Aerospace engineer, history enjoyer, Lutheran, avid board gamer, and all-around geek.
Way Out In The Desert, CA
Joined August 2009
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Alright, I'm finally going to collect all of my military history book threads into one master thread-of-threads to pin for easy access...
Starting with, of course, the Franco-Prussian War.
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Here’s a story for you. We started filming without owning the title and had to do alternates.
Taft Broadcasting owned the title Ghostbusters as part of their half-hour sitcom starring Larry Storch and Forrest Tucker (F-Troop) and a gorilla chasing ghosts. I had never heard of it. They didn’t have proton packs or Bill Murray. Columbia paid $500,000 to buy the name, but they really should have paid Dean Martin, from whom I first heard the term.
In the film Scared Stiff (1953), he and Jerry Lewis (check out his acrobatic stair descent) are in an old haunted castle, and Lizabeth Scott asks Dean: “Who are you guys?” And Dean answers: “You’ve heard of Trustbusters and Gangbusters, we’re Ghostbusters!”
For my research writing the first movie, I watched every single ‘ghost’ comedy ever made. Bowery Boys, Hope and Crosby, Abbot and Costello, Martin and Lewis all did such films.
Happy Halloween 2026.
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🔒 moot
This feeling is good and natural. Human beings desire to relive their own childhoods through their children. This is what sustaining your culture feels like. It's just as fulfilling as it seems it would be, by the way.
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Once, long ago, I was deployed and a terrorist called my then wife. We know, because the caller ID said Iraq. We got her in touch with the proper people and reported it, because they asked about me by name, and my unit. Not cool. A while after I get back from deployment, I get a call. Turned out the number provided actionable Intel, and the terrorist is now dead. Sometimes the Army has your back.
Reasons we homeschool…
NYC public schools deceived me into thinking my son was a straight-A math student - but he can't do fractions, basic algebra trib.al/pWwmbHR
A British Jew is waiting in line to be knighted by the Queen. He is to kneel in front of her and recite a sentence in Latin when she taps him on the shoulders with her sword.
However, when his turn comes, he panics in the excitement of the moment and forgets the Latin. Then, thinking fast, he recites the only other sentence he knows in a foreign language, which he remembers from the Passover Seder:
"Ma nishtana ha layla ha zeh mi kol ha laylot."
Puzzled, Her Majesty turns to her advisor and whispers, "Why is this knight different from all other knights?"
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The DDR in DDR RAM means Deutsche Demokratische Republik
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Story update for the WW1 aircraft machine gun here in Ohio. 'During the call, an officer asked about the firearm and was told, essentially, “That’s my machine gun.”' 😆... "We don't want to destroy it or cut it apart. This firearm has survived intact since approximately 1918" 🤌
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All the alpha is in spotting marriageability before other women notice.
My husband was a theater director in college, so he had clearly demonstrated he could manage projects / lead a household
I think there's a lot to this, and I think some of it really is "baked in", but I also think that some women, even when they mean well, are wretchedly bad at gauging male "marriageability", and I think that's somewhat recent. I think of my own parents. My Mom spent a good part of my childhood as a SAHM, so she had better reason than most to look at economic factors. But she still married my Dad when he was a student, because she was looking at the kind of character that would provide stability over the long term rather than just the current situation. I think a non-negligible number of women now are worse at making those kinds of judgments than their mothers were.
