I guess I'm on a roll tonight.

Had something Monday that struck me low early in the evening--just when I needed to be calling umpires to schedule them.

Slept some ten hours, got up to get the kids off, then slept a couple more hours. Well, whatever got into me is gone and now it's 1 AM and I'm rarein' to go after all of that sleep.

Just wanted to put a plug in for the Airborne and Special Operations Museum, since I mentioned it the other day.

There's a good Special Forces museum associated with the JFK Center on Ft. Bragg proper. Lots of good stuff there, including the original sand table used to prepare for the Son Tay Raid. (A sand table is a model of a target. While out in the field it's often created using natural materials such as sand. The model on the top right of the linked page is the sand table).

There are also 12.5mm Soviet machine guns captured on Grenada. The reason I remember those is an outraged op ed piece at the time, condemning the invasion of Grenada. Among other things the author cited that there were no ".50 caliber weapons" on the island, despite US claims that there were. I guess you could say that, but do the conversion from 12.5mm to inches and let me know what you come up with...

Anyway, when we went by Ft. Bragg in the wake of 9/11, the post was locked up tight. Pretty wild for a post with two highways running through it. So we passed up the JFK Center museum and headed for the new Airborne and Special Operations Museum. Wow.

I can't recommend it enough. It's incredibly well done, it's comprehensive--I thought I knew a lot of military history and I not only learned a lot but got surprised by a couple of things.

They have one of those things that matches motion to a movie screen and I swear that when they were making a helicopter assault and skiing, I was there. It was amazing.

Go there. Buy some souvenirs. Make a donation. But definitely go there.