It was a slow news day at the empty hacienda – slow enough that
I even started one of the 1000 piece puzzles I got for Christmas. I quickly
realized the rabbit hole that represents because time kind of disappeared on
me. Usually on a slow day like today I’ll pick a subject that will cause the Cantankerous
Friend to rise from somnambulesence and charge to defend the naïve progressive
agenda but I’m going to give him some respite. I know he’s still licking his
wounds from the November elections.
I’ve written before that one of my favorite assignments in
the Army was as a young lieutenant in Panama with the Moatengators, an airborne
infantry company. I was telling a friend the other day that the company had
three live gators as company mascots that lived in a pool next to the company
barracks. They were really caimans and
were the bane of the neighborhood cats (but I digress). My friend refused to
believe that we actually took the gators with us when we made parachute jumps. I
told him a mascot for an airborne unit had to be jump qualified or be forever
labeled a “nasty leg” (a non-airborne qualified individual); anathema to
paratroopers.
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| The Gator Pit Next to the Barracks |
We agreed to disagree about my claim jump qualified saurian until
I found this photograph from a Facebook group of old Moatengators (there aren’t
any young ones). The photo shows the mascot (first step was always duct taping
the mouth shut – duh!) prepared to exit the aircraft. He’s duct taped to a
couple collapsing cardboard panels to cushion his landing. New troops were always sent out to locate and
retrieve the gator on the drop zone. I can imagine the horror in the
politically correct world if this was attempted nowadays. It was kind of cool
at the time. No gator was ever injured (that I recall) but we did scare the
living hell out of a bunch of air force loadmasters.
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| The Gator Prepared to Exit the Aircraft and Earn his Wings |
One of my favorite movies of all time is the original Taken
with Liam Neeson’s character Brian Mills tearing Paris apart finding his
kidnapped daughter. Taken 2 was a mere shadow but still palatable. I went to
see Taken 3 last night and I can only hope they’re serious when they say “it
ends here”. Mills pretty much eradicated the Balkan clan from the first two
movies so they had to go in a new direction. I think it was a mistake to keep
him in his Los Angeles home for this one.
Mills’ beloved ex-wife is murdered and he’s set up to take
the fall. This of course leads to a serious run on L.A. County’s supply of body
bags. The fight scenes were dumbed down and edited in such a fashion as there
was no clean view of what was actually happening. This was one of the real strengths
of the first movie. Neeson is also getting a little long in the tooth (aren’t
we all) to take on a squads of bad guys at the same time. If this is the end of
the Brian Mills saga they did a piss poor job of tying up loose ends at the end
of the film and Forrest Whitaker was criminally underused. All this being said,
it was still a Taken film and the action was almost non-stop and the pace
relentless – so very watchable. I just hope they let Mills amble off into his
dotage.
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