Blog number fifty! Oct. 17, 2006
When I was a youngun' spending my summer days walking around Des Moines with my friends, one of our favorite past-times was to go down to the capitol and swim in the water surrounding two of the bronze statues placed in the capital garden.
We would stay there until hunger drove us home. Walking in the alleys we would often come across green apples. I don't know how this came about, and I think it is commonly known, but if you take a sour green apple and bang it on a rock or a log, the resulting bruise will taste sweet. Ain't that odd? We always used to bang sour green apples against an object and thought naught of it.
I once read that if you have cucumbers that are bitter, what you do is to cut it in two - I used to cut near the end, and rub the two cut pieces together, resulting in a sort of foam forming. This would make the bitterness disappear and the cuke would be sweet. Sounds impossible? I thought so to when I first read it. But I tried it and it works. here's an even more impossible thing:
A carpenter was working on our house and got something in his eye -- probably wood dust, and we couldn't get it out. I tried pulling out on his upper lid, pulling the lid down over the bottom lid, I tried rolling up his upper lid with a wooden match stick, I tried everything. Nothing worked. I then asked him if he wanted to try something that my grandmother had taught me and it always worked, but it was going to sound pretty crazy. He said, "OK."
I told him to close the eye that had the particle in it and blow his nose from the nostril opposite the side the eye was on. He did and it worked, like it always does and it makes you wonder, "What the hell?!"
MY grandmother also taught me to drink a cup of ginger dissolved in hot water with a little bit of honey for taste for upset stomach. I remember I would drink as much as I could, tell her I couldn't drinkany more and she would always say, "Just one more sip."
I have recently found just by experimenting that Desenex athlete's foot cream placed on a cold sore will not only cure the cold sore, but if you get it early enough, the cold sore will not even develop.
For many years I have found that pouring plain old rubbing alcohol into the ear will cure most ear aches. Scuba divers use it when they get done diving for the day in order to prevent an ear infection caused from water being in the ear.
Stationed in Texas, I would occasionally have to go on sick call for jock itch, a horrible painful rash. The salt from sweat will increase the pain exponentially. Jock itch is located in the inner thighs near the groin and has nothing whatsoever to do with the sensation of itching.
The nurse there -- a young male corporal would give me a tiny bottle of a clear liquid and tell me to rub this over the jock itch area. I go to my barracks, take down my pants and shorts and pour some of the liquid into my hand and proceed to rub the painful sensitive raw area WITH RUBBING ALCOHOL! Yeow!
I went through this scenario three separate times. The alcohol would fix it right away. But what gripes me is that the guy at the desk that gave me the alcohol never told me what it was. I figured out from the smell of it and the looks of it and the result of putting it on a raw sore place, that it must be rubbing alcohol. The next time I got the itch, I bought a bottle of rubbing alcohol and cured myself. Now, why didn't that guy tell me what was in the bottle so I didn't have to go on sick call every time I got jock itch, and I didn't have to suffer more than a few minutes? Huh?
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I'm having dinner in the mess hall. One section is closed, but I see three or four tables over there with a bunch of guys eating steaks while I'm eating hamburgers or stew or something like that. I don't remember exactly, but I DO remember that I wasn't eating steak.
I asked the cook what was going on and he said that was the Air Force wrestling team. When I got back towork, I calledthe mess hall and asked to speak to the man in charge. I asked him why it was that people in the same military, eating in the same mess hall, were eating entirely different meals. He said that was the wrestling team and they brought in their own steaks and the mess hall just cooked them. I asked him if I brought in my own steaks if the mess hall would cook them. He said, "No."
I said something to the effect that I thought the Air Force's primary raison valable was to fight off our enemies and since I was more in a position to do that with my job than a wrestler was with his, why do they receive star treatment and the rest of us who are protecting our way of life, don't. He asked, "Don't you want our team to win?"
I replied, "No, not especially. I don't care whether a bunch of athletes win or not. Do they care whether I do my job better than anyone else?"
The conversation ended with my getting no satisfaction except the chance to blow off a little steam at a suspected injustice.
In a similar vein, we that were taking courses could not read our text books or do homework during downtime in the shop. we were told to "read tech orders" if we wanted something to do. However, come World Series time and a TV was set up in the shop, the lights were turned off, and all work stopped until the game was over. This went on every day during the World Series.
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We guys in analysis were to come up with a plan to wash off aircraft that happened to get contaminated by radioactive dust. Fortunately we had on board a sergeant that had been trained in procedures to follow after an atomic blast.
He told the rest of us that the best people for a job like that were the wash crew, because that's what would be done and those were the people that did it every day. Whether it was contaminated dust or plain old dust, the washing would be accomplished the same way. To wash is to wash. We all agreed that that was a good plan and we signed off on it and sent it upwards to the powers that be.
It came back that since we had a radioactive "expert" already in place, the most efficient crew tobe assigned to wash the contaminated aircraft was us. None of us had ever washed an aircraft in our lives.
Now here's what really frosted me. They asked the advice of an "expert" and then took the advice of someone that had absolutely no training of any kind in radiation contamination, even though it went against the advice of the only person that did have any training.
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The guy that most impressed me during my twenty-one some years in the Air Force was Senior Master Sergeant Chin.
He was of Korean extract, once told me that his father was a village chieftain until he had to leave Korea because the Communists didn't much care for "elitism." The family now lived in Hawaii. He said his father would mediate arguments among the people, that he wore one of those funny black hats that have a stiff brim and the crown is a cylinder about eight inches high and sits right on top of the head. I think they wear black frock coats too. He said that "uniform" was a sign of a village chieftain.
He told me about hunting mongoose as a child -- that they were rather stupid because they never learned. He also said there were a lot of cardinals in Hawaii, which surprised me because I always heard that where there were mongoose, you couldn't have birds because the mongoose would eat all the eggs. Another scientific urban myth?
He would not let anyone put their feet upon the table or a chair. He once chewed out the captain for sitting on a table and the captain took him aside and kinda whined, "Gee, Sarge, you didn't have to chew out in front of the men," and Chin replied, "Captain, I don't let my men sit on the table. Why should I let you?"
Sgt. Chin was stationed at the Pentagon before he came to Mather. He was looking for a place to retire and California looked good, so he created a job for a senior master sergeant in our shop and had himself fill the new opening.
I once had a job going around with a colonel placing posters, etc., about "Zero Defects," another silly worthless piece of moral-building crap. I didn't like it at all and one day I asked myself what would Sgt.Chin do if he had this job and I realized he wouldn't do it! So I quit without telling anybody. Worked fine.
They had a contest to think up a good slogan for Zero Defects and a lieutenant won with the slogan, "Hit 'em High, Hit'em Low. Zero defects, Go Go Go."
Now this damn thing WON! it won, I tell you! The best damn slogan in the contest.
A friend and I were laughing about this and we came up with the slogan, "Hit 'em low, Hit 'em high. Zero defects, my my my."
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