Bunny Slippers

In a rather entertaining example of "blogging is an odd business", here's how this post developed:

In researching the trope of aliens arriving to chastise humankind I wandered over to the Wikipedia entry for the old Twilight Zone broadcast "To Serve Man" (because I vaguely remembered this as a TV trope from a long-ago viewing of the Simpsons spoof Hungry Are The Damned

Okay, so; having got that far, in the footnotes of the Wiki entry I stumbled across a reference to the whole "tasty, tasty humans" thing as a slogan on the unit patch of the 509th Bomb Wing, the USAF unit that flies the B-2 bomber.

I then ran down this patch, which does, in fact, have an aliens-eating-people connection but doesn't quote "To Serve Man" verbatim. Instead the motto on the unit patch is "gustatus similis pullus", very doggy-latin for the English phrase "tastes like chicken".

Are you with me so far?

The pursuit of this, then, led me here: to a small collection of oddball funny USAF patches. I like all of them, including the 22nd Military Airlift Squadron, whose motto is pretty direct: NOYFB is an acronym for "none of your fuckin' business" which is, one assumes, the attitude that the C-5 jockeys who "...deliver classified aircraft from aerospace plants in Southern California to testing facilities around the country." routinely give when asked what they do for a living.

Which, then, led my mind back to this patch:

Which, when you get past the existential horror of nuclear holocaust, is pretty funny. There's a certain humor value - midnight-black humor, mind you - to the notion of Capt. Joe or Maj. Molly shuffling to the control console in their b-robe and fuzzy slippers, coffee in hand, to put an end to life on Earth.

As an aside, I wonder if there is something about the youthful nature of the USAF that produces these funny patches? Certainly the Army had it's silly slogans and catchphrases but in my experience they tended to be unofficial at best and secretive at worst. We would never have been willing to openly chuckle at ourselves the way these patches do. I have been hard on the USAF in the past and will be in the future, but this is an aspect of that service that I can and do appreciate.

They have a certain perspective of themselves that my own service conspicuously lacks.

So, anyway, there's the destination of all this Internet wandering; tasty fried humans - not as a centerpiece for an alien Thanksgiving but as a result of our own inability to figure out how to solve our differences without a bow and spear.

Not exactly an original thought, but perhaps one to stop for a moment and curl a lip at on the last day of the year.