The Iron Age Revival of the State XXVIII: some Road Trip Thoughts

 

Two things seem safe to say here:

i) The Siege of Troy is the most significant historical event of the Mediterranean Iron Age, whenever it occurred, and there is every reason, archaeologically speaking, to think that it happened, to the extent that it happened at all, around 750BC, and that the textual evidence for the traditional "Late Bronze Age Collapse" dating is weaker than is often assumed.

ii) The revitalisation of the downtowns of the small towns of the interior of southern British Columbia is a work in progress closely tied to the problem of the province's indigenous racialised minority, aka "the Indians."

T 

 (Lots of ruins at the west end of Hope still, very appropriate on an apocalyptic day. Unfortunately I didn't take any pictures of the "character" Coldwater Hotel in downtown Merritt that Booking.com directed me to.)

Summer Road Trip 2026: Apocalypsing Outside

 

So I’m taking a day in Hope for various reasons not limited to the hellacious wildfire smoke and I’ve ended up sitting down for dinner for one in what I expected to be a quiet restaurant and proved anything but. I’m going to sit out on the deck, which is empty, but my waiter is properly sceptical. It’s apocalypsing outside, you see.

To finish the day I watched the latest episode of Silo and learned that, as of this point the eponymous hole in the ground was built, not against the thread of imminent apocalypse, but rather in a “come at me, bro” spirit of taking on any and all potential apocalypses. We’ll see if that holds up in the show. In the real world it seems pretty assholish.

Look, we used to have a pre-gasoline infrastructure, because we used to not have ICE vehicles. Yes, we blew it up, and there were many more consequences than are visible. (Not enough commutable small town jobs for young people, for one.) But little towns like Princeton (shown here being Princeton, and, yes, that’s approximately the heart of downtown) are doing their best to put it all back together again.

Is it daft? Sure. But every journey of a thousand years starts with taking ownership of being “the bronze sculpture capital of Canada.” We need to be in this together, for the long haul, not hiding in a hole in the ground.

A

Tinkertoy to Dexion: A Technical Appendix to Postblogging Technology, April 1956

By susiq5555 - ebay #120137669430,

permission granted [1], CC BY-SA 3.0,

 

"Tinkertoy" is the title because it is what comes to mind when I think about the building sets of my earliest childhood. (Next up are my rich cousins' Lego sets, please don't tell them I called them "rich.") I do not, however, have much of a sense of a Tinkertoy set, as opposed to oddments at the bottom of a toy chest. Tinkertoy Construction Sets are an American product dating to 1914. Their signature feature is the use of wood, which makes it easy to implement wheels and pulleys with child friendly components, but there were lots of wood construction sets. The issue here, it tuns out, is the non-wood one.

The departure point for today's appendix is  the use of Dexion components for field repairs of DC3s. 

 Dexion turns out still be a thing, although such is the state of Google Search today that you won't find them on the main page. essentially A "slotted angle steel strip construciton system," it rather reminds me of the various aircraft-building systems of the Twenties and Thirties that often had their origins in prefabricated steel building sets. But we did Nissen huts around here a long time ago. Dexion seems like an everyday product with a primordial use case and a secure  business plan, so I was a bit surprised to learn that  "it ran into difficulties" and "eventually ceased trading" story, in 2003. The Dexion trademark was bought out, by Swedes, perhaps, and the product is now made in factories in Germany  and Romania. 

The other inciting even this week is that quaint Danish general strike over the forty hour week. Not only is this sure to lead to a wage-price spiral and inflation, but now Britain's supply of butter and bacon is in trouble! And since there isn't much going on in Denmark to my knowledge except bicycling, which they have to share with the Netherlands, and Lego, we might as well go there. And the ever worthy Meccano, of course.

Postblogging Technology, April 1956, II: Colonial Inertia

R_.C_.,
Shaughnessy,
Vancouver,
Canada




Dear Father:

A bit of Flight for you, and a whole bunch of British politics with Miles Thomas' resignation and conformation of the Canadian Pacific order for five Britannias. I'm not sure how that came out in the end? I may have egg on my face over this in the end, but it really does seem to me that the case against the Proteus has pretty much been made. I guess it's the shareholder's money, after all.

Extravagance or not, though, I see worrying signs of the opposite problem. Is the financing of the Aswan High Dam going to fall through? Tony Eden wants to go for Nasser's throat at the best of times, and I have my doubts about how long Jean Mollet can restrain himself from bombing Radio Cairo. I just hope that Nasser doesn't give them the excuse by clearing the Israelis out of their little wall around Gaza if the Dam's financing is withdrawn. 

A man in a business automation ad. Sign of the times

Look at me worrying about world politics when girls should be about fashion and fun!

Your Loving Daughter,

Ronnie

Postblogging Technology, April 1956: Mirage Rising

R_., C_.,

Shaughnessy,

Vancouver,

Canada

Dear Father:

It is, of course, my fault that I forgot some issues while packing for our trip to Honolulu, but in my defence, they are small and easily missed! Perhaps all the advertorials in the lost numbers of Aviation Week will seep out into the air and into the minds of possible buyers. It's not like anyone would ever read them anyway.

Your son is a great deal more upset at the sudden apparently universal decision that the lesson of Kefauver's win in Minnesota is somehow that the Democrats will suffer for nominating a progressive in '56, unless, for some reason, it is Averill Harriman and not Kefauver specifically. As he points out, farm voters defecting from the GOP isn't a sign that the party needs to nominate the man who looks the most like the President they're defecting from!

On the other hand, it looks like Stevenson is going to win in California and go into the Convention on a winning note. On the other other hand, it will all be over soon, at least for eighteen months or whenever we start worrying about '58, and we can all agree to worry about something else, like WWIII starting in the Middle East.  

Your Loving Daughter,

Ronnie

The Iron Age Revival of the State, XXVII: Towards an Economic History of the Trojan Women

 

"That the topless towers be burnt/And men recall that face,/Move gently if move you must/In this lonely place./She thinks, part woman, three parts a child,/That nobody looks; her feet/Practice a tinker shuffle,/Picked up on a street./(Like a long-legged fly upon the stream/Her mind moves upon silence."

In spite of a good faith (says I, and would I lie?) effort, I woke up this morning, the last day of my vacation, without the spring numbers of The Economist, Flight, or Aviation Week. (Or Fortune, for what it's worth.) The library informs me that the situation is now remedied for Aviation Week, but it's a bit late to start working on April postblogging at this point! Oh, well. For a change I still have a full week of the month left. 

Fortunately, I am still digesting Robert Morrissey, and that Dark Knight guy has a movie out about Helen of Troy and her supporting cast. You might have heard about it. You might have seen Eric Cline dining out over it. You might have heard that the Late Bronze Age Collapse is in the news.

As usual, the Iron Age Revival of the State isn't in the news. Helen wasn't dancing the next morning. It might not be poetry to match widening gyres, but they still say that women's work is never done.

Gathering the Bones, XXVI: Philadelphia and Conestoga.

 Conestoga wagon at the National Museum of American History
By Daderot - Own work, CC0,
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=26706952

 The Susquehannock were an Iroquoian-speaking people living in the lower Susquehanna valley. Successful in the early stages of the Beaver Wars, in which they fought, amongst others, the nascent colony of Maryland. From the 1680s the population collapsed, not least because a large number, designating themselves as the Conestoga, moved into a town settlement somewhat misleading known as their reservation, in Lancaster County, on the Conestoga River immediately above its junction with the Susquehanna that creates the ferry to York, Pennsylvania. The timing and extent of the Conestoga's population decline is not a matter of careful attention from the historians of colonial Pennsylvania, but must have been late and extreme for there to have been a flourishing town in the 1820s and  only twenty-odd victims of two massacres during the Paxtang Boys rebellion of 1764. 

The Conestoga is a characteristic but folk design associated with western American roads.