Weather Delays

Went away for a few days over the holiday. Caught an American Airlines (AA) connector flight from Richmond, Virginia, to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Only the flight out of Richmond, originally scheduled to leave at 9:40am, was delayed because of all the bad weather last week in the southeastern United States. In fact, I was on my way to the airport when I got word that my own flight was going to be delayed until 10:40am. That presented me with a problem, because my flight from Philadelphia to Hartford, Connecticut, was scheduled to leave at 11:43am, leaving me almost no time to hoof it across the Philadelphia airport to my flight out. Probably not the best idea.

What to do? Well, an AA agent kindly looked up some alternatives and suggested that maybe I should catch another flight out of Richmond leaving at 9am. Well, that would have been great . . . except for the fact that even that flight was delayed until--get this--EXACTLY 10:40 am. So there I was back to square one.

Well, what to do? Again, the AA agent went to work and suggested that just maybe I could still catch the Philly flight out if she seated me at the very front of the plane, so I could make a quick exit. I was a little dubious. But short of any better alternatives, I took her up on her suggestion.

Find out in tomorrow's post what happened. :-)

View from my 10:40am flight out of Richmond, Virginia.

Operation Columba

I think there must be something about the nature of war that occasionally causes those involved to think out of the box. Ukraine's recent attack on a Russian air base using drones launched from trucks strikes me as an example. But so, too, does the idea of using pigeons (aka Columba livia) as couriers in wartime, because that's what Gordon Corera's book, Operation Columba, is about. 

During WWII, smuggling information out of Nazi occupied territories in Europe was hard, if not impossible. So some creative minds in Great Britain hit upon the idea of dropping homing pigeons into those territories to aid the process. The pigeons would be delivered by planes, resistance fighters would attach specially prepared information to tiny canisters attached to the pigeons' legs and send them on their way back across the channel where the information would be conveyed to whomever needed it the most.

Operation Columba, as it was called, evidently proved surprisingly helpful to Allied forces in numerous ways. And Corera's retelling of that story drew me in deeper and deeper, page by page, and chapter by chapter. So much so that I'm now hot on the trail of some of Corera's other books. 

Operation Whisper

The neighbors next door--how much do you really know about them? For all you know, they could be just who they say they are. On the other hand, they could be, they just might be, spies. 

Turns out, that's exactly who Morris and Lona Cohen were, operating deep under cover for years both in the United States and in Great Britain.

Very well written, Carr's book made me think twice about what motivates people to betray the very same countries to which they owed so much. 

Hitler's American Friends

There are many who believe Trump's appearance on the national stage marks a disturbing trend towards fascism in America. But as Hart points out in Hitler's American Friends, Americans have had a peculiar fascination with fascism since the 1930s. A precursor to Rachel Maddow's more recent treatment of the subject in her book Prequel, I found Hart's earlier account as readable as it is informative.