Happy Bastille Day!
Okay, wishing everyone a happy Bastille Day is kind of a cop-out...I didn't even know it was Bastille Day until I went to the UPS store to mail a book to my brother and a cd to my uncle Mike. Then I felt like a stupid loser bc I was trying to think of exactly what happened on Bastille Day, besides the storming of the Bastille. Sarah-who-paid-attention-in-history-class wants to say that it was a major dispute between the bourgeousie and the aristocrats, but then again, wasn't that the background on every major dispute in French history? Or even every culture in history: the common-folk vs. the wealthy?Oh well. Speaking of uncles, I want to quote this funny story from my favorite uncle of them all, John. He has a new book out, and I've been reading it constantly for little tidbits of great cocktail party stories. He says, "The fact that hundreds of thousands of pounds of aluminum and pretzels can fly is weird enough, but it gets weirder.
Louis Paul Kadlecek of Angleston, TX, started celebrating his 21st birthday on Feb. 25, 2004. He was still drunk four days later when he decided to break into the Brazoria County Airport and steal an airplane (he had never flown one before). He got into a single-engine Cessna (with a case of beer) and took off. A mile later he flew the plane into a 100,000-volt power line, cutting off electricity to a large portion of the county, and plunged 100 feet to the ground. The drunken man then got up and walked the three miles back to his home. Police arrested him the next morning. When asked where he had planned to take the plane, he answered, 'I don't know--Mexico, maybe." He faces up to 20 years in prison."
4 things: 1) I hope L.P. doesn't end up in jail, because I would like to celebrate my 23rd bday with him this August 17th. I'll provide the cases of beer, and he'll provide the faux pilot's licence, and we'll fly to Curacao!
2) He must be one fantastic video gamer if he can hop into a Cessna for the first time and operate it (slightly well, until he met that power line); 3) he must have had a killer hangover in court; and 4) this somewhat reminded me of sky-diving in Capetown...after we had landed and gotten out of our Top Gun harnesses, Ashley Hague and I snuck out back onto the runway to take pictures of each other in the cockpit of a plane. There were a bunch of empty Cessnas on the runway bc this enterprise was pretty efficient, having to take all these shifts of Semester at Sea kids sky-diving. I got a picture of myself with the pilot headphones on, giving (what else?) a thumbs up. Now I'm realizing we probably could have just started the plane up and flown to Johannesburg! Maybe next time though.
P.S. this might have been my shortest post yet...doesn't feel as gratifying as I thought it would...
posted by SES @ 5:23 PM
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