Posted by lex, on July 10, 2006
Another reason why Ireland – having already saved civilization twice – will eventually rule the world:
(Author Steven) Johnson notes that historians interested in genetics believe that the roughly simultaneous emergence of urban living and the manufacturing of alcohol set the stage for a survival-of-the-fittest sorting-out among the people who abandoned the hunter-gatherer lifestyle and, literally and figuratively speaking, went to town.
Continue readingFiled under Beer Blogging, Carroll "Lex" LeFon, Uncategorized
Over a year ago, a German friend and I discovered a genuine German Beer Garden in, of all places, suburban Sacramento. It is in a strip mall down the street from the Rocklin Mercedes-Benz dealer.
The owner, Katherin, has been open 2 years and has been working her hardest for it to succeed. She has been working doing things that people who have never had a small business can’t understand. Chef quits suddenly? She takes over the cooking duties. Dishwasher sick? She washes the dishes.
She has spent some long hours at times to make this a success.
Filed under Beer Blogging
Posted by Lex, on September 25, 2009
It’s good for you.
Moderation in all things.
Speaking of which, it’s the 250th anniversary of the nectar of the gods.
So: Celebrations all the way around!
By lex, on May 24th, 2010
Guinness: It’s good for you.
A pint of the black stuff a day may work as well as a low dose aspirin to prevent heart clots that raise the risk of heart attacks.
Drinking lager does not yield the same benefits, experts from University of Wisconsin told a conference in the US.
Guinness was told to stop using the slogan decades ago – and the firm still makes no health claims for the drink.
The Wisconsin team tested the health-giving properties of stout against lager by giving it to dogs who had narrowed arteries similar to those in heart disease.
They found that those given the Guinness had reduced clotting activity in their blood, but not those given lager.
All things in moderation. But all things.
By lex, on January 11th, 2005
I don’t get it, myself. Motion sickness, that is. Neither from the sea, nor from the air.
Pilots generally don’t – If the gentle heave and swell of an 80,000 ton aircraft carrier puts you ’round the bend and over the bowl, you’re going to have a hard time flying a 20 ton fighter round the sky.
Which makes it all the more pleasant to see a fellow aviator get ill. Lose his cookies. Talk to Ralph.
Get airsick.
Because at the end of the day? There’s nothing quite so funny as someone else’s misery.
It always tickles me to see distinguished visitors arrive aboard the carrier – civilians. In a crowd of 15 or so, there will always be at least one who has the little dramamine patch behind his ear. This on a ship that can shoulder aside the waves almost as an afterthought. There are buildings in major cities which move more than a Nimitz-class carrier, at sea. C’est amusant – n’est ce pas?
But no one starts out so secure in the soundness of their stomach – I paid good money as an ensign for three rides in a Cessna 152, only to ensure that I wouldn’t go down to Pensacola, discover something embarrassing about myself, and fail out of flight school. I learned next to nothing about how to fly – but I did learn that I wasn’t prone to motion sickness.
Not everyone found out so easily: I had several friends who drove down to the cradle of Naval Aviation only to find out the hard way that they weren’t “aerodynamically adaptable.” If, after successfully competing for a coveted billet as a student naval aviator, you find out (to your shame and dismay) that you get airsick, there are two options available: Drop on Request (DOR), or go to “Spin and Puke” school.
That’s not its real name, of course. But it describes the subject matter pretty well. “Students” are seated in a chair, in a dark room, with a single point of light shining down on them from the middle distance. The chair is spun at high speed, and then quickly stopped. The student is then asked to stand up, look into the light, and describe his sensations. Most of which, apparently, being with, “Ralph.”
It’s conditioning – the theory went that anyone, given the time and the will, could overcome the nausea. Spin and Puke school provided the time. It was up to the student to bring the will. But it’s hard for some folks – one of my classmates got so sick, so often that eventually it became a conditioned response: Just walking out to the flight line, and smelling the JP-5 jet fuel, would provoke the reaction. He’d fall to his knees and spill his guts before he even got to the airplane. Which is where he really got in trouble.
Didn’t make it of course. Not his fault, just the way things were.
I had a guy as a student back in the ’80s. Great guy, an All-American lacrosse player from the Naval Academy who had served for two years as a black shoe aboard a destroyer prior to deciding that aviation had so much more to offer (duh!). Came from a big family in New York.
He got pretty sick, in the jet.
We were flying a basic instrument flight one night – he was under “the bag,” to keep from getting any visual cues from the night horizon – when, according to the training syllabus, I put him through some “unusual attitudes.”
Now, unusual attitudes aren’t the posings of UCLA undergrads – it means putting the airplane, under simulated instrument conditions (i.e., bad weather) into a position that you’d ordinarily try to avoid, and then recovering it to normal flight. The usual drill would be for the instructor pilot in the front seat to say, “Close your eyes,” and then fly the jet maybe 30 degrees nose high, and 120 degrees angle of bank, while pulling the throttles to idle. Once established, the IP would say, “Open your eyes. You have the jet.”
And then the student would check his gauges, assess the situation, and (hopefully) execute the proper recovery procedures. Which in this case would be to throttle up, gently fly the nose back to the horizon, and then when that was accomplished (with sufficient airspeed) roll the jet back up right again. All on the instruments.
Now, as a student, when the IP would say to me, “Close your eyes,’ I would. And then of course, because I was curious what kind of attitude he was going to fly us into, I’d open them again, and watch avidly. Which made the recovery so very much more easy to accomplish. After a suitable delay.
Because I’m all about knowing.
But my student on this particular night apparently didn’t “peek.” Because he delayed a bit longer than normal each time, recovering the jet. Not so long that I had to take over again, but long enough that I started to think about it a couple of times. But eventually he met standards, and we headed back to the field for some precision approaches under radar control.
The students do dozens of these in the simulator before they will ever do one in the jet. So they get pretty familiar with the procedures. My man did a fine job getting us checked in with approach, and set up on the final approach course. He got to glideslope perfectly, and when the controller called, “up and on glideslope,” he made the proper power correction, gently bunted the nose, and set us up for a perfect approach. On course, 500 feet per minute rate of descent.
Passing 2000 feet, as per the standard operating procedures, he turned the intercom on “hot mike.” Now I would hear everything he said, approach checklists, landing checklists. Breathing.
Passing about 600 feet above ground level, I heard a strange choking sound, and then the unique, unmistakable sound of my student taking the oxygen mask off, while the flow was still on – a strange, rushing sound as the O2 went past his face. The aircraft started to drift left, and then sag off glideslope at 500 feet AGL, as the next sound to fill my headset was the that of my student retching.
All those “under the bag” unusual attitudes had finally caught up to him, some 20 minutes later, at 600 feet AGL. And when they did, he proceeded to load shed all his aviation responsibilities in favor of becoming very, very ill. On the intercom. Right there in front of God and everybody.
He let go of the stick and throttles, since, at that moment? It was all the same to him whether we lived or died. Either way.
You want to live, instructor pilot-boy? YOU fly the airplane. So I did.
But I started off talking about sea sickness, and that’s where I want to end: Aboard the USS Constellation in 1989 off Karachi, Pakistan – a place where we had stopped to sample some of the least pleasant liberty I have ever known – air wing pilots were required to serve as the officers-in-charge of the picket boat watch. In those more innocent days, it was thought perfectly suitable to have a small boat with four or five Sailors, one of them maybe armed with a shotgun, and commanded by one officer, drive around the aircraft carrier all night, in order to prevent the more curious natives from coming alongside and either getting fouled in the anchor chain or in some other way making a nuisance of themselves.
On one of the nights I went ashore, in one of the local dhows, a young F-14 pilot was the boat officer on the picket boat. The expertly handled dhow dealt with the sea admirably, but as a rough cross sea was up, the stem and stern lights of the picket boat seemed to play the dance of the hyperkinetic see-saw. On speed. Our hero was himself observed by the assembled liberty party manfully laying across the stern sheets, covered in a blanket, and drooling over the side, utterly spent, entirely exhausted. He was nearly as miserable as a man is allowed to be without actually dying.
Which we of course, considered great sport. And never forgave him for.
A fighter pilot, forsooth!
Filed under Beer Blogging, Good Stuff, Humor, Lex, Navy
On our return to Casa De Sharon y Glenn, we stopped by the Vineyard on MCB Camp Pendleton. Among other things, I procured a couple of See Gars.
The Guinness was purchased shortly after leaving the gathering at Shakespeare’s.
The Missus said to maintain the same thing.
Buck Pennington gave me the idea to have a cigar, so I did.
Tonight I enjoyed both on the Verandah at Casa de Sharon y Glenn in California City.
Filed under Beer Blogging, California, Good Stuff, Guinness - For Strength!, Lexicans, Really Good Stuff
I’ll be winging my way to the great New England area and Mystic, Connecticut.
I’ll be leaving the Chi tomorrow morning and arriving in the early afternoon.
I may be going to the New England Air Museum and later to the Quonset Air Museum with pictures to follow in a future post.
Sunday at noon will be the Lexican meetup at the Harp and Hound located at 4 Pearl Street in Mystic CT 06355.
If you’re going to be in the area I look forward to seeing you.
No, not this one:
Or even this one:
In my mind it’s somewhat more analogous to this:
Centurion patch.
At least I’d like to think so.
100 traps aboard the boat is a career milestone in NAVAIR. Patches are handed out to commemorate every 100 landings. Given that traps (landings for you non-aviator-ish people) are the most demanding task in all of aviation this is by no means a small feat. It’s not unusual for pilots and crews to log hundreds and even 1,000 (I do recall seeing a 2,000 somewheres) traps over a career. Case in point. Maybe 1,00 isn’t so common anymore is post-cold war NAVAIR but still.
Here’s the trap from the jet.
Here’s the trap from the “not so” cheap seats…who wants to play PLAT LSO? 🙂
I’m getting to the point…
I noticed a few days ago that I reached the 100 post here. Since I missed my “blogo-versary” I’d figured I take this time to first thank xbradtc for handing me a set of keys (and now I’m posting there too!). I didn’t think I do THIS much blogging but still. My goal was to write about things I’ve always wanted to see posts on so…here I am.
My co-bloggers here are freaking awesome people with a wealth of knowledge, experience, and blogging talent. I’m blessed to be a part of this group.
Finally, I’d like to thank all the readers and commenter. Hell, I’m just a pilot dude with attitude (pun kinda,kinda not intended), a brain and a computer hoping to contribute something to the conversation. All of you readers and commenter keep me motivated to keep putting out content.
Another thing I’d like to mention. The commenters here have SO much expertise on things I just usually read about. That’s been the biggest reward for me is to talk to you all that have the proverbial “t-shirt to prove it.” I’m honored and humbled that you take the time to read and/or comment.
So here’s to all of you and the Blogfather of course:
…for strength.
and hopefully 100 more:
Thank you all again so much.t
Filed under Airplanes, Beer Blogging, Good Stuff, Lexicans, Naval Aviation, Navy, Other Stuff, Outside the Box, Perspective, Plane Pr0n, Silliness, Small Stuff
Harry Truman called it this. “Striking a Blow for Liberty”
Pretty good stuff IMHO. Just me folks, always exploring new flavours. Picked this up at Cost Plus World Market in Visalia yesterday on our way home from Lemoore. Yes, we go to Lemoore on a semi regular basis. It was home to us from May of 1985 to March of 1989.
The Lexicans 