I went and toured the battlefield at Shiloh. I wrote this song afterwards. Incredible place. Holy. US Grant beat back the CSA under Johnson. Terrible cost for both sides. One of the main points of engagement was The Hornets Nest as it came to be known. I took all the pictures or created the imagery. Song is from a charging CSA soldier's point of view.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s own account of how Kubla Khan. In the autumn of 1797 Coleridge was staying at a lonely farmhouse. He was unwell—dysentery, and took two grains of opium (laudanum) as a painkiller. While reading a 1613 travel compilation Purchas His Pilgrimage, he came to a passage describing Kublai Khan’s summer palace at Xanadu. He fell asleep in his chair. For about three hours, he later claimed, he remained in “a profound sleep, at least of the external senses.” In that state he “composed” two or three hundred lines—images rising before him as things, with the words arriving of their own accord, without effort. When he woke he still had the whole poem vividly in mind and immediately began writing it down. He had written the 54 lines we now have when he was interrupted by “a person on business.” The visitor detained him for more than an hour. When Coleridge returned to his room, the rest of the vision had vanished “like the images on the surface of a stream into which a stone has been cast.” He kept only “some eight or ten scattered lines and images” and a vague sense of the overall design. He never recovered the rest. He treated the piece as a private curiosity for nearly twenty years, reciting it to friends. In 1816 Lord Byron heard it and insisted it be published. Coleridge printed it that year as Kubla Khan: or, A Vision in a Dream. A Fragment. calling it “a psychological curiosity” rather than a finished poem. What remains is the 54-line poem that survived the interruption—one of the most haunting unfinished works in the language. Kubla Khan or, A Vision in a Dream. A Fragment. Samuel Taylor Coleridge (published 1816) In Xanadu did Kubla Khan A stately pleasure-dome decree: Where Alph, the sacred river, ran Through caverns measureless to man Down to a sunless sea. So twice five miles of fertile ground With walls and towers were girdled round: And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills, Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree; And here were forests ancient as the hills, Enfolding sunny spots of greenery. But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover! A savage place! as holy and enchanted As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted By woman wailing for her demon-lover! And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething, As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing, A mighty fountain momently was forced: Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail, Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher’s flail: And mid these dancing rocks at once and ever It flung up momently the sacred river. Five miles meandering with a mazy motion Through wood and dale the sacred river ran, Then reached the caverns measureless to man, And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean; And ’mid this tumult Kubla heard from far Ancestral voices prophesying war! The shadow of the dome of pleasure Floated midway on the waves; Where was heard the mingled measure From the fountain and the caves. It was a miracle of rare device, A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice! A damsel with a dulcimer In a vision once I saw: It was an Abyssinian maid, And on her dulcimer she played, Singing of Mount Abora. Could I revive within me Her symphony and song, To such a deep delight ’twould win me, That with music loud and long, I would build that dome in air, That sunny dome! those caves of ice! And all who heard should see them there, And all should cry, Beware! Beware! His flashing eyes, his floating hair! Weave a circle round him thrice, And close your eyes with holy dread, For he on honey-dew hath fed, And drunk the milk of Paradise. This has always been one of my favorite poems. Nothing I can write would do it justice. However, I put a song together. The lyrics are below. The last 30 seconds are the Abyssinian maid on the dulcimer. I stopped it abruptly to illustrate the interruption while STC was writing the poem. The Khan In Xanadu, the river drew a line Through caverns dark and gardens cut in stone A summer palace by the sacred tide Where shadow and the sunlight made a home Walls of war and wonder Held the mountain back Then the ground began to tremble Under hidden cracks Xanadu, Xanadu Hear the river call Xanadu, Xanadu Guard against the fall (Heard the river call) (Heard the river call) A chasm opened that was ceaseless An ancient river to caress The fountain spun its silver into air As if the earth itself whispered prayer Every carved delight Sat on borrowed land Beauty lived beside the terror Hand in broken hand Xanadu, Xanadu Hear the river call Xanadu, Xanadu Gaurd against the fall (Heard the river call) (Heard the river call) Then give me that vision Half ruin, half pearl A king's bright dream And the dark beneath the world Xanadu, Xanadu Hear the river call Xanadu, Xanadu Gold against the fall Xanadu, Xanadu Dream it while it lasts (Heard the river call) (Heard the river call)يا جبالَ النورِ، يا صدى الريحِ في الأعالي نمضي نحوَ القممِ، ويحملُنا ضوءُ الليالي

US seized a directed-energy weapon from a foreign adversary: Herridge piped.video/eXKTFsQPXMM?si=uoZV… via @YouTube

Love Field Dallas.... I was heading to DFW and on the downwind leg for the landing when I snapped this pic. This is where JFK landed and his body took off from in 1963.

The Lockheed A-12 Oxcart was the CIA’s answer to a problem that the U-2 had made painfully clear: a slow, high-flying spy plane could be seen, tracked, and shot down. Conceived in the late 1950s, flown in secret from Groom Lake, and used operationally for only a year, the A-12 was the first aircraft designed to live at Mach 3 and the edge of space. It was also the machine that made the more famous SR-71 Blackbird possible. After the U-2 entered service in 1956, CIA planners understood that Soviet radar and surface-to-air missiles would soon close the gap. Richard Bissell’s office commissioned studies showing that speed and altitude together could shrink an aircraft’s exposure to almost nothing. In 1957 the Agency opened Project GUSTO and invited Lockheed’s Skunk Works and Convair to compete. Lockheed’s twelfth “Archangel” design—the A-12—won in August 1959. Clarence "Kelly" Johnson already had the U-2 on his résumé. The program was renamed OXCART, a deliberately dull code word for an aircraft that would cruise at more than three times the speed of sound. On 26 January 1960 the CIA ordered twelve airframes. The design problem was heat as much as aerodynamics. At Mach 3.2 the skin would exceed 500°F; engine cowlings and the windshield would run hotter still. Aluminum was useless. Johnson chose titanium alloy for more than 90 percent of the structure, even though the United States had almost no domestic supply and almost no experience machining it. Early batches were so poorly processed that most of the metal was rejected. The Agency set up front companies and bought ore on the world market; a substantial share came, with bitter irony, from the Soviet Union. New tools, new welds, and new fuel-tank sealants had to be invented. The aircraft grew several inches in flight as it heated, then shrank again on descent. Fuel tanks leaked on the ground because the airframe was designed to seal only when hot. Pilots sat alone in a full pressure suit, flying a machine whose turning radius at cruise was measured in tens of miles. Louis Schalk made an unofficial hop at Groom Lake on 26 April 1962; the official first flight followed on 30 April. Mach 3 was reached in July 1963. Inlet unstarts, compressor stalls, and debris ingestion occupied the test team for years. The movable inlet spikes that positioned the shock wave had to be mastered before the aircraft could live at design speed. By November 1965 the A-12 was declared operational: sustained Mach 3.2 at about 90,000 feet, with a documented peak of Mach 3.29. Unrefueled range was on the order of 2,500 nautical miles. Fifteen A-12-family aircraft were built, including a two-seat trainer nicknamed the Titanium Goose and two M-21 drone carriers. Several were lost in accidents. Two pilots, Walter Ray and Jack Weeks, were killed. The aircraft was never sent over the Soviet Union. Satellites and political caution closed that mission before the A-12 was ready. Its only combat deployment was Operation Black Shield, flown from Kadena Air Base on Okinawa between 31 May 1967 and 8 May 1968. Three aircraft and six CIA pilots flew 29 operational sorties: twenty-four over North Vietnam, two over the DMZ and neighboring territory, and three over North Korea. The first mission, flown by Mele Vojvodich at Mach 3.1 and 80,000 feet, photographed seventy of 190 known SAM sites and nine other priority targets and detected no hostile radar. Later flights were tracked; SA-2s were launched on three occasions. On 30 October 1967 Dennis Sullivan watched multiple missiles converge behind him. A fragment of debris—not a warhead pellet—lodged in the right wing. It was the only battle damage an A-12 ever took. None were lost to enemy fire. After North Korea seized the USS Pueblo on 23 January 1968, Jack Weeks flew over the peninsula three days later and located the ship in Wonsan harbor. Follow-up missions showed no large-scale North Korean mobilization. Those pictures helped Washington choose diplomacy over a military response. The last operational A-12 sortie was flown on 8 May 1968. Weeks died the following month when his aircraft disappeared over the Pacific on a post-maintenance check flight. The last A-12 landed at Palmdale on 21 June 1968 and went into storage. On 28 December 1966 the Bureau of the Budget ordered the A-12 retired in favor of the Air Force SR-71, effective June 1968. The SR-71 was longer, heavier, two-seat, and packed with a broader sensor suite—side-looking radar, ELINT, infrared, and multiple cameras at once. The A-12, lighter and single-seat, flew a few thousand feet higher at the same Mach number and carried a superb camera, but it could not do as many jobs on one pass. The A-12’s operational life was short; its technical life was not. Titanium fabrication methods, high-temperature hydraulics and lubricants, movable-inlet propulsion, pressure-suit life support, and the first generation of radar-reduction techniques all passed to the YF-12 interceptor and the SR-71, which flew for decades. The Oxcart proved that a manned aircraft could cruise faster than a rifle bullet at the edge of the stratosphere, photograph a battlefield, and come home before defenses could react. It never became a household name because it was never meant to. For a few years it was the fastest, highest-flying reconnaissance aircraft in the world, and it belonged to the CIA. That was the point. May morning, in Russian skies Slow bird hanging where the SAMs learned to fly U 2 came down in pieces the summit shot to hell American window shut — no more pictures that tell The U-2 was a ghost that learned it could bleed So Langley called Burbank: “Build something that we need.” Clarence sends his regards From a hangar not on the map Titanium skin and a prayer in the dark Ninety thousand and 3 plus Mach Just like a witch on a flying broom The shadow already left the room And his regards kept getting through Skunk Works lights, no name on the door Kelly said don’t take two steps — take ten or more Oxcart in the desert, salt flat and heat J-58s screaming, inlet spikes repeat They paid him in checks that came out of sight Built a black arrow with pieces in the night Single seat, no mercy, no second man to talk back The A-12 didn’t ask permission — it just let its engines crack Lou Schalk lifted off when the world did not know First hop was ugly, then the bird stoled the show From Kadena to Hanoi — Black Shield in the rain Over the 38th, cameras drinking terrain Twenty-nine sorties, then the brass called time Air Force wanted a two-seat line They parked her in the desert like a secret that got old But the sky still remembers the heat she used to hold He didn’t send a letter He sent a shadow at three times the speed of sound If you see a contrail cutting the edge of the world That’s Clarence coming around And if the duct stays smooth when it ought to rumble That’s Ben still holding the shock in the tunnel Clarence sends his regards From a hangar that ain’t on the map Titanium skin and a prayer in the dark Ninety thousand and 3 plus Mach You can lock the radar, you can light the fuse That ghost has left the room Clarence sends his regards Ben taught the inlet not to lose They did it all with slide rules Actual intelligence not AI Seven decades ago. And it still holds all the records

I love the full moon on a dark night.

Psalm 139:7–10: Where can I go from your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence? If I go up to the heavens, you are there; if I make my bed in the depths, you are there. If I rise on the wings of the dawn, if I settle on the far side of the sea, even there your hand will guide me, your right hand will hold me fast.

Nintendo was founded as a company while Jack the Ripper was active. Nintendo was established by Fusajiro Yamauchi on September 23, 1889, in Kyoto, Japan, initially producing handcrafted hanafuda playing cards. The Whitechapel murders attributed to "Jack the Ripper" spanned 1888 to 1891.

London drowned in beer (1814) A 22-foot vat of fermenting porter burst at the Meux & Co. Horse Shoe Brewery. The wave of beer smashed nearby vats, flooded slums, and killed eight people. Some accounts say extra deaths came from people drinking the flood. The next year the European Armies beat Napoleon at Waterloo and sent him into exile. So , it was a while ago. Between 18 and 23 I tried to drown myself in beer. Didn't work.

Every time you thoroughly shuffle a standard deck of 52 cards, you are almost certainly creating an arrangement of cards that has never existed before in the entire history of humanity—and will almost certainly never exist again. There are 52! (52 factorial) possible ways to order a deck. That works out to roughly 8.0658 × 10 to the 67th power, a number so large it dwarfs the number of atoms in the observable universe, the number of seconds since the Big Bang, and any realistic count of all the card shuffles humans have ever performed. Even under extremely generous assumptions (every person who has ever lived shuffling decks constantly for the entire age of the universe), the total number of shuffles humanity could have produced is still negligible. The probability that any two well-randomized decks in history have matched is vanishingly small—so close to zero that a freshly shuffled deck is, for all practical purposes, unique in the history of the world. This only holds for a proper shuffle (roughly seven good riffle shuffles are enough to randomize a deck thoroughly). What makes this fascinating is how it collides with everyday intuition. We treat a shuffled deck as ordinary and interchangeable. In reality, each careful shuffle is an act of near-absolute novelty—an arrangement that has never been seen and, in all likelihood, never will be. It is a concrete, tangible demonstration of just how vast combinatorial space can be, and how rarely human activity explores more than an infinitesimal sliver of it. It quietly challenges the assumption that “random” things in daily life must have happened before. Sometimes the ordinary is cosmically unique.

The Binding Window is the small stretch of time in which the brain decides that two things belong together as one event. In science, this is often called the temporal binding window. It explains why we usually experience the world as smooth and unified, even though sight, sound, and touch do not all reach the brain at the exact same moment. Think of it as the brain’s “close enough” rule. If a sound and a sight happen close enough together, your brain treats them as part of the same thing. If they happen too far apart, your brain separates them into two different events. The brain needs this window because information from the world arrives at different speeds. Light travels much faster than sound, so when you see a person clap from across a field, you see the hands come together before the sound reaches you. Touch signals also take different amounts of time to reach the brain depending on where they start in the body. In simple terms, the Binding Window is how the brain edits slightly mismatched signals into one believable “now.” It does not show you time exactly as it happened. It gives you a useful version of time that helps the world feel stable. The Binding Window is not the same size for every situation. For very simple events, like a flash and a beep, the window may be only a fraction of a second. For speech, it can be wider because our brains are used to matching moving mouths with voices, even when the timing is not perfect. Most of the time, the window is measured in milliseconds. That sounds tiny, but it matters. A few hundred milliseconds can be the difference between “that sight and sound belong together” and “those were two separate things.” You can picture the brain working with layers of “now.” Some timing decisions happen in just a few milliseconds. Others happen across a few hundred milliseconds. And our broader feeling of the present moment may last a couple of seconds. The Binding Window is mainly about that middle layer: the brief period where the brain decides whether separate signals should be joined into one event. The Binding Window is not a fixed setting. It changes with age, experience, and training. Children often have wider windows, meaning their brains are more willing to combine signals that are not perfectly timed. In adulthood, the window usually becomes more precise. With aging, it may widen again. The Binding Window matters because it shows that we do not experience the present moment as a perfect recording. The brain is always doing a little editing. It waits just long enough to gather information, compares signals that arrive at different times, and then decides what belongs together. That means “now” is not a single instant. It is more like a short editing window. Inside that window, the brain stitches together sights, sounds, touches, and movements into one useful picture of reality.

My birthday is around the corner. I started thinking about it. Then I remembered the movie and catch saying about Grumpy Old Men. I wondered if I was becoming one. So, I thought some more and came up with this song and video. To make the video, I used a lot of the worst pictures of me that I could find to emphasize my aging. I clean up better than portrayed in this video. However, vanity aside, I will admit I won’t be mistaken for a movie star in any possible reality. Have a great day. I came up with the song title when I was thinking about exercising, then I wrote the lyrics instead.

It always comes in my sleep. I can’t tell you the specifics of my USAF job. It was 40 years ago, but I took an oath and signed a paper. Besides, as you read this, there are still crews out there doing that job at this moment. The US has a fleet of strategic reconnaissance aircraft that cover the globe 24/7/365 and they have since the 1950’s. Besides what I did then doesn’t really matter. It’s what it did to me that counted. My call sign was “Raven 8”. I was in the eighth position – the last position – on the aircraft. Raven was the term common to all reconnaissance electronic warfare officers. I looked out my window facing backwards and watched the blue Mediterranean slide beneath me like a carpet. The plane was a modified Boeing 707 and carried a lot of people. Each doing a specific job. Each life on the plane depended on someone else doing that job properly. I was relatively confident in the crew. I knew them and I knew their strengths and weaknesses. If I swiveled my head and looked up, I could see up the length of the plane. No windows. This was an RC-135. Combat Sent - That was our program tag. The motto for recon guys is, “Alone, unarmed and unafraid.” Gotta tell you, they got the last part wrong. I was afraid. We are flying relatively close to Libya in the early 1980’s, a country I do not like. That country’s government did not like the United States. It did not like the United States government sending me to fly close to their shores. This was how we operated. Freedom of navigation, we can go where we please. All my systems are humming and blinking normally. I check my watch to count off the minutes. We’re working but it’s unusually quiet. I started to get a queasy feeling but couldn’t explain it. When I got them, I knew nothing good was on the way. I tried to suppress it. It kept growing. Too quiet. Way too quiet. Everything is going too well. Not enough stimulation. No events. Why not? Unusual. I kept checking the seconds of the mission ticking away. There is a saying in the Air Force, “Flying is hours of boredom punctuated by brief periods of panic.” Our boredom that day was about to end. Most air forces in the world are very predictable. In the job we were in, we had to know their patterns. If they broke the pattern, things were not good. However, they never, ever broke the pattern. Except this once. “Pilot, RC (Raven Command), how’s are fuel holding out? Think we’ll get out a little early...I could use a steak.” “Hey RC, this is the Pilot, I’ll have you back right on time.” Social chatter was highly unusual. It was against tactical doctrine. I could tell the boredom quotient was high. I did a system calibration and started another scanning pattern. Hey, wait a minute, what’s that? Contrail? A speck. I’ve got a tally. “RC, Raven8, I tally traffic on the climb, estimate over 10 miles, coming from the North. Do we have correlation?” “Raven 8, RC, are you sure of that call?” Tension in his voice. He’s alert. “This is 8, roger that, climbing, closing, speed of heat.” “Recon Crew this is RC, I need immediate correlation on unknown bogie in intercept mode.” I turned my head and looked the length of the plane. There was urgency now. Everyone was checking their equipment... straining to divine this ghost track.” When it happened, it was so quick I went into shock. I was turning back to look at the track. We had an unknown fighter, presumed hostile coming from the wrong direction and closing on us. Fast. I saw the track clearly now. Then the interphone exploded with chatter. It was chaos. “RC, this is Raven 2, I’ve got correlation and activity.” “4 confirms.” “RC this is 3, we’ve got him coming in hot, High PRF going to lock. I’ve got moving triplets.” “Pilot, RC! TACTICAL, TACTICAL, TACTICAL. THIS IS THE REAL THING” “ROGER THAT RC, HOLD ON... WE’RE TACTICAL AT THIS TIME...” The fighter was closing fast. I could see him inbound through my window that wasn’t there. Then I could not. I began to be pulled upward. I was strapped in, but loosely. There was play in my belt. I floated a bit off the seat. The G forces were building. The quiet humming was replaced with the terrible groaning of metal under stress. I checked my altimeter. It was swirling like a pinwheel. Brakes, boards, flaps, gear, pull the power.... Tactical... we were dropping out of the air like a brick. I was pinned against the bulkhead. I was in shock. I use all my strength and shift my eyes. I’m still pinned to the bulkhead. I can see a sliver of light where it shouldn’t be. We’ve blown the seal on the emergency escape hatch; possible rapid decompression. I was thinking,”so this is what it feels like to die.” Seconds are like hours. The noise is unbearable. Finally.... THUD....THUD.... THUD..... WHAM.... We pull out of the dive abruptly. Things had been floating in air all over the plane and now they drop like so many rocks; negative G’s turn positive. We were on the deck and fighting for survival. I was slammed into my seat. Pinned again...but just for two or three seconds. Then I looked up into the plane...down the dark tube usually bathed in a green phosphorescent glow. It was chaos.... Everywhere. “RC, 8, we’ve blown the aft hatch and I smell fumes.... “ “RC, 4, we’ve got a smoke on amp bank 5 by the power converters.... Checking off to fix it...” “Pilot, RC, all hells broke loose back here.” “Standby 1” “Crew, Pilot, we are Canx Tactical, heading out.” I unstrapped, got out of the seat and headed for the cockpit. It was incredibly noisy, as if we had plunged a lance into some sleeping dragon. When I walked into the cockpit the place was lit up like a Christmas tree. Hydraulic lights. There were warning lights on I didn’t even know existed. The front-end crew was methodically working their checklist. Just fly the plane, I thought. Don’t wreck trying to fix the emergency. By this time, everyone had forgotten about the fighter. There was nothing we could have done about him anyway. Fact was, when we went dropped out of the sky, I could see him overshoot, no way he could complete the intercept. I looked in amazement out the windscreen. We were as low as I have ever been in an airplane that was not landing. I could distinguish the waves. It was surrealistic. Over time things were patched back together and we decided to bring it back to Athens rather than divert. The maintenance would be sorely needed. “Nikki control, Nikki control, this is Dandy 44, request direct Athens. We are declaring an emergency at this time.” The pilot was good. We got cleared direct. We limped in. Later that afternoon, on the tarmac, we all walked around the wounded plane in wonder. I walked up to a maintenance guy that was performing surgery on an engine. “What the hell did you guys do to her?” “It wasn’t me.... I was just on for the ride.” I didn’t know what he meant. I didn’t know if he was kidding. I didn’t know if I could take another flight. I mean, this wasn’t even a wreck. For the record, this was a non-event. I saw every second of it.... As I awoke from a tortured sleep 10 years after the fact, with the alarm in the background.

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In July 1518, a woman named Frau Troffea began dancing uncontrollably in the streets of Strasbourg (then part of the Holy Roman Empire). She didn't stop for days, and within a week, about 30 more people had joined her. Within a month, the "dancing plague" had affected around 400 people who danced without rest, some for days on end. Many of these dancers eventually collapsed from exhaustion, suffered strokes, or even died from heart attacks. Local authorities initially believed this was a curse from Saint Vitus and hired more musicians to encourage more dancing, thinking it would help the afflicted "dance it out." When that didn't work, they consulted physicians who concluded this was a "natural disease" rather than supernatural possession. Modern historians and scientists have proposed several explanations, including mass hysteria, stress-induced psychosis, and even a form of ergotism (a type of poisoning from contaminated grain that can cause hallucinations and convulsions). The most compelling theory suggests this was an extreme form of mass psychological disorder triggered by the extreme poverty, famine, and disease that plagued the region at the time. What makes this event so fascinating is how it demonstrates the power of the human mind to produce physical symptoms that spread through communities, much like a contagious disease but operating through psychological mechanisms rather than biological ones.