Drop the mic!
Posted: February 2, 2018 Filed under: America Since 1945, politics 1 Comment
from Politico
Machiavelli
Posted: January 27, 2018 Filed under: America Since 1945 Leave a comment
That’s from this study in the Swiss Journal of Psychology. Happened to see that on Twitter somehow.
Was struck when I actually read The Prince and realized Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney either hadn’t read it or hadn’t taken some of its blunter advice.
foxes, being foxlike
from the piles of Rumsefeld memos you can read online.
On about page six of this book (haven’t finished) he says don’t invade countries where you don’t know the language.
Maybe a new rule should be that when we invade a country, the President or at least the Secretary of Defense should have to live there:
The Crown’s JFK
Posted: January 24, 2018 Filed under: America Since 1945 Leave a comment
Peggy Noonan raises concern about the depiction of JFK on episode 8, season 2 of The Crown on Netflix:
There is nothing—literally nothing—to support the assertion in “The Crown” that after the trip JFK, in a rage at being upstaged by his wife, drank, threw things and lunged at her. There is no historical evidence that he ever got rapey with his wife.
(what a sentence!)
Also he didn’t smoke cigarettes.
All of this, and more, is so vulgar, dumb and careless. It is disrespectful not only of real human beings but of history itself.
Interesting points. JFK did at least sometimes smoke small stubby cigarillo things, as we can see in Primary.
He famously got himself a bunch of Cuban cigars before announcing the embargo (a story that’s told as a funny, cute anecdote rather than an example of small but representative corruption).
JFK was rapey with other young women in his employ, if we believe Mimi Alford.
Caitlin Flanagan points to more evidence.
I loved The Crown’s version of JFK. His psychopathic side. A worthwhile distinction: the way the story is told in The Crown, what we see is Jackie’s perception of JFK. That could be different than like historical truth.
Consider what Errol Morris says here (talking Wormwood) about “reenactments”:
Well, I noticed that even with the scripted elements of Wormwood, people call them “reenactments,” but they’re not reenacting anything, properly speaking. I got so tired of it that. First of all, reenactments came out of a sort of see-and-say type of stuff. You’d have an interview, the person would go, “Blah blah blah,” and then you’d illustrate them with the subsequent reenactment.
“On the night of June 4, 1973, I went to the store and bought a pack of cigarettes,” and you cut to an actor in a wide-lapel shirt and bell bottoms walking into a store and buying a pack of cigarettes.
That’s correct. So I pointed out like, “What exactly am I reenacting?” Am I reenacting truth? No. Am I reenacting belief? More often than not, I’m reenacting claims of what people saw or didn’t see. A version of events, a belief about what transpired, rather than what actually transpired. And I got in the habit — out of annoyance, I would say — of pointing out how consciousness is a reenactment of reality inside of our skulls. This idea that we have some immediate and privileged access to the world around us? Excuuuse me! We do not!
If we’re seeing Jackie’s reality, as imagined by The Crown, is that wrong?
But I’m a sucker for this kinda thing. I loved Dennis Quaid as Bill Clinton in The Special Relationship. I felt he showed the alpha dog side of Bill Clinton that must be present.
Hope Davis as Hillary also. Chilling.
To see the past in all its complexity is impossible and compelling. A key theme of Helytimes.
Mary Anne Trump
Posted: January 6, 2018 Filed under: America Since 1945, Ireland, Irish traditional music, mothers Leave a comment
One of our most popular posts is on Fred Trump, outrageous, villainous, smiling agent of chaos much like his son.
But we never really thought about Trump’s mother. Mothers should be off limits maybe? Even Trumps have mothers. A hasty misreading of this Kellyanne Conway quote:
Got us to look into it.
Stunned to find Trump’s mother was a Gaelic-speaking immigrant from a remote Scottish island.
Hailing from the Outer Hebrides
Mary Anne MacLeod was born in Tong, on Lewis in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland, United Kingdom, in a pebbledashcroft house numbered “5 Tong”
Tong
She was raised in a Scottish Gaelic-speaking household with her second language being English, which she learned at Tong school where it was reported she was a star pupil. Mary attended the school up until the eighth grade. Her father was a crofter, fisherman and compulsory officer (truancy officer). According to one profile, she was “brought up in an environment marked by isolation, privation and gloom.”
Wow. She’s pretty much from the Iron Islands.
You can see her interviewed in 1994 on Irish television, RTé, here. She has an interesting accent. She speaks of her love of Irish and Scottish music.
She claims Trump is meeting Steven Spielberg?
Training Literature Field Unit No. 1
Posted: December 24, 2017 Filed under: America Since 1945, photography, the ocean, Wonder Trail 1 Comment
Helytimes began in 2012. Our idea was
- become good at writing for the Internet
- a writer should have a website
- have a space to collect, digest and share items of interest.
We’ve tried to come up with a mission statement or guiding purpose, but the truth is, this is stuff we had to get out of our head.
The healthiest thing to do was share it.
The best way to put it might be a place to share crazy interesting things we’ve come across.
Since then we’ve published over 1,050 posts. We’re just now starting to get good at it, in our opinion.
Here are the twenty-one most popular posts:
The moral here is probably that we should start a local LA news-and-takes site written by other people.
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Sundown, Gordon Lightfoot (1974)
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Mountaineering Movies on Netflix Instant, Ranked
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Fred Trump
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Cinderella and Interrogation Technique
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The Great Debates
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Karl Ove Knausgaard
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Fascinated by: Ray Dalio
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How Big Was Mexico City in 1519?
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American Historical Figure Who Reminds Me Of Trump
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Losing The War by Lee Sandlin
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Conversations With Kennedy
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Oil Wells In National Parks
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THE WONDER TRAIL
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Gay Hobo Slang
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Vertigo Sucks
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Jackie Smoking Pregnant
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The story of Cahokia
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Ireland should take in two million refugees
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Twenty Greatest Australian Artistic Accomplishments of All Time
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The White House Pool
One lesson here might be to have more local LA journalism written by other people. Keep meaning to start a whole site for that but I do have a full-time job plus several other projects.
In our opinion the most successful post on Helytimes was
Record Group 80: Series: General Photographic File Of the Department of the Navy, 1943-1958
although it didn’t crack the top 21, just felt like a time where we added something of value to the Internet and readers responded.
It’s about the work of the Naval Aviation Photographic Unit, also known as the Training Literature Field Unit No. 1, assembled by the great photographer Edward Steichen.
One thread of Helytimes is attempts to reach into the past and find the sources that give us understanding of the past.
Two personal favorites:
Everything is something.
and
Special Snowflakes
This has been the annual performance review and address to the Helytimes readership:
That photo taken by one of Steichen’s guys, Wayne Miller:
Elizabeth Warren, Pocahontas, and The Pow Wow Chow Cookbook
Posted: December 14, 2017 Filed under: America Since 1945, Boston, native america, New England, politics, presidents 1 Comment
What is the deal here when Trump calls Elizabeth Warren Pocahontas?
At Helytimes, we like to go back to the source.
Sometime between 1987 and 1992 Elizabeth Warren put down on a faculty directory that she was Native American. Says Snopes:
it is true that while Warren was at U. Penn. Law School she put herself on the “Minority Law Teacher” list as Native American) in the faculty directory of the Association of American Law Schools
This became a story in 2012, when Elizabeth Warren was running for Senate against Scott Brown. In late April of that year, The Boston Herald, a NY Post style tabloid, dug up a 1996 article in the Harvard Crimson by Theresa J. Chung that says this:
Of 71 current Law School professors and assistant professors, 11 are women, five are black, one is Native American and one is Hispanic, said Mike Chmura, spokesperson for the Law School.
Although the conventional wisdom among students and faculty is that the Law School faculty includes no minority women, Chmura said Professor of Law Elizabeth Warren is Native American.
Asked about it, here’s what Elizabeth Warren said:
From there the story kinda spun out of control. It came up in the Senate debate, and there were ads about it on both sides.
A genealogist looked into it, and determined that Warren was 1/32nd Cherokee, or about as Cherokee as Helytimes is West African. But then even that was disputed.
Her inability to name any specific Native American ancestor has kept the story alive, though, as pundits left and right have argued the case. Supporters touted her as part Cherokee after genealogist Christopher Child of the New England Historic Genealogical Society said he’d found a marriage certificate that described her great-great-great-grandmother, who was born in the late 18th century, as a Cherokee. But that story fell apart once people looked at it more closely. The Society, it turned out, was referencing a quote by an amateur genealogist in the March 2006 Buracker & Boraker Family History Research Newsletters about an application for a marriage certificate.
Well, Elizabeth Warren won. Now Scott Brown is Donald Trump’s Ambassador to New Zealand, where he’s doing an amazing job.
source: The Guardian
The part of the story that lit me up was this:
The best argument she’s got in her defense is that, based on the public evidence so far, she doesn’t appear to have used her claim of Native American ancestry to gain access to anything much more significant than a cookbook; in 1984 she contributed five recipes to the Pow Wow Chow cookbook published by the Five Civilized Tribes Museum in Muskogee, signing the items, “Elizabeth Warren — Cherokee.”
“I like my corn with olives!” source
What is the best way to handle it, the best strategy, when the President is treating you like a third grade bully, repeatedly and publicly calling you a mean name?
Best advice to someone getting bullied? I googled:
We would amend “don’t show your feelings” to stay calm. We would urge any kid to put “tell an adult” as a last resort.
A suggestion:
- if the problem persists, hit back as hard as possible, calmly but forcefully, at the bully’s weakest, tenderest points.
Such a Lisa Simpson / Nelson vibe to Warren / Trump. Are all our elections gonna be Lisa vs. Nelson for awhile?
from this 2003 episode:
Lisa easily wins the election. Worried by her determination and popularity, the faculty discusses how to control her.
McPeak vs Earthman
Posted: December 5, 2017 Filed under: America Since 1945, war Leave a comment
Have we entered a new way of war in which air power isn’t as important? That this is America’s asymmetric challenge and air power isn’t as wanted?
If so, how do we overcome that? How do we get past that, the fact that our adversaries have figured out how we fight?
Merrill McPeak: Well, it’s not so much that the adversaries figured out how we fight.
That’s dead easy. Everybody can see it. I mean, we don’t make any mystery of it.
What we’ve done is taken the risk out of the kind of operations that we do now with officers.
I mean, we’ve got stealth airplanes. So I’m sitting in a stealth airplane and I’m on super-cruise. In the F-22, you’re cruising at 1.7 to 1.8 (mach) in a stealthy machine.
Who’s going to touch you?
I mean, I never felt vulnerable when I was flying an airplane. Period. Not against any kind of earthman.
Got a lot out of this looooong interview with former Air Force chief of staff and Ken Burns & Lynn Novick’s Vietnam War star Merrill McPeak in the San Diego Union Tribune, (ht Tom Ricks of course).
McPeak on Boyd, whom we have discussed:
So they got the argument a little bit wrong. But then along comes Boyd with the OODA Loop and some philosophy kind of concepts and people said, ‘Wow, a fighter pilot with a brain!’
They tended to listen to him when in many respects he was a failed officer and even a failed human being in some ways.
Carl Prine: There’s an entire cottage industry built around him now.
Merrill McPeak: I was at Nellis the night he jumped out of an F-100. I was a student there and he was an instructor in the Weapons School. He had a bet that he could get anybody from his 6 o’clock to his 12 o’clock in 40 seconds, or whatever it was.
He tried his special little trick and the airplane quit on him. It overstretched the hydraulic system, the plumbing, the flight controls, and the airplane went crazy and he had to jump out.
Here he is coming back to Nellis and they went out to pick him up in a chopper. And he’s dragging his parachute back to Nellis. He didn’t look so good that night.
The general likes Mozart:
Carl Prine: I had this image of you, as a general, appreciating the grand, comprehensive, overwhelming symphony and yet you prefer the smaller pieces? The elegant and tiny works?
Merrill McPeak: Well, you know the big G minor symphony? Ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta, ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta. That’s the famous one, the 40. It’s in there with Jupiter and the later symphonies.
But Symphony 25 has that crystal clear quality to it. If it were a stream, you could look clear through it to the bottom.
There’s something magical about it.
April Ryan
Posted: November 22, 2017 Filed under: America Since 1945, presidents Leave a comment
Ice cold response to demeaning patronizing by Sarah Huckabee Sanders.
Ryan has been a member of the White House press corps for American Urban Radio Networks since January 1997 and has long been the only black female reporter among the White House correspondents.
Is it ok to have this calendar up in my office?
Posted: November 20, 2017 Filed under: America Since 1945, surfing, the California Condition Leave a comment
got it for free at Laguna Beach Surf and Sport.
Asked a female colleague her opinion, she didn’t care, but how much can we weigh that? here it is in some more context.
Another surf shop in Laguna is Thalia
Thalia as we all know is the muse of comedy
Thalia by Nattier
Here’s today’s surf report from Thalia via magicseaweed:
Is it interesting?
Posted: November 13, 2017 Filed under: America Since 1945, politics Leave a comment
source
that William F. Buckley and Ayn Rand kind of look alike?
The story of Profumo
Posted: November 12, 2017 Filed under: America Since 1945, heroes Leave a comment
Shortly after his resignation Profumo began to work as a volunteer cleaning toilets at Toynbee Hall, a charity based in the East End of London, and continued to work there for the rest of his life. Peter Hitchens has written that Profumo “vanished into London’s East End for 40 years, doing quiet good works”. Profumo “had to be persuaded to lay down his mop and lend a hand running the place”, eventually becoming Toynbee Hall’s chief fundraiser, and used his political skills and contacts to raise large sums of money. All this work was done as a volunteer, since Profumo was able to live on his inherited wealth. His wife, the actress Valerie Hobson, also devoted herself to charity until her death in 1998. In the eyes of most commentators, Profumo’s charity work redeemed his reputation. His friend, social reform campaigner Lord Longford said he “felt more admiration [for Profumo] than [for] all the men I’ve known in my lifetime”.
Profumo’s dedication and dignity won him enormous admiration from people in all walks of life. The author Peter Hennessy, a fellow trustee at a charitable foundation associated with Toynbee Hall, described him as “one of the nicest and most exemplary people I have met in public or political life; full of the old, decent Tory virtues”. Margaret Thatcher called him “one of our national heroes”. “Everybody here worships him”, a helper at Toynbee Hall was once quoted as saying. “We think he’s a bloody saint.”
World’s biggest Jeep
Posted: November 7, 2017 Filed under: America Since 1945, Middle East Leave a comment
That’s owned by Hamad bin Hamdan Al-Nahyan of Abu Dhabi. He also once carved his name in kilometer-long letters on his own island:
(It’s since been erased.)
Bases in the desert
Posted: November 6, 2017 Filed under: America Since 1945 Leave a comment(vid taken by me during a demonstration on a tour of Fort Irwin)
From 1942-1991 the US Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines built enormous bases in the desert.
Partly this was to train for the coming war in North Africa.
Indio, California. A half-ton jeep rolling over the desert at the desert training center June 1942.
Farm Security Administration Office of War Information/Library of Congress. Source.
Fort Irwin, built in 1940, deactivated 1971, returned to active status 1981.
China Lake Naval Weapons Center, which is, to use the tiredest comparison in American geography, bigger than Rhode Island.
Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center Twenty Nine Palms, growing and growing since 1949
Edwards AFB. Those are just some of the ones in California alone.
We built the bases, and then we found reasons to have wars in the desert.
Is that interesting?
Melancholy
Posted: November 5, 2017 Filed under: America Since 1945, presidents Leave a comment
Put it to the test; leave a king entirely alone quite at leisure, with nothing to satisfy his senses, no care to occupy the mind, with complete leisure to think about himself, and you will see that a king without diversion is a very wretched man. Therefore such a thing is carefully avoided, and the persons of kings are invariably attended by a great number of people concerned to see that diversion comes after affairs of state, watching over their leisure hours to provide pleasures and sport so that there should never be an empty moment. In other words they are surrounded by people who are incredibly careful to see that the king should never be alone and able to think about himself, because they know that, king though he is, he will be miserable if he does think about it.”
from Pascal’s Pensées, quoted by Laszlo Foldenyi in his book about melancholy, quoted by Dan Wang!
Considering John Kelly
Posted: October 31, 2017 Filed under: America Since 1945, art history, heroes, history, statues 2 Comments
Compelled by John Kelly, Boston Marine turned Trump babysitter / White House chief of staff.
John Kelly, like Robert E. Lee, is brave, self-sacrificing, dignified, and wrong.
It’s possible to be noble and admirable and honorable and really wrong. Like, a force for wrongness.
Watched his entire press conference re: presidential respect for fallen soldiers. Found it very moving. He mentions walking for hours in Arlington National Cemetery to collect his thoughts. Maybe he should send the president.
In one of the infinite amazing connections of American history Arlington National Cemetery was built on the grounds of Lee’s wife’s house.
INTERVIEWER
What about General Robert E. Lee?
FOOTE
The single greatest mistake of the war by any general on either side was made by Robert E. Lee at Gettysburg, when he sent Pickett’s and Pettigrew’s divisions across that open field, nearly a mile wide, against guns placed on a high ridge and troops down below them, with skirmishers out front. There was no chance it would succeed. Longstreet told him that beforehand and Lee proceeded to prove him right. Having made this greatest of all mistakes, Lee rode out on the field and met those men coming back across the field— casualties were well over fifty percent—and said, It’s all my fault. He said it then on the field; he said it afterwards, after he’d gotten across the Potomac; he said it in his official report a month later. He said, I may have asked more of my men than men should be asked to give. He’s a noble man, noble beyond comparison.
(from the Paris Review interview with Shelby Foote)
Henry Lee, Robert E.’s father
Why did people love Robert E. Lee so much? He was handsome, for one thing. Here’s Elizabeth Brown Pryor going off in her Six Encounters With Lincoln:
“Matinee-idol looks.”
They liked Lee too because he reminded of them of George Washington.
Is this interesting?: two of the most prominent American slaveholders, Washington and Lee, only owned slaves because they’d married rich women.
Lee’s wife was Martha Washington’s great granddaughter.
Anyway: whatever, it’s time for some new statues!
John Kelly made his most recent remarks about Lee on The Ingraham Angle on Fox News.
During that appearance, Kelly says something not true, that the events in the indictment came from well before Manafort knew Donald Trump. Not true, if we believe Slate’s helpful timeline. Manafort and Trump have known each other since the ’80s.
Didn’t Manafort live in Trump Tower off the money he made as a lobbyist for dictators?
Kelly also says that the part about where got wrong what Fredrica Wilson said at the FBI dedication, that part “we should just let that go.”
Also brooooo! What is American history up to the Civil War but a history of compromises?
Happened to read an interview in PRISM, a publication of the Center For Complex Operations, with John Kelly yesterday. He’s talking about his career leading the Southern Command, ie Central and South America.
This was not my experience talking to Latin Americans. More than one South American has pointed out to me that in their countries, “the troops” are not assumed to be good guys or on your side.
Didn’t love this:
We need more Marine generals like Smedley Butler:
I wish John Kelly would also remember the time Henry Lee put himself in harm’s way to defend the freedom of the press.
During the civil unrest in Baltimore, Maryland in 1812, Lee received grave injuries while helping to resist an attack on his friend, Alexander Contee Hanson, editor of the Baltimore newspaper, The Federal Republican on July 27, 1812.
Hanson was attacked by a Democratic-Republican mob because his paper opposed the War of 1812. Lee and Hanson and two dozen other Federalists had taken refuge in the offices of the paper. The group surrendered to Baltimore city officials the next day and were jailed.
Laborer George Woolslager led a mob that forced its way into the jail, removed the Federalists, beating and torturing them over the next three hours. All were severely injured, and one Federalist, James Lingan, died.
Lee suffered extensive internal injuries as well as head and face wounds, and even his speech was affected. His observed symptoms were consistent with what is now called post-traumatic stress disorder.
Need to learn more about this!
Maybe a statue of James Lingan, outside Prospect House?:
source: wiki, photo by AgnosticPreachersKid
One last bit from Shelby Foote:
Bud, history always has bias! You don’t think this guy
thought Lee was cool, if only because they looked alike?
Does Ta-Nahesi Coates get tired of having to say the same stuff over and over?:
“History’s history,” says John Kelly on The Ingraham Angle. Is it?
Personally, when I think about John Kelly’s life, I’m prepared to cut him some slack, but man. I can’t say he “gets it.”
Thomas Ricks, as always, has the take:
A must read.The comment of Kelly’s that hasn’t gotten the attention it deserves is when he half-jokingly suggests (around 26:41)
that they’re gonna replace the Washington Monument with Andy Warhol.
Did not know
Posted: October 26, 2017 Filed under: America Since 1945, music, women Leave a comment
That one Jody Miller, no relation to Roger Miller, did a response to his song “King Of The Road” entitled “Queen Of The House.”
Critics on critics on critics
Posted: October 17, 2017 Filed under: America Since 1945, art history, books, writing Leave a comment
This review in the New York Times, by Vivan Gornick of Adam Gopnik’s “At The Strangers’ Gate” caught my attention.
Critics have taken aim on Adam Gopnik before. To which New Yorker editor David Remnick says:
‘The day any of these people write anything even remotely as fine and intelligent as Adam Gopnik will be a cold day in hell.'”
The key to this memoir might be when the author reveals he graduated high school at age fourteen. He’s a boy genius.
This is kind of Young Sheldon the book.
The book has some good stories in it. Adam Gopnik tells about how a guy who came to one of his lectures on Van Gogh. This guy had an axe to grind and it was this: why did Vincent never paint his brother Theo?
My favorite part of the book was Gopnik’s discussion of Jeff Koons. Gopnik is illuminating on the topic of Jeff Koons. Here is Koons talking to Gopnik at a party.
(I added the potato because while it may not be strictly legal to electronically reproduce pages of books, if I include them in an original work of art, that’s gotta be allowed, right?)
Harrowing
Posted: October 6, 2017 Filed under: America Since 1945, words Leave a comment
Ken Burns & Lynne Novick’s The Vietnam War I felt was “harrowing.”
What does the word harrowing mean?
source:
In farming this is a harrow.
A device consisting of a heavy framework having several disks or teeth in a row, which is dragged across ploughed land to smooth or break up the soil, to remove weeds or cover seeds;
A harrowing documentary feels like it’s doing this to you?
A harrowing experience is painful, but it breaks up your clods.
The etymology drifts back into the mists of Old Norse before dissolving away into Proto-Indo-European and Old Persian, but it may have something to do with “harvest”
Icelandic
Etymology
From Proto-Germanic*harjōną (see also East Frisian ferheerje, German verheeren(“to harry, devastate”)) Swedish härja(“ravage, harry”)), from Proto-Germanic*harjaz(“army”) (see also Old English here, West Frisian hear, Dutch heer, German Heer), from Proto-Indo-European*koryos (compare Middle Irish cuire(“army”), Lithuanian kãrias(“army; war”), Old Church Slavonic кара(kara, “strife”), Ancient Greek κοίρανος(koíranos, “chief, commander”), Old Persian [script needed](kāra, “army”)).
As a boy, Winston Churchill went to a school called Harrow:
which he found to be a harrowing experience. Churchill had many harrowing experiences. He was in combat, for one. That’s a famous harrow. Having polio is harrowing.
UNITED STATES – SEPTEMBER 27: President Franklin D. Roosevelt leaves his home at 49 East 65th Street for a short visit to his family estate at Hyde Park, north of New York City. This photograph is unusual in that FDR’s leg braces are clearly visible. (Photo by Martin Mcevilly/NY Daily News Archive via Getty Images)
Childbirth has got to be harrowing, as is growing up on the frontier.
You wouldn’t wish any harrowing experiences on anybody, but it seems like all great leaders had been through a harrowing or two.
Raven Maps
Posted: October 4, 2017 Filed under: America Since 1945, maps Leave a comment
I’ve spoken before of my love of Raven Maps. Shoutout to Professor McHugh for putting me onto them.
Recently I had some correspondence with them. With their permission I share it with you.
Name: Steve Hely
Their Questions or Comments: Hi! Big fan of your maps, have bought several. I was interested in learning some cartography basics so I can make a topo map of a small (five square miles) area of the world I inhabit and love. Do you have or know of any resources for learning these skills! Thanks!
(That’s what I wrote, on their form).
Raven Maps replies:
Steve Hely,
Well, that’s a good question. The old techniques have long-since been reduced to algorithms and interred in software. All maps are now produced digitally, but I assume you want to just enjoy learning your area in the way that mapping it allows? You don’t need to become a GIS / Cartography tech for that.My suggestion: get the printed USGS 1:24,000 scale 1:7.5′ map of your area (perversely, an area you are interested in often turns out to be at the edge of two, or at the corners of two or three, in that case get all the sheets you need), or print them out from an on-line digital source); get tracing paper (or polyester drafting film), and start tracing the features you are particularly interested in– and just keep at it. Many iterations, probably many dozens. That’s OK, tracing paper is cheap. Colored pencils cost more but you won’t need all that many. Remember that every completed map has a great many more layers and classes of features than you probably care about, and probably does not show the ones you DO care about– and that’s where the fun starts, as you figure out what to leave off, how heavy / what color the lines are, how to identify the features you care about, and so on.For an area of 5 miles on a side, differences in projection (among various source maps, which you will probably start consulting) will be only a very minor problem, you can probably ignore. Scale differences can be corrected at your local FedEx copy shop.And always, keep on hand some sample map you especially like, so that you can see how that map handled the particular issue you are wondering how to solve. (There’s a reason you see aspiring painters closely studying the classics in museums– first, learn how THEY did it.)Hope this helps,Stuart AllanRaven Maps
I mean the USGS website is sick. What a beautiful thing we the taxpayers have made.
Shady Grove
Posted: October 3, 2017 Filed under: America Since 1945, music Leave a commentIn honor of the late great Tom Petty I invite you not to forget Mudcrutch, and post this Helytimes classic from April 2015
In my foolish youth I thought Tom Petty was kind of a joke, until Bob Dylan in Chronicles woke me up hard.
Bob also has words of respect for Jerry Garcia:
What an eerie tune. Wikipedia is unusually quiet on this one.
Many verses exist, most of them describing the speaker’s love for a woman called Shady Grove. There are also various choruses, which refer to the speaker traveling somewhere (to Harlan, to a place called Shady Grove, or simply “away”)
Harlan
The folks at mudcat.org take on the problem:
| Subject: Origins: ‘Shady Grove’ a mondegreen ? From: GUEST,Jake Date: 15 Aug 10 – 11:23 PMMulling (for the thousandth time) over the incongruity of ‘Shady Grove’ which is nothing about trees protecting the singer from the sun, but seems to be a woman’s name, it occurred to me in a flash of insight, that of course it must have started as a song about a Woman or girl named “Sadie” with the surname “Grove”, ie, “Sadie Grove”, and was corrupted by the usual vagaries of oral transmission, etc, etc. Searching this forum and the web generally provides no support for this conjecture, however. |
| Subject: RE: Origins: ‘Shady Grove’ a mondegreen ? From: MGM·Lion Date: 15 Aug 10 – 11:32 PMI have always shared this confusion: Shady Grove seems to be the woman’s name, but also the name of the place or location in which she lives, sometimes incongruously both at the same time. The fact that it’s one of those myriad songs [Going Down Town; Bowling Green …] which share pretty much the same set of ‘floaters’ doesn’t help.~Michael~ |
| Subject: RE: Origins: ‘Shady Grove’ a mondegreen ? From: Hamish Date: 16 Aug 10 – 03:18 AM”Wish I was in Shady Grove” takes on a new meaning.”When I was in Shady Grove I heard them pretty birds sing” (and the earth moved, no doubt). |
| Subject: RE: Origins: ‘Shady Grove’ a mondegreen ? From: GUEST,Lynn W Date: 16 Aug 10 – 04:11 AMThere is a comment on Wikipedia that the melody is similar to Matty Groves. Any connection, I wonder? |
| Subject: RE: Origins: ‘Shady Grove’ a mondegreen ? From: Jack Campin Date: 16 Aug 10 – 05:19 AMWikipedia has got it backwards. The folk-revival version of “Matty Groves” took its tune from “Shady Grove”. |
That’s as far down this hole as I can go at the moment.
I’d be shocked if any Helytimes readers hadn’t wikipedia’d The Child Ballads.
If demographizing the known Helytimes readership, I’d say “it’s people, mostly people I know, who have Wikipedia’d The Child Ballads.”
Still, why not a refresher on some best ofs?
Although shy and diffident on account of his working-class origins, he was soon recognized as “the best writer, best speaker, best mathematician, the most accomplished person in knowledge of general literature” and he became extremely popular with his classmates.
Child became the Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory when he we was 26. Says an admirer, writing in the 1970s:
Child well understood how indispensable good writing and good speaking are to civilization, or as many would now prefer to say, to society. For him, writing and speaking were not only the practical means by which men share useful information, but also the means whereby they formulate and share values, including the higher order of values that give meaning to life and purpose to human activities of all sorts. Concerned as he thus so greatly was with rhetoric, oratory, and the motives of those mental disciplines, Child was inevitably drawn into pondering the essential differences between speech and writing, and to searching for the origins of thoughtful expression in English.
(Yes! That’s the good reason for being into this I’ve been looking for.)
Sometimes I picture Child backpacking around from pub to pub learning these things. Mostly, though, he got them from manuscripts.
Don’t you worry, he could cut loose sometimes:
he also gave a sedulous but conservative hearing to popular versions still surviving.
Child engaged
in extensive international correspondence on the subject with colleagues abroad, primarily with the Danish literary historian and ethnographer Svend Grundtvig, whose monumental twelve-volume compilation of Danish ballads, Danmarks gamle Folkeviser, vols. 1–12 (Copenhagen, 1853), was the model for Child’s resulting canonical five-volume edition of some 305 English and Scottish ballads and their numerous variants.
Svend.
Child is buried in the Sedgwick Pie.
Is Kyra Sedgwick eligible for the Sedgwick Pie? Seems like she might be. Also seems a bit rude to ask a wonderful and very alive actress and mother if she’s given any thought to her grave.
Famously (? I guess, I never read the biography) not included:
Helytimes 
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