Chain

Jumble got me started and I followed the chain. Other people, like you, might have followed other links, but these are the ones I followed.

The captions in today's Jumble cartoon sound awfully specific. Could it be referring to a real world event? Google turns up a story about Travis Barker, a drummer from Fontana, California, who has written just such a book. John, Sammy and Sir Paul (mentioned in the caption) might be Johnny Cash, Sammy Hagar and Paul Wall. Travis survived a nasty plane crash seven years ago in South Carolina.

Fontana may not be a thriving metropolis, but it does have its points:

Kaiser Steel, Fontana, California, back in the day.

Kaiser Steel built the largest steel plant on the West Coast during World War II. Located in the Los Angeles area’s Inland Empire town of Fontana, the plant operated for many years after the war, and employed more than 2,500 workers at its peak. Kaiser Steel declared bankruptcy in the 1980s, and much of the plant was torn down and redeveloped. Some of its modern components were purchased by the Chinese government, disassembled by a Chinese crew, and reassembled in China. A large part of the plant was paved over and turned into an automotive race track, the Automobile Association’s California Speedway. Another portion is operated as California Steel Industries, making pipe and steel products out of slabs and rolls from other sources. As one of the few remaining heavy industry sites near Los Angeles, the site is a common filming location. It was used as a location for the film Black Rain, and for the Schwarzenegger showdown with the cyborg in Terminator II. The film Pearl Harbor was refused permission to film at the site because the operator of the plant, California Steel, was partially owned by Kawasaki Steel, a Japanese company. - Center for Land Use Interpretation

One steel mill leads to another:

Geneva Steel © Chris Dunker (Dunker Imaging)

The Last Open Hearth In The U.S. was closed down in December 1991 at Geneva Steel in Utah. The end of an era for a nation that, in 1970, still produced nearly 40% of it’s raw steel out of open hearth furnaces. The Geneva OH-shop [Open Hearth shop] contained ten 340 ton furnaces first tapped in 1944 . . . Large portions of the mill (caster, plate and strip rolling mill) were sold to Chinese steel maker Qindago Steel. - Steel-Photo dot org

Huh, another steel mill dismantled and shipped to China. Sounds a lot like what the Russians were doing to their own stuff when the Germans invaded in WW2 (dismantled their industry and shipped it farther east, out of the reach of the Germans). Also a lot like what the Germans were doing when the conquered another country (take their stuff and ship to the fatherland) and what the Russians did after the war (take the German's stuff and ship it to the motherland.)

Anyway, Open Hearth Furnaces were the way to make steel, up until about 1950 when Basic Oxygen Steelmaking came to the for. The Basic Oxygen process was so much quicker and so much more efficient it would have made sense to shift over as rapidly as possible, but that didn't happen. Problem was that the steel companies had a huge investment in the Open Hearth process and they couldn't afford to write it all off.

While I'm following this trail of steel, I came across this very cool picture:

Rolling Mill Operators inside the helmstand of the 44 inch blooming mill at the Republic Steel company in Cleveland, USA, after 1968. Left to right: The stationary steam engineer, the roller, the manipulator.

And this one:

80 years ago Mexican Artist Diego Rivera finished his famous murals of the Ford  River Rouge plant.

The Ford River Rouge complex was the largest integrated factory in the world. Over 100,000 workers were employed there in the 1930s. Hyundai's factory in Ulsan, South Korea is now the largest.

P.S. Another view of the mural here.

Monsieur Spade

Variety reviews movies and TV shows and some of those reviews are good reading, like this one. Unfortunately, Variety's website was evidently designed by some troglodyte because the page won't sit still long enough for me to read it. It keeps hopping about. Today I'm trying to read this review, which seems pretty good, but then the page jumps and it keeps jumping. I finally got irritated enough to copy the text and paste it here so I could read it in peace. Dang troglodytes.

Monsieur Spade Courtesy of AMC

‘Monsieur Spade’ Makes Clive Owen a Classic Noir Hero in the Best Kind of Fanfiction By Alison Herman

Clive OWEN in Monsieur Spade. Photo Credit: Jean-Claude Lother/AMC

All works of IP exploitation are, on some level, legitimized fanfiction. Once divorced from the original author, the line that separates a franchise’s sequel, prequel or reboot from the average post on Wattpad is a great deal of money and the blessing of an estate and/or corporation. But even with this baseline, the AMC limited series “Monsieur Spade” is an especially unabashed act of wish fulfillment through and for a beloved protagonist. The namesake of “Monsieur Spade” is none other than Sam Spade (Clive Owen), the private investigator who headlined the Dashiell Hammett novel turned John Huston film noir “The Maltese Falcon,” plus a handful of Hammett short stories published in the 1930s. For their spin on Spade, series creators Tom Fontana (“Oz”) and Scott Frank (“The Queen’s Gambit”) send the sleuth to the south of France, where he spends a few weeks of his not-so-peaceful retirement looking into a massacre at a local convent.

Most of “Monsieur Spade” is set in 1963, two years after the death of Spade’s real-life creator. In stepping out of Hammett’s shadow, Fontana, Frank and Owen — also an executive producer — allow themselves to embrace the fantasy of sending an acerbic American to an idyllic vacation spot. (“Monsieur Spade” filmed on location, so the trio were effectively sending themselves, too.) Sure enough, there are ample scenes of Owen luxuriating in a pool or enjoying an omelet al fresco. But while “Monsieur Spade” indulges in escapism, it’s also a compact crime yarn that does right by both its setting and its predecessors.

Spade arrives in the small commune of Bozouls in 1955, though he and his new neighbors still speak in the dry, quippy rat-a-tat of films from decades prior. (When a colleague tells Sam he’s watching his weight, Sam instantly volleys back: “Watching it do what?”) He’s been tasked with delivering a child named Teresa (Cara Bottom) to safety, leaving her with some local nuns when her grandmother refuses to help. What starts as a quick pit stop turns more permanent when Spade falls in love with a local woman named Gabrielle (Chiara Mastroianni), which means he’s still around — albeit widowed — eight years later when six of those nuns are brutally murdered for no apparent reason.

The immediate suspect is Teresa’s father, Philippe Saint-Andre (Jonathan Zaccai), a career thief who’s suddenly reappeared in Bozouls after a prolonged absence. From there, “Monsieur Spade” builds out a largely Francophone ensemble that makes Bozouls more than a scenic backdrop. Local police chief Patrice (Denis Ménochet) enlists Spade to help with the investigation, so the expat takes a break from his day job: co-owning a jazz club with the beautiful singer Marguerite (Louise Bourgoin). (What did I say about wish fulfillment?) Marguerite’s husband, Jean-Pierre (Stanley Weber), is a veteran of the Algerian War of Independence, a conflict and ensuing colonial hangover that starts to loom increasingly large over the mystery as Spade starts to unravel it.

Spade’s bumbling British neighbors, mother and son Cynthia (Rebecca Root) and George Fitzsimmons (Matthew Beard) provide some comic relief as “Monsieur Spade” drifts between lighthearted lark and life-or-death stakes. Anchoring it all is Owen, whose hangdog look and weathered handsomeness are both well-suited to playing an aging legend half a world from home. All of “Monsieur Spade” is a repurposing of the familiar with a slight twist; the sight of the once suit-and-fedora clad Spade in a turquoise polo is a sight gag in itself. So it’s unsurprising the show leans into tropes elsewhere, like the begrudging rapport between Sam and his quasi-ward Teresa. You can find the same dynamic on “The Last of Us,” and in countless stories before it.

Sometimes, you wish “Monsieur Spade” leaned a little harder into the subversion: as the mystery unfolds, the Arab community of Bozouls starts to play a larger role, but they’re still peripheral to a story that ultimately hinges on France’s ugly, still-unresolved past. But that’s not what the show is here to do. “Monsieur Spade” builds out Bozouls just enough to be as convincing a canvas for Sam’s skill set as a fog-swathed San Francisco. It exists to give Spade his own form of happily-ever-after — to reassure us that, even if Hammett never showed it, one of his leading men lived on, and still does.

The first episode of “Monsieur Spade” premieres on AMC, AMC+ and Acorn TV at 9pm on Jan. 14, with subsequent episodes airing weekly on Sundays.

I don't think we have access to AMC, so we probably won't watch it, but being long time fan of Sam Spade and his ilk, I still enjoyed the review.

San Bernardino

David Malki of Wondermark has something to say this morning.

I grew up in San Bernardino.Posted: 03 Dec 2015 08:55 PM PST

Above: My dad, quoted in the San Bernardino Sun-Telegram, 1959. When Dad emigrated to America, he could have settled anywhere, really. He ended up in San Bernardino, where he built himself a business and a family and ran both with equal vigor for 50 years.(Don’t worry — this isn’t going to be a Serious Political Post. Not really.)
Most likely you’ve heard the news this week from San Bernardino, California. A pair of jerks killed a bunch of probably real nice people. What a terrible, terrible event.
Lots of impassioned people are spilling gigaflops of pixel ink on the Big Issues raised by this mass shooting, the largest in…well, a short while.
Political points will be scored by people decrying their opponents for milking the event for political points.
People who already hate certain things (such as Muslims, or guns, or, like me, arguing on the Internet) will discover, folded into their perceptions of this event, newly colorful reasons to hate that same thing even more righteously.
I want to talk about the town. I was born and raised in San Bernardino. I lived there for 18 years, until I moved away to college. My mom and my sisters and their families live there now.
There — that little tiny intake of breath that I heard. If we were speaking face-to-face, I’d hear it clearly. What should I say? Is everything all right? I’m so sorry.My family is fine. According to Facebook, some friends of friends may or may not have known some of the people affected. (The same is probably true of lots of different news events.)
I, personally (and thankfully), require no special sympathy or attention.
San Bernardino, though, could use some.
It’s had it pretty rough. It’s an old town, founded in the late 1800s, a gateway between the urban sprawl of Los Angeles and the desolate California desert.
It’s got two Rs in its name; it’s not San “Bernadino.” Get your hashtags right, people! Especially news organizations that should know better!Police officer who responded to #SanBernadino shootings, speaks of “unspeakable” carnage https://t.co/wJgKbY0Wz9 pic.twitter.com/DqLJbBluzd— BBC News (World) (@BBCWorld) December 4, 2015It was a three-industry town: The Santa Fe railroad had headquarters in San Bernardino for many years, and there was the Kaiser Steel mill, and there was Norton Air Force Base, onetime home to dozens of now-obsolete C-141 Starlifters.
All three vanished during my adolescence. The railroad moved its headquarters elsewhere; the steel mill closed; and the base was shuttered. A lot of the people I went to high school with couldn’t wait to leave, and many of us did.
San Bernardino today is the palm-tree edition of the desolate Rust Belt factory town, seasoned with inner-city gang culture overflowing from Los Angeles and meth culture tumbling down from the desert.
Hugely expensive pension liabilities caused the city to declare bankruptcy a few years back, hurting city services, and sky-high unemployment and illegal drug traffic feed off and nourish each other.
So… I’ve never been entirely proud to say I was from San Bernardino. There are nice areas, sure; and around half the people are employed, which is good. My high school had (andcontinues to have) some good programs.
But at least I had the luxury of knowing that if I said where I was from, people might not know those terrible things about it.
“It’s the home of the very first McDonald’s restaurant,” I could say instead, or if the person is old I could say “Route 66 goes through the center of town,” or if the person looks cool I might say “If you’re going up to Big Bear to ski, you should stop and get a burrito at Rosa Maria’s on Sierra Way.”
Now, I fear that San Bernardino has entered the miserable fraternity of places known only as killing sites, like Sandy Hook, or Newtown, or Aurora.
In college, I had some friends from Littleton, Colorado. They had gone to Columbine High. They had already graduated and moved away when the shooting happened, and had had no involvement with it whatsoever.
Still, it was weird: I couldn’t imagine them having had a normal high school experience, because, you know, they’d gone to Columbine.
How many people will have that weird reaction now to San Bernardino? To the prospect of visiting, or buying property, or going to school, or doing business with my family and friends in San Bernardino? “That San Bernardino?”
I heard one of San Bernardino’s former mayors on the radio today. “We’re a town in transition,” he said wearily, and then, to make the perfunctory point: “I’d say we’re in recovery.”
The shooters’ victims are the fallen men and women. Let nothing take away from that horror, or their families’ grief.
But the shots went on to hit wider targets, too. I’m from San Bernardino. Yes, we must all now add, that San Bernardino.

San Bernardino & Fontana, California

The bit about the steel mill sounds like Fontana, California.

Kaiser Steel in the 1940's

A couple of other bits I dug up:

Surprisingly, San Bernardino is the home of McDonald's.

Norton Air Force Base is now the San Bernardino International Airport.

Roadkill Special