Hopefully it's munching mozzies as I type this :)I'm all for them, because they can eat about 3000 mosquitoes in one night or basically half their body weight in the little blood sucking pests.....and when you have a maternal bat roost as we do, then you can multiply that by about 200 ..... so that's 600,000 mosquitoes dispatched every night !!! so no bad thing I think :)
I went off on a tangent tonight, I was browsing through my music collection and stumbled across Enola Gay by OMD, so I played it and a few others of theirs .... basically had an 80's moment .....anyway I went looking for the cover art for the album/music to put into my Itunes library and then I got dragged into the whole Enola Gay story stumbling from one web site to the next, which I think is the great thing about the web because it can lead you all over the place, for instance I didn't know that in 1975 or thereabouts Paul Tibbets who flew the original mission over Hiroshima re-enacted the bombing of Hiroshima in a Texas airshow complete with fake mushroom cloud, which led America to make a public apology to Japan, or that the original propellors off Enola Gay currently reside in Texas A&M University in a wind tunnel where they have been chopped down to 12½ ft for use in the university's Oran W. Nicks Low Speed Wind Tunnel !!
Personally the whole issue about the atomic bomb's use on Japan is still a bit of a hot potato..... on one side there is the argument that dropping the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki shortened the war and actually saved lives... on the other is the extreme suffering caused to the Japanese who were under it when it detonated...the lucky ones were directly under the blast and were vaporised instantly.... the ones further out weren't so lucky...... (and yes that is actually a picture above of the detonation above Hiroshima) But equally the same could be said of Bomber Harris who commanded bomber command in the UK and the dreadful bombing of Dresden which caused massive fire storms and equally massive loss of life....and of course the casualties caused in the Blitz in London by the Luftwaffe..... but that's war for you, it isn't pretty....it's about killing as many of the "enemy" as you can with as few casualties to your side as possible......Nobody ever said war made any sense did they ????
If there was ANY good that came out of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it was a stark reminder to both sides of the cold war era just how horrific detonating an atomic weapon was over a city filled with innocent people... and that in itself kept quite a few fingers off firing buttons during that time, not to mention the mutually assured destruction of both sides, should one side decide to get a little trigger happy....
but now we are in a new era of the suicide bomber and terrorist attacks.... neither side will win, because they both are comitted to their way of life and beliefs ..... all it will do is rack up death and destruction on both sides..... sigh.... we never learn do we ?
I suppose I can only end this ramble with the words of Emperor Hirohito himself when, in his first ever press conference given in Tokyo in 1975 he said of the Atomic bombings "Shikata ga nai" <- google it .......
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