The toll for “free” wifi is at the airport is getting redirected to stuff like this.
I must say that it’s a miracle of nature that someone this elderly actually conceived. I’m glad the crushing burden of 24 years endured in this vale of tears isn’t holding her back.
raven
This on the 70th Anniversary of D-Day.
Mustang Bobby
They know what causes that now.
raven
Watching the Vets at Normandy enjoy shaking hands and visiting with President Obama after the ceremony is an inspiring moment.
Baud
@raven:
Maybe Ike is the father.
raven
@Baud: I assume you are referring to the post I didn’t read?
Baud
@raven:
Yep. Good choice on your part, by the way.
Baud
@raven:
It’s really cool that they finally get to meet Hitler after all these years.
raven
When the war started the generals wanted to invade Europe immediately. Roosevelt stood his ground and said “we need to learn how to do it first” and began the effort in North Africa and then Italy.
Mustang Bobby
@raven: Same here. My great-uncle came ashore at Omaha Beach and made it through alive.
raven
@Mustang Bobby: Glad he did!
tybee
@raven:
as i recall, the brits were a bit reluctant to invade europe in 42/43 as well.
raven
@tybee: Something about Dunkirk.
raven
Not a huge Brokaw fan but he did just point out that the Italian campaign ended just a few days before D-Day and that there was a little squabble going on in the Pacific as well. My dad was pretty grumpy about the war in Europe, “we were on 27 D-Day’s on my ship’! I did get him to go to the “D-Day Museum” when they dedicated the Pacific Wing and changed it’s name to the WWII Museum.
BillinGlendaleCA
@raven: My dad was in the Pacific too at least in the beginning. He got transferred to DC to train electrician mates. On days like today they talk about the war being over in 10 months. The Pacific seems to always get forgotten.
AnotherBruce
This is truly the age of information.
Unfiltered, unfocused and stupid information.
bago
Old man yells at cloud, misses 20 year old Simpsons reference.
PsiFighter37
So…being pregnant is seen as just another challenge?
Celebrities (the vast majority of them) are stupid. And Hayden Panettierre isn’t all that great – her character in ‘Heroes’ was one of the more annoying ones that I couldn’t have cared less about.
OzarkHillbilly
@raven: One uncle did homeland defense, another went in on D-Day plus 3 at Utah, and still a 3rd was a Marine at Tarawa and at least one more island I forget. A 4th was a pilot on C-10s in Alaska, my mother’s brother was a frogman who was involved in several island assaults, including one during which he did things for which he got wrote up in a teen book called “Frogmen of WWII”, and of course the old man flew B-29s in the Pacific. They all survived the war, but Joe never made it back. He was killed during takeoff a few months after VJ day.
And yeah, your old man was right, the Pacific was the bridesmaid.
Raven
@OzarkHillbilly: The UDT boys! There was one at that parade in New Orleans. He was one tough lookin old dude. Didn’t get on the trucks with the vets, he sat Ina folding chair with his arms crossed with a scowl on his face!
Villago Delenda Est
:@raven: Well, yes, Rome fell just prior, but the Italian campaign was far from over. The slog up the “tough old gut” of Winnie’s “soft underbelly” continued for another 10 months. There were also landings in southern France as well, but D-Day got all the press, because, well, we were heading to Paris, and then on to Germany, direct. In the meantime, on the forgotten front, thousands continued to die on a daily basis as Uncle Joe’s Red Army moved westward.
OzarkHillbilly
@Raven:
I never saw Uncle Alex with anything but a smile on his face, the most happy go lucky man I ever knew. He found life to be an unending joy.
Botsplainer
@Villago Delenda Est:
I knew a guy who had been in Uncle Joe’s Valiant People’s Army. Nicest guy you’d ever want to meet, spoke very broken English, and I didn’t know his history until after he died in the early 90s. He had slogged across Europe and wound up way forward (probably was in the group that was at the Elbe). Wound up not getting repatriated, joined the US Army and served with a ski unit during Korea.
A badass in every sense of the word.
OzarkHillbilly
@Raven: Kinda funny in that Alex was supposed to be ineligible for UDT because he was colorblind. So he cheated and got in anyway.
Chyron HR
@PsiFighter37:
That doesn’t really narrow it down.
Cheryl from Maryland
@Villago Delenda Est: My uncle served on a Submarine Chaser to prepare the way for the Italian invasion. He wasn’t bitter about the publicity given to D-Day, but when he opened up about his experiences, we realized he was a total badass. He and the crew chased U-boats on a little wooden ship (the group was also called the splinter fleet) so troops could land in Sicily and the Italian mainland.
debbie
@raven:
It was nice seeing them smiling and seemingly glad to be with Obama. On the local news here, they always seem to find the one scowler who’s convinced Obama is Satan and promote him as the face of veterans.
OzarkHillbilly
One more way to stop a bad man with a gun to add to the list:
“A man has died after a gunman shot four people on the campus of Seattle Pacific University. A suspect was taken into custody after a student acting as a hall monitor subdued him with pepper spray as he tried to reload, police in the Washington state city said.”
Yeah, outlawing expanded clips wouldn’t make any difference, any difference at all, “You know how long it takes me to change clips?”
“Yep, long enough to beat you like a redheaded stepchild.”
Culture of Truth
@debbie: Yep, last week Meet The Press went to a small town to find out regular folk are thinking and talked to two people, one an old vet who gets all his views on foreign affairs from Fox news.
Glocksman
Who?
I hate to admit that I had to Google her in order to find out who she is..
raven
@Cheryl from Maryland: I recommend Rick Atkinson’s WWII Trilogy.
NonyNony
@OzarkHillbilly:
That is amazing. And there’s more to it if this bit from the Seattle Times is correct:
geg6
My dad and uncle were both part of D-Day, but in very different ways. My dad, the youngest brother (middle brother served in the Navy in the Pacific), was in the Army Air Corps and ferried aircraft and supplies into England in preparation of the invasion. He never saw battle (both brothers did, though). Uncle Bud, the oldest, parachuted into France with the 101st Airborne in some of the first drops. He hardly ever talked about it but he had lots of medals and some cool souvenirs, like German helmets and knives. Dad, who had a relatively cushy war, said the worst part of the war for him was training in Biloxi.
D58826
@NonyNony: new NRA slogan – what you need to stop a bad man with a gun is a good man with a can of mace
James E. Powell
@Cheryl from Maryland:
My dad spent two years on a subchaser in the Pacific. I’ve always been amazed by that. I mean, when I think about what I was doing when I was 21.
Jon Marcus
@Mistermix, from a quick glance at the article, it seems like she’s saying she’s able to parent despite her youth not her old age. Perhaps you need to go the fuck to sleep?
C.S.Strowbridge
@Glocksman:
She was in Remember the Titans. She was the young daughter of the other coach.
Higgs Boson's Mate
My dad joined the Navy in1938. He was stationed aboard the USS Utah on Dec. 7th, 1941. Fought through the entire Pacific campaign, participated the landings at Inchon during the Korean war, and was aboard an ammo ship that resupplied American advisers in Vietnam during the late 50s. He was a WESTPAC sailor for his entire career. He retired a WO4.
Bobby Thomson
@raven: And Lord Mountbatten did his own unauthorized attempt.
@Jon Marcus:
Yes, that’s obviously what she meant.
Elizabelle
C-Span 2 covering today’s DDay anniversary ceremonies live. You can watch it without press corpse yokels yakking over it.
President Obama arrived a few minutes ago to enthusiastic cheers and applause. Escorted by two young children, he greeted a line of DDay vets, thanking them for their service, good to see you, etc.
Some of the vets spoke to him first, but I could not catch the exchange.
kindness
I don’t watch Nashville and have no idea who this actress is.
I must be an old I guess.
Ruckus
@Mustang Bobby:
Usually alcohol.
DrZZ
My dad was on Oahu (Bellows Field) on Dec 7, 1941. He said they were shooting at planes with their .45s because nobody could think of anything more useful to do. They sent him to Texas to become a bombardier and he ended up flying just under 50 missions out of North Africa and Italy. He never talked about it much but you tell by the way he said “Ploesti” that he never wanted to relive those missions. I found his flight record after he died; most of the missions were 8-9 hours long and sometimes a stretch of 8 mission in 10 days. Sit in a cold, cramped, loud plane for 4 hours to get to where a whole lot of people were shooting at you and if you make it though you get another 4-5 hours of cold, cramped and loud. They did what they needed to do, but it seems like they needed to do a whole lot more than than we ever did.
Higgs Boson's Mate
It’s easy to understand why Panettiere’s pregnancy is considered newsworthy: women become pregnant so rarely.
shelley
Well, yes, 24 would be late for getting pregnant; if this was the 13th century.
Ruckus
@Higgs Boson’s Mate:
And never more than once.
Jay C
@raven:
And Dieppe.
Shortstop
Fun fact: Peak fertility hits at 24 for women.
Higgs Boson's Mate
It just occurred to me that if Congress in 1941 was like today’s Congress Roosevelt would have been impeached, convicted and removed from office for Pearl Harbor.
CONGRATULATIONS!
My grandfather, who just died about three weeks ago in his sleep, age 91, was one of the drivers of the landing craft at Omaha on D-Day.
He did an interview with a local TV station when “Saving Private Ryan” came out. The newsdroid asked him how accurate the film was. He said it was pretty good, but the actual landing (the first ten minutes or so of that movie, which I found almost impossible to watch) was “far worse”.
I cannot imagine. I almost crapped my pants in the movie, and that was just a movie!
My grandfather was no saint, and didn’t spend his life trying to be a hero, but by God nobody can question the courage of anyone who went through that.
gogol's wife
@BillinGlendaleCA:
I used to work with a guy who had a huge hole in his arm — just a kind of crater. Machine-gun fire in the Pacific. And he said he was lucky.
Ruckus
@BillinGlendaleCA:
Almost any history gets forgotten. Because it gets in the way of making their own reality.
Helmut Monotreme
Neither of my grandparents were in the military in WWII. My paternal grandfather worked in a munitions factory and my maternal grandfather was an only child and a farmer and thus exempt from the draft. There is a tiny stupid selfish part of me that wishes I could share stories of their battlefield heroism, but the grown up part of me is glad they didn’t have to get within 2000 miles of a battlefield.
Mnemosyne
@Bobby Thomson:
Exactly — she’s responding to people saying that she’s too young to have a child by saying she feels older than her actual age.
burnspbesq
Ms. Panetiere’s pregnancy comes at an awkward time professionally, as “Nashville” only recently got renewed for season three. I imagine we’re in for at least three episodes of “who knocked up Juliette” (my bet: slimy label exec Jeff Fordham, with whom she had one drunken fling), while boyfriend Avery scowls in the background.
TerryC
@Raven: I served with UDT–13 during. Tough, very tough guys.
TerryC
@Raven: I served with UDT–13 during Nam. Tough, very tough guys.
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
My father built airplanes in Baltimore for the first part of the war. He volunteered just ahead of the exemption ending for men in those jobs, disappointed at the time to miss getting an aircraft mechanic slot. Ended up a Coastie on an APA in the Pacific and unloaded troops at Okinawa. His battle station was an aircraft spotter. I found a library book in the early 70s with aircraft silhouettes; he still ID’d every one.
Bill in Section 147
@Baud: Someone said Fox did not over it and now I know why.
They have Hitler derangement syndrome.
Spinoza Is My Co-pilot
@Higgs Boson’s Mate:
Would have happened to President Gore, too, beginning right around 9/12/2001 (with the make-up of Congress then. Yes, I know, Jim Jeffords, but I believe it still would have happened).
tybee
@Higgs Boson’s Mate:
wow. i’ve seen the pics of the Utah turtled.
tybee
@TerryC:
and wow again.
Tehanu
Had to fix the quotation marks, they obviously got them in the wrong place. \meow