Stone-cutters fighting time with marble, you foredefeated
Challengers of oblivion
Eat cynical earnings, knowing rock splits, records fall down,
The square-limbed Roman letters
Scale in the thaws, wear in the rain. The poet as well
Builds his monument mockingly;
For man will be blotted out, the blithe earth die, the brave sun
Die blind and blacken to the heart:
Yet stones have stood for a thousand years, and pained
thoughts found
The honey of peace in old poems.
— Robinson Jeffers
His soul stretched tight across the skies
That fade behind a city block,
Or trampled by insistent feet
At four and five and six o’clock;
And short square fingers stuffing pipes,
And evening newspapers, and eyes
Assured of certain certainties,
The conscience of a blackened street
Impatient to assume the world.
I am moved by fancies that are curled
Around these images, and cling:
The notion of some infinitely gentle
Infinitely suffering thing.
Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh;
The worlds revolve like ancient women
Gathering fuel in vacant lots.
— Eliot
I CELEBRATE myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.
My tongue, every atom of my blood, form’d from this soil, this
air,
Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their
parents the same,
I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin,
Hoping to cease not till death.
— Walt Whitman
The scientists are in terror
and the European mind stops
Wyndham Lewis chose blindness
rather than have his mind stop.
Night under wind mid garofani,
the petals are almost still
Mozart, Linnaeus, Sulmona,
When one’s friends hate each other
how can there be peace in the world?
Their asperities diverted me in my green time.
A blown husk that is finished
but the light sings eternal
a pale flare over marshes
where the salt hay whispers to tide’s change
Time, space,
neither life nor death is the answer.
And of man seeking good,
doing evil.
In meiner Heimat
where the dead walked
and the living were made of cardboard.
Gerard Van der Leun
Comments on this entry are closed.
Just another day at the office….. Awesome !!
Awesome video! What does he keep looking at to his left? Can you imagine how much you would miss that kind of flying after you get discharged? – there is no civilian equivalent!
When I was young I was going to get my degree in physics, join the Navy and fly like this guy and then become an astronaut. I was a young kid living on Merritt Island, FL and everything around me was about space.
Well, that didn’t work out so well. I didn’t finish my physics degree, didn’t join the Air Force or the Navy and didn’t apply to NASA to be an astronaut (though I did work at KSC for 27 years as a contractor on computers). I finished my degree in forestry and really loved that.
Some years later I took private flying lessons and learned the main reason why I should never have been the pilot of a fighter jet. Besides being just a little bit chicken, I barely had the awareness and coordination to fly a Cessna. I soloed twice and that was it. I’ve met and known some men who have flown these jets and helicopters. They are better men than I.
Balls of steel.
I’m no jet pilot but that looked virtually flawless – not a wasted or uncertain motion.
What a rush.
God, please let the men of this ilk be the leaders of tomorrow. This country won’t survive otherwise (assuming it survives the Chinese virus).
Oh, and Chuck Schumer is still a heaping pile of cow excrement.
This proves what jerks aviators are. Like the cable brake jerk; get it? I always thought aviators were primadonnas when I was an infantryman, and all of my encounters with them usually proved it. Then again, I’m a bit of an ass myself.
Actually, that was exciting and it does get your blood moving to just watch. I think he was looking at the carrier over his left shoulder.
Awesome. He’s turning left and he’s looking to see if another plane is coming up on him in the turn.
@Wayne “…What does he keep looking at to his left? Can you imagine how much you would miss that kind of flying after you get discharged? – there is no civilian equivalent!”
I’m guessing that the pilot (who looks to me to be a man, but could be a woman) is looking back towards the left at the carrier. He’s gauging his spacing so that he has enough room to complete the turn to what we in the Air Force called “final”, and to place himself on “final” at an appropriate distance from the carrier.
And yes, when you leave it, you do miss this type of flying. I flew T38s and C130s a
mumble-mumblemillion years ago, and I do miss both. There were many weekends when as a 24 year-old young stud, I was given the keys to a supersonic jet (That’s a joke. Military planes need no keys.), with orders no more stringent than to “bring it back by Sunday afternoon and don’t bend anything.” It was simultaneously more fun than anything you can do with your pants on, an awesome responsibility, and an awesome privilege.And now as a guy 2 years away from my mandatory retirement as an airline pilot, there are things about this job that I’ll miss too. Everyone loves a nice sunset, but what I’ll miss are the sunrises from 30,000 feet. Of course the next 2 years to 65 presumes that there is an industry for me to work in, which at this point isn’t an easy question to answer. We’ll see, and I can never not give thanks for the blessings that I do have, first and foremost, a terrific family.
Are there any adults on the payroll over at Wiki?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Modly
In case it gets wiped:
Thomas B. Modly is an American businessman and government official who has served as Acting United States Secretary of the Navy since November 24, 2019. [Modly is actually a spineless con artist, who shamelessly caved to the demands of the incompetent, corrupt, criminal Trump administration—when they ordered him to close ranks & stop all criticism, no matter how appropriate that criticism might be.]
Modly, who was confirmed as the United States Under Secretary of the Navy on December 4, 2017, performed the duties of the Secretary of the Navy while Richard V. Spencer was Acting Secretary of Defense and Acting Deputy Secretary of Defense from July 15, 2019, to July 31, 2019.[1]
I just checked. The landing speed of the F18 on a carrier is 250 knots, which is just under 290 mph. If he went from that speed to zero in 3 seconds, he was pulling about 4 and a half Gs on that stop.
That the landing speed on a carrier is that high (I’m just guessing here, but in the neighborhood of 100+ knots higher than a landing on a runway), has got to do with the need to have enough speed to fly if he misses the cables. FWIW, 4 1/2 g’s is very common in a fighter-type aircraft.
I agree, pilot is looking to the left often to spot possible traffic.