aeneas

There is a sorority of women who skydive that calls itself "The Pink Mafia." They are basically a loose nationwide affiliation of hot, hardcore, bad-ass, rock-'n'-roll chicks who happen to enjoy flinging themselves out of airplanes. I sense a major crossover demographic factor here. One cannot help but wonder how many Pink Mafia Sisters (PMS) are also Suicide Girls, or at least SG fans and...
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Flying over south Florida at night is an amazing experience visually. There is a narrow strip of luminsecence -- a dense, sparkling grid of development crisscrossed by moving rivers of white headlights and red taillights -- sharply bounded on the east by the blackness of the Atlantic Ocean and on the west by the blackness of the Everglades. I never get tired of it. Still,...
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"People don't complete us. We complete ourselves. If we haven't the power to complete ourselves, the search for love becomes a search for self-annihilation; and then we try to convince ourselves that self-annihilation is love."

-- Erica Jong, from her novel Fear of Flying, chapter 18.

Sometimes I wonder.

Then I recognize the inherent pointlessness and futility of the activity, so I stop.

But then I cannot help but contemplate the greater meaning of the fact that I stopped doing it just because it was pointless and futile, which makes me think about whether something has to have a well-defined and practically useful objective in order to justify it.

Then I...
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"The idea of a Supreme Being who creates a world in which one creature is designed to eat another in order to subsist and then passes a law saying "thou shalt not kill" is so monsterously, immeasurably, bottomlessly absurd that I am at a loss to understand how mankind has entertained or given it house room all this long."

-- Peter De Vries

I'm back from Atlanta. The return ride was cold and wet . . . seven hours of chilly drizzle. I'm ready to buy an electric vest, electric socks and electric gloves.

The job itself was fine, aside from one emergency landing in Macon. (Plus the usual problems with ground couriers. But that's par for the course.)

Conducting interviews and starting a new ground school on...
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Whew! Thursday night I rode straight from work to Tampa and checked into a motel. Friday morning I got up, rode to the airport and went on duty. I flew to Tallahasse and Pensacola, then back to Tallahasse and finally back to Tampa. I went off duty at 11 P.M.

Then I rode back to Orlando! I stopped in Lakeland to eat breakfast at a...
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"The dyslexic agnostic insomniac lies awake at night wondering if there is a dog."

Yesterday a former employee showed up with his six-foot "giraffe" unicycle. Rob brought his 20"-wheel unicycle and I got out my own 24"-wheel unicycle and the three of us rode around in circles in front of the maintenance hangar with airplanes parked everywhere. It was a bizarre and completely unplanned spectacle....
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Ever have one of those days when you drop off a roll of film and as you're driving away suddenly you wonder if maybe it contains photographic evidence which could lead to your arrest, conviction and eventual execution by lethal injection?

No? OK, maybe it's just me.

I was organizing my CDs yesterday morning and I realized that I have four different versions of "Mars, the Bringer of War" from The Planets by Gustav Holst (1874-1934). It's definitely one of my all-time favorite pieces of music.

The first and second are two different performances by the Philadelphia Orchestra, conducted by Eugene Ormandy. (One recording is two seconds longer than the other. I...
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Song Ideas Concocted While Drinking Heavily:

"You say 'hey, I laid the ol' lady,' I say 'I laid the ol' lady, too!'"
(The Dixie Chicks. Say the title really fast. Now imagine it with banjo and fiddle. Yee haw!)

"I ain't that good-lookin'; you ain't all that smart."
(Brad Paisley)

"William Shatner's toupee is but a shadow in the glory of...
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Here I am . . . back at home. 31 hours later. (Uugghh.)

The good news is that I knew I would have a long layover in Fort Meyers. So I had rigged up a bed in the back of the airplane.

First I spread a foam-rubber "egg crate" pad across the bare aluminum deck of cargo compartments A and B. Then I laid three...
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