Canadian equivalent of the VA offering it to military veterans have many upset, along with the ‘skew’ they are seeing toward elderly people now also.

And we know it’s being offered more and more, especially on the left coast to any and all, rather than treatments.

At what point will the states start stepping in and ‘mandating’ it in certain cases??? Another friend left OR for just that reason, as they were afraid it was coming sooner rather than later.

We already lose 20+ veterans a day to suicide, and I’ll be damned if I’ll support ANYTHING that potentially adds to that number, ‘official’ or not!!!

Well…

‘That’ was interesting…

Last night got a bit ‘sporty’ for about 1 1/2 hours as we had a major weather ‘event’ move through Tiny Town…

We got a little over an inch of rain in about an hour, and two reported tornadoes, one a few miles south of us, another a few miles northwest of us, and a ‘lowering’ coming right at us.

Highest ‘sustained’ winds were measured at 70 mph (straight line), and of course we were put under ‘flood watch’ as soon as the tornado warnings had dropped. We were also ‘featured’ on Ryan Hall’s YouTube channel, which is something you NEVER want to see.

I had the computers off, TV off, and kept watch from the garage until the winds started blowing rain six feet into the garage and power started flickering.

So no, I don’t have any pictures of the weather mass, and videos of rain never show well, sorry about that.

This is an after the fact shot of what ran over us last night taken about an hour later. The ‘stuff’ over Lawton is what hit us going NE at about 25mph, and it took a while for ALL that mess to go over.

Screenshot

I turned the computer on long enough to get this drafted and up, and I went to bed, because we were supposed to get hit again about 0400.

Bottom line, we’re all okay, just a tad wet…

Welcome to life on the dry line… sigh

There is trolling…

And then there is EPIC trolling!!!

Democrats spent years insisting that there was no border crisis, but the American people saw the truth with their own eyes. Illegal immigration became a driving issue in the 2024 election and helped propel Trump back into the White House. Yet despite the message from voters, Democrats still haven’t learned their lesson. They continue to prioritize the interests of illegal immigrants over their own constituents and stubbornly deny the very real crisis that President Trump is working to fix.

President Donald Trump just turned their denial into an epic display of truth that has liberal heads exploding across Washington. In a masterful trolling of the open-borders crowd, the White House lawn transformed overnight into a rogues’ gallery of criminal illegal aliens who have been arrested under Trump’s administration. 

Full article, HERE from PJ Media, with video!!!

The only thing ‘better’ in my opinion would have been to have added the name and country of origin, but as we say in the military, ‘photos affirm’…

LOL

This is about laying the truth out there and letting the chips fall where they may. Now, if they can get past the judges, these newest illegals can be put on aircraft and be sent back where they came from…

Couldn’t happen to a ‘better’ bunch in my opinion. And apparently the .gov got another 114 in Colorado Springs Sunday night/Monday morning.

Rack ’em and stack ’em!!!

A little humor…

To start the week…

Tongue firmly in cheek, as it were…

TEN THINGS WOMEN WILL SIMPLY NEVER UNDERSTAND…

Men are a misunderstood lot, which all in all is probably for the best.  Women are better off not knowing that we eat with our hands the minute they leave the room or that we use their nail clippers to trim our nose hair.  Better for them, better for us.  Still, it’s annoying that women spend more time and money trying to understand the minds of cats than they do wondering about what makes men tick.  Which is why they’ll never understand…

  1. Our consuming need to own the biggest and most expensive version of just about everything.

***********************

Our compulsive desire to drive off-road vehicles in cities and use corkscrews that resemble off-shore drilling equipment is well documented.  As marketing targets, men are suckers for terms like “professional” or “industrial strength”, because inside every man is the germ of every profession he ever imagined himself one day excelling at. Most of these purchases are harmless, little more than childish wish fulfillment played out at a higher testosterone level.  But occasionally we go too far.  The guy upstairs from me once boasted that he had a filter which filled his flat with “operating theatre quality air”.  I kept him away from my surgical steel steak knives.

  1. Why we are so bad at shopping.

***********************

We’ve never been trained to do it the right way.  Supermarkets are like giant booby traps for males – which is why if you send a man out to but eggs, sugar and bread you should not be surprised if he returns home with a case of wine, a pair of jeans and a tree.

  1. The reason why we don’t like to discuss The Relationship.

***********************

Most of us will find any excuse to dodge those conversations that start with questions like “Are you really happy?” and “Where do you see us going?”  A relationship is a delicate thing, like an antique clock, and we know what will happen if we start picking it apart.  Often our reticence will result in a lengthy conversation about why we have trouble talking about The Relationship.

  1. Why we think we can fix things.

***********************

Almost all men believe they can repair virtually anything with a little patience.  In reality, we’re only half right.  Men are extremely good at taking things apart: whether it’s a dishwasher or an antique clock, a man can break it down to its most basic components in no time. Unfortunately, this is where our expertise usually leaves off, and we’re mostly satisfied with leaving bits and pieces spread all over newspaper on the kitchen table.

  1. Men and video games.

***********************

Women cannot understand how grown men can waste huge chunks of their lives zapping things off a screen.  When a man repeatedly rings his girlfriend to say he has to work late and routinely comes home at two in the morning all glassy eyed, she will usually take this as evidence of an affair – when it’s more likely that a pirated copy of Streetfighter II is making the rounds at the office.

  1. That sometimes we really are ill.

***********************

When men get ill, women are generally united in their belief that we are faking it.  This is based on a tired old axiom stating that men will never fully understand the agony of childbirth so deserve no sympathy regarding matters of pain, fear or  incapacitation.  For the record, it should be noted that all men are in a constant state of feeling slightly under the weather just from being men.  It’s only a misplaced sense of machismo that forces us from our beds every day to go into work and then down to the pub for a couple of schooners of the only thing that ever makes us feel any better.

  1. The way we watch television.

***********************

Men don’t just watch the TV, they plug right in.  Once we’re on the right wavelength, we can watch almost anything, including commercials, with a slack-jawed intensity which probably drives you crazy. Unfortunately for women, men cannot achieve this higher state without a firm grasp on the remote.

  1. Our sense of humor.

***********************

When women say that what they most want from a man is a sense of humor, they tend to mean something different from what we mean.  Women never understand the comic genius of their mate who makes beer come out of his nose.

  1. Why we’re so boring.

***********************

Male conversation generally relies heavily on petty obsession, technical jargon, numbing detail and presumed expertise.  Topics that women only feel the need to mention in passing become Test-Match length debates among men.  True, some of us are able to combine a scintillating wit with a flair for story telling and a nose for gossip, but we tend to reserve these talents for conversations with women. Between ourselves, the drive to talk at length about tire pressure or “Star Trek” episodes is too alluring.  Even if your local pool team boasted Socrates, Einstein and Oscar Wilde as members, you’d still probably have to discuss the fastest way to get to the freeway.

  1. The male menopause.

***********************

Midlife crisis, the seven year itch, whatever you like to call it – women don’t understand the seriousness of this condition, instead seeing it only as an excuse for a man to resign from his job, buy a Harley Davidson and start a relationship with a woman a third of his age.  Like there has to be more to it than that.

Funny that…

Seems that ‘climate’ change is mysteriously going ‘away’…

The climate scam is imploding right now. Of course there are still plenty of remaining pockets of climate cultism, but the whole movement is crumbling.
It’s the most massive scientific fraud in human history, and it will take significant time to completely die, but make no mistake: It IS dying.
In no particular order, here are some updates on the climate scam implosion.
  1. “Huge: A powerful climate alliance of the World Economic Forum, major companies, the UN, and banks is “at an end“.
  2. “Bill Gates is giving up on climate change …Breakthrough Energy, a joint venture between Bill Gates and a handful of other billionaires… is slashing much of its policy staff.”
  3. NASA GISS funding “terminated”?: “New NASA Chief Will Wind Down Climate Alarm Shop“.

Full list (another 30 items) HERE from Tom A. Nelson on X.

A number of folks, myself included, have been ‘suspicious’ of climate change since 2008, because we’ve dealt with actual climatologists, and/or taken part in test programs that measured certain things in the environment that didn’t ‘match’ what the climate change models said.

Also, we’ve got enough experience with models to question the so called ‘facts’ that mysteriously skewed to ‘match’ the models.

For example, good luck today finding any raw temperature data… Seems all that is now ‘somewhere’ else and not available.

Also, there has never been a discussion of the changes in the environment surrounding many of the ‘urban’ measurement locations, especially WRT the additional amounts of concrete/asphalt/buildings that tend to hold heat and will naturally show higher temps than 30-50 year old measurements in the same location.

Think what you like, but please at least take a look at the embedded links on Mr. Nelson’s post, and think about what they are actually saying…

YMMV, IANAL, I didn’t stay at a Holiday Inn last night either…

 

No Intarwebz…

Apparently a fiber ‘cut’ somewhere in the Dallas area has us, Amarillo, Lubbock, and Midland all down yesterday evening. Estimated TTR is 9-12 hours.

Soooo, go read the folks on the sidebar. They rite gud!

Posted from my iPhone.

What if???

Uber actually followed through for a change???

Uber warned Colorado that it may cease operations in the state entirely if a new bill targeting rideshare companies were to become law.

The Colorado House of Representatives successfully passed a bill designed to “increase protections for persons engaged with transportation network companies” on April 16. Among those protections included conducting a regular criminal background check for drivers every six months and requiring drivers to make audio and video recordings of trips.

The HB25-1291 bill passed on 59-6 bipartisan vote before it was referred to the Senate Committee on Business, Labor, & Technology, where it was amended to the Committee of the Whole on a 4-3 vote on Tuesday. The bill will be reviewed by the state Senate on Friday.

Full article, HERE from Fox News.

I will be the first to admit I haven’t read/understood the bill, so I can’t really speak to it…

But, having said that, Uber is notorious for making ‘threats’ to leave, but not going through with it…

Is that going to happen again?

I have absolutely no idea, but I wonder if the taxis have the same requirements???