Postblogging Technology, March 1954, I: Hard Money, Hard Plastics, Hard Men

R_.C_.,

Shaughnessy,
Vancouver,
Canada




Dear Father:

Here in London the winter of our discontent is rushing to an end. The Economist is at its wit's end trying to portray Rab Butler as some kind of genius after income tax cuts had to be followed by a 4.5% bank rate, and is worried about a Labour resurgence ahead of the election that can't now be too far away. The thought here is that Churchill can't possibly go on any longer, as his senility is leading to public blundering about in diplomacy after we came far too close to a war over Formosa. Whoever replaces him, and it now looks much more likely to be Eden than Butler, will have to call a general election. The tortuous theory that Bevan has staged his little revolt to undermine Labour (and Hugh Gaitskell's) prospects seems a bit conspiratorial, but it might be true. 

Thais have discreetly pointed out how insulting the dinky
American exhibit at the recent Bangkok Trades Fair was. 

If you're wondering how I got so much more political of late, it's because I've been pricing homes in Berkeley and wondering how we can afford them. It is time for our little Air Force family to stop wandering, since I have to settle down somewhere and practice once I join the California bar, and I have actually had a very intriguing response to some feelers I have put out. It turns out that having a personal connection with Bill and David is very attractive in some circles!  James and the Air Force have to decide whether they will part ways some time in the next ten years, and we certainly do not want to drag James-James and little Lizzy through one nursery school after another! Bill and David will certainly have a big enough company to require a Vice-President In Charge of Something Indefinitely Important by 1965. and in a perfect world  he'll be married to one of the company's patent lawyers. 

So, you see, some people are making plans, even with Korea II, 1948 War II, or even WWIII upon us!

Your Loving Daughter,

Ronnie

The memorial to the IDF paratrooper losses in the 28 February 1955  OPERATION BLACK ARROW
is sited between Kibbutz Mefsalim and the fortified border of the Gaza Strip. Mefsalim's armed security
was successful in holding off attackers on 9 October.

Fireflash and Sparrow: A Technological Appendix to Postblogging Technology, February 1955

 

This post is about the contemporary British Fireflash and American Sparrow beam-riding air-to-air missiles, so of course there is a perfectly good reason that I picked this old picture of a Vought F7U Crusader for  thumbnail. A very good reason. I'm certainly not picking on Vought, Westinghouse, and the United States Navy. No sir!  

Gathering the Bones, XXXII: Get Your Kicks on Route . . . Er, 40, It Turns Out

At least if your musical tastes are as lowbrow as mine (it's a brain chemistry thing, I swear!), the "suggested next video" that appear in the personal playlist feature was an exercise in self-abnegation. I would play the Silencer' version of "Wild Mountain Thyme," which does speak to me, and after a few choices out of my frequently-viewed list, there's Ella Roberts' "Loch Lomond." The self disgust came from thinking, "OMG, the AI thinks I like this shite!" The despair it provoked about the way the world was going came from the fact that the AI couldn't learn, no matter how many times I stopped and refreshed at the first note of Ella Roberts' overblown Gaelic kitsch, it just could not learn. Nowadays it gives me this, which is still not the version of "Northwest Passage" I ever search for, but is at least in the first place not bad, and in the second, one that leans into the moment. (Future readers: You may not believe that Donald Trump managed to shine up Canadian nationalism, but trust me. It happened.) 

Maryland has an NHS designation for "Historic Inns on the National Road." This
is the Tomlinson Inn at Grantsville. Built around 1818. James K. Polk
slept here! By Generic1139 -
Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/
w/index.php?curid=21602442

All that being said, "Loch Lomond" is so popular for good reasons.  "You'll take the high road/I'll take the low road" is a lyric meditation on mortality. The whole thing is genuinely affecting. It's sad that it has to be yoked to young love, Culloden, the Rising of '45, the Highland Clearances, but now in the fashion of the Internet I will turn it on its head and talk about high roads, low roads, the '45, and the National Road that the Federalists built from Cumberland, Maryland, over the Cumberland Narrows to Redstone Creek and on to Vandalia, Illinois via Wheeling, West Virginia, in way of having an argument about whether the Constitution allows the Federal government to fund "internal improvements," as opposed to lying down on the (privately built, toll-gated) freeway to die. 

Postblogging Technology, February, 1955, II: Diamonds in the Rough

R_., C_.,
Shaughnessy,
Vancouver,
Canada

Dear Father:

Here is your biweekly news summary, boiled down to a single sentence: Peter Sellers is the funniest thing in the world and the cobalt bomb is the scariest. Are they related? They are! Pardon me for giving away the plot of a movie that's still in the theatre, but the reason that the Grand Duchy of Fenwick wins its war with the United States is that it captures a doomsday device, "the Q-bomb." If you can't laugh at the end of the world, what can you laugh at?

Your Loving Daughter,

Ronnie

Postblogging Technology, February 1955, I: Adding Oxygen

R_.C.,
Shaughnessy,
Vancouver,
Canada




Dear Father:

There is nothing to make you want to buckle down and write an informative newsletter full of the latest developments in the field of  metallurgy quite like February in London. We haven't quite seen the kind of Scottish weather that had Flight beside itself  about helicopter rescue flights, but there have certainly been some days when I wouldn't have minded being rescued from the rain and gloom by a glamorous helicopter of the sort that can't actually fly in that kind of weather.

Alas, its job would have been to carry me off to the north of London, pram in tow, to drop in at the studio and see how they're doing at corralling madmen into acting instead of drinking. Show business is show business, even when it features ghastly alien plagues from beyond. I would write a learned appendix to this answer about what I think of all the alien plagues from beyond these days, but I would probably be arrested on suspicion of thinking about what Das Kapital might have to say about 1929, and then where would my children --and husband, if there's a difference-- be? 

Your Loving Daughter,

Who Knows Ever So Much More About Wave Equation Boundary Conditions Now,

Ronnie

The Early Iron Age Revival of the State, XXXII: Tophets, Himera, Weird Digressions

Field-Marshal Viscount Montgomery of Alamein visits Vancouver Technical High School in 1954 because one of his nephews went there and the Field-Marshal was actually a fairly normal person with a life and stuff like that.  

Major General Wilfred George Fryer, RE (1900--1993)

 There's some fairly weird shit going on about Monty that doesn't speak well of WWII nerds, and one of the heights of this weirdness is the claim that he "held back" Eighth Army after Alamein because he knew that if Commonwealth forces cornered Rommel's Afrika Korps (what, there were Italians there, too? Get out of town!), the Germans would turn around and go all "Nazi supermen are our superiors" on their pasty Limey (now with bonus Antipodean content) asses. If you've a mind to refute that "thesis" with facts, you will explore the fighting after Alamein, and in particular the attempt to encircle the retreating Axis forces via an inland hook around the town of Sirte. To do that you will have to resort to the official histories, if not the archives, as no-one but an official historian could possibly care about the New Zealand Division's travails in the crusty saline bogs south of Sirte that very nearly exposed the isolated force to the Axis counterattack that didn't happen and which would have led to someone actually knowing that Eighth Army was fighting in December of 1942. If you go to Wikipedia you will learn that no less a figure than Milton has something to say about "a boggy Sirte, neither sea/Nor good dry land."  And if you go to Civil Engineers in War, the special series of The Proceedings of the Institution of Civil Engineers, you will get, via W. F. Fryer's "The Military Water Problem in the Western Egyptian Desert, 1940--43," a deep hydrological explanation of the roadbuilding problems discussed at some length by the official history, and otherwise apparently of interest only to the local historians of Sirte, and certainly not to the grand theorists of Classical Antiquity, which is why this post comes to tophets via a weird digression through Wilfrid Fryer's discussion of the problem of watering the Western Desert Force. 

Postblogging Technology, January 1955: Phreaking Over Fallout

R._C._.,
Shaughnessy,
Vancouver,
Canada


Dear Father:

So, nothing much has changed in that I am back in glamorous London. (Joke! Rose Dolores is in the news. It turns out that Dolores Del Rios also used the "most beautiful girl in the world" tagline, though.) The letter is a bit different in that I am finally reunited with my magazines. I hope that you don't mind that I'm a bit shorter with Aviation Week than I have been in the past, but two things have changed. The first is that Aviation Week's editor since 1945 has just disappeared. Robert H. Wood's departure from the publisher's chair was announced by his deputy in the 21 January issue, effective 2 February, but Wood did not contribute an editorial for the next issues and I have no idea what became of him. I have no idea why this matters to me, but I feel sad. Second, I am very tired of treating advertising-disguised-as-editorial content seriously.

I've continued to read to James-James before bed, since it was such a hit at Christmas. After some experimenting I've hit on a book he likes, a wartime fantasy in which some siblings romp around on a flying bed. It's marketed above his age, but he seems to be enjoying it, and I am thinking about The Hobbit when we are done. Best to get him started on fantasy and science fiction early considering the work his mother is doing. (And by that I mean patent law, and not helping out around the studio.) Too bad about the old job. I know if I were at the desk I'd make sure those Australians buy the Avro Vulcan!

Your Loving Daughter,

Ronnie

PS: I guess we know how the world ends now: With clouds of Cobalt-60.