Papa’s Stories
One of the things that drove me crazy in Papa’s book was when he would say something along the lines of “The pilots told some great stories after their missions last night in the Officer’s Club” and them never tell what those stories were. And he did that plenty of times. I was just recently doing a check on what he did during a certain day in his original diary and when I saw that the pilots were telling stories on that day, I almost threw the diary across the room.
Part of the reason I want to make the documentary is I hope to fill the holes in the narrative. Papa’s view of the war was limited. His main purpose was to support the men and allow them to do their jobs. There isn’t a lot in his book what was happening outside the Black Scorpion Squad. If you read his letters to my grandmother, Bea, the view is even narrower.
He had about five key phrases that come up in every letter. I’m OK. The weather is good. Keep your chin up. I thought I would drop a few lines. How are the boys? A lot of that had to do with the censors who read every letter he sent and received. Another thing he said quite often was I will tell you all about it when I get back. That doesn’t help the researcher looking for clues to what happened.
Yes, there are things in the book that happened, most notably the big air battle over Cape Bon, and I know how Papa’s personal tale will play out. My job is to find the context to put it.
The Algorithm Knows
Took a little break in my writing to watch as Threads decided I was a threat to their community and deleted both of my accounts. One was personal and the other was to promote the Black Scorpion documentary.
But the reason I started with the Algorithm knows is because my feed on Instagram is now flooded with posts about Egypt. I have plenty of recommendations on what to do at the Grand Egyptian Museum. I have seen plenty of top ten things not to do in Egypt. I particularly like all the new Arabic phrases, especially the one to tell the hawkers in the Souk “No” (La’ Shukran”) The most important is of course @majid.shahofficial teaching me all the different ways to wrap my head with a scarf. At the moment, I don’t hate it.
Blog Website
After twenty hours watching and rewatching YouTube videos, I am still hopelessly far away from completing the blog website for the Black Scorpions. I had a good base using a program called Divi upon which I used a child theme called Extra. And all of this lives in WordPress. Cool. Cool. The problem is Divi did a really big upgrade that made putting a website together easier. From my viewpoint the jury is still out on that. But the Divi people did not do the upgrades for Extra. As a matter of fact, the newest tutorial I could find was four years old, a veritable eon in the tech world. Things I tried to do in Extra simply did not work and there wasn’t a new way to do the thing I wanted to do.
Yesterday, I gave in and started over. I installed Divi 5 and hoped I could finally get the website I wanted. I did spend the weekend going over the tutorials so there would be no problems finishing the website on Monday. I got part of the Header sort of kind of done.
New Phrases
The Sherman tank tended to burst into flames when it hit. Soldiers referred to them as “Zippos” or “Ronson” in a nod towards the lighters.
“You don’t have your knees brown” means someone who has just come to the desert, meaning they are inexperienced. They haven’t been out in the sun doing the work to get in that good tan. Soldiers said this about General Bernard Montgomery when he first came to take over 8th Army.
Yes, it's a pun.