Procopius

'Twas the night before Christmas, and throughout the manor A middle-aged man was bustling Because he wasn't a planner. The stockings were stuffed with chemist shop crap, In the hopes that his wife wouldn't give him a slap. The children were "sleeping", strapped in the bunk bed, For two puffs of albuterol can mess with your head. Etc etc etc Happy Christmas all. I got socks.

Oh no, I'm always going for a laugh, and there's almost nothing I won't stoop to to get one.

For this reason, they were known as the SS-LMAA (a la the Liebstandarte, which was SS-LSAH), for "Leck mich am Arsch", which I gather is a simplified version of the quote.

I just finished Men at Arnhem, a novel written by Major (later Colonel) Geoffrey Powell MC FRHistS under the pen name of Tom Angus. Powell was part of the second lift of the 1st Airborne Division during Market Garden, and by the end of the operation, was the senior living officer in his battalion. It's a book well-known to young British men growing up in the 1970s, and it's easy to see why it's still in print: Powell is introspective and the book has an elegaic quality, giving one the sense that part of the reason for writing it was to enable him to come to terms with his experiences. There is little of the triumphalism one sees in German or American memoirs or roman a clefs of the war. The scene, taken from life, of a middle-aged Dutch housewife holding the hand of a mortally-wounded British officer throughout the hours it took him to die (with the full knowledge that the Germans would kill her entire family if they found him with them) will haunt me for some time. I'm also reading William F. Buckingham's misleadingly-titled Arnhem (as it's a full history of Operations Market and Garden), and Christer Bergström's two-volume Arnhem 1944. I don't think there's a single account of Market Garden that doesn't have a principal villain upon who the blame is laid (if the book was written by an American, the villain is almost always "Monty", the evil parallel universe twin of Montgomery who never did anything right); Buckingham lays fault principally with "Boy" Browning, in a scathing pen portrait of him, along with Major General Roy Urquhart (you know, Sean Connery), whereas Bergström, always a contrarian, lays much of the blame on James Gavin of the 82nd Airborne, citing his how his account of who made the call to defer capturing a crucial bridge until the perimeter was secured changed more and more as his distance from the event increased. In some ways, as a fan of Montgomery (unlikeable, supercilious, hyperfixated people have to stick together), I want Bergström (who is effusive in his praise of the Field Marshal) to be right, but I'm distrustful of any narrative that confirms my prejudices so readily.

Regrettably, Henry Cavill, who can do anything I can do better, and also appears to have been chiselled out of granite, or alternately, Grand Admiral Thrawn, who is (a) fictional, and (b) blue. Thank you for the good wishes in English and Welsh; mom is a big fan of A Child's Christmas in Wales, which you may or may not be heartily sick of hearing about. I actually have a number of credits on their products, though this represents I think the largest single chunk of writing I've done, and in any case, most of them are just "additional writing". I'm not part of their A-Team, but I'm zealous about getting in on or before deadline. I once read a version of the myth of the birth of Aphrodite by the Dorothy and Bernard Evslin (who are easily one of my most formative influences), where she was entertaining suitors, and Hephaesteus's (successful) pitch, dictated to him by his mother, was "I work late". I think I bring the same energy to my limited freelance work. I agree entirely with you and @Troy Smith on Maddie looking light flight deck crew, but I had nobody to agree with me on that front outside of here.

🎵 All I want for Christmas is antibiotics 🎵 Truly, I'm trying my best this holiday, despite the fact that I've never really been a Christmas guy and don't like cleaning up wrapping paper or tripping over no-longer-interesting toys on the morning of the 26th, or dealing with intersibling rivalry or my children's deeply, deeply irritating compulsion to demand hot chocolate and then not drink a drop (at best) or to spill it all over things because of their almost unbelievable carelessness (as is most likely the case). I'm currently dealing with the fallout of their failure to understand germ theory or the very simple instruction to NOT @#$!ING TOUCH their sister when their noses are running like spigots and we have to constantly nebulize them for to bring about the high-risk, low return prospect of their surviving another night. Unfortunately, while I have lots of ideas, I'm not great at discussing them, and so I'm constantly surprised by reality getting in their way. I wanted to have a big paratrooper wargame set up on the dining room table for when they came down Christmas morning, and've been working in secret towards that goal in between freelance work, cleaning the house after they go to bed to remind myself what it looks like, and, less often, sleep. I've painted and based around 80 US airborne and fallschirmjager, and 3D-printed three M4A1s and three StuG IVs, to do a very stylized and imbalanced version of the Battle of Bloody Gulch on the outskirts of Carentan. Yes, I know they won't care, but I did the research, and that's what the 2nd Armored and the 17. SS-Panzergrenadier "Gotz von Berlichten" divisions were using at that point. (Carentan represents the storied clash of the least effective airborne division in Normandy versus the worst Waffen-SS division present, though I ran out of time and the StuGs are just being supported by fallschirmjager in their dorky little onesies.) However, my in-laws are coming here for Christmas. They've done a lot for us, and I truly appreciate it, but my father in law doesn't particularly like the boys (or, indeed, leaving Michigan, double your pleasure) and spends a lot of time yelling at them, and that's a catharsis I prefer to reserve for myself. More germane to this bout of self-pity (I do the work Americans won't do), he would not respond well to being unable to eat breakfast at a table, or the children loudly disporting directly outside the door of the guest bedroom, where he does his level best to nap away his visit, for the thirty minutes it will take them to tire of my große werke. So an already quixotic endeavour is made even more difficult by reality, a little like Gallipoli. And, as alluded to above, I have a sinus infection thanks to my little self-propelled petri dishes, and my immune system's response is to make me think that not only am I dying, but also that it'll be a relief to go That at least I have some smidgeon of control over, and I will tell whatever lies I need to and condemn however many of my fellow citizens as necessary to death by super-bug to get my antibiotics today. I'm also trying to make that ginger ale and sorbet punch for the boys, because it should be a lot of fun trying to get it out of our poor, long-suffering carpet. But I AM trying. Ho ho ho.

I'm alive! This has been quite a year and I'll be heartily glad to see the back of it. On the 7th of this month, my mom had surgery to have an intervertebral fusion cage placed around part of her spine. The surgery went well, aside from the minor, tiny detail that they left her with a cerebrospinal fluid leak, which in turn caused a brain bleed, which in turn caused a series of small seizures. Mom spent the next week heavily sedated and unable to recognize anyone but my dad. She's recovered somewhat, but she still gets confused and is encumbered with false memories, which can be extremely distressing to hear. They're hoping that she can be moved to a rehabilitation center by this weekend, and that two weeks after that, she'll be in a place where she can go home. It's safe to say that neither mom not anyone else has had a great time lately. Last night the hot water heater broke, which Mrs P neglected to mention to me until this morning. When I was unable to successfully relight the pilot and proposed we call a tradesman, she accused me of losing my head and going to them every time something breaks. (Just this week I personally cleared a blocked dishwasher feed line, and this year I've sanded down and repainted a wall, repaired a hole kicked in the drywall by Grant, and replaced a toilet seal, which I personally think is pretty good for a guy with soft, pink hands who sits at a desk in his basement for work all day.) It then became clear that Mrs P did not, in fact, know how to relight the pilot light and was unsuccessful in her subsequent attempt to do so to show me up. (It helps, I understand, if you actually press the button for the piezoelectric igniter.) In any case, when the repairman arrived, it transpired that not one, but two components still under warranty were broken and needed replacing, which hopefully won't be hideously expensive. Though as it's Christmas and we were about to come into a small amount of money from selling our old car (which is little more than a self-propelled hulk at this point), I expect it should neatly cancel out any gains on that front. I have not gotten anything done on the Lightning in ages, to my undying shame. Winston is currently very big on paratroops, which have always fascinated him, and so he's getting some 28mm paratroop miniatures for the game Bolt Action and some paints for Christmas, while Grant is getting gifts that Winston will find difficult to wheedle Grant into giving them to him, to whit one of those birdfeeders that takes pictures of the birds. Seems rather voyeuristic to me, but who am I to judge? I've recently stumbled into a lot of freelance writing, 16,000 words for Battletech due next month, and potentially some other work as well. We'll see. I'm trying to get back into the swing of things, but what passed for normality has been brutally upended since 2019, and it's increasingly hard to carve out a space for myself in my own life. I see Xtrakit has brought the Spitfire XII back, which I thought would never come to pass, so let that presage an annus mirabilis for 2024. PXL_20231128_221444706 by Edward IX, on Flickr

Similarly, the GIBs in F-4 Phantoms referred to their pilots as "nose gunners".

My word this looks good, Buffers. I had a few Havocs in the stash before the Great Cull of 2021, but I was always afraid to build them due to the tricycle landing gear and the need for noseweight.

Your tube looks magnificent, Stew! (Wait, no.) The Whirlwind is a very beautiful aircraft, isn't it? For my money, the best-looking of all the twin-engined fighters conceived of in the interwar era.

What scale are you hoping to find them in?

Out of curiosity, are you using autosupports, or supporting your prints manually in the slicer?

Pretty amazing, when you think about it, that Arma went from a little-known model company to one of the most important 1/72 manufacturers, to the point where an oblique reference to them is instantly understood, in less than ten years.

In my case, it's the big ones who do all the damage. In the past week I have: Caught them jumping off the (unanchored) dresser in their bedroom Found them tying a stuffed animal to the ceiling fan like some sort of nursery lynching Caught the oldest jumping off the top bunk while the ceiling fan was running, inches from his probable trajectory Woke up to find them lugging the carpet shampooer up from the basement (and catching it on a threshold nail, which was wrenched out) to conceal the evidence of their having fed cookies to the baby in her crib Discovered that the oldest had tied a water bottle to a piece of yarn and was trying to use it like a hamster's water bottle to hydrate his younger brother in the lower bunk, but was instead gently watering him as he tried to sleep They're not stupid, I have to tell myself. But any time I think of the stupidest possible thing they could do, something so dumb that I feel confident I don't have to helicopter parent them and explicitly tell them not to do it, they turn around and do it almost immediately. Sadly no progress on the model over the weekend. The boys, as might be surmised, have been really on a roll recently, and I haven't felt quite up to the task of cracking on given we're in such a delicate stage. Winston went down to the workroom with me the other day to "help" me find a tool, and immediately wandered over to the bench and began wildly swinging the magnifier arm about to examine everything on it. He impaled himself upon the Lightning's pitot tube twice before I stopped asking him nicely to move away and passed into the realm of dire, shouted threats. More seriously, yesterday, a sixteen-year-old was shot and killed in what appears to be a gang-related dispute, less than a block from my house. As we live in an affluent neighbourhood where this sort of thing simply doesn't happen (it happens quite a lot to poorer people in Chicago and Waukegan, but they're not overly fussed about that, because it doesn't affect local property values adversely), every police force in the county within a twenty-mile radius dispatched cruisers to cordon off the area and search it yard by yard with dogs for nearly eight hours (and despite all their very large SUVs and all their impressive taxpayer-funded appurtenances, and all their punisher skull car decals, they failed to apprehend a suspect). A helpful neighbor child informed the boys as to what transpired, and they were extremely distressed, which they have handled by behaving in even more exhausting ways than normal. Everyone is pretty short with each other here in Hedgehog Manor right now. The one bright spot is that after losing twenty pounds this summer and once again being at about my pre-2016 weight and slo-o-o-wly dropping (sadly this would have been a fat weight to me just eight years ago), I did not break my diet and stress eat all of Mrs. P's freshly baked cookies, even though we had ice cream that would have gone perfectly on them as unhealthy little sandwiches. Hopefully normality...well, actually normality is pretty stressful here too, but hopefully tranquility will make an appearance here soon.

This is one of the true, pure joys of Britmodeller for me: the accumulated knowledge of so many users, so freely shared en passant.

Same, really, except I elucidated them anyway. People who've heard me speak know I'm not very articulate in person, though I'm hoping the ADHD medicine I'm on now helps. Anyway, far too late to give extensive updates, longer letter later. Short version: Madeleine can walk. Lightning: gear doors on, serials done (with much fierce clenching along the way), lower strake added etc:

At about halfway in now, the book is a more nuanced portrait of Boyd's contributions before his "contributions", if you will, but IMO does a good job of showing that he was also a massive braggart at best and a colossal liar at worst who would say anything to make himself look good. Truly an analyst's dream. And yes, Sprey makes many appearances, and is damned with his own words as the idiot he truly was.

Is it a Dewoitine D.27?

There are apparently formal rules for using the English language in writing. Unfortunately, nobody has agreed on the One Ring of rules, and so there are several different ones: Strunk & White, The Chicago Manual of Style, AP Style, etc. I use my own style, "Try not to sound like a robot or an idiot" with varying degrees of success and stunning margins of failure.

I have a Hasegawa Liberator VI which could probably be used to stun a cow thanks to all the weight crammed in the radio room. It's a wonder it's still standing on its landing gear.

Principally 803 and 806 Squadrons during their time on Ceylon, with my main focus being the Indian Ocean Raid.

Yesterday was a very frustrating day at work. I used to work alone, with no support, and substantially less pay, and if I didn't have to support a family and a spouse who refuses to apply for any other job ever and expects me to simply make more money any time our expenses increase -- about the only 1950s attitude she has, aside from the belief that it's my job to do all home repairs -- I would happily go back to it, either here or at some other company. As it was, I applied to a job at United Airlines, but I shan't get it, I've been here too long and nobody wants someone who's done that. The short version is that my "team" (I use the word loosely) uses AP Style, because they're former journalists. I unfortunately am largely self-taught when it comes to the English language (which is doubtless painfully obvious, given my ramshackle sentence construction), as I had to see a guidance counsellor during language arts, though when I was making my doomed attempts at applying to graduate schools, I used the Chicago Manual of Style (one of the very few books I have ever destroyed, let alone while in a fit of blind rage). As a result, I keep making mistakes, because AP Style is written in the manner of a very earnest robot that's not trying very hard to infiltrate human society, making it, after the unbearably precious New Yorker Style Guide, possibly my least favorite style of writing. Anyway, my coworker asked me to revise a one-sentence draft for a social media post to conform to AP style. When I asked what was wrong with it, she then asked our mutual boss if we had access to the AP Style Guide in online format, then advised me to refer to that message chain. I asked her to clarify what the issue was, and she ignored me, so I checked with our boss, a former newspaper editor, who couldn't identify what the issue was either. My blood is boiling just thinking about it. I'm pretty passive-aggressive as it stands, but this is a whole new level. Just enraging. Anyway, that aside, I finished painting the tyres, glossed them so the paint wouldn't rub off, and added them to the Lightning (I also lost one of the little gear doors along the way, but the less said about that the better.) Ta-da! But wait, let's move that Space Marine out from under the tailplane. Oh. Oh dear. It would seem the weight of the resin engines was rather more than I had anticipated. Fumbling about in blind panic, I crammed the nosewheel bay full of fishing line sinkers, an inelegant solution, but one which seems to have worked: I still need to add the serials, each individual letter and number of them (ulp) to both sides, and the eight million landing gear bay doors. Tomorrow I pick up Mrs. P and the children from O'Hare after their visit to Michigan, so we'll see if I have any energy left after that to press on.

In between all the renders, that Defiant is looking gorgeous.

Flying Camelot: The F-15, the F-16, and the Weaponization of Fighter Pilot Nostalgia by Michael Hankins I'm always interested in the service politics around defense procurement, and this promises to be very interesting, dealing with two very different programs, one touted by Colonel Boyd (who IMO is vastly overrated), and one by people who knew what they were doing.

And well you might, as it's my phone wallpaper!