I know you’re not from around here and maybe you haven’t been exposed to some of the finer point of meeting etiquette. All, I can say is that if you want your comments to be taken seriously by anyone, you might start by not sitting there all day with your baseball hat on working on your act to be named Surly Employee of the Year. Oh, and lose the giant belt buckle. It’s not 1977. Until you get those little details squared away, you’ll just be the angry guy sitting in the back of the room.
Monthly Archives: November 2007
Fall back…
I just want to go on the record and say that this “fall back” to standard time thing sucks. We’re a post-industrial society. There is no good reason that I can think of that we need to rejigger our clocks twice a year. I’m up and rolling before the sun in both “saving” and “standard” modes, so my proposal is that the country gets together and just picks one. I don’t care which one it is, personally. Plus, there was some asshat on the radio on Friday saying that we should be falling back an hours and 20 minutes to account for the slowing rotational speed of the earth. What? Give me a goddamned break already.
Fortunately, the issue of how we account for time is in the capable hands of the brains trust we call the United States Congress. May God have mercy on our souls.
Farewell to an American Hero
It’s no secret that the generation that came of age in the Depression and were tempered on the anvil of World War II are dying. The youngest of them are now in their 80s. Within the next 20 years, the war will have passed out of living memory to become the sole province of the historians.
I was once privileged to meet an American hero is the truest sense of the word. Slight in build and clearly feeling his years, I was able to spend a few moments simply talking with Paul Tibbets, who piloted Enola Gay on August 6, 1945. Even when we talked, some 60 years after the event, Mr. Tibbets made no apologies for leading his mission that day. His body was bent with age, but looking in his eyes, you simply knew this was a man who was at peace with himself and who was assured of the rightness of his actions and his cause.
Paul Tibbets was a man who answered his nation’s call, did is duty, and returned home to help remake a global system shattered by war. The Director of the National Aviation Hall of Fame best eulogizes him in saying, “There are few in the history of mankind that have been called to figuratively carry as much weight on their shoulders as Paul Tibbets… Even fewer were able to do so with a sense of honor and duty to their countrymen as did Paul.”
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