Judy Dyble. I was unfamiliar with her, but she had an interesting career. She appeared on the first Fairport Convention album, but was let go from the group before it came out. She went on to do a lot of prog rock and electronic stuff:
Grant Imahara, for the record.
I’m stealing that title from great and good FotB of the blog, RoadRich, who tipped me off to this story from Plane and Pilot.
Carolyn Guertin turned 92 on June 29th.
…the State of Virginia issued a proclamation making June 29th Carolyn A. Guertin Day, and if ever there were anyone deserving of it, it is this woman. Oh, and the CAP also marked the day by awarding Guertin the rank of Colonel.
If you do the math, that makes her 13 in 1941.
The high in Austin today is estimated to be 104. I think it is time to bring out something I’ve been holding in reserve.
“Land of White Alice”. No, this isn’t a Lewis Carroll thing. “White Alice” was a communications system in Alaska that used “tropospheric scattering” for over-the-horizon communications links.
The video makes it sound like White Alice was a major communications link for civilian traffic, but from what I’ve read elsewhere, it carried mostly military communications at this time (though it was used to coordinate between military and civil air traffic). The system went into place beginning in 1955: by 1970 or thereabouts, the military considered it obsolete, and transferred it to RCA Alascom for civilian use until the late 1970s.
I’m putting this up for two reasons: in addition to my interest in cold war tech, there’s also a lot of great vintage footage of Alaska. There’s even an Alaskan bush pilot, RoadRich.
Bonus: “Seconds For Survival”, from those wonderful folks at the Bell System.
Benjamin Storm Keough, Elvis Presley’s grandson. He was 27.
The number for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-TALK (8255). If you live outside of the United States or are looking for other help, TVTropes has a good page of additional resources.
Science Sunday!
I wanted to do something a little different today. From 1960 and those wonderful folks at Shell Oil, “A Light In Nature”.
This isn’t a film about a specific area of science, but: “…shows scientific research and the creative process of discovery in probing radioactivity, astronomy, materials science, geology, biophysics, oceanography, the discovery of DNA, etc.” 1960 was the 300th anniversary of the founding of the Royal Society, and this was apparently sort of a tie-in to that. There’s some awesome vintage video of members of the Royal Society smoking cigarettes and watching Captain Kangaroo hanging out, if you’re fond of early 1960s style.
Bonus: Space history counts as science, right?
“Apollo 8 Go For TLI”, a NASA documentary about the mission.
This popped up randomly in my recommendations, but I would have posted it no matter what once I knew it existed.
From the “World Of Warships” channel: “Naval Legends: USS Batfish”.
As you may recall, Mike the Musicologist and I visited the Batfish…cheez louise, it has been almost six years?
And as I think I’ve mentioned before, the USS Batfish was damaged in the flooding of 2019, and the Friends of the Muskogee War Memorial Park are trying to raise money to put it back into shape. If you have a few dollars to spare, why not float them over to the Batfish?
Bonus video: an episode of “The Silent Service” TV series about the USS Batfish.
Fun fact: “DeForest Kelley appeared in three episodes as Lieutenant Commander James C. Dempsey and Leonard Nimoy appeared in two episodes as Sonarman.” Also appearing at various points: Edward Platt (who played a lieutenant commander, not a chief), Jack Lord, Bob Denver, and Dennis Weaver. And that’s not an exhaustive list.
I thought it might be interesting to talk about Nike.
Not the goddess of victory, or the shoe company: the missile system. I’ve always thought that was a cool looking system.
First up, “The United States Army Air Defense Command”. This one is only about 10 minutes.
Bonus video #1, and also short: a vintage AT&T Tech Channel video about the Nike Zeus ABM system.
Bonus video #2, which is a bit longer: “The Nike Hercules Missie System” from the US Army.
List of Nike missile sites from Wikipedia.
San Vicente Park in California. Part of the park was an old Nike-Ajax missile site, which has been preserved and is accessible to the public. I’d like to visit there one of these days.
There were two Nike-Hercules sites in Austin: according to the Wikipedia list, one is in Elroy (which is kind of near the airport and the Formula 1 track, and is the home of Wild Bubba’s Wild Game Grill), and the other “is now the location of the University of Texas System Police Academy”.
(I had no idea UTPD had their own academy. I figured they shared space with the Austin PD’s academy. You learn something new every day.)
Lawrence linked to a follow up story from Bearing Arms about a weird case I wrote about back in February: an ex-stunt woman formerly from Bee Cave and her husband drove to Ohio to shoot her ex-husband, and instead were shot by the ex.
Spoiler: the grand jury no-billed the ex-husband and his current wife.
Today’s entries are part military aviation, part general aviation. Specifically, both of these focus on the kind of mistakes that got military pilots killed (not in combat) in the 1940s: many of those are equally applicable today, as I’m sure FotB RoadRich will attest. (I don’t know if any of the planes he’s flown have talking oil temperature gauges, though.)
“Unless You Fly With Safety”. This is the short version.
Bonus: “Learn and Live”. This is the long version, but it feels like some has been cut off of the end.
I think it is time for some more virtual travel, back to the past, on a defunct airline.
Where to go this time? How about…Bermuda?
From 1961, “Wings to Bermuda” (in color!), brought to you by Pan Am (and the Periscope Film channel on the ‘Tube).
Bonus video: I’m having trouble deciding: did I post the Paul Shaffer video as a segue into “Wings to Bermuda”, or did I post “Wings to Bermuda” to give myself an excuse for the Paul Shaffer video? Decisions, decisions…
Here: enjoy Paul Shaffer in “Behind The Music”.
And just for grins, !Paul Shaffer:
Ronald Graham, noted mathematician and noted juggler.
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Henry Martin, one of the old time New Yorker cartoonists. The NYT obit features a few examples of his work, and I have to admit: they did provoke a chuckle or three.
Finally: Mary Kay Letourneau.
I know I’m running a little long (again) but in my defense, this is in color, and I think better quality than usual.
“Survival”. The YouTube notes say this dates to the 1980s, but the opening says 1978. I’m kind of wondering if at least one person on my blogroll saw this when they were serving.
The other thing that makes this interesting to me is that the setting looks more like Europe (or some areas of the US) rather than the general run of “survival at sea” films I see a lot of on the ‘Tube. Not that there’s anything wrong with those, but I’m far more likely to be lost in the woods than to be bailing out of an aircraft at sea.
Bonus video: “Land and Live in the Jungle”. From 1944 and featuring Van Heflin.
This is a little longer than I’d like, but it popped up in my recommendations, and pushes several buttons at once:
From 1970, “It Couldn’t Be Done”, a Bell System film about “impossible structures”, featuring Mr. Marvin and the 5th Dimension.
Bonus video: since we’re talking about what we can accomplish when we want to, “They Came To An Island”. From 1946, a documentary about the Navy Civil Engineer Corps (aka the Seebees).
Bad day for music.
Imitated, scorned, spoofed, what came to be known as “The Dollars Trilogy” — “A Fistful of Dollars” (1964), “For a Few Dollars More” (1965) and “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” (1966), all released in the United States in 1967 — starred Clint Eastwood as “The Man With No Name” and were enormous hits, with a combined budget of $2 million and gross worldwide receipts of $280 million.
The trilogy’s Italian dialogue was dubbed for the English-speaking market, and the action was brooding and slow, with clichéd close-ups of gunfighters’ eyes. But Mr. Morricone, breaking the unwritten rule never to upstage actors with music, infused it all with wry sonic weirdness and melodramatic strains that many fans embraced with cultlike devotion and that critics called viscerally true to Mr. Leone’s vision of the Old West
“In the films that established his reputation in the 1960s, the series of spaghetti westerns he scored for Mr. Leone, Mr. Morricone’s music is anything but a backdrop,” The New York Times critic Jon Pareles wrote in 2007. “It’s sometimes a conspirator, sometimes a lampoon, with tunes that are as vividly in the foreground as any of the actors’ faces.”
Mr. Morricone also scored Mr. Leone’s “Once Upon a Time in the West” (1968) and his Jewish gangster drama, “Once Upon a Time in America” (1984), both widely considered masterpieces. But he became most closely identified with “The Dollars Trilogy,” and in time grew weary of answering for their lowbrow sensibilities.
Asked by The Guardian in 2006 why “A Fistful of Dollars” had made such an impact, he said: “I don’t know. It’s the worst film Leone made and the worst score I did.”
“Lowbrow sensibilities”, my Aunt Fannie.
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Edited to add: Just got this: a nice tribute to another aspect of Mr. Morricone’s work that I was unaware of.
Morricone, a man of staunch yet humble faith, was part of a gathering of 60 artists who paid musical tribute to Pope Benedict XVI’s 60th anniversary of his ordination.
The Vatican’s obituary goes on to tell how Morricone was so inspired by Pope Francis’s elevation that he wrote a Mass to celebrate both the new pope and all Jesuits. Titled Missa Papae Francisci, the work was also dedicated to his wife, Maria Travia, who had been encouraging Morricone to write such a sacred work for years. The Mass was premiered on the 200th anniversary of the re-establishment of the Jesuit order.
Morricone went on to work with Pope Francis to organize a concert “with the poor and for the poor” in 2016. The charity concert was performed by the Roma Sinfonietta Orchestra, the National Academy of St. Cecilia, and Fr. Marco Frisina, raising much needed capital for several charitable projects of the Pontiff. Pope Francis later awarded Ennio the Pontifical Gold Medal, presented by Cardinal Gianfranco Ravasi, President of the Pontifical Council for Culture, on April 15, 2019.
This article also quotes the eloquent and touching statement Mr. Morricone requested be read on his passing.
Charlie Daniels. I loved “The Devil Went Down to Georgia” when I was a kid. Still have a soft spot for that song, even though some people might say I have “lowbrow sensibilities”.
There are many candidates for the libertarian national anthem. I’d argue this is one of the better ones:
A drunkard wants another drink of wine, and a politician wants your vote
I don’t want much of nothing at all, but I will take another toke
‘Cause I ain’t asking nobody for nothin’
If I can’t get it on my own
If you don’t like the way I’m livin’
You just leave this long haired country boy alone
And because it is there: