We’ve been weathered out for a few days due to high winds and rain. When bad weather comes, the relatively fragile Predator gets tucked away into hangars and I used the down time to snap a few pictures. This photo actually came out kinda crappy… a lot of digital noise in the image due to a small sensor on the camera and bad lighting in the hangar. I thought the image itself was interesting, but it was shameful from a technical perspective. So how do you go about fixing that? You blow the image out with contrast, run a sepia filter on it and call it “grungy.” Yeah, it’s something of a cop out, but hey, when you run up against limitations on your equipment, you do what you have to.
Lewis Black Swears… A LOT
Aside
Lewis Black (Wikipedia’s article), famed comedian, swears a lot. YouTube user DevlJoe has combined every swear from Mr. Black’s first four albums into a single audio track. If you need your day turned around, this is just the thing.
Birthday Sunset
I need a damn massage
Aside
Holy hell could I use a massage. When I get back to Vegas, I’m getting a big woman with strong hands to spend at least an hour hammering on just my back and shoulders. Minimum. Maybe twice.
A Bit About People Skills
Part of being in a Predator LRE unit is giving unit tours to people on your base. People want to get a closer look at the “little airplane that could” that is changing the face of aviation. We have a pretty open policy… we are happy to provide photo ops and personal tours any time of the day no matter the size of the group and I am especially happy to do so.
It’s doing exactly this sort of thing that illustrates just how much I have changed in the past years. In my younger years I was not good with people at all. I was much more capable with book learning than I was in the social realm. Perhaps that was derived from the fact that I wasn’t popular much. Who knows? But as I’ve grown older and much more awesome, my people skills have become one of my strongest aspects. In fact, I can now talk to pretty much anyone about anything. It’s great! I’ve become much more tolerant of people, their individual ignorances and, instead of attacking said ignorance, I instead try each day to make someone’s day a little better. That could be something as simple as expressing genuine gratitude to someone who performs a service for you or simply complimenting someone’s knowledge and skill. Point being, I really enjoy working airshows and giving these tours. Each one gives me an opportunity to interact with strangers, talk about something I enjoy and actually teach a few things. That’s very satisfying to me.
Which brings me to this photo. I was talking to these comm folks about the Predator’s capabilities when one of my audience snapped it. They were gracious enough to email it to me the next day and now I present it to you. The quality sucks as is the case with most point-and-shoots and my uniform is out of regs (sleeves pushed up, morale patch on the left sleeve, zippers not fully zipped), but I’m deployed. I don’t care. I did ditch the ‘stache, though… begrudgingly. The Air Force really doesn’t like those things for some reason.
Dead Bug!
The Air Force, being largely a PC force these days, has few traditions that have survived. One such tradition was the officer’s club. In its heyday (long before I joined) it was hailed as a pilot’s own bar… his place to let shit rip and not care. Glasses were smashed, dancers were ordered, shots were hammered back. Sadly, as the military pushed on into the ’90s and the millennium following, these sorts of shenanigans, despite their great ability to build camaraderie and loyalty, were crushed as being “unprofessional.” The officer’s club was one of the first. Gayed up beyond all belief, most bases have now consolidated to what is called a combined club, one both officers and enlisted are welcome to. Needless to say, this is gay and club attendance has suffered accordingly.
Well, within the O’Clubs of old, you would typically find a healthy collection of fighter pilots and their myriad of traditions. One such tradition was a game called Dead Bug. The rule were simple. When someone calls out “dead bug!” everyone was to fall off their bar stool backwards. The last man to hit the ground buys the next round. A lot of gamesmanship is involved, typically centered around distracting the next victim so that they’re late to react. (A lot of pilot traditions require a lot of attention to detail and multi-tasking… both hallmarks of good pilots.) And now, with this picture from one of the hangars within my compound, I now understand how the game got its name.
The First and Last in Battling Sandstorms
The keffiyeh/ghutra/shemagh is simply a very large bandana. Made of cotton or flax, it is worn by the Arab peoples of the Middle East and is probably the ultimate in versatile desert clothing. Wear it draped over your head to provide shade for your neck and ears, wear it around your neck as a scarf to protect against cold winter nights, or wear it wrapped around your face as shown here to protect yourself from wind-blown sand (and/or scare patrons on a Southwest Airlines flight). It’s more comfortable than the tactical “stretchy sock thing” from my previous battles with the sandstorms. I actually only bought that thing because my keffiyehs hadn’t arrived in the mail yet. I ordered three… black on olive, black on white and red on white you see here. Read more about this ancient desert accessory on Wikipedia.
As for the photo, I was definitely going for a stereotypical “terrorist” look. I think the combination of plain background, sunglasses and artificial contrast evokes the image of an Arab extremist. What say you?
So Improbable as to Inspire Disbelief
I recently watched a video on YouTube called Why Didn’t Anyone Tell Me? It describes the moment when you realize that the universe is completely linked, that everything, you and I included, are a part of that universe. We’re not just living in the universe. We are the universe. The video’s creator postulated that religions exist because reality is too incredible. As per the definition… Incredible: too implausible to be credible; beyond belief.
Of course, it’s all real and that is one of the hardest things for our limited mind to grasp. We spend our entire lives experiencing just one scale, the human scale, and our brains have a hard time comprehending anything considerably bigger or smaller. Can you really conceive what 1.6 trillion looks like? I doubt it. We just don’t have the capacity to understand numbers that big concretely. We know it’s a huge number, but that’s about it. ($1.6T is the annual national deficit of America, by the way. This is why politicians accept a deficit of that size and why we let them get away with it… no one can put that amount of money into perspective properly… but I’ve digressed.)
This picture was inspired by that video and my own moments of unbridled awe. I imagined myself suspended weightless in the middle of the universe and able to see everything within it. Stars, galaxies, black holes, atoms, single-cell creatures, lifeforms entirely different than those on Earth… everything. This is the face I imagine I would have. Many times I’ve had a mental glimpse of the immensity of the universe and how awesome (again, as per the definition) it all really is. The difference in scales from the smallest things to the largest is almost inconceivable… so much so that I am struck with an overwhelming sense of wonder and happiness, something some would call a spiritual moment… I’d call it a mindgasm.
Half Mile Visibility
In my previous post I showed you my “battle rattle” for fighting sandstorms. Well, here are some pictures from that two-day-long storm. The first shows how much the sand attenuates the sunlight. This image was taken at about 4:45 pm. The sky should be blue and the sun should be damn near impossible to look at. But not today! It’s a perfect circle… or at least appears so to our feeble eyes. (The sun isn’t perfectly round.) You can also see that the sun in this image is perfectly white.
This second image was taken while driving. Those towers just barely visible in the distance are part of a cement plant that does a lot of work locally. It would typically be visible at well over two miles, but, again, not today. The dust is interfering with the visible spectrum bouncing it off in all sorts of directions and away from the camera. This same phenomenon occurs to satellite communications during storms and severe weather. Those signals, though in a different part of the electromagnetic spectrum, are attenuated in exactly the same way you see here. Yeah, basic principle, but fun nevertheless. I like knowing how things work.
Battling Sandstorms
The last few days here have seen some pretty solid sandstorms. It hasn’t really been windy or anything like that… just an immense amount of sand from Syria and Saudi Arabia suspended in the air. Visibility has been in the area of one hundred meters and the stuff is getting everywhere. I could literally smell the dirt as I was trying to fall asleep last night. I can only imagine the amount of dirt I’ve ingested in the last few days. Needless to say we haven’t been doing much in the way of work and I’ve spent all of this time indoors avoiding the caustic environment outside. Luckily I have enough gear to keep all of this sand at bay in the moments that I do have to venture outside. The combination of a tactical headwrap, sunglasses and a North Face beanie does a damn fine job of it in addition to making me look like something of a badass. Although somehow you look a little less like a killer when your arm is reflected in your sunglasses as you take the picture yourself.