Author: Randy Rydberg

A fairly mellow fellow who likes to read history books.

An Old Book About Nimitz

I like all kinds of books, new ones, old ones, deluxe leather-bound, guilded-paged editions, beat-up paperbacks, clean-cut pages or deckle-edged pages. I have a soft spot for beat-up books even though they are inanimate objects.

In this case, there are grease or oil stains on the cover and pages and, putting on my detective hat, this probably means that some mechanic was reading this at some point. Because the book was published in the 1970s, I would guess that maybe someone who was actually in the war fixing things, who would be interested in Nimitz enough to read about him. Most people couldn’t care less about Nimitz regardless as to whether they should. Apparently he was important enough to name the current class of aircraft carriers after, so, maybe he was a big deal.

There were other books at the thrift where I bought this that were also beat-up quite a bit, complete with spider-webs and caked-on dust on top of the books (that happens a lot, where someone passes away and the family had to grab all of the ‘worthless’ books and haul them to the thrift.)

So, that’s my guess. I’ll never know. But I’m reading it now with the idea that a former vet read it before me and did so for a reason.

Gripen vs F-35 for Canada

I was reading the comments from another video on this topic, and it was all Canadians who were against anything from the U.S., all insisting on the 40-year old Gripen to replace their aged F-18 Hornets. A perfect example of patriotic bias against logic and the numbers. This video clearly spells out why the Gripen is a terrible idea for Canada going forward. In addition, this should have been decided years ago, but Canada’s governments have continually kicked this can down the road while almost every other NATO country has determined the F-35 was the best option going forward, including other far-north countries that also operate in extremely cold conditions.

Time/Life Classics of World War II

Time/Life Books used to make great sets on all sorts of topics, and their World War II set was a big seller. After it was done, they continued by republishing classic World War II books in deluxe volumes, but I didn’t realize this until this week when I came across two of them. I already have some of the Civil War and Epics of Flight deluxe reprints, but these are the first World War II books I’ve ever seen. They aren’t cheap on eBay so hopefully I’ll stumble across more at the thrifts.