In my longish story on the Wreck of the Shenandoah, I mentioned the release, and subsequent about face by the publisher, of a song by the same name within a week of the disaster.

At the time, I was unable to find words or music to the song, although I suspected that a child's school paper on the event was a transcription of the song, unrecognized by that child's family as they memorialized him.

The always excellent Mudcat Cafe forums, in this thread, one rich r, (whom I suspect of being my deeply knowledgeable acquaintance Rich Remsberg), contributes the complete lyrics to the song, which I've shamelessly reproduced below.

Interestingly, given the sourcing that rich r gives the lyrics, it's possible that the commercial genesis of the song was lost by those that kept the song in circulation and was therefore collected as a specimen of oral tradition.

This particular juncture of myth and ideology in American folk studies is something I'm very interested in - oral transmission of commercial music, incorporating mutating lyrics and melodic variations, produces some of my very favorite songs.

There's a remarkable set of coincidences described in the thread on the Mudcat board as well - Dale Rose writes

This puts me in mind of an extraordinary night, which still holds a place in my mind as one of those magical evenings which one never forgets.

A good many years ago, about 1961 or 1962 I think, I was spending the night with my cousin Johnny and his family in Southern Illinois. We spent the evening in our usual pursuits, just talking about whatever came to mind ~~ a thoroughly enjoyable evening spent with family. We played the old 78s on their windup phonograph, including The Carter Family, Jimmie Rodgers, Vernon Dalhart, and many others of the string band era. Among the Vernon Dalhart songs that we played was The Wreck of the Shenandoah. It was the first time I had ever heard it. Later we spent a good while outdoors looking at the six story tall balloon satellite which was clearly visible in the night sky, looking much like a moving star ~~ certainly a very large airship, if you will.

A couple of hours later, along about midnight, we were looking through a box of miscellaneous items that Johnny had purchased at a sale the previous week. Among the items was a piece of fabric, rolled up and tied with a faded red ribbon. It was fairly heavy material as I remember it, black on one side and a shiny metallic on the other. We untied the ribbon and unrolled the fabric, which was perhaps a foot square or thereabouts. Inside was a card which identified the fabric as a piece of the airship Shenandoah. We sat there in silence for a moment not quite comprehending the enormity of it all. Even now, nearly 40 years later and almost 75 years after the event, the coincidence of the moment still holds its spell for me. It is quite possible that we were the only ones to play the song that particular evening, and most certainly the only ones to play it, then to hold in our hands a piece of that very airship a few hours later.

WRECK OF THE SHENANDOAH

At four o'clock one evening
On a warm September day
A great and mighty airship
From Lakehurst flew away.

Alas! her son lay sleeping;
His last great flight was o'er.
He's gone to meet his Maker;
His ship will fly no more.

source: Frank C Brown Collection of North Carolina Folklore

And finally, you can hear a clip of the song from the CD "Inducted into the Hall of Fame, 1981: Vernon Dalhart" at Amazon.

Via Karen on the Jason Webley list I subscribe to, some aggravating news concerning my favorite of the Seattle summer music festivals, Folklife. Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, I had to miss the festival this year, and so I have not had a chance to round out the news from Karen.

She tells of Folklife's new-this-year policy of harassing street performers should they choose to sell CDs direct to the public rather than via the Folklife store, a policy which resulted in the ejection of my friend Jason from the grounds of the Seattle Center, where the festival was held.

Apparently, the stepped-up enforcement was taken in response to the festival's ongoing economic woes, and was intended to rectify lost revenues associated with control of CD sales via the Folklife store.

Naturally, street performers such as Jason are reluctant to separate CD sales from performance - doing so would effectively end CD sales for the performers. I personally think direct CD sales take very little away from CD sales in the Folklife store. This ban, just like the big media keiretsus attempts to ban analog to digital converters, simply results in a smaller pool of interested consumers and performers, shrinking the market, in the end killing Folklife itself.

No word at press time as to the size of the RIAA donation Folklife has clearly accepted. It seems kinda dumb, actually - the street performers represent, in many cases, the most organically active, non-preservationist venue in which folks can see and hear non-commercial music performed by, well, folks.

Anyway, it seems pretty clear we can kiss Folklife goodbye. Karen thoughtfully provided the address of the sponsoring organization's directing officer, which I reproduce herein in the hopes that venomously polite correspondance will be directed toward it:

Michael J. Herschensohn
michael@nwfolklife.org
Executive Director
Northwest Folklife

NYT (May 2, 2002): Lessons learned at Dot-Com U.

I found this article on the fairly complete failure of online education to live up to the hype it endengered (is that a word?) in the higher education community to be very interesting. I've been hearing about the future of school and distributed education from my Dad, a professor in the business school at UNC- Chapel Hill, for quite some time; and I personally would love to see successful implementations of online courses, especially for technical topics.

In my case, I strongly suspect that higher mathematics would be the ideal topic, because I have no apparent ability to retain testable concepts from traditional mathematic education while at the same time having high aptitudes for procedural learning, symbolic logic, and analytic problem solving.

Indeed, in informal recollection of acquaintances' experience, computer languages appear to lend themselves to this learning style very well.

However, I cannot imagine learning art history or english literature this way. The classroom is a stage upon which individuals with greater or lesser degrees of charismatic performance skill enact dramas of learning for the student audience; removing the element of charisma from "soft" topics would, I think, pretty much eliminate the motivation to learn them for many students.

Additionally, it's important to note that for many of us, to the present, the years we spend at college are the most important formative years of our lives in terms of establishing our habits of work and of interaction with peers and figures of authority. A good friend of mine who, although very deeply self-educated, did not attend college in the conventional sense, pointed out to me that his difficulty in initiating and continuing romantic relationships may stem from his lack of practice: without exposure to the frenetic sex-and-mating-dance experimentation which is a part of that period of many of our lives, he lacks simple skills that the rest of us learned while still young enough to not fret over being stood up or turned down for a date.

Additionally, online community, although intense and of benefit to the verbally inclined, is brittle, as we all know from flame wars we've observed. This brittleness of community means that the lasting value of organically formed relationships simply can't exist under present technologies. I'm not gong to say it just can't exist when mediated by digital technology, but I am skeptical.

This brittleness of community is certainly in the interest of concentrated capital: if there's no strong sense of organic community, there's no effective means to organize for non-capitalist economic action, as in a union or a consumer organization.

This is in fact reflected in the basic concepts of online education as initially implemented: the courseware is developed under "work-for-hire" rules and therefore is the copyrighted intellectual property of the courseware distributor rather than the academic that developed the work. This is in opposition to the former practice of courses being the copyrighted intellectual property of the professor that oversees or develops them, as in the case of my father.

I rather imagine that this has something of an effect on the overall depth of effort that is invested in the given courses.

However, I've had reason to note over the past ten years that the rate of tuition increases for higher education has in fact increased from the rate ten years ago (the Seattle Community Colleges, in many ways a model of a 21st century continuing education system, raised tuition 11 percent for, I think, the third time in two years this past spring semester). It seems clear to me that we are well on the way to re-establishing economic limits upon higher education such that college returns to it's historic status as the perogative of the extraordinarily ambitious and gifted or wealthy only.

Which in and of itself is both a giant step forward for the predominance of the Republican party in US politics and a giant step backwards for democracy, since high-school educated persons lacking college are polled as much more likely to vote Republican, and since economic power in the upcoming decades of this century is likely to rely increasingly upon the skills of persons with higher education, one must conclude that the interests of the less well-educated will be represented by persons with fundamentally differing economic interests and that therefore the interests of the less well-educated will be systematically ignored and demolished for the benefit of the individuals that hold real economic power.

Here is the completed painting, which I'm giving to my in-laws as an anniversary present. All of the materials in the painting have something to do with their life experiences.

You can see a WHOLE lot more of the process of producing this painting in my photo gallery for May 2002.

I believe the appropriate sub-albums are entitled "Still life", or a similarly imaginative combination of words.

Piranha Airships is a Puget Sound area manufacturer of fully-operational toy airships. These airships are about two and a half feet long, and have a single band-driven prop slung elegantly under the nose of the gasbag.

I'm a happy owner, and encourage you too to purchase a vessel. They are so simply engineered, it makes me smile just to think of them. My cats, on the oher hand, find the airship to be of concern - it's as though there's a giant floating dog in the room. The presence of the balloon results in much hiding, peering around furniture, and running away.

We actually ended up buying a tank of helium at Costco, for, like, $30 or something, which considerably simplifies the process of inflating the gasbag.

There are other resources for toy blimps and dirigibles on the net, most of which are radio-controlled and somewhat larger than the Piranha. They run about $80 to $500 depending on the size and compelxity of the vessel. High-end ones often have a wireless video-camera option.

Draganfly is probably the place I'd go first if I were looking to pick up an RC blimp to bother others in the office with. They are 3-channel products, which means you have a left and right drive sytem as well as an elevation control. Draganfly makes some other pretty cool stuff having mostly to do with RC indoor flight.

Ash-scattering mishap at Safeco Field stuns city - Seattle Post-Intelligencer

A, uh, die-hard Mariners fan wanted his ashes scattered from a plane over Safeco Field, but his urn came loose and fell off, hitting the roof and prompting a city-wide terror panic.

What had begun as a final, sentimental journey instead triggered a full-blown hazardous materials emergency response that prompted closure of streets around the field, evacuation of sightseers from the stadium and a bad case of jangled nerves citywide.

Agonizing minutes passed before firefighters declared that it wasn't the work of an anthrax-equipped airborne terrorist.

Man, I tells ya, ya leave town for a day or two and all hell breaks loose. Ken, maybe you better go back home before we see more of this.

http://www.hivelogic.com/safeaddress/

by way of

http://weblog.delacour.net/archives/2002/05/01.html#000455

A form-based interface to an entity-encoding mechanism, wich can make it harder for automated "scrapers" to harvest an email address from a web page or usenet posting.

Go check out subproc.com's Cover Letter Generator. I'm sure I'll be making heavy use of it as I search for work.

I encourage you to do the same.

Infiniti sent me, and presumably a few thousand others, this:

Here's a closeup of the copy:

Well, that certainly sounds promising, eh? Let's look inside!

Sigh. Ohh-kay. Won't be rushing out to get my drivers license today.

(Yes, it's posted a wee bit early again.)

I decided my Goog hat is lost for good, so I went out to find a new one. I'm not completely happy with this one, but it's pretty cool. It's a replica of a 1960 Havana Lions cap. Since I married a Cuban I think I can get away with it.

But geez, don't try to talk baseball with me.

Whoops! Meant to have this up this morning - lost track of time.

This is the underpainting for the still life I posted a sketch for last Monday.

Eric's got a raft of new stuff including links to the Weblog BookWatch and this mighty innerestin' java-based map of the blogosphere.

The blogosphere map is arranged in a spiral, and the author claims it's an arbitrary choice; yet Paul Frankenstein wondered aloud in his entry for May 5 about the possibility of such a map, and used, maybe coined (?) the word "blogosphere". So perhaps the spiral is not as arbitrary as the original author thinks.

The map is searchable; scroll down to the search box at the bottom and type a key word for a given blogteur (blogthor? blogger, I guess), and immediately you can see the links fanning out from the blog under examination.

For example, since Justin Slotman's Insolvent Repubic of Blogistan is both well-known and often linked to, type his last name into the search box to see his linky-ness.

A few weeks ago, Steven Den Beste wrote about communities of links and how he suspects that shared interests and viewpoints condition the links that a blogger adds to their pages; the net effect is to create clusters based on same-interest linking.

Not that there's anything wrong with that; I rarely read Den Beste because I usally disagree with his politics and I don't enjoy the feeling of being poked with a sharp stick. My personal awareness of this discomfort has led me to greatly curtail my own writing about politics here. Why poke you, dear reader, with the sharp stick of my own political opinions?

Enron-bashing aside, natch, that's just comedy.

I've not gone into detailed research about it, but the context for Den Beste's story is the differing approaches to blogging around the initial bloggers (grouped around Dave Winer and descended from a tech sensibility) versus the more recent batch of more-or-less political bloggers, a point Den Beste discusses.

I don't have a thrust of argument, really, just pointing out an emergent theme. The BookWatch has the potential to reflect issues of common interest and clustering around ideology, but it crawls only sites associated with the Winer-developed "recently updated" site Weblogs.com, which is (as it should be) only integrated by default into the also Winer-developed Radio blogging app.

This would presumably tilt the list in favor of geek and tech, and indeed, it tilts that way.

at Space.com, they have SPACE FOOD! It's the same incredibly artificial-tasting mystery food I so loved as a child!

SPACE FOOD!

Now, if only they had my NASA hat. Maybe I'll get an NX-01 Enterprise crew cap while I'm in California. Or a Shenandoah crew cap! Ooh! Gonna have to look into the Moffet Field thing!

the Morning News carries this lovely essay on typography in the newly risen New York Sun.

It's enough to make me wanna track down a copy, which I otherwise expect to hate. But still, more newspapers for everyone makes for a better place, I think we're all agreed.

Ah, I love reading about type. I can do it for hours and hours.

On the other hand, from the guy that hacked away at smartertimes.com for years, I'd expect a better website.

In the May 18 edition of the Seattle P-I, a story by Mike Barber picks up on the initial Blimp Week story of Boeing's investment in CargoLifter:

Dirigibles get the call: Uncle Sam wants you

Dirigibles -- massive flying machines that went the way of the mammoth a half-century ago -- are being resurrected as high-tech weapons in the war on terror.

Twice as big as a jumbo jet and soaring twice as high, they may soon be deployed to guard Canada and the United States, scanning for intruders on the Pacific Northwest's long coastline and international border.

After Arrest, Town Shamed by '68 Killing Seeks Renewal

An interesting article, which provides some opinions that support my own: Martinsville has acted as a scapegoat for the intolerant history and heritage of Indiana politics. This is not to say that I didn't subscribe to this idea while resident in Indiana, nor is it to say that Martinsville has not given us examples of racial intolerance.

from the article:

Last fall Martinsville was back in the news after the assistant police chief, Dennis Nail, wrote a letter to the local paper complaining about "queers," "Billy Buddha," "Hadji Hindu" and the outlawing of organized school prayer.

Neither the mayor nor the police chief disciplined Mr. Nail or publicly criticized his letter, which he had written as a private citizen. Mr. Nail was given a standing ovation at a packed City Council meeting.

So, let's just take it as a given that I won't be moving to Martinsville anytime soon.

I left it around here somewhere I swear. I miss it. It has sentimental value - I got it at the Guggenheim while visiting the witty and erudite Ken Goldstein. Here's a picture.

I hope I find it.

At the San Fran Chronicle via Romenesko's Obscure Store:

Roomie shot and killed in spat over $1,000 utility bill 35-year-old Oakland musician and pot grower was killed by his roommate, who was angered by a $1,000 utility bill for the home they shared.

<sarcasm>
Yes, indeed, it was clearly the dot-coms that jacked these poor saps' rates up that high.
</sarcasm>
Proving once again that guns don't kill people, deteriorating economic circumstances do, statistically speaking.

Here it is!

Suitable for framing, using as a desktop, or any such thing that strikes your fancy. I have a very limited supply of Ken Goldsteins, and would like to take the opportunity to solicit more Ken Goldsteins. I will, I promise, add to the publically available selection, and possibly - just possibly - make amusing photoshop art with them, such as superimposing Ken's head on the face of a pulp-fiction astronaut or possibly - and this is no promise, just me letting the creative muse wander - witty animations in which the various Ken Goldsteins act as, oh, let's say vaudeville stars.

And, you know, given enough Ken Goldsteins, it's possible, I think, to conceive of a great and mighty work for the internet in the sorry post-boom days. Dare I convey it?

Of course I do. If you ask nicely, someday, yes my friends, there may well appear in your browser the Kengoldstein Dance. But only given a sufficient supply of Ken Goldsteins.

Did I mention that Ken Goldstein has a blog, called the Illuminated Donkey and that I've badgered, teased, and amused Ken Goldstein into linking to me quite frequently?

Alas, I, in my churlish self-absorption, have linked to Ken much less frequently.

No more! From now on, I promise! A Ken Goldstein of the week while supplies last - and they'll last some time if my readers (all six of you, no make that five, one just clicked out on one of these many, many links to Ken Goldstein's blog, the Illuminated Donkey) supply me with more!

the Illuminated Donkey has actually also provided me with a lead, by tracking down many other Ken Goldsteins here and here.

Browsing site-visitor Kiyo's site, I noted with interest this link to Four-Word Film Review.

Four taken at random:

2001: "Ape, monolith, Jupiter, baby"
Apocalypse Now: "Fat Brando. The horror."
Dodeskaden: "Crazy boy, Tokyo ruins" (I got to write this one!)
Alien: "Don't chase the cat!"

Although these random examples include mostly synopsis, there are also critical reviews, and it amused me.

This mp3 audio interview at The Comics Journal pairs two of America's greatest brush-and-ink men! Specail guest appearance by Rube Goldberg! Rube Goldberg!

Man! I can't wait to hear this! (More on Kane's estimable work to come)

Uh, while you're at the CJ, I'm sure you'll want to read this account of a comics award ceremony in Spain involving Peter Bagge, Art Speigelman, Osama bin Laden, the WTC, and live sex acts. I am still having a hard time keeping it all straight in my mind.

http://www.vectorlounge.com/04_amsterdam/jam/wireframe.swf

Dang, that's neat!

via Steak and Cheese.

Venerable technocapitalist cheerleader (or apologist) Wired has undergone a sobering redesign, in which quite a few changes have taken place. Gone, gone, gone, are the Wired Index (which is messed up: watching how tech stocks fare in a downturn is MUCH more interesting than watching them in a giant boom - wait, maybe they canned this a while ago) and the Ticker, that long, multi-page, one-line thread of text that was used as a divider in the opening profiles and news nuggets.

Also, apparently gone are the multipage visual introductions to features. The most subtle change I noticed was the abandonment of Wired's house font, Wiredbaum, for body text.

In a flash of creativity (not), they've gone all out in the search for the most radical, challenging, forward looking font family that could possibly use for heads, subs, captions, and body copy and determined that the font which most fervently matches today's zoom-zoom techno-conomy is.... Helvetica, a font which first came to prominence in the late 1920s and last saw truly universal employment in design during the recession of the 1970s.

Uh. Maybe this, like the well-known skirt index, is a sign that the current economic downturn will be a long one.

On a positive note, this was the first issue in a long time that I did not throw across the room in irritation at least once. I loved the first two years of Wired; but once they started running covers featuring 60-year-old money managers, I knew my love affair was over.

For the last few years Wired's editorial direction was driven by the lust for dough and no longer the lust for technoutopia, no matter how hard they tried to convince their readership that they were the same thing. They ain't, never have been, and shouldn't be. The more they played up that neoclassical global capitalist cheerleading claptrap the more my stomach hurt from reading the damn thing.

The Internet is making people dumber faster - By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

"At its worst, it can make people dumber faster than any media tool we've ever had."

To which I really must say, if you click on the link, you're in danger of making his opinion into fact. What a pompous windbag. Is he one of the the guys that blamed the California energy crisis on the dot-coms? This load of crap is the usual geezer-pleasing criticism of a new or developing medium, a tactic lazy, lazy men resort to when they got nothing else to write about.

In fact, the culprit for what Friedman is all bent out of shape over is rumour and credulousness. But what seems to set him off is that someone from Indonesia has noticed what everyone in the US has known for years: Bill O'Reilly is a loudmouth twit. Of course, this takes Mr Friedman aback.

If he'd led with the well-known fact that Fox News is making people dumber faster I never would have felt the need to smack him around. Plus, isn't that teevee? Well, you know, we've known for years that teevee makes people dumber faster.

No word on Freidman's upcoming Blimp Week story.

Viv and I, along with all the rest of the country, dropped into our friendly neighborhood multiplex this weekend to see "Spider-Man".

My viewing experience bears out the reviews I'd noted; Toby Maguire is perfectly cast, the story was deftly and wittily handled, Dafoe's usually better than this, the digital FX were somehow not as good as they should have been (Dude! Ida no how to fix 'em! They just were, well, to computery or something!).

The film suceeds in actually translating the archetypal, finely balanced quality of Silver Age Marvel books in such a way that the story is not resolved at the expense of a major ongoing plot point, which has been a modus operandi of pretty much all superhero comics movies to date.

An additional suprise of the film was the effect of director Sam Raimi's insistence on using the genuine New York metropolitan area as his setting. In essence, New Yoork, as it does in many great films set in the city, becomes a major supporting character.

However, the emotional force that this character delivers doesn't come from the filme itself, but from the events of 9/11. All through the flm I felt like I was seeing a dead relative, alive again. Now, I know NYC didn't die on 9/11, but of course everyone that watched the events of that day has been affected by it one way or another.

The filmakers decided to reshoot the ending, which involved the WTC in a crucial manner, and this delayed release of the film. Thus, the film has no shot in which the towers appear, and no reference to the fall of the towers, either, which is odd, if understandable.

Scenes of parts of a building in the edge of Times Square exploding and falling into the street also had a very different resonance than they would have when the scene was written and shot. There, additionally, was a gratuitous shot of a crowd on a bridge pelting the baddie Green Goblin with debris during which a random person declares "You attack one of us and you attack us all", which as understandable an addition as it is, felt clumsy and unneeded. It certainly did NOT provoke the fist-pumping cries of "Yeah!" it was intended to. I imagine it tests differently the closer you are to NYC.

Anyway, seeing the city up there on the big screen made me realize how much I'm looking forward to seeing it agin the next time I fly into JFK. The approach uses the coolest flightpath in the world, and circumnavigates Manhattan from stem to stern and back again before skimming the roofs of Governor's Island.

So I enjoyed the movie. Sam Raimi has definitely made better flicks, but at the same time, it's clear that this film is really among the better efforts in the genre. I have no idea how he'd go about it, but I'd love to see the same tense, giggly "I can't believe that just happened" quality the Evil Dead movies have in a followup Spidey flick.

The charcoal sketch for a painting I'm working on at the moment.

I experimentally updated a post here to see how it would affect the MT front page update list.

It was immediately visible there, and stayed on their front page for just over 35 minutes. One site visitor came here from there in that time.

Although I know that updating their full donors list (a donation enables the update list there) is not at the top of the giant list of things they have to do, there are about 430 donors appearing on that list, at $20 (minimum) each. That's a mere, if estimated, $8.6k. Not chump change, surely, but, my goodness, Movable Type is such an awesome piece of software I'd really have expected more.

Interestingly, if we assume that all 430 donors update their blogs on average once a day (obviously a shaky assumption), and further assume that those updates are evenly distributed over any given 24-hour period, then we can predict than in any given hour, about 17 blogs will rotate through the list of ten most recently updated blogs.

Which means that on average, the front-page link should last a bit longer than half an hour. Exactly what I observed.

In practice, of course, the updates aren't evenly spread out over 24 hours. Since I'm on the left coast and tend to publish the next day's entry at bedtime (11:30 to midnight, give or take), and the majority of MT's users are probably located in the US, updates come slowly after that time of night, and my recently updated link tends to stay up much longer overnight.

And in fact, last night I had site visitors via that link from Japan, Hawaii, and Australia, as well as two nighthawks from Vanderbilt University and Baltimore over a three-and-a-half-hour window.

All of which I find interesting in a musing kind of manner.

So: Oz, I say "G'day" to ya!

Nippon, "Yo-koso!" (which, I sure hope. means "Welcome!")

Update: Kiyo, via a comment on this entry, corrected my mis-spelling, which was "Yu-koso". I corrected it, and (ahem) arigato, Kiyo-san!

http://fisher.lib.virginia.edu/japan/
will provide a handy link which should translate my site into kanji, I think.

Thanks for visiting! I hope I can be of service, or something.

On May 5th, Viv and I finally pulled into the parking lot of the train-car diner south of the sports stadiums here in Seattle, Andy's Diner. We, along with the rest of Seattle, have driven by this landmark for years without ever venturing in.

The restaurant closed for a period but reopened, I think, in 2001. Diners as a restaurant species in Seattle as a whole are completely endangered, and have been closing up all over the city since the mid-nineties. This is a drag since I subscribe to the "formica equals good cheap eats and bad coffee" belief system. I'm still not over the closure in the early nineties of the other Andy's Diner on Broadway in my neighborhood, Capitol Hill.

Sadly, in fact, the last of the Hill's greasy spoons, the kick-ass diner-slash-bar Ernie Steele's (under the pseudonym Ilene's Sports Bar) closed a few months ago, and just reopened as a Julia's (an extension of the Wallingford eatery).

We walked the front doors of the train-car Andy's at about 5 pm on a Saturday. The joint was totally empty. We were seated in a turn-of-the-century train car that had its' original booths removed and replaced with two and four-top tables. The car was narrower than the cars currently used by the also-endangered Amtrak. It retained not only a great deal of the original fixtures but additionally a great deal of the preceding century's nicotine buildup. For all that the car was currently non-smoking.

I tried ordering a microbrew (stupid! what was I thinking?) and was informed that actually, ALL the taps were offline, and I could choose between Corona or MGD. I shoulda just ordered a Manhattan. I went with the MGD.

I ended up ordering the 10 oz New York Strip with hashbrowns and breaded oysters. The oysters, much to my surprise, were a total triumph. This dish was once a staple of Northwestern cuisine, and I have many a happy memory of noshing on 'em with my grandparents. They don't appear on many menus any more, and when they do, they often SUCK. Not these, not at all.

The steak was OK, nothing speacial. Viv got a porkchop dish which, I cannot stress enough, was spectacular. Our vegetables were also perfectly prepared. In short, to my astonishment, the cook kicked ass.

Our total bill? Forty-one clams. A complete bargain, less than half what we would have paid for the same meal and service on the Hill.

After eating, we wandered around the interior of the diner, which was apparently constructed entirely of old railcars (perhaps as many as ten). It was pretty empty, although a steady migration of middle-age folks were streaming into the "lounge car".

Among other wonders, I found a case full of bowling trophies from the sixties, and a television lounge featuring not a soul, a seventies Zenith color teevee and several orange naugahyde lounge chairs.

These last wonders were located in a rail car which was used by FDR in the late 30s and was installed as a part of Andy's at its' opening in 1946. Let me clarify that: YOU CAN HAVE A PRIVATE PARTY IN A RAILCAR USED BY FRANKLIN DELANO ROOSEVELT AT ANDY'S DINER IN NEAR SOUTH SEATTLE!

Hm, I just realized that since the Museum of Flight (located just a smidge further south) currently hosts the Lyndon Baynes Johnson Air Force One 707, one could eat at FDR's traveling table just prior to observing LBJ's hydraulically mounted monument to the psychology of power. LBJ had a specially constructed seating area on the plane, with a raised seat for him. Everyone else got radically, unconventionally low bench seats at the table. The table itself is hydraulically mounted so that it can be moved up and down at the press of a button.

You'll NEVER guess which person seated at the table could reach the buttons. By which I mean you already know who held that power.

So I think that's a neat possiblility. Eat lunch with FDR and Eleanor, and thank them for the important things they did for our republic; tour LBJ's plane, and realize he was practically a nutcase.

You should know I think that these two are also the best Presidents of the century, men who rival one another, and Lincoln, in the service they performed for our country.

Andy's Diner,
2963 4th Ave. South,
Seattle, WA 98134-1914
(206) 624-4097

No URL that I could find.

But I did find this cool matchbook cover art for the jernt at the American Matchcover Collecting Club. Zounds! Someone tell Jimmy Lileks about this!

Well now, here's a shock. Lets' see now, I've been speculating bitterly about this since, um, MY F***ING ELECTRICITY BILL TRIPLED.

Get 'em! Hang 'em high! Horsewhip 'em! Brand 'em on both cheeks! Ride 'em out of town on a rail! Boil that tar - I'll bring the feathers!

Sounds like Washington pols are scrambling to clamber aboard the California-launched boat, which certainly pleases ME.

Less facetiously (don't actually hang 'em, just keep power utilities in public hands for the rest of my life), it seems clear to me, at least, that the destruction of cheap power for the west coast functioned as the catalyst for the recession (or whatever you want to call it - I'm still not working, so I'll call it a recession).

This InfoWorld Story from the January 2001 bears out my observation, partly.

I don't know if you recall. Falling stock prices of dot-coms in the wake of the Justice Department indictment of Microsoft on April 15, 2000, in conjunction with the energy crisis, led to public fingerpointing - at the dot-coms, because they were using sooo much electricity that it was bringing California to its' knees.

My very favorite of these moments was from ever-smugly irritating former Seattle Weekly editor Knute Berger on the public radio humor show Rewind, in which he blamed the dot-coms for Enron's failure. (Or at least that's how I remember it.)

My own bitterly nursed hatred of Enron extends beyond the company itself and into the fervent hope that hearings will, in fact, uncover irrefutable evidence that Enron officials colluded with the GOP to create the energy crisis, and predictable, consequent recession in time for the 2000 election season.

They just missed, you know; if the recession had arrived in full force in October instead of December there would have been a much clearer outcome in the November elections.

Nonetheless, I'm not holding my breath for such evidence to come to light, or even get covered, let alone have any meaningful political consequences. Representatives of one political party's presidential campaign were conclusively demonstrated to have dealt arms with foreign terrorist governments in order to sway an election a ways back. However, that demonstration was without appreciable political consequences for the administration that resulted from said campaign.

There's no reason to expect anything other than cursory coverage should evidence of a GOP-Enron recession plan emerge. In fact, I'd guess that should such a thing emerge, our good pals charged with making the inquiries will run like hell in the other direction instead of pressing the point.

Ah, 100% randomized image and slogan goodness just above.

BUT

It looks like the page build futzes a bit from time to time.

AND

I learned a new smiley today:

\m/

It's your standard-issue heavy-metal hand signal, the horns. RAWK ON DOODZ.

New York Times political reporter A. O. Scott calls in from the polling station:

"Like weary Brezhnev-era Muscovites, the American moviegoing public will line up out of habit and compulsion, ruefully hoping that this episode will at least be a little better than the last one, and perhaps inwardly suspecting that the whole elephantine system is rotten."

It's pretty much a curb-stompin. Blood, teeth, horrified onlookers. I laughed out loud:

'Star Wars: Episode II': Kicking Up Cosmic Dust (Yeah, yeah, it's at the Times. Oh shuddup. You're already registered or else you don't have a computer in which case go buy the damn rag already and SAY how are you reading this then huh smart guy)

Ask me what a curb-stomping is. Go on. I dare ya. No, I take it back. Go ask ya muddah.

Ouch! He uses the line, oh my god, he USES THE LINE:

"But where are the clones? Send in the clones!"

I'm sorry, you're not old enough to read this review. Your mother and I have decided it's for the best. You can look it up on half-legible microfilm in a couple decades, about the time the last three Star Wars movies come out.

May 4, 2002
"Truck firebombed at poultry company
Undetonated incendiary devices recovered from under two other trucks"

BLOOMINGTON, IN - An early-morning explosion that damaged a truck at a wholesale poultry plant was deliberate, an agent with the federal Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms said Friday.
- www.hoosiertimes.com

here's a link to a mailing list posting of the article, and here's a link to the article in the context of the original publication.

Tip o hat to Spencer Sundell.

UPDATE: the lead story on May 10, 2002 involves the long overdue arrest of an individual on murder charges in Martinsville, the town halfway between Bton and Indy, to which, since the murder, 33 years ago, the stink of the Klan has clung.

While it's time to resolve this matter, I have to point out that received wisdom had it, when I was a sprat, that Martinsville was the source of all evil in Indiana, and that the Klan had sprung from there, reborn, in the wake of D. W. Griffith's monstrous 1920's triumph, "Birth of a Nation".

In fact, what was going on there was my homestate scapegoating a small city. Martinsville had a rep as the worst place Indiana to be black or Jewish in when I was growing up. Maybe that 's true. But it was no piece of cake in Bloomington either, and the whole state elected a Klan government in the 20's.

Yow! Lotsa stuff in the real world last week!

Item:

Minnesotan art student runs amuck, pipebombing mailboxes for no apparent reason.

Alice in TV Land has more, including a link to a mirror of the kid's band site (they are called "Apathy").

Here's what I'd like to know: why is John Walker Lindh such a lighting rod compared to this this kid? My only slightly informed opinion of the bomb kid is that he's sort of hapless, which is somehow reinforced by his choice of band names.

Here's what's interesting to me about this: we don't actually have any evidence at all that Lindh ever hurt a fly. He'd been trained, sort of, and had chosen a religious belief system that became highly unfashionable in the American press in September, granted.

But I'm hard pressed to recall a clear, unambiguous blowing-up-a-mail-carrier's-hand incident associated with Mr. Lindh.

So:

Luke Helder, associated with injuring six people via pipe bomb, a hapless art-nebbish whose concerned parents have helpfully illuminated his troubled mind in the media.

John Walker Lindh, associated with our gummints' enemy du jour, a hapless religious nebbish whose concerned parents have helpfully illuminated his trobled mind in the media and whose head is slated for pikeage by pundits and represtatives of the US government as well.

UPDATE: (CNN.com) "Police: Suspect planned smiley face bomb pattern"

Okay, maybe that explains it. Or maybe the kid just read "From Hell" and "Watchmen" a couple too many times.

Check the map. Looks like he'd gotten the left side of the smile started.

So, is this a junior thesis for art school? It may be the world's largest work of geographically specific art.

Some of you may know that I've been writing occasional comics reviews for Cinescape. I've also had the good fortune to be asked to write about the new Star Trek series for them from time to time. I reviewed the inaugural episode but they took a pass, so I imagine it will wind up here sooner or later. I have a super short one-pager in the current print edition, and also did a speculative piece about possible plot directions for the show.

The double-header that aired Wednesday night was striking because of the naked inspiration the stories took from current events. The story development phase for these episodes likely took place in December, running, possibly, into January.

The name of the pivotal planet in the first episode that aired was "Mazar", undoubtely drawn from the site of several fierce battles during the war, and of course the site of John Walker Lindh's capture; these events occurred in late November and may well have been fresh in the minds of the writers for the show. The plot? A distinguished Vulcan ambassador has been expelled from Mazar for conduct unbecoming, etc., and Enterprise must take her to a rendezvous point. But what's this? Mazarians in fast ships chase Enterprise, battling her for the ambassador. Will our heroes make it? Why are the Mazarites upset? Well, you'll just have to watch the episode, but rest assured, there are plot echoes of current events throughout.

The second episode finds our doughty crew helping a low-rent Lawrence of Arabia, a strapping charmer who invites the Cap'n and Tripp down to his desert camp for a lashing game of white-boy lacrosse. Then the planetary gummint hails T'Pol in orbit and beams the big clue in: our boy down there is a terrorist.

The Cap'n and Tripp get the word, and they make a run for it over 30 klicks of burning sand, fleeing a nighttime artillery bombardment depicted with great care by the FX team. Do they make it? Well, you know I don't kiss and tell.

This episode was as close as I've ever seen Trek come to reflecting on current events in real time. It's important to note that the issue of the dashing rogue's terrorism is left deliberately vague - he's got weapons, he's leading a war against a superior military force, he claims oppression, and they say he takes out civilians. We never get much of either side, in fact.

Which is really as it should be, since Trek is about ideas and character. Braga and Berman era Trek has actually repeatedly returned to the theme of terror and revolution over and over, almost always unsuccessfully. The Bajorans resisting Cardassian occupation. The Maquis resisting Federation treaties ceding their planets to the Klingons. The problems with these depictions of the issue is uniformly their failure to avoid preaching and at the same time their inability to pick a side. It's as though the ambitions of the writers and producers to create comitted, socially responsible fiction about the topic are always defeated by the requirements of the medium of commercial TV.

Of course, it could just be the topic. I don't think you can discuss it and make everyone happy.

This episode did create a sympathetic character who was identified as a terrorist, and in light of recent events in the middle east, I am surprised they aired it. However, becasue the majority of the episode was associated with issues of character and science-fiction problem solving, the episode avoided the tiresome quality that the other episodes revolving about the theme have often had.

Naturally, your mileage may vary. I rather imagine that it probably nettled more people than it did not.

Oh ho! on the official Trek boards, we find this thread: "More than a little disturbed by 'Desert Crossing'", in which thread starter "mike01" (no relation, I assume) sez:

It all stank of a "hidden" pro-Palestinian, and more disturbingly, pro-terrorist (his cause is worth fighting for? he attacks civilian tartgets and Archer has no problem with this?) message.

I am more than a little disturbed. I don't know what to think. It's almost like a Palestinian terrorist made his way into the plot room at Enterprise headquarters and snuck in a propaganda script and no one noticed.

(God, the board UI SUCKS. You can't just flip through the thread in chronological order.)

In January of 2001, a blimp owned and operated by Las Vegas-based Airship USA slipped the surly bonds of Earth and man and wandered the skies of the greater San Francisco metropolitan area before finally crashing into a Bay Area restaurant.

Remarkably, no one was hurt in the incident, and even more remarkably, no one interpreted the event as an omen for the principal advertising sponsor of the blimp's visit to the Bay Area. Said sponsor? The ill-fated XFL.

Here are two stories from SFGate.com, the online presence for the San Francisco Chronicle, um, chronicling the event:

XFL'S UNPLANNED TOUCHDOWN:
Wayward blimp's wild, woolly flight ends in Oakland crash - dated 01/10/2001

Runaway blimp lands atop Oakland waterfront restaurant - dated 01/09/2001

Intriguingly, the article notes that the blimp involved in the accident had already claimed two lives. A tiny bit of digging revealed, via an LA Times story hosted on the manufacturer's website, that two people involved in the construction of the airship died while within the gasbag of the ship itself, when helium entered the part of the bag they were working on.

Much to my pleasure, I discovered that the manufacturer, Aeros Airships, was founded by a visionary Russian aviation engineer, Igor Pasternak. Part of this pleasure is due to my current reading, the second book of Michael Moorcock's four-volume historical fiction novels of the twentieth century, the Colonel Pyat cycle.

Colonel Pyat is a victim of history; and by his own account, a visionary aeronautic engineer, and a self-deceiving drug-dependent con artist with a bad luck streak a mile wide. I feel quite certain Mr. Pasternak only shares the Colonel's good features.

Additionally, Moorcock's work includes "The Warlord of the Air", a tale of the greatest of fictional airship fleets, a fleet constructed for the anarchist utopians of the central Russian steppe. Led by Mr. Moorcock's romanticized version of Nestor Makhno (an anarchist military and social leader during the period of Russia's civil war following the Revolution), the fleet enables the anarchist hordes to establish a new golden age. Said golden age, naturally, spans the globe and opens a bright new chapter in the history of mankind, with liberty, justice, social equality, and cool victorian technology for all.

It's a great work of both airship and anarchist propaganda, which makes no bones of its debt to the sentimental boy's novels of aviation and right conduct such as the well known Tom Swift series. It's loads and loads of fun. Don't look too closely now, or you'll note that's it's kinda litr'y to boot.

And with that, the curtain falls on BLIMP WEEK. I'm sure I'll revisit the theme of LTA as I keep this crazy rattletrap dream alive - thanks for coming by! If ever I cut a side of "The Wreck of the Shenandoah", you'll find it right here.

Up Ship!

Just so my gentle readers don't think I was yanking anybody's chain, here's a wire story with photos about Tuesday's Rolling Stones - Blimp Week cross promo:

Yahoo wire photos which will undoubedly change, and here's the story proper: "Rolling Stones Announce Yet Another".

I thought about nicking a shot or two, but I'll wait till the Stones site has some on offer. But as a bonus, here's a link to a RealMedia clip of the great yellow beast on a test run. Isn't thirty years a long wait to take an answering poke at "Yellow Submarine"?

Hmmmm... That hangar in the background of the still shot on the news page at the Stones' site is familiar to me.

Aha! It's Moffet Field, in Sunnyvale, CA. The clip itself, however, may have been shot at Tillamook - the big standing piers in the background as the ship noses up are the skeletal remains of a wooden Naval LTA blimp hangar, like the remnant at Tillamook. But you know, there are several of these hangar skeletons scattered around, so it could be elsewhere, and it would stand to reason there'd be a skeletal hangar at Moffet.

Here's a link to a museum located at Moffet. They helpfully note that "The hangar includes an awe-inspiring view of hugeness beyond your comprehension", in regard to the shelter seen in the still pic referenced; the rocket scientists at Ames have thoughtfully taken all that hugeness and put it into this quicktime VR look at the interior.

Now you know.

The screaming of the aluminum girders suddenly ceased. The deep spanging thrum of cables popping slowed. Charles E. Rosendahl clung to a girder and watched the rear half of the great dirigible dwindle below him into the, uh, dark and stormy night.

Rosendahl was the navigator on the USS Shenandoah, the first of the US Navy's four great dirigibles. Reverse-engineered from a German zeppelin brought down over England, the major engineering innovation in the ship's design was the use of helium, which, as we all know, is a good idea for an airship. Adding to the attractiveness of the idea, the United States at the time had a global monopoly on helium production.

The airship.freeserve.co.uk site has a gallery of collectors' images of the Shenandoah. Navy Lakehurst Historical Society also has a great deal of Shenandoah-related material.

The Shenandoah (said to be an Algonquian word meaning "Daughter of the Stars") had already survived at least two near-disasters in her mere 2 years afloat. She'd been in flight for about 24 hours, en route to St. Louis from her base at Lakehurst, New Jersey. The other incidents were both wind-related accidents. She'd been torn from her moorings in a New Jersey iwindstorm, losing her nose in the process and free-ballooning for the better part of a day all over the eastern seaboard before the 17 persons who happened to be aboard at the time were able to bring her home.

Her other brush with death happened when she was caught in downdrafts while crossing mountains in Arizona on her way to San Diego.

The first incident was widely publicized, with a commercial radio station (the beloved WOR) actually playing a key role in establishing communications with the wounded giant and broadcasting the radio link live to the greater metropolitan area of New York City (imagine!).

The night-time incident in the mountains was not widely covered.

On September 2, 1925, the Shenandoah had departed Lakehurst on the first leg of a Midwestern publicity tour. Publicity tours proved, for all of the Navy's airships, to actually be the single most time-consuming missions the dirigibles would undertake. The popularity of the ships with the public and politicians, combined with a certain military impracticality, engendered a great deal of criticism of the LTA program within the Navy. Even within the LTA program, these goodwill tours were not regarded as pleasant or worthwhile assignments. The commander of the Shenandoah, Captain Zachary Lansdowne, is said to have been annoyed that the schedule for the airship's Midwestern journey was published in advance.

This annoyance seems selfish and petulant at best to modern ears. In researching this article and from other readings in the area, it's clear that the presence of one of these ships in the sky over your city or farm was regarded as an event of great moment. People took time off work, made plans to rise in the middle of the night, and then talked about the sight for the rest of their lives. Much like the space program of the 1960s, the technology of the airship appears to have offered a sort of totem for utopian ideals of technological and social progress.

At any rate, it's well documented that all along the route the ship was scheduled to take, from Lakehurst to St. Louis, people were aware that the ship was coming and had made plans to be outside looking for the ship when she flew over. For the people of Noble County, Ohio, this anticipation would turn to something very different a little past 4 o'clock on the morning of September 3.

Navigator Rosendahl noted a cloud formation that might be a storm front at 4:20 am, and brought it to the attention of Captain Lansdowne. At the same time, the ship began to rise uncontrollably. This initial rise carried the ship to 3,100 feet, where severe turbulence was encountered. A second, faster rise occurred, carrying the ship to a height of over 6,000 feet despite emergency venting of helium.

The crew of forty-three, roused by the turbulence and the dramatic changes in air pressure, were all working to secure the ship. They were quite aware that an uncontrolled ascent posed a grave threat to the gas cells, which could rupture if the ship were not brought under control.

On the ground, observers recount seeing the ship tumbled along a mass of scudding cloud in the moonlight and suddenly shot high into the sky. As suddenly as it lifted, it was seen to dive dramatically.

Aboard, the crew felt a cold wind catch the ship, and as the ship moved from the rapidly ascending column of warm air and entered the rapidly dropping column of cold air, the efforts to vent gas were replaced by orders to dump ballast. As the crew's frantic efforts yielded a short-lived artificial rainstorm of seven thousand gallons of water onto the Ohio soil, she entered another thermal column.

Navigator Rosendahl was sent aft. As he headed toward the rear of the ship, she assumed a violently inclined position, possibly nose up. In essence, the front of the ship was in one weather system, and the rear was in another. The collision of the fronts created sufficient windshear that the ship was literally torn in two. Rosendahl stood at the breach, riding the nose of the divided ship skyward.

When the break occurred, the nose-mounted control car, containing the bridge and the captain, was torn away from the hull and plummeted about three thousand feet to the ground. Engines along both main sections of the hull fell away as well, carrying with them mechanics who had climbed out to tend them in the fantastic beating the ship had been taking.

The bow section rose into the turbulent night. Rosendahl and six other airmen established contact with one another and took stock of their grim situation as the undamaged helium cells lifted the bullet-shaped wreck high above the Ohio countryside, reaching an estimated height of 10,000 feet.

The aft section, about 470 feet of the 680-foot ship, broke once more before landing close to the location of the control car's impact.

Meanwhile, local residents had begun to stream toward the grounded remnants of the once-proud ship, and as the stunned survivors of the wreck sought both care and contact with the Navy, news spread rapidly, eventually drawing an estimated (by me) ten thousand people to the wreck sites within a couple of days of the event. The wrecks were stripped by souvenir seekers, although a guard was eventually posted.

I've seen photos of unconcerned looking guards before sections of the wreck that have clearly not been picked over, and read accounts of picking so thorough that souvenir hunters dug up potatoes from the farms the hull landed atop when there was no material to be had from the broken body of the Shenandoah.

As Noble County began to react to the historic tragedy unfolding above, the seven remaining fliers systematically began to bring the remnant of the Shenandoah under control, principally by venting helium. An hour after the breakup and twelve miles away, they were low enough to call out to farmer Ernest Nichols for help securing one of the trailing cables.

In a Cleveland Plain Dealer article, "Dirigible disaster", one of several elderly eyewitnesses reminisces:

The farmer’s son, Stanley E. Nichols, 77, of Caldwell, was only 2 ½, but said he vividly remembers when that giant silver cone, nearly 10 stories high and 300 feet long, came plowing through their orchard.

"I was scared. We were all scared. Very scared," Nichols said. "It was coming right at us, open-end first, with long strips of fabric flapping in the wind."

(The article includes an elderly woman recalling the ship coming apart in the air, as well.)

Nichols gave it a shot, busting a fence and uprooting a tree stump in the process before finally setting the rope to a large tree. The seven shaken survivors then borrowed the farmer's shotgun and holed the remaining helium cells, laying the Shenandoah to her rest. Remarkably, only fourteen persons perished, eleven of those in the control car.

Her last flight might have been over, but the consequences of the wreck had just begin. A song, "The Wreck of the Shenandoah" was written and released under the pen name "Maggie Andrews" by the team of Carson Robison and Vernon Dalhart, who specialized in disaster ballads and are remembered today principally for "The Wreck of the Old 97". A recorded version of the song was also released, but both versions were quickly suppressed after complaints from family members of those lost in the incident (click the image of the sheet music for a large view of both sections of the wreck).

I'd hoped to find a recording of the song to link to, or failing that, to perform the song and provide that here, but I was unable to locate the music in time for this article. I did find a link to a "school paper" preserved by the family of one Dalton McLaughlin, possibly in the belief that Mr. McLaughlin had written the lyrics, but which are probably a child's transcription of the song.

An additional, and not at all obvious consequence of the wreck, was the loss of all the US Navy's helium. Helium was dramatically more expensive than hydrogen (over $100 a cubic foot versus hydrogen's $2-and-change), and although the Navy had two active dirigibles in service in September of 1925, (the Los Angeles had been delivered from Germany in October of 1924) but helium was so scarce that only one of the two ships could be airborne at a time. It would be April of 1926 before there were sufficient helium reserves available for the ship to take to the skies once again.

The wreck is still recalled today, as the Plain Dealer article referenced above shows, and I also located an article at the New England Aviation Museum which includes photos of the wreck site from 1997 and from 1925. Bryan Rayner, of Ava, Ohio, the town closest to the wreck, maintains a museum in a trailer with wreck-related artifacts and curiosities.

Finally, here's another account of the airship's loss, originally published in American Heritage in 1969: The Death of a Dirigible. It's much more dramatic than mine.

UPDATE: I followed up some on the Vernon Dalhart song here, and there are some other wonderfully interesting comments on that entry as well.

UPDATE, 2008: Gregg Frisby has sent some family photos of the tail section, probably taken early on the morning of the wreck.

Ken Goldstein, of the Illuminated Donkey has kindly agreed (actully, he's done no such thing, and will come away from this performance believing it was all some sort of peculiar dream brought on by one too many egg creams) to perform the BLIMP WEEK theme song for us here in the vast and dusty mike.whybark.com Dirigible Theater, largely abandonded since the dot-com collapse picked up steam.

(Enter KEN stage left, wearing a straw boater, white flannel pants, and a red-and-while striped jacket while twirling a cane and performing stereotypical vaudeville dance moves. a sad piano tinkles the melody in the echoing, empty hall, dusty but still flashing gilt through the murk)

blimp week, it's blimp week
not shark week or zep week
it's blimp week for me and for you

blimp week, it's blimp week
where you'll feel firm and strong
and the songs will make you cry
blimp week, it's blimp weak
sailing through the internet SKYYYY!!!

(with, the, you know, big finish, down on one knee, cane hooked over outspread arm, you know the bit)

According to Reuters, "Rolling Stones to Blimp New York".

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - The Rolling Stones plan to drop in from the sky next week to announce their first tour in three years, according to a U.S. government official.

The veteran rockers will commandeer an airship and cruise into Van Cortlandt Park, New York City's third largest park, in the northwestern Bronx, on Tuesday at about 12:45 p.m. EDT (5.45 p.m UK time) The site's wide open spaces, used for football and cricket matches, make it a practical landing area.

A tip of the hat to mike.whybark.com roving field personnel Eric Sinclair and Anne Zender for arranging this spontaneous publicity for BLIMP WEEK, and of course, we'd like to thank the fun-loving grandpas in the venerable British rock band too. Don't hurt your backs, boys! And don't forget to tell 'em it's BLIMP WEEK!

Members of the press who may find themselves at the event will be encouraged to sing the Blimp Week theme song allong with Mr. Jagger, in a hearty chorus of good-fellowship and old-boy vaudeville.

Here's a bit more from the German press:

Kommen Rolling Stones mit einem Zeppelin nach New York? at sueddeutsche.de.

UPDATE: The Blimp Guys were behind this ship.

Shocking news!

Recent discoveries indicate that in an alternate timeline, the company which produced the poster above makes money hand over fist over jowl!

For a printable PDF, click the image.

UPDATE: I've realized that I misused the word "Zeppelin" in the poster. Since I depicted the Cargolifter dirigible and not the currently-flying Zeppelin NT I suppose I should change it to Seattle Pacific Dirigible Airways, or mayy-be Seattle Pacific Air Dirigibles. That would have the added benefit of gently teasing the Germans with the acronym SPAD, an obvious nod to some very excellent and fast areoplanes from the Great War which were 100% French! Whoo! Vive la Brie! J'aime bien les brioches! J'ecoute Serge Gainsbourg!

from Zeppelin's announcements page, dated April 19, 2002:

Want to ride in a Zeppelin? Me too! The next season begins 19 April. Book flights via Deutsche Zeppelin Reederei: http://www.zeppelinflug.de/pages/D/buchung.htm. Auf deutsch. € 335,00 - € 370,00 per person. Tell them I sent you. They'll look at you strangely :)

Deutsche Zeppelin-Reederei GmbH
Allmansweilerstrasse 132
D-88046 Friedrichshafen
Deutschland

Telefon: +49 (0) 75 41 / 59 00 - 0
Telefax: +49 (0) 75 41 / 59 00 - 499
E-mail: info@zeppelinflug.de

Hey look! The krauts have a webcam pointed at the zeps!

Here's a googlefish tranny of the deustchsprak about the webcam:

"Our Web Cam shows pictures of the anchorage for the zeppelin NT with telephoto and wide angle. The pictures are updated once in the minute by the camera. We wish you much fun with the observation of the zeppelins."

Lessee now... As I recall, this company is actually related to the old, prewar Zeppelin company started by Herr Zeppelin at Freidrechshafen around the turn of the century and continued under the leadership of Dr. Hugo Eckener until the Hindenburg disaster. That company, though, was pretty well wrecked by both wars.

Hm, understanding the actual ties of the old company to this one must be pretty complex; I'm sure the current proprietors must be eager to embrace everything about the old Zeps except their actual use as aerial terror weapons during World War One (however abject a failure such deployment proved to be) and as ambassadors of Nazi propaganda up to the eve of World War Two.

Which leaves pretty much just the technology itself, abstracted from any messy real-world political or economic considerations.

Hmmm.

The Great Zeppelin Raid on England of 1916 is thoroughly documented in the eassy at this link. The essay begins with these words:

This article was begun on January 31st, 1996, at just before 9.00 p.m. At around that time and on that date eighty years before, two German airships were flying South over Shropshire, and although they didn't know it, they would soon bomb my town, and almost kill my great grandfather, my grandmother and her sister.

Which is a great lead. Go read it.

There's a great but also terrible movie, made with a generous budget in 1970, called "Zeppelin", starring Michael York and Elke Sommer, which is about a fictional spy mission involving a German military zeppelin. If love the LTA, you'll dig the flick, which is geektacular for it's accurate recreation of the scale of the great ships and for the detailed, persnickety recreation of the control deck of a German military zeppelin. The control systems for the zeps were borrowed, in part, from the control systems of u-boats, with a seaman (or naval airman, in this case) at two independent attitude wheels, one for steering starboard and port, and one for setting climb and dive inclination.

Bouyancy was controlled by dropping water from ballast tanks, and venting gas as needed - very similar in principle to the bouyancy controls on a submarine.

I actually learned about the control system for these zeps from an online game, "Dawn of Aces", in which you can select from a number of WW1 military aircraft to fly against others while online, including a military zep.

... and an UPDATE (which I have also added to the appropriate entry): I was mistaken, somewhat, in characterizing the Shenandoah as United States designed - she was actually built using plans developed in Germany by the Zeppelin operation, and can be considered the immediate forerunner of the great zeps we think of most commonly when the subject comes up, namely the Hindenburg and the Graf Zeppelin. She can be immediately recognized in photographs by her streamlined control fins; all the later ships employed more blockily shaped fins in order to increase control-surface area. She's clearly the ship seen on the cover of Sky Ships.

Sigh. And an update to the update. first, the cover of Sky Ships actually shows the Los Angeles, built in Germany by the Zeppelin company for the Navy immediately after the end of the war. The Shenandoah was in fact reverse-engineered from a zep brougt down over England, but was indeed built in the United States. A diagnostic distinction between Shenandoah and Los Angeles is the externally mounted control car of the Shenandoah.

Sky Ships, a history of the airship in the United States Navy, published 1990 by Pacifica Press. By William Althoff, 304 pp.

Out of print. Buy it from the NAS Lakehurst gift shop online or used from Amazon. Here's an excerpt concerning the consruction of the Shenandoah at NAS Lakehurst, New Jersey.

Finally, it should be noted that Lakehurst is open for tours. If you live in New Jersey, you may want to visit (you know who you are).

---

I picked this book up in late summer 2000 at the Tillamook Air Museum, in Tillamook, Oregon, on the Oregon coast, an air museum housed in the surviving hangar of a former Navy blimp station (or NAS, Naval Air Station). If you're a Nova watcher, like me, you may recall a Nova (entited "the Blimp is Back") on blimps and alternative flight technology shot around 1991 in which a home-made rack of surplus Huey helicopters, all welded together, falls apart explosively on the airstrip, and later features an impossibly large building burning.

That building was the other hangar at Tillamook NAS. The buildings are huge, impossibly large. They have many interesting airplanes, and yet, the museum feels homey and small. It's definitely worth a visit if you ever hit the fantastically beautiful, and gratifyingly remote and isolated, Oregon coast. Portland dwellers, just drive west for an hour. Everyone else, buckle up.

The book itself is a fanatically detailed history of United States naval lighter-than-air aviation. The program began during world war one, but only began to see actual flight after the end of the war, with a British airship and the United States designed and built Shenandoah. There were also some soft-bag airships imported from the British, known as the B-type, which were effectively wingless American biplane fuselages slung under gasbags. Alas, I could find no images on the net of this incredble bit of jury-rig engineering.

You know, we have a car we're not using, and, I bet we could, like, um, soak, like, sheets in some, um, rubber cement, and um... unh, what? Oh, sorry, I, uh, drifted off there.

UPDATE: I was mistaken, somewhat, in characterizing the Shenandoah as United States designed - she was actually built using plans developed in Germany by the Zeppelin operation, and can be considered the direct forerunner of the great zeps we think of most commonly when the subject comes up, namely the Hindenburg and the Graf Zeppelin. She can be immediately recognized in photographs by her streamlined control fins; all the later ships employed more blockily shaped fins in order to increase control-surface area. She's clearly the ship seen on the cover of Sky Ships in today's graphic.

Sigh. And an update to the update. first, the cover of Sky Ships actually shows the Los Angeles, built in Germany by the Zeppelin company for the Navy immediately after the end of the war. The image is in fact of her coming into port at Lakehurst for the first time; Dr. Eckener is in command of the ship. The Shenandoah was in fact reverse-engineered from a zep brougt down over England, but was indeed built in the United States. A diagnostic distinction between Shenandoah and Los Angeles is the externally mounted control car of the Shenandoah.

The most surprising thing I gleaned from the book was the detailed internal politics of the US Navy from the end of World War One through the 1960's, when the LTA program was halted. The author spares no detail in recounting the byzantine posturings of the various service departments and interest groups as they jockey for position and for their share of the ever-growing, ever-more-astoundingly-huge defense budget of the United States of America.

Unfortunately, from the author's perspective, and, I suppose, from mine, LTA was a consistent loser in these lobbyist's wars. I believe that the author's intent in detailing the politicality of military budgeting is the soldier's intent in the oft-heard complaint "I'm a soldier, not a politician".

Naturally, such a statement, although fervently subscribed to by the utterer, is at best a misrepresentation of the facts, and persistently creates difficulty in public discourse concerning the military. It's my opinion that it's an effective defensive tactic deployed in democratic combat, and in point of fact, my reading of this book supports that view.

Nonetheless I found it fascinating, rather than a dirty shame. If military budgets are easily documentable as the result of political processes, then, the development of these budgets can and should be completely open to the public as all political processes should be in a democracy. The fact that much of the politicality of the process is documentable is in and of itself reason to toast our democracy and her traditions.

However, one of the most important tactical determinants of the political defeats of the naval LTA program is clearly the repeated loss, in the dramatic airship wrecks of the Shenandoah, Akron, and Macon (as I recall), of the senior airship brass within the Navy. If the most committed admirals died in peacetime as the consequence of the difficulty of safely operating a small number of large, rigid-construction lighter-than-air ships, one might reasonably conclude that ambitous younger leaders might prefer to explore such technology as, oh, the aircraft carrier.

Indeed, one of the lessons I drew from the book was that the reason we lack those fabled queens of the sky today is not due to the dim vision of evil bureaucrats, or due to the horrible, lingering publicity of the loss of the Hindenburg. It's physics.

Something that big, which moves slowly, has negative bouyancy, and retains the mass of any object the size of two football fields, is, first, hard to control, and second, at the mercy of, well, everything.

After the Los Angeles, the last of the great American dirigibles and the only one not lost in amazing wrecks (stay tuned for a piece on the wreck of the Shenandoah in Ohio!), the Navy refocused the program on smaller, soft-bag vessels, which operated successfully thoughout World War Two as convoy escort scouts. These vessels are the direct ancestor of today's Goodyear blimp, and in some cases are still in service with the Goodyear company. Goodyear, naturally, prays before candles nightly that a military LTA program will rise from the dead. In point of fact, their candles may be well burnt, if they know how to speak Boeingese.

At the tail end of the program in the early sixties, a new technology was emerging which tied a large, rigid keel to ever-larger soft lifting bodies. Within the lifting body itself? A long-range radar station. These ships were designed for high-altitude, near continuous service, something like a high-altitude geosynchronus satellite, but, duh, within the atmoshpere.

As noted earlier, Boeing and Cargolifter have just announced a partnership. One of the proposed uses? Long-range high-altitude surveillance.

Stay tuned! It's BLIMP WEEK!

OK, I'm making it official. I declare this to be BLIMP WEEK!

Seven consecutive entries here at mike.whybark.com will be oriented toward the wonders of lighter-than-air aviation! Tell your friends! Send your mom!

Now, technically, I hope to make most of the entries about dirigibles, but Blimp Week is more fun to say. And it's so utterly opposed to that lamest of lame cable promos, the Discovery Channel's $%^&* Shark Week.

And you KNOW what folks would think if I tried to call it "Zep Week", for god's sake.

<voice=pitchman>
All week, on mike.whybark.com, it's BLIMMP WEEK! If it's SLOWWW... and it FLOATS in the AIR... and it's been EMPHATICALLY ABANDONED as a MILITARY TECHNOLOGY... we've got it here. It's BLIMMP WEEK... DON'T TOUCH THAT MOUSE!
</voice>

Uhm, I'll make that eight entries, since the next entry really should have it's own title, and I am counting this entry.

Here's a link to an old site about LTA, ZEPPELIN. I believe this is the oldest site on the topic to be found online. If "Zeppelin" is not the oldest, than this one is: Airship.

Later the same day I dribbled the two scanty grafs on airships headlined "The goodrich blimp?", this crossed the wires:

"Cargolifter buoyed by Boeing partnership" - Reuters

Cargolifter, which aims to develop zeppelin-like airships to transport heavy plant and construction loads, said it had signed a letter of intent with plane maker Boeing (NYSE:BA - news) to examine potential business opportunities to develop "lighter-than-air" vehicles for commercial, military and security use.

Ooh! Can we have an airship base in Seattle? Can we? Pretty please? Hunh? Can we? Can we?

They could, uh, dock at the Space Needle! Yeah! Yeah! That's the ticket!

Thanks to Prism kites for the skyline shot (oh, I made a few improvements) and to Cargolifter for the CG airship. The non-CG airship is a demo model called "Joey" that is literally small enough to be carried with in the larger CL160.

"Scanty grafs", get it? Like, you know, the Graf Zeppelin? Oh, never mind.

Oh, and "LTA" is geekspeak for "lighter than air" and implies "aviation"; so a translated headline would be "More lighter-than-air aviation".

Nope, the Goodyear paper bag.

While we're on the subject, check out Goodyear's killer site on the company's long association with lighter-than-air aviation: www.goodyearblimp.com. Includes this page featuring old film footage of lots of interesting things, including a five-ship fleet parade, the christening of the Akron, and other footage that will confirm your pre-extant belief systems regarding lighter-than-air aviation.

I personally would really love to be able to, for example, take an airship to San Francisco, or even Victoria B.C. Here's what the flight to Seattle from Victoria looks like on a perfect flying day at 3000 feet - approximately the cruising altitude of the great sky ships of the 30's.

Listening to the coverage of the tornado storms of late April 2002, I was put in mind, as I am every time I hear coverage of tornadoes, of my experiences on the evening of April 3, 1974. I was eight years old. The map above links to a very large and detailed version; here are some photos.

Over April 3 and 4 of that year, the largest outbreak of tornadoes ever recorded swept across the midwest. 127 tornadoes were documented during this outbreak. My family lived in West Lafayette, Indiana, the home of Purdue University. My parents had dropped me off at the apartment of a classmate for babysitting, as they had some sort of engagement that night.

As I remember it, shortly after they left, the weather became very gloomy, and the clouds took on the extraordinary grass-stain green that I still associate with tornado weather. The apartment we were in had no basement, and it made me quite anxious. We'd gotten used to retreating to the basement of our house during the regular tornado watches that are a feature of spring in tornado alley.

I have a memory of looking out the second- or third-story sliding glass doors that led to the balcony of the apartment. Silhouetted against the evening sun beyond the cloud deck, the shafts of no less than four tornadoes danced and writhed in the distance, the fingers of a giant hand reaching from above. I have no idea if this is a legitimate recollection or something that I later inserted into the memory. The map above appears to record only one track through Tippecanoe County. However, the NOAA records also refer to tornadoes with multiple funnels, and to one in particular that went through Tippecanoe County at 4:50 pm.

There were at least three small children in the apartment. We were pretty scared. Indeed, I think the experience of being without shelter and separated from my parents was profoundly traumatic for my sister. For the rest of her life she had a true phobic reation when exreme weather watches would occur. I think, however, that this did not really take root until a few days later.

A colleague, or perhaps a graduate student, of my dad's was living, with his prtegnant wife and maybe another child, on a rented farm in rural Tippecanoe County. We'd been out to the farm several times the previous summer. The tornado or tornadoes I was watching destroyed the house in which these people were living. As I recall, my father's colleague was away, possibly at the event my parents were attending, and his wife went to the basement, as instructed by the weather alerts.

In the basement, she was huddled down, when suddenly, she felt a dripping or spitting. Looking up, the entire house had been removed from the foundation. I don't recall the details of their story. But I do recall standing on the sodden soil, looking down into the hole in the ground that was once a basement. We went out to see the damage as a family.

In my adulthood, I've long been a fan of what they refer to as moderate climates. Do I miss the snow? Nope. Do I miss the tornado watches? Nope. Do I miss the incredible humidity and heat of the midwestern summer? Not at all.

It's interesting to note, however, that among the tornadoes which struck this past week (the last week of April, 2002) was an F5 - the stongest grade - in Maryland, the first that a storm of such ferocity has been recodered in Mayland. For more info, here's a NOAA article on the storms.