From Bomber Nose Girls to Hotel Room Porn

I recently heard about www.SaveTheGirls.org. Little did I know that "the Girls" they are trying to save aren't so young anymore. These fine ladies were painted on the nose panels of WWII aircraft.

To help personalize the huge B-17 flying fortress bombers, airmen started pasting racy pictures from Esquire Magazine on the nose panels. Before long, the pasting evolved into painting, with scantily clad women often being the subjects. One would not expect to see such images on today's military equipment in Iraq, but not because the soldiers wouldn't want them.

The airmen in World War II, often under the age of 20, were flying terrifying missions. Many would not return. The painted ladies gave the bomber crews something to smile about, and helped the plane feel a little more like home. Naturally, the farther away the plane was stationed from the mainland, the more suggestive the paintings became. Planes stationed in the South Pacific had some of the most suggestive nose art. Toward the end of the war, crews were known to give the girls "clothes" with water-based paint or even mud when the brass was on base.

Bombers were nicknamed after their nose art, from the Hoosier Hot Shot and Lil' Patches to Strawberry Bitch, Miss Behavin, Photo Fanny, Panama Hattie, Reveille with Beverly, Heavenly Body and Frisco Frisky.

In addition to SaveTheGirls.org, see:

www.skylighters.org/pinupqueens/

northstargallery.com/Aircraft/sensualilty.htm

parentseyes.arizona.edu/militarynoseart/overview3.htm

The nose art helped unite the crew behind its mascot and it gave the plane its all-important good-luck charm. It can't be said how important this was when young men were being asked to fly through a living hell in the heavens above.

In another bit of news that feels like it might have come from the 1940s, the ACLU just filed a lawsuit asking the courts to overturn a West Virginia law that prohibits unmarried couples from living together. The suit stems from a case where a prisoner in West Virginia had his parole delayed three months because he had planned to live with his fiance upon his release. The parole board cited the West Virginia law prohibiting cohabitation as its reason for the delay. To be paroled, the prisoner had to eventually agree to live at the Union Mission, where a condition of his staying there was that he attend religious classes and go to an approved church. I'm sure if he'd been gay, the parole board would have thrown in aversion therapy as well, so he could come out religious and straight.

This brings us to our final stop. I have no idea if World War II bomber pilots would have risked their lives to prevent a traveling businessman from being able watch porn in his hotel room, but a conservative Christian group has started up www.CleanHotels.com.

On this site, the "clean" isn't about the condition of the carpet nor the toilet and shower, but the hotel's television. This conservative group believes that their www.CleanHotels.com can bring the big hotel chains to their economic senses—chains that allow guests access to the Sodom & Gomorrah Channel.

It's interesting how statistics show that the average hotel guest watches the pay-per-view porn for something like 8 to 12 minutes. Could this be the amount of time it takes a tired business man to wet a wad of tissues when he's in a hotel bed and ready to doze off for the night?

Perhaps the folks at CleanHotels.com would rather the average businessman go to a hotel bar instead, picking up a hooker and risking giving his wife a sexually transmitted infection, in addition to committing adultery. I wonder what she would prefer?

As for myself, after my next 8 to 12 minutes of hotel-room pay-per-view, I'll be reading the biography of World War II flying ace hero Dick Bong. It's titled, "Dear Mom: So We Have a War" and was written by one of his brothers.