Red Gauntlet , SASS 60619

The oath is good for the trial, but often the judge will remind the witness that he's still under oath if there has been some time between the examinations. This is for the jury's benefit as well as the witnesses. As for "I remind you that you are under oath"-- I may have heard this a time or two over the decades but very, very rarely. It would make the examining lawyer look foolish in my opinion.

I've never needed a password to come to this site. If I have one, I have no idea what it is.

How so? He was in four Hitchcock movies, all good, but two of them, Rear Window and Vertigo, real good.....

No.

A profound milestone. As I've posted here before, I had the privilege to correspond with and then meet Air Commodore Sir Archie Winskill KCVO, DCF*, a Spitfire ace and Battle of Britain veteran. That was in 2002. He was 85, and died in 2005 at 88. At that time, there were about 200 or so B of B pilots still alive; all by then old men, of course. So now the last remains, at an extraodinary age. May their memory be everlasting.

If a bank pays on a forged check on your bank account, it has to repay you the money.

"A Nice Place to Visit" is one of my favorites, with Sebastian Cabot as the....guide in the afterlife.

I have no problem with the beard.

I'm not selling anything. I'm buying. I use a credit card or a paper check. I have no worries about my check being good. I don't need to use those contemporary methods. If I was selling stuff, I would, probably.

Those were American firearms so I have doubts about that. Others here have knowledge of British guns of the era; I don't.

One of my all-time favorites. And I wished he'd been cast as Roberto Valdez in 'Valdez is Coming' (the book in my opinion being one of the greatest western novels). A good movie would have been a great one.

Then there's 'flout' and 'flaunt'......

Nice potatos!

Here we pronounce it North.

That's how we know whether you're from around here or not!

In the late stages of the war, aircraft production had reached the point that damaged planes, easily capable of repair, were pushed over the side in favor of brand-new ones.

Mossberg is the Rodney Dangerfield of US gun manufacturers, sometimes it seems. Don't get no respect. Now, that's an exaggeration, of course. But we think Colt, Winchester, Remington, Savage, Marlin, etc. But not so much Mossie, which has been making good guns here for generations. I've bought shotguns in the past for daughters living in the big city-- always Mossies. I own a Mossberg 30-30 lever action (464) that I got at a Big 5 sale a few years back. A really fine gun and a great shooter. I really like it. But is it a Winchester 1894? or Marlin 336? No. Yet the quality is great. What's in a name? As the Bard asked....

A great read is Ernest K. Gann's 1960 book "Fate is the Hunter", about his days in early commercial aviation, then in the Air Transport Command in the War. He flew everything, starting with DC-2s (which he didn't like), and a lot of DC3/C47s (which he did).

It was talked about here in the Saloon a fair amount 15-20 years ago. I recall that Sixgun Shorty, a regular in those days, was a participant in that game.

Incredibly prolific; in more than 200 movies according to the NYTimes obit.

If you don't make any kind of claim you haven't committed any insurance fraud (and you can't conspire with yourself). There may be other possible crimes involved from the arson even though it's your house. That would depend on a lot of circumstances.

Man, he was in a lot of good movies!

L. Sprague de Camp was writing in the 1930s, putting him somewhat ahead of Asimov and Heinlein. He had a lot of good stories. One time travel tale is a classic, Lest Darkness Fall, a story in which the collapse of the Roman Empire in the West never happened. One reason is that the protagonist, catapulted by mysterious means into late antiquity, among other things introduced double-entry bookkeeping. An innovation which in real time happened only many centuries later, it changed commerce profoundly. The only story, perhaps, that attributes world-changing events to accountancy...

One of the greatest 'golden agers' was Jack Vance, a SF/fantasy author whose works continue in print. He has an international fandom because of the unique literary, indeed lapidary, quality of his writing. Never as widely read as the three mentioned here, though he was their contemporary, he nonetheless had wide recognition. His name was the first thing I entered into a search engine in 1999 when they put a computer on my desk. He'd been born in 1916, eschewed publicity, and I didn't know whether he was still alive. He was, and 7 months later I had dinner with him in Oakland. He and the other SF greats Frank Herbert and Poul Anderson were good friends, and for a number of years owned a houseboat together, cruising the Sacramento Delta. He had interesting stories to tell about that. I had the honor and privilege in 2000-2005 to be involved in the Vance Integral Edition, an international effort to collect, edit, and publish in a 44-volume limited edition all of his published works. It was the first internet-based effort of its kind, and I believe that it is still unique in that respect. He died in 2013 at the great age of 96. I read all of Heinlein and most of Asimov in my time. Somewhat less of de Camp, who actually represented a slightly earlier 'age'; that of E. E. "Doc" Smith and A.E. van Vogt. They were greats. My favorite time travel story of all time is Asimov's "The End of Eternity" Great post, Joe.

And of course the P-51 was initially designed and built for the British, in response to their approach to North American, before the US entered the war....