Okay, so does anybody want to hear my Gloster Gladiator model meets airhead girlfriend story?
Well, I’ll tell it anyway. So, there I was, minded my own business, riding back from the annual all week dove hunt with Dad. About 2 hours to go to home. This small town along the parkway, for passing I guess what now refer to as a mall or shopping center there’s some regional big box store there. Somehow I convinced Dad to stop and let me go looking for models and there I found the LifeLike 1/48 British biplanes: Gladiator; Fairey Flycatcher; Bristol Bulldog; Hawker Fury. Never even knew that such things existed. I was incredulous and beyond excited. Did not buy the Fury but the 2 hours of driving saw me occupied with examining each kit in detail. I don’t think I painted the Gladiator I think that was before my painting days really started. Loved that model so much that only a year or two later I built it again, this time with paint and full rigging. LifeLike or their predecessor Pyro, they engineered dimples into the surfaces so one would know where to drill to put thread for rigging. Parts of the airplane and the design of the kit were such that I rigged the mainplanes and fuselage with a single piece of thread. That model was my pride and joy for a while and always one of my top five favorites.
A few years later, come home from college with new girlfriend in tow. After a while we break away from family and sneak up to my bedroom. After all, what does a young healthy red-blooded boy want to do more with his smoking hot new girlfriend than show her his plastic model collection? I hand her the Gladiator and not knowing how to hold it, she takes it and immediately snaps one of the landing gear off. Okay, my buddy and I have a habit of knocking parts off of each other latest masterpiece and he’s not a smoking hot new girlfriend, so… if I don’t get mad at him, why get mad at new hottie - I just roll with it. And then, somehow, she manages to drop my glorious Gladiator to the floor, bouncing it off the side of a table in its descent. When I finally start breathing again, I reached down and pick up the model-mishandled model. Low and behold, that single piece of thread zigzagging from the bottom wing to the top wing, through the fuselage, and between some of the interplane struts? The thing is solid! Only the landing gear leg that she knocked off is… knocked off. And it is easy to repair.
Turns out she was a nice girl and fun to date for a while. But that was about 40 years ago and we are not together, although I still have that Gladiator.
Good news, I’m actually one of the slow readers. I can only read about 10 pages an hour if I want to retain what I’m reading. And that’s providing that I don’t get relaxed and fall asleep after 5 to 10 minutes.
I’ll look those up. I read an article years ago that said that they did not have an atomic bomb like we used, but they had something akin to a hybrid of it and a dirty bomb that they were preparing to detonate in East Prussia to stop the soviets. Supposedly there’s an area over there that had a very high radioactive count but it disappeared behind the Iron curtain and no further information was gained on it.
yes i remember reading something similar to that as well about some sort of atomic device used against the Russians by the Germans. iirc the Russians told the Germans they eould start using chemical/biological weapons on Germany if they continued using their atomic devices.
In the UK it was come upstairs and I’ll show you my etchings. I never did get what that was about…I mean, photo-etch brass? Ahhhhh now I get it, bras. So much easier living in a single-storey house, The Ploy was to look at the view from a different window
I’m reading the series of books about wwI from the german"Reichsarchiv".Nearly 60 books written in the 1920s.Includes maps to discribe the campaigns and interviews with soldiers who were fighting.I read the first of 4 books with the theme"Marne-battle 1914",I’m looking for books telling the story from the french point of view.I did the same with the theme"Verdun",it’s very interesting to read the storys of both sides.Something’s wrong.Not nearly 60 books,38.There stand other books between them,what confused me
Getting away from the military for a bit, I’m a bit of a sc-fi geek and Iain M. Banks is my favourite author. For those who haven’t read a Culture novel they are well worth it.
Had to take a quick look at the “Culture” books…sounds delightfully amusing and fun to read.
This wiki comment was very amusing "In one instance, a direct democratic vote of trillions – the entire population – decided The Culture would go to war with a rival civilisation. Those who objected to the Culture’s subsequent militarisation broke off from the meta-civilisation, forming their own separate civilisation; a hallmark of the Culture is its ambiguity."
This is my book when I read to relax,one of 13 in a series.It’s about england in the viking-era,before it was called england.There is a tv-version on netflix,called “the last kingdom”.In march there is a movie coming to finish the story,called “seven kings must die”.The tv-version is okay,the books are great
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