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“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 159

Saturday, September 5th, 2020

Wow. I did not expect Wednesday’s jail poetry post to get the activity it got. Thanks to Borepatch and Lawrence. Thanks also to Desley Deacon for mentioning their book, Judith Anderson: Australian Star, First Lady of the American Stage (affiliate link) which is available in a very reasonably priced Kindle edition.

I haven’t posted any survival videos in a bit, so when I ran across these, I thought they’d be good fodder. They give a slightly different perspective. Also, while this runs about an hour in total, it’s broken up into handy 15 minute chunks.

“SAS Escape, Evasion, Survival” with Barry Davies.

Part 1.

Part 2.

Part 3.

Part 4.

Barry Davies passed away in 2016. Telegraph obit.

The non-fragmentation grenades were designed to stun anyone close to the detonation for between three and five seconds. Davies pulled the pins of two of them. He threw one over the starboard wing and another over the cockpit. This exploded two feet above the flight deck.
He then scaled a ladder on to the wing and followed two GSG9 soldiers through the hatchway into the aircraft. The terrorists exploded two grenades and there was a fire fight for close to five minutes, largely confined to the flight deck, with shouts to the passengers of “Get down! Get down!” while continuous gunfire rattled up and down the aircraft.
Morrison cradled one of the beauty queens in his arms as he helped her down from the wing. “I’m afraid you may have to give her back,” Davies shouted to him. One member of GSG9 had been hit and three passengers and a stewardess were slightly wounded. Two of the terrorists had been shot dead. A third died a few hours later in hospital. News of the rescue of the passengers was followed by the deaths in custody of three of the Red Army group. Davies was awarded the British Empire Medal. Morrison was appointed OBE.

Posted in Books, History, Safety | Comments Closed

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 158

Friday, September 4th, 2020

Another dose of random for today.

How could I not post this?

“The Poisonous History of Tomatoes”.

(Obligatory.)

Bonus, slightly longer, video, which you would not see on television today. Or any time after about 1965, I’d guess.

A 1950s episode of “Bold Journey” featuring the editor of True magazine, Douglas Kennedy. Mr. Kennedy goes to Africa…to hunt rhino.

This is within a few years of Ruark’s Horn of the Hunter: that was published in 1953, so I think (but can’t confirm) that Ruark’s safari was 1951 or 1952. According to the YouTube notes, this aired in the third season of “Bold Journey” which ran from 1956-1959.

Bonus #2: as a hattip to ASM826, I thought I’d post this one: “YOJIMBO & A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS – How The Western Was Changed Forever”.

Posted in Books, Food, Guns, History, Movies, Ruark | Comments Closed

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 157

Thursday, September 3rd, 2020

Travel Thursday!

I can’t find that I’ve done this one yet: as much as I try to keep track, after 157 of these, it is starting to get hard.

Today: “Wings to Germany” on Pan Am! Berlin in the 1960s!

They had me at “over which we pour bananas and flaming brandy”.

(Wow! I managed to find this on the Wayback Machine, and it is now moved over to the new SDC site.)

Bonus: in the interest of equal time, TWA’s “Flight To Germany” from the 1950s.

Bonus #2: Just to give you that feeling of being there, a Lufthansa safety video for the 747.

Bonus #3: First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin.

(Apropos of nothing in particular, this Reddit thread gave me a few much needed laughs night before last.)

Posted in History, Travel | Comments Closed

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 156

Wednesday, September 2nd, 2020

Some people may be surprised by this, but: I like poetry.

I know, maybe I should turn in my man card. But I’m weird about the poetry I like. I find much of T. S. Eliot incomprehensible, but his imagery! Rod Dreher wrote a while back about the Australian poet Les Murray, and I want to read more of his work. Someone gave me a coffee mug with a quote from James Merrill’s “The Black Swan” on it and now I want to read more Merrill.

And Penny Arcade introduced me to “i sing of Olaf glad and big” which I find comforting from time to time.

“there is some shit I will not eat”

I believe there are two poets you don’t have to turn in your man card to like.

One is Kipling.

Charles Dance reads “The Road to Mandalay” during a 70th anniversary of VJ Day commemoration in London.

“The Power of the Dog”.

The other poet you don’t have to turn in your man card for? Robinson Jeffers. I think even TJIC would concede this point: you have to like a poet who apprenticed himself out so that he could learn stonemasonry, then used that skill to keep adding on to Tor House for the rest of his life.

He later built a large four-story stone tower on the site called Hawk Tower. While he had not visited Ireland at this point in his life, it is possible that Hawk Tower is based on Francis Joseph Bigger’s ‘Castle Séan’ at Ardglass, County Down, which had also in turn influenced William Butler Yeats’ choice of a poets tower, Thoor Ballylee. Construction on Tor House continued into the late 1950s and early 1960s, and was completed by his eldest son. The completed residence was used as a family home until his descendants decided to turn it over to the Tor House Foundation, formed by Ansel Adams, for historic preservation. The romantic Gothic tower was named after a hawk that appeared while Jeffers was working on the structure, and which disappeared the day it was completed. The tower was a gift for his wife Una, who had a fascination for Irish literature and stone towers. In Una’s special room on the second floor were kept many of her favorite items, photographs of Jeffers taken by the artist Weston, plants and dried flowers from Shelley’s grave, and a rosewood melodeon which she loved to play. The tower also included a secret interior staircase – a source of great fun for his young sons.

Judith Anderson reads Robinson Jeffers, part 2.

I’m leading off with this one because it contains two of my favorite Jeffers poems: “Hurt Hawks” and “The House Dog’s Grave”.

Part 1:

A shortish documentary from 1967:

Sadly, I can’t find any readings of my other two favorite Jeffers poems: “Be Angry at the Sun” and “The Stars Go over the Lonely Ocean“.

“…Long live freedom and damn the ideologies”

Posted in Art, History | 3 Comments »

Obit watch: September 2, 2020.

Wednesday, September 2nd, 2020

Kaing Guek Eav, also known as “Duch”, is burning in Hell.

Duch was sentenced to life imprisonment in 2010 for atrocities he had committed as a commandant of the Tuol Sleng prison. At least 14,000 people died after being held there, most of them sent to a killing field after being tortured and forced to confess to often imaginary crimes. Only a handful survived.
Duch (pronounced doik) and Tuol Sleng prison became a symbol of the brutality of the Khmer Rouge as it devoured itself in paranoia and purges. Under the regime, from 1975 to 1979, at least 1.7 million people died from execution, torture, starvation, untreated disease or overwork.
A joint Cambodian-United Nations tribunal found Duch guilty of crimes against humanity and war crimes as well as homicide and torture. The tribunal first sentenced him to 35 years, giving him credit for years already served in pretrial detention. A higher court within the tribunal later increased the sentence to life imprisonment without a right to appeal.

…

The force of his personality dominated the courtroom, and his self-confidence sometimes hardened into condescension as he corrected a lawyer or witness about details of the case against him.
At one point, a judge reminded him that laughter was not an appropriate response to a question.
A panel of court-appointed psychiatrists said that Duch was “meticulous, conscientious, control-oriented, attentive to detail and seeks recognition from his superiors,” and that he exhibited “a strong presence of obsessive traits.”
One question hovered above the trial: the source of the “evil” — as he himself described it — that could have compelled him to scribble on a list of 17 children, “Kill them all.”

…

When a Vietnamese invasion drove the Khmer Rouge from Phnom Penh in January 1979, Duch oversaw the execution of the remaining prisoners. But he did not destroy the records of interrogations, meticulously kept accounts that could run to as many as 200 pages. They amounted, in the end, to his life’s work.

…

During his trial, however, Duch seemed to doubt the validity of his work, telling the courtroom that while running the prison he did not believe most confessions that his torturers had extracted and that he then annotated and sent to his superiors.
“I never believed that the confessions I received told the truth,” he said. “At most, they were about 40 percent true.”
And he said he believed that only 20 percent of the people whose names had been extracted through torture were genuine opponents of the regime. Those people were in turn pursued, arrested and tortured until they, too, produced the names of imagined accomplices.
“The work expanded,” Duch said. “People were arrested illegally, right or wrong. I considered it evil eating evil.”

Posted in History, Obits | Comments Closed

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 155

Tuesday, September 1st, 2020

A couple of food videos on the shorter side today.

First off: an explanation of grog, and the importance of rum.

Bonus: how to make garum. First off, you leave a barrel of fish with some salt added out in the sun for two months…okay, not in this case, but that was basically the traditional Roman method.

Bonus #2: James May on the subject of Spam versus ham.

Posted in Food, History | Comments Closed

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 154

Monday, August 31st, 2020

I thought I’d try some things that are lighter and shorter today.

First up: “See A Job”. Actually, I have the impression that “See A Job” is the title of this whole series of educational films, and the actual title of this one is: “The Airline Stewardess: What’s A Nice Girl Like You Doing Way Up Here When The Ground’s Way Down There?”, “the story of Elaine Vaughn, an African-American Pan Am airline stewardess.”

That was from the 1960s. Bonus: “Airline Glamor Girls”, stewardess training from the late 1940s.

More bonus, and in the interest of equal time: TWA explains their “Inflight Services Personnel Selection Process” as of 1979.

Another really short bonus. “Top Gear” enthusiasts may have seen this one, but I had not previously: Clarkson’s custom drink cabinet for the trunk of his car.

I just find that very cool. One more, but still on the short side: “A Roman Solider Prepares Dinner”.

Posted in History, Planes | Comments Closed

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 153

Sunday, August 30th, 2020

Science Sunday!

Today, a compilation of shorter videos for once. First up: yes, it is a TED talk. But it is also James Randi. As I’ve said previously, I consider debunking pseudoscience (including “psychic” frauds) to be legitimately science.

Bonus: from the Periodic Videos channel, a short video on anatoxin-a. Anatoxin-a is also known by another name: “Very Fast Death Factor“.

Bonus #2: from the MIT Science Reporter, “Underwater Photography”. I picked this one because it features another one of my heroes, Harold “Doc” Edgerton.

Posted in Geek, History, Photography | Comments Closed

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 152

Saturday, August 29th, 2020

I know I’ve been running long all week. I apologize for that: next week, I’m hoping I can keep things a little shorter. Also a confession: I’ve watched the second two videos, but I’m only about 50 minutes into the first one.

Since today is Saturday, and since this video sits at the intersection of two of this blog’s obsessions interests, here you go: “Hadrian’s World: Leadership Lessons from a Roman Emperor”. You know, Hadrian? The wall guy?

Bonus: We haven’t spent enough time in the UKOGBNI recently, so let us remedy that. “How To Make A Royal Marines Officer”.

Part 1:

Part 2:

Richard Van der Horst. More from the Telegram. I know this seems out of context, but it will make more sense if you watch all the way through to the graduation ceremony in part 2.

Posted in Bookmarks, History, Leadership | Comments Closed

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 151

Friday, August 28th, 2020

It seems to me that the C-130 is an underappreciated plane.

It isn’t sexy. But it can carry a lot of stuff:

It can carry a lot of troops.

It can land on a short field.

It can land and take off from an aircraft carrier.

Properly equipped versions even have a “frappe” setting.

Today’s feature: “Touchdown!” a 1960s vintage promo film for the C-130 from the Lockheed-Georgia Company.

Bonus, just for fun:

Posted in History, Planes | Comments Closed

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 150

Thursday, August 27th, 2020

Travel Thursday!

Here’s something a little different: “To Catch a Dream”, a visit to Spain by way of Iberia Airlines. I could go for Spain right now. Sherry! Tapas!

Iberia merged with British Airways in 2010, according to Wikipedia, but both airlines still operate under their own names.

Bonus video, for two reasons: in keeping with the Spanish theme, “Morocco to Madrid by train & ferry”.

The other reason is that I like The Man In Seat 61. One of these days, if I can ever get the time and money together, I want to ride the Trans-Siberian Railroad, and his site has a lot of useful information on doing that (as well as other train travel).

Posted in History, Travel | Comments Closed

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 149

Wednesday, August 26th, 2020

More history today. And again, I’m running a bit long. I know.

British Army Documentaries has posted a three part series: “Falklands: The Land Battle 1982”.

Here’s part 1: “The Landings”.

I understand if you don’t want to watch all 46 minutes of this. Not everybody is that interested in the Falklands War. But at least listen to the first 45 seconds or so: is that literally the most 1980s music you’ve ever heard?

Bonus video: if you’re interested, part 2: “Towards Stanley”.

Part 3, “The Final Countdown Battle”.

And part 4, “In the Light of Experience”.

Posted in History | Comments Closed

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 147

Monday, August 24th, 2020

I thought today I would:

a) be a little self-indulgent again, and
II) do some real history this time.

I don’t think I’ve mentioned it here, but I know I’ve brought this up in other places: I’ve been listening to the back numbers of Mike Duncan’s “History of Rome” podcast, and enjoying them a great deal. Some other bloggers have been discussing history, and especially Roman history as well. So today’s entries are all Roman themed, for reasons.

I know these are long, and I apologize, but I think they are worthwhile.

First of all: this is a talk at Stanford University from 2011 by Dame Mary Beard: “Mistaken Identities: How to Identify a Roman Emperor”, in which she talks about various busts and statues, and why the identification of them with Romans like Julius Caesar probably isn’t true.

(You could probably fast forward to about the 7:00 mark if you want to skip the excessively long introduction.)

Bonus video: “The Accidental Suicide of the Roman Empire” by Michael Kulikowski. I have another reason for posting this: while Dr. Kulikowski is currently at Penn State, he gave this lecture in 2012 at Washington and Lee University, where he was formerly a professor of history. So this is basically bait for the Washington and Lee contingent out there.

Bonus #2: Dame Beard again, at the 92nd Street Y from 2015, talking about SPQR: The History of Rome.

I was going to write more about Dame Beard, but I find that pretty much everything I wanted to say, I wrote not long after reading SPQR in 2015.

Point of etiquette: if someone is both a PhD and an OBE, does the OBE title (Dame or Knight) take precedence over the “Dr.”? I would assume that it does, since I believe it is a lot harder to become an OBE than a PhD, but I’d like to establish that for certain.

Posted in History | Comments Closed

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 146

Sunday, August 23rd, 2020

Science Sunday!

This is something I’d vaguely heard of in the past, but only just stumbled across on the ‘Tube.

“Mr. Tompkins In Wonderland”.

Mr. Tompkins in Wonderland is a short educational film from the University of Akron based on the story by George Gamow. The film uses Gamow’s story featuring the titular character Mr. C.J.H. Tompkins to explain the basics of space, time, and relativity.

Bonus video: I could sit here every Sunday and post videos of Richard Feynman from YouTube until the end of time. But I’m going to try to avoid doing that.

This one interests me, though: Feynman responds to the question “Do you think there will ever be a machine that will think like human beings and be more intelligent than human beings?”

I like that statement: “Intelligence is to be defined.”

One more. I’m going to assert something here: pseudoscience is science. At least, when you’re debunking it.

Orson Welles talks about “cold reading“.

Posted in Geek, History | Comments Closed

“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 145

Saturday, August 22nd, 2020

This is another one of those days when I don’t have a real theme, so I hope you enjoy some things that amused me.

First up: Salvador Dali appears on “What’s My Line?” You’ve got to like the way he signs in.

Bonus: Orson Welles talks about Ernest Hemingway. That story about Welles and Hemingway attempting to trade punches and ultimately opening a bottle and toasting each other is also recounted in a neat little book, To Have and Have Another, about Hemingway and Hemingway’s cocktails. (Affiliate link.)

Last one, because this is a little longer.

“A Conversation with Igor Stravinsky” from 1957.

Airing on NBC from 1957 to 1965, the Wisdom series featured interviews with luminaries in science, the arts, and politics. These interviews were often conducted by a journalist or colleague well-known to the guest and usually took place in familiar surroundings such as the subject’s home or workplace. While each program forms a picturesque snapshot of the cultural conventions of the day, it frequently transcends its mid-20th-century broadcast style as it presents challenging and in-depth perspectives from a great mind. Guests include Igor Stravinsky, Robert Frost, Somerset Maugham, Eamon de Valera, Alfred P. Sloan, Robert Moses, Edward Steichen, Margaret Mead, Frank Lloyd Wright, Pearl Buck, Eleanor Roosevelt, Marcel Duchamp, Arnold Toynbee, and Carl Sandburg. 14-part series, 29 minutes each.

Posted in Art, History, Music | Comments Closed

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