Guitarist Jeff Healey passed away on March 2, 2008. Healey finally succumbed to lung cancer, but he had battled cancer in one form or another for his entire life. Retinal cancer had robbed him of his eyesight as an infant. 

Back in the 90s, I had the good fortune to see Healey perform at Los Angeles’ Roxy Theater. These many years later, I still vividly remember that show.

With the notable exceptions of Jimi Hendrix and Stevie Ray Vaughn-who was responsible for bringing Healey to the attention of the music world-I saw just about every one of the great rock guitarists of the 70s and 80s, many of them multiple times; some more than a dozen performances. Healey’s performance that night at the Roxy ranks in the top twenty percent of all the shows I have ever seen. It was definitely one of the most unusual performances I have witnessed.

Healey usually played with the guitar across his lap, sometimes while seated, sort of like a pedal-steel player. The style looked a little awkward, but it did not prevent Healey from playing blisteringly fast, soaring, fluid runs. And neither his style nor his blindness restricted Healey’s showmanship.

Adding a little visual flash to his virtuosic playing, Healey picked with his teeth; he played behind his back.  We’re not talking gimmicky stuff here, either. In his lap or behind his back, Healey played searing, don’t-miss-a-lick, amazingly melodic blues-rock. 

Watching him play that night, it was easy for me to see why Guitar Player Magazine in 1990 named Healey “Best Blues Guitarist”. Jeff Healey was a player. He was just 41 years old when he died.

Saying he was “mentally tired”, quarterback Brett Favre on Tuesday announced his retirement from professional football. Favre, 38, played 17 seasons in the NFL, all but one of them for the Green Bay Packers. He is a first ballot Hall of Famer.

Favre played the game with boyish exuberance and reckless abandon, a style that made him unpredictable and a bit like Mother Goose’s “little girl with the curl”: when he was good, he was very, very good; and when he was bad he was horrid. 

Favre threw an NFL-record 288 interceptions, many of the errant throws coming at very inopportune times.  In the Packers’ last 8 playoff games (3-5 record), Favre threw 16 interceptions. His interception during overtime of this year’s National Conference final set up the Giants’ winning field goal. 

But those pickoff throws were often the result of Favre trying to force something good to happen, something Favre did plenty of times.

He set NFL career records for touchdown passes (442), passing yards (61,655), pass completions (5,377), and pass attempts (8,758). Those personal stats helped Favre win the NFL MVP three times.

More importantly, under Favre’s leadership the Packers won 160 times, a record for a starting NFL quarterback.

Perhaps no statistic, personal or team, tells as much about Brett Favre as his streak of 253 consecutive regular season starts (275, including playoff games). For perspective, Favre went nearly 16 straight seasons without missing a single start.

The message was faint but unmistakable: the small UN force was outnumbered and outgunned, pinned down on open ground and taking heavy fire from Taliban forces holed up in a well-fortified building. The pilot on call broke off his approach to the base in Afghanistan and immediately turned his plane around to help. Several minutes later, the pilot released a 500-pound laser-guided bomb, steered toward the enemy stronghold by the plane’s sensor operator.

The bomb scored a direct hit, though the building remained standing. The crew could see that there were no “squirters”, people who run in all directions from the point of impact, but to be on the safe side, the pilot dropped a second bomb on the building.

The soldiers on the ground, just a few hundred yards from the bomb strikes, confirm that the building has been destroyed; no sign of any Taliban survivors. 

Welcome to the future of war.

The Taliban combatants probably never knew what hit them, their annihilation delivered by a whisper-quiet aircraft, flying nearly 5 miles above the battlefield. The plane that exterminated those Taliban vermin was an MQ-9 Reaper, the US Air Force’s next generation of unmanned aircraft. The military calls the Reaper, which has as much firepower as an F-16, the world’s first remote-controlled hunter-killer.

The Reaper has several big advantages over a piloted aircraft. It costs less than a third of what an F-16 costs. Where fuel capacity often reduces to mere minutes the time an F-16 can spend over a battlefield, a Reaper can spend hours in the air. This extended flying time allows the Reaper to find the enemy-including tracking him if he moves, assess the surroundings, target, engage and destroy the enemy, and then assess the damage. And the Reaper can do all of that without putting a pilot in harm’s way.

Current plans call for a fleet of 60 Reapers, which will compliment the US military’s 160 unmanned Predator aircraft.

Michele Malkin has linked to a site that allows visitors to “Name that Collectivist”; it’s clever and fun. It is also very enlightening and worth the time to check out.