Beware Of The Cheerleader

“It’s not the size of the dog in the fight, it’s the size of the fight in the dog.”

—Mark Twain

 

A bully confronted this young lady and got more than she probably expected.

Bullies generally prey upon those they perceive as weak and vulnerable. I came across this video today and immediately thought of the character Claire Bennet (The Cheerleader) in the old NBC series Heroes.

Traffic Tickets

I’m not what you’d call a reckless driver, despite getting a speeding ticket now and then. And in over a million miles of driving (probably closer to 2), never had an accident other than some guy in West Virginia running a stop sign and my broadsiding him in my aunt’s ’66 Ford LTD station wagon.

When I was 16.

With some experience I probably could have avoided that too.

The College Cheating Scandal

What has surprised me is not the cheating – there have always been those who have cheated to gain an advantage – but the depth of this scandal. And it was in 2 forms. Someone would take the entrance exams for the applicant, and that person would bribe those who administered the tests to allow this fraud.

Singer arranged for a third-party — usually Mark Riddell — to take the test secretly in the students’ place or replace their responses with his own….

Exactly 7 years ago…

We lost a good friend. I wasn’t a Neptunus Lex reader that morning; I hadn’t even heard of him. I will have learned about him tomorrow, when reading the notice from Chicago Boyz.

MarineMom probably described the reaction of his readers best, when she reported the news to her Marine aviator son.

He said that “I feel like somebody just punched me in the gut“.

OldAFSarge has a good post describing that day here.

The very first post I read, recommended by David, really told me all about the kind of man Lex was.

Immensely talented in his chosen line of work.

A man of faith.

Humble.

Kind to others.

A wicked sense of humor, even at his own expense.

I started devouring his posts on his now-gone website.

When that went down, I started reading the files advokaat fortunately created (for his later reading, he has said).

I thought that for such a good man who described many of his readers as “the best friends I never met”, giving his  readers so much of himself, to be silenced simply because of a password would not do.

He turned out to be the best friend I never met..

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Update: 03/07/19 – If you have just come across this via search engine, and want to know more about Carroll LeFon, here’s a good place to start. For one, you will learn a lot about Naval Aviation. But he wrote about so many other things – life and current events.

My Epilogue is here.

Happy New Year

 

By lex, on January 1st, 2011

To each and every.

The perceptive reader will have noticed a certain lack of density round these here parts over the last cuppla, and perhaps a certain lack of gravitas. It’s my sincere hope that the most of yez are using some class of RSS reader to find out when there’s something novel to scan, for I dread that the regulars come back on their own any number of times on a day like yesterday. Each to their own, of course.

So: It’s not you, it’s me.

Enough of all these politics

By Lex

On November 9, 2006

 

Let’s talk about me.

I’m half-way to 92 today, Constant Reader, this being the anniversary of my coming into this veil of tears a-hollering and a-squirming, like. I was a joy I’m sure to my sainted ma, God rest her and keep her close, although I’m not sure she was all that verklempt to see me at the moment of my emergence given that she’d been at a cocktail party when the water broke, and, having had a pair of martinis with which to celebrate my imminent debut upon a soon-to-be  amazed world  – a habit then as  kosher as it is today trayf  – was denied the ne plus ultra of natal care in the day, to wit: the opportunity to be reduced to open-mouthed, snoring insouciance during junior’s arrival by the liberal application of narcotic anesthetics. So, a “natural” child birth was to be our conjoined fate, and the word itself in scare quotes since the idea had long been out of favor with the fairer sex by the 9^th of November, 1960 and was not to emerge as preferred – dare I say: Mandatory? – option until sometime in the hazy future.

Scantlings

By lex, on December 18th, 2011

So, corporate HQ is making a worldwide tour of company deployment sites, in concert with holiday parties and presents to exceptional employees and such. Your host had wild notions of maybe renting a Cessna 172 for to transport his bride and hisself unto Camarillo, renting a car, dining with the co-workers and spending the night. ‘Twas to be a brave notion of demonstrating the subtleties of navigating the Los Angeles Class B airspace using a tower-to-tower clearance maybe, but Gaia gets her vote: A forty knot windshear was forecast at 1500 feet at the time of his arrival, which made the notion of lowering a mere toy like the Skyhawk – which crosses the fence at maybe 80 knots – problematical. Then there were clouds, rain and the undesirable prospect of carrying some icing.

Car?

Car!