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.

The Iron Age Revival of the State, XXVI: The Past Isn't Even Past

 

Something about how for every Southern boy, it's 3PM on 3 July 1863, and Pickett's Charge hasn't been launched yet and I'm not even going to continue with this line of thought about history not being past. The last week of June isn't a good time to be thinking about the Neo-Confederate capture of American government in the Anglosphere because 70 million of us are suffering through a historic heat wave, and a major British political party's solution to the problem is to let the oil and gas industry rip.  

It hasn't been terrible in British Columbia. My work week was disrupted by a heat wave, and everyone in Vancouver felt it, but it was, as these things go, a normal heat wave with cooling at night. We're seeing plenty of early signs of a food security crisis in the form of chronic and persistent shortages of seasonal crops like watermelon, asparagus, strawberries, and sweet corn, and part of that is down to weather; but it is also in large measure politics, and I guess we're back to the first paragraph. 

I was away visiting last week, but I was rewarded for my time off with a five day work week followed by a single day off (yesterday). I didn't feel like high effort blogging yesterday, and there's some business to catch up, specifically Eric Cline's book about the "collapse and survival of civilisation" after the "collapse" of 1177, which struck me as fairly low effort for most of its run, until the final chapter, which was on about the IPCC's take on Climate Change and Cilizational Collapse, as the bloody Wikipedia article is titled.

(The short week is why Postblogging March 1956, II, isn't up yet. There may then be delays in July over library issues, and I still won't have an aviation magazine next week, as Aviation Week managed to fill up a whole volume with the January-February issues, and I have no idea what was going on with Flight in the spring of 1956, what with the labour trouble in the British printing industry.) 

Supplementary Postblogging: What Did Happen in Late January 1955?

 To Whom It May Concern:

The total archive of these papers, in their tiny parchment and cribbed family code, covers almost a hundred years and five correspondents, is packed in two-and-a-half steamer trunks, and has been moved back to Arcadia now that the roof is fixed. They would not fit in even that much if the scheme of writing monthly, semi-monthly, or sometimes even weekly letters had been carried on continuously, so I shouldn't feel ashamed of myself for getting mixed up last month, but I do. At some point we will know just how important the last two weeks have been, perhaps once the Fourth Republic has fallen or Dwight Eisenhower, or, any of Adlai Stevenson or Estes Kefauver or Richard Nixon or Joe McCarthy (I refuse to believe that the American electorate will pull the lever for Bill Knowland after a full campaign) are elected President. On the other hand, I'm not sure the reader will care. This is supposed to be a kind of investor's newsletter, highlighting the Progress of Science, as our first correspondent was wont to capitalise.  Well, some of the most important technology of the last ten years has involved the projection of motion pictures and the recording of music, and the most important technology news has pertained to Air Force budgets, so it is hard to set hard and fast limits.

On the other hand, now I'm just going to give you a quick rundown of what was in Newsweek, because it's the weekly with the best pictures. (Which will go into the trunks as photographic flimsies bleached of all interest for the future reader, but at least you, the reader of 1956, if any, will see the clipped originals, or, better yet, get your own copy.)

The Iron Age Revival of the State, XXV: Company's Calling

 The rhythms of an industry devoted to hospitality are a bit at odds with a society that treats hospitality as, not unreasonably, a social thing. I have worked very hard for the last three months and skipped holiday travelling. It is time for a well-earned vacation, which started this Thursday, and in which in a world where everyone lived my life, I would have rested on Thursday and Friday and postblogged on the weekend. This is not that world, and I write from my mother's kitchen on Sunday morning,  bound for Campbell River later today. (I also have a dog poking her nose in my leg, undeterred by the fact that it is still pitch black out.)

So let's talk about visitors, instead. I'm working my wage through the Cambridge Early Iron Age volume right now. Archaeology is great, and, impressively, is getting close to being able to tell stories about a very select group of Early Iron Age individuals --vase painters. There is, however, a larger argument about visitors in archaeology, namely, were there any? We have stories about Early Iron Ag visitors, and an argument that they were central to the phenomena by virtue of sharing important technologies (like vase painting). On the other hand, there is a robust counter-argument to the effect of "Show me!" Which is fair, because our stories about visitors are, just that, stories (except we can now hope, for vase painters). Stories are for poets, and, well, you know, poets. 

So lets make up a story: Assur-uballit II and Thales are the same person. Just to be clear here, this is 200% unmotivated, a Robert E. Howard-level historical fiction that, if presented seriously by someone who wasn't me, I could tear apart in a million different ways. (Just to start, he was at least a generation too old.) But it sure does invent one heck of a dinner guest, and a wanderer and a rambler, as someone's poking nose reminds me I should be, too. 

(For the lack of proper diacriticals I make no apologies. I'm on a laptop and a deadline here.)

Rural Crime Watch Area; Or, A Vacation Post for 2025

 

In a perfect world this would be a substantive post, as I left on my summer bike  trip last Wednesday and arrived home yesterday. On the other hand, I'm owned one short, breezy, on-the-road post. Owed, man. 

Anyway, my Dad died the winter before last of the slow and fading road to the west that my uncle is now following, removing the need to ride the Crowsnest to Grand Forks for my annual visit. I also accomplished my goal of riding (part) of the Okanagan last year, and was free to return to Highway 5A, "The  Old Princeton-Kamloops Highway," which I last rode, in part, as a youth so many years ago, full of all the silly follies of youth that seem so absurd when you are possessed of the follies of old age. 

A Technological Appendix to Postblogging Technology, October 1954: Microelectronics and Music

 

"Micro" indeed. The screencap is the first size comparison for the proximity fuze I've ever seen, which is why I took the screencap. If you're disappointed that it's not a video, here it is:

I'll start with some housekeeping. The ordering software for the holdings stored in the UBC Library's  Automated Storage Retrieval System is working, and has been for several weeks now. The aisle that holds Engineering and Aviation Week is still only intermittently operational, and your requests will be available when the Library tells you so. I am not sure of the details of this, and the desk librarians are not forthcoming. My best guess is that they cycle the aisle every few weeks; and the moral of the story is that I probably didn't successfully place my request for them last fall, and so missed some retrieval windows. Or not. It's not like the library is inclined to explain! 

Honestly, automated storage is such a fiasco, especially considering that it cam in just as physical acquisitions collapsed. I know that it could be worse. When I got back to Vancouver after my PhD, much of UBC's old technical journal collection was held off campus with no intention of ever making them accessible again. The intent was to destroy them and create a pdf  library in the cloud, and there is going to be a history of the fiasco of Google Books one day, but the short summary is that this was, as usual, placing more faith in computers than warranted. (Seriously, check out this disaster!) Instead, it all went to PARC, which may or may not have automated retrieval, but, importantly, actually works. The building of PARC somewhere in the no visitor's part of UBC campus did lead to The Economist and Time being withdrawn from the open shelves, which is annoying, especially considering that  the university used up the freed floor space for underutilised offices. But, on the other hand they didn't pulp Newsweek. 

So will I have Aviation Week and The Engineer next week, when I have a long weekend to finish October postblogging? Who knows? The important thing is that I got in 40 hours in Baldur's Gate 3 during my (short) vacation.

Fortunately, there's a lot of "microelectronics" to catch up with, going back to the proximity fuze.

The Early Iron Age Revival of the State, XXVII: Ahousat/Huelva

 Let's see how far we can push this. 

Huelva from orbit, and a satellite map of Ahousaht from Google. The conjoint estuaries of the Odiel and Tinto have been progressively silting in, while in the post-glacial period Ahousat is located at the conjunction of two drowned valleys, or fjords. I do not see archaeologists going as far out on a limb as to tell us the situation of ancient Onoba ("Fortress of Baal"), but depending on the extent of the silting it might have been an estuarine island. Ahousat isn't technically an estuarine island, but there is significant outflow from the two fjords, both of which have productive watersheds in spite of their small size, due to the heavy precipitation of the region. 

We do not normally think of any place on the northwest coast as flat and fertile, but Ahousaht (technically Marktosis Indian Reservation 15) is almost as close to an exception as it gets:

 
The Ahousaht band is actually a confederation of eight tribal entities and has 25 smaller reserves attached, all seasonal fishing and resource extraction sites.

The Early Iron Age Rise of the State, XXVI: Yet Another Questionable Historical Comparison

 

Whatever else can be said about making an analogy between the coming of iron to the Mediterranean basin sometime between when we want to say that the Late Bronze Age collapsed (1171BC?) and when the classical age began (490BC?) and to the Northwest coast, we can at least be very sure of things like when iron came to northern Vancouver Island, what locations were inhabited and the languages spoken there, and the tribal ethnicity claimed by the grandchildren of the people who first encountered iron (to be maximally careful).

 The modern band councils are the Kwakuitl Nation of Fort Rupert, a suburb of Vancouver, which chooses to use an older rendering of the ethnic name Kwakwa̱ka̱ʼwakw, understandably enough in my opinion but I'm just an old fart, and the Namgis Nation of Alert Bay, also speakers of Kwakwa̱ka̱ʼwakw and perhaps a bit indifferent to the larger tribal identification. Of perhaps more importance is the traditional territories of the two nations, which are, respectively, spread along Quatsino Sound on the west coast, and the extended estuary of the Nimpkish River on the east coast of the Island. Both nations may be described as "migratory" in that they moved through their respective territories harvesting seasonal abundances in various littoral environments, and both had "capitals," at Quatsino in the narrows of that Inlet, which is a flat and fertile landscape suitable for camus beds, a rarity in the region; and on Alert Bay, where unlike on the more fluvial terrains of this very wet part of the world, you didn't have to worry about waking up to find your bed floating out to sea. Both peoples commanded passages across the island, respectively the narrows between Coal Harbour and Port Hardy, and the long portage up the Zeballos River and down the Nimpkish, ultimately from the bight of Nootka Sound, commanded from Nuchulnath-speaking Ahousat. 

In contrast it is necessary to speak with great caution about the earliest phases of the Iron Age in the Mediterranean, in part because so much of it is so implausible. That is, we  have been waiting for evidence that the earliest region affected by Phoenician connections was the southwest of Spain at the other end of the Mediterranean from the territory of these Israeli, Lebanese, and Syrian cities; and that the influence of Greek culture was first wielded (in the Iron Age) by one or both of the classical cities of the island of Euboea off the coast of Boeotia, cities which, afterwards, receded into obscurity as second-, or third-rate powers by Greek standards. 

Nevertheless, with centuries of archaeology under our belts by this point, we are unable to reject the priority of Huelva   or ignore the wide dispersal of Archaic Euboean pottery. Reversing my way into the question, I propose to problematise it by invoking the Northwest comparison.

Gathering the Bones, XXXI: Raven And The First Men

 

This morning I am thinking about Raven the trickster, creator and king. but I also travelled on the weekend and visited my world-travelling doctor brother and his wife, who in conversation chanced to mention how much better the Pacific Northwest art held at the British Museum is than that shown here in its homeland.

"After the great flood had at long last receded, Raven had gorged himself on the delicacies left by the receding water, so for once, perhaps the first time in his life, he wasn't hungry. but his other appetites, his curiosity and the unquenchable itch to meddle and provoke things, to play tricks on the world and its creatures, these remained unsatisfied.

Raven gazed up and down the beach. It was pretty, but lifeless. There was no one about to upset, or play tricks upon. Raven sighed. He crossed his wings behind him and strutted up and down the sand, his shiny head cocked, his sharp eyes and ears alert for any unusual sight or sound. The mountains and sea, the sky now ablaze with the sun by day and the moon and stars he had placed there, it was all pretty, but lifeless. Finally Raven cried out to the empty sky with a loud exasperated cry.

And before the echoes of his cry faded from the shore, he heard a muffled squeak. He looked up and down the beach for its source and saw nothing. He strutted back and and forth, once, twice, three times and still saw nothing. Then he spied a flash of white in the sand.

There, half buried in the sand was a giant clamshell. As his shadow fell upon it, he heard another muffled squeak. Peering down into the opening between the halves of the shell, he saw it was full of tiny creatures, cowering in fear at his shadow.

Raven was delighted. Here was a break in the monotony of the day. But how was he to get the creatures to come out of their shell and play with him? Nothing would happen as long as they stayed inside the giant clamshell.

They were not going to come out as long as they were so afraid of him. So Raven leaned over his head, close to the shell, and with all the cunning and skill of that smooth trickster's tongue, that had so often gotten him in and out of so many misadventures during his troubled and troublesome existence, he coaxed and cajoled and coerced the little creatures to come out and play in his wonderful shiny new world."

"Raven and the First Men" is a Haida creation myth, here truncated. The second image is a rattle, used in shaman and healing dances. The specific meaning belongs to the owner who commissioned it, but the general theme is the transfer of power, which is another way to understand the creation myth. Deprived of its context by the decision to sell it to an outsider, it remains an eerie symbol of the relationship between Raven and one man, no doubt privileged.  I would be stretching nonexistent wings in a ludicrous play at exegesis to go any further (Raven would approve!), but we can reasonably ask how it was made around here.

A Vacation Week Short That Is Also A Sacred Spring Contribution: Hurrians, Mitanni, and Owning Land

 I am just back from a cycling vacation in which I finally rode the Okanagan Rail Trail from Kelowna to Vernon. This turns out to be a trick, because between the exquisitely appointed section in Kelowna and the somewhat rougher but eminently ridable section between Lake Country and Vernon that passes through my childhood summer camping grounds, there is an  "unimproved" section that was very rough riding, and quasi-trespassing, as the landholder objects to the transformation of the CN rail right of what through their property into a recreational/highway bypass rail trail. 

It turns out that that the landowner is the Westbank First Nation; the parcel is remediated wetland, and I imagine was classified as reserve land because of seasonal bird hunting, which was ruined by the CN's railbed. The contrast between the all-but unpopulated Okanagan-owned parcel and the stretch approaching Oyama just north of it, in which one lakefront property after another evidently had its own private access across the tracks (at least my family settled for a culvert underpass, never used for its intended purpose of watering livestock) is striking. The Salishan-speaking Okanagans left a clear imprint on the geography that their descendants still occupy, but that doesn't make them any less of a marginalised group. You can draw all the property lines on a map that you want; if you don't have the social power to make them work, they are just lines. 

A Technological Appendix to Postblogging Technology, January 1954: Dieselpunk

 

Did anyone else reading this frequent Young and Bloor in the early Nineties? Remember the giant poster of Pamela Anderson as Barbed Wire? There's something about comic book movies about girl characters where a dyke director (I assume) gets hold of the property and makes a movie with an aesthetic that says, "Hey, straight guys, we're just not going to apologise for not being for you," and then the straight guys don't go to see it and everybody looks at the box office and is,  like, "What happened?' I mean, I don't want to be the culture warrior here. I liked Birds of Prey well enough. But "we're going to shoot Ella Jay Bosco like she's chunky (she's not!) because you should be ashamed of your male gaze" is quite a message to swallow to enjoy me some movie. While I am determined to validate the artistic choice, I am wondering how you get to spend eight figures on a movie when your head is that far up your ass. It's not like you got the MoD (MoS) to pay for it!

By MigMigXII - Animated from CAD drawing, CC BY-SA 3.0,
 https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=24337752

Speaking of which, this cool animation adorns the Wikipedia article about the Napier Deltic, an 18-cylinder opposed-piston diesel engine consisting of six layers of cylinders arranged in a stack of equilateral triangles. Beginning as Napier's visionary submission to an Admiralty requirement for a diesel engine suitable for Coastal Forces, as of January of 1954 it has been at sea in a proving boat for almost two years, and is about to go into service on 18 "Dark" class 50t patrol boat, as noted in The Engineer for 5 January 1954, which covers the current state of the Royal Navy (which absolutely needs 60 cruisers and its battleships, but which can afford to cut the size of its new aircraft carriers from the excessive 37,000t displacement of Eagle and Ark Royal.) The article also notes that the Deltic has "been covered fully in these pages." But in the first half of whatever month the article ran in, damn it! Apart from the "Darks," Deltics went into a number of subsequent large coastal classes and several classes of British railways locomotives, Especially the Class 55, which made an indelible impression on the trainspotting public running 100mph services and hitting 125mph descending Stoke Bank with its distinctive noise. (Did I mention that this high speed, high power diesel was noisy? And smoky? I know. Next thing I'll be saying that it rattled!) Boring and conventional engines rule the diesel engine world today since given the costs involved in high speed rail infrastructure they might as well be electrified. The Deltic isn't precisely forgotten, but it is a curiosity of a bygone age, and not the only one in this post.

A Socio-Technological Preface to Postblogging Technology, Decemer 1953: The Louche Years

I started the first installment of December technological postblogging yesterday before deciding that I was a bit too spent from the work week to have a hope of finishing it over the weekend. But before giving up (because it was hard), I did some pretty basic things, like finding the big Christmas song of 1953?

Which was Eartha Kitt's Santa Baby, which I'm saving for next week. Have some meta-commentary instead! So then I had a reaction. I'm not offended by Santa Baby. "Sex positive," I remind myself. We're sex positive these days. And it's a Christmas classic, which, I don't know, did we ever get it sorted out whether that saved Baby, It's Cold Out There? And it's not like Kitt invented the idea of putting double entendres in hit parade music. But it's Christmas. It's for the kids! So that was what I was thinking just before I thought to myself, "Speaking of louche things in popular culture, I forgot to make a fuss for the first issue of Playboy when it came out! When did it come out, anyway?"

December of 1953, it turns out. Begun, the louche years have! We are starting down a valley at the bottom of which is the moment when you're not allowed to complain about skin magazines at the front of the corner store, and all the cool high school teachers are sleeping with their students, and the "Me Too" moment, which might be over as a cry for justice, but sure seems like the mood in public culture. We may or may not be back where we started,  but this isn't about  before it began, some images below notwithstanding, and it's not about where we are now. It's about things that happened in the louche years, and here I'm thinking about that second wave feminist thing about pornography being a way to hold women back. Without going too far down that road, there's a story of images --or, should I say, because we're about technology around here, graphics?

A Technical Appendix to Postblogging Technology, July 1953: The Columbia River Treaty

 

Hugh Keenleyside (High Arrow) Dam, Castlegar, British Columbia

Renata, British Columbia, is a lost town on the right bank of the Columbia River in the 232km stretch from Revelstoke to Castlegar, where it forms the Arrow Lake, or Lakes, in dry years. It might seem like cheating to call a river a lake, but the Okanagan River runs through Okanagan Lake, and Nakusp is the next Kelowna. (That's a joke for all you BCers out there.) Most of Renata (there's a bed and breakfast or two still operating in the upper reaches of the former townsite) was quickly flooded out by the rising waters of the Lake after the Keenleyside Dam was completed on 10/10/68. As an isolated farming community still mainly populated by the Mennonite farmers the railway originally suckered into settling there fifty years before, Renata wasn't much missed, any more than the other small communities similarly affected. Although when Nakusp real estate goes for as much as Kelowna's that lost waterfront property will be the subject of much speculation. (Doubling down on the joke.)

Since we're currently visiting old Renata and witnessing the Eisenhower Administration's bumbling approach to hydroelectric and related hydraulic control issues, I thought this might be a good time to talk about the Columbia River Treaty, so the reader will know what the heck I am talking about. 

Also, considering how insane the Eisenhower Administration has turned out to be so far, on this issue and so many others, I wanted to poke around the Internet and find out, "Why now?" Well, now I know, and the answer is pretty typical of the actual record of the Infrastructure President, in that he didn't actually do fuck all except get in the way. 

The Early Iron Age Revival of the State, XXIX: Lazy Sunday Outline with Premonitions of Mortality

 Two things, first, a very late change of schedule; second, a scary moment at the Silver Kettle Lodge as my 92-year-old father seemed to be failing after his vaccination. These mean that I do not have Sunday to work on my postblogging, although I am covering a mid-shift on time change day, and do have some extra writing time. And I am reminded that we do not live forever and I should get my intellectual life in order. 

So here's a summary of work to date on Sacred Spring: The Early Iron Age Revival of the State  and a brief outline.

The Early Iron Age Revival of the State, XXVIII, With Lazy Public Engagement And Some Reference to the Fifties: Tin and the Resource Curse

 

This was the view east down Copper Street from the slight height of land that marks central downtown Greenwood, BC in 1906. The mountain slopes up to the right, but Copper Street takes a hard left turn just behind the photographer and descends to the terrace above the creek on which the road down to the Kettle River at Midway follows. 

Cross the street and move forward 117 years, and the view changes in two ways:

First, some of the older buildings are gone. Second, Copper Street has turned into Highway 3, because a major interprovincial highway has been run right through the downtown. You would probably see a crosswalk here somewhere if it weren't so easy to jaywalk across the highway. When I made the first of my annual bike trips through Greenwood to Gand Forks in 2017, I watched a family of deer do the same, but the city has picked up a bit in the interim. Oh, yeah, right, "city," because Greenwood's "biggest hockey stick in the world" claim to fame is that it is Canada's smallest city. 

The reason for that is that, unlike most of the instant towns of the first copper boom, before WWI, it had a revival. In 1941, a calculating and humane mayor grabbed the one opportunity that the war had so far presented and offered the town as a resettlement location for the Japanese Canadians then being ethnically cleansed from the Coast, and in 1956 the combination of a local workforce and the postwar revival of the international commodities market proved just barely enough to justify reopening the smelter on nearby Phoenix mountain. The ore at Phoenix is, Wikipedia says, "self-fluxing," meaning that whatever fluxing agent is added to the ore at the Trail Smelter, isn't necessary at Phoenix. (The veins have numerous intrusions of "calc-silicate alteration of limestone;" Maybe that's it?) This tidbit led me to Google around for something a bit more serious about the nature of the ores in "the Greenwood camp," which is apparently the technical term for the 400 square kilometer zone of 25 mines centred about half the way up Highway 3 to Eholt summit. Apparently, way back when the entire region was under volcanic hot springs which have produced an estimated 32 million tons of ore including 38 tonnes of gold, 183 tonnes of (native) silver, 270,000 tonnes of copper, 966 tonnes of lead, and 329 tonnes of zinc. The ores are "copper-gold porphyry," which is great, because it's an excuse to say "porphyry." 

I regret to report no evidence of more exotic metals, your germanium, your tantalum, or, of course, tin. All I can report is that the smelter  closed in 1976, just four years after its last upgrade, relatively painlessly inasmuch as it seems as though most of the workforce took early retirement, being children of the era of the last metal boom, which may or may not be a coincidence, and Greenwood gradually dropped back into its Depression-era sleep. The post-WWII commodities boom was not quite yet obviously dead, and the mills and mines would keep on closing for years yet until British Columbia's former high pressure labour market was decisively over, and my employer could ram through a two-tier contract that basically condemned the next generation to work at near minimum wage for, as it turns out, their entire career. (Unless they took advantage of an escape clause dangled before us in the years around the Olympics. Yay!) 

So. Was the Late Bronze Age Collapse a working out of the resource curse? By the way, can we have a round for Investopedia's formulation? 

The term resource curse refers to a paradoxical situation in which a country underperforms economically, despite being home to valuable natural resources. A resource curse is generally caused by too much of the country’s capital and labor force concentrated in just a few resource-dependent industries. By failing to make adequate investments in other sectors, countries can become vulnerable to declines in commodity prices, leading to long-run economic underperformance.

Oh, those feckless resource-rich countries, with their "failure" to "make adequate investments in other sectors." The picture, by the way, is from a press release about an event at the Aspers' prize Museum of Human Rights in Winnipeg.  I can't even. 

A Technological But Also Inevitably Political and Medical Appendix to Postblogging Technology, June 1953, I: Diagnosing Presidents

 

Leaving aside the unintentional, dark irony of an ad exalting modern diagnostic practice and focussing on peptic ulcers,  this post was only secondarily inspired by this ad. It actually mainly has to do with my nephew, C.'s, enrollment in a doctoral programme in medical physics. No, that's a lie. It has mainly to do with my company put roasting chickens on two for one last week. I spent entirely too much time on Tuesday and Friday cooking them, so Postblogging June, II is stuck two-thirds of the way through 15 June. 

And that is why my attention is very much focussed on the already reported 10 June 1953 press conference in which Senator Robert Alphonso Taft announced that he was ill and would be temporarily resigning as Leader of the Senate, with William F. Knowland as his interim replacement. "The Senator from Formosa" would end up remaining as Majority and Minority Leader, until 1959. 

Taft had first sought treatment at Walter Reed in May after a round of gold with the President was interrupted by the increasing severity of hip pains which the Senator had been suffering for some time. At the time the pains were dismissed as arthritis. It was not until a late May visit to Holmes Hospital in Cincinnati that nodules were removed from his neck and abdomen and biopsied, coming back malignant. It was for some reason found necessary to hospitalise Taft again in New York on 7 June to finally confirm the cancer diagnosis, and a final diagnosis of metastatised cancer of unknown origin was made on the basis of exploratory surgery on 4 July. As The Periscope will report next week (around here), by 15 June, there were rumours that Taft's condition was life-threatening, but he was only officially put on palliative care in July, and died of a brain hemorrhage on 31 July some hours after a final visit from his wife, a detail that I assume Wikipedia offers in a spirit of "Do I have to paint you a picture"? 

The man who almost won the Republican nominations in 1948 and 1942 was dead, within months of beginning his first or second term, depending on which alternative history you prefer. This is something that has struck me as somehow significant ever since I read the grief-stricken Time obituary of 1940 Republican candidate Wendell Willkie in October of 1944. At the time and since it has been my lively suspicion that one of the problems with Willkie is that Henry Luce had such a massive crush on the man, but I think we can all agree that it is a bigger problem that in some alternate history he would have dropped dead at the climax of WWII, just a month away from contesting the 1944 Presidential election. In other words, pick your alternate timeline carefully, and you'll get three Republican Presidents dying in office in thirty years.   

The Great Siege, I: Attlee Was Right

 

I added "The Great Siege" tag early in the life of this blog to organise the idea that Germany's strategic campaign against the British Empire was effectively a siege of Great Britain with consequences extending well beyond the end of the war. One could say, I thought to myself in 2013, that it was ultimately a success, inasmuch as the British Empire no longer exists. That is because, by situating the Battle of Britain and the Battle of the Atlantic into an overarching effort including mining and, most easily missed, the V-weapon campaign, one could extend the long range consequences of the campaign well beyond the end of the war, and, in particular, say that the attrition of British housing stocks during the war was an important factor in What Came Next.

Well, this is a travel installment, with me currently struggling to touchtype with reasonable speed on a very nice ASUS laptop with a keyboard that is just too small for my fat fingers, which doesn't encourage me to be loquacious, but which on the other hand leaves me thirsty to share pointless vaction pictures and experiences. 

The overall idea with which I started this tag was, I now see, hopelessly naive, which is why I have decided that the right time to call an end to the Great Siege is with The Economist's disgraceful surrender to permanent deficit financing of the British economy with the 1953 budget introduced by RAB Butler for the Churchill government, because what's more important, "economy" or higher interest rates, lower taxes, and a tacit turn away from  full employment? Without either agreeing or disagreeing with the  traditional Liberal "peace, retrenchment, and reform," so blatantly giving the game away is the 1953 equivalent of the French "rearming in 1938" to the tune of "What about the rentier?" It's capitulation, is what it is. Here's the keys to the city, Herr Grossadmiral, on the sole condition that you let us march out with our consols shouldered. 

The town of Keremeos lies on the junction of the Similkameen River with Keremeos Creek on Highway 3 and Highway 5C in the south centre of the province, in one of two regions that loves to attach itself to the Okanagan Valley as an extension of BC's "summerland," to borrow the actual name of an Okanagan Valley town between Penticton and Peachland, across the lake from Naramata. Keremeos, like the rest of the "Similkameen" part of the "Okanagan-Similkameen," has no lake suitable for summer fun. It is a farming and crossroads town in the midst of endless orchards and vegetable farms with a good run to Vancouver since the Hope-Princeton opened in 1953, although the housing stock you see in these pictures is earlier than that, dating to a previous era of prosperity based on loading fruit cars onto an extension of the Great Northern Railway. The town has a population of a bit over 1700, which explains why the drugstore in town is open 12--4 on Sundays. 

A walking tour of the town might seem very familiar if you have seen Beaverdell, Greenwood, Olalla, Hedley, or similar towns laid out before WWII which have since not enjoyed very much growth. It is a four--to-six blocks by four block street grid, readily walkable, with a solid downtown area with enough vacant space for more businesses if you're in the mood to move and invest, and enough room for far more houses than are there,  overwhelmed by the size of their lots, and even a few apartment buildings, mostly comically undersized, as if the builder lacked a certain conviction. Around this core area is an area of new building from the postwar era, where such new houses  as have been built over the subsequent eighty years are located, abstracted from the town core in every case, and in that of Keremeos, dramatically overlooking it from an Okanagan bench --meaning that although they are very close to the city physically, you have to drive down to a draw that gives access to the Upper Bench of the Keremeos in the far northeast corner of the town. 

Now let's talk about one reason that Clement Attlee was right. 

A Technological But Also Economic and Engaged Appendix to Postblogging Technology, May 1953, II: The Bee Problem

 

I hope there's some of the bee scenes I remember from my slightly traumatised junior high viewing of this documentary based on Frank Herbert's Hellstrom's Hive, because the "problem" here is the old saw about how science doesn't know how bees fly. The joke being that of course science knows how bees can fly. The airliner business, on the other hand . . . ? See? I knew there was a reason to read Fortune! 

A Technological Appendix to Postblogging Technology, April 1953, II: Cutlass to the NBS!

 

It will not have escaped the attention of the alert reader that this is a technological appendix to a postblogging installment which hasn't posted yet. Why? A difficult work schedule and my own stubborn refusal to face the reality that I wasn't reasonably going to finish the installment before Tuesday. 

Fortunately, we have a science-policy-politics story this week which deserves its prominence at every level, the "AD-X2 controversy," and another story, slowly rolling on to its 1958 denouement, the Chance-Vought F7U Cutlass, announced this month in an attack variant that Chance Vought expects to produce after completing its contract for 90 of the air superiority type. 

Our historical memory of the Eisenhower Administration has over the years veered between a roseate nostalgia for the President of interstates and Brown Vs. Board of Education and an increasing disquiet as the damage done by the Guatemalan and Iranian coups keeps on compounding. There is, therefore, something revelatory about descending from our 20,000ft historical view into the trenches to find incoming Commerce Secretary Sinclair Weeks receiving a well-deserved bayoneting from Drew Pearson and the 400 employees of the National Bureau of Standards who threatened this week to quit if their boss, Allen V. Astin, were fired.