The Nefarious Mister S (part 1)

This all started back in early June of '07. I was a delivery driver; in the shop there was a big dry-erase board where we wrote our stops and time out. I came back from a run and noticed that someone had rubbed the top off the "O" in my name, so now I was up there as "Judy."

Really?

For cryin' out loud, can't this person come up with something better than this? What, am I working in a freakin' KINDERGARTEN?! What's next--"Circle, circle, dot, dot, now you got your cootie shot!"?

Instead of bitching about it, I did a little detective work. I was still the New Guy, only there for 3 months and change, so I didn't really know anyone all that well. I wrote down everyone's name, then over two or three weeks I eliminated people who were out or unlikely, and ended up with one name.

Mister S.

He seemed like an okay sort at first, just a lonely, grouchy old man. He spent a good bit of time and energy being worked up over one of the other drivers--she couldn't do anything right, he didn't like her, and he was always talking crap behind her back. I was starting to realize that this guy was so uptight, you couldn't pull a needle out of his ass with a Mack truck.

She quit in July, I think. That left Mister S without a playmate, so he latched on to me.

Since I didn't rise to the bait with the name thing, Mister S changed tactics. I found that out in late July, on my way home from work. I reached to the back seat for something and found a pile of something else, which I brought up to look at.

Cracker wrappers. Over the next few months, I would find several wrappers a week behind the back seat of my Tracker.

But whose?

Connecting the dots was easy--it was obviously Mister S--but I wanted to catch him in the act.

Pic of the Day: Ft. Clinch NW Bastion Gorge

A companion piece to yesterday's picture, taken at Fort Clinch, the twin to Fort Gaines.

Where yesterday's picture had us looking straight down from a bridge across Gaines' gorge pit, this time we're at the top of a flight of stairs leading down into the northern half of Clinch's pit.

The retaining wall is to the left, the gorge wall of the bastion to the right. Straight ahead, spanning the pit, is a caponniere. This defensive work controls access to the pit, the bastion, and the fort's parade ground: there are four tall, narrow openings to allow musketmen to fire up the stairs and a heavy door facing on each half of the pit. Lock those doors and the bastion becomes a miniature fort complete with a powder magazine and room for four cannons on the ground level.

One interesting detail of Fort Clinch's history can be seen in the stretch of red brick atop wall in the background. When the Civil War began, the fort was incomplete. It was briefly held by the South, who abandoned it when they realized they didn't have the men to hold on to it. The Union guys moved back in and got back to building. Since they couldn't buy brick from the South anymore, they had to source them from Northern suppliers. Different clay, different brick color. The upper half of the west, southwest, and south walls and parts of the south, north, and east bastions were all built between then and 1867.

Pic of the Day: Gaines Bastion E Pit

Here we're looking down into half of the pit behind Ft. Gaines' southwest bastion.

To the right is a gracefully-curved retaining wall; to the right is the back wall--the gorge--of the bastion.

Below is a short tunnel that spans the space between the two, giving a covered passage from the bastion to a tunnel running to the parade ground.

Above, the pit floor becomes a ramp that narrows toward the top and ends at a walkway spanning the length of the fort wall to the next bastion.

As built, the gorge pits and tunnels gave the only access to each of the five bastions. Each has a spiral stairway inside for getting to the gun emplacements on top.

Pic of the Day: Samurai Guy (Winter Armor)

Turns out I did have a pic of Samurai Guy.

I've never seen him without his armor vest (duct tape) and Asian-style hat--either this one, a "Coolie" hat, or an armored sun hat (more duct tape).

I've seen him as far north as Ensley (several miles north of Pensacola) and as far south as the split at Palafox and Pace.

Pic of the Day: Entering Florida!

Skid marks on the Alabama side of the Florida line.

Why would someone coming out of Alabama panic over entering Florida? It's not THAT much more liberal here.

Important Day in History

Quite a bit happened on various April 12ths.

The most important, I think, is that Jonas Salk's polio vaccine was called "safe, effective, and potent" in 1955.

In 1961, Yuri Gagarin became the first human to go into space and the first in orbit.

In 1981, the shuttle Columbia took its first flight.

In 1945, Franklin Roosevelt died, just months before the end of the second World War.

In 1983, Chicago got its first black mayor, Harold Washington.

In 1861, the South continued--and deepened--its treason against the United States by attacking Fort Sumter.

Pic of the Day: Does This Rocket Make My Arse Look Fat?

Fair is fair, so here's my chunky self back in August, 2007 standing at the noisy end of the last Saturn first-stage booster to be built, # S-IC-15 at the Michoud Assembly Facility near New Orleans. If not for budget cuts, the completed booster would have been loaded onto a barge, floated to Stennis Space Center just across the Louisiana-Mississippi border, mounted in a test tower, and lit off.

The combined roar of five F-1 engines could be heard as distant thunder as far away as Mobile, Alabama.

Once everything was certified "Go" the booster would go on a barge and take a long boat ride to Cape Canaveral to meet up with the rest of the rocket stack.