History major, Veteran of US Army, Realtor, curious of pholosophy
Phoenix Arizona
Joined February 2014
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Lynn Ashton retweeted
49 years ago today, one of the greatest outtakes of all time.
Tim Conway's elephant story. 😂😂
Lynn Ashton retweeted
The Brophy swimming and diving team won its third consecutive state championship and set a state record with its 45th title in school history, dominating at Skyline Aquatic Center. The Broncos won six events and recorded 22 top-10 finishes.
Story: brophyprep.org/swimming-and-…
Lynn Ashton retweeted
In the winter of 1939, the Soviet Union invaded Finland.
The Soviets had one of the largest armies on Earth. Finland had a few hundred thousand men, not much artillery, and almost no tanks.
What Finland had was snow, forests, and a 5 foot 3 inch farmer named Simo Häyhä.
Before the war, Häyhä was a quiet man from a small village near the Soviet border. He farmed. He hunted. He'd served his required time in the army and joined Finland's civil guard, where he became known as a crack shot in shooting competitions.
When the Soviets crossed the border in November 1939, he was sent to the front near the Kollaa River.
The temperatures there dropped to 20, 30, even 40 degrees below zero. Days were short. Most of the light was gone by mid afternoon.
Häyhä thrived in it.
He dressed completely in white so he disappeared into the snow. He'd head out before dawn with a little food and stay out all day, lying motionless in the cold, waiting.
He used an old Finnish version of the Mosin-Nagant rifle. With iron sights. No scope.
That was on purpose. A scope's glass could catch the sunlight and give away his position. It also meant he had to raise his head higher to aim, and in freezing weather the glass could fog up. Iron sights let him stay lower and stay hidden.
He packed snow in front of his position so the muzzle blast wouldn't kick up powder and reveal him. He reportedly kept snow in his mouth so his breath wouldn't steam in the cold air.
The Soviet soldiers learned to fear that stretch of forest. Finnish propaganda gave him a nickname that stuck.
The White Death.
In roughly 100 days, Häyhä was credited with killing around 500 Soviet soldiers with his rifle. Some counts are higher if you include his submachine gun. Historians argue about the exact number, but even the conservative estimates put him at the top of every list of snipers ever recorded.
The Soviets tried everything to get him. Counter snipers. Artillery barrages on the areas where they thought he was hiding.
On March 6, 1940, they finally got him. A Soviet bullet hit him in the face, shattering his jaw.
Fellow soldiers who found him said half his face was missing. He was carried off unconscious.
He woke up a week later, on March 13, 1940.
The day the war ended.
He spent years recovering and needed multiple surgeries. But he lived. Finland's commander, Marshal Mannerheim, promoted him straight from corporal to second lieutenant.
After the war, he went back to a quiet life. He hunted, bred dogs, and lived near the Russian border for the rest of his life.
When asked late in life how he became such a good shot, he gave a one word answer.
"Practice."
When asked if he regretted the killing, he said he did what he was told to do, as well as he could.
He died in 2002 at the age of 96.
Lynn Ashton retweeted
I mean, you're not wrong. congress really hasnt done shit these past 2 years.
I just want to cry for my beautiful state of Texas and my country.
Lynn Ashton retweeted
She was a movie star. He was building one of the most respected careers in Hollywood. Then they chose a different kind of life.
Phoebe Cates and Kevin Kline met in 1983 when she auditioned for The Big Chill. She didn’t get the part. She got something better: the man she’d marry six years later. By then she was already famous from Fast Times at Ridgemont High and Gremlins. He was on his way to an Oscar for A Fish Called Wanda.
They married in New York in 1989 and had two kids, Owen and Greta. Instead of both chasing the spotlight at full speed, they made a quiet rule: one parent stayed available. Cates eventually stepped back from acting almost entirely. Kline kept working—in film, theater, and television—but never at the expense of being present at home. They simply took turns.
That’s why the “then and now” photo hits differently. The young woman on the left was everywhere. The woman on the right largely disappeared from public view—not because Hollywood forgot her, but because she decided family mattered more than being seen.
More than 35 years later, they’re still together, still choosing the same rhythm.
Fame fades. The life they built didn’t. Sometimes the most interesting Hollywood story is the one where someone walks away and never looks back. ❤️
🤖 Made with AI
Lynn Ashton retweeted
HEARTWARMING: When #Bucs WR Tez Johnson introduced his teammate Emeka Egbuka to his parents Mr. and Mrs. Nix.
Such a wholesome moment between teammates and family.
This is really cool to watch.
❤️❤️❤️
Lynn Ashton retweeted
November 3, 1943. A huge force of American bombers, around five hundred of them, attacks the German naval port of Wilhelmshaven, and they do it in a new way: bombing through solid cloud, aiming by radar, unable to see the ground at all. It marks a significant step in the air war, the beginning of all-weather bombing, and it comes at a moment when the Americans badly needed a way to keep flying after the disaster at Schweinfurt.
I told you about Black Thursday, the second Schweinfurt raid in October, when the unescorted bombers were slaughtered and the deep daylight campaign was brought to a halt. One of the problems crippling the American effort was the weather. Northern Europe is cloudy for much of the year, and the American doctrine of precise daylight bombing depended on the bombardier being able to see the target through his optical bombsight. When cloud covered the ground, which was most of the time, the bombers often could not attack at all, and the campaign stalled for weeks on end waiting for clear skies.
The answer was radar. The Americans had begun equipping some of their bombers with a ground-mapping radar set, which the crews nicknamed "Mickey." It painted a crude radar picture of the ground below, showing the outline of coastlines, rivers, and cities, even through total cloud cover. With it, a specially trained crew could find a target and aim the bombs by radar when the eye could see nothing but white. These radar-equipped planes would lead the formation, and when they dropped, the whole force dropped with them.
The raid on Wilhelmshaven on the 3rd was one of the first major uses of this technique by the Americans. The great force of bombers flew to the German port, found it completely socked in by cloud, and bombed it anyway, through the overcast, aiming by radar. And they did it with relatively light losses, in part because the same cloud that hid the ground from them also hampered the German fighters and gunners.
It was a turning point in method. Radar bombing was far less accurate than the clear-day optical bombing the Americans had dreamed of; "precision" bombing through cloud was really area bombing by another name, the bombs scattered across a city rather than placed on a factory. In that sense it blurred the line between the American daylight doctrine and the British area-bombing approach, and it meant more bombs falling on cities and the people in them. But it allowed the campaign to continue through the long months of bad weather, to keep the pressure on Germany around the calendar instead of waiting helplessly for clear skies.
Combined with the arrival, soon after, of the long-range Mustang escort I told you about, radar bombing helped transform the American campaign from the stalled, bleeding effort of late 1943 into the relentless, year-round assault of 1944 that, together with the British by night, pounded Germany around the clock. The raid on Wilhelmshaven on the 3rd, five hundred bombers attacking a target none of them could see, was an early step toward that all-weather air war.
Lynn Ashton retweeted
Las tropas de @nayibbukele están bien artilladas. Si logran que bandas haitianas se rindan y entreguen sus armas será un logro histórico. Que Dios los guíe y proteja .
Lynn Ashton retweeted
It's 1942. You're 19 years old on an American destroyer off Guadalcanal, and it's the middle of the night.
The ship is completely blacked out. No lights topside, not even a cigarette. Below decks there's only dim red bulbs so your eyes stay adjusted to the dark. You can't see the ship ahead of you in the column. You can barely see the guy next to you.
Then the alarm goes off. General quarters.
You run to your station in the dark, past guys pulling on helmets, life jackets, and flash gear. Flash gear is a hood and gloves to keep the skin from burning off your face and hands if a powder fire sweeps through. Somebody dogs the watertight hatch shut behind you. If the compartment floods now, that hatch stays shut. Everybody knows it.
If you're below decks, you're not going to see anything tonight. You're in a hot steel room passing powder and shells into a hoist. All you get is what comes through a sound-powered phone. "Contact bearing..." "Range closing..." Then nothing for a while. That's worse.
Topside it's quiet except for the engines and the water. Everyone is staring into black. The enemy is out there somewhere and you can't see them.
Then a searchlight snaps on.
It's so bright it hurts. Everything after that happens at once.
Your own 5-inch guns open up and the concussion hits you in the chest every time they fire. Your ears ring and then stop working right. The air fills with burnt powder smoke that coats your mouth and throat. Star shells pop overhead and hang there under little parachutes, turning everything a sick white. Tracers go out in long red lines. Other lines come back toward you.
There are ships everywhere. Some are burning. You don't know whose they are. Neither does anyone else. A huge dark shape slides past so close you could throw a rock at it, and it takes you a second to realize it's a Japanese battleship.
When a big shell hits, the whole ship shudders like it's been kicked. Steel screams. Lights below go out. Steam lines burst and the steam can cook a man alive in a closed space. Damage control parties go into flooded, smoking compartments with flashlights, looking for fires and holes and guys who are still breathing.
Japanese torpedoes are the thing everyone fears. They barely leave a wake. You don't see them coming. One second the ship is fighting, the next there's a massive blast under you, the deck jumps up, and men are thrown into the air. Some ships break in half and are gone in less than a minute.
Wounded men are being dragged to the wardroom, which is now an operating room. The corpsmen are working by battle lanterns. The deck is wet and you don't want to know with what.
If the order comes to abandon ship, you go over the side into black water covered in fuel oil. It's in your eyes, your nose, your mouth. Some of it is on fire. Ships are still shooting all around you. Some of them come close enough to run you down without ever knowing you were there.
And all of this, the whole fight, can be over in less than an hour.
Then it's dark again. Quiet. You're in the water or on a wrecked ship, counting who's still around, waiting for the sun to come up so you can see what's left.
The men who fought there called it Ironbottom Sound because of how many ships ended up on the floor of it.
Lynn Ashton retweeted
Sale temps pour les gangs Haïtiens !
Haïti : les soldats salvadoriens entrent en action, le sérieux commence pour les gangs.
Le Salvador a envoyé au moins 2 000 militaires en Haïti, officiellement pour retrouver quatre soldats disparus après une attaque, et un soutien logistique américain confirmé.
Les quatre disparus sont des techniciens de l'aviation qui servaient dans la Force de répression des gangs, autorisée en 2025 par l'ONU.
Les moyens sont à la hauteur de l'enjeu.
Des hélicoptères MD500E et des Black Hawk ont été acheminés, sept appareils ayant fait escale à la forteresse dominicaine d'El Rodeo, à Jimaní, avant de gagner Haïti.
Les soldats ne sont pas seuls : dans le quartier de Santo, la force opère aux côtés de la police haïtienne et de sa propre Task Force.
Ce territoire est contrôlé par les gangs Chen Mechan, 400 Mawozo, et les opérations au sol se doublent de frappes de drones.
On n'a pour l'instant aucun bilan. Après cinq jours, rien n'a été communiqué sur le sort des otages.
Les experts soulignent que le déploiement dépasse largement une simple opération de sauvetage.
La République dominicaine, voisine directe, n'envoie pas de troupes au combat mais soutient la manœuvre.
Sa coopération couvre le transit du personnel militaire, le transport de matériel, les évacuations médicales et l'approvisionnement.
Le président Abinader a aussi renforcé sa frontière avec deux bataillons, de l'artillerie et des équipements lourds, en plus d'environ 11 000 militaires déjà sur place.
Reste un point de fragilité.
Cinq forces armées distinctes opèrent désormais en Haïti, sans commandement unifié, ce qui inquiète les analystes du Crisis Group.
Pour les chefs de gangs, le temps de l'impunité semble pourtant compté.
Illustration @grok IA
Lynn Ashton retweeted
Taylor Sheridan reveals Sam Elliott rejected Yellowstone as a “cowboy soap opera”:
“So with Sam, which I I used him in 1883, it's funny cuz I called him and and and we talked, and he's like, ‘I don't like that Yellowstone. That's a that's a cowboy soap opera.’”
“I said, ‘You're right. I'm not asking you to be on that. We're not that's the punk rock me throwing middle fingers at the industry and a lot of other shit. This is going to be the grown up me. I have a story I want to tell. Here's the story, and here's the arc of your character.’”
“And I pitched it to him and he said, ‘That's beautiful. I'd love to do that.’ I said, ‘Great, I'm going to go write it for you.’”
