Here’s a little something for Military History Monday that’s at the intersection of military history and film history.
I’ve written before about Five Came Back: A Story of Hollywood and the Second World War (affiliate link). Here’s another work from one of the five: Mister Wonderful Life himself, Frank Capra.
“Know Your Enemy: Japan”.
Bonus: “Prelude to War”, from the “Why We Fight” series, also directed by Capra.
The US National Archives has a “Why We Fight” playlist, if you’re interested.
Science Sunday!
I’ve got a few things for you today. First up: “ABCs of Radiation” with “Illinois EnergyProf“, which gives a nice explanation of alpha, beta, and gamma radiation for the uninitiated. You know, for kids.
Bonus #1: Some kind person appears to have uploaded all of Jonathan Miller‘s “The Body In Question” series to the ‘Tube. I wanted to see this when it was first run on PBS in America, but for some reason I don’t recall at the moment was unable to.
Here’s episode #1:
Bonus #2: Have you ever asked yourself, “How do atomic clocks work?”
Here’s how the The NIST-F2 Atomic Clock works:
And here’s a more general introduction:
Bonus #3: which, of course, was nicely set up by the previous videos. This guy’s voice is right on the ragged edge of annoying for me (he reminds me of Inspector Clouseau), but I thought the content was worthwhile for HP fans: the HP 5061A Cesium Clock.
It has been a busy weekend, so I’m only getting to this one now: Beverly Cleary. I’m not going to sneer at the description of her as “beloved children’s author”: everything I’ve seen about her points to her being a kind and gentle soul who had a long full life.
The children’s books she read at school disappointed, she recalled in an article for The Horn Book in 1982. The protagonists tended to be aristocratic English children who had nannies and pony carts, or poor children whose problems disappeared when a long-lost rich relative turned up in the last chapter.
“I wanted to read funny stories about the sort of children I knew,” she wrote, “and I decided that someday when I grew up I would write them.”
“Beverly Cleary Wrote About Real Life, and Her Readers Loved Her for It“.
When I win the lottery, one of the things I want to collect is a complete run of the “Notable British Trials” series. I have a few paperbacks which contain edited versions of some of the trials, but I don’t have any complete volumes, reprint or otherwise.
One of the paperbacks I do have contains the trial of William Joyce. Students of history may know him better as “Lord Haw Haw“.
“The Story of Lord Haw Haw and his Trial”, a 2015 BBC radio documentary. Since this is radio, you could put it on as background while you do something else.
Bonus: As long as we’re talking about trials, here’s a little something from the “Timeline” folks: “The Origins of Witch Trials”, part 1:
Part 2:
Larry McMurtry, noted antiquarian book dealer.
…
He also wrote books sometimes.
Over more than five decades, Mr. McMurtry wrote more than 30 novels and many books of essays, memoir and history. He also wrote more than 30 screenplays, including the one for “Brokeback Mountain” (written with Ms. Ossana, based on a short story by Annie Proulx), for which he won an Academy Award in 2006.
But he found his greatest commercial and critical success with “Lonesome Dove,” a sweeping 843-page novel about two retired Texas Rangers who drive a herd of stolen cattle from the Rio Grande to Montana in the 1870s. The book won a Pulitzer Prize in 1986 and was made into a popular television mini-series.
…
I haven’t read “Last Picture Show”, but the Saturday Night Movie Group watched the movie just a few weeks ago. It has a lot going for it (like a young Ms. Shepherd) but as Lawrence put it, it is a good movie that we never want to watch again. (A motion to obtain and watch “Texasville” was resoundingly defeated.)
….
Thanks to his friendship with Mr. Kesey, Mr. McMurtry made a memorable cameo appearance in Tom Wolfe’s classic of new journalism, “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test” (1968). The book details Mr. Kesey’s drug-fueled journey across America, along with a gang of friends collectively known as the Merry Pranksters, in a painted school bus.
In the scene, Mr. Kesey’s bus, driven by Neal Cassady, pulls up to Mr. McMurtry’s suburban Houston house, and a naked and wigged-out woman hops out and snatches his son. Mr. Wolfe describes Mr. McMurtry “reaching tentatively toward her stark-naked shoulder and saying, ‘Ma’am! Ma’am! Just a minute, ma’am!’”
Interestingly, he went on to marry Ken Kesey’s widow in 2011. But:
After completing “Terms of Endearment,” he entered what he described as “a literary gloom that lasted from 1975 until 1983,” a period when he came to dislike his own prose. He had a heart attack in 1991, followed by quadruple-bypass surgery. In the wake of that surgery he fell into a long depression during which, he told a reporter, he did little more than lie on a couch for more than a year.
That couch belonged to Ms. Ossana, whom Mr. McMurtry had met in the 1980s at an all-you-can-eat catfish restaurant in Tucson. They began living together, and collaborating shortly afterward — Mr. McMurtry writing on a typewriter, Ms. Ossana entering the work into a computer, often editing and rearranging.
“When I first met Larry, he was involved with about five or six different women,” Ms. Ossana told Grantland.com in 2014. “He was quite the ladies’ man. I was always really puzzled. One day I said to him, ‘So all of these women are your girlfriends?’ And he said, ‘Yes.’ And I said, ‘Well, do they know about one another?’ He said, ‘Nooo.’”
“an all-you-can=eat catfish restaurant”. I live for these telling details.
THR. Variety. I would link to Publisher’s Weekly, but they don’t seem to have run an obit yet. WP.
Here’s a two-parter for you. From 1966, and an old show for children called “Discovery“.
“The World Beneath the Sea”, part 1. This is mostly about marine animal life.
“The World Beneath the Sea”, part 2. This concentrates a lot on things like scuba diving, minisubs, and SeaLab II, which would have been right up my alley when I was a child (and is still right up my alley today).
Bertrand Tavernier, noted French film director.
The Saturday Night Movie Group has watched “In the Electric Mist“, which is an interesting but flawed adaptation of James Lee Burke’s In the Electric Mist with Confederate Dead (affiliate links). And I’ve seen “Coup de Torchon“, which is likewise an interesting adaptation of Jim Thompson’s Pop. 1280 (ditto). It seems to me, just looking at his filmography, that he was one of the more interesting French directors.
Jessica Walter. Damn.
I have never seen an episode of “Arrested Development”, but the Saturday Night Movie Group has watched quite a bit of “Archer”. We’ve also watched “Play Misty For Me”, which I think is a swell Clint Eastwood directed film.
And she appeared in every damn thing at some point, too: “Quincy, M.E.”, the good “Hawaii Five-O”, “Banacek”, “McCloud”, “The F.B.I.”. “Cannon”, “Mission: Impossible”…
…and she did a guest shot on “Law and Order: Criminal Intent”, in the episode “Please Note We Are No Longer Accepting Letters of Recommendation from Henry Kissinger”. Really, that’s the title, and if it comes up in reruns, you should seek it out (assuming you have a taste for black comedy). She’s basically playing a live action Mallory Archer: a social climbing woman who’s obsessed with her grandson attending the right pre-school. (“If it wasn’t for me, he’d be eating yams and watching ‘Jerry Springer'”.)
…and, yes! She was a “Mannix” three-timer. (“The Danford File”, season 6, episode 24. “Moving Target”, season 5, episode 18. “Who Is Sylvia?”, season 3, episode 19.)
Travel Thursday!
Today, we journey to the Outer Limit.
Well, actually, not that one, though these folks did manage to control the horizontal and the vertical.
This is a vintage (1969) promo film from Boeing, “The Outer Limit”, about the flight testing and introduction of the 747.
I’m fudging the definition of travel a bit with that one, but it is short. The next one is, admittedly, long, but it lets me cross another state off the list, and it is a place I enjoy visiting.
“The City of Las Vegas, the Early Years”. This covers the period from 1905 to 1920. See? Who says Vegas doesn’t have a sense of history?
Bonus: I’ve griped before about the hard hat tour of Hoover Dam (which I was lucky enough to go on) and how it was shut down after 9/11. Well, here’s a video (a little over 30 minutes long) of the hard hat tour from March 2001.
“If you’re going home by plane, wear the hard hat on the plane. It scares the heck out of the other passengers.” Man, wasn’t that a simpler time?
George Segal. THR. Variety. I feel bad about not saying more, but he was an icon, and it seems like everyone is paying deserved tribute to him.
Houston Tumlin. If you saw “Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby”, he was Ricky Bobby’s son. That was his only acting role. He was 28 years old.
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.
By way of Lawrence, Elgin Baylor.
Baylor was voted to the all-N.B.A. team for the league’s first 50 years. He was a 10-time N.B.A. first-team All-Star selection and averaged more than 30 points a game for three consecutive seasons in the early 1960s.
He set a league record by scoring 64 points against the Boston Celtics in November 1959, then scored 71 against the Knicks in November 1960, only to see Chamberlain score 100 points for the Philadelphia Warriors against the Knicks in March 1962.
Baylor joined with West and later with Chamberlain to turn the Lakers into a glamour team. He played in eight N.B.A. final series, but the Lakers lost seven times to the Celtics in the Bill Russell era and then to the Knicks in a memorable Game 7 at Madison Square Garden in 1970.
Let’s take a coffee break.
“The £299 Aldi Espresso Machine – How Bad Could It Be?”
Oddly enough, I don’t shop at Aldi either, and for the same reason: the nearest one to us is about 30 miles away.
Bonus #1: Since we’ve talked about an espresso machine, how about we talk about a can opener? A very specialized can opener, that is: this one opens powder cans for the 16″ guns on the Battleship New Jersey.
Bonus #2, and a little shout-out to the Saturday Night Movie Group. From the “Old Car Memories” channel, Jim Rockford’s Firebird.
I was talking with my brother about calculator watches recently, which reminded me of this video from Techmoan: “Hewlett Packard HP-01 1977’s Smartest Watch”.
As a HP geek, I would kind of like to have one of these: however, examples in good condition are expensive.
Bonus #1: I also thought it might be interesting to do some startup videos. Not tech startups, but starting up things. For example, an Airbus A320:
Bonus #2: Or a railroad locomotive.
Bonus #3: Or a DC-3.
Bonus #4: Or a tractor, “with a 12 guage shotgun shell”. I believe this gives new meaning to the term “shotgun start“.
Yeah, I think we’re doing Military History Monday. Also, I have a doctor’s appointment today, and expect to be pretty much useless afterwards, so I’m queuing up a couple of longer ones.
This is an OSS training film from 1944, “Undercover”.
Bonus: “Evading Capture in Enemy Territory” from 1957.
I have an idea that I’m still kicking around in my head for a post on a somewhat related topic: OPSEC, or operational security. You’d be surprised (unless you’re someone like Borepatch) how many people seem to have no concept of OPSEC and make basic stupid mistakes…
Kent Taylor. He founded and ran the Texas Roadhouse chain of restaurants.
According to the reports I’ve seen, he was suffering from serious post-COVID-19 symptoms, and committed suicide.
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.
Sometimes, the warning signs are lit up with neon and searchlights, and people still miss them.
A married pair of San Francisco entrepreneurs were indicted Thursday on multiple federal charges, the latest twist in the saga of a once trendy, now bankrupt fecal matter-testing startup.
Zachary Schulz Apte and Jessica Sunshine Richman, co-founders of defunct microbiome testing company uBiome, are accused of bilking their investors and health insurance providers, federal prosecutors said. They were indicted Thursday on multiple federal charges, including conspiracy to commit securities fraud, conspiracy to commit health care fraud and money laundering.
Now, I’m just a poor dumb white boy from Hampden, but I feel like there’s at least two big warning signs that were missed here.
1.
I’m an absolute believer that you should avoid – indeed, run away from – any crowd funding campaign that is medical or health care related.
2.
Goop? Seriously? No s–t.. Again: anything that’s recieved an award from Goop, is promoted on Goop, or has any involvement with Goop: run like hell in the other direction.
Science Sunday!
I’ve been fascinated by rocks and rock hunting and geology since I was a young child.
I’m just not very good at it. So instead, I enjoy reading the works of others, like John McPhee.
Mr. McPhee talks with Eldridge Moores, a University of California geologist (and collaborator with Mr. McPhee on Assembling California) and reads from Annals of the Former World (affiliate link).
Bonus #1: “A Brief History of Colorado Through Time”. I used to collect those “Roadside Geology of…” books. I should at least go out and replace my copy of Roadside Geology of Texas (affiliate link). Perhaps I will be able to use it soon.
Bonus #2: “Flood Basalts of the Pacific Northwest”. Or, giant lava flows!
George Bass. I think he may have been an obscure figure to most folks: Dr. Bass (a professor at Texas A&M) was one of the pioneers of underwater archeology.
After being honorably discharged in the late 1950s, he pursued a Ph.D. in classical archaeology at the University of Pennsylvania. At the time, an American photojournalist named Peter Throckmorton was researching Turkish sponge divers and learned that they knew of ancient artifacts on the ocean floor. Mr. Throckmorton wrote to the renowned archaeologist Rodney Young seeking sponsorship for a proper excavation. Professor Young turned to one of his graduate students who specialized in the Bronze Age and had enthusiastically read accounts of deep sea dives — George Bass.
Mr. Bass was less than fully prepared. He had time for only six weeks of a 10-week diving course at a Philadelphia Y.M.C.A. And before joining the expedition and diving 100 feet into the Mediterranean, he had tried on a tank just once and gone no deeper than 10 feet — in a pool. Yet that first trip became the foundation for the rest of his career.
“You have to be young and ignorant and naïve to get anywhere,” he reflected in a 2010 interview with the Penn Museum.
…
Early on, archaeologists who sought to take advantage of the aqualung remained aboveground, relying on reports from hired divers, who lacked archaeological expertise. Professor Bass took a more hands-on approach. He became the first archaeologist to do his own diving while supervising other divers. And he organized on-site training in underwater excavation methods for fellow archaeologists and students.
With help from scientists he recruited for his teams, he engineered new methods for removing artifacts from the seabed and for spending long periods underwater. One crucial early insight was that objects that look like rocks may actually be the corroded remnants of metal goods. Professor Bass X-rayed what he found interesting. If a rocklike object contained an inner cavity where a metal artifact used to be, he would pour epoxy inside and cast a replacement.
His excavations produced illuminating material about ancient shipbuilding. His first expedition, off Cape Gelidonya in Turkey, solved a puzzle about why Homer refers to brushwood on Odysseus’s ship. The remains of a sunken ship there revealed that brushwood had been used as a cushion for heavy cargo to protect the hull.
Deborah Carlson, the president of the Institute of Nautical Archaeology, which Professor Bass helped create and then ran for much of his life, ultimately in Texas, said he deserved to be considered the founder of the field.
“Under his direction, ancient shipwrecks were excavated underwater for the first time,” she said in a phone interview. “He did it by taking his archaeological training and putting on scuba gear and taking the excavation to a new dimension.”
Roger Baldwin. He and three of his Army buddies – Wilbert Cantey, Herbert Maisel and James McDermott, collectively known as the “Four Horsemen of Aberdeen” – were early pioneers of basic blackjack strategy.
It led Edward O. Thorp, a mathematics professor and blackjack expert, to validate their calculations on an IBM 704 computer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and to write the best-selling 1962 book, “Beat the Dealer: A Winning Strategy for the Game of Twenty-One,” which helped bring the Army group to public renown.
Mr. Thorp recalled the influence of the men’s strategy in his 2017 memoir, “A Man for All Markets: From Las Vegas to Wall Street, How I Beat the Dealer and the Market.” “The Baldwin group,” he wrote, showed that the advice of the reigning experts was poor, unnecessarily giving the casinos an extra two percent advantage.”
Arnold Snyder, a renowned author of blackjack books, said by phone: “No one actually knew what the right strategy was because it hadn’t been calculated. They figured out what to do if your hand totals 15 and the dealer has an 8 up: do you hit or do you stand?”
Dick Hoyt, marathon runner. He ran the Marine Corps Marathon in 1992 and finished in 2:40:47.
Oh, I forgot to mention, it should be “they”, not “he”. Dick Hoyt was was pushing his disabled son, Rick Hoyt, in a wheelchair the whole way.
Rick Hoyt was born in 1962, a quadriplegic with cerebral palsy, unable to control his limbs or speak. “We had long since learned how to interpret our son’s smiles and nods,” Dick Hoyt wrote in his 2010 book, “Devoted: The Story of a Father’s Love for His Son.” “But as good as everyone in the family was about figuring out what Rick needed, we were still only making educated guesses.”
But in 1972, engineers at Tufts University built a computer that allowed Rick to communicate by choosing letters with a tap of his head. His first words were “Go Bruins,” revealing a passionate love for sports.
In 1977, Rick asked to be involved in a five-mile benefit run. Though his father was not a competitive runner, he pushed Rick in his wheelchair the entire distance, finishing next to last.
“When my dad and I are out there on a run, a special bond forms between us,” Rick Hoyt told The New York Times in 2009 with the help of his computer voice program. “And it feels like there is nothing Dad and I cannot do.”
You might remember this from one of Rick Reilly’s SI essays.
I’m a Marxist.
But talking about flywheels…”F–k Everything, We’re Doing Five Blades“. Or in this case, five flywheels.
A flywheel trebuchet? Why not!
Okay, one more, sort of related to things that spin fast: “The Story of Hoover Dam”. Some nice turbine footage in this one.
I was thinking about insurance.
This is a short film from the 1980s about Lloyd’s of London and how it works.
Something that I find kind of interesting is the Lloyd’s Open Form (LOF). The basic idea is: if something comes up at sea that requires a salvage operation, the two parties (the one being salvaged and the one doing the salvaging) sign a LOF.
One of the key aspects of the LOF is: “No Cure, No Pay.”
Back in 1978, an oil tanker, the Amoco Cadiz, ran into some problems: it encountered a storm that damaged the rudder and caused a hydraulic fluid leak. The captain called for assistance: the responding salvor wanted the captain to agree to a LOF.
One of the books I’ve read on the subject states that the captain was resistant to signing a LOF, as he felt he’d be signing an open-ended commitment, while the salvors were reluctant to proceed without a LOF. Ultimately, the captain agreed, but the situation had deteriorated…
…and the Amoco Cadiz ran aground off the coast of Brittany and dumped over 220,000 tons (metric) of oil into the sea.
Semi-related, because we’re talking about oil: “Fires of Kuwait”. For once, something in high-res.
Travel Thursday!
I’ve been neglecting the United States. Technically, I still am, as today’s presentation is a place that isn’t a state: the place that my sister and her family refer to as “WashingtonDCOurNation’sCapital” (all one word).
From 1945, “The District of Columbia”, part of the “This Land Of Ours” series.
Bonus: and if you liked that one, here’s another one from 1954 and Esso (aka “Standard Oil Company of New Jersey”). “Welcome to Washington”.
James Levine, “one of the world’s most influential and admired conductors”, according to the other paper of record.
Nicola Pagett, British actress. She was “Elizabeth Bellamy” on “Upstairs, Downstairs”.
Barbara Rickles, Don’s wife.
By many accounts, the Rickleses had one of the happiest marriages in show business. They socialized often with another enduring Hollywood couple, Bob and Ginny Newhart. Don Rickles died at 90 in 2017.
Barbara Rickles helped produce the Emmy-winning documentary “Mr. Warmth: The Don Rickles Project” (2007) and the 2020 release “Don Rickles Live in Concert.” Don Rickles, in serious moments, would note that he was nearly 40 on his wedding day and had struggled for years to find someone.
“I advise any young person that gets married, really, work at it. If you work at it, it’s delightful,” he said in 1986, during one of his many appearances on “The Tonight Show” with Johnny Carson, whom he would tease endlessly about his multiple marriages.
Burning in Hell watch: Ronald DeFeo.
Mr. DeFeo was convicted in 1975 on six counts of second-degree murder after he confessed to using a rifle to shoot and kill his father, Ronald DeFeo Sr.; his mother, Louise; his sisters, Dawn and Allison; and his brothers, Mark and John Matthew.
The victims were found in their beds with gunshot wounds on Nov. 13, 1974. Mr. DeFeo, the oldest of the siblings, was 23 at the time.
The historical significance of this is: the DeFeo’s old house in Amityville was sold to another couple a year later.
Yeah, that house.
Today, some real history.
A while back, when Morlock Publishing’s Twitter feed was public, he retweeted a fascinating quote from someone’s book.
“The meteorite itself was so massive that it didn’t notice any atmosphere whatsoever,” said Rebolledo. “It was traveling 20 to 40 kilometers per second, 10 kilometers — probably 14 kilometers — wide, pushing the atmosphere and building such incredible pressure that the ocean in front of it just went away.”
These numbers are precise without usefully conveying the scale of the calamity. What they mean is that a rock larger than Mount Everest hit planet Earth traveling twenty times faster than a bullet. This is so fast that it would have traversed the distance from the cruising altitude of a 747 to the ground in 0.3 seconds. The asteroid itself was so large that, even at the moment of impact, the top of it might have still towered more than a mile above the cruising altitude of a 747. In its nearly instantaneous descent, it compressed the air below it so violently that it briefly became several times hotter than the surface of the sun.
That someone turned out to Peter Brannen, and his book is The Ends of the World: Volcanic Apocalypses, Lethal Oceans, and Our Quest to Understand Earth’s Past Mass Extinctions (affiliate link).
Here’s a talk at Google from 2017. He does go off into climate change about 25 minutes in, so you could maybe punch out when you’ve had enough. I think his discussion of things like Chicxulub make this worth it. (I was actually not aware that there was a controversy over whether that killed the dinosaurs: I thought the science was settled.)
Bonus: since the Ides of March have just passed, how about an episode of “Ancient Rome: The Rise and Fall Of An Empire” on Caesar?
Bonus #2: while I guess this is semi-thematically appropriate for St. Patrick’s Day, I’m bookmarking this here because of my interest in crime, law, and prison breaks.
“Unlocking the Maze”, about the escape of 38 IRA prisoners from the maximum security Long Kesh prison on September 25, 1983. Again, I am not making a political statement here: I just find prison breaks fascinating.
I’m a little behind on this, but I have to note it here anyway: after a little more than four years on the job, Art Acevedo is leaving as chief of the Houston PD…
…to take over as chief of the Miami PD.
(“The Tom Brady of police chiefs”? Fark that.)
My personal feeling? He decided to leave town before he got run out on a rail behind the narcotics scandal. But that’s just my opinion: I could be wrong.
More interesting question that someone asked me last night: could Flint Ironstag Brian Manley be headed to Houston?
Well, it is close to home, and it is a larger department, and he does have a proven track record, and it seems Houston is slightly more reasonable (and less hostile to the police) than the current Austin city council. But: 30 years in at APD, 97+% of his salary in retirement…what incentive does he have to take another police job in the current environment?
Other than the challenge, I guess.
Edited to add 3/17: Ha!
Farewell to Art Acevedo, the LeBron James of performative self-promotion
I got dragged into a meeting that took a lot longer than I expected. Which means I’m starting my lunch a lot later than I expected. Which means I’m queuing up this post a lot later than I expected. Which means a handful of random today.
First off, you know I had to include this, even if it does draw a little too much on random gun crankery: Lena Miculek shoots her mom’s “Space Gun”. Which is actually a custom Remington XP-100 chambered in 6mm BR.
Bonus: here’s something for Lawrence, and for other “Simpsons” fans: “Worker and Parasite” exists. No, really. And I’m not talking about this:
This is something called “The Millionaire”, an animated Soviet propaganda cartoon.
What the Hell was that?
Bonus #2: “Inside The F1 Medical Car”. This is fairly recent, and also fairly short.
Bonus #3: I’m not a real big car guy, but I found this video weirdly compelling. I think there’s actually something compelling in general (well, at least for me, but it seems like I hear this from other folks, too) about watching people do teardowns. In this case, the presenter is tearing down a Corvette LS7 engine that is totally locked up: it won’t even turn. But why?
Bonus #4: “C’est un Nagra. C’est suisse, et tres, tres precis.”