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

Postblogging Technology, December 1953, I: The Louche Years Begin

 

R_., C_.,
Shaughnessy,
Vancouver,
Canada

Dear Father:

Thank you for the tickets, which we received on Monday. I have no idea how you found out when James' leave began, as he swears that he didn't tell you. We are very happy to accept the invitation, I repeat, just in case our letter is, I don't know, eaten by the Purple People Eater whilst winging its way across the Atlantic. I feel as though I should be updating you with our plans, but I obviously don't have to tell you our schedule for a trip you paid for and arranged! I would tell you how much luggage we are bringing, but I haven't even begun to sort that out! 

As  this completely upends Christmas shopping, I would be happy to have an updated list of suggestions from Vancouver, if you could find the time to forward one. You'll also have to give some thought to gifts that will satisfy the little ones and still be small enough to pack back with us. Don't worry about space in the apartment, unless for some reason you decide to give them a pot! 
 

Your Loving Daughter,

Ronnie

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?

Boom: The Space Race, 1

 

Everyone has a first public event they remember, and for me, it is the live television broadcast of the landing of Apollo 9. I was a bit young as these stories go, and this might have something to do with the fact that, as it turns out, this was four days before my fifth birthday. I was far too young to remember the two events sequentially, but heightened attention to the one  might have leaked over to heightened attention to the other, I dunno. The point here, such as it is, is that I will have my 60th birthday this year. I try not to blather on about work around here too much, so I won't go into the details of why I am not getting all the paid time off that the contract says I get, just to note, once again, that it has to do with the lack of younger workers at my place of employment and in the Canadian economy in general. Hence the clever double meaning of the title of this series, a reference to the baby boom as well as to the "space race" that culminated on 20 July 1964. Do the two things go together? I sure think so right now!

Even if they don't, this blog obviously can't ignore the space race, and this is the first occasion in the progression of the technological postblogging where it seems appropriate to give the space race its own series. Notice how I've cleverly begun the enumeration of this series in Arabic numerals? That's so I'm not working out the Roman notation for "47" at some point in the probably not-so-distant future.