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.

End of summer panic

As the summer dwindles, I get cravings for summer flavors -- knowing that soon we'll be reduced to stews, steaks, and so on, and the vegetables in particular will go to hell in a handcart. Here's last night's act of desperation, Jody Adams' grilled fish with a basil-potato puree' and grilled heirloom tomatoes. No rouget to be had, nor any striped bass, either, so we went with farmed rainbow trout instead. The brown things are nicoise olives scattered around.

More on autism

Another study on autism vs vaccinations. As we all know, you can't really prove something is impossible or something doesn't exist, and the other side of this debate (notice how polite I'm being? I didn't say something snarky like "the people who desperately want someone with deep pockets to sue," or "the people who think science consists of deciding what you want to be true and then going to look for evidence that it is.") will certainly make that point in response. But the work described in this article adds some more weight on the rational end of the teeter-totter.

plus ça change ...

An old colleague from our days in the tape backup biz was in town, and without giving it much thought (although it was Friday,) we decided to go to the fabled Old Town (a.k.a, the Odd Town Tavern, famed in story and song, but mostly in the Wood-Charles News Service.) Lo and behold, we were seated at the same old long table in the back, under the same old nude painting. The same old Liz (not that old - certainly not as old as the nude painting, anyway) was on hand, as she used to be. We ate peanuts, drank beer, and told the same old stories of life in the world of employment.

Afterward, we went to the Wine Bar at the Earle, a block away, and were waited on by Felipe, another Old Town alumnus. Except for the fact that they fled the decaying urban grittiness of downtown Ann Arbor for the sanitary tracts of Zeeb Road and I-94, we could have made a real night of it and ended up at Metzger's. The only real change of any import is that you can now see where we were on Google streets, since they've thoughtfully photo'ed the whole bleedin' town.

Labor day morning

Momentarily excited

By the headlines: "McCain chooses Palin as running mate!"

But then I thought, "Wait, he's not a US citizen."

A mind is a terrible thing ...

I was annoying an old acquaintance with this, recently, and I thought I'd annoy you, too. The concept is: song parodies based on lurking in a barn. One of them is a contribution, the rest are my fault.

John Fogarty
Left a good job in the city,
lurkin' in a barn every night an' day

Bob Dylan
I ain't gonna lurk in Maggie's barn no more

David Allen Coe
Take this barn and shove it, I ain't lurkin' here no more

Traditional
I've been lurkin' in the barnyard ...

Dolly Parton
Lurking nine to five
Hay up to the ceiling
Crouching in a barn
With a rustic feeling

Loverboy
Everybody's lurking on the weekend,
Everybody's lurking in a barn ...

John Lennon
As soon as you're born they stick you in a manger,
And everything they do just makes you feel stranger,
Till you just cultivate an aura of danger,
A lurking class hero is something to be

Herman's Hermits
Babbadeebiddy DOOO.
Well I was lurking in the barn
(Late last night!)
When all the window shades were drawn
(Way down tight!)
I heard the raucous serenade
Of idiots on parade
(Idiots idiots idiots idiots on parade!)

Bachman-Turner Overdrive
I've been taking care of business, what's the harm?
Taking care of business and lurking in a barn