I read this today and I want everybody else to read it too because this is the best thing ever.
DIY Ice Cream in Wartime
The Vought F4U Corsair was a multi-role aircraft: fighter, ground attacker, and ice cream maker.
By late September 1944, the men of U.S. Marine fighter squadron VMF-122 were stuck on Peleliu and bored. Their F4U Corsairs were only 10 minutes’ flight time from Japanese-held islands, but the enemy, cut off from their supply lines, posed no aerial threat. As squadron commander J. Hunter Reinburg recounted in his autobiography Combat Aerial Escapades: A Pilot’s Logbook, he told a reporter, “This dive-bombing and strafing just isn’t as exciting as dogfighting, but the damn Japs won’t come up and fight.”
After lifting off on what he logged as an “oxygen system test,” Reinburg circled at 33,000 feet over Japanese-held Palau, watching anti-aircraft batteries—useless over 28,000 feet—waste irreplaceable ammunition trying to hit him. After 35 minutes of fireworks, he returned to Peleliu with a disappointing cargo. The mixture was cold but not frozen (the squadron scarfed it anyway), a failure the crew chalked up to its proximity to the hot engine.
For the next attempt (a “supercharger test flight”), they bolted ammo cans to the underside of a removable maintenance panel on each wing, well away from the engine—doubling their yield to 10 gallons, enough for 100 men. This time the mixture froze. The squadron again devoured it immediately. But the ice cream was too flaky for Reinburg’s taste, so his crew modified the ammo cans with small propellers: The wind turned the propellers, which drove a screw inside the can, churning the mixture. The result, finally, was a smooth, creamy chocolate ice cream.
Operation Freeze flights soon became routine, rotated between the squadron’s pilots and airplanes. They went off without a hitch, wrote Reinburg, until his boss, group operations officer Colonel Caleb Bailey, called to make clear that he didn’t buy the “test flight” ruse. “Listen, goddammit, you guys aren’t fooling me,” Bailey told a VMF-122 officer. “I’ve got spies. You tell [Reinburg] I’m coming over there tomorrow and get my ration.”
Reinburg’s Marines were not the only ice cream-makers of the war. B-17 crews in Europe brought ice cream mixtures along on operational bombing raids, according to a 1943 New York Times article, and at least one unit used its P-47s to create a real delicacy, vanilla ice cream mixed with canned fruit.
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Grandma:so, you bored and waiting for school to start?
Me: welll no
Bonus Mom: cuz he bought a new video game
Grandma, looking more confused than she normally is by my nerdy ass: what game?
Me: …..bauldrs gate
Grandma, trying to move the conversation to anything else
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I could think of no better way to share the news than this!
So when I was 17, my cat went missing and I'd given up hope of ever seeing him again.
Until on Monday, 27th of May, 2024, my friend sent me a FB post asking 'isn't that your mother?' about the person named on the microchip.
Here he is! 16 years old, and found safe, twelve whole years after he went missing!
Yesterday (Tuesday the 28th of May, 2024) I went to the rescue that had him, and I reclaimed my boy, renaming him Artie! (He'd originally been called 'Cat' because my mother and I couldn't decide on a name)
He's home safe with me now, currently inhabiting my bathroom and purring up a storm every time someone goes in there!
I'll be doing slow introductions between him and my current cat to give them the best possible chance of living in harmony!
Here's some pictures of Artie once we let him out of the carrier:
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If my mom sees a significant amount of blood she gets lightheaded, and has fainted on some occasions. Once it happened when we were kids, I wasn't there to witness it but I heard the story from my dad. Basically my brothers, around 7 or 8 at the time, were playing outside while my mom was making their lunch, and she accidentally cut her finger. It wasn't anything serious, but it drew a fair bit of blood and she passed out. My dad saw this and rushed over, but he didn't really know what to do so he just sort of started slapping her to wake her up (not recommended, but he had no idea and panicked)
At that exact moment my brothers both came in from playing, and all they saw was our mom unconscious on the floor and our dad slapping her. So, like, without even saying a word to each other they both just INSTANTLY start whaling on him, like, full blown attack mode to defend our mom. Which obviously didn't help the situation, but she did wake up and everything was fine.
Now our dad says that he's actually really glad they attacked him over what they thought was going on, because it means he raised good boys. And I still think that's true, they're very good boys.
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The first time Danny sees Dick Grayson he calls him Tata.
Danny, in his Ghost Zone travels, befriended the Flying Graysons. John and Mary like him so much, that it started as a joke, sort of.
"Ahhhhh, the son we never had! Welcome!"
"My little Robin's long lost little brother, come, come!"
And it morphed into him jokingly calling them Tata and Daj. Then it wasn't really a joke anymore.
Then the Observants inform him that as far as Ghost Law is concerned, they're his Ghost Guardians.
This means that Danny has two sets of parents; Jack and Maddie on the human side of things, and John and Mary on the ghost side of thing.
So when he sees Dick Grayson, who looks a lot like John, it just slips out.
This leads to a very awkward stare off in the middle of a coffee shop.
Danny has no idea how to explain himself.
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