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books / friends / history / photo / video / Wednesday — Comments Off
18
Jan 17

Stuff in the air, and in my office

I found this book last weekend:

It was published in 1958 and seems to be aimed at giving a reasonable historical re-telling and description to teens. The chapters have great line art:

That’s a paratrooper, which was pretty much the moment I decided to take pictures to send to our friend Adam, who is a modern paratrooper, because I thought he’d appreciate the biplane:

But it was this one he really liked, and how could you not? Look at his left hand:

Just another day at the office, oh, and do remember your briefcase. Here’s an almost contemporaneous accounting of Captain Sergei Mienov:

He spent almost a year in the United States. On his way back to Russia he passed a few days in Paris. He was full of enthusiasm for what he had seen in the development of air technique. Although Russia was not yet officially recognized, Mienov had been courteously received. He had visited airplane factories, airdromes and training schools. He praised highly the quality of American parachutes and the instruction American pilots received in their use. He had made his first parachute jump here.

[…]

When Mienov submitted the report of his US observations to Air Chief Alksnis, he mentioned the wide interest which parachute jumping could arouse. He suggested that the interest of the Soviet population, and particularly the young, could be turned toward the development of air power by this type of propaganda. Alksnis passed the comment on to the Politburo. Stalin agreed that it was a good idea.

And so parachuting became wildly popular in the Soviet Union.

Until the purges. And then the Germans did it better and then the Americans did it more. And that’s the story of how one of the more crazy ideas a person could do as a spectator sport became one of the craziest things people would do in military service. How the book wound up where I found it remains a mystery.

Here’s Adam now, this is his jump into Ste. Mere-Eglise, Normandy, France, commemorating the 70th anniversary of D-Day:

He took a miniature American flag on the jump with him and sent it to me as a keepsake, which super cool. That’s in my office now.

So is this stuff:

We are about to surplus a bunch of old equipment. The university has a surplus process for its eight campuses and some things of a certain value must be processed in a certain way and that’s where I am. More specifically, that picture is opposite of where I am, in my office, which is now filled.

Because it made more sense to bring this stuff out of storage, start (and hopefully complete) the paperwork process and then wait on the nice fellows from the Surplus store to come over and pick it up. So I have huge bundles of television cabling, a half dozen old cameras, a switcher, various accesorries and a chest-high stack of old engineering components in my office. If anyone wants to come push buttons, now is the time.

As a bonus, many of the buttons sound different.

books / Indiana / Thursday / video — Comments Off
5
Jan 17

Without a doubt, irrefutably: snow

Woke up to snow. Watched it, off and on, fall all day. Little flakes, big flakes, sticky flakes. Here’s some shots from the office:

Classes start back next Monday. People are starting to trickle back into the building, the ones that aren’t sick with something anyway. There’s a lot of that going around, which has been the case since before Thanksgiving. This is a new old building, one side of which you see at the beginning of the video, but it might be out to get us, in a biological sense.

But the snow! Isn’t it lovely! Tonight it will actually get cold. Tomorrow we’ll be between 0 and 5 degrees and wearing heavy jackets. But, today, the snow is full of that magic that wipes away doubt and impossibility and dirt and the decay of autumn. Tomorrow, or the next day, the snow will be its own doubt and dirt.

I canceled my XM subscription today. Two representatives tried very hard to upgrade me or reduce my bill or extend me this or offer me that. But I just don’t spend that much time in the car right now and the reception to their transponders is blocked on about 20 percent of my route. The quality has been in decline ever since the Sirius-XM merger, while the price has almost doubled.

I really only listened to the 40s station anyway.

We’re watching West Wing, about 15 years too late.

I feel like, after tonight’s episodes, that we might have already watched the best part of the show. But last night we were here:

Tonight we got here:

And I think I see what everyone likes about the Charlie character. He’s not a bad character, but I think this is about first impressions — and binge watching. When you met him he was that young kid, who thought he was there to be a messenger. And then you learned his backstory, which was heartbreaking and then he was frozen in amber. He’s a humble sort, but never in over his head. And so he became the precocious child of the show, even as a young adult.

It probably hurt him, then, that he’s in a room surrounded by talented, accomplished people and has a paternalistic lead. Now, it is supposed to be four years later. But, really, for us, it has been just a few months. He’s still that boy, still precocious, which isn’t fair to the character. He’s not a boy, we haven’t allowed for that evolution with time.

Some things about binge watching are antithetical to character evolution.

Would you rather we discussed books?

If you like sports, or baseball, or books about sports, or just good research and writing, I’d suggest Bottom of the 33rd. It is about the longest game in the history of organized baseball, a Triple-A struggle in Massachusetts in 1981.

It featured Easter, 40-degree temperatures, Wade Boggs, Cal Ripken Jr., Bruce Hurst and maybe the best hitter you’ve never heard of. The book covers two clubs, owners, communities, broadcasters, managers … it is difficult to imagine how did not get included, so complete is the research.

The writing is incredibly crisp. I don’t read a lot of sports books, but this was written by a New York Times columnist and it shows in his love of the craft.

I’m also about halfway through The Adventure of English. This is the companion book to a BBC series on the language, told as a biography, almost of a living person.

It’s a slog, but its a good read. You have to really want it, I think, really appreciate the power of language to find this book interesting. It’s poetic in places, and it is as dense as a technical manual in others. Halfway through, though, and Shakespeare just retired and the study of the language has moved to the Pilgrims, landing months late and at the wrong spot, and the meeting, either by “chance or through God’s providence,” with Squanto.

Tisquantum, you might recall, helped the pillaging Pilgrims survive that first harsh winter. He was perhaps the only English-speaking native for hundreds of miles around, and arguably the most fluent English speaker on the continent. How fortunate for them that he was in the next village from where they came ashore. Now, the book is moving into the American Colonial period. I just learned that of the 13 colonies only two were derived from native terms. Connecticut, for example, stems from Quinnehtukqut, which the Internet tells me means “beside the long tidal river.”

I think the best part of the book is that, while it is talking about the power of the language to evolve, it stops in 2011. So some of these words from the 2011 additions to the OED may be in there, but surely not all of them, surely not the word “posilutely.”

books / Monday / photo — Comments Off
4
Apr 16

These are a few of my favorite things

It is a good day when you get sat and purred upon:

And this is my favorite part of the day in our home library. The sun comes in late and long and lovely.

Auburn / books / cycling / errands / photo / Thursday — Comments Off
19
Mar 15

Got any AP Style?

I was looking for a book, a new Associated Press Stylebook, but one place didn’t have it. A second store was closed.

Going to a third place I had your standard “Don’t see that every day” moment. A bicycle-mounted police officer pulled over a car. The officer turned on a little blue light and the car pulled over.

You can almost imagine the mental calculus going on in the car. But that was a good move, stopping. Oh you’ll get away from the guy on the mountain bike with the fat tires. But he has friends just down the street. And those people aren’t riding bikes.

I believe that’s the first traffic stop I’ve seen by a cycling officer. Now I want to see the officers on the ruggedized Segway-trike get someone making an improper turn.

I rode 22 miles on my bike this afternoon and I didn’t see anyone that would stop for me. But I don’t have a badge or a blue light. I just have the lycra.

Anyway, the third bookstore didn’t have the book. I can try another place tomorrow. I hit Walmart. I was looking for two things, but I only found one. I got a watch battery for an old watch. (Still works! Now I have three watches that might, from time-to-time, help me out. I’ll be late somewhere tomorrow.) So I only found the one thing at the retailer, that let me make a withdrawal at the cash register. These are the details of my day.

I needed the cash because as I was going from one place to the next I got a message from an e-bay seller. We’ve been negotiating the sale of two Gloms. A deal had been reached. He’s in town and so we set up a meet.

So I find myself watching the sun go down from the Kroger parking lot, waiting on this guy to show up. He brought two books. I paid cash. He felt like he got a good deal. I felt like I got a good deal. We were both happy.

Turns out the guy’s a picker. He’s telling me stories about how he used to go dumpster diving, how it is different now. Once, he said, people would come up to him and strike up a conversation. Now he’s afraid they’ll just call the police.

But is it the times or his age? You can probably get away with more in your 20s than 40s, I’d guess.

He feels like he covered the entire area, going through old abandoned buildings, salvaging and scavenging. I wonder how many of those roads I know because of my bike and how many I have no idea about.

The newest condos being built are going up on a large tract that previously had several old, decrepit houses. He says he got the call to go into those houses, that he was the only guy, and that he got to pick them clean for leftover property, repurposed fixtures and, of course, the copper.

The stories of all of the local stuff he finds sounds like a lot of fun.

We probably talked for an hour, mostly with me just trying to get him to show me his collection. Never know what else he might be willing to sell.

Probably should have asked him if he had a Stylebook.

books / family / history / Wednesday — 1 Comment
26
Nov 14

My family is now convinced I am a picker

Which is funny, because when I first saw American Pickers, which introduced me to that entire group of people, I immediately thought “That’s the job I should have.”

It’s like they invented it for me. You get to prowl and learn things? And there’s money to be made doing those two things?

I’m pretty sure I developed my prowling and curiosity at my grandparents’ place. So many things you didn’t see all of the time, so many things that were different than what little you knew about anything. So many things that spanned ages of time — to a child at least. A lot of stuff got kept by my grandparents — and yet my grandmother also had a clean house.

But the storage building out back … well, I spent all afternoon in there today. We spent time in there as children, probably hide-and-seek and trying to figure out the boxes and stacks of things. I’m sure some of this stuff hasn’t been touched in years, or more. And today I glanced around a few rooms, but concentrated on the books.

Here’s something that belonged to my uncle as a boy. You can buy My Name is Pablo for pennies on Amazon or a few bucks on ebay. But that cover art is great:

This is on the inside cover of the Book of Knowledge, an encyclopedia aimed at elementary and middle school students. My mom told me she would sit and read these for hours. It was one of three encyclopedia sets I found, but it obviously has the best illustrations:

This car art just jumps out:

This is the cover to another book you can buy online for pennies, Fifty Famous Americans. The dust jacket is gone, which is a shame, because it apparently featured a great Wright Brothers illustration.

That book was written in the 1940s and so, happily, there isn’t a single reality TV star listed. Here’s the inside cover:

My grandfather was a ham radio operator and owned an electronics store and was apparently a varied reader. This isn’t a book I’d ever read, but you could see he might have a reason to consult it, also, the cover is terrific:

My grandfather was so cool, he had things like this:

And this just scratches the surface. I learned a fair amount about my grandfather today, just digging through dusty stacks of wonderful old pulp. I’m glad to have the opportunity to see and hold and laugh over some of the things he read and wrote. Inside those many pages there will be plenty more to share. Clearly I’m going to have to revitalize his section of my site.