It has been a LONG TIME since I have posted. I am going to try to do better...

WOW! Penny and I started Taekwondo at Frederick's ATA at the beginning of December. It has been SO MUCH FUN!  Mrs. Frederick is so nice and an awesome instructor! Everyone else has been really nice and supportive too! If you are looking for a fun way to get into shape, I want to recommend trying this out!

So, lets say that you want to get into a new chopper but you have never ridden before.  THIS is the chop for you! 

Rest in Peace to my Aunt Betty and to my Uncle Lew. Our thoughts go out to their respective families...

During lunch at work last week, I ate 3 plates of beans (which I know I shouldn't). When I got home, my wife seemed excited to see me and exclaimed delightedly: "Darling I have a surprise for dinner tonight." She then blindfolded me and led me to my chair at the dinner table. I took a seat and just as she was about to remove my blindfold, the telephone rang. She made me promise not to touch the blindfold until she returned and went to answer the call.

The beans I had consumed were still affecting me and the pressure was becoming unbearable, so while my sweet wife was out of the room I seized the opportunity, shifted my weight to one leg and let one go. It was not only loud, but it smelled like a fertilizer truck running over a skunk in front of a garbage dump! I took my napkin from my lap and fanned the air around me vigorously. Then, shifting to the other leg, I ripped off three more. The stink was worse than cooked cabbage.

Keeping my ears carefully tuned to the conversation in the other room, I went on releasing atomic bombs like this for another few minutes. The pleasure was indescribable! Eventually the telephone farewells signaled the end of my freedom, so I quickly fanned the air a few more times with my napkin, placed it on my lap and folded my hands back on it feeling very relieved and pleased with myself.

My face must have been the picture of innocence, when my wife returned, apologizing for taking so long. She asked me if I had peaked through the blindfold, and I assured her I had not. At this point, she removed the blindfold revealing twelve dinner guests seated around the table. With their hands to their noses and tears in their eyes, they choked out the chorus... "Happy Birthday"...

The blurb below was posted in response to some comments about an article related the recent presidential election, in our local newspaper. I thought it was very good so I am reposting it here.

If you prayed for God to guide the election, and your candidate DIDN’T win, then three possible outcomes enter my mind:

1. There is no God.
2. There is a God and he doesn’t care who won or who you wanted to win.
3. He heard your prayers, and answered them, not with the politician you WANTED, but the ONE YOU NEEDED.

You know... Riding motorcycles can be pretty dangerous, from getting tired and losing focus to being distracted by your surroundings. My cousin shared the image below on FaceBook so I "borrowed" it so I can share it here. Thank you Kevin for your concern! This will solve both the problems I believe...

And don't be shy about it!!!

YUM!

You gotta love your dog...

Dogs, they are happy to see you when you come home from work. They will willingly give you kisses and love when you need kisses and love, BUT, boy they can have a naughty streak!

When we lived in Alabama we had a doberman pinscher named "Makeba". She had a brother, a black cat named "Bart", who thought he was a doberman pinscher. They did most everything together when they were both in the house. Makeba had a particular love for Bart's special treats; tootsie rolls in his special box. Well I had caught her indulging several times and had chastized her letting her know how bad that was and tried different things to prevent her from getting to the nuggets but had little success.

One night after we had gone to bed, I heard a familiar "crunch crunch crunch" coming from the direction of the "treat" box. I yelled out, "Makeba, get out of the litter box!" and the house got quiet. As I drifted toward sleep, I had a sudden feeling of being watched and opened my eyes. There in the darkness sat Makeba. When she saw my eyes open, she gave me a kiss right in the mouth. Yeah, you guessed it. A mouth full of gritty kitty litter (to say the least). I probably brushed my teeth ten more times that night...

Yeah. You gotta love your dog(s)!

Thanks to Penny for the pics!

First picture from NASA of water on Mars – an amazing and outstanding achievement!

Click on the thumbnail above to view the full sized image of this amazing discovery!

Thanks Mom!

I didn't think twice about this tiny fellow on my baby boxwood until I got this letter:

GARDEN SNAKES CAN BE DANGEROUS...

Snakes also known as Garter Snakes (Thamnophissirtalis) can be dangerous. Yes, grass snakes, not rattlesnakes.

Here's why.

A couple in Sweetwater , Texas , had a lot of potted plants. During a recent cold spell, the wife was bringing a lot of them indoors to protect them from a possible freeze.

It turned out that a little green garden grass snake was hidden in one of the plants. When it had warmed up, it slithered out and the wife saw it go under the sofa.

She let out a very loud scream.

The husband (who was taking a shower) ran out into the living room naked to see what the problem was. She told him there was a snake under the sofa.

He got down on the floor on his hands and knees to look for it. About that time the family dog came and cold-nosed him on the behind. He thought the snake had bitten him, so he screamed and fell over on the floor.

His wife thought he had had a heart attack, so she covered him up, told him to lie still and called an ambulance.

The attendants rushed in, would not listen to his protests, loaded him on the stretcher, and started carrying him out.

About that time, the snake came out from under the sofa and the Emergency Medical Technician saw it and dropped his end of the stretcher. That's when the man broke his leg and why he is still in the hospital.

The wife still had the problem of the snake in the house, so she called on a neighbor who volunteered to capture the snake. He armed himself with a rolled-up newspaper and began poking under the couch.. Soon he decided it was gone and told the woman, who sat down on the sofa in relief.

But while relaxing, her hand dangled in between the cushions, where she felt the snake wriggling around. She screamed and fainted, the snake rushed back under the sofa.

The neighbor man, seeing her lying there passed out, tried to use CPR to revive her.

The neighbor's wife, who had just returned from shopping at the grocery store, saw her husband's mouth on the woman's mouth and slammed her husband in the back of the head with a bag of canned goods, knocking him out and cutting his scalp to a point where it needed stitches.

The noise woke the woman from her dead faint and she saw her neighbor lying on the floor with his wife bending over him, so she assumed that the snake had bitten him. She went to the kitchen and got a small bottle of whiskey, and began pouring it down the man's throat.

By now, the police had arrived.

Breathe here...

They saw the unconscious man, smelled the whiskey, and assumed that a drunken fight had occurred. They were about to arrest them all, when the women tried to explain how it all happened over a little garden snake!

The police called an ambulance, which took away the neighbor and his sobbing wife.

Now, the little snake again crawled out from under the sofa and one of the policemen drew his gun and fired at it. He missed the snake and hit the leg of the end table. The table fell over, the lamp on it shattered and, as the bulb broke, it started a fire in the drapes.

The other policeman tried to beat out the flames, and fell through the window into the yard on top of the family dog who, startled, jumped out and raced into the street, where an oncoming car swerved to avoid it and smashed into the parked police car.

Meanwhile, neighbors saw the burning drapes and called in the fire department. The firemen had started raising the fire ladder when they were halfway down the street. The rising ladder tore out the overhead wires, put out the power, and disconnected the telephones in a ten-square city block area (but they did get the house fire out).

Time passed! Both men were discharged from the hospital, the house was repaired, the dog came home, the police acquired a new car and all was right with their world.

A while later they were watching TV and the weatherman announced a cold snap for that night. The wife asked her husband if he thought they should bring in their plants for the night.

And that's when he shot her.

Thanks Penny!

Everyone meet "Richard"...

He's a weiner dog!!! !!! !!!

Thanks Matt!

Early in my Air Force career I was stationed at Keesler AFB in Biloxi Mississippi for my geek technical training. There were also some airplanes there as well; the C-130 cargo aircraft and the A-10 Thunderbolt. While I am sure the C-130 is an outstanding airplane in its own right I learned to loath them because the pilots would sit out at the end of the runway (a couple hundred yards from our dormitories) and run their engines up at all hours of the night. The A-10 pilots on the other hand would fly around the dormitories during the day time, making all these amazing turns and acrobatic maneuvers. That is when I decided that the A-10 Thunderbolt was one BAD ASS BIRD! I have gone to many an airshow and stuck my fat thumb into one of it's gun barrels in awe. It is amongst my all-time favorites. My buddy Clay sent me the email with this information below and reminded me that there is no way around it... It is just a BAD ASS BIRD!

THE A-10 GUN

THE GUN (not just any gun, but "the gun")

This is Unbelievable, I sure agree with the final statement

First there was this gun...

It was developed by General Electric, the "We bring good things to life" people. It's one of the modern-day Gatling guns. It shoots very big bullets. It shoots them very quickly.

Someone said, "Let's put it in an airplane."

Someone else said, "Better still, let's build an airplane around it."

So they did. And "they" were the Fairchild-Republic airplane people.

And they had done such a good job with an airplane they developed back in WWII....

...called the P-47 Thunderbolt, they decided to call it the A-10 Thunderbolt.

They made it so it was very good at flying low and slow and shooting things with that fabulous gun.

But since it did fly low and slow, they made it bulletproof, or almost so. A lot of bad guys have found you can shoot an A10 with anything from a pistol to a 23mm Soviet cannon and it just keeps on flying and shooting.

When they got through, it looked like this....

It's not sleek and sexy like an F18 or the stealthy Raptors and such, but I think it's such a great airplane because it does what it does better than any other plane in the world.

It kills tanks.

Not only tanks, as Sadam Hussein's boys found out to their horror, but armored personnel carriers, radar stations, locomotives, bunkers, fuel depots... Just about anything the bad guys thought was bulletproof turned out to be easy pickings for this beast.

See those engines. One of them alone will fly this puppy. The pilot sits in a very thick titanium alloy "bathtub."

That's typical of the design.

They were smart enough to make every part the same whether mounted on the left side or right side of the plane, like landing gear, for instance.

Because the engines are mounted so high (away from ground debris) and the landing gear uses such low pressure tires, it can operate from a damaged airport, interstate highway, plowed field, or dirt road.

Everything is redundant. They have two of almost everything. Sometimes they have three of something. Like flight controls. There's triple redundancy of those, and even if there is a total failure of the double hydraulic system, there is a set of manual flying controls.

Capt. Kim Campbell sustained this damage over Bagdad and flew for another hour before returning to base. But, back to that gun....

It's so hard to grasp just how powerful it is.

This is the closest I could find to showing you just what this cartridge is all about. What the guy is holding is NOT the 30mm round, but a "little" .50 Browing machinegun round and the 20mm cannon round which has been around for a long time.

The 30mm is MUCH bigger.

Down at the bottom are the .50 BMG and 20x102 Vulcan the fellow was holding. At the bottom right is the bad boy we're discussing.

Let's get some perspective here: The .223 Rem (M16 rifle round) is fast. It shoots a 55 or so grain bullet at about 3300 feet/sec, give or take. It's the fastest of all those rounds shown (except one). When you move up to the .30 caliber rounds, the bullets jump up in weight to 160-200 grains. Speeds run from about 2600 to 3000 fps or so.

The .338 Lapua is the king of the sniper rifles these days and shoots a 350 grain bullet at 2800 fps or so. They kill bad guys at over a mile with that one.

The .50 BMG is really big. Mike Beasley has one on his desk. Everyone who picks it up thinks it's some sort of fake, unless they know big ammo. It's really huge with a bullet that weighs 750 grains and goes as fast the Lapua.

I don't have data on the Vulcan, but hang on to your hat.

The bullet for the 30x173 Avenger has an aluminum jacket around a spent uranium core and weighs 6560 grains (yes, over 100 times as heavy as the M16 bullet, and flies through the air at 3500 fps (which is faster than the M16 as well).

The gun shoots at a rate of 4200 rounds per minute. Yes, four thousand. Pilots typically shoot either one- or two-second burst which set loose 70 to 150 rounds. The system is optimized for shooting at 4,000 feet.

OK, the best for last.

You've got a pretty good idea of how big that cartridge is, but I'll bet you're like me and you don't fully appreciate how big the GA GAU-8 Avenger really is.

Take a look....

Each of those seven barrels is 112" long. That's almost ten feet. The entire gun is 19-1/2 feet long.

Think how impressive it would look set up in your living room.

Oh, by the way, it doesn't eject the empty shells but runs them back into the storage drum. There's just so dang many flying out, they felt it might damage the aircraft.

Oh yeah, I forgot, they can hang those bomb and rocket things on 'em too, just in case. After all, it is an "airplane"!

Like I said, this is a beautiful design.

I'm glad it's ours!!

Thanks Clay!

This is hillarious!

Thanks Matt!