A wide-ranging Comment of the Day by commentariat regular Other Bill. It begins with this post on the wine-tasting frauds, and moves on to other vital matters, including the meaning of Memorial Day.
Here it is…
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This is depressing. I enjoy decent wine and have a reliable source for good, reasonably priced wines. I doubtless pay the guy a premium but it’s like buying insurance. The wines are invariably good. Most all wine sold is priced below twenty bucks a bottle, and yes, there’s always Two Buck Chuck. But frankly, I think it’s unfortunate that the vast majority of wine drinkers have never tasted decent wine and have no idea how unpalatable the stuff they put up with is.
I’m with Ben Franklin: The quote originally came from a letter that Franklin wrote to his friend André Morellet while he was in France. He stated, “Behold the rain which descends from heaven upon our vineyards, and which incorporates itself with the grapes to be changed into wine; a constant proof that God loves us, and loves to see us happy!” (Personally, I’d say the same thing about good, loving, monogamous sex.)
Just had a flyover here at the house in Phoenix by a formation of four WWII vintage trainer biplanes (I’m assuming they’re Stearmans) in their bright yellow and blue livery. Lots a pilots trained in Arizona during the war, and I know about 80,000 U.S. airmen were killed while doing strategic bombing from England. And who knows if it even worked. An unimaginable sacrifice.
A C-47 just flew over. Remembering my HS English teacher’s husband who retired as a check pilot for Pan Am after having flown The Hump in WWII. And my mother’s cousin who was an ambulance driver in India and killed when the plane he was flying in was shot down by the Japanese. And my son in law’s uncle Mike killed in Vietnam, as well as a neighborhood kid my brother’s age, Steve Gomez killed in Vietnam shortly after graduating from high school.
Ethics Alarms 
Thumbs Up, OB, primo; better the 2nd time ’round!
I don’t know if it was intended for effect but the shift from the first topic to the more important second without any segue works to shake the reader into thinking about what really matters.
Well done OB
Thanks Pauli and CM. And thanks Jack. What an unexpected honor.
The pain suffered by families losing loved ones in war strikes me as unimaginable. In the early ‘sixties, my parents and my brother and I stayed in a cousin of my dad’s house on a visit to my father’s home in West Virginia. The cousin was named McKinley, a great first name, and his wife was named Lola. Their only son had been killed in the war, then only some twenty years earlier. (Mrs. OB recently looked up the son’s service record and found he was an ordnance man/armorer in the Navy, in the Pacific theater, probably on an aircraft carrier. I’m not sure they ever found the body.) Even as a ten-year-old, I could sense a silence and void in that house that was palpable.
And Steve Gomez’s parents were never the same after they lost their only son in such a conflicted war. Mr. Gomez closed up the great, old school neighborhood barber shop he used to run (five chairs, three barbers) and took a job as a security guard at the bank Mrs. Gomez worked at downtown. Maybe Mr. Gomez simply didn’t want to talk to people anymore.
And The Hump pilot was an alcoholic, who always stopped drinking eight hours before his next flight. But I suspect he was treating his PTSD the only way he knew how. He drank himself to death shortly after he retired, a delayed victim of the War in my book.
(Great rendering of the Boeing Stearman. No sound on earth like a radial aircraft engine overhead. Fastest way to get me out of the house.)