Monthly Archives: April 2009

The Pinky Dinky man

Posted on April 30, 2009 | Comments Off on The Pinky Dinky man

This snap of an ice-cream-and-soda-pop merchant selling to Israeli troops-in-training reminded me of the Pinky Dinky trucks at Fort Benning in 1968. The sergeants would tell us if we finished the next whatever-it-was in fine form, we’d have a Pinky Dinky break. Otherwise…

We usually got one, as they wanted a break, too. I tried Googling the P-D phenom for more, but no luck. OCS classmate Tom Ringwald recalls the Pinky Dinky man as being one of several such available then. "I know that they still operate down there," he said. I figured they did. Why stop a good thing?

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Posted in Infantry OCS

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Polar ice refuses to melt

Posted on April 30, 2009 | Comments Off on Polar ice refuses to melt

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The next time you hear Democrats assert that they must stop the use of coal to make electricity because the North Pole is melting from warming sea water, remember this planned assessment of a month ago, and its finding this week. The north polar ice is a hundred percent thicker than expected. Instead of the two meters anticipated, it is four meters thick. Twelve feet, y’all. What warming sea water?

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Posted in Weather/Climate

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Take two aspirin and, uh, call, uh, who?

Posted on April 30, 2009 | Comments Off on Take two aspirin and, uh, call, uh, who?

Nevermind the inevitable higher taxes and rationing that national health care will bring. First, try to find enough doctors, particularly general practitioners. There aren’t enough of them now. Can you imagine the government quickly increasing the supply, such that you would really want to be treated by one?

UPDATE: Let the rationing begin. Barry’s chosen just the guy to do it. Course it won’t affect Barry and his cronies. Just you and me. Health care rationing, like paying taxes, is for the little people. The elite buy $540 shoes while lecturing the rest of us on how to live, eh Michelle? Great portrait, by the way.

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Posted in Obamalot

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The Aporkalypse

Posted on April 30, 2009 | Comments Off on The Aporkalypse

Cytokine Storm. Sounds like the title of a Larry Niven space opera. It’s the Internet’s latest scare meme that’s supposed to explain why those twenty-something Mexicans died of the, uh, swine flu. Yawn. Call me when the CDC-confirmed death toll reaches a thousand in the first world. Then I’ll, maybe, get alarmed.

UPDATE:  Yes, this is where I got the title. Credit where it’s due, after all. Even if it’s late.

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Posted in South of the Border

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Adios, Pontiac, et al

Posted on April 29, 2009 | Comments Off on Adios, Pontiac, et al

My memories of Pontiacs date back to the chrome behemoths of my childhood in the late ’50s, the ones with a choke on the dashboard, not the look-all-the-same, jelly-bean cars of the past few decades. Never bought one. Drove one once or twice as a rental.

Won’t miss ’em, or the Hummers mentioned here. Or the Saturns, which I considered buying but never did. Going to be amusing watching the bureaucrats and the autoworkers’ union leaders drive GM into the dumper. For philisophical or practical reasons their cars will be pariahs now. Course, wouldn’t be so amusing if I owned a Suburban, or a Tahoe, or one of their pickups. Fortunately, I have a Honda.

Via Instapundit.

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Posted in Obamalot

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USS New Orleans

Posted on April 29, 2009 | Comments Off on USS New Orleans

neworleansdamage2.jpg

In dry dock at Manama, Bahrain. Shows repair work on the sixteen by eighteen hole that sub the USS Hartford tore in the New Orleans in the Strait of Hormuz. The Hartford got the worst of it, but it’s still impressive the New Orleans’ crew kept it afloat as they did.

Via Information Dissemination.

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Posted in Troops

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Change it or lose it

Posted on April 29, 2009 | Comments Off on Change it or lose it

A fellow commenter on a blog I read, a Dem who adores Barry, said maybe I’d like to try living in Somalia, when I indicated displeasure with our coming new taxes, for such frauds as national health care and cap & trade. Typical liberal response, an ad hominem attack rather than an argument.

Ah, I came back, the old Love It Or Leave It, the conservative bumper sticker of the ’60s, which was aimed at the anti-war crowd. What I didn’t say but thought of later (the Wisdom of the Stairs, as Treppenwitz puts it), was the ’60s liberal comeback: Change It Or Lose It. Which seems pretty apt, nowadays, though the positions are reversed. The message also is the opposite of Barry’s meaning of the word change.

The commenter’s notion that Barry is popular, meanwhile, falls before this new Gallup Poll on his first hundred days, and a comparison with his predecessors of the past forty years which shows him less popular than Richard Nixon or Jimmy Carter. I’m not surprised.

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Posted in Obamalot

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