Postblogging Technology, March 1949, I: When Roosevelt Bombed Pearl Harbour

R_. C_.,
Shaughnessy,
Vancouver,
Canada

Dear Father:

Thank you so much for putting Mr. Sutter on the case! It turns out that this was a particular bit of research for which he was well suited. Not as a distinguished member of the California bar, as you would think, but as a man. It turns out that the archives were withholding a file because they thought it would give me the vapours or something. 

Just to review, I've been trying to find out why Horace Stevens didn't show up for Binger Hermann's trial in Portland in January of 1910. It's a bit of a puzzler, and for three years I thought I was going to ask either Stevens or his family, but I couldn't find the man! It seems hard to believe that he just disappeared, but last year, after one too many detective movies, I finally decided to look at the obvious other avenue --"Unidentified corpses of 1910." It was a pretty long shot, but Mr. V. has some friends who write detective novels, which is just as good as actually being a detective, if you ask me. They disabused me of the idea of some desperado shooting Stevens on the train to Portland and heaving the body out of the windows. Dramatic, I know, but reading the biographies of the men of the Land Scandal puts you in the way of thinking of these things. Anyway, it turns out that it's harder than it seems, and the body usually ends up on the tracks, attracting attention. Better, I was told, to pack a big, empty trunk. 

Bodies showing up in trunks, you say? Well, yes. Specifically, in Los Angeles, in early February. Said trunk was weighted with some dumb-bell plates and wrapped in a terrycloth Turkish bath towel, and thrown in Buena Vista Lake, but floated to the surface. a Los Angeles detective took charge (I'm not sure why, since the body was turned over to state troopers out of Bakersfield) and proceeded to generate a thick, thick file by going around every boxing gym in Los Angeles looking for the man's supposed homosexual lover, on the basis of a violent murder in a fit of jealous rage, etc, etc. The file included many pictures of a decayed, naked male body, since the detective had to prove a violent death, and there was evidence of a beating and death by asphyxiation. Hence the womanly vapours. 

Since I requested the file the week before the attempted "hit," and was, in fact, there to see it, not knowing that the clerks were going to claim that it had been lost, it'll do as a movie-plot explanation that I was ordered rubbed-out because it is a vital clue. Well, it or one of the other 132 files in the fasicle, but this is the biggest and most interesting one, so there's that. 

(Who else is surprised to hear a moderate Republican attributing defeat in 1948 to the party refusing to repudiate conspiracy theorists who claimed that "Roosevelt bombed Pearl Harbour"?

Yours Sincerely, Ronnie

The Bishop's Sea: Saint Colman, Saint Boniface and St. Tridwell, Pray for Us

I'm not going to go pointing fingers, but someone underperformed on the writing front this holiday long weekend. (In completely unrelated news, Captain Marvel was okay, but I --excuse me, someone-- was a bit disappointed by his first visit to Pineapple Hut on Burrard above Fifth Avenue Cinemas since Wonder Woman.) February technology postblogging comes next week. This week, I've practically been commissioned to put on the tinfoil hat and look at the Atlantic on the front porch of history --the phase in which Europeans might have crossed it early. 

I know, I know, it's inconsequential in the long run. The most plausible explanation for the historic trajectory of Eastern Woodlands civilisation remains endogenous change. The appearance of the cross motif in the earliest phases of the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex, about 900, has provoked wild speculation since the Nineteenth Century, which itself has tended to discredit the idea that known European activities on the western shore of the Atlantic in this period had any larger impact. The subsequent sequencing (1250--1450 for the mature "Southern Death Cult;" 1350--1450 for the attenuated Cult period; 1450--1550 for the post-Cult) is almost aggressively dissociated from the closing of the Atlantic gap. 

And yet there are the gaps, the mysteries, the attenuations that the crackpot loves. And, surprisingly enough, when we turn to northern Britain, it seems that crackpottery is all but triumphant.

Shell gorget recovered at Spiro Mounds. By Herb Roe, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=19409020. The cross motif has a number of interpretations, none of which involve missionary Scandinavian bishops wandering the wilderness preaching the word of Christ to the Lost Tribes of Israel.

A Technical Appendix to January, 1949, II: Machine Tools, 1943 and 1949

According to Ibis World, the British machine tool industry had a projected revenue of £1.1bn, an annual growth rate for the period 2014--2019 of -5.4%, employed 15,181, and involved 1,027 businesses, compared with £30 million and 42,700 in 1948. (And £8.9 million and 22,400 in 1935). The negative growth rate is due to the downturn in commodities (so oil and mining dominate the British scene, I guess.) To frame these numbers, the "red-hot" American scene is projected to buy $8 billion in machine tools in 2019. (Note that I am not adjusting for inflation.)

That reminds me of last week, when I took my bike into the shop for the first time in over two years, and got the usual mechanic's litany of "We had to replace this, and this, and this, and then we discovered that this had to go. Then there was labour, and the GST, but we cut you a little break on that, so," with a pause and an apologetic look, he ended up, "It'll be $450."

If you drive a car, that's the punchline. If you don't, I'm not sure what I can do. My instinct is that bikes are getting cheaper, although some time spent noodling around looking at historic cost of living figures isn't exactly confirming that. The idea here is that, while the machine tool industry has lower employment than in  1949, it's just about as big as it ever was. It's just a bit irrelevant, because making things isn't such a big deal any more.

A Technological Appendix to Postblogging Technology, January 1949, II: Long Playing

Edit: While I've left an incorrect title stand for a week without the sky falling, correcting it will be helpful to me.

Source

We've been treated to three technology stories worth following up on this last week. The first, which should be the most pressing, is the loss of the third Avro Tudor airliner, which, incredibly, is not the end of the Tudor's time on the cross, with the Llandow disaster still to come. Second, Farnsworth Television has just been caught in a little fib. Somehow, the Fort Wayne, Indiana company has managed to lose money making televisions, and the NYSE takes a dim view of companies that issue stock to cover losses without mentioning the losses in the prospectus.  ITT will buy out Farnsworth in 1951, but, as near as I can tell, the takeover will be put in motion a bit sooner than that. Third, in contrast to the sordid tales of two unrelated business failures, Columbia has just introduced its new 33rpm long-playing vinyl record format, which will soon come to dominate the industry. I wouldn't say that these are related stories, but they do belong in some kind of compare-and-contrast discussion. 

Postblogging Technology, January 1949, II: Our Hearts Go Out for Avro

R_. C_.,
Shaughnessy,
Vancouver,
Canada

Dear Father:

Thanks for your kind concern. I am bearing up, I think, considering that I shot a man two weeks ago. Like you said, we tried to bring Mr. A. into the picture, since a foreign sailor found floating in the Bay is a matter for the spybusters, especially after we arranged a "tip" about his Green Tong membership. Unfortunately, the FBI immediately stepped in, with someone coming around to his office to tell him that he better keep his nose out of it, just like in a movie! This wasn't the end of it, because of course A. isn't without his own influence. I'm a little flabbergasted to report that no less than Shirley Temple was invoked. You'll note below that she was in Washington for the Inaugural, and of course she and A.know each other. The really flabbergasting part is that she knows ME! I am frankly beyond words that teenaged-me met Shirley TEMPLE(!!!!!) at a family gathering and didn't realise it! It says something about Temple that she can work a room so slickly.

Ahem. Close encounters with Hollywood stars in incognito aside, the upshot is that A. will be allowed to take over the case as soon as the Hoover Report leaves the front pages, so alphabetically-named agencies can step all over each other's feet again. In the mean time, everyone assumes that if you find a Tong man floating, it's because another Tong man's bullet managed to hit the target. (Insert hilarious joke about Tong men not shooting straight.) 

So, anyway, I mean, it's an urgent matter to me, but I've flowers and an apology wired from Shanghai in my room, which is either a bum steer or something is up. (The girls think they're from Reggie, and are wondering what he could possibly have done.) What could possibly be so sensitive about the Oregon Scandal seventy years on???

In other news, the millionth (okay, third) Avro Tudor to be lost is now history. I hear that James is telling everyone in sight that this is what you get when you let Don Bennett into your business, even though Bennett was out of BSAA well before the loss of Star Ariel. He is, however, creating a stink in the dailies about it being all due to "sabotage." What kind of maniac would sabotage an air liner? The suggestion that it is Avro's incompetence won't do, so I suppose we're all going to settle for blaming the Ministry of Civil Aviation. 

Yours Sincerely,
Ronnie.

I'm a little surprised that the Tudor losses in the "Bermuda Triangle" don't get more play in the legend. In the mean time, I'm not going to let you forget some good old Marv Wolfman/Steve Gann goodness. 

Austerity, The Barrier Fortresses and the Pretender: Another Visit to 1745

In this modern age of computer-assisted scheduling and twenty-four operations,you can be sure that if you mention that your schedule violates the ten-hour-between-shifts rule (I know the rule; it's just you have to do it to claim overtime), you are likely to get a worse one. I won't trouble you with the gory details, but I've lost most of my days off to a blur of disrupted sleep. If, therefore, this post smacks of a certain economy of effort, well, hey, at least I was able to write a big post last Sunday!

Swedish GDP per capita growth in comparison to world

That being said, there are issues here that deserve addressing ahead of whatever happens next with Brexit, and a measure of resonance with the postblogging.

Last time, we saw The Economist urge Sweden to give up on the inflationary, high-investment programme. As it turns out, that was just plain bad advice, establishing that poorly-informed and partisan pundits really can make a difference. It's even more interesting when you contrast Sweden's Hugh Dalton-ish "trente annes glorieux" with Britain's Stafford Cripps-ish era. Initial budgetary returns reporting in the same number showing revenues disappointing to the low side, spending to the high, might be the first frost of winter.

Might be. After all, Britain did pretty well in the "trente annes glorieux," too. Today's interest lies in another glorious thirty years, the 1713--43 of Cardinal Fleury and Horace Walpole, guarantors of European peace and the Sinking Fund.

The question is whether this might have been a reverse "thirty glorious years?" That is, did the "return to normalcy" in financial affairs during the long peace between the wars throw the earlier economic expansion into reverse? Did the War of Jenkin's Ear save the Industrial Revolution?

That's the speculation, anyway. Let's see how far it can be supported. Warning though. I'm writing this at 5 PM Friday night, I'm a little bleary, and I'm expected at work at 7 tomorrow morning, so don't expect any luxuries like proof-reading here. 

Postblogging Technology, January 1949, I: You Know Those French

Ooh la la!

R_. C_.,

Shaughnessy,

Vancouver,

Canada.

Dear Father:

I'm sure that you will have heard from Wong Lee, and thank God for him, as I'd be waiting my turn at the gas chamber at San Quentin if not for him. 

I can't believe I'm still alive, and I owe that to you. I am certainly not the kind of girl to carry an automatic --with a muffler, no less--  around with her, and I certainly wouldn't have been watching for a "tail" if you hadn't pressed the issue. But there he was, and he followed me into the lady's restroom at Happy's, down across from the archives building, and was about to plug me through the stall door when I got him first. (Yes, I used that compact trick, though frankly I never believed that the putty would stick it to the ceiling like you said.) I chose Happy's to clear my tail because it connects through the char woman's closet. 

Wong Lee's man went through the body's pockets before they dumped it in the harbour, and says the shooter is off a Shanghai-registered freighter, and no doubt the police will deem this a Tong matter --true enough. The question is, which Tong. Although the answer to that seems obvious, I thought we had an agreement that they would stay out of California if we stayed out of Shanghai. And, yes, that seems like a poor trade now, but that doesn't mean that they should be trying to edge their way back into the state by shooting me. 

Pardon me, I've got to hyperventilate until I pass out.

Yours Sincerely,

Ronnie.