Hooray. Although I had previously bought myself the best Christmas present I got this year (i.e. the complete first season of Battlestar Galactica) I did manage to get several things of note:

-The Adventures of Indiana Jones, widescreen edition. Woo hoo. Marian Ravenwood and Elsa Schneider, archeological babes of note. Unfortunately, either the sound mix on Raiders of the Lost Ark is bad or the settings on the family home theater system are bungled, because I can't hear the dialogue all that well.

-Jane's Battleships of the 20th Century by Bernard Ireland and illustrated by Tony Gibbons. This book, although a little on the slim side, is splendid for a quick-reference book on the subject. It's also got short essays on other battleship-related topics, like the loss of Repulse and Prince of Wales to Imperial Japanese aircraft three days after the successful IJN strike against Pearl Harbor. It's also got a color illustration of what a Montana-class battleship would have looked like had we ever finished one. Heh heh heh, these things just scream evil.

-Iowa Class Battleships - Their Design, Weapons & Equipment by Robert F. Sumrall. This is an older book, published by the United States Naval Institute in 1988. I've got the British edition of the book, printed by Conway Maritime Press, which adds to the cool of this tome. It's more than I ever wanted to know about the mighty Iowa-class battleships, and is a splendid reference for these last battlewagons for America's navy.

As you can see, I'm kind of fond of battleships. Suffice it to say that when I stand on the decks of USS North Carolina or USS Wisconsin, I'm prone to getting a big grin on my face as I wander these monsters from out of time. It's almost creepy seeing them, because nothing we've built since then carries the same visual menace as a battleship. John Lehman understood that, which is one reason we brought them back in the 1980s. The Soviet Union understood visual menace, and thus built the hulking Kirov-class atomic-powered missile-armed battlecruisers. Sure, aircraft carriers are wickedly destructive in their own right, but nothing says "Reach out and annihilate someone" like a shower of 16" shells being fired from 20 miles away. Heh heh heh. You can't look at a picture of an Iowa broadside without getting the big Calvin grin on your face.

Anyways, the relatives are over, so I'll hush now and get back to them.

Posted by: Country Pundit at 02:36 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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