Pearl Harbor Day Forum
Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor? Hell no!
Steven L. Taylor
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Saturday, December 7, 2024
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35 comments
About Steven L. Taylor
Steven L. Taylor is a Professor Emeritus of Political Science and former College of Arts and Sciences Dean. His main areas of expertise include parties, elections, and the institutional design of democracies. His most recent book is the co-authored
A Different Democracy: American Government in a 31-Country Perspective. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas and his BA from the University of California, Irvine. He has been blogging since 2003 (originally at the now defunct Poliblog).
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Paul Krugman has announced he is leaving the NYT.
https://bsky.app/profile/pkrugman.bsky.social/post/3lcngxcsm6k2s
The sendoff he mentions is here: https://www.nytco.com/press/paul-krugman-retires-as-times-columnist/
Just read the sub heading. Thanks for the morning laugh.
Ok the subtitle is a joke. I have never watched Animal House.
Yesterday I wrote a long post about my parent’s marriages etc. I forgot an important factoid.
Mystery woman Tee was with my father when he died. Dad had been put in hospice two days earlier. I wasn’t there because I had outpatient surgery for a possible skin cancer that day. Multiple relatives told me to keep the appointment. I was going to visit Dad after Leonita got off from work but he died before that happened.
Dad, like my mother, left strict funeral instructions. Which included a short wake and only a open coffin viewing for family members. My Uncle Paul or Uncle Bobby suggested Tee be allowed to be at the viewing also. I was Dad’s executor and I said yes. I wonder if my Uncles knew more about her but both of them are dead now.
I have tried doing an internet search for Tee but not knowing her exact name isn’t helpful. Her last name may have be McLauglin or MacLaughlin or something like that but it is still a needle in a haystack search.
@Bill Jempty: Have you ever done a genealogy DNA test, Bill? It might help with your search for Tee.
I just read about the “hawk tuah”coin. Which led me to the “hawk tuah” girl story.
This is what you get when Trump and anyone named Kardashian set the cultural standard.
Dear wife and I may be going to India either late January or early February. India isn’t on our bucket lists but filming on the second of my books to be made into a movie will be beginning there in January. We’ve been invited to visit the set all expense paid and a cameo appearance for me is planned but I don’t know how with the way the script is written. It passes a fair resemblance to my book but there was only character who I’d remotely fit the description of and that one has been written out the last time I saw the script.
If I go to India, I will probably do some book signings and sight seeing. Of Amazon’s 12 KDP market places, India earned me more royalties than all but the US, UK, and Canada Amazons when I was still self=publishing.
Tom finished that world war ii book we’re co-writing. Now it is up to me to finish it.
Just a thought. If Biden signed pre-emptive pardons for people, do you expect Trump and minion to respect them or still try prosecuting? Another thing, what charges is Trump going to make against these people? It is going to have to go before a judge and a judge will call a hearing/or ask what evidence there is for charges? Wouldn’t Biden and Harris use the same USSC ruling on preidential immunity that supposedly protects Trump? Just some thoughts. I’m not a legal expert.
Anyone want to hear about how my 1962 baseball season replay is going? I didn’t think so……
When the Germans Bombed Pearl Harbor short video
@Jax:
No I haven’t. I’ll put it on my projects list for 2025.
@Kathy: I wonder if you know this little aviation movies bit of trivia. You seem very interested in all things aviation.
1975 disaster movie Airport 1975 featured a mid-air collision between aircraft whose pilots were played by Efram Zimbalist Jr. and Dana Andrews. Zimbalist’s character lived by Andrews character didn’t.
Spin the clock back 15 years to a movie The Crowded Sky where there is another mid-air collision featuring planes piloted by the same actors. That time around Andrews survived but Zimbalist didn’t.
@Bill Jempty: Confession: I haven’t either. But have long been aware of that line.
@Bill Jempty:
I’d no idea.
I remember having watched all the Airport movies at one time or another. Looking back, they are soooooooooo bad 🙂
At the time I did like them. But you can’t learn about air accident investigation and take them seriously. The parody of them, Airplane!, is a lot better.
With this scene John Landis became a visionary when he made Animal House.
Set in 1962 and released in 1978 how could Landis possibly have known that he was predicting the future?
@Kathy:
The last 3 Airport movies were bad but I am kind of fond of the original. Helen Hayes steals the movie as the little old lady stowaway Ada Quonset. I read Haley’s book in the 1970’s. It is pulp fiction much like Jaws and The Godfather. None of the three were very good books but all three were made into hit movies.
One of my books opens with a depiction of a passenger on Korean Air 801. That book of mine , the crash sets up the rest of the story, isn’t a particularly good effort of mine. I did however spin off another book from it. That one is my best seller.
At Balloon Juice OzarkHillbilly and His Beloved 4-Footed Friends
@Kathy:
Did you have to concentrate before writing that or are you too busy with a sale at Penney’s to answer? I’m sure you don’t speak jive or sniff glue.
You’re just trying to Stay Alive, right?
@Bill Jempty:
“Oh, stewardess? I speak jive.”
@Kathy: For a real gem of god awful airport operations storylines, watch Die Hard II: Die Harder. It’s almost hilariously bad, just total nonsense.
The synopsis: snowstorm around DC, terrorists take over the radios at DCA and force planes to hold until they’re low on fuel. They turn off the runway lights and – and I couldn’t stop laughing at this because of the physical construction of the device – move the ILS (precision nav back then) glide slope so planes will land short of the runway. Just comically wrong in every way.
(For those unfamiliar with the ILS glideslope, it’s based on following the intersection of 2 fixed-angle beams generated by dishes adjacent to the runway, so moving it beyond the end of the runway would require physically moving the transmitters. There is an equivalent pair transmitted from the far end of the runway that intersects on the runway centerline, so you follow both intersections to align for landing) (Modern “precision” approaches may be ILS, but they are more often GPS, including GPS-based glideslope using local signal enhancement, since GPS is notoriously bad at altitude precision. The FAA does not technically consider these “precision approaches”, for Reasons.)
The holes in this plot are so large you could drive the entire 747 fleet through them.
@Kathy:
Have you seen Zero Hour? It’s the movie that they effectively remade when filming Airplane!, except it is entirely serious.
It is probably awful if you haven’t seen Airplane! enough times to anticipate all the jokes, but if you have… it’s all set up and anticipation for punchlines that never come, that tension builds, and it is funny in a way that I’ve never experienced elsewhere.
@Bill Jempty:
That one was the one with an actually plausible scenario. But it’s plain that a focus on the technical aspects of flight and getting a stuck jet off the runway, was too dry a subject for a whole movie. So the plot adds in stowaways and love affairs to make it interesting.
To be fair, a real life incident like that would not have rated more than 40 minutes in a Mentour Pilot recreation. hardly feature movie length.
@gVOR10:
broken link
@Sleeping Dog:
found it
https://balloon-juice.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/balloon-juice-2025-A6.png
@Sleeping Dog: That’s not it, although it has a picture of Ozark with a dog. I linked to a long story by Ozark with a handful of pics of Ozarks’s dogs. It’s now missing from the site. Or I was hallucinating. Very detailed for an hallucination. ???
@ptfe:
Like, pilots have a lot of discretion. Largely because they are in the cockpit flying the plane, and can’t be reached physically. No sane pilot would fail to divert when they realized fuel would become an issue.
@Gustopher:
I’ve seen a few clips here and there, but am not interested enough to see it.
@Gustopher: Trivia I stumbled across in WIKI. Zero Hour was adapted from a 1956 CBC television live play called Flight Into Danger. It starred a young, James Doohan, Scotty.
When I saw Airplane! I remembered as a kid reading the serious version of the plotline as a novel. But none of these WIKI pages mention such a novel. The TV play was written by one Arthur Hailey, who has a WIKI page that lists a 1958 novel, presumably expanded from the play.
@Mister Bluster:
Yes, and this is what people are talking about when they mention the “Otter defense”.
Some movies become necessary to see simply because they have scenes which enter the general culture and discourses. Memes, if you will. Animal House has achieved this exalted status which it shares with Monty Python’s Holy Grail, for one.
Interesting aspect of this phenomena is both movies were made with the absolute minimum resources. Oddly akin in that Monty Python could not afford horses, and the highest paid actor by far in Animal House was Niedermeyer’s horse.
Pilots, generally speaking, revere a couple movies. The original Flight of the Phoenix and Island In The Sky. The latter one is not of the quality of Phoenix, but is a pretty accurate account of a true incident and covered in Gann’s autobiography Fate Is The Hunter. The movie made under that name has no relation to the book, btw, and is a total POS.
Honorable mentions: Blue Max, The Great Waldo Pepper, BBC’s A Piece Of Cake, but these are fighter-pilot/barnstormer tales. The Tom Cruise movies are too unrealistic to make this list. Everybody likes to see the wonderful aerial cinematography but those stories do not jibe enough with reality.
I think I’ll re-watch Airplane! tonight.
@dazedandconfused: I agree with you about the Tom Cruise movies. the last Top Gun was so silly I gave up halfway through. My favorite aviation movie is “the Bridges at Toko Ri”. It not only had realistic flying sequences, but it was also a great story.
@a country lawyer: Let me second that. A great story and a realistic story.
The Navy heavily supported the movie. They filmed aboard ship and in 1954 the only way to get realistic flying sequences with F9Fs was to fly F9Fs. Surprises me, as I take the movie to be anti-war.
@CSK:
Good luck, we’re all counting on you
@Stormy Dragon:
😀
@dazedandconfused:..Animal House has achieved this exalted status…
Right after Animal House came out one of the bars in Sleepytown had a Toga Party. It was a sight to see hundreds of college students wearing togas, mostly white bed sheets, lined up on the sidewalk waiting to get in!
@gVOR10: Those were f9f Panthers. I flew the swept wing Cougar in the training command back in the late 60’s. Grumman made great aircraft.
@a country lawyer: That’s a good flick too. I strongly recommend A Piece of Cake for anyone that likes it. Incredible footage, they had a lot of Spitfires still flying in 1988 and they did not spare them. The pilots? “Warts and all”, as it should be.
In the writing end there are two books which all pilots love: Ernie Gann’s Fate is the Hunter and Saint-Exupery’s Night Flight. Gann captures the tension of the cockpit, St. Ex does a better job in capturing the wonder and the beauty. I wonder if anyone who has not had a load of ice over mountains or barely managed to break out on top of the dark turbulence of a rain squall into a brilliant moonlit night with castles of cumulus all around will fully appreciate and grasp St. Ex though. He waxes a bit too poetic at times.