Fencers, Fitters, Floggers and Foxbats
A MiG-35 “Fulcrum F” fighter, dressed in a subtle red star
Part of “Upper Italy” has been trying to make a living. This happens. And when it does, it tends to require long and complex travels.
While we were abroad – that is, with respect to Italy – the Government “fell.” In non-parliamentary democracies like the United States, that particular expression summons up images of tanks in the streets and whatnot, but all it really means is that the level of political confusion briefly grew somewhat beyond the ability of the governing majority to pretend that its members can stand one another.
We should probably be writing about this “political crisis,” but everyone else here already is, and it isn’t really all that significant anyway. It is – we believe, at least – pretty much “derivable” from a lot of other things that have already been written in this space. That is, if you have been paying attention…
At any rate, rather than go into that, you now get to look at a handful of random notes, none of which really have anything to do with Italy. This will be good for you. Upper Italy is for the Italy-obsessed, which means – practically by definition – that you care too much about tiny, useless stuff. We are of course all in favor of the tiny and useless, but today it will be non-Italian.
The aircraft shown in the snap above is a Russian Aircraft Corporation MiG-35, their hottest and newest fighter. Its NATO reporting name is the “Fulcrum F”. Purists – there are purists in every field of human endeavor – believe that this aircraft is really a MiG-29OVT and that it has been given a trendy new number all its own basically for marketing purposes, since the Russians are attempting to sell the machine in a number of foreign places that are perhaps unsophisticated enough to be impressed. These are understood to be Syria, Libya, Iran, Algeria, the Sudan, India, Brazil and maybe Peru. If, as is likely, they offer the plane to Venezuela as well, the Americans are liable to become pissed off.
Whichever side you were on in the Cold War, it now probably ought to be admitted that the MiGs and the heavier Sukhoi fighters the Russians fielded were pretty good planes. They were, on the whole, more maneuverable and more powerful than their American counterparts, but since their control systems were inferior, they took a good deal more “flying” than the Stars and Stripes brands.
Top Gun types will not want to admit this, but a “good” Russian pilot probably had to be a little better than a “good” American fighter jockey because his plane was that much harder to fly. Now that these very hot combat aircraft have been given a state of the art “fly by wire” control system – and that is what the MiG-35 is largely about – they are mean stuff indeed. If that is where Venezuela’s Mr. Hugo Chavez decides to start spending his oil money, there will be Monroe Doctrine kinds of unhappiness in the Western Hemisphere.
We will halt here for a brief note on military poetry. NATO “reporting names” are unclassified code names for Russian and Chinese military equipment. They are intended primarily to ease communications between military units speaking different languages and are also a help in those cases where the “real” name is not known.
The initial letter of the reporting name indicates something about the use of that equipment; for example, fighter aircraft are assigned names beginning with the letter F, bombers with B, helicopters with H and so on. A fuller treatment of this nice, if minor, subject is available (here).
If you study that article carefully, you will discover that the Fencers, Fitters, Floggers and Foxbats mentioned in the title are then, respectively, the Sukhoi Su-24, the Sukhoi Su-7 and successive models, the MiG-23 and successive MiG-27, and finally the MiG-25. The “Fulcrum” label, as you will by now have guessed, refers to the MiG-29 family and its derivatives.
Now that all that is out of the way, we are going to speak briefly about sacred cows. The world’s religions are littered with sacred animals. The Egyptians were into cats and crocodiles, certain North American indian tribes thought highly of eagles and bears, even feathered serpents had a good run among the Aztecs. Christians at the very least considered the white dove an entirely appropriate image with which to represent the Holy Spirit – a very tricky trinitarian thing to do, but the lamb was already taken.
The Hindus, for reasons entirely beyond Upper Italy, decided that cows should be sacred. No offense and all that, but this seems to us an extremely eccentric choice. Even at their best, cows neither exude elegance nor offer the impression of a lively intelligence. Certainly, the word “bovine” is rarely used as a compliment in English. These cattle, and once again no offense is intended, project a sense of freezing stupidity. If anything, the Indian animals appear to operate on an even lower wattage than their Western cousins.
Not wanting to eat them has nothing to do with vegetarianism. It is true that Indian MacDonald’s restaurants do not offer beef burgers, but they’ll hand over a lamb Big Mac without a shudder. And chicken tikka is of course made from dead chickens, just as you might think.
Though Upper Italy does not as a rule encourage any form of communication from its readers, we find all this so mysterious that we are prepared to accept and even read eventual explanations from our, ahm, public.
And now the final bit on veils, our contribution to the ongoing European debate on Moslem female headgear. Upper Italy’s general view of this issue is that, on the whole, people ought to be free to wear whatever damn silly stuff they want – and, beyond this, that veils are at least more interesting than the tattoos on fat people that are apparently the rage in the American Republic.
We have been under the impression that veils, at least in Western Europe – where, as we have suggested, they are an issue – are more a problem for the outside world than for whoever is wearing them. We assumed, having looked though little holes, gauze and such in the past, that from the inside you could probably see well enough.
This turns out not to be true. We recently spent the better part of an hour in an Abu Dhabi shopping center drinking “Seattle’s Best” coffee and watching well-dressed Arab ladies attempting to use an escalator. They mostly can’t. It may be that you can see well enough into the middle distance, but with a full veil you cannot look down. There is no way to see where to place your feet.
This observation has led to further illumination. As is known, in the more conservative Arab countries, no even moderately well-bred Moslem wife would leave home without the company of her husband or a close male relative. We supposed this was as a guarantee of feminine purity and that the male presence amounted to a kind of chaperonage. No sir. These men are seeing eye dogs.
No offense intended.