Nancy and Jane

Voodoo Doughnut

Nancy and Jane, childhood friends of the boss, arrived in Portland Monday after a week-long cruise down the Columbia River from Lewiston, Idaho. We picked up Jane at her hotel near the airport and headed into town. We stopped at Voodoo Doughnut, the east side location, and then went down to Powell's City of Books in downtown Portland. 

I picked out a couple of science fiction novels, Nemesis by Isaac Asimov and Shipbreaker by Paolo Bacigalupi. I haven't read anything by Asimov in like a zillion years. I read pretty much all of his stuff when I was younger. Nemesis interests me because it involves a large self-contained spaceship with a population of people that has gone to a nearby star. There's all kinds of technical problems with making that kind of voyage but technicians can figure that kind of thing out. The part that's a complete mystery to me is how are you going to get a group of people to live in a confined space for an indefinitely long time without killing each other or going crazy. Is it possible? Anyway we'll see how Isaac sorts it out. Maybe I'll learn something. 

I read another of Bacigalupi's books a while back, The Windup Girl, and it was pretty great. As I recall it involved a girl with some kind of cybernetic-biomechanical enhancements that gave her, I don't know, high-speed ability or something, but it was problematic because if she used it very much she would overheat and she was already living in the tropics so staying cool was already a problem. Seems to me there was also a big shop that employed elephants turning big turnstiles or something. I also remember there being the remains of giant animals like skeletons or exoskeletons that were part of the landscape. 

Since I found these two books and the girls weren't done browsing I headed down to the coffee shop and got myself a $4 cup of coffee in a ceramic cup. The coffee shop used to be run by Powell's but they've turned it over to some other outfit and now the coffee shop area is for coffee shop customers only. It's okay, I can afford $4 for a cup of coffee. I walked over to the corner of the room to find a seat. 

There's a bench against the wall and some small two-person tables in front of the bench and then chairs facing the opposite side of the tables. I picked out a place to sit and at first I was going to sit with my back to the window looking back at the room which is kind of my go-to orientation but then I thought, you know, I'd like to watch what's going on outside. I have a good view here and it's raining outside and inside it's nice and dry so I sat at the other side of the table and then I thought this is the kind of position somebody doing, you know, surveillance would choose. 'Oh look there's a man's in a coffee shop looking out the window. Is he looking at anything in particular? No, he's just in the coffee shop looking out the window.' But a person with a suspicious turn of mind would wonder what he's watching. Is he watching that building across the street waiting for the bad guys to show up? But if they saw me hesitate when I sat down they might think well no he's not looking for anything he's just looking out the window. On the other hand someone might think that would be deliberate ruse to make you think that he's not doing surveillance, he's just looking out the window. You could argue either way.

The girls wanted to do some shopping so we headed over to Northwest 23rd. I took a nap in the car. While I am dozing there, a little box appeared in my vision. It was just big enough for two or three letters. They looked like letters that were printed in the books I had been reading. The letters were sliding by, right to left, too fast for me to make out if they were actually words or not. I was a little short of sleep, which is why I was napping, but in any case it was very strange.

We had lunch at Fireside. I got a cheeseburger, it was delicious. 

On my way there (two blocks from the car) I was accosted by two people asking for spare change and passed one guy, flailing his arms, gyrating and cursing loudly, next to another guy curled up in a ball by the wall. Just typical downtown Portland. I had to use the restroom several times while we were out and about. Three of those restrooms required a passcode to unlock the door. The only one that didn't was the one at IKEA, which is its own little empire.

Note - I originally dictated this to my phone and when I said 'deliberate ruse', the phone transcribed it as 'deliberate rouse'. Now when I am editing this for the blog I saw the word rouse is wrong but I couldn't think of what the right word was, so I asked Webster for synonyms for deceive and it did not list ruse. Took me a while, but I eventually remembered ruse.

War

The eight phases of the Song of Roland in one picture; illustration by Simon Marmion from an illuminated manuscript of the Grandes Chroniques de France (15th century), currently preserved in the Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg, Russia

Stolen entire from Essays in Idleness by David Warren.

The task of war

One does well to examine the Song of Roland (the French, XIth century, chanson de geste) before jumping to conclusions about war. I particularly recommend Scott Moncrieff’s translation (1919), which had an introduction by G. K. Chesterton that has been anthologized elsewhere. He neither glorifies nor condemns war, and actually, neither did Roland in the “splendidly inconclusive conclusion.” War contains both good and evil characters and events, and is never finished in this world. Any final victory must wait patiently on God. So long as there are insane barbarians (the present regime in Iran offers an unambiguous example) they will have to be fought. It is inappropriate to “make peace” with such a vicious and deceitful enemy. And when there is fighting, there are casualties. The Lord — and Christ is not a milquetoast — does not require us to omit this task, and did not condemn it in His Bible. Those who fight for the right, deserve honour; those who insist on “peace, peace” regardless of circumstances are cowards who deserve contempt.

It is sad that there are people, even Catholics, who don’t understand this.

Probably should go read the Song of Roland (translation by Jesse Crosland), but I probably won't because it is 78 pages long. 

Quote of the Day

Idoru by William Gibson. On page 28 Laney is interviewing for a job with Slitscan, some kind mass media operation akin to People magazine or Facebook:

"Anything that might be of interest to Slitscan. Which is to say, Laney, anything that might be of interest to Slitscan's audience. Which is best visualized as a vicious, lazy, profoundly ignorant, perpetually hungry organism craving the warm god-flesh of the anointed. Personally I like to imagine something the size of a baby hippo, the color of a week old boiled potato that lives by itself in the dark, in a double wide on the outskirts of Topeka. It's covered with eyes and it sweats constantly the sweat runs into those eyes and makes them sting. It has no mouth, Laney, no genitals and can only express its mute extremes of murderous rage and infantile desire by changing the channels on a universal remote. Or by voting in presidential elections."

 I think he nailed it.

Flat Tire Addendum

A Young People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn
4.1 rating on Goodread

While I was waiting for the flat to be fixed I notice a couple of books in the office. Don't often see books in auto repair joints, or maybe I just never noticed. Anyway, I'm always looking for something new to read, hoping I will find something that will grab me. So I take a couple of pics. It's quicker and easier than writing it down and the camera doesn't forget.

The Perfect Girl: A Novel by Gilly Macmillan
3.7 rating on Goodreads

Don't know that I will read either one of these.

Cheap Amazon Tire Pressure Gauge

When we got back to the house we checked the pressure in all the tires including the emergency spare. That spare needs to be inflated to 60 PSI and it was only about half that. Start pumping it up, stop and check the pressure and the gauge only goes to 50 PSI. What is this? When did we start cheaping out on tire pressure gauges? I used to have a couple of decent gauges but they got old and quit working, so I bought a new one off of Amazon. It was only $8 for a pair of them. Guess I got what I deserved.

Twinkle, Twinkle Little Spy by Len Deighton

1958 The first prototype ammonia maser in front of its inventor Charles H. Townes. The ammonia nozzle is at left in the box, the four brass rods at center are the quadrupole state selector, and the resonant cavity is at right. The 24 GHz microwaves exit through the vertical waveguide Townes is adjusting. At bottom are the vacuum pumps.

This story is set in the 1970s, near as I can tell.

I'm gonna give this book a 4. I was gonna give it a solid 3.5, but goodreads doesn't allow half points. First off, I was able to read the whole thing in four days. Given that it often takes me months to get through a book, that's pretty good. Of course, time spent reading the book depends on whether the story gets a hold of me or not. This one has espionage, a doll, a dollop of science, and a heaping spoonful of the KGB (Soviet secret police), so yeah, right up my alley.

The story tells us of Bekuv, a Soviet MASER expert defecting to the USA, his wife and the CIA agents and MI6 agent assigned to pick him up. They pick him up in the Sahara desert, take him to Washington D. C. Talking to Bekuv, our agents start to hone in on a leak somewhere in the US government. Eventually their focus lands on one guy and the whole story explodes. There is a hostage scene at the airport that makes no sense, but then maybe if you are suddenly feeling this extreme pressure, you wouldn't be making any sense either. So maybe realistic. Probably wouldn't be handled like this now, but we've had fifty years of studying hostage situations, so we might do better.

Now we're back in the Sahara desert at a secret Soviet satellite communications station. The Soviets have set up shop in an old fortress with sixty foot walls. Inside the fort are two satellite antennas, each sixty feet in diameter, along with a helicopter. I'm thinking such an establishment would need to be at least 500 feet square. I looked for old fortress and satellite stations and found plenty of old satellite stations and plenty of old forts, so many that I haven't been able sort them all out. Did not find a Russian satellite station set up in an old fort, but that doesn't mean it wasn't there.

Both the US and Soviet governments want Bekuv because his knowledge of MASERs, but his interest lies entirely in communicating with alien civilizations. Quasar CTA-102 get mentioned on page 52. Look it up on Wikipedia and we find this line:

"In 1963 Nikolai Kardashev proposed that the then-unidentified radio source could be evidence of a Type II or III extraterrestrial civilization on the Kardashev scale."

Algeria
Blue are mentioned in the book. Purple are old fortresses.

I made a map with all the places mentioned in the book, well, at least all of the ones I made note of. The map also has a couple of giant Soviet radio telescopes cause that's what our man Bekuv would have liked to get his hands on.

Notes:

• Chapter 1 Page 1 Adrar Algeria
• Chapter 3 

GAZ-69



• Page 13 GAZ 59A Russian four-wheel drive field car does not exist so we have GAZ-69 
• Page 16 Dornier Skyservant

Desert Tour in a VW Bus

• Page 17 bright new VW bus marked Dempsey Desert Tours
• Chapter 4 
• Page 19 Washington Square New York University

Fats Waller plays Alligator Crawl (piano solo, 1935)
gullivior
• Page 23 Alligator Crawl

Chinoiserie

• Page 23 "it was all chinoiserie and high camp, with lanterns and gold-plated Buddhas"
• Chapter 6 

Dmitri Shostakovich - Waltz No. 2
The Wicked North

• page 43 Shostakovich. Soviet composer and pianist.

Pulsar P3 - When a Digital Watch cost more than a Rolex - 1970s LEDs
Techmoan

Page 49 Pulsar wrist watch

Blazar CTA 102

• Page 52 Quasar CTA-102, 
• Page 52 1924 Society - There are a bunch of 1924 Societies, but no UFO related ones. However, 1924 is the year Edwin Hubble proved there were other galaxies outside of the Milky Way. Gawd, why do we have such a pansy ass name for our galaxy? Shouldn't it be something like 'The God King Galaxy', but in Latin so it's impressive.
• Chapter 12 'No Extradition' graffiti in Ireland. It was frequently used to protest the transfer of Republican prisoners from the Republic of Ireland or Northern Ireland to prisons in the United Kingdom.
• Chapter 14

Perry Point VA Medical Center

• page 127 Commodore Perry US Navy psychiatric hospital

Ilyushin Il-62

• Page 192 Ilyushin airliner

أم كلثوم - فكروني - بعد ما اتعودت بعدك غصب عني [Umm Kulthum – Remind Me – After I Had Grown Accustomed to Your Absence, Against My Will]
Rasha Gamal

• Page 195 Om Kalsum the Ella Fitzgerald of Arab pop
• Page 198 the Atlas Mountains and then the Ouled Nail and then Loghouat
• Page 206 In-Salah, Adrar, Reggane, Timbuktu

AKMS machine pistol

• Page 214 AKMS machine pistol

I'm thinking I need to look into this business of Soviet satellite communications stations and old forts in the Sahara. And MASERs. We shall see.

Bonus. 2nd thing that popped up when I searched for Ouled Nail.

Dance of the Ouled Nail
MosaicDanceTheaterCo

Previous post about this book.

The Answer - Imagination Audio Books

The Answer
Imagination Audio Books - Topic

The question is 'who started the war of nuclear Armageddon?' An American and a Russian scientist discuss their plan to launch 50 kg of anti-matter high up and watch it as it falls back to Earth. What a good idea. 30 minutes is just enough time to wear myself out walking around the block. Could it be that the bomb that started the war wasn't a bomb made on Earth by human beings, but a chunk of anti-matter from another galaxy that just happened to strike Earth?

Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Spy (A Harry Palmer Novel) by Len Deighton

Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Spy (A Harry Palmer Novel) by Len Deighton

Stopped by Barnes & Noble the other day so I'm looking for something to read. I looked over the new Science Fiction section but it seemed to be all swords and sorcery. If there was any hard science fiction in there I didn't see it. So I headed over to Mystery / Thrillers. No Jo Nesbo, and no Michael Dibdin. Okay, I didn't remember Michael's last name exactly, but I knew some of the letters and I didn't find anything. And the I saw this book by Len Deighton and for some reason that name rang a bell. Seems I've read a couple of his books - The Ipcress File and Berlin Game. Don't often buy new books from bookstores. I think this is the second one this year. It's one of the perks of having paid off the mortgage - I can indulge in penny ante whims.

Dornier DO 28 Skyservant

The book starts off with a rendezvous in the middle of the Sahara desert. Business completed, they are picked up by a Dornier DO 28 Skyservant.

War with the Newts

 War with the Newts by Karel Capek

I'm reading War with the Newts by Karel Capek. It tells the curious story of the discovery of a race of six foot Salamanders in the South Pacific and their exploitation by various 19th century organizations. 

It's not a great story, but it is a curious one, and I am plugging along.

At the beginning of chapter 8 I find a list of islands, and me being me, I have see if they are real islands or just figments of the author's imagination. Turns out most of them are real, and the only three I didn't find (Hiau, Uap, Fukaofu) could well be because of the funny spelling of island names.

Chapter 8

Andrias Scheuchzeri

ENDLESS is human curiosity. It was not sufficient that J. W. Hupkins (Yale), the greatest authority alive at the time having anything to do with reptiles, declared that those mysterious creatures were unscientific humbug and sheer fantasy in the scientific journals and in the news-papers accounts began to increase of the discovery of so far unknown animals resembling huge salamanders in the most diverse parts of the Pacific Ocean. Relatively reliable statements claimed their discovery on the Solomon Islands, on Schouten Islands, on Kapingamarangi, Butaritari, and Tapeteuea, as well as on the whole group of smaller the islands: Nukufetau, Funafuti, Nukunono, and Fukaofu, then as far as Hiau, Ua Huka, Uap, and Pukapuka. There were legends quoted of the devils of Captain van Toch (mainly in the Melanesian zone) and of the Tritons of Miss Li (more in Polynesia) then the newspapers inferred that it was a matter of various kinds of submarine and antediluvian monsters mainly because the summer season had begun, and there was nothing to write about. Sub-marine monsters are usually well received by the reading public. In the United States especially Tritons became the fashion: in New York a showy revue ran for three hun-dred nights featuring Poseidon with three hundred most beautiful Triton girls, Nereids, and Sirens in Miami and on the beaches of California youth bathed in the costumes . . .

War with the Newts Chapter 8 Islands

More Whole Earth

Whole Earth Catalog

The Whole Earth gang has indexed all of the Whole Earth publications, so now you can search the catalogs and other stuff.

The (Searchable) Whole Earth

Based on the (incredible) archiving effort of the Whole Earth Index to scan and digitize all of these old issues, by Gray Area and Internet Archive. That effort was led by Barry Threw, designed by Jon Gacnik and Mindy Seu. More info here. This site (+ OCR-ing these pages, embeddings, search functionality, and this webapp) was built by Lucas Gelfond, you can read the source here.

Previous post about the Whole Earth Catalog

Via Detroit Steve

The City Who Fought - Anne McCaffrey & S. M. Stirling

The City Who Fought - Anne McCaffrey & S. M. Stirling

Goodreads

Google summary:

. . . a 1993 science fiction novel, part of the "Brainships" series, about a "shellperson" (a disembodied brain) named Simeon who runs a space station and must use his hobby of wargaming to defend it and refugees from brutal pirates. The story follows Simeon and his new, strong-willed human partner, Channa Hap, as they work together to save the station and its inhabitants from the invading Kolnari.

Not the greatest book, but the exploration of the psychological aspects of the characters in the middle section was pretty good. There is a weak attempt at fitting Faster-Than-Light (FTL) travel with local space travel, but why do you need cold-sleep if you have FTL? Yeah, and when you start looking at tactics, you really need details on how this flavor of FTL works, and that is pretty much completely missing. Never mind, all the important characters and important action are going on on the space station.

Some items that caught my eye:

Page 164 paragraph 3 new-to-me word: sicatooth - "... and I want you to start pulling together those tasty goods we're going to use to tempt the ... sicatooth ." Google can't find it. I suspect it means something like a wolf-like attacker, a pirate, for instance.

Page 184 new-to-me word: antiphonally - in a manner characterized by the alternation of musical parts in a responsive manner between two groups of singers or musicians

Page 184 also a sex scene without using any sexual terms. Clever.

Page 202 paragraph 6 - a new-to-me term: stranger'n - contraction of 'stranger than' I expect.

Page 203 paragraph 9 - new-to-me word: chatelaine - the mistress of a household or of a large establishment

Page 234 "lost her rag" - all the good people say it means she has lost her temper, but I like this explanation I found on English Language & Usage Stack Exchange

Men have always dismissed women who have lost their temper as losing their rags meaning they were only in a bad mood/short tempered because of their period.

Page 237 paragraph 3 - Another unknown word: precocity - it is just the noun version of the adjective 'precocious' which means 'exceptionally early in development or occurrence'.

Page 249 paragraph 10 - In the last sentence we get some clever invented slang from Joat, a renegade girl, describing crawling around in the station's maintenance access tunnels:  "Some of the places pinch grudly but they're in-able if you're sveltsome."

Page 276 paragraph 2 - Hebrides Suite. Hmm, there is The Hebrides, a concert overture that was composed by Felix Mendelssohn in 1830, but there is also Clare Grundman's Hebrides Suite (1962), a popular four-movement concert band work based on Scottish folk songs from the Hebrides Islands. 

Page 276 last paragraph - whipped Jersey - Jersey cow cream is so rich that you can thicken it with a few good shakes (as used on an Irish Coffee), and whip it in no time at all. - Foodie Pilgrim

Page 287 and Page 288 fragments of three poems

• Ode to Duty By William Wordsworth
• Ode on Solitude By Alexander Pope
• The Waste Places by James Stephens

Page 293 paragraph 8 - Carmina Burana could be a medieval collection of poetry or it might be the a cantata composed in 1935 and 1936 by Carl Orff. Video. Includes O Fortuna. I suspect the cantata is the correct one here.

Page 313 top, fragment of a poem - The Quest by Rudyard Kipling

Victorian Spaceflight

Ancillary Justice by Anne Leckie

I've been trying to spend more time reading science fiction and less time surfing the net. It's not working great, but I am making some progress. I read Ancillary Justice by Anne Leckie last month and it's pretty great. Galaxy spanning adventure with a roboticized human who is ostensibly under the absolute control of his/her masters. The sex of any of the characters is never made clear, but it doesn't really matter. Anyway, about halfway through the story you realize he/she is lying. Ack! Now the story becomes very interesting. I think I read this once once before, like a zillion years ago. The part that stuck in my mind is a group of evil masters destroys a large military starship filled with thousands of troops AND THEMSELVES to keep some vital information from getting out. Fortunately for us, and unfortunately for them, our hero manages to escape before the ship explodes. Think that might have impacted her ability to be truthful?

Hillsboro Library Friends Shop

On a recent visit to downtown Hillsboro, I stopped by the Hillsboro Library Friends Shop, a tiny little bookstore next to the Max commuter rail line. They seem to be stocked with surplus from the library, books that are no longer in fashion, maybe. Anyway, I picked up a couple of science fiction novels for cheap, like a couple of bucks each, less than the price of a candy bar. 

One of them is The City Who Fought by Anne McCaffrey and S. M. Sterling. It's not great, but it's not too terrible, so I'm plugging along. 

Anyway about a third of the way through, this giant spaceship comes hurtling out of depths, headed right for giant space station. Through masterful machinations, our heroes manage to avoid a collision. Bah, humbug. Makes for great drama, but statistically speaking it is nonsense.

Any star fairing civilization, as a matter of course, is going to maintain a scan of their entire sphere of view for possible interlopers. Shoot, we are barely getting off the ground and we are doing that now. That's how we detected the recent interstellar asteroid that came through our system.

If a starship was approaching Earth, decelerating at one gravity, and we just detected it by the time it crossed Pluto's orbit, it would still take 9 (nine) days to get here, which should give us plenty of time to move our space station out of the way. Even if it were decelerating at ten gravities, it would still take three days to get here.

Deceleration

Average Radius of Pluto's orbit	40	Astronomical Units
times	93,000,000	Mles per Astronomical Unit
equals	3,720,000,000	Mles
times	5,280	Feet per Mile
equals	19,641,600,000,000	Feet
Formula	Distance = (1/2) times Acceleration times time squared
Formula solved for time	Time = Square root of (Distance divided by Acceleration)
Acceleration	32	feet per second per second
Time	783,454	Seconds
divided by	86,400	Seconds per Day
equals	9	Days
Formula	Velocity = Acceleration times Time
Velocity	25,070,525	Feet per Second
divided by	5,280	Feet per Mile
equals	4,748	Miles per Second
equals	2.6	% Speed of Light

I want to see more science fiction stories about space flight WITHOUT warp drives. Stories about voyages that take months or years. Kind of like Patrick O'Brian's stories about commander Jack Aubrey.

Glacier Pilot Notes

Six years ago I was reading Glacier Pilot by Beth Day, a story about Bob Reeve, one of the pioneers of aviation in Alaska. Now I'm trying to clean out some old drafts, so here are some items that caught my eye.

Alaska
p. 25 Nunatak - A nunatak is the summit or ridge of a mountain that protrudes from an ice field or glacier that otherwise covers most of the mountain or ridge.
p. 26 Williwaw - a sudden violent squall blowing offshore from a mountainous coast.

Aviation pioneers, page 28:

• Lindbergh
• Doolittle
• Twining
• Curt Le May

Before Bob went to Alaska, he spent some time in South America. Pan American Grace airlines, aka PANAGRA, used several different airplanes when they started email service to Santiago Chile (page 38).

Loening Amphibian

Fairchild FC-2 flying over the Andes mountains

Ford Trimotor refueling in Guatemala 1933

Sikorsky S-38

The Sikorsky S-38 made an appearance in the movie The Aviator:


The Aviator (2004) - Howard and Kath Flying Scene (Spanish Subtitles)

New-to-me terms:
p. 38 sin publicadad - Spanish for 'without advertising'.
p. 41 Hegira - the journey the Islamic prophet Muhammad and his followers took from Mecca to Medina.
p. 43 gambling - "Ship, Captain, and Crew" is a dice game where players bet tokens (like "gold booty") and try to roll a 6 (Ship), 5 (Captain), and 4 (Crew) in that order, within three rolls, setting them aside to collect the score from the remaining two dice (Cargo) for the highest score to win the pot. It's a push-your-luck game that can be played for ante to a pot, with the winner taking all the tokens. 

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry makes an appearance on page 41.

Flying between Santiago Chile and Buenos Aires Argentina means flying over the Andes mountains, and since aircraft weren't pressurized, you needed to find a pass. Uspallata Pass with statue of Christ was one.

1911 Uspallata Pass

Wikipedia article. Google 3D map.

Christ the Redeemer of the Andes

The statue of Christ the Redeemer is the hiding place for the red suitcase in Kleo.

Bookland

Why does every book come from the same country?
Chris Spargo

That's some jacket he's wearing. I mean, how many books does he pull out of it?

Modesty

An airman inspects his B-25’s four nose mounted .50 caliber machine guns. The .75mm cannon can be seen on the lower right portion of the nose.
Note the machine guns mounted in pods on the outside of the cockpit.

I'm reading Indestructible by John R. Bruning. It's about Pappy Gunn and his experience fighting the Japanese in the early days of WW2 in the Philippines and Southeast Asia. It's a bit of a slog, about half of the book is repetitive emotional clap-trap, but the actual story is fascinating. I'm a little past half way through and he is the process of mounting eight 50 caliber machine guns to the nose of a B-25. His group is also involved in flying missions out of Charters Towers, Australia, supporting the garrison at Port Moresby, New Guinea. On page 300 we get this report of one flight to Port Moresby:

After work after weeks of working long hours and stifling hot hangers, those flights to Moresby afforded him the chance to air himself out a bit, much to the astonishment of the skeleton crew who ran with him. 

He donned an aboriginal loincloth and would stretch his shirt and slacks out behind the pilot seat to let them get some air, too. This cost him dearly once when somebody opened a side window in the cockpit somewhere over the Coral Sea the sudden jet of the slipstream into the cockpit blew his clothes into a whirlwind. Before he could catch them, they spun right out the side window. Normally, that would just have been an aggravation, but Pappy's pocket contained at least $1,000 in pay and poker winnings. The actual amount varied on the telling and retelling by his pals but even worse was his arrival at Port Moresby in nothing but a loin cloth. As they parked at the Airdrome there, a group of females - either Red Cross workers or nurses - showed up with coffee and snacks for the crew. Pappy refused to get out of the cockpit. Always modest, the idea of a woman other than Polly [his wife] seeing him in such a state roused him to panic fury. He demanded that somebody get him a change of clothes, and when his crew wouldn't stop laughing, legend has it he threatened to shoot them. Somebody finally got him a shirt and a pair of slacks he dressed while muttering a constant stream of invectives, then dropped out of the B-25's hatch and stormed off.

Charters Towers to Port Moresby

Update next day replace Darwin with Charters Towers.

Whole Earth Catalog

The Last Whole Earth Catalog

The Whole Earth Catalog was the coolest thing ever. They did want $5 for it, which was like 'two hours of pushing broom' so I put off buying a copy until they threatened to discontinue it by calling this issue 'the last'.

I spent hours pouring over this massive volume. It was the greatest thing I'd ever seen. Wikipedia sums it up nicely:

The magazine featured essays and articles, but was primarily focused on product reviews. The editorial focus was on self-sufficiency, ecology, alternative education, "do it yourself" (DIY), community, and holism, and featured the slogan "access to tools".

Eventually I noticed there was a story written in the margin of the pages that continued from one page to another. It was an amusing tale. All I remember of it was that one of the minor characters drove a silver Alfa spider and maybe wore a silver jump suit. Anyway, the story was Divine Right's Trip by Gurney Norman. You can buy a copy of the book from any of the regular book sellers. Or you can read it off the Whole Earth website, but it means downloading a huge jpeg image file for each page. Or you might be able to buy a copy of the catalog off of Ebay. Kind of spendy for old newsprint. 

Via Detroit Steve

Curious thing about King of the Road (linked above). I found an exact copy of the video, except this one has the fan girls screaming like you'd hear on Beatles videos. I can understand if someone took a recording and added the screaming, but is it possible to remove the screaming and make the tune come out clear? I suppose the audio guys have any number of tricks up their sleeve that would enable them to do this.

High Pockets

Claire "High Pockets" Phillips

Manila Espionage is Claire's story about her life in Manila during WW2, and, hoo boy, what a life. She changed her name and opened a night club that catered to Japanese officers who were the only ones with the freedom and money to enjoy such things. Kind of like Humphrey Bogart and Rick's Café Américain in Casablanca. 

She's using the money she's making to buy food for POW's and the guerillas. Occasionally she extracts useful information from the Japs, which gets sent to the guerillas, who radio it back to the Americans. Eventually she gets arrested for espionage and spends eight months in prison before being liberated by the Americans. She weighed 145 pounds when the war broke out and 95 when she got out of prison.

Claire Phillips standing in front of her nightclub, Club Tsubaki, during its early-1940s heyday in Japanese-occupied Manila. (Image: Binford & Mort)

Reading it was kind of a slog. Her story was just a sequence of events.

The Translator by Harriet Crawley, Notes from first four chapters

The Translator by Harriet Crawley. I picked this book up at Broadway Books on Northeast Broadway. As I started reading it, I started making notes.

AgustaWestland AW109

Clive Franklin, the British translator, is picked up by a helicopter from a village in Scotland.

York Minster

They fly over York.

Rioja

He has a glass of Rioja at the airport.

Royal Air Force Voyager Vespina

They fly to Moscow.

The Caipirinha is Brazil's national drink, made with fresh lime juice, sugar, and cachaça, which is distilled from sugar cane juice p. 32

The Russian translator, Marina Volina has drinks with her son at a bar while watching the Russian Victory Parade.

Newton Running Shoes p. 32

Marina is a marathon runner.

Jaguar XJ Stretched Limousine p. 33

Clive catches a ride in Land Rover, the big shots ride in a limo.

Now we have a few places in Moscow:

Karl Marx Monument
Google - Workers of All Countries Unite
Wikipedia - Proletarians of All Countries, Unite!
Harriet - Workers of the world, unite!

British Ambassador Residence in Moscow p. 42

The Moscow Times reports:

The mansion at 14 Sofiiskaya naberezhnaya across the Moscow River from the Kremlin was built in 1893 for the “sugar king” Pavel Kharitonenko and his family.

After the 1917 Revolution, the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs claimed the mansion — and saved the interiors. At first it housed the families of important Soviet diplomats and visitors such as H.G. Wells and Isadora Duncan.

In 1929 the mansion was transferred to the embassy of Great Britain, the first major country to establish diplomatic relations with the U.S.S.R.

They also has some fine photos of the interior of this place.

Zaryadye Concert Hall p. 44

Zaryadye Concert Hall Interior

At the Russian President's villa, the gang admires the paintings. These two get special mention.

Girl with Peaches by Valentin Serov (1887) p. 46

The Monarch of the Glen by Sir Edwin Landseer (1851) p. 47