THE TEXAS SCRIBBLER

Driving Mr. B. to his scout meeting last night, I was startled when he suddenly said “Wow!” and pointed at the sky. It was just after dusk and the sky was still bright enough to illuminate a dense crosshatching of airliner contrails (condensed water vapor) overhead—east, west, north and south. ’Twas a busy evening up there, apparently.

Take that, Gorebot, Obozo, et al. Find your tax revenue somewhere else. Not that they’ll notice. They’re still singing the “CO2 causes global warming and the science is settled” refrain. Maybe when the glaciers move as far south as Chicago and, then, Tennessee. Ya think? Via Instapundit.

Michael Flynn’s third installment in his January Dancer series falters nae a bit, with such lines as these: “A faint band of red has cut the throat of night and bleeds across the eastern horizon.” I’m only half through this one but it’s already safe to say it’s as good as the first two about [...]

  Now we know their problem. They’re blinded by all the “snow”, obviously. UPDATE:  Make that thirty-five pounds of cocaine, in hollowed-out text books, found in bags in the UN mail room.

A world where free-fall is normal and gravity is a luxury you have to pay for. A world where sunlight is not available to all and even those who have the machines that produce it have to get used to full-dark hours of sun-off with no moonlight. Some even live in full-dark all the time. [...]

Mrs. Charm survived her recent inflamed appendix and her recovery from the surprise surgery has been going well. And she never ate grass (or leaves) to begin with so she doesn’t miss the vestigial organ. Not that it would help her digest grass or leaves, if she was so inclined, any more than my intact [...]

The (apparently) world’s first combat submarine, which few alive today have ever seen. Now you can be one of them. You’d never have gotten me in that thing. I’m the descendant of  infantrymen. But I can’t help but admire the sailors who volunteered for the H.L. Hunley—and perished.

Time was (it seems like only yesterday, but it was actually before 1995) if you wanted advice from an expert you had to seek them out and hope for an answer. You could, for instance, investigate until you found their address and wrote them a letter. Or hunted them down in public and shouted your [...]

After the war the American versions flew USA airmail routes cross-country. I used to make plastic models of these and similar planes when I was Mr. B.’s age (11 going on 12) and hang them by threads from my bedroom ceiling.

MyOldRV is on the job, thanks to the mini-boom in shale oil these days due to $100 a barrel pricing. It pays good but it can be a lonely life: “One of the impediments to commerce in Texas has always been the distances involved and the remote aspect of some areas of the state…Oil field [...]