I wrote about my peculiar fascination with a particular bit of history here a few years back. In August of 1943, a bunch of American planes flew a bombing mission to the oil fields of Romania. What made this mission unique was that they flew at low-level—where most raids were flown at 20,000 feet, this one was at treetop height. I’ve always been interested about aviation history, and loved planes, but there was something about this story that stuck with me. Since I’ve been online, I’ve searched for information on the subject, and found some places where it’s discussed in great detail by some of the men who flew the mission.
As Jen and I were leaving Baltimore last friday, we stopped at the Giant to pick up some snacks. On our way out I spied an older gentleman with a baseball cap sitting on a bench by the exits. Passing by, I noticed he had a 98th Bomb Group patch on the bill—one of the main groups involved with the bomb raid. Although we were in a bit of a hurry, I stopped and asked him about the patch, and his eyes lit up. After a few minutes of talking with him, it turned out he wasn’t on the August raid (he missed it due to illness) but he eventually flew 37 missions—no small feat in thse days. Jen and I sat with him for a fascinating half hour, and he invited us to stop up to his house to look through his collection of papers and photos from the war, and talk about history. I can’t wait.
Jen and I are hitching up the sled dogs and heading north into the wilderness for a belated Christmas with the Dugans this weekend. This is exciting for a couple of reasons—we haven’t seen them since Thanksgiving, it’s freakin’ Christmas, and this means we get to finally put all the boxes back in the basement.
Christmas with the Dugans is something I don’t think my wife is quite used to yet. My family tends to go nuts on the present shopping for each other, to the point where it becomes kind of obscene. Not that I’m complaining, though—the thrill of the sucessful hunt is the real payoff, and we love to surprise each other (my family has a certain way of listening to you talk in April about that thing you’d like to have, or making a list of odd household items you don’t currently own but could really use, and then surprising the crap out of you with them in December.) We also like to stretch the process out into a five-hour afternoon, complete with breakfast, champagne, and cookies—something speed-openers just can’t understand.
I always look forward to the holidays up north because I don’t see a lot of my family during the year, and it always makes me happy to see them. I think this year will be bittersweet for various reasons, but it’s been good to have something to look forward to after the “real” Christmas season ended.
For looking at, and spending a half hour attempting to rationalize, a Triumph TR-6 I saw on the Baltimore Craigslist yesterday. Or, the ’62 Vespa for $650 in Dupont Circle. BAD MONKEY!!
After a two-day outage, from what I’m told was a bad cable, I’m back. Email will reach me again, so fire away.
Hint #471 that Politics Suck (and yet another reason I don’t like Robert Erlich). From the Baltimore Sun: Ehrlich associate targeted O’Malley.
“The governor had no idea,” Steffen said. “I don’t even think he knows where the Web site is. If anyone is guilty, it is me. There was no outside influence. It was all me.”
Yeah, right.
Gerry Brewster, a Towson Democrat who ran against Ehrlich in the governor’s first congressional election in 1994, said Steffen was well known as “the dirty tricks operative” of Ehrlich’s campaign.
It kinda makes me think of another dirty-tricks operative in the news today.
Romesick. You’ll need QuicktimeVR to view this shot of the Spanish Steps in Rome. (If that link doesn’t work, go here, look for the PANORAMS 2004 pulldown on the upper right side of the page, and open the Spanish Steps link under 2005.) We ate dinner to the immediate left of the Samsung advertisement/monument on the right side of the steps. Our hotel was a mere three blocks up the steps and almost directly as the crow flies behind Ghandi’s head.
In the sad news department, I read this afternoon that Incredible Jimmy Smith passed away today. If you’re not aquainted with Jimmy Smith, he was the absolute tip-top MACK on the Hammond B-3 organ, recording such excellent tracks as “Organ Grinder’s Swing” and “Root Down” (Sampled by the Beastie Boys, who always knew quality when they heard it). Recommended listening from the Dugan archive: Organ Grinder’s Swing, The Blue Note Years, and Back at the Chicken Shack. RIP, Jimmy.
This morning I was in downtown Baltimore for a doctor’s appointment, and decided to kill two birds by stopping by the nearest branch of the Johns Hopkins Credit Union to close my account out. This account has been open since my first “real” job out of college that didn’t involve a hammer, ladder, or dust mask, as a print designer at Hopkins. The account has been sitting and slowly hemmorhaging money since they screwed up a couple of payments on a loan and reduced my balance below the minimum, so every month they deduct $1.50 for the ATM fee and add $0.90 in interest. Driving to the Bayview campus took me squarely through my old neighborhood, so I decided to mosey around and see what was happening.
First off, I read in the City Paper that DeGroen’s Brewery is shutting down. After many years of making the best local beer around, they couldn’t make a profit (and the construction around their location killed their foot traffic.) So my favorite Märzen will cease to exist.
Canton is still dotted with real-estate signs and renovation work trucks; what was Mrs. Bonnie’s Elvis Shrine is now an empty rehab, sporting a vinyl advertisement for first-time homeowners. My old house looks good; the new owner removed the 1950’s-era storm door off and put a gold kickplate and a large lockset on the front door. The whisky barrel continues to rot away next to the steps. My old-skool neighbors are still home—the Cadillac sits gleaming at its parking spot next door, and Nell’s bench is still outside waiting for a group of friends to gather.
The cabinet factory one block over and behind 620 is now a levelled vacant lot, featuring a sign advertising three-floor townhomes (with garage) starting in at $400K. (There were rumors it was to become an outdoor biergarten and high-rise condos.) $400K for a breathtaking view of the Shell station parking lot and American Harry’s roof. sweet. The rehabbed house on the north corner of Fleet, which had been vacant and empty for three years, is occupied again; the back parking pad now houses a motorcycle and gas grill where people used to throw their trash bags. (Note to the new owners: I used to watch bums climb through your kitchen window and piss on your living room floor. Enjoy!) Linwood Avenue now features nose-in parking, which probably alleviated the local lack of parking for about fifteen minutes.
Further up into Highlandtown, the march of Latino culture continues eastwards. Empty storefronts are now brightly colored bodegas and shops (Who knew that “Zapatas Botas” meant “Sneaky Feet?”) and Provident Bank has taken up residence on a prominent corner. The once-beautiful Grand Theater has been razed to make way for a new branch of the Enoch Pratt Library. Old Baltimore still exists, though, in the old guy with the 60’s era plaid pants crossing Eastern Avenue, the combination grocer/electronic store/garden center, and the heartwarming sight of 14-year-old mommies pushing their kids in strollers. Haussner’s is still empty, but the Patterson movie theater is now a neighborhood rec center. Plus ça change, plus ça méme chose.
What was a bleary, semi-conscious but cheerful mood has turned ugly and black, courtesy of my work computer. I’m getting really tired of working on four-year-old technology, both here and at home. I’ve recently considered the possibility of a new laptop to replace the five-year-old Powerbook I’m on right now, but with our priority list remaining full and unchanging, I’ll probably have to put it off a while longer. And a Mini, while inexpensive and fast, is still out of my current price range. (It’s sad that over the years my target price range has dropped at the same rate as the street pricing of technology.) As for the work computer, I don’t know if my bitching (and kicking) has changed anybody’s priority levels either. Go to your happy place…
Saturday: HTML-> PHP-> library -> Photoshop-> lunch -> HomeSite-> dinner-> HomeSite-> beer-> posting-> sleep (3am.)
Sunday: HTML-> HomeSite-> posting-> duck, potatoes, chocolate-> Photoshop-> beer-> Illustrator-> HTML-> posting-> Illustrator-> tea-> Photoshop-> posting-> sleep (3:30am.)
Last night, we got water back at the house. …Granted, it’s rusty, hissing, orange water for the first ten or fifteen minutes. Filling a glass with it reveals a whole spinning universe of floating stuff, stuff that should be back in the reservoir it came from and not in my glass. However, it’s water, it comes out of the shower head, and when I consider some of the questionable rivers and lakes I’ve bathed in before, it’s not all that bad. (And the water is hot—an important distinction.) When we get another 50° day where I’m not doing five other things, I have to drain our hot-water heater and clean out the gallons of sediment I’m sure are sitting at the bottom.
In other news, the freelance fairy came and dropped a project in my lap for the weekend, one that’s going to make our existing commitments that much more interesting to work around; it’s another long-distance job which will test my knowledge of PHP, ssh, and the lovely VI editor. Fun (not that the Superbowl is going to be that interesting, anyway.) Money is a good thing.
I don’t think words can describe how fucking irritated I am with my work PC right now. I don’t think it’s possible to run a web browser, email client (Outlook, a memory pig if there ever was one) Max5 and Photoshop all at the same time without the entire thing coming to painful grinding halt. I spend more time waiting for the “End Program” dialog to finish whatever lousy kung-fu it does than I do working. (I seem to remember “End Program” actually doing something in 2000.) The funny thing is that this machine is a replacement “upgrade” from the previous one…and it runs slower.
Other than that, there’s a big hole out across the street where a major water main blew under the sidewalk, and we have a trickle coming through the downstairs pipes; the jackhammers were working until midnight, and then they all left. So there’s no telling when we’ll get water back. (To the City employee who told my wife yesterday that the water running down the street was simply snowmelt: GET BENT. Why is my water ORANGE, you moron?) The lovely and accomodating Sara let us use her shower last night, so we don’t reek, but I can’t do anything with the house until I can shower again.
Meanwhile, I’m in some kind of wacked-out hibernation mode right now- my metabolism has sped up so that I’m constantly hungry, but I need 10 hours of sleep a night to be functional. (the fact that I’m averaging about 7, and that there’s a storm blowing in this afternoon, which makes my sinuses feel like somebody’s been filling them with concrete, does not help.)
This morning I woke up blearlily and stumbled downstairs to make coffee. Running the water in the carafe to clean out the dregs took a little longer than usual, because the cold water came in a trickle. And so did the hot water. I got the coffee started and checked all the pipes downstairs to make sure the basement wasn’t floating away. I checked the doctor’s office bathroom to make sure it wasn’t frozen solid. Then I went back upstairs to relieve myself, and found that the toilet tank wasn’t even refilling. At this point, I looked out the window to see a lake across the street from our house on Frederick Road: a 20′ section of sidewalk was covered in water where one of the mains had burst, directly across the street from our house. Swell. We have calls through to the Baltimore City DPW, but there’s no telling when our pressure will be back to normal (or when that annoying rust in the water will be gone.) So that funk you may smell as you go about your busy day just might be me, the guy with the hat pulled down over his day-old hair.