A lot of people have been saying that Hurricane Earl will be an instant replay of Charley, but the current track looks a lot more like a repeat of Mitch.

All weekend I’ve been hearing the sound of loud prop planes here (in Redondo Beach–still getting the house ready to rent). A quick web search reveals that there’s an air show at Hawthorne airport this weekend. At the sound of the most recent one, I went out on the balcony to see what it was. It was a Mitchell bomber, similar to the one in which my father was shot down in Italy (though it may have been a different series–I couldn’t tell at that distance).

There were only two survivors–him and one other, and his crewmate was captured behind the German lines, spending the remainder of the war in a POW camp. My father was the second one out because he was a radio gunner at the waist of the plane, and he came down in Allied territory, breaking his leg on landing. The rest of the crew didn’t have time to bail, or at least to do so and get a chute open. Reportedly, you couldn’t get him in a plane again for many years after that (though he’d gotten over it by the time I was old enough to remember). He’d flown his plane, with his crew, over to Europe (stopping at Ascension Island), but he came home on a troop ship.

It was also the aircraft type that performed the Tokyo raid after Pearl Harbor under Jimmy Doolittle’s command.

It’s only a twin engine plane. The sound of this single one made me wonder how awesome it would have been to hear whole squadrons of B-17s flying over.

Kathy Kinsley, who unexpectedly ended up being very close to the path of the storm, is all right, but she needs some help.

If you don’t want to tip her, hire her to update your web site. She does good work for reasonable rates.

Claudia Cowan is sitting in for Greta Van Susteren tonight on Fox News.

Kathy Kinsley is battening down the hatches in southwest Florida. Looking at the map, it looks like our house in Boca Raton will be OK.

Here’s a fun interview with the very fun (based on my occasional partying with her) and smart Cathy Seipp:

I think people always considered me more of a contrarian than a traditional values conservative. The problem with the L.A. media isn’t that it’s dominated by liberals but that it’s dominated by idiots. Occasionally someone comes along — like Allan Mayer, founding editor of the now-defunct Buzz magazine (and a liberal) — who’s smart enough to hire people with different points of view…

…My mother…told me when I was young that when she was looking for an entry level job after graduating college, she noticed the most interesting, better paying jobs were always under “Men Wanted” instead of “Women Wanted,” which is how jobs used to be advertised. So she just went ahead and applied for the “Men Wanted” jobs and usually got them. And most of the time the men who interviewed her were not outraged that she’d applied but quite nice; they just said it hadn’t occurred to them that a woman might want the job. Which is how it is with most situations, I think; people aren’t usually out to oppress you, they’re just unimaginative.

I loved this:

I don’t mind closely trimmed short beards. But those long, scraggly beards on men are like underarm hair on women. In both cases the tacit message is: “In case you were wondering what my pubic hair looks like, wonder no longer, because now you know.”

She just nailed why I no longer have a beard.

RTWT

Here’s a fun interview with the very fun (based on my occasional partying with her) and smart Cathy Seipp:

I think people always considered me more of a contrarian than a traditional values conservative. The problem with the L.A. media isn’t that it’s dominated by liberals but that it’s dominated by idiots. Occasionally someone comes along — like Allan Mayer, founding editor of the now-defunct Buzz magazine (and a liberal) — who’s smart enough to hire people with different points of view…

…My mother…told me when I was young that when she was looking for an entry level job after graduating college, she noticed the most interesting, better paying jobs were always under “Men Wanted” instead of “Women Wanted,” which is how jobs used to be advertised. So she just went ahead and applied for the “Men Wanted” jobs and usually got them. And most of the time the men who interviewed her were not outraged that she’d applied but quite nice; they just said it hadn’t occurred to them that a woman might want the job. Which is how it is with most situations, I think; people aren’t usually out to oppress you, they’re just unimaginative.

I loved this:

I don’t mind closely trimmed short beards. But those long, scraggly beards on men are like underarm hair on women. In both cases the tacit message is: “In case you were wondering what my pubic hair looks like, wonder no longer, because now you know.”

She just nailed why I no longer have a beard.

RTWT

Here’s a fun interview with the very fun (based on my occasional partying with her) and smart Cathy Seipp:

I think people always considered me more of a contrarian than a traditional values conservative. The problem with the L.A. media isn’t that it’s dominated by liberals but that it’s dominated by idiots. Occasionally someone comes along — like Allan Mayer, founding editor of the now-defunct Buzz magazine (and a liberal) — who’s smart enough to hire people with different points of view…

…My mother…told me when I was young that when she was looking for an entry level job after graduating college, she noticed the most interesting, better paying jobs were always under “Men Wanted” instead of “Women Wanted,” which is how jobs used to be advertised. So she just went ahead and applied for the “Men Wanted” jobs and usually got them. And most of the time the men who interviewed her were not outraged that she’d applied but quite nice; they just said it hadn’t occurred to them that a woman might want the job. Which is how it is with most situations, I think; people aren’t usually out to oppress you, they’re just unimaginative.

I loved this:

I don’t mind closely trimmed short beards. But those long, scraggly beards on men are like underarm hair on women. In both cases the tacit message is: “In case you were wondering what my pubic hair looks like, wonder no longer, because now you know.”

She just nailed why I no longer have a beard.

RTWT

Someone should tell Dari Alexander that Mackinac Island is pronounced “Mack-i-naw,” not “Mack-i-nack.” You can sure tell she’s not a Michigan native.

Laughing Wolf was live blogging incipient tornadoes in northern Alabama.