Whipped Cream Difficulties

Lieutenant Commander Conrad Shinn (US Navy – ret.) died on May 15th. He was 102.

LTC Shinn was the first man to land a plane at the South Pole.

Late in Commander Shinn’s life, his daughters said, when asked about being the first pilot to land a plane at the South Pole, he began replying, “And the first to take off.”

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On Oct. 31, 1956, Commander Shinn, Admiral Dufek and five other Navy men made the seven-hour flight from McMurdo Station on Antarctica to the pole aboard an R4D-5L Skytrain, a twin-engine military version of the commercial DC-3. Internal politics affected the assigned duties for the extraordinary mission.
A captain onboard, Douglas Cordiner, was so upset at not being named the co-pilot that he later stood on the deck of a ship in New Zealand and “threw his library of Antarctica into the water,” Commander Shinn said in his oral history interview.
The R4D, nicknamed Que Sera Sera — Whatever Will Be Will Be — after a popular song, had its landing gear outfitted with skis and was accompanied by a circling Air Force C-124 Globemaster cargo aircraft. Maurice Cutler, then an 18-year-old United Press correspondent from Australia who joined other reporters on the cargo plane, which had wheels but no skis, said in an interview that pallets of survival gear were to be airdropped if Commander Shinn’s plane could not lift off from the pole.
The landing, photographed from above by Mr. Cutler, was not exceptionally rough. Commander Shinn set his plane down at 8:34 p.m. during continuous sunlight across windblown ridges on a desolate ice sheet nearly 10,000 feet above sea level. The temperature was minus 58 degrees Fahrenheit.
Admiral Dufek planted an American flag, and Commander Shinn kept the engines running as the plane remained on the ground for 49 minutes. By then, the skis had become stuck to the ice.
In the thin air on the ice cap, the propeller-driven plane, weighing 28,000 pounds, did not budge with its engines at full power. “We just sat on the ice like an old mud hen,” Commander Shinn told the National Naval Aviation Museum.
To gain thrust, Commander Shinn made a jet-assisted takeoff, firing a series of small rockets housed in canisters attached to the fuselage. After all 15 rockets had been fired, the plane lifted off. “Barely,” he said in a radio interview a day or so after the flight.
Tom Henderson, who directed the 2019 documentary “Ice Eagles,” about aviation in Antarctica, said in a recent interview that Commander Shinn had told him he had lifted off at 58 miles an hour, two below the plane’s minimum designated takeoff speed.
Later, an engine oil pressure light came on, Mr. Henderson said, and Commander Shinn promptly unscrewed the bulb, telling his co-pilot that he’d rather not have Admiral Dufek “see that and get excited.”

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Commander Shinn’s pioneering flight showed that remote research stations could be supported by air. Today, planes land routinely at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station. In his oral history interview, he said he had probably landed six miles from the actual pole. Mr. Cutler’s initial United Press dispatch said four miles.

Frederick Forsyth. The obits right now are still in the preliminary stage, but I’m going to be on the road tomorrow and don’t know when I’ll have time to write.

I wrote a long time ago about my early experience with The Day of the Jackel. I also wrote a little, not quite so long ago, about The Shepherd.

I remember thinking The Odessa File was pretty good, but I was young at the time. I’m not sure it holds up. I do think The Dogs of War does.

Oddly, I think my second favorite Forsyth (of the ones I’ve read) is the short story collection No Comebacks. A story that turns on an obscure point of libel law? Another story about a man who figures out a way to take his fortune with him when he dies…and tick off his greedy family. A group of blackmailers meet their match in a meek insurance executive.

And then there’s “The Emperor”. This seems like a typical fishing story of the kind Hemingway would have written: man gets into the fight of his life with a big fish. But the man is a henpecked bank employee…and in the struggle with the fish, he finds something inside him. This story contains another of my favorite lines in fiction:

“To hell with the bank,” he said at length. “To hell with Ponder’s End. And madam, to hell with you.”

Bill Atkinson, one of the pioneers of the Macintosh.

It was Mr. Atkinson who programmed QuickDraw, a foundational software layer used for both the Lisa and Macintosh computers; composed of a library of small programs, it made it possible to display shapes, text and images on the screen efficiently.
The QuickDraw programs were embedded in the computers’ hardware, providing a distinctive graphical user interface that presented a simulated “desktop,” displaying icons of folders, files and application programs.
Mr. Atkinson is credited with inventing many of the key aspects of graphical computing, such as “pull down” menus and the “double-click” gesture, which allows users to open files, folders and applications by clicking a mouse button twice in succession.

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Mr. Atkinson’s programming feats were renowned in Silicon Valley.
“Looking at his code was like looking at the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel,” recalled Steve Perlman, who as a young Apple hardware engineer took advantage of Mr. Atkinson’s software to design the first color Macintosh. “His code was remarkable. It is what made the Macintosh possible.”

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He was also the author of two of the most significant early programs written for the Macintosh. One, MacPaint, was a digital drawing program that came with the original Macintosh; it made it possible for a user to create and manipulate images on the screen, controlling everything down to the level of the individual display pixel.
Ordinary users without specialized skills could now create drawings, illustrations and designs directly on a computer screen. The program introduced the concept of a “tool palette,” a set of clickable icons to select simulated paint brushes pens, and pencils.

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After the introduction of the Macintosh, while under the influence of a modest dose of LSD, Mr. Atkinson conceived of a program that would weave text, images and video seamlessly in a simple-to-use database. That experience would lead to Apple’s HyperCard software, a forerunner of the World Wide Web.

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At age 10, after Bill was given a subscription to Arizona Highways magazine, he began cutting out nature photographs and placing them on his bedroom wall. That led to a lifetime passion for nature photography and eventually a second career as a commercial and artistic photographer. A 2004 book, “Within the Stone,” presented his close-up photographs of stones that had been cut and polished.