Snapshots of the world you live in:
1. Apparently, the pilot of an Air Canada Jazz jet got up and went to the bathroom in the middle of a flight a couple weeks ago and returned to find that he was locked out of the cockpit. Not to worry, though; after applying a little elbow grease, he managed to take apart the door and get in just in time to land.
All’s well that ends well. They just took off the cockpit door, and they got around the whole “locked” problem.
Which part of this story is supposed to bother me the most? Would it be wrong of me to prefer the headline, “Canadian Plane Crashes the Hell Into Mountain; Cockpit Security Tight as Drum, You Jihadist No-goodniks”?
It may or may not be good news to learn that we as travellers are either so tough (or so petrified to move on planes) that a guy in a pilot’s uniform began breaking down the cockpit door and nobody even got up. Imagine you were on a plane and you learned the pilot was on the wrong side of a locked door from the controls: do you think you would freak out, or do you think you would freak the f*** out? “Put your hands up in the air and wave them like you just don’t care” is just the opening move. Um, hey, everybody: free drinks from now until we land!
Anticlimax: the first officer was inside the cockpit. But the articles I’ve seen about this paint Air Canada’s first officer as something of a Gilligan figure.
2. This is real this is real this is real: when the Maine National Guard ships men and women off to fight Islamofascists, they are now helping the families cope with the prolonged absence of their loved ones by giving the families cardboard cut-outs of their loved ones.
Yes, they are. They call them Flat Daddies.
Yes, they do.
“I prop him up in a chair, or sometimes put him on the couch and cover him up with a blanket,” said Kay Judkins of Caribou, whose husband, Jim, is a minesweeper mechanic in Afghanistan. “The cat will curl up on the blanket, and it looks kind of weird. I’ve tricked several people by that. They think he’s home again.”
At the risk of thinking about this more than Maine has, that’s already Norman Bates creepy if Regular Daddy’s making it home. Can I really be the only person who’s pictured the kids pulling Flat Daddy around at the funeral home? I mean… uhhuhhuhhghhh wibbly-jibblies.
September 29th, 2006 at 10:39 am
Flat Daddy may fool the kids and a few others, but I’m pretty sure that it won’t fool the mom..in at least one way.
September 29th, 2006 at 3:35 pm
In the earlier part of our now decade-long marriage, my husband and I joined the Army. Well, actually, he joined to pay off student loans and I was immediately in as well, as an Army wife. An Army wife, I read, was the hardest job in the military. The fact that I read this off an embroidered sweatshirt in the Post-Exchange does not mean that it wasn’t true. The wives (and entire families) of deployed military personnel have a lot to deal with: worry, a sense of loss, loneliness, etc. I understand this, and can therefore understand some of the more unusual coping mechanisms the situation provokes. For example, one Thanksgiving, when my taller half was incommunicado and training (translation: blowing sh*t up), I perched the groom-half of my bride/groom teddy bear couple (wedding gift from an elderly relative unfamiliar with the “registry” concept) at my dinner table as my spouse’s representative. To be fair, I was young, and the bear was wearing a tux, as well as my husband’s baseball cap. It also made my mother-in-law feel better.
Anyway, with that little disclaimer out there, let me now state that the Flat Daddies story made me flash back to two things:
1)The scene in “Lonely Guy” where Steve Martin and Charles Grodin throw a party whose only guests are cardboard cutouts of celebrities. I’m predicting a USO function for the Flat Daddies any day now. I think the conversation between the families at that party would go something like this: “Do you know if they have General Powell? Yes they do, but you have to reserve him a week ahead.”
2)The year my husband turned 30 and I decided it would be a fun surprise if he woke up with our apartment already decorated. So, after we turned in, I lay awake until 2am, then snuck out of bed, retrieved the helium tank I had stashed in the trunk of my car, and spent the next two hours filling 85 latex balloons, tying them off with ribbon, and creating a beautiful balloon ceiling. As a final touch, I perched a cardboard cutout of Sarah Michelle Gellar (as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, naturally, my husband’s fave) in the front window. When I finally returned to bed, I collapsed under the exhaustion of almost 24 straight hours of consciousness and scheming. Which is why I never heard the earth shattering “Rat-a-tat- tat-tat” at 4:15am. But my husband did. Convinced we had an intruder unloading an entire ammo magazine in our apartment, he jumped out of bed and ran in to the living room, where he soon discovered that it was just a balloon ribbon that had been sucked into our return-air vent. Relieved but still edgy, he turned around and spotted an indistinguishable shadowy figure lurking in the window. To this day he swears he thought we were being burgled by Chewbacca. He also swears that the chest pain he experienced lasted the better part of an hour.
So, bottom line, I can understand the idea behind the Flat Daddies, but I sure do hope that the Maine National Guard is setting aside some cash for the kids’ psychotherapy.