Flat Fish

Halibut, I think... I bought a 30 Day Buss Pass for twentytwofifty, senior discount!, and it's been sitting, but tried it out this morning, and tried to get to the Ocean and Balboa Pier...geared up around 5 am, got to the end of the Pier around 7:30 am!...hmmph....long wait for connection between 43 and 71...pass is good all day for all transfers..everyone seems to have one...end of Pier was occupied by serious Vietnamese fishermen...mixed group along the Length...Ruby's Restaurant is on the End, and I had pancakes and watched...Smelt, I think they were catching, infrequently!...sat outside at Table with Coffee, camera at the ready...thought to get Smelt pic, but Flatfish came up on the line!...pretty fish, and I like the pic!...I have one other 'fisherman's hands holding catch'...the crab catcher on the Pier in Crescent City...don't know but these two favorite fish pics might be the start of a motif for me in a populated genre--fishermen holding fish!...I have fishing gear, and have fished, but the last Trout I caught at May Lake seemed a bit cruel...which brings me to the Deerslayer!...and James Fenimore Cooper...towards the end of the story there's an almost comic relief scene where the Deerslayer and Chingachgook have a shooting contest to test the worth of a coveted rifle called Killdeer...they shoot Ducks, then Deerslayer shoots an Eagle hoovering high overhead...from the description it sounds like Osprey...he's quite pleased at his success, having bested his friend, as he does apparently anyone in a shooting contest, but then his plight comes over him...he's about to be the 'sport' of the Hurons...and he laments having killed the Eagle for sport, and wishes he might find the Eaglets in their nest so as to put them out of their misery to come, being without parent...gosh this is a convoluted book!!!...I have no idea how I got through it when I was a kid!...a thought here is that Deerslayer overlooks that both Male and Female take care of Osprey/Eagle Young...anyway, Cooper does a fine job of portraying the Hurons as they have sport with Deerslayer, first tomahawks, then muskets, in circus style--Deerslayer tied to a post, then untied to see if he'd flinch...then during the third course, fire torment, there are some delays, and the troops arrive and put the whole bunch of Hurons to the Bayonet and Musket Ball, fatally wounding the one untangled sort in a tangled scene, Hetty....but during the torture, each Huron brave, and the women and children, are sketched by Cooper with fidelity, and earlier how they were getting along as a foraging party with a penchant for raiding was done well too...how they camp, how they sleep, and what they do on the warpath...myself, I think Deerslayer should have taken up with them, that was the choice Huron Chief Rivenoak gave him, join the Hurons and take care of the family berift of the warrior Deerslayer had killed in combat earlier...rather, Deerslayer stuck to his guns, being White and affiliated with the Delaware, enemies of the Huron, the Delaware Indians having adopted him...if he'd taken the offer, the Hurons would have packed up and left...he was on a quest with Chingachgook to retrieve Chingachgook's fiancé who had been abducted by a Delaware who joined this Huron group as refuge...I suppose this Delaware's action perpetrated the whole mess, mess being the bayonets and musket balls that wipe out the Hurons...there's a wider conflict afoot...the Hurons allied with the French, and the Delaware with the English, this being, I gather, the time of the French Indian War...and it is war without quarter, but  this gracious offer of mercy from Rivenoak is walled off by Deerslayer's scruples...Deerslayer seems to overlook that he is in league with the unscruplus sorts actions that he thought to hang back from earlier...two of his compatriots were intent on scalps...Deerslayer draws the line at scalps!...being White!...oh...White Christian!...apparently Whites that take scalps have fallen from Christian grace...but it's okay to fight alongside such for Deerslayer....well, they're all after scalps, I'd say, the unscrupulous literally, Deerslayer figuratively, Deerslayer being content with  intangible tales of his triumphs rather than  the hard proof of a scalp...don't know but Cooper is saying they're all a sorry lot, save for Hetty...the troops finished the Hurons as Deerslayer would have the Eaglets...

quote

"In a 1985 autobiography by the American who was the first pilot to break the sound barrier, the author described how, while serving in the US armed forces during World War II in the autumn of 1944, his fighter group was attacking Germany and '...assigned an area fifty miles by fifty miles and ordered to strafe anything that moved...We weren't asked how we felt zapping people. It was a miserable, dirty mission, but we all took off on time and did it ... We were ordered to commit an atrocity, pure and simple, but the brass who approved this action probably felt justified because wartime Germany wasn't easily divided between "innocent civilians" and its military machine. The farmer tilling his potato field might have been feeding German troops.'"

https://www.facebook.com/TribalTheocrat/posts/530773553678887

unquote

That quote is in a lot of places, and Yeager too says "there's no morals in war"...Yeager is the real deal Hawkeye!

cloudy cool...the air is so foul from autos' and trucks' and busses' exhaust in Town, while sitting at Bus Stops, I'd just as soon not inhale!