Old songs used to tell little stories, mini melodramas that could be sexy without uttering a single suggestive word. They let your own mind arouse your erotic imagination.
And at the same time the songs could be comical, poking fun at how a man goes all loosey-goosey over a woman who is just toying with him for her own amusement. They didn't take themselves, nor us, seriously. It was all just for a good time. Plus every song had a righteous beat and you could dance to it.
I put together this video 18 years ago when my grandfather -- my New England grandfather, as I called him -- passed away. I've written about him before a few times. He was an Army Air Force pilot in World War II, flying P-40s in the Southwest Pacific in 1942 and P-51s out of England in 1944.
I just stumbled across this video by chance. I'd forgotten all about it, but it had 50,000 views on one of my old blogs, so I guess it's worth reposting.
My New England gramps was my favorite and his passing affected me more that I suppose it should have. Thinking about him now it's hard to realize that he has been gone for so long. I can still hear his voice, his laugh.
Oh, well.
“Our memory is a more perfect world than the universe: it gives back life to those who no longer exist.”
― Guy de Maupassant
None of the photos are colorized. I don't think that was possible two decades ago.
I've been thinking over my life and how it has been, what and how I used to think, the dreams I had, so I thought I would repost this from a few years ago. It reminds me a lot of the me that once was.
Who were my scientific heroes back then? One man I was especially influenced by was David Chalmers. Chalmers' exploration of panpsychism, that consciousness is a fundamental fact of nature, as part of his discussion of the hard problem of consciousness, has influenced my whole world view to this day. In high school, I poured over his book, The Conscious Mind. I was reading a lot of Robinson Jeffers' poetry at the time and I found it remarkable how similar their thinking was, although Jeffers said life rather than consciousness. I connected Chalmers and Jeffers thought with panentheism (pan-en-theos “all-in-God”) -- not to be confused with pantheism. It was expressed by Paul saying, “There is only Christ. He is everything and he is in everything” (Colossians 3:11). I was also reading a lot of Loren Eiseley at the time. In particular, The Immense Journey profoundly impressed me and I also connected his thought about life, mind and consciousness with Chalmers' and Jeffers'. I melded them into my own developing attempts to grasp the meaning of existence into one concept that I understand fully but am not really able to explain.
“If 'dead' matter has reared up this curious landscape of fiddling crickets, song sparrows, and wondering men, it must be plain even to the most devoted materialist that the matter of which he speaks contains amazing, if not dreadful, powers, and may not impossibly be, as Thomas Hardy has suggested, 'but one mask of many worn by the Great Face behind.'” ― Loren Eiseley
“I am sure now that life is not what it is purported to be and that nature, in the canny words of the Scotch theologue, 'is not as natural as it looks.'” ― Loren Eiseley
“We are one of many appearances of the thing called Life; we are not its perfect image, for it has no perfect image except Life, and life is multitudinous and emergent in the stream of time.” ― Loren Eiseley,
"The story of Eden is a greater allegory than man has ever guessed. For it was truly man who, walking memoryless through bars of sunlight and shade in the morning of the world, sat down and passed a wondering hand over a heavy forehead. Time and darkness, knowledge of good and evil, have walked with him ever since...a new world of terror and loneliness appears to have been created in the soul of man. For the first time in four billion years a living creature had contemplated himself and heard with a sudden unaccountable loneliness, the whisper of the wind in the night reeds. Perhaps he knew, there in the grass by the chill waters, that he had before him an immense journey. Perhaps that same foreboding still troubles the hearts of those who walk out of a crowded room and stare with relief in to the abyss of space so long as there is a star to be seen twinkling across those miles of emptiness." ~ Loren Eiseley
I came in on runway 24, which was, um, unimproved, shall we say, allegedly grass, 915 meters long, the longest of the two choices I had. There was a fourteen knot crosswind coming in from due east, the weather was clear, dry and warm but not too hot, so piece of cake. But, to be honest, a grass runway that short had my attention.
I came in steep with 40 degrees of flaps, power a bit high, cutting power to idle, propeller levers full forward, right before the threshhold, got the stall warning just as the tires touched the runway, hit the brakes and reversed prop thrust all the way back, flaps up, then props forward at 60 knots, (to avoid FOD damage) trying to prevent overloading the nose wheel, locking the brakes or bursting a tire, and came to a screeching halt with a good 100 meters to spare. I blew on my fingernails and buffed them on my sleeve. But if I ever have to fly down there when that runway is wet, you can just forget it. Back to RSA.
Simple preflight, just CIGAR, gyros erected, avionics set. Left engine started first to reduce the possibility of FOD damage. Began taxing by increasing propeller blade angle rather than with a burst of power, also to avoid possible FOD damage from increasing rpm; this way actually reduces rpm. Kept moving, setting approach flaps at the end of the runway and off we went.
Aaanyways, the reason I mention this is that we have some investments in cattle ranching in Argentina and I was freighting some of our guys to an estancia, as they call cattle ranches down there. We've been reducing our herds stateside for various reasons, but expanding them in Argentina. (In both cases, thank you very much, President Trump.)
We used to sell a lot of our American beef to China but not so much recently, the Chinese having begun sourcing their beef buying to other countries...like Argentina.
 |
| Funny things happen down there. |
When I first met him at our Montana ranch, he wouldn't look directly at me but kind of off to the side or down at his shoes. Then, when he thought I wasn't paying attention, he would stare at me, letting his eyes slide over me. But after I talked to him enough and he got used to dealing with me he stopped doing that. Chinese women can certainly be quite pretty, but as a rule tend to be somewhat flat both uptown and downtown. That, I am not. So I guess I unsettled him until he got acclimatized to the landscape.
We were both kind of surprised to see each other in La Pampa, but pleasantly so. I was a bit set back because I couldn't remember his name, Sum Dum Ting or whatever it was, and I think he couldn't remember mine, either. So we were all like, "Hey, it's, ah -- you!" But we had a cordial reunion and also had a laugh about how ridiculous all this switching of import sourcing was. The same big outfits, companies, corporations, run everything, regardless of nationality. The only people who are hurt are the 25-dollar to 35-dollar an hour guys with families to support. You know, the backbone of the country. But what can you do?
So if you wondered why, after China retaliated for Trump tariffs by switching its beef buying from the USA to Argentina, Trump gave the "Argentine" beef industry 200 billion dollars, now you know.
********
Some details of the trip down; the flight back kind of the same. Let's just say my Avcard was groaning.
Jet-A fuel costs at the pump, not including taxes and surcharges (Hi, Argentina!) = $16,292.
Landing fees and FBO charges, customs processing, overflight permits, let's call it...hmm...rounding off...$8,000. Nine fuel stops. Most expensive fuel was at SLA ($7.50), cheapest at PAC ($2.88). Same go juice.
Trucking along at 256 knots:
Total Air Miles: 6,233 nautical miles.
Total Air Time: 25.5 hours.
Total Fuel Burned: 3,162 gallons (21,185 lbs of Jet-A).
Fuel Burn per Leg: 350 gallons per 3-hour leg (including taxi, climb, and 45-min IFR reserves).
Other expenses you can guess -- three squares and flops along the way.
You think that's expensive? Call the total, let's say, $35,000. With no particular advanced planning, seven peeps, let's go! Travel in essentially first-class conditions with no worries about weirdos on board (well, except for you, Dave, heh).
Compare that with booking seven people on commercial flights, being only able to get to Buenos Aires. You couldn't just call up on the spur of the moment and even get reservations for that many people without paying, what $50,000...$75,000? Maybe even more. And then the hassle of changing planes, hanging around at the airports and all the usual crap associated with commercial flying these days. And how would you get from Buenos Aires to Puelches? You'd have to charter a plane. What would that cost? Not cheap, for sure.
So for way less than half of what we would have spent on commercial, maybe only a fourth, we got mission accomplished. In comfort. That's no joke. The guys I flew down had to get to work right away and it was important they be both physically and mentally rested. Would you have been if you'd made that trip on commercial?
Today, I danced. I haven't danced in months. It was good.
Close my eyes and I'm next to you.
Due to popular request -- no, seriously -- I'm thinking about reviving this blog and posting again. But I gotta think up something to write about first.
Well, honestly, I was pretty beat down by a lot of things back there a while ago, but I'm slowly climbing out of that hole, and maybe messing around with this old blog will help me get out of it all the way and move on with my life.
"Who has seen the wind?
Neither you nor I:
But when the trees bow down their heads,
The wind is passing by."
--Christina Georgina Rossetti
One last post. It was 20 years ago today that I made my first blog post, so I thought I'd commemorate it with one final blog post.
What was that first post about? Don Marquis and his alley cat Mehitabel, who thought she had been Cleopatra in a past life. Her adventures were chronicled by her friend the cockroach poet Archie. He typed her life story in lowercase because he couldn't hold down the shift key and reach a letter key at the same time. He didn't bother with punctuation, either, typing one letter at a time, jumping from key to key on a typewriter in an empty, after-hours newspaper office. Mehitabel's catch phrase was "toujours gai" and I adopted it as my own and tried to live by it in those days, oh, so long ago.
Mehitabel, by the way, is Hebrew for "God makes happy" and Mehitabel, the battered and abused alley cat, was always happy.
The first quote in the first entry on the first day of writing posts in my first blog:
"We do not do what we want, and yet
we are responsible for who we are."
--Jean Paul Sartre
 |
| What he said from the bottom of his heart remains in my heart and is just for me. |
"The fairest things have fleetest end,
Their scent survives their close:
But the rose's scent is bitterness
To her that loved the rose."
--Francis Thompson
"Now therefore keep thy sorrow to thyself, and
bear with good courage that which hath befallen
thee."
--The Apocrypha 10:15
