Wednesday, October 1, 2014

WNW: More Nerdery

Following up on my initial "I am a huge nerd" post, here's more of the same.

During the pre-game banter of my Saturday night Traveller game, the guys and I got started talking about really cool combat planes.  I think we started withe the A-10 Warthog and moved on to some others, like the A-7 Corsair... 

P-47N Thunderbolt

Anyway, I mentioned that the A-10 is called the Thunderbolt II because it's the spiritual successor to the original WW2 P-47 Thunderbolt, which is a VERY Russian design -- built like a brick shithouse and carrying no fewer than eight .50 BMGs! The guys were all "No, really?" and I Googled the designer to get the name. 

I was slightly wrong:  The P-47 was designed by Alexander Kartveli, who is in fact Georgian. I think I can be forgiven this mistake because, when I first learned that fact, Georgia was still part of the USSR and back then every single Soviet was Russian, regardless of if they'd been born in Russia or not. 

So anyway, I was looking at the Wikipedia article and noticed that, funny enough, every major project that Kartveli worked on had the word "Thunder" in its name:
Cool, eh?

F-105 Thunderchief

So here's where the funny part of the story comes in:  As I told the guys,  waaaaaay back when I first heard the song Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap, I misheard the lyrics. I am slightly hard of hearing, you see, and Angus Young isn't the easiest fellow to understand. But since I knew that the song came out in the mid-1970s, when the Vietnam War was still going on, my brain just filled in the garbled words with something that made sense to me. 

You see, I could have sworn that he was saying, "Dirty deeds in a Thunderchief," and my mind imagined a Thud doing a napalm run over an NVA-occupied rice paddy. 

Tell me that doesn't make as much sense as anything else you hear on the radio!

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