Doc 40: Mick Farren, recommended to me with extreme prejudice by the Best Bus Driver in the World.
The brand new cam-gnome at Mount St. Helens' Johnston Ridge Observatory has clearly heard the message. His placard states, “I will get the snow,” and you know gnomes are industrious little fuckers.
RESIST FALSE WINTER!
Supposed to hit seventy today and the upcoming week's lows are all over forty. Time to move plants around and get some more into the ground. Back to the garden.
Hit it, Jason.
Huh, might as well make the to-do list here as anywhere.
1. Mow lawn.
2. Pot tomato suckers, start a few more.
3. Site herbs: Sage, sage, rosemary, lavender, rosemary, oregano.
4. Plant taters.
5. Pick up compost bins, soil sifter.
6. Sift soil, replace as needed, discard rocks.
7. Fertilize as needed.
8. Compost deer ferns.
9. Set up floral seed sets.
10. De-winterize back deck.
Several years ago, casting about for a subject of interest to me on which I felt I might be able to contribute in some small way, I wrote a blog post concerning the wreck of the United States Naval airship Shenandoah. Happy with the result, I had no idea that the piece would become a destination for readers from all corners of the internet, many of whom shared a personal connection either to the great ship herself or to the wreck.
Over the years, I've received first-hand accounts from people who watched the ship break up on the stormy fall morning of September 2-3, 1926. I've been sent photos, song recordings and lyrics, and family anecdotes. I have always taken care to highlight these contributions and to update the various posts treating of the event.
Early this month, I was contacted by Gregg Frisby, who kindly forwarded some scans of a family heirloom: a series of photos taken in the wake of the ship's loss. Gregg thinks the pictures were taken early in the morning of September 3. They are of the tail section, and show a different and more intimate view of the section than this prior submission, which shows the port side of the tail section from quite a distance.
Interestingly, in reviewing my Shenandoah-related posts, I noticed a comment on the original:
My great-aunt Maude Phillips Harrison, and her husband John Harrison, lived in Caldwell, OH. We have several family pictures of the wreck of the Shenandoah, including a man in Navy uniform who may have been a survivor. Although Aunt Maude and Uncle John's involvement in the wreck has been lost over time, the pictures are quite real and diffent than any “official photos” I have ever seen. I can only speculate that the Harrison's (or someone they knew) took them very soon after the crash.
Posted by: Kim Frisby at February 28, 2003 7:12 AM
The pictures that Gregg has so generously shared are clearly these photos.
Gregg and I had an interesting correspondence over the images, which I'll excerpt inline with the images.
Here's most of Gregg's initial note (interspersed with the images for effect):
My great-aunt Maude Phillips Harrison, and her husband John Harrison, lived in Caldwell, OH.
Attached are family pictures of the wreck of the Shenandoah, including a man in Navy uniform who may have been a survivor (see this photo).
They are not digitally enhanced in any way, but are in remarkably good condition for being over 80 years old.
Although Aunt Maude and Uncle John's involvement in the wreck [remains unknown] they may have been in the photos, but they are not clear enough to tell and no one surviving in the family knew Aunt Maude when she was younger.
We can only speculate that the Harrisons (or someone they knew) took them very soon after the crash.
They were obviously taken before the Navy or War Department was able to come in and secure the site, or begin clearing away the wreck.
I looked at the picture of the man with the bandaged arm, and realized I might be able to propose an identity, if the man was indeed a survivor of the wreck. Here's what I wrote back to Gregg with (my correspondence is blockquoted and italic):
The guy with the middy hat may very well be a survivor, given his bandaged hand. It's been a while since I did my research, but my recollection is that until marines reached the site the survivors tried to secure the site from souvenir seekers, but were overwhelmed.I found a site with some 1926 news clippings about the wreck, and under a section headed “Survivors” found this:
It was the only reference to minor hand injuries I could find online.
'J. Cole, Philadelphia: “I had just got out of my berth and gone forward when I felt the upward lift of the bag. I heard the noise of the twisting framework as the ship buckled. As the center of the bag dropped I slid down a rope ladder. Burned my hands, but laded safely.” '
A countervailing point here: Mr. Cole's narrative would tend to place him in the nose of the ship, and it seems most likely that any survivors photographed in these images early on the morning of the wreck would have been among those that came to earth with the tail section, eighteen of the total twenty-nine who survived. She had 41 (I have also seen 43 cited) in her complement at the New Jersey initiation of the voyage.
I have never seen pictures of the tail section which included the ship name similar to these; while I'm sure the photographer probably regretted the low shutter speed I quite like it. I also really like the wear and tear on the prints you scanned: thank you for not cleaning them up.
Finally, while I'm sure you know this, I thought I'd expound a bit. The longer-frame shot that's quite blurry with at least 13 people visible is a longitudinal view down the spine of the tail section from the rear on the starboard side of the ship. The three horizontal bands are the colors of the starboard elevator, the large flap used to set the pitch or climb/descent angle of the ship in the air.
The structure that appears to rest on the elevator, connected by three vertical lines in the image, the largest of which is directly above a man in a white longsleeved shirt with his hand in his pocket, is the starboard trim-tab, a smaller elevator used to make finer adjustments to the ship's angle of attack.
Gregg responded with a brief note.
The story from J .Cole does seem to match the injuries shown in the photo. If it is not him, it most certainly must be one of the other survivors. I am wondering if the fellow next to him isn't also a survivor. He isn't dressed like the other townpeople shown, and he looks a little grimy and shell-shocked. Since the ship didn't go down until 5:30 AM, these pictures must have been taken at first light. It is amazing the craft was able to survive almost 2 hours in such bad conditions.
Thanks for the article. I never realized the crash site was so close to Caldwell, (great-Aunt Maude lived on the outskirts of town), where the uninjured survivors were taken. What a strange coincidence that one of the survivors was from Logan, and took the opportunity to take a few days leave to go home.
I will never cease to be amazed at the way that the internet has provided an opportunity for people to come together and share information like this. I'm deeply honored to simply fulfill my role as catalyst and cataloger for this stuff. I hope you find it as fascinating as I do.
The ROM update to the Treo went fine, but was entirely too much work. Backup this, wipe that, locate a clean media card (no other mechanism was provided) - all in all, a GIANT WASTE OF TIME.
Oh, and here's a charming update - since it was a ROM update, everything on the internal storage was nuked, including the IBM WebSphere JVM, the java interpreter required to run such frilly little addon programs as Opera and Gmail.
So I went to Palm to redownload it, only to lean that Palm dropped their licensing agreement with IBM in January.
Can you say 'death spiral?'
UPDATE, here's a download link. Who knows how long that will last.Treo 680 update.
Yesterday afternoon, the Treo stopped seeing the cell network. Looks like this update should resolve the issue. What a pain.
Another day of sleet and cold inspired me to don a Twittermask, recorded here since I have yet to bolt on a satisfactory RSS scraper for consolidation purposes hereabouts:
REPEAL FALSE WINTER
NO JUSTICE NO SPRING END FALSE WINTER
BRING SPRING HOME NO FALSE WINTER
FALSE WINTER? TRUE SPRING!
FALSE WINTER STEALS YOUR TIME 3 minutes ago
FALSE WINTER RETARDS THE WITHERING AWAY OF THE STATE 4 minutes ago
FALSE WINTER DENYS HISTORICAL INEVITABILITY 5 minutes ago
WITH SOUP AND FIRE AND TIME, FALSE WINTER WILL FALL TO YOUR RESISTANCE 6 minutes ago
LET FALSE WINTER BE SHAMED BY PUBLIC DENUNCIATION AND DRIVEN FROM THE AIR BY MEANS OF ECLIPTIC PRECESSION 7 minutes ago
FALSE WINTER ALIENATES THE WORKER FROM TRUE SPRING - LET THE BULBS AND BLOSSOMS MINGLE 9 minutes ago
RESIST FALSE WINTER 10 minutes ago
DRIVE THE FALSE WINTER FROM THE HEARTHS OF THE PROLETARIAT 11 minutes ago
DEATH TO THE FALSE WINTER 12 minutes ago
---
SOL INVICTUS VADUM DEBELLO REPROBA HIBERNA
STAND WITH THE HISTORICAL INEVITABILITY OF THE ORBITAL REVOLUTION: FALSE WINTER YEILDS TO AXIAL PRECESSION
BENEATH THE SNOW, THE BEACH
PWN F4LS3 W1NT3R
Plants inside, per warnings of a two-day hard freeze and a week of lows in the 30s. Planted crops wrapped in plastic.
There was more snow today, although last night's drop left with the dawn as expected. After that, there was hail. No thunder and lightning yet.
OK, in the past ten minutes, half-an-inch of snow has accumulated, and if anything, it's snowing harder.
.
Chili down for the pre-cook. The recipe I selected was of interest specifically for its' dogged avoidance of namby-pamby Frenchified flavor-building practices, can be simplified thus:
Add ground beef to about half the beef's volume of water. Dump some spices and chopped onions in. Boil for a couple of hours.
I will be tasting and adjusting the spicing, but in the end declined to pproceed as I would have if faced with the same ingredients and flavor goal on my own. No staged addition of spices to browning meat, no carmelization of onions: chili, fifty years ago, was a food designed to be cooked by busy men for other busy men, in large quantities and with a minimum of fuss.
I do imagine remaking the chili in my normal manner, once I've sample the recipe. But tomorrow night, youse can call me Cookie.
Wikipedia. Skyline. Recent recipe in the P-I.
History of Cincy chili. A recipe.
To chocolatize, or not to chocolatize? And shall I adulterate by using my customary turkey instead of beef?
I'm looking at Wednesday evening. My thinking is to start the cookery on Tuesday night, except for the noodles and such items as may be best served by a shorter cook time. Complainants, please advise!
Cathy's Book - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
For whatever reason, this 2-year-old ARG popped up in some Google ads for me today. Here's a nonlinked version of the ad:
Cathy's Book
If found call (650) 266-8233 -- And change the default access code!
www.cathysbook.com
I'm interested, but what's even more interesting is this:
When I saw the ad, I immediately thought, "Wow, someone's directly looking to drive ARG traffic via ads! I must investigate!"
Given that my operating assumption is that I am just like everybody else, I wonder if that means everybody else also has such well-tuned ARG antennae by now.
Probably not, huh?
Certain of my esteemed readership have decried with confternation a recent addition to this publication, viz. In particular the emotive and affected tone of urgenfy, in combination with a most genteel lack of germane or illuminating detailf, has raised alarums in the heartf of certain more senfitive personf among the readerfhip.
Thus, a clarification: neither illnefs nor emergenfy has afflicted the persons of thif houfe, or indeed thif family. A life-event conferning a friend fimply caught me unawaref.
The editorf of this publication regret any public difcommodation or diforder prompted by our refent reportagef.
She was murdered in 1808, and her body was thrown into the Deep River.
After her killer was found and escaped punishment, the killing became famous, and a ballad (or two or three) was written about the murder, Omie Wise.
Omie Wise, it seems, is the wellspring of a particular tradition in American murder balladry, centered on the theme of a cad doing in his pregnant girlfriend by the banks of a river. Pushing beyond a strict folkloric interpretation, one might argue that the murder ballad gives rise to crime stories, and in particular murders, as a central narrative element in popular entertainment. An element in many of these songs is a verse which describes the grisly moment of the killing, often in conjuction with a first-person perspective. The best-known example of this is Knoxville Girl, which is in and of itself not based on a true murder, unless it is Omie Wise's death which has been crossbred with the older British sources. At any rate, one can draw lines straight from this gravestone to today's police procedurals, such as CSI. One wonders if a pregnant murder victim, done in by her fiance and tossed into the river, figures in any of these contemporary works. One certainly hopes so.
In the last week of March, my family and I drove to the cemetery where this stone stands. (I was in North Carolina to visit my parents and for a business conference). It is an old cemetery, and most of the original stones are long gone. I was able to locate three from just after 1808. Instead of the typical arch-top marble slab we think of as a gravestone, these early markers were made from a slick, greenish-grey local stone similar to slate. They were lightly engraved by, as one might say, 'divers hands.'
In researching this, it became clear to me that the stone I took a picture of is a replacement. In addition, near the stone, there is a large block-shaped marker in the center of an area without markers. The stone is inscribed as a memorial to the cemetery's anonymous dead. Given these three elements (very few original markers, one replacement marker only for a well-known interment, and an open section without markers identified as containing unknown interments), I would speculate that the stone bearing the name of Naomi Wise might be a memorial stone rather than a true grave marker. However, the headstone is accompanied by a footstone, a mostly-neglected practice whereby a smaller stone is placed at the foot of the grave.
In the older graves in this cemetery, the practice was clearly standard. Markers switch to professionally engraved white marble sometime around 1840 or 1850, and these markers continued the practice of placing a headstone and footstone pair at the site of the interment. So it's quite possible I am wholly off base in my surmise.
Much of my free time this week has been occupied by following the sudden accretion of old friends over at MFT in the wake of John Strohm's initial series of reminiscences. MFT is hosted by Ning, Marc Andreesen's current project.
Reading John's summery recollections with an 82-degree day outside the door has me jonesing for a quarry run, a case of Wisconsin Club, and a bowl of instant ramen.
I just received news which has me in a state of utter discombobulation, but which should not, really. I lack a behavioral model to appeal to. I think I know how to be gracious in the situation. My goodness. I can't think of a single person I know who has ever been in this situation. My situation, that is, not the situation which is in fact newsworthy but which I here elide.
Based on the facebook photo album, Facebook | Brad Wilhelm's Photos - Obama, I would venture that Senator Obama and Brad Wilhelm stood in relation to one another roughly as Dave D'Eath and I once did on the eve of his wedding.
Far out.
Bloomington is a Democratic strionghold, of course, but the state is reliably Republican in the general election. There must be a brass-knuckles fight in the state Dems over superdelegates. I'd love to hear who is leaning where in Monroe County.
Pursuant to my cincy-style chili cravings, I am fixin' to whomp up a chili feed. Please let me know if you'd like to eat with us. No date is yet set but I think a weekday night next week is likely.
James gave me a CD after he and Erin played their set at CHAC, which I enjoyed. Hope to have a meal with him while he's in town. I also found a double-sheet master of SARS Chicken stickers... although they may, in fact, not be by the Chicken Kid, as a moment of pondering reveals.
MJ Hibbet, via The Best Bus Driver in the World. Lyrics.
Hands behind your back, move your feet around...
The blog posts are hilarious, also.
Oh, man, I'm bummed! A favorite author, who I now count as friend, is suffering some serious diabetic complications. He's alert and in his usual sardonic good humor, but he's suffering and it kills me to know it. I do not identify him by name not to draw privy curtains over his illness - I have learned all this through his website - but to permit me this little wail apart from the encouragement and good thoughts I have shared with him on his site.
Funny, maybe I'll go back and joke with him about my concerns; I bet he'd get it.
Ages ago I put together a post on the loss of the USS Shenandoah, a rigid airship of the US Navy, over Ohio in the 1920s. I did so simply because dirigibles fascinate me and the end of the Shenandoah's career is a whale of a yarn. After I crafted that original post, the wisdom of the internets began to produce a truly amazing stream of Shenandoah-related information, from remarkable first-person anecdotes of the ship in flight and/or the wreck to photos taken on the day of the ship's end by curious locals to songs, sheet music, and lyrics.
Today, out of the, um, clear blue sky, a correspondent forwarded a cache of family pictures showing the tail section of the ship on the ground. The pictures are tremendous, in my opinion, and I need to do some research to do justice to them. I am so interested in how this sort of thing happens. I post about something I'm intrigued by, and from nowhere, from everywhere, people with direct first hand knowledge and amazing family heirlooms share them with me, and by extension, with you.
The nation, and the world, is filled with striking events which generated news and passed into history. Each one of these events affected countless lives and families directly. I'm deeply affected by the multiple opportunities I have been afforded to act as a catalyst for the gathering of such histories. Every time a new contribution bubbles up, I'm overjoyed and amazed.
Recently, I was prompted to rummage through the back of a memory drawer by a MetaFilter thread on the circus. In the thread, a poster noted that the classic big-top incarnation of the American circus ended with a terrible and deadly fire in the 1940s.
I found this very puzzling, as I have distinct personal memories of having attended a tented, saw-dusted, circus. Horse acts and elephants parading, Clowns in a car and trapeze artists and tumbling acrobats. A top-hatted master of ceremonies and a uniformed brass band in the bleacher seats.
Interestingly, I also have a memory of attending a public concert given by a uniformed brass band on a gazebo-like bandstand, a memory seemingly ripped from a Ray Bradbury novel. However, my father, an inveterate gadgeteer, actually taped this concert on a portable reel-to-reel tape recorder he had purchased for use as an innovative correspondence mechanism while we spent a year abroad. I have both tape and machine and have listened to the brassy strains of that summer afternoon within the past five years. I began an audio-capture project on this and other tapes about eight years ago, but it was just before hard drive costs went into free-fall and space constraints caused me to abandon it.
Given that one improbable time-traveling memory should prove indisputably real, it stands to reason that another might as well. Yet, the circus impressions I retain are clearly early-childhood memories, so I had assumed that the recollection might have been crossed wires derived from a media-based experience such as a movie.
On today's drive in to the airport with my parents, I had the early-morning presence of mind to ask them if I had ever attended a tented circus.
To my surprise, they said that I had, during the year we lived in Chile over 1968 to 1969. Dad said the circus set up their tents in a dry riverbed near the town we lived in, Vi&ntlide;a del Mar, which held some futbol pitches. His mention of this conjured up another layer of lost sense-memory - a panoramic hubbub of yellow dust, the bustle of the midway and crew, the tent itself looming up against a midsummer backdrop of browned bluffs above the riverbed.
Mom and Dad did note that they don't recall the tent as a true three-ring wonder, and I guess that jibes with my recollections as well.
(Posted at the boarding gate from the phone with the intent of adding links later, to Viña del Mar and to the MeFi thread, among others. UPDATE: link'd!)
UPDATE II: Things has an inspired essay on the developent and practice of the English Victorian spectacle, a close cousin to the circus.
Carnival Obscura: The Esoteric Rocketman: partly on Gravity's Rainbow, still Pynchon's apogee, but mostly about a book concerning Jack Parsons, the OTO-JPL man.
High-school punk-rock buddy John Strohm (and musician and lawyer) is autobioblography-ing. Part one. Part two. Part three. Part four.
It's really, really interesting to read another person's well-written recollections of your shared adolescent experiences.
For reasons unknown to me, this guy that used to work at the Safeway on 15th for years and years just popped into my head. He had had some kind of operation that left him without an ear, and generally wore a bandage over it, and a brown, broad-brimmed hat. He also wore a device in a holster on his hip that I took for some sort of obscure grocer's stocking tool. He was always at the store. I recall thinking he must have been working 60-hour weeks on a regular basis.
The last time I saw him, we spoke briefly in the checkout line and I believe I mentioned having a cold or something and working while sick. He laughed, and in a slightly slurred voice said he had been there.
Just after Viv and I moved off the hill, we stopped back by the store on our way up to the far northern reaches of the city, and there was a memorial display. He'd passed away, probably due to cancer. In my mind, I have an imaginary narrative that fills in all the dots - the cancer, the missing ear, the holster, the incredible work hours - and my feelings toward the deceased are deeply respectful and tinged, of course, with regret.
I have no idea why he popped into my mind.
Sandhills Woman's Exchange: big, low ceilinged tea room in back, tiny, two-century-old cabin in front, filled with white haired persons, crafts, &c.
Including preserves, of course.
Not quite a year ago I stopped using the excellent weblog com position tool ecto and went back to composing entries in the browser. I am not sure why any longer.
This is a test.
