titus n. owl

Not this power-armored pansy:


This Tim-Curry-lookin' Kraut is my emperor:


George "V" Saxe-Coburg-Gotha Windsor of the British Empire, back in the ol' sun-never-sets days. Specifically, 1910 to 1936.

For a bit in the middle of that, there was only war.

But you already knew that. ( Click here for a celebration of Enfield arms and Wilkinson steel. )

Jeffie:  I want to take a bath, but I want to have a smoke.  I could be like Marlowe and do both!
Justin: ... I suppose....
Jeffie:  Seriously he didn't have an ashtray in there.  Was he just ashing straight into the tub?
Justin:  I don't see why not.
Jeffie:  Because then he was soaking in cigarette ash!  Making himself redolent of it in an even more visceral way!
Justin:  They make soap out of ash.
Jeffie:  There's an intermediary step!
Justin:  Well, ash and fat.
*pause*
Jeffie:  Ouch.  Ice burn on Marlowe.

These are all clickable to show the gihugic versions, scanned at 300 dpi from the originals.

Louisiana, and I could probably find the date by looking up the style of the license plate.  I think it's the 1930s.  Yay braces!


Two dudes in a hammock.


My second photo of an oil rig crew. That means it's officially a collection, right? A REQUEST: If any of the rest of you just happen to find somewhere a group photo of a drilling crew, let me know? I intend to scour the stores down in Kilgore next weekend if I can; there ought to be some down there, given that's where they were actually drilling, you'd assume.

Today we went to a big antiques store in Dallas, where we bought a billiard ball (#14, with a green stripe, which Justin now wants to get as a tattoo - just the stripe and a number around the bicep), a First Aid kit from the 1920s or '30s which still had a bunch of supplies in it (ancient band-aids, a gauze bandage, some other stuff), and some photos.

On a random shelf we found this picture: http://www.jkbaker.com/SA/peashooters800.jpg

Which is of a formation of this plane: http://www.fortunecity.com/meltingpot/portland/971/boxart/revellmono/revell_p26a.jpg

Incidentally, our photograph contains more than 10% of all of that plane that ever existed.  Only 170 were made, and there's 18 in that formation (unless I counted wrong).

They had a section that was CRAMMED FULL of random photographs, and I could've spent all day there digging around, but Justin got bored.  I did, however, find a few pages from a scrapbook.  There was a whole bag of pages from a vacation in Yellowstone and the Wild West in the '20s or '30s, plus a couple of loose pages from the '20s showing the wife and kiddy and their brand-new house and car, but the only one I bought was from his time as a doughboy in WWI: http://i137.photobucket.com/albums/q230/chikkiboo/ww1guy.jpg

One blurry photo is pasted to the back of the scrapbook page: http://i137.photobucket.com/albums/q230/chikkiboo/ww1guy2.jpg

And a closeup of my favorite shot of the bunch (dig the face the guy on the bottom, viewer's left is making!  The pile's about to tip over if it's up to him!): http://i137.photobucket.com/albums/q230/chikkiboo/ww1guy3.jpg

Then we headed across the street to the Love Field Frontiers of Flight Museum, where we saw OMG SO MANY PLANES ALSO A HUEY HELICOPTER AND SOME KIND OF OUTER SPACE THING FROM AN APOLLO MISSION AND FOOTIE PLANES A-GO-GO AND FIGHTER PLANES AND A SOPWITH PUP AND OMG OMG PLANES PLANES PLANES PLANES PLANES!!!1  We took oh ever so many pictures and Justin has made a gallery of them.

And in the WWII section there was an old man with a nametag that gave his name and rank (he was an Air Force captain who served in the war!) and who saw me and grinned and said "You're a girly-type person! I've got a story about girly-type people with this here plane," and showed me a model.  Then, to Justin, "You're not a girly-type person, but I'll let you listen too." The story was that this plane had a bad reputation as a hard-to-handle aircraft, that people didn't like to learn on it, that pilots were trying to get out of that group and get into some other plane instead (they nicknamed it the Widowmaker; our host's opinion was that they were whiners).  But the AF had already paid for a bunch more of these planes, and dammit they weren't going to let people pansy out of it.  (He was dropping names of generals and stuff, but I don't recall.)  So what they did was when they took delivery of the ten new planes, they sent down new instructors to deliver them to the Tampa training base.  Ten FEMALE instructors.  Who had orders signed by the general himself to teach these men how to fly this "omg terrible" plane.  And that got the men to quit bitching and learn to fly it already.

And we also went shopping and stuff like at IKEA and Goodwill (where Justin bought a Marines uniform, the standard one - a green one they no longer use - not the dress blues; we now own at least part of the uniform for every branch of the U.S. Armed Forces except the Coast Guard.  And screw the coasties; who cares about them anyway?  They're not even DoD!) and then we came home and had hamburgers for dinner and yay!

We went shooting yesterday with about a dozen people we know from the Internet.  I used my bayonet (affixed to the Enfield) to roast a hotdog over the fire. 

This is such an awesome photo.  I look so maniacally gleeful.

I ate the hotdog, too.  Somebody said something about it and I said "Why not?  This blade hasn't been stuck in a Frankfurter in ninety years."