Postblogging Technology, May 1954, I: The Fall of Dien Bien Phu

R_.C_.,
Shaughnessy,
Vancouver,
Canada

Dear Father:

I shall be brief here as I am finding myself excitingly indispensable at work as the aviation world scrambles to find replacements for Comet 1s now and Comet 2s soon. I was not completely convinced by my professors' talk about learning to "think like a lawyer," but I find myself called upon to read a  great many contracts. In fact, to make all the jokes about my useless schooling as completely obsolete as a Handley Page Halifax, some of them are in French! (I'd volunteer to read the ones in Chinese, too, but, first of all, there aren't any; and, second, it might raise suspicions.) It is nice to have help at home, but I am missing my ambles with James-James already! Your son, by the way, has been dragooned to Farnborough to give his perspective on a water tank they are building big enough to take an entire Comet fuselage so that they can prove that fatigue happens to Geoff De Havilland and other suspects. 

And if you think I've gone a bit mad with the accompanying illustrations, we have splurged on a copying machine that makes producing them a breeze, and I might have gotten a bit carried away.  

Your Loving Daughter,

Ronnie

Postblogging Technology, April 1954, II: Lewis Strauss's Boom

 

R_. C_.,

Shaughnessy,

Maybe Newsweek has it garbled, as it often does? Or perhaps this is 
the TX-16 "Emergency" cryogenic bomb that was never test detonated, 
and the 40 megaton yield is a post BRAVO revised yield estimate. Or
someone at Lawrence Livermore (oh, who am I kidding, it's Teller)
 is talking up their first designs, "highly innovative" devices that
fizzled. Anyway, 40 megatons! 

Vancouver,

Canada

Dear Father:

As some have predicted, the Comet has fallen, this time,  think, for good. I have no idea how long it will take for everyone to accept that it was too flimsy to fly, but it is all embarrassing enough that it may take a while, and no-one is going to want a Comet 2 or 3 until it is all settled. Whether anyone will want a Comet 3 at all is another question. No doubt champagne corks are popping at Weybridge right now!

Spring is coming to our fair city, and I have to say that James-James has the legs of a trooper. I have conceived a notion of seeing this city, and he seems willing to walk as far as my own legs will go! He is a very charming young man, too! I hope that that continues into adulthood and he does not become another engineer with his head in the clouds! 

Or a cloud of radioactive ash, as seems to be he fashion of the day. 

Your Loving Daughter,

Ronnie

The Early Iron Age Revival of the State, XXIV: Fall and Revival

 

Iron Age sheep shears, found at Flag Fen

First, a housekeeping note: There was a hitch in my techblogging process at terms' end in April, resulting in my having to return all my materials and recall them, which I have done this week. Or, rather, two hitches, as my summer holidays and stat days were all heaped up and pushed to the end of August, leaving me off from the 14th to the 31st, or possibly the 2nd of September, although I am not counting on  having the first Sunday of September off work. I currently intend to get caught up on the postblogging from the 14th to the 21st and then leave for my summer road trip, unless the province is on fire by then. 

Meanwhile, the icy hand of mortality, in the form of knee pain that started on my trip to Kamloops and which was exacerbated by having to run around the store for days on end covering for other peoples' vacations has reminded me that I Would Run Away to the Air, Plantation of the Atlantic, and Sacred Spring aren't writing themselves. Of the three I have no manuscript material for Sacred Spring apart from blog posts, and while I am hardly satisfied by the first two projects, Plantation is steadily progressing in  my off-blog writing time and I have decades of investment in I Would Run Away, so Sacred Spring deserves a bit more attention here. 

The Early Iron Age Revival of the State, XXXIII: Buttons

 

The Heraion of Argive Hera at Prosymna

Like many other cities of Classical Greece, Argos was a synoecism of nearby towns, overshadowed by the older sites of Mycenae and Tiryns. The construction of a temple of Hera on a massive artificial terrace, deliberately built in the "Cyclopean" style of the Before Times, and convenient to the earlier cities, amidst a group of "Mycenaean" monumental graves, may be seen as a way of appropriating the prestige of the earlier foundations. I talked about it very briefly as an example of a sanctuary of a city (polis) goddess that wasn't Athena. What did not appear last time was a gruesome story out of Herodotus, which I embed in about as much of the Father of Lies as the reader is likely to tolerate since the whole thing is so evocative:

This is the Athenian story of the matter; but the Aeginetans say that the Athenians came not in one ship only; "for," they say, "even if we had had no ships of our own, we could right easily have defended ourselves against one ship, or a few more; but the truth is that they descended upon our coasts with many ships, and we yielded to them and made no fight of it at sea." But they can never show with exact plainness whether it was because they confessed themselves to be the weaker at sea‑fighting that they yielded, or because they purposed to do somewhat such as in the event they did. The Athenians then (say the Aeginetans), when no man came out to fight with them, disembarked from their ships and set about dealing with the images; and not being able to drag them from the bases they did there and then fasten them about with cords and drag them, till as they were dragged both the images together (and this I myself do not believe, yet others may) fell with the selfsame motion on their knees, and have remained so from that day. Thus, then, did the Athenians; but as for themselves, the Aeginetans say that they learnt that the Athenians  p97 were about to make war upon them, and therefore they assured themselves of help from the Argives. So when the Athenians disembarked on the land of Aegina, the Argives came to aid the Aeginetans, crossing over from Epidaurus to the island privily, and then falling upon the Athenians unawares and cutting them off from their ships; and it was at this moment that the thunderstorm came upon them, and the earthquake withal.

 87 This, then, is the story told by the Argives and Aeginetans, and the Athenians too acknowledge that it was only one man of them who came safe back to Attica; but the Argives say that it was they, and the Athenians say that it was divine power, that destroyed the Attic army when this one man was saved alive; albeit even this one (say the Athenians) was not saved alive but perished as here related. It would seem that he made his way to Athens and told of the mishap; and when this was known (it is said) to the wives of the men who had gone to attack Aegina, they were very wroth that he alone should be safe out of all, and they gathered round him and stabbed him with the brooch-pins of their garments, each asking him "where her man was."

 88 Rawlinson p294Thus was this man done to death; and this deed of their women seemed to the Athenians to be yet more dreadful than their misfortune. They could find, it is said, no other way to punish the women; but they changed their dress to the Ionian fashion; for till then the Athenian women had worn Dorian dress, very like to the Corinthian; it was changed, therefore, to the linen tunic, that so they might have no brooch-pins to use. But if the truth be told, this dress is not in its origin  p99 Ionian, but Carian; for in Hellas itself all the women's dress in ancient times was the same as that which we now call Dorian. As for the Argives and Aeginetans, this was the reason of their even making a law for each of their nations that their brooch pins should be made half as long again as the measure then customary, and that brooch-pins in especial should be dedicated by their women in the temple of those goddesses; and that neither aught else Attic should be brought to the temple, nor earthenware, but that it be the law to drink there from vessels of the country.

 89 H & WSo then the women of Argolis and Aegina ever since that day wore brooch-pins longer than before, by reason of the feud with the Athenians, and so they did even to my time; and the enmity of the Athenians against the Aeginetans began as I have told. And now at the Thebans' call the Aeginetans came readily to the aid of the Boeotians, remembering the business of the images. The Aeginetans laying waste the seaboard of Attica, the Athenians were setting out to march against them; but there came to them an oracle from Delphi bidding them to hold their hands for thirty years after the wrong-doing of the Aeginetans, and in the thirty-first to mark out a precinct for Aeacus and begin the war with Aegina; thus should their purpose prosper; but if they sent an army against their enemies forthwith, they should indeed subdue them at the last, but in the meanwhile many should be their sufferings and many too their doings. When the Athenians heard this reported to them, they marked out for Aeacus that precinct which is  p101 now set in their market-place; but they could not stomach the message that they must hold their hand for thirty years, after the foul blow dealt them by the Aeginetans.

I swear Herodotus privately identified as Carian. Anyway, we hear about Athens' long and strange conflict with Aegina, about the obsession with symbolic acts of war like the seizure of images leading to real human tragedies; another intimation that the Athenian identification with Ionia was deliberate self-fashioning; and some mythical references.