Pilot's Log

The crookedest street in the world is a one-way, block-long span of San Francisco's Lombard Street. It consists of eight hairpin turns down a very steep hill. The recommended top speed for a car is five miles per hour. So on the one hand, you've got to proceed with caution. On the other hand, the quaint, brick-paved road is lined with flower beds, and creeping along its wacky route is a whimsical amusement. I suspect you will soon encounter experiences that have metaphorical resemblances to Lombard Street, Sagittarius. In fact, I urge you to seek them out.

I think I've already done that this week, in a weird fashion.

FP

Dieterich Buxtehude (1637-1707) was a German composer whose organ music is still played today. He was a major influence on a far more famous German composer, Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750). When Bach was a young man, he decided it was crucial for him to experience Buxtehude's music first-hand. He took a leave of absence from his job and walked over 250 miles to the town where Buxtehude lived. There he received the guidance and inspiration he sought. In 2015, Sagittarius, I'd love to see you summon Bach's determination as you go in quest of the teaching you want and need.

Okay, so now I know how to spell "Buxtehude".

A couple weeks ago at the Knoxville IPMS meeting, a fellow member was clearing out his closet of old periodicals and some of us got to divvying the pieces among them.  When I saw that he had old issues of War Monthly and True War among them, I shamelessly scooped up as much of those as I could.

Both those magazines were influences on me, and perhaps more than I'd care to admit.

War Monthly was the product of the Marshall Cavendish publishing powerhouse, and (I felt) a good value for the combination of artwork, writing and layout work.  The articles would get repurposed into volumes, and from there sometimes into whole coffee table books.

True War, on the other hand, was the product of the notorious low-budget tabloid schlockmeister and pornographer Myron Fass at Countrywide Publications.  The only color content was on the cover, and the interior was made up mainly of archival or press-release photos and cut-to-the-bone prose.  True to form, their presentation on the Battle of Arnhem (for an example) was slimmer in both page count and journalist prowess as the photo spread of Cornelius Ryan's book A BRIDGE TOO FAR!  I got a replacement copy of an issue of True War I thought I lost in 1978 and now that I think about it, I think one of my parents could have thrown mine out in disgust.

To make a long story short, I couldn't afford as a kid to subscribe to War Monthly, and even if the option were available my folks probably wouldn't have condoned me subscribing to True War.  My main go-to publisher of magazines from then was Challenge Publications (Air Classics, Air Combat, Air Progress, Military Modeler, etc.).

But I'm glad to get back these.  And then I found a bunch of online sources for .pdf versions of War Monthly, so one way or another I have all the content from the get-go through to Issue 49.  The series lasted much longer than that, but the later ones are very hard to find because they were subscription-only and most went to library collections.

FP

* The Public Radio station is playing the Lord of the Rings Symphony as I'm writing this.

* Dad just installed the window air conditioner unit, and it works.

* I frosted the cupcakes for Dad's Bible study group tomorrow.

* When I looked up my own name on a search through my data base for a graphic I've already shared here, I found a reference in a Battletech e-book.  I'm a Steiner.  I don't know how I feel about that.

* We await word from our mechanic on the status of Dad's pickup truck.  A stud in one of the wheel mounts failed, and the other studs for that wheel mount were in bad shape, so he's replacing the lot.

* I'm dabbling with Bitstrips on Facebook...but it doesn't seem to be habit-forming, yet.

http://www.roleplayer.me/frustratedpilot

http://www.roleplayer.me/749134

Again, there probably won't be much there for a while.

PS: http://www.aniroleplay.com/frustratedpilot  <- Or here either.

Touted as a prime source of "kick-@ss spirituality," author Danielle LaPorte has advice that's good for you to hear. "You will always be too much of something for someone," she says, "too big, too loud, too soft, too edgy." But that's exactly as it should be, she adds. It would be a mistake to "round out your edges," because then you would "lose your edge." And I'm here to tell you that you need all of your edge right now, Sagittarius. It's time to ignore people's mediocre expectations and push past their limits. To be true to yourself, you will probably have to be too much of something for several someones.

There's no place like hone?