Jerrie Mock

Comrade Misfit put up a post about Jerrie Mock this morning. It didn't mean much until I followed the links and found she flew from Columbus, Ohio. That rings a bell! I was in Columbus then, and I remember there was a big fuss about Mock somebody. This happened right around the time Kennedy got shot, and that kind of overshadowed everything from that time period. Poking around, I came across this newspaper clipping:

Front page of The Columbus Dispatch, January 19, 1964, Via dispatch.com

So it wasn't just Columbus, it was Bexley, the same small suburb of Columbus where I went to junior high school.

Statue of Jerrie Mock at The Works

     More digging uncovered a statue erected at The Works in Newark, Ohio. Newark is about 40 miles East of Columbus. After we moved to the farm near Highwater, Newark became the local 'big city', i.e. where you went if you needed something more than a loaf of bread. I'm not sure why Newark got the statue.

Jerrie's flight path. Joan's flight path.

At the same time that Jerrie was making her flight, Joan Merriam Smith from California was making her own attempt.

Three Eight Charlie - Amazon has one copy of her book available for $500. Phoenix Graphics is selling paperback versions for $18. Kindle doesn't count.

P.S. I was delivering The Dispatch then. Did you see what it said on the front page? 208 pages! I don't think you could get 208 pages if you piled up an entire months worth of The Oregonian.

Chechen Dragon Rug

Caucasian Kazak Dragon rug with Yellow Ground

Martin Smith Cruz covers a lot of central Russia in Stalin's Ghost including Tver, where the Russian's stopped the German advance on Moscow, and Chechnya, site of recent wars. In the book (it's fiction) there was some kind of an incident in Chechnya that just didn't smell right, and so Arkady, our hero, has to keep poking at it until he figures out what happened. What happened was that the villain, a Russian officer, was trading with the enemy. He was buying Chechen Dragon Rugs from the rebels and, like so many illegal transactions, something went sour and a bunch of people ended up dead.
    I'm wondering if Chechan dragon rugs are a real thing so I check, and, yes, they are. The one in the picture above is valued somewhere north of $10,000. That's in the USA. In Chechnya with a war going on rug merchants could probably pick one up from a refugee for considerably less.

Here's a story about the rug business written between the first and second Chechen wars. I found it on Guide to Caucasian Rugs.

Treasure From Iowa

We picked up this oak suitcase stand when we were in Iowa this summer. It's kind of a weird piece of furniture. It's like a small end table, but it has slats instead of a solid top. It could have had a shelf down below, you know, to put things on, but it doesn't. Right now it is holding a stack of books we never look at. I was thinking I should get some bookends to hold them upright, make them easier to access if anyone ever wanted to look at one, but our household has gone almost all electronic, at least as far as reference materials go. But it's well made and it doesn't pretend to be anything it's not, and for some reason I really like it.

KONGOS - Come With Me Now

Tune of the week.

Caption of the Day

Ciudad Mier, Tamaulipas, Mexico. Sept. 5, 2014. Weapons seized by the military are displayed at a military base. Two rival gangs, the Zetas and the Gulf cartel, which use Tamaulipas as a route to ferry drugs and migrants to the United States have diversified their business, selling stolen gas and crude to refineries in Texas or to gas stations on either side of the border. (AP Photo/Eduardo Verdugo)

Emphasis mine.

Stalin's Ghost

Tractor Drivers by Arkadi Plastov 1943

Plastov awarded the Stalin Prize 1946.

I started reading another Arkady Renko novel yesterday. People are claiming to have seen Stalin's ghost on a subway platform. I was just taking my first nap of the day and it came to me in a semi-conscious daze that someone had mounted a holographic projector in the ceiling of the metro. Don't know why that came to me. It's not science fiction, it's a murder mystery set in present day Moscow. I'm not even sure holographic projectors exist, though I wouldn't doubt it after all the other weird things that have turning up in the news. Somehow I doubt that any holographic projectors will appear in this story, but I will keep my eyes peeled.
Couldn't find any ghostly pictures of Stalin, but I thought this one was pretty nice. Too bad about the Stalin Prize, but sometimes circumstances box you in.

Previous Arkady Renko novel mentioned here.

P.S. Finished the book, no holographic projectors appeared.

Clouds

September. 18, 2014. Aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson somewhere in the Pacific.

U.S. Navy photo by John Philip Wagner Jr.