I wanted to break up the disaster stuff a little bit. I planned to do a few more before Halloween, but I was trying to limit myself to one a week.
However, my window for this is rapidly closing, so I wanted to post these.
I’ve been reading a little about the late great Jean Shepherd, and I’ve written before about the 23rd Street fire, so when this popped up, I knew it was going in the feed: Jean Shepherd talks about the 23rd Street fire, and about firefighters.
Bonus #1: an interview with Joe D’Albert, one of the firefighters who was there that day.
Bonus #2: Haven’t had a chance to watch all of this yet, and it is longish, but: the “Fire Engineering” channel talks about 23rd Street.
The plan for today’s video went out the window because I watched the video I was thinking about using. I won’t name it here, but it was from a channel I don’t usually watch, and was about a subject I thought would be amusing. Unfortunately, it turned out to be kind of draggy and more boring than I expected.
So, instead, I thought I’d fall back to some actual history today. I finished listening to “The History of Rome” a few weeks ago, and vacillated for a while about subscribing to “Revolutions“. Not because I didn’t like “The History of Rome”: I thoroughly enjoyed it, and commend it to your attention. But having cleared out my backlog of one podcast, did I want to immediately start a backlog of another podcast?
In the end, I decided “yes” because Mike Duncan is currently covering the Russian revolutions (1905 and 1917), he’s taking an extended break between 1905 and 1917 to work on his new book (Citizen Lafayette, which I don’t see listed on Amazon yet), and he’s announced that he is wrapping up “Revolutions” after the Russian revolutions are done. So like “The History of Rome”, there’s a defined limit, and I have time to catch up. Plus there’s structure to “Revolutions” that allows me to listen in blocks of episodes, rather than crunching through from episode 1 to the end.
Anyway, Mr. Duncan recommended these two videos in episode 10.35, and I liked them enough to feature here, even if they are a bit long. I find Drachinifel kind of funny: almost like a good stand-up comedian.
It helps that, in this first video, he’s got naturally funny material to work with: the Russian 2nd Pacific Squadron. Or, as he refers to it, “Voyage of the Damned”, one of the most messed up operations in naval history. Start with the decision to send the fleet on an 18,000 mile voyage with no friendly naval bases for resupply and refueling. Add in the fact that many of the ships in the fleet weren’t designed for operations in this environment, and were rather dated. Then add in the fact that many of the officers were incompetent drunks, and the crews lacked experience.
Hilarity ensued. The 2nd Pacific Squadron nearly started a war with the United Kingdom, narrowly managed to avoid some other incidents because their gunnery was incompetent (and they didn’t have enough ammunition loaded for practice), turned their ships into a zoo (complete with a poisonous snake that bit an officer) and an opium den, and the list goes on. I think this is one of those historical moments that justifies the use of the word “fiasco“.
Bonus #1: Unfortunately, the punchline to the voyage of the dammed isn’t quite as funny: the Battle of Tsushima. In which, having sailed 18,000 miles, the 2nd Pacific Squadron confronts the Japanese navy…and gets slaughtered.
Lawrence, as a SF/fantasy/horror collector and writer, is more familiar with the highways and byways of the genre than I am. The things that tend to horrify me are the ugly realities of existence, so I leave October mostly to him.
But this channel popped up in my YouTube recs, and I thought it might be interesting to highlight these two kind of scary events from the “Fascinating Horror” channel. There are a lot of people I don’t link because I honestly can’t stand their voices, and this guy is right on the edge for me, but I think these have some enough historical value to where I can put up with the narration.
First up: “Disaster on Webb’s Bait Farm”. This one I was unfamiliar with.
On May 27, 1983, there was a massive explosion at a place called Webb’s Bait Farm, near Benton, Tennessee. Eleven people were killed in the blast.
Now, Webb’s Bait Farm was a place that raised and sold worms for fishing. You’re probably thinking “What could possibly explode with that much force at a bait farm?”
Could it have been…meth?
Spoiler for those of you who didn’t follow the link above: it wasn’t meth.
Bonus #1: this is a disaster I’ve actually heard of (I think I was visiting my grandparents in Cleveland when this happened), but which seems to have been forgotten by many people: “The Beverly Hills Supper Club”.
Bonus #2 and #3: Here are two shorter videos from local news channels about the Beverly Hills Supper Club fire.
Bonus #4: a documentary from the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) on Beverly Hills.
“Fire after fire, the lessons are the same…” I remember watching an episode of “Nova” about building fires. One of the people being interviewed commented that, in the profession, they considered NFPA’s Life Safety Code to be a holy book: every word in it was written in the blood of someone who died or was badly injured.
She had a heck of a career, going from “Out of the Past” to “Gunfight at the O.K. Corral” to “The Nude Bomb” and “Won Ton Ton: The Dog Who Saved Hollywood”. Never did a “Mannix”, but she did do some Western series, “Police Woman”, “McMillan and Wife”, and “Search”.
(“Search” is apparently available from Amazon as a slightly pricey DVD set. I think it’s print-on-demand, but can’t tell from the listing. I may have to pick this up: on the one hand, it isn’t like we don’t already have enough TV series to watch on Saturday nights. But on the other hand, “Search” only had 23 episodes.)
Down to one team after six weeks. I thought this was fairly rare, but it actually happened in 2016. And in 2015 and 2012, we had no losers at this point in the season.
Are the Jests bad enough to pull this off? My optimism is fading.
Today: a pretty high quality documentary from Rolex, “The Trieste’s Deepest Dive”, about the 1960 descent by Jacques Piccard and Lt. Don Walsh (US Navy) to the bottom of the Challenger Deep.
The plan for today’s videos went out the window because NFL Films is a bunch of mindless jerks who will be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes.
So how aboot (see what I did there?) some true crime stories from Canada? Specifically, from “The Fifth Estate” channel on YouTube. My impression is that “The Fifth Estate” is kind of like a Canadian “60 Minutes”.
I actually watched this one many years ago on the hotel television when I was visiting Vancouver. (I didn’t go up there to watch TV: I got back to the hotel late, turned on the TV, ran through the channels, and found this). I had not heard of the “Squamish Five” before, and I think it is a rather interesting story.
If you don’t want to watch the whole thing, I would encourage you to at least fast forward to about 20 minutes in: a man who was standing right next to the Litton Industries bomb details his injuries. “I had a half a brick embedded in my back. And that half a brick that was embedded in my back was embedded solidly because four pounds of muscle had been blown out of my back…”
Bonus #1: “Bad Day at Barhead”. This is another interesting, and more recent story, that I was appalled I had not heard of. On March 3, 2005, the RCMP was executing a search warrant on a farm near Mayerthorpe, Alberta. The owner of the farm (who had fled earlier in the day) returned to the farm and killed four RCMP officers: Anthony Gordon, Leo Johnston, Brock Myrol, and Peter Schiemann. This was the second worst loss of life in one day for the RCMP. (Five officers drowned in a 1958 incident.)
Bonus #2: Just one more, because I’m also fascinated by the Quebec biker war. “Walk the Line” about Benoit Roberge. He was a prominent investigator of biker gangs for the RCMP. Turns out he was also on the Hells Angels payroll.
According to Wikipedia, Roberge pled guilty in 2014 to “breach of trust” and “engaging in gangsterism”, and admitted accepting $125,000 from the Hells Angels. He was sentenced to eight years in prison. He was paroled in 2017.
I thought today, for a change of pace, I’d make everyone hungry.
Chicken Chasseur, or “Hunter’s Chicken”.
Bonus #1: Bigos, or “Polish Hunter’s Stew”.
Bonus #2: This is longer, but it pushes another of my hot buttons (other than food), arctic exploration. “The Food Of Prince Philip’s Arctic Expedition” from the Real Royalty channel. (The arctic expedition part is early on, if you don’t want to watch the whole thing.)
She never did a “Mannix”, but she did appear on “The Rockford Files” and “Quincy, M.E”, and had a recurring role as “The Fox” on both “B.J. and the Bear” and “The Misadventures of Sheriff Lobo”, along with a bunch of other guest shots.