I'll bet you he knows how electrical sockets taste.

So I'm watching NatGeo teewee this morning, because it's that, infomercials, Nazi ghosts, Fox & Friends, or Jennifer Granholme's new show. I tried the latter, but when that woman tries to be bubbly and personable for the camera, she falls headfirst into the uncanny valley. I think it's the weird bobbing motion, like she's sitting on one of those little grocery-store coin-operated horsies just beneath the camera's view.

Anyhow, like I said, I'm watching NatGeo. A couple of insane Australians are swimming around catching sea snakes bare-handed. Then one of 'em grabs a stonefish, also bare-handed. You know, a stonefish: the fish with the venom that causes a wound so painful that sting victims beg to have the limb amputated, allegedly even after being morphined to the gills? It gets worse from there:



0:15 Is he standing in the tank with the fish, barefoot?

0:35 For Neptune's sake, man, those are your fingers!

1:05 Wait, and now they're not even wearing gloves in the lab while they poke at the thing! Did you not just hear the narrator and all that "most venomous fish in the world" stuff?

1:35 Oh. My. Gawd. They are squirting streams of neurotoxins all over the room like silly string at a birthday party, and there's not so much a paper mask in sight.

The next segment had them standing waist-deep in water, playing with a box jellyfish while explaining that it was okay to hold the bulbous bell bare-handed, since all the stingers (which can kill you dead in minutes) are in the tentacles.

No wonder they're afraid to let people have guns in Australia! Judging from accumulated video evidence, Aussies have absolutely no sense of self preservation whatsoever.

Taxi ride.

So I was flying in my dream.

Not the cool kind of flying in your dreams, but the kind of flying that involves the TSA and screaming babies.

Photo of Lockheed P2 Neptune water bomber taxiing by, taken from inside the gate area at RDM, just for Ancient Woodsman.

The airport terminal in my dream was modeled loosely after RDM, right down to boarding the plane via airstairs. The thing about the airport itself was the terminal appeared to share a large runway complex with a bigger and newer facility, and so there was an interminable amount of taxiing to get to the departure end of the runway.

Like, a lot of taxiing. And all this taxiing was down narrow little tree-lined taxiways paved with cracked and weed-shot asphalt that seemed way too narrow for the undercarriage and which looked suspiciously like the Monon Trail.

The seating was six abreast, and I was in 1E, which meant I didn't have that great a view of the trees flashing past the wingtip but, since they hadn't closed the cockpit door, I could see rather more trees off the port bow through the windscreen than was comfortable. I pulled the emergency info card from the bulkhead pouch, and amused myself by reading the abandon ship instructions for the creaky old 707, which had a very That '70s Show rust-and-tan (or "counterculture and draft card") color scheme and was operated by Colvin Air according to the card.

Despite the fact that we were racing to get out before we got closed in by an ice storm, there were innumerable interminable holds where we just sat there in the woods. During one of these, I absentmindedly fumbled a cigarette out of my purse before remembering duh, airplane. The young woman in the aisle seat, who was on her way to visit Farmgirl and who could have been her doppleganger, pulled out a Marlboro red and started smoking it more or less right at the flight attendant. I woke up before that little scene reached its denouement.

ETA: I remember where the color scheme came from! When I was working at SmithKline we had a 310 Quebec that was tan with dark brown striping that was a hangar queen. I used to amuse myself late at night by going out in the hangar and chasing down a tennis ball I'd bounce off the wall. I saw a lot of that old Cessna.

Chicagoese-to-English Dictionary:

"No taint of scandal" is Chicagoese for "The wiretap was busted so he hasn't been caught yet."

Also, his race is listed as a qualification, which kind of appalled me, since I thought I was supposed to be the evil racist and they were supposed to be all "...but by the content of their character."

Look, race and sex and religion don't matter to me. I don't care if it's a green-skinned devil-worshiping hermaphrodite from the moons of Neptune; are they not a crook and can they do the job?

Eureka!

I figured out the ending for my Neptune Spear movie!

When last we left the lovable misfits of SEAL Team 6, freshly whipped into shape by their new leader, call sign "POTUS" (played by Denzel Washington), they had just assaulted Bin Laden's hideout in Pakistan. The Plucky Female SEAL (played by Demi Moore) proves her courage in the firefight, and then... and then...

I was stuck.

But wait! Hollywood has taught me well! You've got to have the plot twist, right?

The real villains will turn out to be some old corrupt white guys at [the Pentagon/Langley] who [pine for the good old days of the Cold War/are under the thumb of some generic evil US petrocorp] who just used Al Qaeda as cats-paws.

When POTUS and his team discover the evidence in UBL's hideout (discovered by the Troubled Rebel SEAL, played by Charlie Sheen, whose cynicism and acting-out is thus vindicated) they fly back to DC for the final [confrontation with the corrupt senator/assault on the star chamber meeting of the cabal of crooked generals in their secluded mansion on the Potomac]!

Find, Fix, Finish

Having recently read Relentless Strike, a history of Joint Special Operations Command, from before its actual formation up through Operation Neptune Spear, I then picked up Killer Elite, which is more specifically a history of "The Activity", which is JSOC's in-house intelligence outfit.

Consisting of "knob turners", or signals intelligence guys, as well as more conventional human intelligence operatives, this is the organization in JSOC responsible for the "Find" and "Fix" parts before the doorkickers (or a drone strike or JDAM) do the "Finish" part.

It goes into a surprising amount of detail on the methods used to track down everybody from drug barons in Columbia, to war criminals in the former Yugoslavia, to the various Islamic terrorist franchises operating around the world right now.

If the history and methodology behind this stuff is as interesting to you as the action, shoot-'em-up parts, then this book will be worth your time. And the Kindle version is very reasonably priced!

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Idiots.

Is it not possible for a reporter to give a moment's thought before charging off with a narrative?

"He also disclosed that Russia was given a heads-up about the operation, even as top Democrats in Congress were not. “We told them, 'We’re coming in … and they said, ‘Thank you for telling us,’" Trump said. But he added, “They did not know the mission.”

Trump said, however, that he didn’t tell House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) because he worried about leaks spoiling the operation. And before the news conference, there were reports that Trump also hadn’t notified House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), who is a leader of the impeachment inquiry against Trump but would generally be a member of Congress you’d inform about these things.

Trump seems to be indicating that he trusts Russia with this information more than congressional Democrats, which will be a talking point in the days ahead."

That's because the helicopter's weren't flying through Pelosi/Schiff-controlled airspace where they would have been shot down by Democratic party SAMS if proper deconfliction protocols hadn't been followed, you numbskull.

And I don't remember John Boehner or Mike Rogers being anywhere in the famous Neptune Spear Situation Room photograph.

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Attention Neptune Spear cosplayers...

Brownells is going to be putting HK416 parts kits out for sale this weekend, if you really want to flex on the poors.
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Maybe this one will have SEAL sergeants in it, too!

So, allegedly the administration leaked classified info to filmmakers so they could do a movie about Operation Neptune Spear, one which will (purely coincidentally, of course) hit theaters the month before Election Day.

In the wake of the most accurate SEAL movie ever, this Hollywood effort is sure to be a hoot:

The misfits of SEAL Team 6, with the Troubled Rebel played by Charlie Sheen and the Brave Female SEAL played by Demi Moore, are energized by the arrival of a new commander, call sign "POTUS", played by Denzel Washington, who whips them into shape in preparation for leading them all on the mission of their lives.

Terrorists will tremble when they face the wrath of POTUS and SEAL Team 6!

Automotif CCCIV...

Neptune Green was not a standard color on a '55 T-bird. As best I can tell it was only offered on the Fairlane that year, so if this is factory (which it sure looks like up close; it's just tatty enough around the edges to be unrestored) it was a special order item.

Of course, in '55, you could even special order your T-bird in primer so you could paint it yourself.

Canon EOS 5DS & 24-105mm f/4L IS

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Another day at the office...

Apparently the helicopter that went down was carrying some guys from DEVGRU. No word if they were the same guys who pulled off the Abbottabad raid (and we may never know, at least officially.)

If so, it's a reminder of the ops tempo that SOCOM has been dealing with for ten+ years now. The media only notices them once in a blue moon, when something big like taking down Bin Laden happens, as though they'd been sitting around waiting for something to do, twiddling their thumbs since the Battle of Takur Ghar.

UPDATE: Latest RUMINT is that none of the operators on board were the guys from Neptune Spear... (...who are probably busy elsewhere already.)