Postblogging Technology, October 1951, 2: The Seawolf

R_.C_.,
Shaughnessy,
Vancouver,
Canada

Dear Father:

I bet you had given up on this ever coming! I choose to blame Stanford and the BCG tuberculosis vaccine it mandated of me after a classmate was diagnosed, and which laid me clean out for a weekend when I should have been writing this newsletter.

Whatever, I am  not going to infect my baby, and I am done now, leaving me time to find out about this mysterious second nuclear submarine the Navy is working on.

I will leave further to you, as I expect to see you next week in Portland for the family meeting with this bright young thing of an engineer so that we can see his "slabs."

Your Loving Daughter,

Ronnie

Postblogging Technology, October 1951, I: Battle is Joined

R_. C_.,
Shaughnessy,
Vancouver, Canada

Dear Father:

It appears that I was overconfident in telling you that I would have my magazines in hand this month. The public health officer in Palo Alto who diverted my subscriptions is isolated at home with a baffling mystery disease that keeps him out of the sunshine, and, whilst doing a fine job from his home office I am sure, the necessary information is held at his office in a brand new file-desk that supposedly makes it easy to get at this or that record with a spin of a dial and a pull of a lever. It is also suspected that one of the levers might not lever, as the machine simply sits there when you pull that one? Who knows! The man who installed it came out from Buffalo for the job, and is currently fighting Global Communism at Ridgeway's headquarters in Tokyo, and will not be available for a return trip to repair the desk for the duration. 

At this point I would just give up and get new subscriptions, but it is the principle of the thing, and also I find the letters are a bit faster to write this way, although they'd be even faster if all copies of The Economist spontaneously caught fire, here's hoping.

Your Loving Daughter,

Ronnie

Seals, the Floating Proletariat, and Indigeneity: From the Bass Strait Backwards

Hurrah! Our staff is up to complement, and I am able to defy the Omnicron Directive and start having days off again. I had thought to talk a bit about the economics of sealing, but it does not appear that there is much to say in this regard. The story of sealing industries is often told in terms of local extinctions, but there are more seals than ever. It is true that the classic long-distance sealing industry was always depopulating rookeries, while the coastal industries summarily disposed of by Brigitte Bardot were perhaps only semi-sustainable, but the only industry I am aware of actually exterminating the local population is the Caribbean one. So it is unique, maybe?

Recorded long distance sealing is associated with whaling, and makes a dramatic and easily documented intrusion into the south Atlantic, so that overwintering sealers are known on South George as late as "the eighteenth century," while a sealer may have been the first human to set foot in Antarctica, admittedly the Antarctic Peninsula, which only barely counts, but still. There is probably a great deal more to be said about the way in which the world's fur industry was able to absorb a sudden boom in seal pelts at the turn of the Nineteenth Century, but that is not where this post ended up, as it was distracted by the story of one member of the floating proletariat. And, to be fair, a SUNY Press author who was kind enough to post a large portion of her book. (I never fail to be amazed at the way in which university press publications come to appear on the website without a readily identifiable author. If you go to the previous link, you are reading Lynette Russell's Roving Mariners. )

The Bishop's Sea: Islands in the Helix

 

(The Canaries have a great deal of volcanic tuft that makes it relatively easy to dig out a cave sanctuary or necropolis, something that old time Canarians loved to do.)

The Omicron Variant isn't just a rejected Michael Crichton manuscript. It's also eaten my weekend! But I did want to post something today, and given the rate of typos in just the paragraph I've already written, it sure better be low effort. Fortunately, there's an interesting question that has been weighing on me. It's even tangentially related to an epidemic of swabbed rapid tests! Have we caught up with the ancestral genetics of the island Atlantic now that everyone is asking 23andMe to do their genealogy homework for them? We haven't.

Postblogging Technology, September 1961, II: Production Bottlenecks

 

R_. C_.,
Shaughnessy,
Vancouver,
Canada

Dear Father:

I hope this finds you well. You will be glad to know that I followed your advice and took Ana and Jimmy up to Chinatown on the weekend. Ana had a grand time, while the staff at the Gold Garden fussed over Jimmy even after he started to get colicky. Back home in Palo Alto, she started singing as we put our treasures away. I was a bit worried that it was the Fenyang song, but I'm no-one to talk!

Speaking of being an absent mother, second year law seems like less work than first year. My old cronies, now firmly ensconced in the empyrean realms of Third Year, tell me that that's normal and that I should really be worrying about the Bar, like them. Reggie's first leave is in October, and there's some talk of a short attachment at Barbers Point to take one of the Willie Victors up for a spin. This would probably not be until  the New Year, because Lockheed is still busy stuffing more vacuum tubes into it, and apparently you can't just open the lid and step on them for some reason. That will at least bring him through the Bay and make him happy because it would involve not being in a flying boat. 

And that's the story of the week! 

Your Loving Daughter,

Ronnie