Pejman Yousefzadeh

The complaints about the New Yorker in the post immediately preceding this one notwithstanding, I think that this piece is hilarious. A sampler:

… My drone is the conversation-starter to end all conversation-starters. I don’t mean “end” in a killing way. What I mean is, when I have it parked in my driveway people will slow down and gawk and just start shouting stuff right there in the street. They’ll roll down their windows and yell things like “Jesus, what the hell is that thing?” or “Are you in the Air Force?” or “Did you steal that from the Air Force?” or “Holy mother of God, I think that’s a Predator drone!” I get a kick out of that one, because—this is a good example of the misconceptions about my drone—the Predator is a whole other species of bird. (That’s what we droniacs call them: birds. And we call ourselves droniacs.) The Predator is a killer / scout and used only secondarily against dynamic execution targets, while the Reaper is a hunter / killer first and an intelligence-collection asset second. Totally the opposite kind of deal. I mean, you’d no more primarily task a Reaper to collect intel than you’d let the kid from the Safeway take out your gall bladder. It’s apples and oranges.

I know what you’re thinking right now. Yes, I did have to have the driveway lengthened so it could accommodate the drone trailer, which is close to forty feet long. It also had to be reinforced, because my drone weighs about two and a half tons unladen, and that doesn’t count the weight of the trailer. And sure, that cost a lot of money. But look at it this way: my expenses went waydown when my wife and kids left me. One thing drone ownership teaches you is that when God closes a door he opens a window, and then you can shoot a Sidewinder through it.

That’s a drone joke. Obviously, you don’t need to open a window to shoot a Sidewinder through it. And in fact it’s probably better if you don’t, because of the surprise factor.