Ground Control to Major Tom, you may commence your bomb run. B-29 with a P-51 coming up behind. Who doesn't love a little Good War nostalgia? FIFI here is a movie star, been on the big screen multiple times and even made it onto the talky box for an episode of Better Call Saul.
Got to be what he's watching on his phone. Here in Louisville we have an airshow to get ready for a horse race every year. With enough bourbon it makes sense. Thunder Over Louisville they call it and every year hundreds of thousands of folks pack the banks of the Ohio River to stare at their phones as they work on their next sunburn and hangover.
Always been a sucker for a good airshow and Thunder usually delivers, with a mix of modern and historic military aircraft, skydivers, and assorted aerial acrobatics. Naturally the military hardware is my favorite but I can never quite shake the words of a certain peacenik president that we'll just call Ike:
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.
That's above Thunder's pay grade, they're just here for the party and the tourist dollars. These are from a couple years back, the first Thunder after covid when everyone was partying and having a time like they hadn't in a few years.
You'd think, in a country that spends more on defense than the next ten countries combined, that we'd get more than one day a year to party while B-25s make low level passes. Sadly, that is not the case. Now if only Karen could speak to the manager about this...
Smoke'em if you got'em, the fireworks are fixing to start. The ones after the airshow that is. This may not be Apocalypse Now but it'll do for now.
