Lesson #182: The Sopwith Camel

Autobiographical note: This will rank right up there with the ceiling wax/sealing wax post as regards complete lack of in depth thought.

One thing I’m enjoying about being back in the States after years abroad is Jeopardy. After having spent the entirety of the last school year watching University Challenge, which makes me feel like a dullard, Jeopardy makes me feel like a freaking genius. No joke. After University Challenge, Jeopardy is cake.

Most of the time.

Today, Jeopardy taught me that the Sopwith Camel is an actual thing. Who knew? I always just thought it was the name of Snoopy’s plane.* My friend who lives in the Texas capital mocked me (deservedly) for this.

The Sopwith Camel is actually a type of plane. It was an agile British bi-plane introduced on the western front in 1917 and was responsible for shooting down 1,294 enemy aircraft.  By February 1918, eight months after its introduction, 13 British Squadrons were equipped with Camels. Sopwith, incidentally, was a British aviation company that began in 1912 and was defunct by 1920.**

*Stop laughing. I’m not well versed in World War I era planes. Besides, if there were one at the Smithsonian’s Air and Space Museum, I’d have known this well before now.

**More information here (this one has a picture!) and here.

Okay…I’m really getting it together

The World Cup is over and I’m back from the major Canadian city in which I spent last weekend with my cousin, her husband, her brother (the oldest of the six close cousins), her friends, with whom I am also friends, and a good friend of mine/grad school classmate/coworker from when I lived in a southern state who happens to be from said Canadian city and is a former collegiate footballer, so my brain can process other things again. I will no longer be distracted by Diego Forlan’s flowing locks (seriously, they’re magical…I ended up cheering for Uruguay when England went out based solely on the pull of a footballer’s hair and no one who knows me found that at all surprising), France’s awesome implosion, godawful American football announcing (I loved Alexi Lalas as a player, I loathe him as an analyst…he’s smug and offers nothing of value), Spain’s possession, the name Bastian Schweinsteiger (best name of the World Cup) and England’s disappointingly early exit from South Africa.

I’m not going to write back posts, so I’ve renumbered the posts since I got back from Iceland. I’ll just pick up from there.

Coming soon, the Sopwith Camel.