Postblogging Technology, March 1955, II: Detroit's Battle of the Century

Tony Randall as sex symbol is the perfect lead into the musical act that closes the thumbnail below. 

R_. C_.,
Shaughnessy,
Vancouver,
Canada

Dear Father:

It is my understanding that I am to call you "Daddio" and decline to do my homework until such time as there's a revolution or something, and there's really no point in doing anything but knock over newstands. I'm not even sure that I am allowed to care about Kefauver '56 or Aneurin Bevan, as they might be too square. (Bevan sure is. Binge drinking is for when you're young and irresponsible, not putting yourself forward as a potential prime minister!) 

So, you know, who cares about stuff and anything? Not us young people today! (I am young, right? At least, I'm not thirty!) Anyway, because it is March and the technical press is still exhausted from the New Year's stuff, and the British press is waiting on an election, it will probably feel like this installment is all rebellion.  

Your Loving Daughter,

Ronnie

It won't hit the top of the charts until the summer, but Rock Around the Clock is the hit single from the Blackboard Jungle soundtrack. Did you know that the novel that Blackboard Jungle is based on is set in a British school? I didn't!

U-Bomb: A Technical Prologue to Postblogging Technology, March 1955, II

 Yeah, well, I was tired yesterday and I needed to do some bike training (mainly wearing calluses into my tender tootsie) ahead of my summer bike trip, which is in July this year. That's why I'm talking about something that came up while I was half-finishing the March II postblogging.

The Special Report in the 7 March issue of Newsweek  covered the then-ongoing movie industry revival, and the 28 March issue has some letters about it, including a self-promoting but still valid explanation from Lester Rand of the Youth Research Institute (kids like going to the movies), and a letter from Zira Siegel of Culver City, California, pointing out how extraordinary this self-portrait with the Junior MGM Players, shot by Newsweek staff photographer Dale Healy is. Siegel asks whether it is a composite, and the Editor replies that it is not. Leslie Caron is 20ft behind the lens; Debbie Reynold is three feet away leaning in, and Pier Angeli is sitting on a pillow. 

Dean Schary doesn't even appear to have an online biography. He was just one of the anonymous staffers who made Newsweek, in spite of itself, a great magazine. And speaking of "in spite of itself," I first encountered the "U-bomb" in The Periscope, which feature, as was its way, got the whole thing so hilariously wrong that I was sent down the very productive rabbit hole that makes up most of this post. The U-bomb, it explains, means that the American atomic stockpile has been suddenly increased ten-fold, that there are enough bombs to "knock out the USSR with radioactivity," and that since the U-bomb "does not, (contrary to some reports) necessarily require a hydrogen bomb to set it off, the Soviets are in a position rapidly to overtake our lead." 

UB.109T: A Technological Appendix to Postblogging Technology, March 1955

 

So my boss is on his annual pilgrimage to the Old Continent to show everybody that he's a big shot in Canada, and we're training yet another ambitious young man as a future produce manager, as we do because the company totally has a skilled labour continuity plan that involves systematically identifying talent and nurturing it. "Nurturing" in this case tends to mean humping oversized orders around the back room, because our automated perishable ordering system is proving the brilliance of our plan to use AI to replace skilled labour. (Look, it's obviously not the computer's fault that we use the same produce code for two distinct kinds of carrots, but manually straightening out the order and inventory every day is precisely the kind of fiddling that AI was supposed to get rid of!) The upshot is that yesterday was my second day off in the last eight and I was not exactly filled with energy on what had to be a laundry day anyway. 

Which is fine, because this is the month that Flight grudgingly fessed up to an explanation for why the United States has the Matador, and we don't. We have the UB.109T, or RED RAPIER. So why have I chosen a Bomarc for my thumbnail?

Because.

On 31 March 1958, the Canadian electorate got its long-awaited opportunity to send Canada's Natural Governing Party to the benches, electing "Prairie populist" John Diefenbaker and his Progressive Conservatives by a swingeing 53% to 34% popular vote majority. Diefenbaker proceeded to reign over the Party for an immensely destructive decade-and-a-half. Anyone who has read as much contemporary Newsweek as I have and wonders whether my narrator's cynicism is anachronistic is referred to my Dad's collection of old Brothers-in-Laws albums to illustrate one fairly common reaction to Dief the Chief.  One might even draw larger conclusions about contemporary events if it were desired! 

Although as far as aerospace defence issues are concerned this would be a red herring. Cancelling the upcoming Avro long-range supersonic continental interceptor was an unfortunate necessity, and the fact that the Bomarc was insane has nothing to do with the fact that Diefenbaker was also crazy. And since Wikipedia has pictures of Bomarc and not RED RAPIER, there you go. 

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