That's a new one

I've heard a lot of excuses from airlines about delays, but this was a first. Coming back from DC, we boarded the plane, then sat for 15 minutes longer than usual -- I was just thinking, "Wonder what's holding things up." when the pilot came on and said, "Sorry folks, we're experiencing a bit of delay ... we're shipping some military dogs to the Philippines, and the ground crew is having a bit of, um, uncertainty about how many of them there are."

After a few more minutes, we got underway. Sure enough, after we landed in Detroit, there was audible barking from the baggage hatch.

Poor guys -- I've flown from Detroit to Manila, and it wasn't fun, even in the cabin, let alone in a crate in the baggage. Come to think of it, maybe it would have been better in baggage ...

Local boy makes good

With the successful defense of his thesis, a fellow named Pat becomes Dr. Patrick Russell McConnell. Feel free to send congratulations to p.r.mcconnell@gmail.com.

More books from the fringes

Books that haven't made it even into the Daedalus Catalog yet. Thanks to Greasy Jimmy for the link.

New cure for what ails ya

Apparently, a sports car is a cure or prevention for disabling ailments. In the course of doing our weekly farmer's market visit, we used a handicapped parking spot. I have qualified for a handicapped hang tag for some time now, although I don't actually use it all that often -- mostly just to avoid gimping miles in from the visitor lots at the hospital, when I do my MRI festivals.

But this week, the HC spot was all that was available, so we made use of it. First, as we were getting out of the car, one of Ann Arbor's miserable meter persons (a thankless job if there ever was one) accosted us "to let us know that's a handicapped sp ... oh, never mind" as he actually bothered to look for a tag.

Then, as we dropped off one set of purchases and were heading off for another batch, a huge woman in a huge SUV asked essentially the same question, in a distinctly hostile tone.

So for the future guidance of the ill-bred, whose numbers around here appear to be increasing, yes, you can drive a 3-year old 350Z and still have cancer. No, nothing about owning a reasonably performant vehicle is proof against a permanent limp and a shaky knee.

More cookery

In my on-going quest to annoy everyone with images of food they didn't get to eat, here are a couple of shots of recent Domaine Ste. Melange de Berger kitchen output. Starters: a small plate with smoked trout (Durham's Tracklements), Arzua Ulloa cheese, roma tomatoes, toasted cumin mayo, and an olive or two. The other shot is braised rabbit with chasseur sauce and a corn n' peppers saute. And of course, our best customer.

Breaking scientific news

An important new research study, that you truly, truly do need to read. Oh, nothing implied, I assure you, just thought you'd be interested. Really.

Fetchez La Vache

Retrofitting a GAU 17

Just a note on the Marines' long-suffering V 22 Osprey tilt-rotor aircraft. If you've followed this at all, you're probably aware that the Osprey -- intended to be faster than a helicopter, but do most of the same things helicopters do -- has had a long history of controversy, mostly due to a series of crashes during development and testing. Tilt-rotor is an inherently difficult technology, and experts have argued the pros and cons to the point of exhaustion. I don't know enough, myself, to have an opinion. The aircraft has finally made it into operation and is being used in Iraq. Anyway, one of the sub-issues that was raised almost at once is that it's unarmed. Designed to be a transport aircraft, it was not given any built-in weaponry, nor hard points for attaching modular munitions. It has a rear ramp for loading and unloading, and there have been some re-fittings with a machine gun that the crew can fire out the open ramp, but the arc of fire is obviously limited to a portion of the aircraft's rear aspect.

Now, there's a design for a ventrally-mounted, sensor-controlled gatling gun, operable by the crew chief (not the pilot). The gun is the GAU 17, a very standard 7.62mm (rifle calibre) rotary weapon, used on a wide range of aircraft, ships, and vehicles, both in our military and to a lesser extent in that of the UK. There's some demo video out there, if you're interested at all. Story at Defense Tech.

My only reason for posting this or caring, for that matter, is just that I find these retrofits interesting -- we learned in Vietnam that anything that flies low and slow and has the mission of landing in potentially hostile areas ("hot LZs") really ought to have forward firing weapons. Don't know how that escaped the attention of the designers.

Stories retold: Benihana Atlanta Culture Clash

(I'm going to set down, periodically, a few of the stories I seem to keep telling, in the hope that maybe I'll stop boring people with them in person. This is an old one, from many years back. Ed.)

Back in the eighties, I went to a convention in Atlanta, as the lone "headquarters" guy, teamed up with two young saleswomen from a small company we'd just acquired. Like many acquirees, they were nervous about the future, nervous about looking professional in front of the new owners, and so on. Although they were both from the south, neither knew anything about Atlanta, nor did I.

After the show floor closed, we headed out to find dinner, not knowing that downtown Atlanta rolled itself up at 5:00 -- instead of a cosmopolitan set of dining options, the area around the convention center seemed to be mostly emptied-out office buildings. We did, though, find a Benihana nearby and open.

I assume you know what a Benihana restaurant is: a corporate-teppanyaki-style Japanese place, where you sit around large tables, usually with other parties, and a cook prepares a limited set of dishes for you on a grill that's essentially part of the table. It's a kind of dining theatre that's old hat today, but was a more or less new thing in the US, back then.

We got seated, along with a group of self-conscious, dressed-up high school kids, and were talking about the day's work, when -- the drunkest woman in the world was seated with us. I don't know why they even let her in the door, but her state of complete intoxication was immediately apparent to us, her new dining companions. She sat down, looked dazedly around, and said, "Hell, I'm in a damn Chinese restaurant." I'm not going to try to do the dialect, here -- you'll just have to keep in mind that everything this person said was in a deep, deep southern accent, complete with multiple syllables where standard English would use but one; "damn" thus became "day-um."

Next, and before anyone could really absorb the magnitude of our friend's incapacitation, our chef arrived, and unfortunately for him, he was not of the expected ethnicity. In fact, he was South Asian, not Japanese. The drunk stared at him for a minute and then pointed out, "You ain't no Chinaman -- you're an A-rab." Everyone immediately looked away.

There followed a confused few minutes during which the chef tried to explain the menu (which was just a matter of choosing the kind of protein she wanted grilled.) Somehow, he managed to get her to agree that chicken would be OK, although he could probably have gotten her to order mongoose, if he'd wanted to. But as he began to do his knife skills thing, she began to have second thoughts. She turned to me (it was my honor to have the seat next to her) and asked, "They ain't going to kill that chicken right here in front of us, are they?"

"Yes," I said, "and be glad you didn't order beef."

At this point, my memory of the precise sequence of events becomes a bit hazy. I remember the saleswoman seated on my other side elbowing me, not wanting to see me make things any worse than they were (both of my companions were mortified, it later turned out, that their new Yankee owners were seeing such a sordid side of the New South.) And I remember the restaurant staff removing the drunk -- why it took them that long to realize what they had on their hands is baffling. But it remains one of my fondest memories of that innocent time, when things were still a blend of yuppified and stupefied.

How not to write history

Make a note: next time you're asked to write the text to accompany a bunch of archival photos of pre-Dreadnought warships, do a bit of proofreading. In The Ironclads, by Peter Hore, the second sentence begins, "Then, just as the British Navy delivered the victory of sea power in 1815 at the battle of Trafalgar ..."

Hore is ex-Royal Navy, associate editor of Warships International Fleet Review (whose website could do with a bit of proofing, itself), and "eight books." His writing, what of it I've read, is full of strange assertions and bizarre opinions, (viz, streamlining bulges on today's merchant ships and chin-mounted sonar on ASW craft are somehow descendants in naval architecture of late nineteenth century rams), but I have to presume that even he knows when Trafalgar was really fought.