Bench Grass is a blog about the history of technology by the former student of a student of Lynn White. The main focus is a month-by-month retrospective series, covering the technology news, broadly construed, of seventy years ago, framed by fictional narrators. The author is Erik Lund, an "independent scholar" in Vancouver, British Columbia. Last post will be 24 July 2039.
So I took my summer bike ride last week, nine days, seven in the saddle. This is the final downhill coming down from Rock Creek Summit, the height of land on the old Kettle Valley Railroad that became Highway 33. so I'm showing off a bit with this particular vacation photo.
(Although in terms of climb and gradiants Highway 33 has nothing on the Hope-Princeton, the route that my family used to take on vacation in the distant days of the 1960s, when the highway was new and home movies, about vacation trips and this and that, were the rare enthusiasm of hobbyists.
This one is going to be a bit rushed because I am a bit rushed, on my way to catch the slow plane to China. Unless some angry Navy pilot in a Privateer finds me and shoots me down. Well,no, that won't happen. Though we should probably look into getting the Goose a Panamanian registration, just to be sure. You should hear from me at a bit more leisure from the Avenue of Harmony in a few weeks. In the mean time, don't take any domestic vermouth in your martini or a home movie in your pre-med calculus lecture, which some mooks are trying to pawn off instead of first-class instruction at innovative, small Southern liberal arts colleges. Isn't it cool that I can find a Chinese translation of "mook?" Though I don't know why I am emphasising it so much. It is not like it is some kind of anachronistic in-joke about educational fads or anything like that.
I am going to take a minute away from the Chase Mission's advance party, which is currently trying to find accommodation for a now 600-strong MAG group around Taipei. On the one hand, I am jealous that they won't be stuck out in the sticks like me. On the other, Ronnie is always reminding me to mind my tongue around my future colleagues, and this way I won't have to. As much, anyway. The General seems to think that I'm some kind of master fixer because I speak Chinese, and is reportedly less than pleased about my paternity leave next month.
Well, tough. I'm not even in his chain of command right now. I guess I will be as soon as the Navy sorts out its "Yankee air pirates" to suit the new, post-Congressional authorisation age, but it is all very sensitive as hopefully we can be folded in without anyone ever acknowledging that we were already here.
In the mean time, here's a letter, with something for Mom under the cover and some postcards for you to show at the Arbutus Club now that I am officially in-country. One more of these from Taipei, and then I will be writing you from Macao.
Our Vice-President for Retail Operations visited the store on Thursday. The white glove inspection went very well, and I'm pleased with my part in it, and that would be that except for all the disruption in my schedule, which is why I am offering a progress report on ongoing research/writing as opposed to May 1951 postblogging ahead of my August vacation.
Today I am talking about some reading I've been collating on the early days of the Spanish Caribbean, and a sideways look at John Cabot. The Admiral of the Ocean Seas was a new St. Christopher, carrying the burden of Christianity to the New World. The latter, apologies to the Cabot Project aside, was a cut-rate imitation who needed the supervision of the Bishop of London, if not unctuous clergymen who invite themselves in to sit at the bedstead and read the Bible to a painfully dying mother of seven who has to pretend to be polite to gain that ". . . advice, often material."
