[Normy]

It's not Iran at all. They just stink is all.

-About two years ago, during my 747 Captain training, I flew with a training pilot who was originally from Iran. He left that country just before the revolution in 1979, and hasn't been back since. I didn't ask how he would have been treated if he returned to Iran: I didn't have to; he told me such before we left the ground. Our flight plan called for us to leave Dubai and fly over Western Iran en-route to Amsterdam, and he told me way in advance that unless we had flames in the cockpit...we wouldn't land in at an Iranian airport. If an engine failed...we would turn towards Baghdad or Kuwait or...drop altitude and land in Incirlik, Turkey. Those were the ground rules from the first moment we met. I obviously didn't have any problem with this!

-Well, of course that piqued my interest. What is odd is that once we reached our planned flight altitude and had completed all checklists and as such had nothing to do for a few hours, he turned to me [over Iran] and asked about my ancestry. People commonly ask me about my ancestry, a question I've always thought strange. I think I look pretty generic.

[My ancestry? My fathers family came from Austria-Hungary, though they were ethnicly slavic Czechs. My mothers family were a mixture of Scotts-Irish from Belfast and true Irish from Cork, along with a Hugenot French, a German, a Spaniard...and Cherokee or three. I am well and truly a "mutt". The result is that I can look like a lot of things.]

Well, I told him about our family history, and he was fascinated by the "barrel-maker" part, what my family name means in Czech. Most people are, since if I changed my name to the English language variant, it would be "Cooper". I then asked him about Iran. He told me that he'd like to go back to visit but since he was involved in the Shah's government, he can't go back until the current regime ends. Which he thinks will occur within 10 years or so. There is a lot of backlash against the "sharia" or Islamic laws, and he thinks that will eventually foment revolt.

-I asked him if he had met Iranians around the world, specifically flight crews, since we stay in hotels with them. He told me that he had, that they were always cordial to him...and that they always smelled bad! I'm like "What?" and he said "Yes, in my country, it is common today for people to bathe weekly. While most in the cities don't do that...in the countryside the notion of hygiene is very weak and you can smell the farmers farther away than their animals"

I don't think we should bomb Iran. I do think that we should probably send a fleet of B-52's with bomb-bays filled with deodorant bars over Tehran and perhaps send them a signal-

N!