Our troops need our support and encouragement. They are away from home, some for the first time, and usually lonely or discouraged. It is important for us to reach out and help them in the same way we would want someone to reach out to our loved ones if and when they are in the same position.
They answered their call and we are answering theirs offering them the USO Canteen FReeper Style each day and thanking them for serving.
This is IN Coming Mail from some of those serving now.
We at the USO Canteen FReeper Style, a running thread at Free Republic, are proud to support our Military. The mail comes in from contacting some of our Military Bases, Marine Corps Leagues , and friends and family of those serving now. Also from responses at the wonderful P.O.Box that 68-69TonkinGulfYatchClub has made so easily available to each of us here at Free Republic.
They are writing to those that frequent the FReeper USO Canteen to thank you for your support.
I work with damage-control and small-boats on a guided missile destroyer,I just want to thank you at the Canteen for your support. Thank you for being there for all of us. Sometimes you feel like you are all alone out here, then I get online and get to read the Canteen.
My girl broke up with me right before I left. I guess that could be the story for a lot of us .
My mom is all I have back home and she can’t afford a computer . She writes to me when she can and it is good to hear from her.
A buddy back at the base told me about an email he got from a creature with a heart, named Snow Bunny. It had the web address for Free Republic and told how the founder had been a Navy man and how everyone respected him. That he was a heck of a guy and had this place at Free Republic called the Canteen.
One lonely day I checked it out and sat here with , darn it anyway, tears rolling down my face.
I never saw anything like it in my life. OH I have surfed the web in school before I enlisted, but this is a whole new ballgame. The Canteen is my home now away from home.
All of you make a difference and your support means more then you may know. One of the things that makes it more real to me then just a place on the web are several things I’d like to share with you.
You know you all can be serious and then on a dime laugh and have fun and I like that. I like the way the day gears down just like life at home does. When you have done your business in the day and sit around with friends in the evening and cut up.
None of us here could be intense all day and the way the Canteen moves into night is why it feels so much like home too.
Thanks for being there .
Mark A.
Command Master Chief , right before 9-11 my wife and I had just gotten settled in our new home. I have 3 kids and a beautiful wife. Then I was transferred to Norfolk and then shipped out.
I missed Christmas but I know being here has helped preserve our freedom for the future. Only have a minute this time to write Snow Bunny. I know that other stuff I asked you not to pass on helped me to be able to share when I needed it most.
This time I do want you to pass something on to someone.
Whoever has a fan here and please tell whoever that for me. I wasn’t sure if whoever was a man or woman at first, but then I watched the reactions and the tenderness and could tell. So thanks for what you bring in your basket when you visit the Canteen.
I read every thread all the way through and it is powerful stuff. Thanks Snow Bunny for caring so much about us and making a place I can see others that care too.
Stephen A.
Air Force Sgt
Hey Snow Bunny, I am Charlie, just Charlie OK !!!!
Thanks for the Canteen from my heart .
I guess you can call me a lurker but that sure sounds weird. I can’t enter in but I can tell you I have read every day of the Canteen since March.I can’t get to it every day, so I go back and see what I missed when I do have the time.
Some of the ones I like are the one you call HiJinx, 4TheFlag,and you call this one Tonkin. Tell that Tonkin guy the Air Force knows how to spell. LOL , Victoria Delsoul and a mystomachisturning. You have to change that name beautiful girl, with your bubbly personality , AFVetGal one of our own, and this one gets me every time, Deadhead. That one reminds me of a rock group, but I have a crush on Deadhead and SassyMom.
Snow Bunny thanks for making it so I could write to you. Someday maybe I can tell you more about me. But you have been supper about it with a friend of mine and he said Bunny is AOK.
Hang in there and we will too.
Our friend,
Charlie
Navy Hospital Corpsman 1st Class
It is because of you all and your support and caring about us, that I am strengthened and makes me proud to serve our country. Please tell SAMWolf , my brother could use his talents. I saw where he was the head scrounger at the Canteen. I think my kid brother is headed in that direction when he gets in the Army. Bad boy turned “Bad Boy” in many ways and a heart as big as a ship.
Whoever whoever is, could you tell this whoever being that I have saved and sent a lot of things from whoever to my nephew and his wife. They have the time to pass it on to the rest of the family. Tell whoever thanks for the fun stories and jokes.
Snow Bunny, thanks for doing this for me. I never met anyone like you, not sure how I could thank you enough and Billie. So please know that you are making a difference out here and if your ears are burning it is because we are talking about you in awesome ways. God just gave some people bigger hearts and you Snow Bunny and Billie are two girls that got them.
God bless you all at the Canteen and thank you Free Republic for being all to so many of us.
James K.L.
Air Force 1st Lt
Mr. Jim Robinson and ladies and gentlemen of the Canteen. Thank you for your magnificent support and dedication, day in day out for all of us. You make a difference in my life. I printed out a copy of the logo for Free Republic with the Eagle and all and have it inside on my plane. Just so you know it is right next to a very sexy blonde. I didn’t think you would mind. Apple pie and moms and sexy blondes are all American.
I just wanted you to know your efforts are noticed and not just by me.
Your support means we have Americans that care about us and that goes a long way believe me.
Tim B.
Wouldn't want to give that impression at all! shhhhh...I am new here....didn't know about the temperance lectures! Oh my! I really must find LadyX!
Mr. Magoo...I for one was in no way offended by your joke :)
I dunno, I kinda like our Southwest variation.
Down here, we make Sun Tea...
Place 3 or 4 large tea bags in a gallon jar full of water and set it outside.
After 4 hours of natural brewing in the brilliant Arizona sunshine, you have tea the way God meant it to be!!!
Most of the grocery stores sell gallon jugs with a tap, so you don't even need to transfer the tea to a pitcher!
LOL...that reminds me of the blonde who looked into the box of cheerios and exclaimed, "Oh!! Baby donuts!"
My sister in law who now lives in MS but grew up in Fort Worth, makes tea your way and it is good!!! Guess it is what you are use to. There is nothing better on a hot humid Southern day than a glass of cold ice tea. MamaB
OK, CS, I'll try to make sure the pitcher is always refilled after you are finished. Maybe my new Southern FRiend MamaB can also make some authentic Southern sweet tea if I forget.
My 'evil twin' wants to reply to you so bad.... Not gonna say it. Zipping the lips. Not worth getting banned for. hehehehe
Good afternoon, all.
It being Mail Call, thought I'd take a semi-humor break and post this article about May 13th being arguably the most famous day in philatelics.
From Smithsonian Magazine July 1996
To a layman, the Inverted Jenny is just a 24-cent stamp, red with a blue picture of an old-fashioned biplane — but oops! The plane is upside down. To a pilot it pictures an ancient Curtiss JN-4, or "Jenny," apparently at the top of a loop or in the middle of a slow roll. To postal officials it's an embarrassing error that regrettably stumbled into circulation. Only 100 examples slipped past printing inspectors and made their way to the public at the tag end of World War I. All 100 instantly became collector's items. To philatelists, each one is worth about $100,000, depending on its condition. Quite a return on an original investment of 24 cents, though in 1918 for that sum you could buy four glasses of beer with change left over.
"Ever since we were given ours about 30 years ago," says James Bruns, director of the National Postal Museum, "philatelists have planned their vacations around a visit to Washington just to look at it. When they arrive and find it's hidden away, they complain and write nasty letters. But we can't put it on permanent display if we want our grandchildren to see it."
Why? Because of that old museum curator's bugaboo: ultraviolet light. The stamp's perimeter, the "frame," is red, an unstable color. Ultraviolet light would gradually fade it, turning it orange. It's OK, however, to showcase this Smithsonian treasure for short periods. So, in order to atone for past disappointments, and to celebrate the Institution's 150th birthday, our Inverted Jenny is being reunited with those others to provide a feast of philatelic rarities worth more than $2 million. The 23 stamps will be on display at the Postal Museum (Smithsonian, August 1993) from July 30 through September 30.
"This is our first big-time exhibit," Bruns says with pride--and a touch of stage fright. "We have to cope with insurance and security."
The stars of the museum's show are airmail stamps offered for sale on May 13, 1918, in time for the first official airmail flights, two days later. On the morning of the 14th, avid Washington, D.C. collector William T. Robey showed up at a post office on New York Avenue near 13th Street. He was looking for errors and knew that the last minute rush to print, as well as the two-color printing process, would make the stamps especially vulnerable to discrepancies. He knew that stamp collectors would pay high prices for those errors, but he probably never imagined just how high.
Though $24 was serious money back then, Robey decided to get a sheet of 100 stamps. The details of what happened that day are varied, but one version recounted by Robey in 1938 describes how he went back to the post office and asked the clerk if any more airmail stamps had come in. "He brought forth a full sheet," Robey said, "and my heart stood still." The image was upside down! "It was a thrill that comes once in a lifetime," said Robey.
The clerk scanned the sheet but did not hesitate to hand it over. Robey asked if he had more sheets just like it. "At that," says Jim Bruns, "the clerk smelled a rat, and closed his window."
Laying the sheet carefully in his briefcase, he went back to work. There he quickly set about notifying friends and collectors of his find. It wasn't long before a couple of postal inspectors arrived. One of his coworkers, upon hearing of Robey's good fortune, had gone off in search of more inverts and had told postal officials where they could find Robey.
The inspectors were extra polite. Had he just purchased a sheet of 24-cent airmail stamps with an inverted center? "Yes." "Would it be too much trouble to show it to us?"
"Sorry." "Would you be interested in selling it back to us?"
"Sorry." If the expression "No way!" had been in vogue in 1918, it would have sprung to Robey's lips.
Politeness aside, the inspectors then threatened that the government would confiscate the sheet. Robey went home that evening and hid the stamps under his mattress. He knew that official pressure would increase. So he got in touch with some well-known philatelists. One Eugene Klein of Philadelphia snapped up Robey's sheet of stamps for $15,000. Exit Robey, whistling happily. Enter Edward H. R. Green (son of the miserly financier Hetty Green, the fabled "Witch of Wall Street"), who paid Klein $20,000 for the sheet of upside-down Jennies.
Green broke the sheet up, dispersing individual stamps and blocks of four to collector friends. "The condition of some of those stamps has deteriorated since 1918," says Bruns. "Four were stolen; two, recovered. The thief cut off the perforations so the stamps wouldn't be recognized. Perforations are like a stamp's fingerprints, you know. They fit like pieces of a puzzle."
Robey's sheet, ten stamps across by ten down, had been cut along its top and right side. That gave 19 stamps straight edges, nine on the top, nine on the right, one at the corner with both top and right straight-edged. The story goes that Green went to a stamp collector's club, put some of the straight-edged stamps into an ashtray and announced that he was about to burn them. He wanted all present to bear witness to this destruction. The remaining stamps would be the pedigreed thoroughbreds of philately.
"The other members were horrified and made him stop," says Bruns. "So he took the straight-edge stamps home and put them in a safe. After his death in 1936, they again came to light — by then all stuck together." Unsticking them with water removed the gum. Ours is one of those — gumless, with a straight right edge. It's worth about $120,000.
Most printing errors involve either an inverted plate or a sheet fed improperly to the printer. And most are caught quickly, either by a print inspector or a postal clerk. But the clerk who sold that sheet to Robey didn't spot the mistake. Asked about it later, he replied, "How was I to know the thing was upside down? I never saw an airplane before."
In May 1918 the Curtiss JN-4 was one of only a few American military aircraft in full production. Our hope of quickly snuffing out World War I by darkening the skies over France with American-designed "aeroplanes" had come down to this: a lunky training plane, whose prototype had been built in England.
It was awkward and slow, with few instruments. Practical Flying, published in 1918, advised pilots that the best way to avoid skidding or slipping in a turn was to keep an eye on "a piece of string or tape fastened to a strut." You judged a Jenny's airspeed and power largely by listening to the clatter of engine valves and the changing pitch of wind shrieking through the web of wires. The Jenny had wooden skids on the underside of each wingtip to guard against damage in a ground loop — not uncommon because the plane's wheels were about as close together as a flounder's eyes.
When the war was over, the planes went on sale, and many a pilot who had trained in Jennies coughed up $300 or so for a surplus job and took up barnstorming, flying folks for 10 or 15 minutes, charging by the pound for the ride. Pilots found the original 90-horsepower Curtiss OX5 engine dangerously feeble; many replaced it with a Hispano-Suiza ("Hisso"), turning up as much as 150 horsepower. Hisso-powered Jennies were assigned to fly the first official U.S. airmail. Those are the planes on the 1918 airmail stamps, all flying purposefully straight and level except for those 100 aberrations that sputter along on their backs, doubtless spewing a mixture of hot oil and radiator water.
On May 15, 1918, two Jennies loaded with letters were to take off simultaneously from New York and Washington, land in Philadelphia and switch the mail to new planes with fresh pilots (as though at a Pony Express relay station) who would fly on, one to Washington, the other to New York.
President Wilson, scores of dignitaries and thousands of spectators showed up to watch at Washington's Potomac Park. The Washington to Philadelphia flight (Smithsonian, May 1982) soon proved a fiasco. The pilot, Lieut. George Boyle, was fresh out of flying school, where he seems to have studied his fiancée more closely than aerial navigation. Since she was the daughter of the Interstate Commerce Commissioner, political clout got Boyle this pioneering mail mission, guaranteed to chisel his name in the annals of flight.
It did, all right. Hurrying to the field, he barely scanned a road map, then took off, just squeaking over the trees. Sublimely confident, he headed south instead of north. Soon lost, he landed on a soft field 25 miles away, nosed over and broke his propeller.
Two days later, he got a second chance, a new prop and another load of mail. Told to keep the Chesapeake on his right and thus pick up his course for Philadelphia, Boyle obeyed so mindlessly that he turned right at the top of the bay and headed back south down the Eastern Shore, the water of course still to his right. Eventually he reached Philadelphia but picked the wrong field and cracked up on landing. It had taken him three days to fly the 140 miles from Washington.
Despite Boyle, U.S. airmail managed to get off the ground in 1918. Pilots braved dreadful weather, night flights without navigation aids, blind landings, engine failures. Many bailed out, joining the "caterpillar club" or "hitting the silk" successfully. Many died. Today airmail is taken completely for granted. Not so the misbegotten stamps designed to mark its first official flight.
By Edwards Park
All About Chocolate
If you get melted chocolate all over your hands, you're eating it too slowly.
Chocolate covered raisins, cherries, or ange slices and strawberries all count as fruit, so eat as many as you want.
Eat a chocolate bar before each meal. It will take the edge off your appetite, and you will eat less.
If you can't eat all your chocolate, it will keep in the freezer. But if you can't eat all your chocolate, it may be a sign of a deeper problem.
Store your chocolate on top of the refrigerator. Calories are afraid of heights, and will jump out of the chocolate to protect themselves.
Equal amounts of dark chocolate and white chocolate make a balanced diet.
The preservatives in chocolate will make you look younger.
If not for chocolate, there would be no need for control-top pantyhose, and an entire garment industry would be out of business.
A nice box of chocolate provides your total daily intake of calories in one place. Isn't that handy?
Put "eat chocolate" at the top of your list of things to do today. That way, at least you will get one thing done.
Question: Why is there no such organization as Chocoholics Anonymous?
Answer: Because no one wants to quit.
Problem: How do you get two pounds of chocolate home from the store in a hot car?
Solution: Eat it in the parking lot.
