Whipped Cream Difficulties

This is the last entry in the series.

I feel we’ve reached the point where we are, more or less, out of jail: restrictions are being relaxed, I am fully vaccinated, and I’m seeing many businesses doing away with mask requirements.

I originally started this as a diversion while we were all on home confinement. If you were locked in, what did you have that was better to do than watch weird old videos that popped up in my YouTube recommendations? Now, it seems like this…feature? recurring trope?…has gone beyond what originally motivated it. This seems like a good time to wrap it up.

Mostly. I’m holding a couple of things in reserve for days in the future. And if we’re hit by a new variant and have to lock ourselves in again, I reserve the right to restart this.

I have something special I want to post, as the final entry, and also as a tribute.

Gardner Dozois passed away three years ago today. To the best of my knowledge, the NYT still has not published an obituary for him.

Back in the dim mists of time (1986, Lawrence?) there was a SF convention in Austin, SerCon 2. Unlike many SF conventions, SerCon was devoted to “serious and constructive” discussion of SF. Which basically meant people sitting around talking about books.

That doesn’t mean people didn’t have fun. One of the panels was something called “The Howard and Gardner Show” (the “Howard” here being Howard Waldrop, noted Austin short story writer). Howard and Gardner alone are two of the funniest men alive when they get going, so putting them on a panel together is the comic equivalent of tickling the dragon’s tail: the kind of thing where you could reach a critical mass of funny very fast.

Anyway, among the stories Gardner told (and I know I mentioned this in passing when I wrote the obit) were stories about his time writing the “safety column” for “Stars and Stripes”. The “safety column” was basically Gardner reading reports from the field about all the spectacular and stupid ways GIs stationed in Europe found to kill or seriously injure themselves, and then writing those up…

“DO NOT pee out the window of a train onto the high voltage wires above. Because a giant bolt of electricity will shoot out of the power lines, down the urine stream, into your PENIS, causing you to EXPLODE all over the train car, AND YOU WILL DIE!!!

That wasn’t Gardner’s only story in that vein, but they did all end with “…AND YOU WILL DIE!!!”.

With that long introduction out of the way, and in tribute to Gardner: “Once Too Often”, from 1950. The basic plot is: hapless soldier goes on leave and discovers ten different ways to kill or seriously hurt himself. Despite the plot summary, this is actually kind of light and humorous.

And if you’re saying to yourself…”Is that guy in the thumbnail…?”, the answer is “Yes!” This was Jack Lemmon’s first “starring” role, according to the notes. (He has five credits before that in IMDB, but I think those were mostly bit parts in TV shows between 1949 and 1950.)

Bonus #1: “Don’t Gamble with Ammo”. Somewhat more serious, this is a British Army training film telling soldiers: don’t play with live ammo or pyrotechnics.

Bonus #2: “Disasters Don’t Just Happen”. This is an old (1971) Navy training film that was made in the wake of the Oriskany, Forrestal, and Enterprise incidents.

I’ve read Sailors to the End (affiliate link) so I sort of feel like I understand the Forrestal incident a little bit. I can also wrap my mind around the Enterprise incident.

But the Oriskany I struggle with. I mean, a flare goes off, and your reaction is…kick it into a closet full of even more flares and dog the hatch? Really? Then again, if I had a magnesium flare burning at 6000 degrees Frankenstein in my hands, my first reaction would probably be to toss it far away from me, too.

On the gripping hand, it seems like a massive failure of leadership not to have had a plan and equipment in place, and to be drilling on that plan, just in case one of those flares did go off unexpectedly. (And I saw somewhere that about one out of every 1,000 would go off unexpectedly if jarred. Given the volume of air operations in Vietnam, one out of 1,000 would probably come up pretty often.)

Other lesson: as I understand it, many of the deaths were not directly due to the fire, but due to inhalation of smoke and toxic fumes. How many times have we seen that?

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 27th, 2021 at 2:00 pm and is filed under Guns, History, Safety, TV. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.