Field Trip to Dungeness
The plaque reads:
This is one of four Wright/Cyclone engines and propeller from a WWII B17 Flying Fortress bomber (the same aircraft as the Memphis Belle). The artefact was accidentally snagged off Dungeness on the 18th of September 2017 by Joe Thomas and Tom Redshaw (local fishermen). The engine is almost certainly from a well documented B17 Flying Fortress that ditched off Dungeness in 1944.
The Sleepytime Girl was on a daytime bombing raid on an aircraft factory over Oberpfaffenhofen in Germany. The aircraft suffered heavy flak damage over Germany and all four engines stalled. The crew dived the B17 to 5,000 feet and managed to restart the damaged engines. The crew then had a vote and opted to strike back towards the safety of Britain, rather than trying to make it back to Switzerland, which was closer.
At 5,000 feet the B17 was a sitting duck was was repeatedly attacked over France, where two German ME-109s further damaged the aircraft, knocking out three of the four engines. Amazingly the remaining crew managed to limp the aircraft back over the Channel on a single engine, where they ditched it off Dungeness. Only four of the original crew of ten were left alive and were rescued by an Air Sea Rescue Walrus (an amphibious biplane). The co-pilot, William Nesen, received a posthumous Purple Heart.
It’s difficult to imagine how these incredibly brave men in their teens and early twenties could submit themselves to a virtual death sentence on a daily basis. Please take a few moments t reflect on the extraordinary sacrifices that were made for us, in order to free occupied and oppressed peoples and to ensure our own freedom and way of life.
September 26, 2024 — 6:03 pm
Comments: 4
She finally had enough
Shirley Curry, the Skyrim Grandma, has finally played enough Skyrim. Nine years, 1.5M subscribers and 2.3K videos later, she’s done.
I have to say, she’s lookin’ really good for 88. My friend group is in the 75 to 85 range, and everybody’s getting a little cyborg-y.
I didn’t watch a whole lot of her videos, but her interactions with the game and with her viewers were fun. When she played with an in-game companion, she chatted away to him like he was people. It was like watching a kid play with Barbies.
She also loved to read aloud from the books in the game, of which the Internet tells me there are 337. I always thought that was an outrageous waste of developer’s time, writing those books, as I assume most players opened and shut them without reading a word. (You have to open them all because a few of them gave you skill points on opening).
The Bethesda game studio has scanned her likeness so they can make her a character in the next game. I hope she lives to see it.
September 25, 2024 — 6:36 pm
Comments: 3
They never came back…
Beg pardon. Didn’t mean to leave you with a mystery yesterday.
The lady who was ambushed does more for the club than all the rest of us put together. She works it like a full time job. She needs the money she gets from selling artwork, but that can’t explain it. Absolutely nobody else would go at it this hard.
However, she does it while firehosing the rest of us with long, rambling emails. The other ladies wake up to a bulging inbox every morning and panic. We’ve lost committee members over it and are in danger of losing more. And she’s a bit of a loose cannon.
It’s a dilemma. I guarantee you, if they push her out, they won’t find volunteers to take over the work she does.
Which brings me to a question. Scheduling volunteers is my least favorite part of my current gig (see above snapshot of my Google calendar). After lockdown the volunteers didn’t come back.
Everyone’s complaining. The National Trust. The National Council of Voluntary Organisations. The Scouts.
I mean, some of them died. You have to hand it to those people. But an awful lot of people got a taste of idleness and decided they like it.
Same in the States?
September 24, 2024 — 5:43 pm
Comments: 8
Here we go!
Came today. I was starting to get worried. I mean, it’s not much use in deep red Tennessee, but you gotta do your part.
I just sat through a four and a half hour meeting of the steering committee of my art club. Oh, my friends, you haven’t lived until you’ve watched two elderly English women set an ambush for a third.
My bottom hurts. I have earned every drop of my G&T tonight.
September 23, 2024 — 6:42 pm
Comments: 7
bracing myself
A snapshot from my garden today. Which made me wonder – can bugs fart? The answer, apparently, is also yes.
Come to sweasel.com for all your burning science questions.
Tomorrow morning – early, if I know the workin’ man – they’re coming to put scaffolding up around the house. Our (500 year old) chimney needs repointing. We know this because if it rains hard enough, our (500 year old) house leaks badly. It doesn’t bear thinking about water that has filtered through 500 years worth of dust, dead bees and rat skeletons.
‘Unhygienic’ really doesn’t seem adequate.
Have a good weekend!
September 20, 2024 — 6:03 pm
Comments: 4
Weird.
This guy’s face screams functional psychotic to me. The long-term nutter has an emaciated, hollowed-out look because eating as a pleasurable activity humans engage in is not for him.
Also, he has a long, long history of minor scrapes with the law, another whackjob characteristic.
But he’s able to run a business and fly around the world (albeit for loony reasons). So reasonably functional.
Not one for conspiracies, but I bet he had a handler. Somebody noticed him, probably in Ukraine, and figured him for an easy mark. One cock-eyed story about saving the world would do it.
He had stolen plates and a gun with the serial number filed off and he was hunkered in the bushes of the golf course even though Trump had no advance plan to golf that day. Big hmmmmm.
Oh, and I know it was justified, but it flips me out that the agents fired into the bushes when they had no idea what was there. I wonder if they were expected to kill him. I wonder if interrogation will get anything out of him.
We will probably never know.
September 16, 2024 — 5:55 pm
Comments: 7
Fun fact
British newspapers report things that happened in British soap operas as news items. You might have noticed this if you frequent sites like the Mail. This confused the hell out of me at first.
What you might not realize is that British soaps are the only ones in the world that are about ordinary, working class people. (I read this; I don’t pretend to be an international authority on soap operas). Everybody else’s soaps are about rich people or actors or doctors and nurses, but local daytime drama is about ordinary mooks doing ordinary stuff.
The explanation I’ve heard is that Brits are intensely private, but still intensely curious about their neighbors, so they make up imaginary neighbors to snoop on.
I was never into the soaps, except by chance I had a period of unemployment after leaving school that exactly coincided with the Luke and Laura era of General Hospital. I mean, it has a Wikipedia article, for pity’s sake. It was just that big.
Have a good weekend!
p.s. speaking of snoops, I regard it as one of television’s greatest injustices that Gladys Kravitz was right!
September 13, 2024 — 6:19 pm
Comments: 4
they said she couldn’t play BLUES on the BAGPIPES…
No, really – that’s the title of the YouTube. She manages it, too.
The YouTube algorithm is a dark mystery to me. I mean, I know I don’t like it. There’s that.
But I have no idea why they recommended this video to me. I don’t really do music, let alone blues or bagpipes. Not necessarily a bad thing to throw something random in my lap. Maybe I’ll find something new to be stupidly fascinated by.
But recently it’s started showing me videos I’ve watched before. Like, in the past week. I know it knows I’ve seen them, because they have a red line across the bottom where the progress bar has gone all the way across.
NOW they’ve been offering me videos I watched (and liked) fifteen years ago. Yes, I realize that means I’ve been visiting this supreme timewaster for a decade and a half. I’m not proud.
I had something raunchy queued up to post until I realized how bad it looked next to yesterday’s non-post.
September 12, 2024 — 7:01 pm
Comments: 4
I don’t post on September 11
I don’t have anything more to say but I can’t just ignore it either, so I take the weasel’s way out.
I don’t care what you discuss in the comment thread, though.
September 11, 2024 — 5:38 pm
Comments: 4
I outted me :(
I hate clothes. I suppose there was a time when I were a lass that I felt differently, but most of my adult life I’d’ve been perfectly happy to wear a nun’s habit every day. Or Zuckerberg’s identical sweatshirts. I don’t care which.
The uniform I’ve landed on since moving here are these fisherman’s smock things. Heavy, come in a variety of colors, lots of useful big pockets. A pair of jeans and a comfy old t-shirt underneath and I just about solve the feeling comfy versus doesn’t look like a hobo equation.
So this morning, I spotted a glob of rain on the satellite headed my way and I thought to myself, “pff! I can outrun that!”
Gentle reader, I could not. I biked as hard as I could and arrived with the whole front half of me soaked to the skin. Fortunately, I get there ages before anyone else and I keep a spare pair of jeans under my desk. I stripped to my t-shirt, changed jeans and put everything on a radiator to sizzle.
The t-shirt I was wearing today? This one.
Oh, dear reader – I try so hard. I do my best to tone down the whole American thing. I never talk politics. I smile politely at the mention of Trump. I never chant U S A! U S A! (they really hate that, by the way). I strictly limit the number of dagnabbits and consarnits per conversation.
Guns! Freedom! Angry looking eagles! Oh, this wouldn’t do at all.
I got away with it. The first person in is terribly old and didn’t seem to notice. By the time I had to go to the corner shop for coffee, my smock was dry enough I could stand it. Not pleasant, but I could stand it.
Why couldn’t I have been wearing a t-shirt with a cat on it or something?
p.s. Deborah asked about Uncle B’s Cereus peruvianus which, when we visited it last, was about to come into flower. I believe the buds just…fell off. I’ll ask if he wants to add anything.
September 9, 2024 — 7:02 pm
Comments: 12