For the historical record, and because Lawrence has already posted: Walter Mondale. WP.
Archive for the ‘History’ Category
Obit watch: April 20, 2021.
Tuesday, April 20th, 2021“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 384
Monday, April 19th, 2021Military History Monday!
This is a little shorter than I usually do for MHM, but it is also higher quality, and I thought it was kind of interesting: “Russian Undersea Cable Recon”. I’ve heard a fair amount about US undersea cable recon, but very little about the other side’s activities.
Bonus: since that was short, I’m going to share something a little longer that I’ve been holding in reserve: “The Science Of Spying”.
This dates to 1965, and is narrated by John Chancellor.
Obit watch: April 19, 2021.
Monday, April 19th, 2021Marie Supikova has passed on at 88.
She was one of a small number of survivors of Lidice.
Mrs. Supikova was 10 when Nazi forces arrived in Lidice, a village of about 500, on June 9, 1942. They were bent on avenging an attack by Czech parachutists on Reinhard Heydrich, a principal architect of the “final solution,” the Nazis’ plan to annihilate the Jewish people, which led to his death on June 4.
Looking to eradicate Lidice (LID-it-seh), the Nazis destroyed all the village’s buildings. They killed nearly 200 men, including Mrs. Supikova’s father, by a firing squad against a barn wall cushioned by mattresses. The women, including Mrs. Supikova’s mother, were sent to the Ravensbrück concentration camp in Germany.
…
While there, she was one of seven children chosen because of their appearance to be re-educated as Germans (the others were sent to gas chambers). They were moved to a school near Poznan, Poland, where they stayed for about a year until they were adopted by German couples.
Her new parents, Alfred and Ilsa Schiller, gave Marie a new name, Ingeborg Schiller, and a tiny room behind the kitchen in their home in Poznan. In an article in The New Yorker in 1948, Mrs. Supikova recalled that the Schillers had argued about her presence in the household.
“You and your Party friends!” she quoted Mrs. Schiller saying. “Why did they pick you to take this girl?” Mr. Schiller, she said, shouted back, “They have ordered us to make a German woman out of her and we are going to do it.”
After the war, she was reunited with her mother, who was dying of TB. (Her brother was also executed by the Nazis.)
…
Before Mrs. Supikova’s mother died, she took her daughter to the ruins of Lidice.
“She told Marie, ‘We’re going to see your father,’” said Elizabeth Clark, a retired journalism lecturer at Texas State University, San Marcos, who is writing about Lidice for a faculty writing project. “Marie didn’t understand at first that they were going to the mass grave where he had been buried.”
Rusty Young, one of the founding members of Poco. I feel like I’m giving him short shrift, and perhaps tim will weigh in on this one. Poco was just a little before my time.
Catching up on a couple from the past few days when I’ve been tied up: Helen McCrory, “Harry Potter” and “Peaky Blinders” actress. She also did quite a bit of work in British theater.
Felix Silla. He was “Cousin Itt” on “The Adams Family”, and (as I understand it) played the physical role of “Twiki” on “Buck Rodgers in the 25th Century”. (Mel Blanc did the voice.)
Things I did not know. (#7 in a series)
Monday, April 19th, 20211. There was a 1989 movie called “Return From the River Kwai”.
It was not a sequel. Really. That’s what the filmmakers said. It was supposedly based on a book of the same name.
Columbia pulled out of a distribution contract after Sony bought them, and claimed Sam Spiegel’s estate threatened to sue. The filmmakers claimed Columbia pulled out because the movie made the Japanese look bad, and, anyway, Columbia owned the rights, not Spiegel’s estate.
There was a lawsuit.
The case went to trial in 1997. Columbia argued that “if you use a name and it becomes famous you are able to use it in a certain area of commerce, such as the exclusive use of River Kwai in the title of a film. It does not matter where Pierre Boulle got the name.”
In 1998 a court ruled that the title suggested the film implied it was a sequel to Bridge on the River Kwai. It was never released in the US.
Amazon has a region 2 DVD listed.
2. Remember “Hands on a Hardbody”? Remember “Hands on a Hardbody: The Musical”?
Obviously, I knew about this. The subject came up again over the weekend as part of a discussion with Mike the Musicologist about Broadway being out of ideas, and the sheer number of recent musicals based on movies.
What I did not know: Houston’s “Theater Under the Stars” (TUTS) tried to stage a production of “HoH” in 2014. Thing is, the director of the production decided that he was going to make changes:
Having attended the opening night of Hardbody at [Bruce] Lumpkin’s [director – DB] invitation, [Amanda] Green [co-creator – DB] described to me her experience in watching the show. “They started the opening number and I noticed that some people were singing solos other than what we’d assigned. As we neared the middle of the opening number, I thought, ‘what happened to the middle section?’” She said that musical material for Norma, the religious woman in the story, “was gone.”
When the second song began, Green recalls being surprised, saying, “I thought, ‘so we did put this number second after all’ before realizing that we hadn’t done that.” As the act continued, Green said, “I kept waiting for ‘If I Had A Truck’ and it didn’t come.” She went on to detail a litany of ways in which the show in Houston differed from the final Broadway show, including reassigning vocal material to different characters within songs, and especially the shifting of songs from one act to another, which had the effect of removing some characters from the story earlier than before. She also said that interstitial music between scenes had been removed and replaced with new material. Having heard Green’s point by point recounting of act one changes, I suggested we could dispense with the same for act two.
This upset a lot of people. Including Amanda Green and Doug Wright, the other creator. It also upset Samuel French, the theatrical agency that licensed the show.
So Samuel French pulled the plug. They withdrew their license and TUTS was forced to cancel the remaining shows.
That’s what i didn’t know, and honestly, was surprised by. I thought it was extremely rare for a licensing agency to go to that length: then again, I also thought it was extremely rare for a professional theater company to make those kind of production changes without permission of the licensing agency.
I’m still not sure how common this is, but someone in one of the linked articles above mentions a production of David Mamet’s “Oleanna” which was shut down after one performance because the theater company gender-swapped a key role. This may be more common, and less newsworthy, than I think it is. But I still find it surprising that professional productions think nobody’s watching and they can do this (stuff).
“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 383
Sunday, April 18th, 2021Science Sunday!
It seems like it has been a while since I’ve done anything computer or computer history related. How about something from General Electric? Specifically the “Heavy Military Electronics Department”?
“Systems That Look Ahead”, a 1960s promo video on the virtues of computer information processing.
Honestly, I’m just fascinated by the idea of the “Heavy Military Electronics Department”. Was there a “Light Military Electronics Department”?
Bonus #1: They call economics the “dismal science”, right? Actually, this sits kind of at the interesection.
“Economics of Nuclear Reactor”, with our old friend Illinois EnergyProf.
Bonus #2: Periscope Films has put up some more educational videos from Shell Oil. This is actually one that they posted a while back from the 1970s that’s in color: “How an Airplane Flies: Part 1, Weight and Lift” and “Part 2: Thrust and Drag”.
“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 382
Saturday, April 17th, 2021I thought I’d put this up, mostly as a nod to Lawrence, and because I found it mildly amusing: “Top 5 Hilariously Bad Carry Guns” from TFB TV.
I could almost see carrying a cap and ball gun. Something like a reproduction Walker Colt would be retro cool, and pack a significant punch. Then again, I’m the guy who is thinking about getting a shoulder holster for his XP-100, so what do I know about hilariously bad carry guns?
Bonus #1: What does a flight medic carry?
Bonus #2: “The Impossible Micro Survival Kit”. I’ve been fascinated by survival kits since I was very, very young, and I like the idea of one that can fit into an Altoids tin. If I was doing this, though, I might split the first aid and the survival components out. If you wear Internet pants, you should be able to throw both into the pockets. Or you could fit both into a fanny pack.
Bonus #3: Les Stroud on survival kits.
“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 381
Friday, April 16th, 2021Phone Phriday!
Okay. I’m not sure I’m going to actually make that a thing.
But for today, how about some more vintage fun from the AT&T Tech Channel?
“The Astonishing, Unfailing Bell System” from 1967.
Bonus #1: I’m sure some of my readers – the younger ones – may be asking the question “What is this ‘Bell System’ you keep going on about?”
“What is the Bell System?” from 1976.
Bonus #2: If you haven’t had enough nostalgia already, this might do it for you.
“AMPS: Coming Of Age” from 1979. This is about the early mobile phone network:
This is the only one of the three with an intro, and the only one where I’ve set it to start after the intro.
“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 380
Thursday, April 15th, 2021Travel Thursday!
Continuing our tour of the United States, let’s visit Wisconsin! More specifically, let’s visit a place I’d really like to see, and hope to one day soon: Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin.
Bonus: This is a historical oddity that I confess I haven’t watched all of yet, but am bookmarking here.
“Ridin’ the Dog” is a documentary from 1989 about taking Greyhound from Seattle to Chicago. The extra historical oddity here is: Studs Terkel narrates.
Obit watch: April 14, 2021.
Wednesday, April 14th, 2021Ray Lambert, another Amercian badass, has passed away at 100.
A native of Alabama, Staff Sgt. Lambert was leading a unit of medics with the Second Battalion, 16th Infantry Regiment, part of the Army’s First Division. He had taken part in the invasions of North Africa and Sicily and had already earned three Purple Hearts and two Silver Stars before his war came to an end on the morning of June 6, 1944, on Omaha Beach.
He was in the first wave of Allied forces as they crossed the English Channel and stormed German defenses strung along the coast of northern France, beginning the long offensive that would culminate in Germany’s defeat. His brother Bill, also a medic, was with him.
In heavy surf, Ray Lambert was helping a wounded soldier when a landing craft’s ramp dropped on him, pushing him to the bottom. The water was deep as the medics scrambled off the craft.
“When we went under the water, they had barbed wire and you had to try to get through that,” Mr. Lambert said in an interview in 2019 with the American Homefront Project, a public radio effort, “and there were mines tied to that. So we had a lot of guys get tangled up. A lot of the underwater mines went off and killed some guys.”
But he made his way to the beach to tend to the wounded, amid withering fire from German bunkers above.
At one point he scanned the beach for something behind which he could safely treat the wounded. He spotted a lump of leftover German concrete, about eight feet wide and four feet high.
“It was my salvation,” he said. (A plaque installed in 2018 recognizes the concrete as “Ray’s Rock.”)
“Again and again, Ray ran back into the water,” President Trump told a crowd gathered for the ceremony at the Normandy American Cemetery, on a bluff overlooking the beach. “He dragged out one man after another. He was shot through the arm. His leg was ripped open by shrapnel. His back was broken. He nearly drowned.”
As Mr. Trump spoke, Mr. Lambert sat behind him wearing a purple “D-Day Survivor” cap. At the end of his speech, the president turned to him and said, “Ray, the free world salutes you.”
Only seven of the 31 soldiers on Mr. Lambert’s landing craft survived. He and his brother, who was also badly wounded, were hospitalized in England.
Mary Ellen Moylan, early and influential ballet dancer who worked with George Balanchine. Noted here because this is one of those odd ones: she actually died almost a year ago, but her passing went unnoticed until recently.
Lee Aaker. This is a sad one. He was a child actor: he played “Rusty” on “The Adventures of Rin Tin Tin”, and appeared in “Hondo” and “The Atomic City”, among other credits. His last one in IMDB was an episode of “The Lucy Show” in 1963, when he was 20.
Aaker had suffered a stroke and died April 1 near Mesa, Arizona, Paul Petersen, the former Donna Reed Show star who serves as an advocate for former child actors, told The Hollywood Reporter.
Aaker had battled drug and alcohol abuse during this life and was alone with one “surviving relative that could not help him,” Petersen said, adding that Aaker’s death certificate lists him as an “indigent decedent.”
For Petersen, it marked another sad end to the life of a Hollywood child actor. “You are around just to please everyone,” he said, “and when there’s nothing left, they are done with you.”
Lawrence sent over an obit from ZeroHedge, and the NYT now has it as breaking news: Bernie Madoff is burning in Hell.
“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 378
Tuesday, April 13th, 2021I started out doing police training videos, but those have become thin on the ground. So when a new one shows up in my feed it is a cause for celebration.
Especially this one. I believe it is called “Out Numbered” and dates to 1968 according to the notes. Those same notes also point out that it features “Martin Milner of Adam 12 Fame”.
I want to point out that, while a lot of people knew Mr. Milner best from “Adam-12” (and I include myself in that category) he had a much broader and more interesting career beyond one cop show: “Route 66”, “Sweet Smell of Success”, both “Dragnet”s (the 1950s one and the late 1960s-early 1970s one)…
Bonus #1: totally unrelated to police work, but something I found kind of cool. This is a vintage (1969, maybe) promo film by Canadair for their CL-215 water bomber.
Bonus #2: “Testing a $600 survival tool”.
$600? At that price, not only should it include a tent, but it had better be setting up that tent for me automatically. And making me breakfast in the morning and dinner at night.
Noted.
Tuesday, April 13th, 2021Hattip to Lawrence on this Twitter thread:
Today is Thomas Jefferson’s Birthday.
Here are reasons why Thomas Jefferson is my favorite nerd.
— TRHL™ (refollow here) (@TheTRHL) April 13, 2021
One thing that’s missing from that thread: he wrote this.
[Emphasis added.]
“What you gonna do when you get out of jail?…” part 377
Monday, April 12th, 2021I thought today, for Military History Monday, I’d do a couple of videos at the intersection of survival and military history. For reasons.
Short-ish: Have you ever asked yourself, “Self, how do I escape from a sinking submarine?”
If so:
- You’re weird. (Unless you served on subs in the Navy.)
- I want to hang out with you.
“Submarine Escape” from 1953.
Long: there are actually two versions of this on the ‘Tube. I’m picking the longer one because the shorter one seems to be cut off. The longer one seems to be a little chopped as well, but not as dramatically.
“Survival in the Arctic Tundra”. In which the crew of a C-119 bails out and has to survive…in the Arctic tundra.
The Saturday Night Movie Group recently watched “Island in the Sky“, one of William Wellman’s two great John Wayne aviation films. (The other is “The High and the Mighty“.) “Island” is in large part about the crew of a downed aircraft trying to survive in the Arctic, and in equally large part about the interpersonal relationships between transport pilots, and how everyone unites when a crew is in trouble.
Both movies get my thumbs-up seal of approval.
Also, I kind of like the C-119.