You Can Be My Wingman Anytime: Fleet Week Photos

Every Columbus Day weekend, the Navy, Marine Corps, and Coast Guard send their ships, planes, and sailors to San Francisco.  Although it gives the men and women in uniform a well-deserved chance to blow off steam in the original city of sin (trust me, you can find weirder stuff here than Las Vegas), it's also a blatant attempt to recruit more bodies for the military.  Apart from the political, social, environmental, etc. implications of Fleet Week (I won't do it today), it's a lot of fun.  And crowded.  The air show and rehearsals over Friday, Saturday, and Sunday culminate in demonstrations from the Blue Angels and besiege the city with earsplitting, window-rattling, car-alarm triggering fly-bys for four hours or so each day.  It's incredibly obnoxious (and slightly unsettling) when you're not watching the planes but awe-inspiring when you are.  I want to share a few of the photos I took while watching the air show on Saturday with friends, who were kind enough to bring a grill and delicious grub.  You have to have a much better camera than mine to really do it justice, but it was pretty darn cool. 

The opening planes, with patriotic jet trails.

Beautiful weather meant that a lot of people came out to watch.

 

 The support plane for the Blue Angels, making a low pass over the Bay.

 The Blue Angels' finale. 

Glancing Blows

Adultery Fridays

New (short) post up at the Foreign Policy Association.  I am seriously pissed off about the US foreign aid budget.  Not that anything new has happened, mind you.  The New York Times decided to write about it this week, so everyone started talking about it again.  Dark days, my friends. 

It's Fleet Week in SF (I am somewhat afraid to go to the Castro in this post-DADT world...or so very curious), so there are planes all up in our business.  Setting off car alarms as they buzz by, barrel rolling overhead.  It's kind of cool to watch--you can't help but have respect for someone with the balls (ladies too!), skill, and strong stomach to fly a jet.  It's also a bit scary: although I knew the planes were here for Fleet Week, I still got a little knot of worry. Welcome to life during the War on Terror, I guess.  And, on top of cool and scary, it's also infuriating: how much money gets spent on freaking jets when there are starving kids in Africa, et cetera?  You know the drill.  I won't do the whole thing here.  Plus it's a lot of macho BS posturing, a little weenie shaking for a nation that keeps screaming it's the best but feels, well, woefully inadequate.  I'm going to go watch Top Gun, stare at some gentlemen in uniform (they're EVERYWHERE), and see how I feel.