Postblogging Technology, January 1951, I: A Whole New Year

R_.C_.,
Shaughnessy,
Vancouver,
Canada




Dear Father:

Thank you again for your hospitality, which I am sorry I am so late, but things in London have been hectic. You may have noticed from the calendar that we flew out of Montreal the day of the Comet grounding, and London was an absolute zoo when we got there. On the other hand the Azores are BEAUTIFUL, which is just as well because renting a car and touring made up for spending a week there.  Or almost did, because why did there have to be an entire class of children aboard that plane? Why? 

All this bad enough before the Britannia accident. And, yes, this should have been in the mail long before the first week of February, but what can I say?  I've been touring James around because we've only the one car and I've had business in the counties, too trying to get the business of assorted people who were trying to move sterling into dollars ahead of the Crash of '54 and don't hold with old-fashioned surface shipping any more. 

So. Late. Sorry. Grateful. Missing you. Busy. Azores nice. Summaries good.  

Your Loving Daughter,

Ronnie

A Technological and Nimrodian Appendix to Postblogging Technology, Fall 1953: Delta Dawn

 There was something about "Delta Dawn," an earworm of my childhood (written by Larry Collins and Alex Harvey, as performed byTanya Tucker, Bette Midler, and Helen Reddy) that bothered me as a young man. That's not surprising given its disturbing lyrics, but I did not then pick up that it was written about Alex Harvey's survivor's guilt over his mother's apparent suicide. So there's that, even before the Wikipedia article has to disambiguate the song from an even sadder story, which is definitely not the kind of competition that people should be having. 

The Convair F-102 Delta Dagger, on the other hand, just didn't go as fast as it was supposed to. Not much of a story, but jeez, the subtext. 

A Technological and Muck-Raking Appendix to Postblogging Technology, December Titanium

 

By Anynobody - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=18445244

Titanium is, we keep hearing, going to be one of the major structural elements in the North American XF-108 Rapier supersonic interceptor. We hear a great deal about how much of it is being used in the DC-7; and while the XF-108 will be cancelled, fifteen A-12s, 3 YF-12s and  34 SR-71s will fill some of the gap. 

Another thing we here today is that a shortage of American titanium led to the surreptitious import of  Russian titanium during the 1960s, so that the Soviet Union was spied upon by planes made with the Motherland's titanium. And as if that weren't enough to make for a story about oopsy-themed metals instead of planes, we have the sour suggestion that the real reason America is dragging its feet over titanium is that all that newly-built magnesium infrastructure would go to waste, and this finally makes the story of "Mag-Thor," or magnesium-thorium alloy, the slightly radioactive  structural metal so widely used in the early years of the Space Race, but mostly on "New Look" weapon systems like the Bomarc missile, one of the great cringing embarrassments of Canadian industrial and political history of the last century, make sense. For Dow-Corning to make adequate excuses for the titanium shortage, there had to be a competitive magnesium product. 

Postblogging Technology, December 1953, II: Girls Who Won't Say No

R_.C_.,
Shaughnessy,
Vancouver,
Canada




Dear Father:

Norah Docker for woman of the year, 1953!

I guess the day had to come when I wasn't done writing one of these until after I was snug in my room and waiting for whoever it comes on the Twenty-Eighth. The ghost of the Park Royal Boxing Day Sale? Anyway, I'm going to drop this in the courier box so that everyone else can see it. Now this is the part where I mention a winsome event in my life and that of your grandchildren. So did I mention that I saw Field-Marshal Montgomery on the plane? I did? In giddy tones when I got here a week ago? Drat. I've got nothing else. 

Your Loving Daughter,

Ronnie