A TowDog

This is so cool I had to dust off the old blog. The 75th Anniversary was actually yesterday but as you know, the US media is focused on other “more important” things so I missed it.

https://twitter.com/cafinus/status/1206836381848395777

It’s been quite some time since I’ve felt compelled to post anything here, politics is a useless blame game where both sides are increasingly the same. So feeling enough to want to sit down and crank something out that I care enough about to finish.

This is one of those rare instances.

Getting ready for bed Sunday night, I looked at Twitter before I closed up my laptop and saw something about Las Vegas police scanner reporting shots fired at a concert venue. Holy crap!

I turned on the TV, and sure enough it was on every channel already. My wife, daughter, and I are planning to go there in November, so this hopefully was a mistake. Fireworks. Something.

No. No mistake. You know the story already.

Well it turns out my friend Mike from my Seabee days was in Las Vegas at the concert where Jason Aldean was playing. Seems like not a week or two ago he just made Chief Petty Officer (E7), and I’m sure this was him and his wife celebrating.

Big and Rich had just been playing an hour earlier, and with cellphones lit, the crowd waved and sang “God Bless America” together:

What the shooter hadn’t apparently counted on (hopefully) was the large number of first responders attending the concert off duty with their families. Active duty military and reservists were also in attendance, many with combat experience.

Big and Rich knows this, and they call out to bring some of them on stage with them, and shout out to those who remain in the crowd.

So the shooting starts during Jason Aldean’s final set, and in the first video I saw I was struck by the way the crowd moved. When the shooter was reloading, they were up en mass moving toward exits. When he started firing again, down they went to whatever cover they could find. The ones I saw weren’t stampeding, they were being led.

One of those leaders turns out to have been Mike.

His wife was the first to to post publicly about their horrific experiences escaping the carnage. Mike, as usual, was all business:

Finally they made it home to the LA area, and Mike posted a pic he took before the show started, back from where the better memories came.

We often wonder how we would react in a situation like that. I hope for myself I would be at least with half the poise as ol’ Chief Lopez.

Hoorah, brother.

You’ve heard of the massive bomb the US dropped in Afghanistan? Well here it is – the GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast

The coffee table, in many homes (but ours) is a collection of reading material we leave out for guests to discover our interests, and maybe stimulate conversation (in ours it’s multiple remote controls, shopping lists, glasses, and pill bottles, but I digress).

This book, in a home with a conservative, is good to stimulate conversation among our more liberal friends:

The above Twitter post should take you directly to the sale page. She’s not kidding, the book was number 4 at the time of the tweet, but I just checked and it’s number 1 now. 

The reviews are well above 4.5 out of 5, and seem to be screaming “Masterpiece”.

If by now, in the event you’ve read all the way to here in this post, here is the secret to the books success – unvarnished truth. Solid, comprehensive research into all the reasons one should vote Democrat from the author himself:

https://twitter.com/michaeljknowles/status/837508637530570752