Memorial Day

One kind of neat thing about Facebook is that you could see, at least of my friends, how many of them were remembering the fallen today, many had family or others who had touched their lives that they honored today.

At midnight last night I was contacted to see about doing a series of Memorial Day fly-overs, in formation with 5 other airplanes, at seven different events over in the Ohio area.  I was also asked to do a solo fly-over at Ft. Wayne.  The problem was two-fold.  1). The weather and 2). My health.  The bigger problem was that neither one was so bad as to be a definite no-go.  Participating in these fly-overs today means something to me, and I'd be honored to be able to do that.  On a more shallow note, I also haven't been able to go on any of the formation flights like this that I've been invited to since this season began, and I don't wish to stop being invited as a non-participant.  But mornings are still not great for my throat, head, lungs, and I'd have had to get up at 6 a.m. or earlier to be over in Ohio by the time they wanted to start.  I also couldn't swear not to get stuck by rain or even storms trying to come back to Indiana.  The 6 p.m. flyover at Ft. Wayne would not have happened anyway--that's right when we had a line of storms moving through.  So, instead I stayed home quietly today.  I am feeling better.  I'm supposed to fly tomorrow with students, so I'll give that a go, I think my three days of forced inactivity, sleeping in, drinking water and resting helped head it off.

I read "Inferno" by Dan Brown today. As usual he incorporates a lot of symbols and secrets and factual information with art and history to weave a pretty interesting tale.  This one is more about the word being overpopulated, and one man's quest to fix that problem any way he could.  They posed an interesting question: If you could flip a switch and randomly wipe out half the world's population, would you?  Everyone answers, of course not.  The follow up question was: If you could flip a switch and save half of the word's population, along with most of the earth's resources, which will otherwise be headed for extinction or destruction within a relatively short time-frame, would you?  One guy decided yes, he would, to save the world, and his solution was actually pretty ingenious.  This is a spoiler alert, so if you plan on reading it, don't read the rest of this paragraph.  Throughout the whole book, the race is on to find and stop a virus he set up to disperse around the world that they assumed would wipe out 1/3 of the world's population, as in the Black Plague, which had fascinated him.  Instead, in the end, his solution was more simple and less violent.  He created a vector virus, something they're actually working on by the way, to infect the world's population, which would lie dormant in 2 out of 3 people, but in the 3rd, it would activate, and render that person...sterile.  And this vector virus changed their DNA, so even the people who have kids will pass on that genetic component, and future generations will also all be reduced by 1/3.  Nobody actually dies, no blood bath like you expect from all the talk of the Black Plague, just a large reduction in population growth for the foreseeable future.  The book ended with them being too late to stop the virus, and world leaders of WHO wondering if they should try to reverse it...if they'd cause more damage trying to mess with the human genome again when they didn't even know how he'd done it, or if they should just leave it alone because it actually was a fairly elegant solution to the world over-population disaster, even if it was unfair, dangerous, immoral, etc. to do.   By the way, the over-population statistics really are disturbing, and we really are vulnerable to another plague to thin the herd...

Kaylee is wrapping up the end of her school year, and I suppose it goes without saying that next week will be busy for all of us.  I'm especially looking forward to Wednesday morning when I get to rise at 3:30 a.m. for a trip to Mississippi.  ;)