monkeyplus1

My webhost upgraded the server hosting my site, and in the process, my blog got nuked. In any event, the good folks at dreamhost.com fixed it up. I did apologize for using the word “fucked” when describing my situation in regard to their upgrade.

At first, video games kept me occupied, then on-demand movies, and of course, my friend the public library. My reading list over at goodreads continues to grow phenomenally.

Lately, I’ve been devouring the work of the late writer Philip K. Dick.  Many things have been said about him, and I’d agree that he had a brilliant and uniquely original mind.

His writing has been behind some movies: Blade Runner, Total Recall, A Scanner Darkly, The Minority Report.

His writing style is stark, unornamented. The ideas behind his stories often overshadow the meager character development, but the ideas are brilliant.

Towards the late 60s and throughout the 70s, it seems obvious he experimented with all kinds of mind-altering substances, particularly hallucinogens and entheogens. The writing in the years before his death in 1982 grow vastly more metaphysical and psychological.

He wrote a lot, so when I pick up a book of his, I usually forego the synopsis on the back cover, and look for the first copyright date.  Any of his books in the late 60s forward are sure to be mindblowing.

Couldn’t get to sleep the other night. For some reason, I started thinking about what I’d put in an autobiographical memoir. My mind wandered across my entire past, thinking of all the people and events that have unfolded.   What a trip it’s been so far.

Made some beautiful music with Des, under the Pinkstrom umbrella.

Listen here at our site   the track is “silver shock”, which we recorded the weekend before Thanksgiving.

We spent Thanksgiving in Boise, Idaho this year, with the wife’s extended family.

We drove the Maxima, to keep the mileage low on the WRX, and also to be able to share the driving, since the wife doesn’t do manual transmissions.  It’s about a 7 hour drive.

The first couple hours driving outside of Portland is amazing, I soaked in the overwhelming beauty of the Columbia River Gorge.  Once you get past that, the scenery grows less and less interesting, and once you cross into Idaho, abandon all hope.

The northern part of Idaho is beautiful, though it’s notorious for white supremist camps. The rest of Idaho is pure red-state: white, Christian, meat-eating, republican, small-town America. They’re not peeling off their McCain/Palin bumperstickers any time soon.

The first two nights we spent at my mother in-law’s house, in the quaint North-end of Boise.  She was kind enough to have a couple vegan things for me to eat on Thanksgiving.

Sleeping there was an allergy nightmare, I inhaled probably an ounce of cat hair and dander, and slept in a room next to the litter box.  The little shits are complete fucks at night, fighting, vomiting, tearing ass through the house, and walking over our beds after visiting the litter box.

The next two nights the wife and I stayed at a Hyatt hotel, pure luxury, almost as nice as being home.

The only times I think being vegan sucks is when I’m traveling, finding food is always a problem.

Glad to be home in lush, verdant Portland. My mother-in-law had a scale, and I weighed myself for the first time, and was surprised. Holy shit, I’ve put on some weight. I’m fasting for a few days, shrink my stomach down, get rid of some toxins and bad habits. It’s worked many times in the past.

I’ve been enjoying some time off between contracts, luxuriating in the new house.

Since I can think of no close friends or family that share my love of aviation history, I drove myself down to the Evergreen Air & Space Museum down in McMinnville, about 40 miles Southwest of Portland.

It’s probably best known for housing the Spruce Goose, the enormous, wood-and-fabric seaplane built by Howard Hughes.  That’s only mildly interesting to me, as the museum also houses what I was really interested in - beautifully restored warbirds.

There is a replica of the Wright Flyer, the first airplane.  Here is an old bi-plane, showing the wooden struts normally covered by fabric.

What really got my interest on this visit, since I’ve read so much about their mission in Vietnam, was the F-105 Thunderchief, aka, the “Thud”.   (The huge grey wing over it belongs to the Spruce Goose).

These were originally designed in the 1950’s to fly supersonic into Russia and drop nuclear weapons.

When Vietnam came about, these planes were fitted with conventional bombs, and flown out of several bases in Thailand against heavily protected targets in North Vietnam.  The defenses there were state of the art radar-guided anti-aircraft guns and surface-to-air missiles (SAMs), provided by the Soviets and Chinese.

Some of the F-105s were fitted with electronic counter-measures to jam the North Vietnamese defenses, known as “Wild Weasels”.   They carried an interesting weapon called a Shrike.  When the Vietnamese SAM batteries activated the radar-guidance for their missiles, a Shrike could home in on that signal and fly right down to the battery. That was really high-tech for the time, when there was no GPS, no JDAMs, and laser-guided bombs were still years away.

The bomb-dropping was very low-tech by today’s standards, and not too far improved from the techniques used in WWII.  The flights of Thuds would fly from Thailand, across Laos, and then drop down into the mountain valleys of North Vietnam, using the mountain ridges to hide them from radar.  If the weather was good, they’d continue on until they visually identified the target, pop up to get some height, roll-over and into a dive-bomb, drop their weapons, and afterburner their way out of the area.

They took such heavy losses, that instead of requiring them to serve a specific amount of time overseas, if they lived through 100 missions, they could go home.

Here are some shots of the cockpit of the Thunderchief.

Lastly, I’d just finished reading about P-38 Lightning pilots in the Pacific theater of WWII.   I believe this plane is restored to look like the one flown by the legendary Jerry Johnson, a triple-ace from Eugene, Oregon. (The book is called Jungle Ace and I highly recommend it).

Col. Johnson shot down 24 enemy aircraft in 265 combat missions.  After surviving all that, he was on his way home from Japan after the war to his wife  and child, when his aircraft was lost in severe weather, never having been found. The aircraft (I believe he was flying a B-24 home), had 5 parachutes for the 7 people aboard.  Johnson and his co-pilot stayed aboard while the other crewmen parachuted down to a beach they’d overflown.  Johnson had planned to turn around and make a crash landing on the sandy beach, but was never seen again.

a few new Pure Brown tunes for your pleasures:

“night crawlies”

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“painless”

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“an empty house”

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