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

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.

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Obit watch: August 29, 2020.

August 29th, 2020

Chadwick Boseman. Variety. THR.

This is one of those cases where I don’t have much to say: his death at 43 is shocking and is being covered pretty much everywhere by everybody, and I really have nothing to add.

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

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:

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Obit watch: August 28, 2020.

August 28th, 2020

Gerald D. Hines, prominent developer.

At his death, Mr. Hines’s company had built 907 projects around the world, including more than 100 skyscrapers, many of them designed by architects like I.M. Pei, Harry Cobb, Philip Johnson and John Burgee, Cesar Pelli, Kevin Roche, Jean Nouvel, Frank Gehry, Robert A.M. Stern and the firm Kohn Pedersen Fox.
Hines built the Lipstick Building (officially 885 Third Avenue) in Manhattan and Pennzoil Place, Williams Tower and Bank of America Plaza in Houston, all designed by Mr. Johnson and Mr. Burgee. It was behind the Salesforce Tower, designed by Mr. Pelli, which is the tallest building in San Francisco; the DZ Bank in Berlin, designed by Mr. Gehry; the sprawling Porta Nuova complex in Milan; the Diagonal Mar project in Barcelona; and the Aspen Highlands ski area in Colorado, a favorite project of Mr. Hines’s. (He had a home in Aspen and continued to ski into his 90s.)
Architecture was his passion, although it would probably be more accurate to say that what he cared about most was fusing a point of intersection between serious design and profit-making real estate development. He took issue with colleagues who saw creative architects as dangerous to the bottom line. Spending a little more to create a better building would pay off in the end, he believed, because tenants would spend more to be in a better building that had a distinctive identity, and that would benefit both his tenants’ businesses and his own.

…

Ada Louise Huxtable, then the senior architecture critic of The New York Times, hailed Pennzoil in 1976 as a “rarity among large commercial structures: a dramatic and beautiful and important building.”
“It successfully marries art and architecture and the business of investment construction,” she added.Pennzoil was internationally acclaimed, and it led other developers to attempt the Hines formula of hiring celebrated architects and commissioning them to design one-of-a-kind towers that could be marketed as defining points of downtown skylines. (Not all of his peers were as good as Hines, however, in simultaneously encouraging creativity and controlling construction costs.)
The success of Pennzoil Place marked the beginning of a close and long relationship between Mr. Hines and the partners Mr. Johnson and Mr. Burgee. It would transform Mr. Johnson’s practice from a boutique firm designing mainly expensive civic and institutional projects into a major player in commercial architecture — one that would reshape skylines around the country. Hines also commissioned the Johnson firm to design Comerica Tower in Detroit, the Wells Fargo Center in Denver, 550 Boylston Street in Boston and 101 California Street and 580 California Street in San Francisco, among many others.
Mr. Johnson and Mr. Hines made an unlikely pair: the intellectual architect who rarely stopped talking and loved gossip and controversy, and the buttoned-up developer so averse to grandstanding that he would keep a slide rule in his pocket and take it out and pretend to use it during a meeting to avoid having to speak. But before his death in 2005, Mr. Johnson told the writer Hilary Lewis that he considered Mr. Hines his “first and greatest client.”

Walter Lure. Interesting story: Mr. Lure was the rhythm guitarist for the Hearbreakers (also known as Johnny Thunders and the Hearbreakers, as opposed to Tom Petty’s Hearbreakers) one of those legendary NYC punk bands.

The Heartbreakers were together for a brief three years and recorded only one studio album, “L.A.M.F.,” released in 1977 on the British label Track Records. But among the bands that clustered around downtown clubs like Max’s Kansas City and CBGB during the early punk years, the Heartbreakers had an outsize reputation.
“They were probably the best band besides the Ramones and the Dictators,” Legs McNeil, a co-founder of Punk magazine and the co-author of “Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk” (1996), said in a phone interview. “But they’re kind of like mythical, you know, because no one ever saw them. And when they did, Johnny was usually too drugged out to perform.”

…

Mr. Lure had played mostly in cover bands before he joined the Heartbreakers in 1975, but he quickly bonded with the other members musically and otherwise. In his memoir, “To Hell and Back,” published in March, Mr. Lure wrote of his initiation into the band in Mr. Hell’s East Village apartment. His bandmates cut off his long hair, and Mr. Nolan cooked him up a shot of heroin.

…

He had strong opinions about how a rock band should sound. In his book he disparaged artier contemporaries like the Talking Heads and Television, writing: “It was as if everybody was so concerned about somehow sounding ‘unique’ that they forgot that, sometimes, the kids just wanna rock. That was the niche that the Heartbreakers slipped into, and that was why they’d excited me so.”

After the Hearbreakers, he went into product testing for the FDA (he had an English major and a chemistry minor from Fordham) and from there went into Wall Street.

It led to a position at a brokerage firm overseeing a team of 125 and a long career in finance that lasted until he retired, in 2015.

…

Mr. Lure remained a drug addict until sobering up in 1988. He continued to moonlight as a rock musician, playing reunions with the Heartbreakers throughout the 1980s and then touring and recording with the Waldos.

He was also the last surviving member of the Heartbrakers (with the exception of Richard Hell, who was briefly the Heartbreakers bass player. Hell left/was fired from the band and formed Richard Hell and the Voidoids. Heartbreakers entry from Wikipedia.)

After he heard the news of Mr. Lure’s death, Glen Matlock, the bassist of the Sex Pistols, who toured with the Heartbreakers in the 1970s, noted the end of an era, tweeting, “And then there were none.”

Posted in Art, Music, Obits | Comments Closed

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

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

Things I enthusiastically and wholeheartedly agree with.

August 26th, 2020

The first two panels of today’s “Dinosaur Comics”. Having extensively studied listened to the first 112 or so episodes of “The History Of Rome”, I am confident in stating that the decline and fall of the Roman Empire began when the Empire proscribed setting off fireworks whenever you felt like it.

All of this Babylon Bee op-ed. (Hattip: MtM.) Yes, I am aware that they are a satire site, but everything in that piece is correct: everything did start going downhill when men stopped wearing hats.

“The best thing about kids’ soccer being canceled this year”. Although I quibble slightly with this: the best thing about kids soccer being cancelled isn’t the renewed socialization, it is the fact that kids aren’t playing soccer.

Posted in Bagatelle, Explosives, Hats, Sarcasm, Sports | Comments Closed

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

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”.

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Obit watch: August 26, 2020.

August 26th, 2020

For the historical record: Gail “Passages” Sheehy.

Justin Townes Earle, singer, songwriter, and son of Steve Earle. He was only 38.

Norman Carlson. He ran the Federal Bureau of Prisons from 1970 to 1987.

Starting in the early 1980s, government policies like the war on drugs and mandatory minimum sentencing had led to mass incarceration, swelling inmate populations in both state and federal systems. Aiming to ease the stress on penitentiary inmates and staff, Mr. Carlson favored building more prisons; during his tenure, he created 20 new facilities, nearly doubling the existing number.
And in Marion, Ill., he established a tough new system of solitary confinement that became the model on which future supermax penitentiaries were based. These included the United States Penitentiary Administrative Maximum Facility in Florence, Colo., known as the ADX; it is the toughest prison in the federal system, housing those who have been labeled the “worst of the worst.”

…

Mr. Carlson was credited with professionalizing the Bureau of Prisons. He disciplined officers who beat inmates, setting a policy of zero tolerance for prisoner abuse. Guards were to call themselves corrections officers, and assistant wardens were to wear suits and ties. He often ate with prisoners and brought along his wife and children, to show that prison food was good enough for his own family.
And he was a stickler for cleanliness.
“Mr. Carlson viewed a dirty prison as a sign of poor management; consequently floors were highly polished and walls kept painted,” Mr. Earley wrote. He said that one warden was so eager to please the director that when the snow outside had turned muddy and brown, the warden had his staff sprinkle flour on it to make it look whiter before Mr. Carlson arrived.

…

“We have to divorce ourselves from the notion that we can change human behavior, that we have the power to change inmates,” Mr. Carlson told Mr. Earley. “We don’t. All we can do is provide opportunities for inmates who want to change.”

(Pete Earley’s The Hot House is a swell book about Leavenworth specifically, and to some extent about the Federal prison system in general. I enthusiastically recommend it if you’re interested in prisons or criminal justice issues.)

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“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 148

August 25th, 2020

I’m going long again, I know. I’m sorry. But this is something I’ve actually looked for in the past, and only now just found on the ‘Tube.

One of the non-“Top Gear”/”Grand Tour” series that James May has done is “James May’s Toy Stories“, in which he did interesting things with children’s toys.

For example: launching “Action Man” (the licensed UK knockoff of “G.I. Joe”, which someone describes as “the most derided toy in Britain”) on a rocket to see if he can exceed the speed of sound.

Example #2: build a three mile long slot car track.

Just one more: a Lego house. A Lego full-sized house.

Sadly, the house no longer exists:

An attempt to sell it to the Legoland theme park in Windsor fell apart, after the cost of dismantling and reassembling was judged too expensive. The house could not remain at its site at a vineyard because the space was needed for vines and there was no planning permission. With further attempts unable to prevent it being dismantled on 22 September 2009; the bricks used in it were however donated to charity.

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Obit watch: August 24, 2020.

August 24th, 2020

Great and good FotB Borepatch has lost his mother.

If you haven’t already, please head over there to extend your sympathies.

Posted in Obits | 2 Comments »

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

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.

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

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“.

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

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.

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“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 144

August 21st, 2020

This isn’t exactly travel, but more a cross between business and aircraft.

“Tailspin”, which seems to be from something called “Enterprise” narrated by Eric Sevareid. This is a fairly short documentary about the history, and especially the fall, of Braniff. Warning: for some reason, the sound completely drops out at about the 24:30 mark, but most of what’s left at that point is shots of parked Braniff aircraft and the credits.

Bonus video #1: did you know Braniff flew the Concorde? Well, technically, they offered Concorde service between DFW and Dulles, with connecting flights to Paris and London (operated by Air France and British Airways: I think this is what we might call a “codeshare” today, but the US leg of the flights was operated by Braniff pilots.)

They started the service in early 1979.

The domestic flights often had no more than 15 passengers on average for each flight while Braniff’s Boeing 727 flights were filled close to the capacity despite being five to ten minutes slower than Concorde.

Bonus video #2: a 1966 vintage (and mildly amusing) Braniff commercial.

Bonus video #3: another one from 1965 for “The End Of the Plain Plane“.

“We won’t get you where you’re going any faster, but it’ll seem that way.”

Bonus video #3: footage of “The Great Pumpkin”.

If I remember Splash of Colors correctly, the Great Pumpkin was the last Braniff plane in the air. I do remember a story about them being enroute to Hawaii: during the flight, the captain called the chief stewardess up to the flight deck.

Officially, it appears that the crew was given the choice by Dallas operations to either divert to Los Angeles or continue the flight unpaid to Honolulu. Urban legend has it that the pilot had been ordered to divert. Either way, we suspect that the pilot really did tell Operations that he had “a good airplane, good weather, and a load of passengers who have paid for a trip to Hawaii. What are they gonna do…fire me?” The pilot then brought the lead flight attendant into the cockpit and informed her of what was happening. Her response: “Is that all? I can get another job…I thought you were going to tell me that you were putting this big son of a bitch in the water!”

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Obit watch: August 20, 2020.

August 20th, 2020

Ben Cross. He was “Harold Abrahams”, one of the two runners in “Chariots of Fire”. He also had a part in the 2009 movie reboot of a second-rate SF TV series from the late 1960s.

Mary Hartline. My mother actually mentioned this to me the other day. She was one of the very early TV stars:

“Super Circus,” a live Sunday afternoon series on ABC, began in early 1949, when the television industry was still laying its coaxial cables. Ms. Hartline was a striking presence with her long, wavy hair, her majorette-style costumes — including her signature uniform, with musical notes on the thigh-high hemline — and white tasseled boots.
Between the show’s death-defying circus acts, she conducted the band’s lively musical numbers, performed comedy sketches with the clowns, guided young audience members through contest segments and delivered live commercials. (Everybody did it. The future newsman Mike Wallace, also a cast member, pushed peanut butter.)
Ms. Hartline, often called television’s first sex symbol (a lot of fathers, it seems, were watching, alongside their offspring), was a master of promotion. In addition to having her face on Kellogg’s cereal boxes, representing Canada Dry beverages and demonstrating the joys of the newest Dixie Cup dispenser, she had her own merchandise line.
Those three dozen products included the Mary Hartline doll (“all hard plastic with socket head, jointed arms and legs, sleep eyes, blond wig,” according to a recent auction-lot description), which can still bring hundreds of dollars at auction.

Dr. Jay Galst. Interesting sounding guy: he was professionally an ophthalmologist. But he grew up with a dad who brought bags of coins home from the grocery store for him to sift through (pulling out the rare ones), and he continued pursuing numismatics into his adulthood and professional career.

He specialized in coins and coin adjacent objects (“…tokens, medals and similar artifacts”) that were in some way related to eyes, and co-wrote a book on the subject with Peter van Alfen.

The volume, “Ophthalmologia, Optica et Visio in Nummis,” which translates as Ophthalmology, Optics and Vision in Numismatics, was 574 pages and had some 1,700 entries.

He also specialized in coins from ancient Judea.

“The last time we were together, back in pre-pandemic February, we were in the A.N.S.’s vault looking through trays and trays of 17th-century British farthing and halfpenny tokens,” Dr. van Alfen said by email, “trying to find an example produced by a London optician who also produced a different token he had just purchased in order to compare the two. I knew very little about 17th-century British tokens before that morning. In the hour it took to find the token, I received a crash course. His pure joy in such numismatic arcana was always irresistible.”

Marvin Creamer, who sounds like another interesting guy, and died at 104. He:

…taught geography for many years at Glassboro State College, now Rowan University, in Glassboro, N.J.
His expertise helped him become a history-making mariner, the first recorded person to sail round the world without navigational instruments. His 30,000-mile odyssey, in a 36-foot cutter with a small crew, made headlines worldwide on its completion in 1984.

…

It is daunting enough to circumnavigate the Earth with the aid of modern global positioning technology, much less with medieval and Renaissance tools like a mariner’s compass and sextant.
But Professor Creamer, in the grip of an obsession that had held him for years, shunned even those newfangled contrivances, as well as a radio, a clock and a wristwatch. He chose instead to rely on his deep knowledge of the planet and its vagaries, and be guided by nothing more than wind, waves, the sun by day, and the moon and stars by night.
Under cloud-massed skies, he could divine his location from the color and temperature of the water, the presence of particular birds and insects and even, on one occasion, the song of a squeaky hatch.

…

…when the 66-year-old Professor Creamer set sail from Cape May, N.J., in his cutter, the Globe Star, in late 1982, he was widely considered unhinged: No mariner in recorded history had traversed the globe without at least a compass, used by sailors since the 12th century if not before, or a sextant, introduced in the 18th.
His 513-day journey would entail nearly a year on the sea, plus time in ports for repairs and reprovisioning. It would take the Globe Star to Capetown, South Africa; Hobart and Sydney, Australia; Whangara, New Zealand; and the Falkland Islands off Argentina before its triumphant return to Cape May on May 17, 1984 — an event that Professor Creamer gleefully described as “one small step back for mankind.”

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