Flashes in the night
During our night flights it is common to see bright flashes of light on the ground. Sometimes long series of flashes in two places close together. These can be seen from a long way off, 5 or 10 miles.
When we first started seeing these we got all excited. We thought we had a birds eye view of a battle. But there were never any reports from anywhere that anything at all had happened. Nothing. The nearest we can figure is that we are seeing evidence of a dilapidated electrical grid. Flashes in the night mean something that should have been fixed wasn't. We will never know though. We can't go outside the wire to ask and our curiosity is just idle to others.
A guy I know wrote in his book you can't know what is unusual if you don't know what is usual. In this case we don't know either one and probably never will.
When we first started seeing these we got all excited. We thought we had a birds eye view of a battle. But there were never any reports from anywhere that anything at all had happened. Nothing. The nearest we can figure is that we are seeing evidence of a dilapidated electrical grid. Flashes in the night mean something that should have been fixed wasn't. We will never know though. We can't go outside the wire to ask and our curiosity is just idle to others.
A guy I know wrote in his book you can't know what is unusual if you don't know what is usual. In this case we don't know either one and probably never will.
posted by Carl at 1:36 PM
2 Comments:
I love that observation, that you cannot know what is unusual if you dont know what is usual. It reminds me of an observation one of your nephews made (can you guess which nephew??): You can never be truly original because, being entrenched in a specific culture, you dont have the breadth of knowledge or experience to know what true originality is. Your notions will always be based in the culture in which you were raised, therefore not truly original. Even in another culture where you appear unusual, you are not original because you are usual in your own culture. HMMM.
i suppose in an absolute sense that is true. but you can be original enough to make a difference in the world of humans. complete originality probably wouldn't be useful because no one else would be able to understand it. if it were completely divorced of context, who else could figure it out.
we did see some flashes yesterday that we are convinced were bombs dropped from some airplanes. and we saw what we think were illumination flares. remember when the Coast Guard used to drop those over the lake if they were looking for somebody who went through the ice? of course, with all the night vision devices they have now, maybe they weren't illumination flares.
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