Tim Herbert

@TomcatJunkie How long is the lens you are using to get that kind of close-up? 500mm???

@LocalPeddler I really had to play with the exposure to get that to where you see it.

Trying to salvage some low light shots I took at Nellis last year. I love my camera but low light is one of its weaknesses. What do you think?

@RSE_VB I've got a very cool patch I bought at the Navy base in Yokosuka when they were doing an open house. I'll take a photo of it and see if it sparks any memories. This was back in the early 90's.

@LocalPeddler Atsugi.

There was NOTHING like being on the Carrier when a Tomcat did a super sonic pass. With 60,000 pounds of American titanium, steel, and aluminum moving that fast, the BOOM was enormous. It literally shook the whole carrier. If you were on the flight deck, you’d cover your ears and open your mouth to keep from over pressurizing your ears. Below decks, there was this noticeable THUNNNNGGG as the shockwave passed through the whole ship. Even the Snipes (the Sailors way down in the lower engine room decks, God Bless ‘em!) could feel it. Nothing like that experience in the world.

@RSE_VB Yokosuka?

@LocalPeddler Saw the same when I was stationed there. Amazing!

@MikeyDiMercurio Was this the same Victor that you tapped after the jump flank bell?

THE KIROV STORY Before we start, I need to make it clear that nothing that happened was my fault. Totally not my fault. So you may or may not have heard of the "Kirov." This was a Soviet battleship straight out of Star Wars. It bristled with radars and every weapon imaginable. To see it out the periscope was to see your life flash before your eyes. It was that terrifying. The background music, Darth Vader's Death March. And Kirov was at an anchorage. The problem? The anchorage was on what was, for us, the wrong side of THE LINE OF DEATH. See, there's a bay off Libya called the Gulf of Sidra. The Line of Death is an imaginary line segment from Benghazi to Tripoli. The water is shallow with a smooth sandy bottom. And the evil dictator of Libya vowed that any American vessel intruding beyond the Line of Death would be fired upon, and that was not an empty threat, since he had the Kirov on his side. So, you might be asking, Mikey, if the Kirov is on the bad side of the LINE OF DEATH, why would you and your submarine decide to sail over the line? Well, I'll tell you why we sailed over the line. There was intel that a Soviet Project 671 Yorsh-class nuclear fast attack submarine would be surfacing and anchoring at the anchorage. We and NATO called the "Yorsh-class" the Victor-class, since, at the time, we in the trenches didn't know what the Soviets called it. You might be asking, Mikey, why would the Victor be anchoring at the anchorage? Well, I'll tell you why the Victor was anchoring at the anchorage. You see, all these Russian ships were from the Northern Fleet. A long way from Libya. And on a 6-month deployment, the boys need some R&R. Some liberty, as the American Navy would call it. And it's not like they could just go ashore to Tripoli or Benghazi. Rumor is, the women there were not (a) hot or [2] loose. You need the correct combination in a liberty port, see? So what did the Soviets do for sailor morale? Well, I'll tell you what the Soviets did. They sailed in a bigass cruise ship, painted gray, which they called the comfort ship. Comfort as in, friendly hot slavic women. VERY friendly. That's right, free hookers for every man Jack on the crew of the Victor. "Captain," I remarked, "I'd really like to go to the Russian comfort ship." So, you want to get in trail of a Victor submarine? Best thing to do is be lurking, waiting for him when he goes somewhere you know he's going to be. None of that open ocean searching. Trouble is, in a shallow water anchorage, how are you going to loiter on-station without being detected, surrounded by Kirov and its accompanying destroyers and frigates, all of them impressively versed in antisubmarine warfare, and, like the Kirov, bristling with weapons? Well, I'll tell you how you loiter without being detected. You sail our submarine DIRECTLY UNDERNEATH THE KIROV. Barely enough room to thrust under there without hitting the bottom or bonking the top of our sail on his keel. Trouble is, the Kirov has a sonar set in the bulbous bow that is so powerful that it boils water when it blasts out a sonar ping. This is not the "one ping, Vasily" bullshit. This is a continuous police siren sound, rising and falling in frequency and never stopping, the sonar electronics able to transmit and receive AT THE SAME TIME. This sonar kills any fish within 500' of it. We called it the Death Ray sonar. It was a terrifying thing. With the shallow bay and the power of the Death Ray sonar, the Kirov, if tipped off that we were inbound, would "snap us up" (detect us) and, emboldened by Libya, put some weapons on us to kill us. I know what you're thinkin'. The Russians wouldn't fire ordnance on an American submarine during the Cold War since that would cause escalation, perhaps even leading to a nuclear exchange. Yeah, tell that to the dead crew of the sunken submarine SCORPION. So how did we avoid getting snapped up by the Death Ray sonar? Well, I'll tell you how we avoided detection by the Kirov. We let it leak through sailors and prostitutes that we'd be sailing into the anchorage on Thursday. When, in actuality, we sailed in Monday. And we hovered and thrusted right under the Kirov's hull, with us rigged for ultra-quiet. Ultra-quiet is a blessing and curse. You tiptoe. No maintenance. If you're not on watch, you are REQUIRED to be in your bunky. But the galley is shut down. You want food? Content yourself with cheese and crackers, buns and cold cuts with mustard and potato chips. A few days at ultra-quiet, you start to miss hot food something fierce. And food on a nuclear submarine is impotent. In all the U.S. military, it is the best food. Closest thing you'll come to Aunt Maude's home cooking. So it's Monday, and we just linger there, underneath Kirov, waiting for the arrival of the Victor. As expected, at dawn on Thursday, Kirov lights off the Death Ray sonar, looking for us. And not finding us, because a sonar like that can't find an object closer than 300 yards or so, and certainly can't find an object directly underneath its hull. But that fucking sonar was blasting out for three days, and was so loud inside the hull that to communicate with someone, you'd need a pad of paper (shouting was bad form during ultra-quiet). Sound can exhaust and fatigue you, which is why it's used in torture. And man, we were tortured by that fucking Death Ray system. Every watch, we'd thrust stealthily out and pop up the periscope to see if we could see the approach of the anticipated Victor. If any Russian sailors would have been out on deck, leaning against the railing, smoking a cigarette, we'd be dead. "Uh, Captain, I saw a periscope." Finally, Mr. Kirov shut down his Death Ray sonar. Our ears rang for days afterward. I wonder how many VA disability claims arose from that event. And praise the Lord Holy God, Victor showed up and moored at anchor and offloaded his officers and ratings in shifts to go to the comfort ship. Eventually, when the entire crew of the Victor was fat, dumb and fucked out, he weighed anchor and sailed off, then submerged into the deeper Mediterranean Sea. With us right behind him. For 40 days and 40 nights, we trailed that Victor with him none the wiser we were there, except when we collided with him - and that was TOTALLY NOT MY FAULT. This was the 56-day run where we ran out of food on Day 40. Sorry kids. No grocery stores 546' beneath the tossing waves of the Med. It's apple juice and coffee for you. For 2 weeks. The captain ordered us to report to him the number of hours of coffee left aboard at the end of each watch. He said, when we got down to 80 hours, we were coming back in. You can't run a nuclear submarine without coffee. People think it runs on bomb-grade uranium. Nope. It runs on coffee. Eventually, P-3 ASW planes dropped sonobuoys at our direction, and another submarine, the SCULPIN, arrived to take over trail of the Victor. Once SCULPIN reported on Nestor UHF secure voice that they'd gotten the Victor, we broke trail and headed for the tender ship off Sardinia. I had a friend on SCULPIN. Later, over bourbon, he confessed that they had the Victor for 40 minutes before they lost him. The Victor sailed off, never to be heard from again. All that, for nothin'. And now you know...the Kirov story. Good day!

@TomcatJunkie That is a really difficult decision on which band. Proud to say, though, we do have a Tomcat in our town at the Estrella Warbird Museum. It is great to see it up close.

Me doing the math on which strip has the most Tomcats. Sadly I think it’s the red one.

@MikeyDiMercurio Bob's your uncle...

"So we took a bigass gun firing rounds big as a Red Bull can at unimaginable rounds/min rate, put a seat on it, a couple jet engines and some wings for good measure, and called it the A-10."

@MikeyDiMercurio There is a void in the force when you are offline and static is at its peak.

No writing since Sunday. Excuse log . xls Sunday - fighting off a spam attack that correctly listed my banking info and intended to raid it for 3000 clams. Wrote letter, advised bank, made copies, made scans, filed things. Monday - tax prep day. So much fun. Created 8 hours of static in my brain. H&R Block @HRBlock had a program flaw that cost me nearly 2 hours. "You have a glitch in module XYZ. You must fix before you can e-file." Okay, click on "FIX." Nothing happens. Click "Chat with an expert." Click "Technical Problem." Chat person arrives. Describe problem. Chat person says, "That's a tax problem, not a tech assist problem." Me: YOUR PROGRAM HANGS UP AND IS CIRCULAR! IT'S A TECH ASSIST PROBLEM!" Chat person: No answer. I figure out the solution myself. Tuesday - Maximum anxiety and mental STATIC over a medical horror show scheduled for Wednesday. Wednesday - Medical horror show. Today - well okay then.

@MAXIMUM_ODEN Awesome video!

GRUMMAN F-14 トムキャットのプロモーションフィルム。いま見ても格好いいグラマラスなリフティングボディ👍

@TomcatJunkie This guy was hunting a pond that we were camping near. He allowed me to get really close with my iPhone.

They are very cool.

@RSE_VB I never heard of this. Of course, it took a while to dial your phone number with a rotary dial phone! I remember dialing our number and getting a busy signal, but didn't realize you could talk between the tones.

You used to be able to dial your own phone number and get a busy signal. Between the busy tones you could shout a word and other people doing the same thing could hear it. Me and my neighbor would do it at the same time.

@MikeyDiMercurio Good luck Amigo. I had to go thru two major iterations on fed and state itemized deductions before coming to the correct number of Benjamins. And, finally, Bob’s your uncle…

I did not post much today. Today is the day I render unto Caesar that which is due Caesar. Plus it’s Mom’s 96th birthday. She left us in 2015. I figured, who better to look out for me while I’m doing taxes than my mom.

@ThrillaRilla369 Just spent most of the afternoon confirming my taxes were done correctly. Couldn't agree with you more about your statement on property taxes.

Property taxes are basically a stealth tax on unrealized gains, and it's exhausting to act like they aren't. Picture this: You buy your house for $ 300k Fast-forward a decade—the market heats up, the county assessor slaps a $ 600k valuation on it. Suddenly your tax bill doubles. You haven't sold, haven't cashed out equity, haven't pocketed a single dollar of that "profit." Yet you're forking over real money every year on value that lives only in spreadsheets and real-estate apps. People lose it when someone suggests taxing billionaires on unrealized stock gains ("You'll force them to sell assets! It's unfair!"). But when the same logic hits regular homeowners—especially retirees or folks who've paid off their mortgage—we're told it's just the price of "schools and roads." Give me a break. Once the mortgage is gone, true ownership should mean something. No more annual fee to the government simply because your street became desirable or inflation did its thing. It's a recurring wealth tax masquerading as a civic duty, normalized only because it's been around forever. Scrap property taxes on primary residences. If revenue's needed, tax spending or transactions instead. Stop forcing people to rent their own homes from the county indefinitely. Real ownership doesn't come with a perpetual lease to the state.

@USN_Submariner Thanks for the education. I wasn't aware of this capability.

One of the many reasons the US is investing in keeping Los Angeles-class submarines operating is that they are our only boats that can deploy submarine launched mobile mines. The Mark 67 Submarine Launched Mobile Mine (SLMM) is currently the only operational submarine-launched mine in the US Navy arsenal. Deployed for combat operations by our submarine force in 1983, its primary operational advantage is absolute stealth. The SLMM allows a submerged boat to clandestinely fire the weapon from a safe standoff distance. Once launched from a standard torpedo tube, the mine swims under its own power into highly defended or inaccessible areas, like enemy harbors or narrow shipping choke points. Upon reaching its pre-programmed destination, it sinks to the seabed & arms itself. However, the SLMM relies on obsolete 1960s technology & legacy interfaces. When we designed Seawolf & Virginia, we opted not to include the specialized equipment & interfaces needed to deploy it. Because only the remaining 688i boats can lay the Mark 67, there is a gap in offensive mining capabilities for our submarine force, a vulnerability that is currently driving the development of next-generation weapons like Mining Expendable Delivery Unmanned Submarine Asset (MEDUSA) & Hammerhead (Encapsulated Mark 54), both years out from being operational. Mark 67 Submarine Launched Mobile Mine (SLMM): - based on chassis & propulsion of Mark 37 torpedo - 13'-5" long & weighs ~1,700lbs - 330 pound warhead - range of ~8nm from launch to planting - max operational depth ~600ft - combination of magnetic, seismic, & pressure signatures for Target Detection Device (TDD) USS Montpelier (SSN 765) performing an expeditionary SLMM load at Souda Bay in 2021

@MikeyDiMercurio Looks slippery compared to the old ones!

Somebody want to tell me what was wrong with the old grenades?

These were our fledgling Barn Owls in 2020. They didn't realize they are nocturnal birds, so we have color video of them out in the daytime. One is trying to coax the other to leave the nest box.

@USN_Submariner Thanks for sharing this. I barely recall the incident but it is useful to see the after accident reporting.

Extreme example, but this is why you don’t want non-essential people as distractions, & this was a drill. The control room of USS Greeneville before the CO killed 4 high school kids, 2 teachers, & 3 crew aboard Ehime Maru.

This should shock no one who’s served on a submarine. Non-essential personnel are always sent to their racks during any rigging for quiet operations. Being in an off watch section on a boomer rigged for ultra quiet for “reasons”, I got some awesome rack time 😴

Bobcat alert for our Barn Owl nest box. Fortunately, Momma owl was not home.

@MikeyDiMercurio Too bad they didn’t let you pilot that big girl out of the harbor. All ahead flank with a cigar fired up.

THE CRUISE SHIP STORY I can't believe this happened to me. I finally admitted to myself that a girlfriend was not something the good Lord was going to give me, so I might as well go on vacation by myself. So I jump into an aeroplane and head down to Lauderdale to climb aboard a cruise ship for a week meandering the Caribbean. My suitcase is packed with $400 worth of scotch and $200 worth of cigars (money I would have spent on the girlfriend...so she missed out, whoever she is). So the first thing that happens is I'm in line to present my passport and ticket and while standing there I meet this comely maiden who is also traveling alone. I'm nice to her. I probably should have asked her to meet me for a drink later, but for whatever reason I didn't. I kept running into her on the cruise and it got super awkward. We'd avoid eye contact. So I give my baggage to the handlers and board the vessel, but can I go to my stateroom? No, I can't. For 6 hours, they keep us on the pool deck, all that time in the sun, with my skunk-screen in my suitcase, as is my bathing suit, so I can't swim. Only thing to do is buy drinks. I must have burned through a $300 bar bill. Finally they release us to go to our staterooms. I'd booked one on the very stern, the ass end of this bigass cruise ship, right, with a balcony so I could smoke cigars. Immediately I see a "NO SMOKING ON THE BALCONY SIGN." Fuck. Not only that, but there's a security camera pointed exactly at my balcony. Eventually, the crew brings my bags. I open up my bags. The whisky is all gone. I complain to a steward. "Outside alcohol is not allowed on the ship," he says. I ask if I'll get it back. He shakes his head. Fuck. My cell phone rings. It's The Irishman, who is my boss, who called to piss in my ear about a post, an article, I wrote on the Linky-Dink. I assumed no one would read it. In it, I said that small modular reactors were stupid because they'd have all the rules and regulations of bigass reactors, and as long as you have to go through all that shit, you may as well build 1300 megawatts instead of 80. The Irishman orders me to take it down and says the CEO wanted me fired that day, but The Irishman fought to keep me on the payroll, but man, he is pissed. And there's no wifi till we shove off. The whole thing added to my day being ruined. Finally we're underway, but we wait off the coast at speed zero, just sitting there, for hours. Exhaust from the engines makes all the outside air hazy with pollution - temperature inversion on a calm day with no wind. I decide I'll wait until we're doing 20 knots before lighting up a cigar. A few hours later, whatever delay held us up is over, and we set off for Bermuda or one of those Carib ports. I go to the balcony to smoke a stogey. Someone knocks on my stateroom door. It's the steward. "No smoking on the balcony, sir." Fuck. So I decide, at dinnertime, to go find some food. I couldn't believe the crowds. I mean, imagine the worst Christmas Eve crowd at O'Hare Airport, that's what it was like. After an hour wait, I got some mediocre choke-puke food. After that, I just ordered room service, but about all they had for room service was kid food. Hotdogs and chicky nuggies. So for another 5 days, I survived on hotdogs and chicken nuggets. And I had to do all my drinking at one of the bars, assuming I could get a seat at a barstool, hopefully away from the comely maiden. So arrival day back at Port Lauderdale. I had no idea when I'd get off the ship. They disembarked passengers by deck, and mine would be the last one called. It began to look like I'd miss my flight. When they did call my deck, almost 3 hours into the disembarking process, the elevators were so crammed with people and suitcases that I lugged 100 pounds of luggage down eleven flights of stairs and out to the gangway. At the exit of the pier facility, there are no taxis. So I try to arrange an uber or lyft, but everyone else departing had the same idea. Fuck. So I wait and I wait and I wait. Eventually, I got to the airport and onto a flight back to Newark. I shut the door of my apartment behind me and leaned up against the door and shut my eyes. Never again will I take a cruise. Never. And now you know...the cruise ship story. Good day!