The TASER follies.

Because I'm under the weather, I decided to watch one of my all-time favorite videos. It's a few years old but it cheered me up so much that I just had to share it with all of you.



Noting how right from the beginning, she's argumentative, insulting and tries to play the race card right after threatening to sue. And then when given commands, she defies them and actively resists and still has the nerve to act surprised when she gets what she was told that she was going to get. Then it's all drama afterwards. I'm betting that she was already mentally spending all that lawsuit cash right up until her public defender got a look at that dash cam tape.

Good job, officers!

The Left's new hero: Scott Olsen.

The leftist blogosphere and left-wing media is now all atwitter over Scott Olsen, a former Marine who served in Iraq before coming home, getting a good corporate job with a software firm, and--inexplicably--joining the unwashed hippie masses in the Oakland Obamaville tent city set up to "Occupy Oakland".

You see, the police were sent in to clear the park because these hippies were urinating and defecating all over it and the hippies decided that it would be way cool to resist, because laying around in your own or someone else's waste sends a message that you're angry because no one will give you a high-paying job. (Maybe it's just me, but would YOU hire some scumbag who came in reeking of BO and human waste to work in your office? I'm telling ya, there's a reason that these dirtbags are unemployed while the majority of the rest of us have decent jobs even in this Obama economy.)

Anyway, the hippies fought back with violence, as leftists always do. They pushed over barricades, they broke windows, they threw things...finally the police were forced to deploy gas and use a bit of muscle to get these cretins out of the park so that it could be cleaned and made sanitary for the rest of the citizens, especially the ones who actually do work and pay taxes. Somehow, in the melee that followed, Scott Olsen was hit in the head by something. The hippies claim that it was a tear gas canister that was fired "right at him", but I personally suspect that he caught a rock or other projectile hurled by one of his own confederates. In any event, scott Olsen is down for the count and the left now has a hero that they are wasting no time exploiting in media stories all around the globe. Ignoring the fact that Olsen was just another well-off white kid who worked for one of those "evil corporations", they seize on his service record as if to somehow make the claim that he's some sort of noble guy, and by extension, imply that they're all noble, too.

Nothing could be farther from the truth.

Firts off, while I applaud Scott's service to the country, it in no way cloaks him with any special status. He served his hitch and he got out, just as many others have done and will continue to do for as long as we have a military. If anything is noteworthy, it's the fact that his service makes him an almost unquantifiable minority among the suburban savages who are now dancing in his blood. Very, very few of these "Occupy" twits have served or ever will serve, because they're just not that kind of people. They're too lazy, pampered and self-obsessed to ever sign on the dotted line and become part of our military machine. (and then there's that whole haircut and bathing thing that the military insists on...) So he's a novelty to them, not a representative of their demographic. If anything, Olsen would have been more at home on the side of the decent American police officers who were there to deal with the mess that his friends were creating. Many police officers are former military because they, unlike Scott Olsen, wanted to continue to serve and protect their fellow Americans.

But Scott, like many others before him, made some bad decisions. He decided to go hang out among the great unwashed masses, he chose to become a law-enforcement problem instead of being part of the solution, and then he put his melon in the way of something heavy that was moving fast.

So cott got laid out, and the left is ecstatic now. They have a bona-fide "martyr" that they can put on display. Scott the person has no value to them and never did, but Scott the former Marine has plenty, and he will continue to have value right up until the media stops caring about him, at which time they'll abandon him, too.

Granted, if it had not been Scott, it would have been someone else. The left is all about creating sympathetic "victims" among their ranks for public consumptioin. This is why if you look at footage of their events, you will see the crowds peppered with people in wheelchairs and even little children. Those human beings were brought out specifically to gain public attention and sympathy, and if one gets hurt--like Scott Olsen did--so much the better! It's an old ploy that the left routinely engages in, and they'll keep doing it until everyone wises up and starts castigating them and punishing them for bringing their children to these events and placing them in front of trucks or between themselves and lines of police officers.


Scott, thanks for your service and sorry that you got hurt, but honestly, I'm surprised that your service time didn't teach you that stupid is supposed to hurt.

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

UPDATE: I retract my thanks and any residual sympathy that I might have had for this loser. Ed Rasimus tipped me to the article on Gateway Pundit (Great job, Jim!) that shows that this loser runs an anti-military website and that he was obviously one of those loser malcontents who couldn't hack serving and lacked the class to just walk away gracefully when his obligation had been fulfilled. I have less respect for this punk than I do for a rat. If a rat ran out in front of my truck I would probably try to avoid crushing it. Scott Olsen...well I'd have to think about that for a few minutes but it would probably come down to expected sheet metal damage and the number of witnesses.

Olsen's clearly a cockroach and I hope that whatever hit him leaves some serious marks. If a police officer did inflict that injury to Olsen and they can identify that officer, I'm sending him a gift card for a nice dinner.

Bizzaro land on the border...

A Border Patrol Agent is JAILED for TWO YEARS for allegedly roughly-handling an illegal alien caught smuggling drugs into our country, meanwhile the illegal--who wasn't even injured--gets amnesty in return for testifying against the lawman.

I'd say "Only in Post-Obama America" but Bush's so-called "Justice Department" did the same thing to our border protectors more than once.

How are we ever going to get our border territory under control and stop the flow of criminals, terrorists, drugs, and maybe even weapons of mass destruction from coming across if we keep jailing the good guys and rewarding the bad guys with free passes and amnesty? Is it any wonder that the border states are so intent on acting to keep illegals out, since everyone knows that our federal government's first loyalties are to Mexico and the Hispanic voting bloc? And with our states being sued by our Washington administration every time they try to solve these problems, how long before we start seeing American citizens down on the border taking up arms to do what our federal "public servants" refuse to do?

I could be tempted to support that or even join in if this stuff doesn't stop.

I cry for my country...

Apparently in Sonoma County, California, US citizenship has become so valueless, and deporting illegals so mean, that now the county will accept mexican identification cards from illegals to prevent so many of them from being locked up for not having ID and grabbed from the jail by ICE and deported.

This is what happens when illegals and their extended families and networks of friends outnumber the rest of the citizens and vote to advance their agenda. And once this sort of stuff starts to spead, the demise of our great and once-soveriegn nation will be in sight, our laws ignored, our culture disgarded and our citizens' collective will subjected to the demands of the foreigners.

"Today is a great day," Sonoma County Assistant Sheriff Lorenzo Dueñas said. "We're now going to accept the matriculár consular ID."

And this guy's boss needs to be voted out come the next election...and HIS bosses, too. This crap doesn't happen without the complicity of many public officials, Quizlings all.

Murphy--Alert but ungrateful.

Yesterday, Mike the UPS man came by with a couple of boxes. Murphy hates Mike because Mike dares intrude upon his domain, and Mike is more than a little fearful of Murphy, who barks and jumps and snaps at him with dark intent every time he comes up the driveway towards the Lair.

This time, Murphy is inside with me when Mike comes, and he's going ballistic at the window. Before I can get out there, Mike has set the boxes on the edge of the deck and pushed them carefully under the rail. I open the door to get them and Murphy also races out so that he can continue roaring at Mike. But as Murphy get to the boxes, he stops and notices that Mike has put a dog treat on top of the boxes just for him. He contemplates it for half a second and snaps it up. Then, with his mouth still full of the gift, he jams his head between the deck rails and continues to bark at Mike, his barks somewhat muffled by the mouthful of cookie goodness that he's still chewing.

Silly ungrateful dog...

The "My First Car" meme

Because everyone else is doing it...

My first car was a 1964 VW Beetle that had been rather amateurishly hacked into a "Baja" dune buggy by some former owner. I used to see it sitting on a side street near our house and thought it was so cool, so when a "for sale" sign popped up in in it's window, I jumped at it. realistically, it was a beat-to-death wreck, and my father told me that it was a waste of money at $300 when we went to look at it together--but I just had to have it so I bought it...and promptly wound up putting $450 more into a new front end.

But it was mine, so I loved it in spite of it's faults. And I treated it nicer than I'd been treating my father's much more expensive cars to date, because this one...it was mine.

(Sorry about blowing the engine on your Skylark, Pop...and cracking up your Aries...and putting your Bonneville into that pond. But honestly, it wasn't until I got my own car I learned to appreciate and take care of automobiles.)

Anyway, this bug was my car, with it's white paint job that had been done by someone with a brush, and it's rabbit fur interior. (PETA folks, worry not...it was fake rabbit fur. Real rabbits aren't big enough to make a Bettle headliner out of.) It also sported a wicker pair of yellow fuzzy dice that just made the car complete.

It had a 4-speed transmission, but third gear never worked, so you just had to drive the RPM's up and jump from second to fourth. But it worked and it worked well considering.

Now the rest of the car...not so much. For one, none of the gauges had any glass on them, and one time, our neighbor's little brat kid was in it playing and he apparently moved my gas gauge needle much closer to the "full" mark than was at all accurate. This caused me to run out of gas at 2AM one night way out in the middle of nowhere (with the gauge still reading "half". And as I trudged along in the dark towards a distant gas station, I was surprised that not a single car would stop to help me. In fact, many of them swung wide into the other land to avoid me by as much distance as possible, and one even did a u-turn and went back the other way . Finally I figured out why when I encountered the sign that said: "Warning. Prison area. Do not pick up hitch-hikers." Yeah, that was helpful. But my old man came out again--with a gas can--and we got my bug running and back home again.

Eventually the 1600cc motor that was in the car gave out, so, being a dumbass kid with money, I bought a 2150cc racing engine and we installed that in the bug. Twin Webber carbs and an oil cooler that mounted on the roof reall gave it a bit more performance, to the point where it would beat much more expensive muscle cars off the line, which was funny because it looked like total hell but would lift it's front wheels off the ground on take-off. Man, I had that little deathtrap well up into the triple-digits speed-wise many times just running it up and down the highway late at light and it's a wonder that I'm still alive, because that thing was literally held together with baling wire and duct tape. And it had a straight-pipe exhaust with nothing but a spark arrestor on it so you could hear this car coming blocks away. Yeah, my parents' neighbors were loving me, let me tell you.

But that new engine was nothing but trouble, as it was really a racing engine, and keeping the carbs synced and doing the other fine-tuning needed to keep it running right got to be a pain, as did dealing with ice on the intake manifolds every time it got much below 50 degrees out. Still, it was my car and I loved it, no matter how many times it wound up getting towed to some garage, usually behind my father's car on the end of a tow rope with me sitting behind it's steering wheel to brake. (Hey, tow trucks cost money that I'd rather spend on Volkswagen bling!) I finally got rid of it after one demonstration of speed ended badly with the hood latches popping loose and the hood flying up and smashing my windshield, causing me to go off the road and mess up the front end again big time. So I sold it, basically as an engine with the remains of a dune buggy included.

And looking back, if just I'd taken the thousands of dollars that I put into that car for repairs, body work and flashy JC Whitney stuff and put it into the bank instead... sigh.

But it was mine, and I loved it.

Critters

OK, just when you thought that you were safe, here's more Alaska pics.

This time it's animals.

My biggest hope was to see another moose. Last time I was up, they were everywhere. But this time, it seemed like I couldn't find a moose with a sack of moose crack and a moose call. So here's a bear instead. I already posted the Grizzly Bear from Denali once, but it was just so cool that I'm posting it again.


Then there were these caribou that were just swimming in Summit Lake, near Paxson.

Close, but no moose. Still pretty damned cool though.
How about that up in the tree? Is that a moose? Nope--it's a Bald Eagle.
These guys were pretty thick along the southern coast, but this was the only one that stayed still long enough for me to get good shots of him. I'm thinking I need a few of these guys around the Lair to help Murphy deal with the feral cat problem.

So ok, last day of the trip. 1400+ miles driven and I haven't seen a moose. Maybe they're all gone. So I'm now in freaking Anchorage (A suburb of Seattle that's just a short distance from Alaska) and what do I see on the airport road?

A MOOSE! Right there at the airport to see me off, too.




My trip was now complete. The last thing on the "to do" list had been checked off. A moose had been seen and photographed, with literally two minutes to spare. Rock on, Bullwinkle! (OK, it's a chick moose, I know...)

Your tax dollars at work. Recently ransomed leftist hikers now supporting "Occupy" hippies

Someone tell me again why we wasted our money to buy these three leftist twits back from Iran?

Iran Hikers Pick Oakland for Public Debut

Sarah Shourd, Shane Bauer and Josh Fattal took part in the an Occupy Oakland rally at Frank Ogawa plaza. They said they wanted to show their support to the movement taking place in their town.

Up until now Occupy rallies have been mostly economic protests, but the hikers appearance took a turn toward the political. The hikers said they also felt a solidarity with hunger strike going on now in California prisons.

Would someone PLEASE send these three BACK to Iran and get our money back, at least until they learn to appreciate this country and show the appropriate gratitude?

Every time I think that I can't hold these three in any more contempt, they pop up and open their mouths again.

More people who need to be kicked

Self-important women with a whole cart full of groceries who jump into the "11 items or less" express item line ahead of the guy carrying ONE ITEM...and the cashier that lets her.

And in this case, I'm talking about a red-haired overweight woman at Food Lion who saw me approaching with my one item and actually picked up speed to beat me into the only express lane with her cart. I'm also talking about the young male cashier who just looked at me as she began putting her items on the belt and put his hands up as if to say "what can I do?"

I'll tell you what you can do, Casper Milquetoaste. You can tell her to take her fat ass over to one of the regular lanes and stand in line like everyone else...and you might even suggest that she put the Haagen-Das back in the freezer because she sure doesn't need it!

Suffice it to say, my one item was deposited on the Customer Service desk and the employee there was told that I'd be back when they actually got serious about customer service.

Obama hates successful people...but he still loves their cash.

So now Obama is sucking up to the hippie rabble, even choosing to use their term - "99%" - to try to stoke the class warfare between those who've done well and earned money in this country and his core constituency--those who are typically too lazy or stupid to succeed without government subsidization but who still show up to vote, if only to keep the government cheese coming.

Well if Barry feels so strongly about this, then maybe he should just limit his never-ending re-election fund-raising efforts to passing the hat among the useless shitbirds "demonstrators" currently stinking up these public parks and stop jetting around the country to beg that 1% that he keeps demonizing for the money that he wants so badly.

I mean, if you're going to pin your re-election hopes on a plan to turn everyone against a small number of the producers in this country for your own gain, shouldn't you at least stop going before those same producers with your hat in your hand asking for their evil money?

And in the "totally nuts" department...

We have this guy and his wife, both lawyers, who insist that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, better known as the underwear bomber, was set up and did not set out to blow up that jetliner in Detroit two Christmases ago, despite his pleading guilty in court just the other day.

Curt Haskell would have been the lone defense witness if the trial for 24-year old Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab had moved forward.

Haskell and his wife, both local attorneys, were passengers on Northwest Airlines Flight 253 on Christmas Day 2009. WWJ Newsradio 950′s Vickie Thomas reports the couple plans to file a civil lawsuit saying they are convinced the U.S. government was involved.

“The government staged an intentional falsified terrorist attack that almost took our lives,” said Curt Haskell.

“We were greatly traumatized by this event, as well as intentionally smearing our good name...

Hey Curt...you've already smeared your own name so badly that the government couldn't possibly make you look like a bigger ass-monkey than you've already managed on your own. Just saying...

What I wanna know is who the hell would even consider hiring this unbalanced lunatic or his wife to handle their legal matters? (oh, and Curt...if you want to sue me now, go for it. But service of process is only accepted in person, hand-delivery, from you to my pal Murphy. Come on over.

PS--dress like a UPS man. He's eat off your hand...maybe even both of them.

23 hippies arrested in Denver--the names.

Well denver's dirty hippies wanted to protest and make a statement, so me being a nice guy, I'm helping 23 of them out by making sure that a record remains of their names and arrests long after the Denver Post takes the story down. This should give them reason to be proud for some time to come and it should also assist any potential future employers or dates. I know that if I were hiring employees, these folks could just forget about filling out an application for any position that I'd need mature, responsible people for, and God help them if one came around trying to date my son, daughter, sister, etc,.

According to Denver Police and Denver County court records, the 23 people listed below were arrested when law enforcement evicted participants in the Occupy Denver movement on Oct. 14. Most were charged, given a court date, and released with no bond assigned.

-- Jordan Brody, 20, unlawful conduct on public property.

-- Christopher Burkhardt, 27, unlawful conduct on public property.

-- Elisha Capracota, 29, unlawful conduct on public property.

-- Matthew Carlton, 26, unlawful conduct on public property.

-- Cory Donahue, 28, unlawful conduct on public property and resisting arrest, bond set at $1,000.

-- Barbara Gawlowski, 32, harassment.

-- Ryan Hartman, 32, unlawful conduct on public property.

-- Charles Howe, 30, unlawful conduct on public property and resisting arrest, bond set at $1,000.

-- Justin Jeffries, 26, unlawful conduct on public property.

-- Kerri Kellerman, 38, unlawful conduct on public property.

-- Richard Klassen, 23, unlawful conduct on public property.

-- Noah Levine, 19, giving false information and obstruction of a roadway.

-- Scianda Long, 24, unlawful conduct on public property.

-- Vincent Lopez, 24, unlawful conduct on public property.

-- Patrick Marsden, 31, unlawful conduct on public property, bond set at $2,000.

-- Kristopher Norvell, 23, failure to obey a police order.

-- Aaron Petrovich, 40, assault.

-- Tiffany Rosengrant, 24, unlawful conduct on public property.

-- Jonathan Shepard, 27, unlawful conduct on public property and resisting arrest, bond set at $750.

-- Caryn Sodaro, 46, unlawful conduct on public property, bond set at $300.

-- Aaron Stuckner, 23, unlawful conduct on public property and resisting arrest.

-- Heather Turner, 25, Unlawful Conduct on Public Property and Marijuana Possession under 2 oz.

-- Matthew Velasquez, 25, unlawful conduct on public property.

There they are, folks. Twenty-three losers who have absolutely no reason for even existing. While everyone around them is getting up and going to work every day, these losers are just lounging around in their own filth and contributing exactly nothing to society.

The article doesn't report if the hippies were bathed, shaved and given flea dips, but for the sake of the police that had to handle them and the community in general, one can only hope so.

BTW, Caryn...Forty-six years old and still getting arrested by the police? You're not an idealistic kid any more, sweetie. And that's probably why you had to post a cash bond. That's society's way of suggesting that it's time for you to grow up.

And any other bloggers out there, I'd encourage you to follow suit any time you see the name of any of these dirtbag hippies appearing in print following an arrest. If they want to make a public statement so bad, let's be decent and help them own it.

Dirty hippies are now "just like us"? I don't think so!

Well it’s starting.
The hippies, dirtbags “protestors” who claim to be just like the rest of us (other than the fact that they don’t have and won’t take jobs and sit around for days in their own filth and feces, smoking dope and having sex with each other under tarps) are now showing us how they respect the laws “just like the rest of us do.”

In Boston, over 100 have been arrested for trying to set up a camp in a prohibited area and refusing to vacate it.
In New York City, hundreds more are defying the city and refusing to vacate a privately-owned park so that it can be cleaned of their own refuse and offal.
In Denver, hundreds more are refusing to leave a city park that closes at 11PM, and local scumbags “activists” who weren’t even part of the protest group are flocking into the park just to be part of any fight with the police that breaks out.

Yeah, just like you and me.

One unifying factor that defines these shitbirds citizens no matter which liberal city that they are currently infesting is that they have no real message or agenda other than causing mayhem for it’s own sake. This it what the core of these groups are all about, in stark contrast to TEA party groups comprised of ordinary people who have jobs, mortgages and an actual message (stop spending our money). These losers have no real point or focus, which is why the powers-that-be, the puppeteers steering them (Soros and Obama, among others) have to supplement their ranks with paid union organizers, at least during daylight hours when people are paying attention to them. These loser kids can’t even be trusted to run their own protests by the people who are benefitting from their actions. (That would be Obama and every Democrat who worries about their failings being on the front page of the papers every day.)

So unless you are a drug-addled, no-job-having hippie who reeks of B.O. and just shows up places because other smelly hippies are already in those places smoking dope and defecating in public, these people are not like you at all. I know for sure that they’re not like me. You and I, we obey the rules and respect lawful authority. We also provide for ourselves instead of sitting around demanding that others be taxed to pay for their rent, student loans, health care and basic sustenance and that the municipal government agencies and local businesses give them toilets, food, shelter, and pretty much everything else that they want for free. As much as they like to paint themselves as being just like our nation's founders and the civil rights heroes, they're just the opposite. Those people fought for their freedom and independence and these kids are demanding to be more dependent, insisting on a bigger nanny state to run their lives at the expense of other people. Frankly I’m thinking that we’d do better as a nation if we simply rounded them up and shipped the whole lot of them off to North Korea in trade for a few hundred North Koreans who just want to come here and be free and productive.

More planes

One thing I like about Alaska is the number of aircraft that are always out and about. Everywhere you look, there's one sitting off in the brush next to a dirt strip, like this one I found by a lodge near the Edgerton Highway junction with the Richardson Highway.
Or these guys on an airfield near Glen Allen (with the Wrangell-St. Elias range in the background.) Note the fact that the vast majority of them are tail-draggers, which are preferred up here because they're better suited for grass and dirt strips where a bump or hole could put a regular tricycle-geared plane's prop into the ground. (Ouch!)
Even Fairbanks has aircraft, like this neat subdivision we visited, with signs laying out the right-of-way rules.
This neighborhood is built around a grass runway and every yard has at least one plane in it. I SO need to live someplace like this.

Then there was this nice Cessna 180 belonging to Wrangell Air just outside of Chitina. I'd take this one home in a heartbeat.
Here's a cherry Piper Super Cub at the Alaska Aviation Museum in Anchorage.

And of course float planes, like this Maule.
ONe thing's for sure: Being up there in a state with more pilots per capita than anyplace else in the country makes me want to quit slacking and get up in the air again real soon...and maybe buy me a tail-dragger of my own before too much longer.

Maybe a Stearman?

Frivolous lawsuit loserette of the day: Colleen O'Neal.

Poor Colleen. She had a rough flight in an airplane--an airplane which still managed to land safely at it's intended destination--and now she claims that she's so scared to fly that she can't apply for better jobs so she's suing several airlines.

Lubbock resident Colleen O'Neal flew from College Station to Houston on Oct. 29, 2009, when tornados and thunderstorms were reported in the region, she alleges in the lawsuit filed Tuesday in Harris County district court.

The plane took off and soon hit turbulence. The normally short flight took more than two hours, and the suit alleges the plane "fell repeatedly, and felt as if it had lost power and was falling out of the sky."

O'Neal believed she was going to die and has experienced post-traumatic stress disorder and fears flying, she alleges.

A Texas Department of Public Safety employee, she had hoped to work for the Federal Emergency Management Agency in a job that would require air travel. She alleges that because she no longer travels by air, she has lost out on economic benefits.

O'Neal purchased the ticket from Continental. She is also suing United Airlines, which merged with Continental last year. Colgan Air, owned by Pinnacle Airlines, operated the aircraft. She is suing all four for physical and mental anguish, medical bills and the cost of the lawsuit.

So because she now chooses not to fly, she declined to pursue a job that she was interested in, yet presumes that had she continued flying, she'd have gotten that job.

Frankly, Colleen O'Neal sounds like the kind of person best kept away from any job that requires stable, rational people with maturity and integrity. She apparently already works for Texas Department of Public Safety (God help Texas. Hopefully it's not in any sworn capacity.) and she wants federal employment with FEMA, which she claims that she can never have now because she's too scared to fly. Based on her demonstrated thought process and actions in this story, I'm not sure that I'd want her working unsupervised on the night shift at my local 7-11, much less entrusted with a government job giving her any authority over me and my fellow Americans.

And shame on the ambulance chaser who agreed to file this case in a real court on her behalf.

More plane goodness...now with secret stuff!

Eilson is not just home to KC-135 tankers. They also have the super snooper version known as COBRA BALL, an airborne intelligence platform that, among other things, tracks missiles (ours and theirs). My first inclination was not to post on it so as not to give stuff away, but then when I saw all of the info on the internet about it, including stuff put out by our own Air Force, I figured that I wasn't going to be disclosing any national secrets...especially since they park it right outside where anyone driving by can see it "blending in" with all of the tankers.One of these things is not like the others...
Still, as we're driving by the fence doing police stuff, Tom says "Why don't you try to get a picture of that COBRA BALL aircraft? Just do it inconspicuously."
So I roll the window down and steady my camera on the door, and he says "Is that what you call inconspicuous?" So I had to take the pictures on the fly while pretending that I wasn't taking pictures.
I mean, Geez, man...if they didn't want it photographed, maybe they should have put a tarp over it, or just put it inside, you know? But they didn't. And here it is.

Pity I don't have a recording of Tom in the background predicting that we were both going to be in Gitmo for this. In fact, I've tried calling to tease him about his worrying, but every time I dial his number now, no one answers. Just a coincidence, I'm sure.

Ladies and Gentlemen...COBRA BALL!


Oh, and here's some F-16 fighters.
The lead two were taxiing as we were driving by. Very nice.

Eilson AFB and The KC-135

Our visit to Eilson AFB got us in and around this wonderful 1963-vintage KC-135. For those of you not in the know, that's a tanker based on the Boeing 707 airframe. It gives gas to other aircraft in the air.
This one's up on jacks for landing gear work. It weighs 115,000lbs empty.
Here's that bit again. Cycling the gear five times to make sure it works right.

The business end of an aerial tanker.

Or the view that one or two readers might be more familiar with:

Now THAT is an engine. The KC-135 has four, but can remain flying on JUST ONE.

The cockpit. Note the newer glass display panels. The old Flight Engineer position has been eliminated as well.
People often forget the "C" in KC-135. They haul cargo, too. Here's the cargo hold.
Always take pride in who you are and what you do.

Back in the boom control cockpit. The boom operator works these controls while lying on his stomach on a special bench or couch.
A bit more complicated than your average self-serve pump.

Looking back from out on the wing.
It was an excellent opportunity to see one of these classic workhorses up close, and my only regret was that they would not let me take it for a hop or two around the pattern.

Special thanks to the 168th Air Refueling Wing.

More Alaska

Leaving Denali was hard, but I was way late as I was supposed to be in North Pole, AK (yes, really...) for a bonfire. Still, how can you not stop to take pictures of scenery like this?
Or things like this? A Huey delivering a small bulldozer to a highway construction site. Only in Alaska...
Here's the Alaskan Pipeline as it passes through Fairbanks.
This thing runs eight hundred miles, from Prudhoe Bay to Valdez. Hippies and greenies hate it, but all of America relies on it.
So now I'm getting set to go play Alaska State Trooper. Nice car, huh? Here we are, pulling out of Tom's garage and getting ready to go fight crime.
And here we are, going to resolve yet another domestic resulting from the usual source, even in Alaska: Baby Mama Drama.
The voice you hear in the background is Super Trooper Tom.

Oh--and here's that big golf ball that was guarded by the two security goons "construction workers" in a pick up truck. Really blends with the surroundings, doesn't it? Masters of camouflage, those Alaskans.

Alaska after-action (with promised pics!)

OK, I'm back, am somewhat rested, and I've sorted through the latest Picasa problems which kept me from putting pics up yesterday. I have a lot of pics, so I'll do a few here and a few there for a while. To start with, welcome to Talkeetna, Alaska. Nice place when it's not overrun by hippies.
My lodging for the night.
A few stars short of four-star, but after hitting all of the local pubs, I really didn't mind this quaint room (with bathroom down the hall).
The Talkeetna airport. Here are some float planes on a lake just off the Talkeetna road. Alaska has a lot of these. I'm thinking that I need a float plane.
Look--dogs. These are the National Park Service sled dogs used at Denali National Park in the wintertime. Betcha didn't know that your tax dollars paid for dogsleds and sled dogs, didja?
Woof.
They even have puppies, and a webcam where you can watch them.

And here's the bear I met a short time later. Kinda wish those dogs were handy because my .40 wasn't up to the challenge.

But bear or no, Denali's beautiful. I was a bit bummed that I didn't see any moose though.



Thanks again to Liz for the hook-up with the dogs, the tip on the road being open, and the rice and spinach salad you made for lunch...also for the trail mix that I snacked on all the way back to Anchorage.