A NICE PLACE

I spent a day here once and enjoyed just walking around.

Drone shot by Garrit Wes Anderson

There are a number of remarkable photos by Anderson at his secret agent site on the web.

DESERT PASSAGES

I went to Las Vegas about 15 years ago and the person I was with wanted to see the local Bebe store which was located in this strange place called Desert Passages. We tracked it down and entered and I was entranced. It's not everyday (never) that one enters a world out of fairy tale.

It's an amazing place and well worth a couple minutes of your time in Las Vegas the next time you're there. What can I say, painted sky, twilight, a river running all the way around it and it rains from time to time. My kind of place. Civilized.

I hope that it has borne up well over the last 15 years. It's not the kind of thing we'll ever see again.

PLAYING PITTSBURGH

After a bit of worship with good microbrews and good food at

one can step out and see the town and what's happening at the Strip and Carnegie Museum.

BACK IN A COUPLE OF DAYS

TIME TRAVEL

I originally found this map at The Arts Mechanical. It's an interesting map that shows the travel time to go from London to anywhere in the world back in 1914. As I looked at the map what struck me was a different map showing how far back in time a traveler would go by traveling from London to, say, Riyadh or Tripoli or Detroit. Those who have traveled to the viler places around the world know how very thin is the veneer of civilization on cultures rooted firmly in a time more than a thousand years removed from today.

FLIGHT TRACKER

Interesting that there are still commercial airliners flying over Syria from Turkey. After the tragedy in Ukraine and the sudden European realization that it is madness to send commercial airliners over a war zone with modern Russian anti-aircraft missile systems deployed, I would have thought United Arab Emirates Airlines and Qatari Air would have elected to fly around Syria. It's like running with scissors. Not even a senseless foreseeable tragedy will get kids to stop.

I'm not flying over Syria and particularly not on a southerly heading out of Turkish airspace.

IDYLLIC SPOT

Winter is coming. In fact, it snowed here in MetroParkCentralis and it is darned cold. Naturally, my thoughts turned to a warmer place. Yes, the Hale Koa in Oahu is calling.

I've  heard of the place for decades; ever since I first stayed at the Dragon Hill Lodge in Seoul. A few months ago we were listening to a couple who were there with us. Neither had heard of the place even after spending 20 years with the Army. It caters to a very select clientele. Staying there is reserved for the nation's best.

INTERNATIONAL KICK ME

It's like the Light-worker has a big sign taped to his back inviting everyone to kick him.

Mr 'Nothing to Fear About Terrorism' had this immediate response from his State Department.

The DOUBLETHINK
Wouldn't it be interesting if this 'warning' from the State Department dramatically reduced the numbers of Americans who travel abroad and resulted in a more inward looking insular American electorate that doesn't care about the rest of the world and really believes that everywhere is just like anywhere in the United States? You know, the kind of people who think the entire world has a right to freedom of speech and that everywhere is as secular and multi denominational as Albany, NY.

OTOH, how many Americans travel to Arabia or Pakistan or take a trip to India or Nepal or enjoy pub crawls in Transylvania?

ANYBODY SEEN OUR LITTLE CLOCKMAKER

As I looked at the cartoon posted from Last of the Few I wondered, 'what happened to our little muslim clock maker after he left the White House last month? Did he head for Egypt enroute to Qatar and take a vacation at a Red Sea resort where one of his clever little clocks might have gone astray?

Never gonna fly to Egypt again

PIZZA AND AMMO

We got an announcement today from a pizza place we ate at on our drive back home from San Diego. It was the first I received from them in almost a year. They're not exactly beating the drum. It was though, excellent wood fired pizza and the atmosphere was friendly and inviting so we recommend it.

The place is also across the street from a Walmart that seemed to contain all the guns and ammo in Christendom. That may be no big draw for some, but living here in MetroParkCentralis and coming from San Diego, guns were scarce and ammo was even more conspicuously not available at either end. If I hadn't loaded up with ammo at the Post Exchange at Fort Riley that morning, I'd have squeezed in some more .45 ammo.

WE ENJOYED IT AND CAME HOME

It's a nice place, Hawaii. We only visited one island this time but it is a study in contrasts.

West End of Oahu at the bitter end of the Farrington Highway

Diamond Head and Waikiki Beach

LOCATOR

Defiant has shifted his pennant for a few days. Departed MetroparkCentralis on Monday, return 4 September.

FROM HERE TO THERE AND BACK AGAIN

Other than the burn, it was a trellig good vacation. The map below pretty much conveys the journey there and back.  We, as usual, took a cruise across the lake of Champlain because, after all, doesn't every true vacation involve a voyage? We could cruise to Bulgaria you know. But what's the point? Maine is pretty much Bulgaria without the ruins. Nice coastline though.

IS THE TSA SMART ENOUGH TO DO THIS?

It's a fairly simple question so read this and ask yourself what will happen as people who actually have ebola make their way into the already ridiculous airport screening process and need to be taken somewhere after spending hours in a plane and then waiting in a packed customs and immigration line so they can be 'screened' for ebola based on whether or not they originated in West African ports of embarkation.

I don't think there is the physical structure to allow them to do this anywhere in the airports until after they go through customs/immigration and baggage claim areas. I happen to believe that the people in TSA are so ruthlessly uncunning that if some ebola sufferer vomited in the 'screening' room, the TSA would continue to use if for days before a janitor was ordered to thoroughly clean the space. At least customs would put a little "Wet Floor" sign and maybe adjust their endless loudspeaker announcements and include a little, "Don't Step in the Vomit," announcement after they send for the highly skilled janitorial staff to do a bit of cleanup.

In a way it is even more senseless than Sierra Leone's confession that they let the plague get out of control because failed to follow the very simplest and first step in fighting a plague and imposing a quarantine on travel into and out of the effected region. They not only didn't do that, they sent teams of people who have been exposed to ebola to every village in the country to explain about ebola and no doubt left a trail of devastation  in their wake.

VIKING CRUISES

We watched Masterpiece Theater last night and saw a number of ads for Viking River Cruises. While it looks like fun I'm sure they've left out the part that made it so much fun for actual vikings.

Viking Shortish-Long-Ship Going Roving 

Little mention given to the opportunity to debark for a little looting and pillaging. The ads were all about cultural stuff no sane man would be interested in. I mean somebody has to pay for the gas burned by that outboard.

JUST SHOOT HIM

From the local police blotter after we got back and learned that our neighbors had all been robbed.

A clerk at the BP station on Larchmere Blvd. reported that a Black male, approximately six foot one, wearing a black hoodie and black pants entered the store with a handgun.The suspect proceeded to take $125 in cash and $280 in lottery tickets from the business and $272 in cash from a customer inside of the store. The suspect then fled the scene. The investigation is ongoing.

It's a fashion statement that should be augmented by a hint of plumbum in the head. I keep seeing cities passing local ordinances banning saggy pants but I've never heard of a single city or town that thought banning mugger costumes was an appropriate way to spend time at city council meetings. I wonder why it never seems to come up.

Neither condition is really a fashion statement so much as it is a shoutout that screams to the world that yes, yes you are in fact too damned stupid to pull your pants up over your knees and that you're a criminal suspect looking for the next scene of the crime. I've never understood the narrow philosophy that insists that it's no crime to dress like a mugger on the one hand and yet passionately hate being treated like a criminal simply because one looks like a criminal on the other hand.

I'm no fashion maven or clothes horse myself. 30 years in Southern California and a lifetime before that racing sailboats left me addicted to wearing shorts, sandals, ball caps, sunglasses and T-shirts. With sandals. 30 years of wearing a uniform always meant changing when I got home. That used to mean a hot tub on the back patio but the definition always included shorts, t-shirt and sunglasses.

There is one guy in the picture who managed to wear a hoodie. Guess which one started a towering bonfire one night right off the coast of Iraq. Go on, guess. He is standing right next to the admiral. When I was choosing my team for this op, the CSO said no girls. After reflecting on it for a microsecond, I saw his point.

TOURISM

Once again I filled my morning with the dulcet sounds of NPR and listened to a woman describe the Red Army soldiers captured by Ukrainian forces as "tourists." She said that Vladimir claims that his tourists simply got lost and ended up 30 miles into the Ukraine on the wrong side of the border. Given the quality of our people at the Department of State I was kind of looking forward to Ambassador Pouncetrifle coming forward to offer oleaginous descriptions of how such a tragic affair came to pass and urge the Ukrainian authorities to do the dignified and stately thing and hand the tourists back to the Russians.

I think Keith Laumer and William Lederer had it easy back in the days when they wrote Retief of the CDT and The Ugly American. There was no shortage of material and we know now that the Department of State has always been the last refuge of the ignorant polished turds of the elite ruling class. ....not you of course ambassador cousin Tim.

I found a few pictures of Russian tourists that I like.

Russian Panzer Tourists on the Road

Russian Panzer Tourists in First Class

Russian Tourists Third Class

What can one say about NPR? They offer such a rich breakfast for the mind.

INSHALLAH YOU ARRIVE WHERE YOU BELONG

This sucks.

What kind of idiot would fly on Malaysia Airlines today?  Not me.

MORE ANGRY CARTOGRAPHY

If there wasn't more than a grain of truth to these, they wouldn't be so amusing.

THE FALL OF THE WHITE STAR SHIP TITANIC

Lost at Sea this night in 1912