Diesel Only
A commingling of a few of my favorite obsessions presents itself. A confluence of gulf stream and arctic waters. A virtual nor' easter of fun.
First off an enduring category of referrer hits to the web log remains pictures of Ra5c Vigilantes. This is the plane of one of my units when I was in the Navy, RVAH Seven, or Reconatkron Seven in that full Navy quasi acronym style. Until I run out pictures I'm happy to oblige. This is a picture of a RVAH 7 Vigilante in USS Forestal colors flying over what I have always believed to be Stone Mountain Georgia. The pictures I put up here on Atomized Jr. are compressed and resized images of old photo's I've scanned. Usually to around 4x3 inches and 30kb file size. For all these scans; though, I still have the original tiff image and often a larger jpeg already made. If any of these really strikes your fancy, you can always email me, or leave a comment, and ask for a higher resolution copy. 
I should also point out also that while wandering through a hobby shop with my nephew I found a small book on the A5 which gives a nice history and description of the plane through its various incarnations and includes pictures of RVAH 7's planes even during the period I was in the squadron
North American Rockwell A3J/A-5 Vigilante [WorldCat.org]. Regulated to history, but at least it's documented history. This in turn presents an opportunity to mention that I've heard a lovely restrained cover of New Order's song "Love Vigilantes" recently. I mention this simply because it has the word Vigilante in the title and because it moves things off in a very different direction. It's sung by Laura Cantrell on her new lp Trains and Boats and Planes (Diesel only records). (That link is to apple's phobos server which when eaten by your browser will prompt it to open iTunes). She also does a nice version of Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, the Gordon Lightfoot song, on the same record. Laura Cantrell is a former Dj at WFMU in New Jersey
Laura Cantrell - Wikipedia. After hearing her version a couple of times I decide to revisit a mystery which has plagued me about that song. I have always associated the song Love Vigilantes with a short story I read once a long time ago. I've been trying to remember this story for twenty years. This time after an afternoon of intermittent thought I decided that the name of the story might be Night Flight and tried that against the
Internet Speculative Fiction Database and came up with the name Josephine Johnson.
A short story called Night Flight by Josephine Johnson was published in 1944. From its reprint history I could see I probably read this in a Ray Bradbury edited collection of short stories which may still be among my sister Ann's books.
I went upstairs to the stacks to find the collection
The sorcerer's son, and other stories [WorldCat.org] which is what McKeldin (a library at the Univ. of Maryland) had that contained Night flight. It is an unassuming surreal and very short tale of soldiers flying from their barracks and camps back to their homes and loved ones at night. The New Order song has a few other things going on: a sharper sensibility. But this is the story I had read before and is what I've been trying to remember. I was intrigued by some of the other stories. as I read through the whole collection over the next few days. In the "Story without End" a father starts an indifferent story to distract his two squabbling children. A hero is described traveling through a snow storm carrying a magic bag to save a village from a dragon. Eventually he simply ends the story perfunctorily. The dragon is vanquished the village saved. The bag never enters into it. The son is satisfied but the daughter, a little older, feels cheated and observes to herself later, ending the story: "He didn't know what was in the bag." A good observation for a story teller. I've read so much in my life written by people who didn't know what was in the bag. A near and common example, television shows like Lost. Three seasons in and I am no longer sure they know what's in the bag. Its only television I suppose, though saying "its only television" makes me feel ungrateful, and un-American. Johnson's stories I realized after I had read a few of them were sly, craftier than I had first thought. I'd also recommend the Rented Room. It made me wonder what sort of writer she was The wikipedia bio has very little on her
Josephine Winslow Johnson - Wikipedia. Not a fantasy or science fiction writer, not a home magazine writer. Not trafficked in the same circles as Peter Taylor, O'Conner or Welty though she published stories in the Virginia Quarterly Review. There is a clever and gothic undercurrent to the stories which keeps them safely out of the ordinary world which would forget them.
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