did you eat at the national chains for convenience/time or familiarity?

Nice TR. Gallagher Steakhouse is one of my favorites. Have had several bday dinners there. I agree it's pricey, but it's got a pretty great feel to it, and the food is generally top-notch. Their meat room is impressive and worth the price of admission, imo.

Did you go to Sbarro for a New York slice?

Glad you had a great trip, Prairiebreeze!!

The Sbarro in Times Square was shut down. Looked like it had been for a while. Sucks cuz I kinda wanted to do that.

It was because we got time crunched and was in the path to our evening location.

I got a a 5th or 6 gen ipod off ebay which can't have it's ios updated to a newer version just so that I can use my live hud and tracking apps without ever fearing I would lose them to an upgrade like happened with my phone.

This of course results in me endlessly hearing the "is this an ipod? I haven't seen those in a while" question at the tables.

But I think you re in luck and the iphone you got has the same feature. Just make sure it can't get upgraded above ios 12 IIRC.

Why did you make that call? Because of the bet size? Because otherwise, you re blocking his busted draws.Or was it some other tell about villain?

That sounds fortuitous to me. I could be wrong, but I think bombing Germany was more dangerous than bombing Japan.

I never did figure out how to port over the long-since-unsupported PokerJournal, and I'm far too cheap to pay a subscription service for the new stat tracking apps / their importing features, so I'm stuck with my Excel spreadsheet for the foreseeable future.

Also can't for the life of me seem to include an android in a group message chat in my 5s (something my previous 4 could do), sigh.

GifyouwantmeI'llbein1987anddoingjustfine,thanksG

New itunes version don't allow porting apps from your computer to your phone, but if you have an old backup of your phone, you can download an old version of itunes (don't remember which, you have to google), find the backed up version of pokerjournal and copy it into your phone (as long as pokerjournal is compatible with the ios version your iphone has).

Because MadSkillz

he never spoke about the war, remember once while visiting him I was hanging out in the living room and he was reading a book, he said it was the first time in his life he ever read or saw anything about the war that even remotely captures it

like the idiot 12 year old or whatever i would have been at the time, i didn't ask any follow up questions because i would have loved to have read the book - even scoured all the books on his shelves when i got back to usa#1 to look for anything that had anything to do with the pacific and didn't find anything

what he did speak about the war, was the basecamp stuff, how they'd show up at some island inhabited from people from the stone age and within a week all of them quit doing everything because you could get easier meals just taking what the army threw away after each meal and you no longer needed to thatch a roof because soon enough the military would toss some sheet metal away and you could use it - how they'd hire locals as house boys to clean their barracks etc, how the only time he ever fired a gun was while going hunting on the islands for boar in between sorties

never got shot down been hit plenty of times - i only know this because once he ran into a vet at something and the vet really wanted to trade stories, my grandfather had zero interest (never did any reunions or anything) as he was a bomber pilot in the pacific as well and he said he got shot up and shot down and my grandfather only responded that he got shot up plenty but lucky enough to never been shot down - think he may have lost some crew here or there in those situations hence why never wanted to talk about it

the one thing he ever told me about the war (shared it a few times here at 2p2 i think) was they'd just taken a new island/airstrip and the right before the Japanese fled, they killed all the locals and put their heads on stakes at the airstrip


but yeah, without knowing any details, I'd assume it was a lot safer to be a pilot in the pacific, japan's airforce was pretty much knocked out the game early and they couldn't replace it and had no access to fuel as we put that under embargo (huge reason why they hit us at pearl harbor was the oil embargo we put on them unless they relinquished all the land they had taken)

the entire reason for kamikaze was simple, they had a bunch of training planes and poorly trained pilots - even if they built up new planes, they didn't have the fuel and time to spend training those new pilots - but as 9/11 showed us, it didn't require a nice plane, endless fuel, or highly trained pilots in order to crash a plane into an aircraft carrier - even with using those "smart bombs" they still overwhelmingly failed - very few actually hit the target as they were shot down or even actually missed


so yeah, with minimal fighter defence and no worries about flak/aa guns for majority of the voyage over open water, i imagine the survival rate was significantly higher

not to mention down time you're living in paradise instead of some barracks in England

I do hope this is irony. Though I'm tempted to agree with critics who say the best NY pizza is in Jersey. Damn near lived of Basile's, getting off work, the two months I did there. Razza's pretty damned good too.

Bummed to read about the marital strife from everyone else.

Query: was he primarily in the SW Pacific or Central Pacific with 20th Air Force? "Touched With Fire..." is an excellent history of the Allies in the SW Pacific Theater, and its unique challenges. 20th, of course, had a really bad time until LeMay revamped their procedures. Hell of a way to learn about the Jet Stream.

Europe for awhile in the USAAF, was rough. 50/50 chance of making it through a 25 mission tour is grim.

I was thinking, if there was ever a need for the pen's favorite clip.

that's a thing?
I don't think we were in bombing range of Japan until right near the end of the war. That was the point of Okinawa. OTOH in Europe we tried daylight bombings without escorts, at least in the beginning.

My grandad flew bombers in WWII. Our good friend Sir Garick wrote and published an article from a diary of his. It's great.

Link?

Did you know that the US Air Force in the Pacific gave birth to numerous cargo cults? As in, a plane would drop a chute with supplies by accident in some random island in which a remote tribe lived and that was such a huge event for them that they would start elaborate rituals in order to make the gods drop more cargo from the skies.

yeah the cargo cults wiki gets shared in the interesting wiki chapter occasionally

Here. Page 25

In software engineering, there is a phrase that originates from this event. When someone is "cargo cult"-ing, they've copied code that they don't understand.

You know that term is taboo for being un-woke?


In law we call that "Tuesday."

One benefit of being carless is swapping the scenery of globogym for the local park. I got back to the old covid-era pullup-branch and somehow did a set of 10 reps! And only the last two needed institutionalize-him levels of twitching.

Once you start living in a van you’ll need the globogym for showers