Check out our new Motivator component!
Here's some pretty cool color footage of the venerable P-47 Thunderbolt doing some good work during WWII:
Remember when it was Fighter Weapons School?
12/17/2009 - NELLIS AIR FORCE BASE, Nev. (AFNS) -- An Air National Guard MQ-1 Predator pilot marked the beginning of a new era Dec. 12 as the first unmanned aircraft pilot from a reserve component to graduate from the Air Force Weapons Instructor Course at the U.S. Air Force Weapons School here.
Maj. Tammy Barlette, from the Arizona Air National Guard's 214th Reconnaissance Group based at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base, completed the five-and-a-half month course along with three active duty UA pilots. They were the first to attend the school in its 60-year history. The school, regarded as having the U.S. Air Force's premier weapons and tactics training program, provides graduate-level instructor academic and flying courses. Its graduates are regarded as top authorities in their respective fields.
"I've been through a lot of training but nothing as difficult as this," said Major Barlette, a former A-10 Thunderbolt II pilot who left active duty to fly Predators over Iraq and Afghanistan full time with the Air Guard.
"The course is intended to make you the best instructor you can be for your squadron, weapon system and the Air Force," she said. "They teach you how to get to the root of a problem and find solutions. It's constant studying, briefing and flying."
Within the first month she had to get qualified to fly the MQ-9 Reaper. The course requires UA pilots to have dual qualification in both the Predator and Reaper so that they can routinely fly training missions with various platforms to include A-10s, F-15 Eagles and F-16 Fighting Falcons.
The school, initially created for fighter pilots, now integrates Airmen from 22 different aircraft and specialties. The addition of UAs is an indication of their value in current conflicts and the need for their inclusion in the broader Air Force mission.
"Our training was focused on preparation for the next conflict," said the major. "The course taught us to keep a focus on the future so that, when required, a vast array of weapon systems can integrate in any number of situations. I feel like I have a better grasp of how all of these capabilities compliment each other, and I think officers from other Air Force communities got a better understanding of what (UAs) bring to the fight." Back at her unit, Major Barlette will be her commander's resident expert and will be relied upon to teach fellow Predator pilots how to improve operations.
"Everyone else in the unit will be marching behind her so we can learn how to better serve our customers: the troops on the ground," said Lt. Col. Randy Inman, 214th RG commander.
"We're very proud to have Major Barlette represent our unit, the state and the Air National Guard," Colonel Inman said. "We recognize the historic significance of her accomplishment and I know it was one that did not come without personal sacrifice."
One year ago Major Barlette was five-months pregnant with her second child when she learned of her selection to attend the school. Accepting the appointment meant she would have to leave her 1-year-old daughter and new-born son the following July.
"I talked it over with my husband and he said, 'You have to go. We'll figure out the rest.' He was very supportive, and my parents, who live in Tucson, helped us out tremendously," said Major Barlette.
Though Major Barlette admits the family separation was difficult, she says her new qualification as a weapons instructor will serve her and the UA community well.
"I just wanted to go to the school to get answers. I wanted to get better and I wanted to help my squadron get better," she said.
According to the major, weapon school patch-wearers from UA units across the country will enjoy the added benefit of being able to cross check ideas with each other.
"It's starting to connect us all," she said.
So Who Is / Was Jeremiah Weed?
"A Hard Man to Know" - by Bob Greene
THIS is the story of how I went looking for a hero. I will tell you now that it has a sad ending.
Everywhere I have turned in the past few months, I have bumped into the name "Jeremiah Weed." Jeremiah Weed is a new brand of bourbon; it's a hundred proof, and it's manufactured by Heublein, - and it's being advertised in a lot of big magazines.
THE ADS are about Jeremiah Weed, the man. The first ad I noticed featured a vintage photograph of an 1890s dancehall girl, who was identified as "Kate Kincaid."
The text of the ad quoted Miss Kincaid as saying: "Jeremiah Weed? They say he was a real loner.. I know better."
Just in case I missed the point, the other copy in the advertisement told me that "Jeremiah was a lot of things. Loner was not one of them. He was a magnet for women. And the attraction was mutual."
SO Jeremiah was kind of a stud. Great. The next ad I saw him informed me that he had a sense of humor, too.
The picture in this ad was of Sean Sweeney, a railroad boss, Mr. Sweeney was saying: "We were stopped dead... 'cause Weed had traded all the railroad ties for two dozen oysters and a French piano."
All right! Jeremiah was a sly prankster. But just when I was thinking he might be too much of a gadabout. I learned about his more somber side.
This was in the third ad, which featured a picture of an old prospector named Pappy McCoy. Pappy said: "Jeremiah and me was surveying together for two months. He never said a word. That's what I call good company."
I WAS getting intrigued. Whoever this Jeremiah Weed was, I wanted to know more about him. Not only had they named a bourbon after him, but apparently he was one of the finest characters ever to come out out of the turn-of-the-century America.
Romantic, funny, taciturn ... in an age when we can't seem to find heroes. Jeremiah Weed was a guy I felt like knowing.
So I decided to do some research on Jeremiah and find out what made him tick. That's when I got the unhappy news.
"Uh ... Jeremiah never existed," said the liquor executive at Heublein.
"We made him up out of whole cloth," said the chairman of the board of Heubleins's advertising agency.
IT TURNS out that not only does Jeremiah Weed sound too good to be true. He is too good to be true.
"We wanted to create an image to associate with this new brand," said David Boyle, brand manager for Jeremiah Weed at Heublein. "We wanted something to compete with Wild Turkey and Yukon Jack and the rest.
We decided to build the image around a person. And since we didn't have any real person in mind, we decided to make up a Jeremiah Weed."
SO RATHER than stress the taste of the liquor, Heublein determined that it would romanticize this fellow Jeremiah Weed. The company wanted the young male drinkers to identify with Jeremiah.
When the drinkers thought of Jeremiah Weed, Boyle said, they were supposed to conger up certain feelings. "Ruggedness... maverick ... potent."
Heublein wasn't worried about whether a credible job of building up this fictional character was possible.
So Jeremiah Weed was born. I said that, in the ads, I have never seen Weed's face or heard him quoted directly.
"And you never will," Coleman said. "Our research showed that we didn't have to show Weed in order for people to identify with him. All we had to do was put the right words in other people's lips."
BESIDES, Coleman said, it would be virtually impossible to come up with a picture or drawing of Weed.
"I don't know who he is."
Col. Dick "Lucky" Anderegg, was my Squadron Commander in Bitburg, 1985, I was his "paired wingman" back when we did those things. He, got the "Lucky" call sign on the sortie in this story and was/is one shit hot guy. Here he has answered that age old question... Why do we drink this shit!?
Rock
Clarence R. “Dick” Anderegg (L) and Clyde "Joe Bob" Phillip (R)
From 'Sierra Hotel - Flying Air Force Fighters in the Decade After Vietnam
Every USAF fighter squadron has a lounge where the pilots sometimes gather for a cold beer after the flying day is over. Every refrigerator in each of those lounges contains a chilled bottle of a 100-proof product called Jeremiah Weed. For special occasions, and sometimes for no reason at all, someone will bring out the Weed, fill a shot glass for each person present, and propose a toast. At the conclusion of the toast, all down their Weed in a single gulp. It is not tasty. To many it seems like drinking kerosene, and it leaves a very strong aftertaste. Be that as it may, few refuse because the downing of a Weed is a ritual deeply imbedded in the fighter pilot culture. That ritual started long before today’s squadron commanders were even in college, and stories abound as to how the custom started. A famous newsman once said, “When there is disagreement between the legend and the truth, always print the legend.” Since I disagree, here is the true story of Jeremiah Weed, and I know it’s true because I was part of it.
On December 1, 1978, I was flying as an instructor in the back seat of a F–4E, tail number 649, on a BFM hop out of the 414th FWSq at Nellis Air Force Base, Nevada. The student in my front seat, Maj. Nort Nelson, was a highly experienced F–4 pilot with hundreds of combat hours. Leading the flight was Capt. Joe Bob Phillips, who had in his back seat Capt. Larry Ernst, an instructor who was just along for the ride. The mission called for Joe Bob to attack Nort in a scripted scenario that gave Nort the opportunity to use his best defensive BFM to defeat Joe Bob’s attacks. The mission did not last long. On the first engagement, Nort managed to put the airplane into a position from which I judged that recovery was impossible (The details are for another story, which I will tell in a future book). I ejected both of us from the jet. Neither of us was injured, and within an hour we were picked up by a helicopter that returned us to Nellis. It probably goes without saying that Nort and I had different views: he thought he could miss the ground; I did not. It was too close to bet my life on. The accident investigators agreed with me. They determined that ejection was the only possibility for survival. Further, they believed that if I had delayed more than a second, one or both of us would have died in the desert seventy miles north of Las Vegas.
A year later, both Joe Bob and Nort were members of the F–16 Multinational Operational Test and Evaluation squadron at Hill Air Force Base, Utah. On the first anniversary of the accident, they were flying to Nellis to participate in Red Flag. As they passed over the crash site, which Joe Bob easily found since he had circled our downed position many times, they sketched some brief road maps on cards in their cockpits and decided to return to the site by car.
The next day, a Friday, they drove out of Las Vegas with a friend, Pete Mock, intending to find the site and camp out in the crater that the crashing airplane had gouged in the high desert. However, it was dark by the time they got to the dirt road they thought would lead them to the site. After a couple of aborted attempts to drive up dirt roads to nowhere, they decided to go back to a roadside café they had passed to ask directions.
They entered the Paranaghat Bar and found no customers, only a bearded bartender who looked a lot like Grizzly Adams. When they told the bartender what they were up to, he was delighted to tell them he had seen the fire from the crashing airplane the day of the accident. Further, he was very pleased that he had three real fighter pilots in his bar. He had heard that fighter pilots knew many bar games (true), and he wanted to play games for drinks. When they balked at the idea, he persisted, and after much cajoling asked them if they knew the game “horses.” They shook their heads no (not true). Over the next several minutes, the bartender “taught” them horses, finally saying that whoever lost had to buy a round of drinks. After three games of horses, the bartender had bought all three rounds. And after three rounds the pilots were a little less stressed to get to the crash site.
Joe Bob asked the bartender if he knew how to do afterburners. No, the bartender said, he had never heard of that game. So, Joe Bob explained to him how a shot of brandy in a shot glass is ignited so that the alcohol on top burns, and then the drinker throws down the flaming shot. If done correctly, all the brandy is emptied from the shot glass, so that when the drinker puts the glass down, a small, blue flame still burns in the bottom. The bartender was eager to play but said he had no brandy. Nort suggested that any high-proof booze might work, and the bartender fumbled around under the bar for a moment. He straightened up and plopped a tall, brown bottle with a brown and green label on the bar, and said, “I’ve got this here stuff—it’s 100 proof.” The brand name on the green label proclaimed that it was Jeremiah Weed. The three fighter pilots filled their shot glasses and demonstrated, all three glasses returning to the bar empty except for a small blue flame flickering at the bottom.
The bartender immediately poured one for himself and lit the top. Now, these were no ordinary twentieth-century shot glasses. Joe Bob thought they might be from the 1800s because the glass was very thick, and the bottom was probably an inch of heavy glass. When the bartender picked his up, he held it by the bottom while he licked and smoothed the mustache of his thick beard out of the line of fire. He took several moments on his grooming, not realizing that as he held the thick glass at the bottom, the top near the fire was heating quickly. By the time he tilted his head back and put the glass to his lips…..well, Joe Bob says you could probably hear the s-s-s-s-sizzle of the hot glass barbecuing the bartender’s lips halfway to Las Vegas. Then the bartender made his second mistake and flinched. The flaming Weed went all over his beard, and by the time Joe Bob, Nort, and Pete could beat out the flames, the bar was filled with the smell of cooked lips and singed hair.
As soon as things calmed down a bit, the trio, feeling badly that they had not paid for a drink all night and greatly embarrassed that they had nearly immolated their new friend, bought another bottle of Weed from him and left again for the crash site, this time guided by one of the bartender’s friends who had entered the bar just in time to witness and smell the blistering. The friend showed them the correct dirt road, and the trio found the crash crater, where they spent the rest of the night camped out and drinking the entire bottle of Weed.
The next morning they dragged themselves out of the crater, gathered a few souvenirs from the parts still lying around, and headed straight for the Nellis Air Force Base Officers’ Club. There they found the manager, showed her the empty bottle, and strongly suggested she add it to the bar stock. She did. Soon, the Nellis fighter pilots were downing shots of Weed (nonflaming) for no good reason except it was different, and it was a good excuse to toast “fallen comrades.” As Red Flags came through the Nellis club, they saw the weapons school guys doing it, so they did it, too.
And that is the true story of how Jeremiah Weed started. I have a bottle in my freezer.
A brief historical note: I had an uncle named after this guy, (no kidding), I guess my Grandfather liked his style... So do I. Rock
OK - couldn't resist. if you've seen MST3k (Mystery Science Theater 3000) you already know what's coming. If not, the bottomline is three 'guys' watch some of the world's worst movies and make sarcastic comments. Here's an eight minute clip with the 'best' moments from a terrible movie; "The Starfighters."
PS - If you can't handle the entire video, fast forward to 7:46 to hear a summation of what it's like to be an Air Force fighter pilot...
What could be better than watching cartoons on a rainy Sunday morning...One of the best ever?
Looks like the infamous Smurf Jet "Rolling Maneuver." Wonder how this went over with the SQ/CC... Also, had to tag it as "Rolls." Sorry Rolls!
We get to watch McGarrett, Danno, (Zulu as) Kono and (Kam Fong as) Chin Ho every night at 6:00 on local TV. McGarrett and Five-O trample on suspects' rights, shoot the bad guys from 500 yards with their snub-nosed .38s, crush all opposition, enforce the laws of the sovereign state of Hawaii and generally kick ass 24/7, 365 days a year.
This has got to be the best opening sequence ever for any show in the history of TV. Jack Lord standing in his penthouse suite in the Ilikai is 'no ka oi.' He's ready to pursue Wo Fat and his evil commie minions to the hell and back.
JC Penney Catalog circa 1977
Here's how to get your ass kicked in elementary school:
Just look at that belt. It's like a boob-job for your pants. He probably needed help just to lift it into place. The belt loops have to be three inches long. And way to pull them up to your armpits, grandpa.
Here's how to get your ass kicked in high school:
This kid looks like he's pretending to be David Soul, who is pretending to be a cop who is pretending to be a pimp that everyone knows is really an undercover cop. Who is pretending to be 15.
Here's how to get your ass kicked on the golf course:
This "all purpose jumpsuit" is, according to the description, equally appropriate for playing golf or simply relaxing around the house. Personally, I can't see wearing this unless you happen to be relaxing around your cell in D-block. Even then, the only reason you should put this thing on is because Joe Arpaio made you, and as a one-piece, it's slightly more effective as a deterrent against ass-rapery.
Here's how to get your ass kicked pretty much anywhere:
If you look at that picture quickly, it looks like Bob "No-pants" Saget has his hand in the other guy's pocket. In this case, he doesn't, although you can tell just by looking at them that it's happened - or if it hasn't happened it will. Oh yes. It will. As soon as he puts down his matching coffee cup.
Here's how to get your ass kicked at the beach:
He looks like he's reaching for a gun, but you know it's probably just a bottle of suntan lotion in a holster.
How to get your ass kicked in a meeting:
If you wear this suit and don't sell used cars for a living, I believe you can be fined and face serious repercussions, up to and including termination. Or imprisonment, in which case you'd be forced to wear that orange jumpsuit.
How to get your ass kicked on every day up to and including St. Patrick's Day
I honestly don't believe that color exists in nature. There is NO excuse for wearing either of these ensembles unless you're working as a body guard for the Lucky Charms leprechaun.
In this next one, Your Search For VALUE Ends at Penneys.
As does your search for chest hair.
And this -- Seriously. No words.
I'm guessing the snap front gives you quick access to the chest hair. The little tie must be the pull tab.
Also, judging by the sheer amount of matching his/hers outfits, I'm guessing that in 1977 it was considered pretty stylish for couples to dress alike. These couples look happy, don't they?
I am especially fond of this one, which I have entitled "Cowboy Chachi Loves You Best." 
And nothing showcases your everlasting love more than the commitment of matching bathing suits. That, and a blonde girl with a look on her face that says "I love the way your junk fights against that fabric."
Then, after the lovin', you can relax in your one-piece matching terry cloth jumpsuits:
I could go on, but I'm tired, and my eyes hurt from this trip back in time. I think it's the colors. That said, I will leave you with these tasteful little numbers:
Man, that's sexy.
When I was a kid, one of my favorite toys was the Quisp cereal whistle ring, which went a long way towards annoying anyone unfortunate enough to be within earshot. If this kicks off a bit of nostalgia in you, and you want to buy one of these babies, it will set you back about $200 bucks at The Toy Tent. Quisp's arch-nemesis Quake also had a whistle ring, but his sells for upwards of $500 in its original packaging.
The Cap'n Crunch whistle was another little gem that was popular back then. The interesting thing about this one was that back in the 60's, an Air Force guy by the name of John Draper figured out that if you plug up one of the holes and blow through it, it emits a 2600hz tone. The 2600hz tone just so happened to be the frequency used by AT&T on its long distance lines to indicate that the trunk was all clear and ready to route a new call. This led to the infamous "Blue Box" hack, which allowed the user to make free phone calls all over the world, and set in motion the entire computer hacking genre. Google "2600" and you'll see what I mean.
If you think you've outgrown the whole childhood ring and whistle thing, you might be interested in one of these. You know the chicks are definitely gonna dig one of these on your fingers - and of course they'll never think you're a douchebag for wearing one. It sells for about ten bucks at a site called -- what else -- "DickPillRings.com". Viagra sold seperately...
Just thought I'd add a Ray Harryhausen clip for those who aren't familiar with the name. He's the guy who mastered stop-motion monster animation in movies such "Mighty Joe Young", all those "Sinbad" movies, and "Clash of the Titans". Pretty cool stuff in a time before Silicon Graphics, SoftImage, and Maya...
