This is a great video. Also, I would NEVER do this.

It’s Over For the Cartels

A great video for understanding how the Cartels work, and what is going on regarding the Drug War.

Great Aunt Helene

I was recently given the article on my Great-Aunt Helen’s death, something that was a bit of a mystery as so many who were there have long-since passed away. Such a simple thing to have taken her from us, she was too young. Grandma Rydberg and Helen were very close.

Why The Spike?

Inside the Panzer VIII Maus

Excellent video on the Maus, of which the Germans only created two of, and never took to full production. Too late in the war. By focusing on projects like this, which couldn’t cross a bridge for being too heavy, the Germans weren’t making the tanks that were actually making a difference. Obviously a good thing. Still quite an ambitious project.

The turret by itself was heavier than an entire Patton tank.

Unfortunately, the only survivor is at a museum in Russia, and not the Bovington Tank Museum in England.

Travelling to Afghanistan

He said at the end of the video that he wants to go back, because the people were just lovely… I can find plenty of lovely people close to home, without having to go to Afghanistan! He had to leave within hours, or he’d go to prison for who knows how long… but… go back because the people are lovely? Uh, no.

He did another video, and went on a train that was actually a step up from the one Bald and Bankrupt went on in India. (Backpacker Ben, a hard-core traveler, was beyond his ability to endure on that trip. If he can’t handle that train, nobody can.)

Joe Fazer was on this train for three days, having to share his bunk bed with strangers, in addition to all of the other wonderful things that Indian trains are known for.

I am going to watch his Yakutsk video, as that is slightly less insane than Afghanistan or India. Just slightly.

I like these kind of videos a lot, because they show more reality than the travel shows I used to watch so often, or the National Geographics where I’ve read about these places. People walking around with cameras, showing what life is actually like in these areas, wheras GlobeTrekker used to try really hard to make the worst places seem so much better than they actually are. (Still a great show, though.) So many of these sources don’t have incentive to show you the real negatives of going there, something apparent in the videos of a regular person with a camera.

And yes, he’s going to the most dangerous or unappealing places on the planet to get clicks, I get it. But like police body cams, people with video cameras are revealing things that were hidden from us by the likes of shows and magazines that didn’t have a good reason to show things as they really are. And still there are a lot of cultural aspects to these places that aren’t fully explored, most of these people running around with their cameras need to get along with everybody, so there isn’t much revealed about pre-teen girls being sold as brides, things like that in these walk-around videos, but they are another step in being more aware of how things work in other parts of the world, other societies and cultures where there are major differences from our own other than language, food, and fashion.

Uncle Hank • Before And After The War

My Great-Uncle Hank was a ball-turret gunner on a B-29 in the Pacific Theater. Shot down and captured, he spent time in a Japanese prison in Rangoon. What he must have gone through between when these photos were taken, we can only speculate as from what I can remember, he didn’t talk much about what happened, and I don’t blame him. Grandpa Windholz went through his own war on the other side of the planet, and he didn’t talk much about that either.

I recommend reading extensively about this war as there is no shortage of great books about it, and it is in no way a chore to do so. To understand what ball-turret gunners had to experience… it was already a nightmare to be up in those planes, much less in a glass ball underneath while being shot at by men trained and committed to killing you. And he was captured by men from a militaristic culture where you just weren’t a prisoner, you were less than human because you were captured and didn’t die in battle.

We would be better off with fewer streaming services and more time spent reading about things like this as it is the least we can do, living in such luxury and safety in comparison with what these guys experienced.