You know how it goes. An Elephant flaps it's ears in Africa & a butterfly sneezes which causes a stampede of anteaters that changes the weather pattern that causes a storm in Florida & inspires Walt Disney to write a racist song about crows.
No, wait a minute. I think I got that wrong.
A butterfly flaps its wings in Africa which causes an elephant to fly with its ears which then causes a stampede which changes the weather pattern which makes a storm that makes you late for work.
Something like that.
History changes over very little things. Sometimes it changes because a butterfly flaps its wings & sometimes it just changes because a cow gets machine gunned.
What I guess I'm trying to say is that I have wonderful eyes. My eyes are my best feature. They are the only part of my body that actually works like they are supposed to. Well, they actually work better than they are supposed to. They work so well that I live in an HD world.
And that is sort of leading us to the point of this post.
I have wonderful eye. They are better than 20/20 & they are blue.
No, this has nothing to do with either John Crichton, Ben Browder, or the greatest Science-Fiction show ever created...with muppets.
I actually have 20/10. The last time I was tested I had 20/15, but in defense of my eyes, the last vision test I had only went to 20/15...& even after that I still didn't get the job.
I've had a heck of a lot of vision tests because of my whole job-hunting circumstance. Jobs today want a background test, a credit test, a drug test, a vision test, a hearing test, & a physical & even after all of that, they still pick other candidates.
So it goes.
Anyway, I have 20/10 & the subject of this post has 20/10 as well, or he did, before he became ancient. Now I don't know what he tests at.
His name is Charles Elwood "Chuck" Yeager & once upon a time he machine-gunned a cow & that sort of changed history.
You see, once upon a time there was also this thing called the "Cold War," & a lot of it was skullduggery & slight of hand & covert operations & brutal coups & prolonged wars in Southeast Asia & Afghanistan, but some of it was also science.
There were a lot of races, the race to make it to the moon & get the first man into space are probably the most famous & the US one the man on the moon race but lost the space race.
We also won the race to break the sound barrier.
Once upon a time there was a demon in the sky
No, that's Jesus. Once upon a time there was a DEMON that lived in the sky and that demon was called the sound barrier.
The race to break the sound barrier was sort of the start of the space race.
In 1923 Chuck was born & he was raised on a farm in West Virginia & when he was a little kid he wanted to be a soldier, in the army. He wanted to be a soldier so bad that when he was a teenager he went to Indiana and joined the Citizens Military Training Camp with the hopes of becoming an army guy.
Things were going pretty well, until, one day, when he was training on a machine gun, he saw a cow & thought that a cow would make a much more interesting target than shooting at nothing.
The army doesn't like it when you kill cows, especially when you kill them with a machine gun & the cow belongs to a private citizen & the army gets stuck paying the price of the machine gunned cow.
So they kicked Chuck out.
This was one of those hinges in history that people in the history department love to debate. There is actually a book out there that every history major has read & absolutely none of us have admitted to. It is called Guns of The South by Harry Turtledove.
It's really not very good, but it's super popular because it deals with what would have happened if the Confederate soldiers had machine guns & modern weapons. Everyone in every history department in the world loves it because they all love to play the "What if" game, even if that game is as ridiculous as The Guns of the South.
Do yourself a favor & don't read it. 50 Shades was better & that is sort of a "What if" in real life.
In this case, "what if Chuck Yeager never killed a cow?"
If Chuck Yeager never killed a cow, the world might be different.
Because this really big war happened & it was called World War II & if Chuck had not killed the cow he would have been a soldier, but because he killed a cow he got kicked out of the army before World War II & rejoined this time in the Army Air Force.
He was a little guy, little enough to have a lot of space in a cockpit & he had 20/10 vision & great reflexes so they made him a pilot.
If he never killed the cow, he would have been in the infantry.
He actually started as a mechanic, he never went to college & he was still really young when World War II started, so they let him linger away in the hangers. But thanks to World War II, lots of people died & the USAAF was forced to change it's recruiting standards.
Chuck had 20/10 & that sealed the deal. 20/10 is great if you are a pilot.
With 20/10, you can watch the red stitching on a baseball in flight.
I know this for a fact, I can follow the red stitches on a baseball as it blows straight past me to the catcher.
I am going to take a leap of faith & assume that Chuck & everyone else on earth is better at baseball than I am.
Moving on....
They sent Chuck to England, they gave him a P-51 Mustang that he named Glamorous Glennis & they set him loose on the Nazis.
He named it after his friend Glennis Faye Dickhouse & Chuck & Glennis kicked some serious Nazi ass...for exactly seven missions.
On mission number eight, he was shot down over Spain & sort of had to evade the Spanish fascists & & then the Nazis, with a wounded buddy, & make his way back to England.
The thing is, to make his way back, he had to do a lot of daring-do & that meant making contact with the Spanish & French underground while he was dodging the Nazi's & trying to act like a European with a thick southern accent. And it was even harder while dragging a clearly wounded American over the Pyrenees.
So when he returned to his post they grounded him.
Yeager spent a lot of time with the underground &, being Chuck, he spent a lot of time providing aid to the underground in their operations. That meant exposure to how they operated & that meant that, if he got shot down again, or became a POW in any way, he would risk exposure.
This wasn't a policy that Chuck could support, so he went to Dwight & said.
And then Ike said:
And then Chuck said:
And then Ike's bosses said:
And then Chuck said:
And then he went to his wing-man & said:
And then the war was over, giving old Chuck 11.5 official victories & a hand full more when he sneaked up when he was still technically grounded for helping the French Resistance after he got shot down & carried a wounded buddy over the Pyrenees.
Today, people go there because it's a less famous Area 51 & they are looking for aliens & the Libertarians are looking for Lizard Aliens that are Jewish & secretly controlling the world & the history channel is looking for Ancient Aliens that gave us all the technology we were too dumb to think of on our own...like fire & the wheel.
Chuck went there, because the air force sent him there to be a test pilot.
And that was a pretty brass thing, because at the time, the sound barrier was killing some of our best pilots. It was that demon in the sky & the engineers weren't exactly sure what the sound barrier was, but they were pretty certain that it looked exactly like this:
At least that's what their best scientific guess was.
So they went to the best private pilot in the world & gave him the chance to become the fastest man on earth. His name was "Slick" Goodlin & he said:
And that was back in 1947, for those of you that don't know how 1947 dollars work it's roughly equal to $1,625,923.25 per-flight today.
That was a pricy series of flights.
But Chuck Yeager was in the bar when the conversation with slick went down. He listened to Slick's demand & then said:
And they looked at Slick, a private pilot, who was demanding the 2014 price of $1,625,923.25 a flight, & then they looked at Chuck Yeager, a public pilot that was getting paid the 2014 price of $270.98 a month & said:
By then, Chuck Yeager had married his old sweetheart Glennis Faye Dickhouse & made her change her name to Glennis Faye Yeager, which was a really good change. And they liked to play a little cowboys & Indians game & two days before he was slated to break the sound barrier, he fell off his horse & broke his ribs instead.
But he opted not to tell anyone because then they would ground him again & he'd miss his date with destiny. So he told his wife & his friend Jack Ridley & they took him to a vet outside of the base & stitched him up a little, & then rigged a way for him to close the cockpit door without having to use his left hand...his right hand...his hurt hand.
Jack loaned him some Beeman's the official lucky gum of test pilots & atomic weapons testers at Trinity & they were off.
Well, Chuck was off & like all his other planes, he named the X-1 Glamorous Glennis after his old friend & current wife.
On 14 October 1947, Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier at mack 1.07 at an altitude of 45,000 feet for $25 dollars a month & with broken ribs in a plane he named after his wife...again.
And that really pissed off Slick who was hoping to get paid $150,000 dollars for multiple flights to break the sound barrier after multiple tries at an outstanding price.
And now there is a statue of Chuck at Edwards Air Force base & he still holds the record for the highest ground to air flight, almost taking his jet from ground to space before the engines gave out.
And it was all because he killed a cow with a machine gun. Had it not been for that, he would have been in the infantry, like he always wanted to.
And then NASA came to Edwards & said:
And then everyone at Poncho;s bar said:
And then NASA said:
And they said:
So NASA settled for what it could get & not the absolute best.
And then Jeff Goldblum came running into the Oval Office & shouted:
And that's how we won the sound barrier race & lost the race to space.
I'll leave you with this:
A butterfly flaps its wings in Africa which causes an elephant to fly with its ears which then causes a stampede which changes the weather pattern which makes a storm that makes you late for work.
Something like that.
History changes over very little things. Sometimes it changes because a butterfly flaps its wings & sometimes it just changes because a cow gets machine gunned.
And that is sort of leading us to the point of this post.
I have wonderful eye. They are better than 20/20 & they are blue.
I actually have 20/10. The last time I was tested I had 20/15, but in defense of my eyes, the last vision test I had only went to 20/15...& even after that I still didn't get the job.
I've had a heck of a lot of vision tests because of my whole job-hunting circumstance. Jobs today want a background test, a credit test, a drug test, a vision test, a hearing test, & a physical & even after all of that, they still pick other candidates.
So it goes.
Anyway, I have 20/10 & the subject of this post has 20/10 as well, or he did, before he became ancient. Now I don't know what he tests at.
You see, once upon a time there was also this thing called the "Cold War," & a lot of it was skullduggery & slight of hand & covert operations & brutal coups & prolonged wars in Southeast Asia & Afghanistan, but some of it was also science.
There were a lot of races, the race to make it to the moon & get the first man into space are probably the most famous & the US one the man on the moon race but lost the space race.
We also won the race to break the sound barrier.
Once upon a time there was a demon in the sky
In 1923 Chuck was born & he was raised on a farm in West Virginia & when he was a little kid he wanted to be a soldier, in the army. He wanted to be a soldier so bad that when he was a teenager he went to Indiana and joined the Citizens Military Training Camp with the hopes of becoming an army guy.
Things were going pretty well, until, one day, when he was training on a machine gun, he saw a cow & thought that a cow would make a much more interesting target than shooting at nothing.
So they kicked Chuck out.
This was one of those hinges in history that people in the history department love to debate. There is actually a book out there that every history major has read & absolutely none of us have admitted to. It is called Guns of The South by Harry Turtledove.
Do yourself a favor & don't read it. 50 Shades was better & that is sort of a "What if" in real life.
What if horrible fan fiction became a best seller?
In this case, "what if Chuck Yeager never killed a cow?"
If Chuck Yeager never killed a cow, the world might be different.
Because this really big war happened & it was called World War II & if Chuck had not killed the cow he would have been a soldier, but because he killed a cow he got kicked out of the army before World War II & rejoined this time in the Army Air Force.
He was a little guy, little enough to have a lot of space in a cockpit & he had 20/10 vision & great reflexes so they made him a pilot.
If he never killed the cow, he would have been in the infantry.
Chuck had 20/10 & that sealed the deal. 20/10 is great if you are a pilot.
With 20/10, you can watch the red stitching on a baseball in flight.
I am going to take a leap of faith & assume that Chuck & everyone else on earth is better at baseball than I am.
Moving on....
They sent Chuck to England, they gave him a P-51 Mustang that he named Glamorous Glennis & they set him loose on the Nazis.
On mission number eight, he was shot down over Spain & sort of had to evade the Spanish fascists & & then the Nazis, with a wounded buddy, & make his way back to England.
The thing is, to make his way back, he had to do a lot of daring-do & that meant making contact with the Spanish & French underground while he was dodging the Nazi's & trying to act like a European with a thick southern accent. And it was even harder while dragging a clearly wounded American over the Pyrenees.
So when he returned to his post they grounded him.
Yeager spent a lot of time with the underground &, being Chuck, he spent a lot of time providing aid to the underground in their operations. That meant exposure to how they operated & that meant that, if he got shot down again, or became a POW in any way, he would risk exposure.
This wasn't a policy that Chuck could support, so he went to Dwight & said.
"Sir! Please, please, please, please, give me my wings back, with sugar on top & a cherry. Sir!
"Listen, bitch, I am the supreme allied commander, you have to do everything I say. I am God of the war in Europe...so let me ask the politicians that are really running the show back in Washington."
"Hi guys, what's up, peace. Can Chuck please fly again with sugar on top & a cherry?"
"Yeah, Okay."
And then Ike said:
"Yeah, okay."
"I feel the need, the need for speed."
And then he went to his wing-man & said:
"Let's play homoerotic volleyball with two guys we pathologically hate."
And then Chuck said:
"No, we're fighting a war, we have to get back to work."
And that made Chuck so happy that he shot down five enemies in a single mission. And then he shot down one of the first jets, a Messerschmitt Me 262, scoring the United States one of its very first air-to-air victories over a jet.
But that wasn't the end of Chuck Yeager, shortly after World War II, his father, an F15 pilot, was shot down over Iran.
"NOOOOOOO!!!!!!!"
And then Louis Gossett Jr. had to teach him how to fly so he could illegally sneak into Iranian airspace, blow up a whole bunch of buildings & single-handedly take out the entire Iranian air force all by his onesie, rescue his father & making it back to the United States without starting a war.
And then Louis Gossett Jr. said.
"I taught the boy everything he knows."
And we all thanked God that it was a true story & not a movie because it would have made an absolutely shit movie that you might have loved when you were six & an idiot.
I'm joking, that is not at all what happened.
In real life he went to Edwards Air Force Base which, today is not really much of anything & back then it wasn't really much of anything. In fact, back then it was really even less of anything, trust me, it was one of the myriad of bases my mother grew up on & all she could remember of it were the sonic booms & emptiness.
That's not why Chuck Yeager went there.
And that was a pretty brass thing, because at the time, the sound barrier was killing some of our best pilots. It was that demon in the sky & the engineers weren't exactly sure what the sound barrier was, but they were pretty certain that it looked exactly like this:
So they went to the best private pilot in the world & gave him the chance to become the fastest man on earth. His name was "Slick" Goodlin & he said:
"I'm a private pilot, I'll break that sound barrier for $150,000 per flight & not a penny less."
And that was back in 1947, for those of you that don't know how 1947 dollars work it's roughly equal to $1,625,923.25 per-flight today.
But Chuck Yeager was in the bar when the conversation with slick went down. He listened to Slick's demand & then said:
"The air force is paying me $25 a month. I'll break it for you."
"We'll give Chuck a try first. If he dies, we'll pay you Edward's entire yearly budget."
By then, Chuck Yeager had married his old sweetheart Glennis Faye Dickhouse & made her change her name to Glennis Faye Yeager, which was a really good change. And they liked to play a little cowboys & Indians game & two days before he was slated to break the sound barrier, he fell off his horse & broke his ribs instead.
On 14 October 1947, Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier at mack 1.07 at an altitude of 45,000 feet for $25 dollars a month & with broken ribs in a plane he named after his wife...again.
And now there is a statue of Chuck at Edwards Air Force base & he still holds the record for the highest ground to air flight, almost taking his jet from ground to space before the engines gave out.
And then NASA came to Edwards & said:
"We are looking for the best pilots in the world to be our Mercury Seven Astronauts & represent the seven planets of Mercury so we can beat the Russians into outer space."
And then everyone at Poncho;s bar said:
"Chuck Yeager is right over there."
And then NASA said:
"Okay, we're looking for the best college educated pilots, not the best pilots."
And they said:
"Gus Grissom is right over there."
So NASA settled for what it could get & not the absolute best.
"His name is Yuri Gagarin!"
And that's how we won the sound barrier race & lost the race to space.
No comments:
Post a Comment