Remember when talk show host and funnyman Conan O’Brien paid a visit to the troops at Al Udeid Air Base last November? Monday night on TBS, everybody’s going to get a chance to see what he was up to during his trip to Qatar with First Lady Michelle Obama. The special episode will be called #MissionConan (which is how they’re promoting it on social media). Besides Michelle Obama — who, it seems, challenged Conan to drop and give her 50 — O’Brien was joined by comedians John Mulaney, Laurie Kilmartin and Brian Kiley and singer Grace Potter. Shortly after his…
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In case you haven’t been anywhere near the Internet for the last few weeks, a little movie called Star Wars: The Force Awakens opened this weekend. (Spoiler alert: It was a lot of fun.) Pretty much everybody jumped on the Star Wars bandwagon (including Military Times, with our “Pick your Star Wars battle buddy” poll). And as the movie entered theaters late last week, the 45th Space Wing at Patrick Air Force Base in Florida also joined in the fun. The 45th has filmed a trailer parodying the first teaser for Force Awakens, using airmen to stand in for Stormtrooper deserter Finn, desert…
Funnyman Conan O’Brien and First Lady Michelle Obama put on a show for troops stationed at Al Udeid Air Base yesterday. And judging by this short clip of Conan’s stand-up set — apparently taken by someone in the crowd and sent to John Q. Public blogger Tony Carr, who posted it on his YouTube channel — he left the troops howling with laughter. In his gut-bustingly hilarious rant, Conan eviscerates the base’s restrictions on consuming alcohol and suggests a few tweaks to the military’s policy that seemed … let’s call it warmly received by the crowd. Portions of Conan’s trip will be…
Troops at Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar are getting an unusual guest this week: Talk show host and comedian Conan O’Brien. Conan landed at Al Udeid today with First Lady Michelle Obama. During his visit, O’Brien will be putting on a show for some of the roughly 11,000 service members stationed there. Portions of Conan’s trip to Doha will be shown on his late-night TBS show later this year, according to Entertainment Weekly. But in the meantime, he’s taken the reins of the First Lady’s Instagram account and is promising to post more photos showing his trip. Said O’Brien: Hi everyone! It’s…
Walking the floor at Comic-Con, you’re bound to see people pretending to be Darth Vader, Captain America, Batman or Daenerys Targaryen from Game of Thrones. What you don’t expect to run into is someone pretending to be an Air Force Office of Special Investigations special agent. But that’s exactly what a federal indictment alleges airman Jonathon Wall did last month at the Salt Lake City Comic-Con. The Justice Department yesterday announced that Wall, 29, of Layton, Utah, was indicted by a federal grand jury on Wednesday on one count of pretending to be a federal officer, which could carry a jail…
October is almost here, and that means it’s time for the Air Force Academy’s Falcons to square off against the Naval Academy’s Midshipmen. It also means that it’s time for the usual inter-service rivalry to flare up, and Annapolis has delivered a doozy. Naval Academy cadet Rylan Tuohy has directed a video called “Air Force Training at Navy,” which was posted on YouTube Sunday. The mock training film purports to take a “recently declassified” look inside the Air Force Transition to Navy Environment program. But in a riff on the “Chair Force” stereotype, the supposed Air Force cadets prove to be incapable…
If you need a good laugh to ease into your Monday, we’ve got just what you need. A bunch of Air Force recruiters have taken the moniker R.W.A. — Recruiters With Attitude — and filmed a video parodying N.W.A.’s hip hop classic “Straight Outta Compton.” Their song, “Straight Outta Lackland,” cracks jokes about the life of a recruiter and the ways they sell potential recruits on life in the Air Force. And I’m no hip hop historian, but I’d be willing to bet this is the first rap song to drop a reference to the Air Force Song’s first line, “Off we go…
If you’ve been anywhere near the Internet this weekend, you’ve probably seen the first trailer for the new Star Wars movie, The Force Awakens. Fans applauded the return of the legendary Millennium Falcon and the debut of an updated X-wing starfighter, and how their appearance hews closer to the utilitarian, beat-to-hell look of the original movies and not the shiny, spiffy look of the much-derided prequels. Jalopnik’s military-focused blog, Foxtrot Alpha, took things one step further this weekend by outlining how the advancement — or lack thereof — of weapons platforms in the Star Wars universe mirrors our own. Said Foxtrot Alpha: Like…
OK, some of these guys at Kadena Air Base in Japan are having a lot more fun than they probably should be. Back in May, Kadena airmen weighed in on whether the Air Force would be able to take down Godzilla in a head-to-head matchup. And on July 31, Kadena posted its latest episode of “The Show,” a goofy video series from the 18th Wing’s public affairs shop that tries to inform airmen there about what’s going on. It seems a few airmen there aren’t getting the picture that when a typhoon warning sounds, you DON’T GO OUTSIDE. In an…
By now, you’ve probably gone out and seen the smash hit remake of Godzilla, featuring not one, not two, but three authentic Navy aircraft carriers. But we know what you’re thinking: How would the Air Force do against the King of the Monsters? Fortunately, the good people at the Smithsonian’s Air and Space magazine took a trip to Kadena Air Base in Japan to put the question to members of the 18th Wing. The video below contains the Air Force’s strategy for fighting off a 350-foot kaiju with F-15s, Super Cobra attack helicopters, Segways and slingshots, and it’s pretty classic. 18th…