Bent Corner

Back in February a B-2 bomber crashed on take off from Andersen Air Force Base on Guam. Both crew members were able to eject safely.

In case you are wondering, a B-2 Stealth Bomber costs $1.2 billion.

I was stationed on Guam from the late 80’s to the early 90’s. The B-2 was built back home in Palmdale, California. Some of my relatives worked at Northrop and helped manufacture the B-2.

During World War Two, Nazi Germany transported six U-boat submarines 2,000 miles overland from Germany to attack Russian shipping in the Black Sea. The subs operated out of Romania for over two years, hunting and sinking dozens of Russian ships.

When Romania switched sides and declared war against Germany, it left the remaining three subs - three had already been lost in combat - with nowhere to go. They were scuttled by their crew as the war neared its end.

The location of the three U-boats has been a mystery. Until now.

Selçuk Kolay, a Turkish marine engineer, has located one of the subs two miles off the coast of Turkey sitting 8o feet under the surface. He believes he knows the location of the remaining two.

I’ve always wanted to dive a U-boat. There are about seven that can be reached by SCUBA here on the east cost of the United States. I got to dive ship wreaks while I was in the Air Force and stationed on Guam. There is one Japanese tanker from Word War Two sitting atop a German cruiser from World War One. I once dove deep enough so that I could put one hand on the German ship while placing my other hand on the Japanese tanker. It turned out to be highly anticlimactic.

Guam had a lot of cool dive sites. It didn’t have any U-boats.

Link (Telegraph.co.uk)

I stopped in to the Hagerstown Best Buy yesterday and ended up buying a new hard drive. It’s a Western Digital 500GB External Hard Drive.

I took it up to the register and the the total came out to be over $170. I knew the Maryland sales tax went up recently, but not that high. I told her that the tag said it was on sales for $129. She told me that she could go grab a weekly sales ad and take a look. She looked though the entire ad, but the hard drive could not be found. She then called the computer area and asked them to look for the posted price.

Luckily there wasn’t anyone else waiting in line. I hate holding things up.

The person called her back and informed her that that price was indeed $129. This is getting to be a definite pattern on the part of Best Buy. Other then a spindle of blank DVD +R discs, the last few items I have purchased there have scanned in at the register at a price different then what was posted in either the weekly ad or the sign displayed where the item was sitting.

I don’t mean to be bitching about Best Buy. I’m old enough to remember ordering peripherals for my Commodore 64 over the telephone when I was stationed on Guam. I was calling a 1-800 number, but to call anywhere in the United States was .99 a minute from Guam. The dork I was talking to on the phone was taking his sweet old time taking my order. If I didn’t want that second 1541 floppy drive so badly, I would have hung up.

The point is, I remember what it was like living in a world without Best Buy.

I found this photo on flickr. It’s of the Arc Light memorial located at Andersen Air Force Base on Guam. The photographer, flicker user harogi, writes:

This is a 3 Exposure hand held HDR of the B-52 Bomber Stratofortress at the Arc Light Memorial on Andersen Air Force Base Guam, USA. I just had to stop by here before leaving back to Hawaii. Oversaturated.

I know this memorial quite well. I was stationed on Andersen Air Force Base. I used to run a lot back then and I had a route that took me around this memorial. I also spent a couple of days scrapping rust off it when it was being refurbished. At one time it was in very bad shape. The wet, salty air isn’t very kind to a B-52. For that reason planes were always swapped out after 12 months with a B-52 from the states. Maine to be exact.

This old D model sat in the corrosive Guam air for decades.

I love this photo. Click on the above photo to go to the flickr page where it’s located. Also check out the photographer’s other similarly stunning photos.

To read about what Arc Light was, you can check out this Wikipedia article.