I have a comic I was going to put up today, but I just found some stuff on the web that has me rather excited. For once, by the way, it's not excitement about myself. It is, however, excitement about one of the reasons I'm on this planet.

An editor for the Dr. Phil show put together a documentary about my grandfather's service in the Air Force in WWII. My grandfather was one of a handful of US airmen who flew Spitfires. The Spitfire was, literally, the Rolls-Royce of fighter planes in the war. The American P-51 had similar stats, but my grandfather insists that the Spitfire was a finer plane. Not having had a chance to fly either, I can't reliably comment. I did once get to "fly" a very poorly reproduced P-51 in a flight simulation game that came out around 1990, but I don't think it was much like the real thing. I had a joystick, though. That made it a little more realistic. The only things missing were the cockpit, the plane, the war, the enemy, the ammunition, the guns, the oxygen, the flight jacket, the goggles, the weather, the fuel, the taking off, the landing, and anything else that might fall under the scope of reality ("reality" being defined in psychological circles as the 70% of experiences we can all agree on, leaving a 30% margin of error accounting for taste).

Anyway, I woke up this morning thinking about my grandfather, and wondered about the progress of the film. It's been entered into various film festivals, which is happy making (apparently, Buzz Aldrin saw the film at Sundance and liked it, according to a post from the producer - that's, like, unreal - to think that Buzz Aldrin watched a video about my grandfather is mind blowing (I'm a bit of an Aldrin fan as well, in part because he knows how to deal with idiots)).

In the film, my grandfather got to watch a film (yes: it was a film about a guy watching a film) of himself as he crashed a Spitfire (yes: I said "a" Spitfire - he crashed more than one - my grandfather is an accomplished crasher of airplanes).

(Wow. There have been a lot of parenthetical statements so far.)

I lifted this image from another site that's promoting the film - if anybody finds it and believes that I am violating any copyright or whatever, then, you know, like, go away - it's my grandfather, and you can sue me (by that, I mean, please don't sue me - but do go away):

As you might be able to tell from the photo, the landing gear wouldn't come down. It wasn't that my grandfather was a bad pilot - he wasn't - it's that the landing gear was bad landing gear.

(Trivia: My grandfather still has a piece of one of the broken propellers from this plane - it was very strange getting to hold it, knowing that it was from the plane in the film, crashed half a century ago.)

Very few Americans flew Spitfires. The particular outfit to which my grandfather belonged was a reconnaissance unit. Each pilot flew alone and unarmed over enemy territory to snap photos to ensure that things like bomb factories were destroyed rather than schools and churches.

They had to strip the planes of anything that might slow them down. This was before the days of craft like the SR-71, capable of flying at mach 3.0 with a ceiling of 85,000 feet. You didn't get any such conveniences in a Spitfire. You just had to be completely insane.

He's told me plenty of stories about his flights. Flying over Berlin and getting shot at by, well, anyone who could see him, having no way to fire back, and having nobody there to cover him.

In Spitfire 944, I finally got to actually watch footage from one of the stories he had told me many times (mainly because I asked - he doesn't tend to repeat himself unless you ask him to, as he seems to have a photographic memory - and, yes, I'm experiencing some grandfather-pride here - deal with it).

My favorite part of the film wasn't the actual crash. Rather, it was when grandpa hopped out of the plane, wearing a tie, big smile on his face, and walked over to a crew member, grabbed a cigarette, lit up, then got back to work (image couresy of (stolen from) the official site for Spitefire 944):

Back in the day when courage was spelled c-a-n-c-e-r

While I like to believe I inherited a little bit of bravado (hey - public speaking is regularly listed as being the #1 fear in the universe, above death by rabid-squirrel, lawn mowing failures of judgment, and accidentally coming into contact with Keith Richards' toxic, lethal blood), I think that, had I been the guy to crash, I probably would have sat there and cried about it. I'd be wondering why the airbag hadn't deployed. I'd start whining about the lack of proper lumbar support. I would have ended the event by blaming everybody else present, storming back to base, swallowing some anti-depressants, and writing a very self-pitying account of the crash on my site.

Granted, it would have been hard to find a place to have hosted Neopoleon at the time.

But I would have found a way. And, from it, I would have been able to post the bitch-session heard 'round the world.

What I mean to say is that I don't think I would have dealt with the situation as casually as my grandfather did (although he has considerably more experience crashing planes than I do).

While I admire his courage and bravery, and while I'm proud of the work he did, I'd like to think I'm not the only guy in the family with strange fears and phobias (such as a fear of plane crashes).

I console myself with one thought, which is that my grandfather, who is now hooked up to the net like the rest of us, reads my site every now and then - and it scares the dickens out of him. So much so that he hardly has any dickens left. His dickens supply is getting really low. "Can I get some more dickens over here?" he says to nobody in particular.

Because here, in front of who-knows-how-many-people-anymore, I declare on a regular basis that I, Rory Blyth, esteemed and wholly legitimate grandson of John S. Blyth, the pilot featured in Spitfire 944, am a total loon.